The Rise of Industrial
America, 1877-1900
When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age, they gave the late nineteenth century its
popular name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle
with inner corruption and poverty. Given the period’s absence of powerful and
charismatic presidents, its lack of a dominant central event, and its sometimes
tawdry history, historians have often defined the period by negatives. They
stress greed, scandals, and corruption of the Gilded Age.
Twain
and Warner were not wrong about the era’s corruption, but the years between
1877 and 1900 were also some of the most momentous and dynamic in American
history. They set in motion developments that would shape the country for
generations—the reunification of the South and North, the integration of four
million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion, immigration,
industrialization, urbanization. It was also a period of reform, in which many
Americans sought to regulate corporations and shape the changes taking place
all around them.
THE END OF
RECONSTRUCTION
Reforms
in the South seemed unlikely in 1877 when Congress resolved the previous
autumn’s disputed presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes on the backs of the nation’s freed blacks. A
compromise gave Hayes the presidency in return for the end of Reconstruction
and the removal of federal military support for the remaining biracial
Republican governments that had emerged in the former Confederacy. With that
agreement, Congress abandoned one of the greatest reforms in American history:
the attempt to incorporate ex-slaves into the republic with all the rights and
privileges of citizens.
The
United States thus accepted a developing system of repression and segregation
in the South that would take the name Jim Crow and persist for nearly a
century. The freed people in the South found their choices largely confined to
sharecropping and low-paying wage labor, especially as domestic servants.
Although attempts at interracial politics would prove briefly successful in
Virginia and North Carolina, African American efforts to preserve the
citizenship and rights promised to black men in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
to the Constitution failed.
THE WEST
Congress
continued to pursue a version of reform in the West, however, as part of a
Greater Reconstruction. The federal government sought to integrate the West
into the country as a social and economic replica of the North. Land
redistribution on a massive scale formed the centerpiece of reform. Through
such measures as the Homestead and Railroad Acts of 1862, the government
redistributed the vast majority of communal lands possessed by American Indian
tribes to railroad corporations and white farmers.
To
redistribute that land, the government had to subdue American Indians, and the
winter of 1877 saw the culmination of the wars that had been raging on the
Great Plains and elsewhere in the West since the end of the Civil War.
Following the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn the previous
fall, American soldiers drove the Lakota civil and spiritual leader Sitting
Bull and his followers into Canada. They forced the war leader Crazy Horse to
surrender and later killed him while he was held prisoner. Sitting Bull would
eventually return to the United States, but he died in 1890 at the hands of the
Indian police during the Wounded Knee crisis.
The
defeat of the Lakotas and the utterly unnecessary Nez Perce War of 1877 ended
the long era of Indian wars. There would be other small-scale conflicts in the
West such as the Bannock War (1878) and the subjugation of the Apaches, which
culminated with the surrender of Geronimo in 1886, but these were largely police
actions. The slaughter of Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 did
bring a major mobilization of American troops, but it was a kind of coda to the
American conquest since the federal government had already effectively extended
its power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The
treaty system had officially ended in 1871, but Americans continued to
negotiate agreements with the Indians. The goal of these agreements, and
American land policy in general, was to create millions of new farms and
ranches across the West. Not satisfied with already ceded lands, reformers—the
so-called “Friends of the Indians” whose champion in Congress was Senator Henry
Dawes—sought to divide reservations into individual farms for Indians and then
open up most or all of the remaining land to whites. The Dawes Act of 1887
became their major tool, but the work of the Dawes Commission in 1893 extended
allotment to the Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws in
Indian Territory, which became the core of the state of Oklahoma. Land
allotment joined with the establishment of Indian schools and the suppression
of native religions in a sweeping attempt to individualize Indians and
integrate them one by one into American society. The policy would fail
miserably. Indian population declined precipitously; the tribes lost much of
their remaining land, and Indians became the poorest group in American society.
IMMIGRATION
Between
1877 and 1900 immigrants prompted much more concern among native-born white
Americans than did either black people or Indian peoples. During these years
there was a net immigration of approximately 7,348,000 people into the United
States. During roughly the same period, the population of the country increased
by about 27 million people, from about 49 million in 1880 to 76 million in
1900. Before 1880 the immigrants came largely from Western Europe and China.
Taking the period between 1860 and 1900 as a whole, Germans comprised 28
percent of American immigrants; the British comprised 18 percent, the Irish 15
percent, and Scandinavians 11 percent. Together they made up 72 percent of the
total immigration. At the end of the century, the so-called “New Immigration”
signaled the rise of southern and eastern Europe as the source of most
immigrants to America. The influx worried many native-born Americans who still
thought of the United States as a white Protestant republic. Many of the new
immigrants did not, in the racial classifications of the day, count as white.
As the century wore on, they were increasingly Catholic and Jewish.
Immigrants
entered every section of the country in large numbers except for the South.
They settled in northeastern and midwestern cities and on western and
midwestern farms. The Pacific and mountain West contained the highest percentage
of immigrants of any region in 1880 and 1890.
The
immigrants forged networks that shaped how and where they migrated and the
kinds of communities they established. Chain migrations linked migrants to
prior migrants. Early arrivals wrote home to bring family, friends, and
neighbors to the United States. Over large swaths of Minnesota, the Dakotas,
and elsewhere German was the primary language of daily life. Tensions between
immigrants and the native born over the language to be spoken in public schools,
Sunday closures of businesses (sabbatarianism), and temperance reform often put
cultural issues and practices at the center of local and state politics.
Taken
together, immigration and the end of Reconstruction triggered an
anti-democratic movement to restrict access to the ballot box. By the 1870s
proponents of restricting suffrage, having defeated an early push for women’s
suffrage, were calling democracy a mistake. They advocated restrictions on
voting as a way to check corruption, elevate political culture, and marginalize
those—they had in mind immigrants and blacks—whom they thought incapable of
meeting the obligations of republican politics. They sought political changes
that would make it far more difficult for the poor and immigrants to vote. Over
time, through poll taxes, residence requirements, literacy requirements, and
more, they would succeed. The mass politics and high voting rates
characteristic of late nineteenth-century America would not outlive the era.
Attempts
to restrict suffrage were part of a strong political and social backlash
against immigrants that developed over the course of the century. The United
States welcomed immigrants because they were essential to its growing economy,
but nativists opposed immigrants as antithetical to American culture and
society. They thought of immigrants as exotic and inassimilable. In certain
situations, however, nativists had allies who were immigrants or the children
of immigrants. Workers, both immigrant and native born, often feared that corporations
were using contract labor—workers recruited abroad at lower wages than those
paid American workers—to undermine American working conditions and the American
family, which they defined as a working man whose wife maintained the home.
They opposed certain kinds of immigration. One of the forgotten reforms of the
period, the Foran Act of 1885, outlawed contract labor, but the law proved
difficult to enforce.
Alliances
of some native-born Americans with some immigrants against other immigrants
proved most effective in the case of the Chinese. Roughly 180,000 Chinese
immigrated to the United States between 1849 and 1882, and they became the
personification of both the inassimilable immigrant and the contract worker.
Although the Chinese came as free laborers, they were often branded as coolies:
abject semi-slaves, whose low standard of living allowed them to thrive on
wages that could not support white families.
Racists
had previously claimed that superior Anglo-Saxons would inevitably replace
“inferior” races. But in the West, while Sinophobes saw the Chinese as exotic
and inferior, they also thought the Chinese would triumph over the supposedly
superior white men because they were efficient workers. Immigrants and the
native born formed mobs that attacked the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in
1885 and expelled them from Tacoma, Washington, in 1885 and Seattle in 1886.
Congress passed ten-year restrictions on Chinese immigration in 1882 and 1892
and a permanent exclusion act in 1902. Late in the nineteenth century, those
who opposed immigration from Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere compared those
groups to the Chinese.
Some
immigrants could wrap themselves in the mantle of Americanism if they were
“white” and Protestant. Protestant immigrants, particularly Scandinavians and
Scots-Irish, joined the American Protective Association in 1887 to restrict
Catholic immigration as it rode a larger wave of anti-Catholicism that swept
over the country. Aimed initially at Irish and Catholic schools,
anti-Catholicism increased its range as new Catholic immigrants began to
arrive.
AGRICULTURAL,
COMMERCIAL, AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
Although
not all of them intended to stay, most immigrants came to the United States for
economic opportunity. Cheap land and relatively high wages, compared to their
home countries, were available regardless of citizenship. The Homestead Act did
not require that settlers filing for land be American citizens, and the
railroads not only sold their land grants cheaply, they advertised widely in
Europe.
The
results of this distribution of fertile and largely accessible land were
astonishing. Everything in the late nineteenth century seemed to move faster
than ever before. Americans brought more land under cultivation between 1870
and 1900 (225 million acres) than they had since the English first appeared at
Jamestown in 1607 (189 million acres). Farmers abandoned small, worn-out farms
in the East and developed new, larger, and more fertile farms in the Midwest
and West. They developed so much land because they farmed extensively, not
intensively. In terms of yields per acre, American farmers ranked far below Europe.
Maintaining fertility demanded labor, which was precisely what American farmers
were bent on reducing. They invested not in labor but in technology,
particularly improved plows, reapers, and threshers. With westward expansion
onto the prairies, a single family with a reaper could increase acreage and
thus production without large amounts of hired labor. Arable free lands grew
scarcer during the 1880s, forcing more and more land seekers west into arid
lands beyond the 98th meridian. In many years these lands lacked adequate
rainfall to produce crops. “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted” written on
the side of a wagon cover by a family abandoning its homestead summed up the
dangers of going too far out onto the semi-arid and arid plains.
The
expansion of agricultural lands led to what superficially seems a paradox: the
more farmers there were—and the more productive farmers became—the smaller was
agriculture’s share of the economy. Farmers had the largest share of the dollar
value of American economic output until 1880 when commerce’s 29 percent of the
gross national product edged out their 28 percent. In 1890 manufacturing and
mining at 30 percent share of the GNP both exceeded agriculture’s 19 percent
share. During the same period, the percentage of workers employed in
agriculture fell. A majority of the nation’s workers were farmers or farm
laborers in 1860, but by 1900 the figure had declined to 40 percent.
Such
statistics seemed to reflect a decline in the importance of farming, but in
fact, they reflected its significance and efficiency. Farmers produced more
than the country could consume with smaller and smaller percentages of its
available labor. They exported the excess, and the children of farmers migrated
to cities and towns. Where at the beginning of the century exports composed
about 10 percent of farm income, they amounted to between 20 and 25 percent by
the end of the century. What farmers sold abroad translated into savings and
consumption at home that fueled the nation’s industry. Migration from rural to
urban areas dwarfed both foreign migration and westward migration. American
agricultural productivity allowed it to remain the world’s greatest
agricultural economy while it became the world’s largest industrial producer.
The rise of industrial America, the dominance
of wage labor, and the growth of cities represented perhaps the greatest
changes of the period. Few Americans at the end of the Civil War had
anticipated the rapid rise of American industry. For the first time in the
nation’s history, wage earners had come to outnumber the self-employed, and by
the 1880s these wage earners were becoming employees of larger and larger
corporations. As the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics and Labor declared in
1873, wage labor was universal: “a system more widely diffused than any form of
religion, or of government, or indeed, of any language.”[1]
Skilled workers proved remarkably successful
at maintaining their position through the 1880s, but they had to fight to do
so. The relatively high wages for skilled workers led employers to seek ways to
replace skilled with unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Mechanization provided
the best tactic for deskilling work and lowering wages. Many of the bitterest
strikes of the period were attempts to control working rules and to maintain
rather than raise wages. Beginning with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, through
the Great Upheaval of 1886 that culminated in the slaughter at Haymarket
Square, then through the Homestead Strike (1892), Pullman Strike (1894), and
more, the largest confrontations often involved violence and the intervention
by state or federal governments to repress the strikes.
RAILROADS
Many of these strikes involved the railroads;
the whole economy seemed to revolve around the railroads. At the end of the
1870s the railroads renewed their expansion. With a brief break in the 1880s,
expansion continued at a reckless pace until 1890. At the end of 1890 more than
20 percent of the 161,000 miles of railroad in the United States had been
constructed in the previous four years. By the end of the century the railroad
corporations rivaled the United States government in size. In 1891 the
Pennsylvania Railroad had 110,000 employees, almost three times the number of
men in all the armed forces of the United States. Its capitalization of $842
million was only $150 million less than the national debt. Nationally, 418,957
people worked for railroads in 1880 and nearly 800,000 in 1890: about 3 percent
of the entire work force of the nation. By 1900 roughly one-sixth of all
capital investments in United States were in the railroads.
The railroads powered the industrial economy.
They consumed the majority of iron and steel produced in the United States
before 1890. As late as 1882, steel rails accounted for 90 percent of the steel
production in the United States. They were the nation’s largest consumer of
lumber and a major consumer of coal. They also distributed these commodities
across the country.
At times, however, railroads threatened to
haul the American economy into the abyss. Rail corporations overbuilt, borrowed
recklessly, and were often atrociously managed. They ricocheted wildly between
rate wars and the creation of pools to fix prices, and they encouraged other
industries to follow. Wheat, silver, timber, cattle, and other commodities
flooded the market, sent prices tumbling, and dragged many producers into
bankruptcy. The signal of every economic collapse in the late nineteenth
century was the descent of railroads and the banks associated with them into
receivership.
THE ECONOMY
The railroads were typical of the economic
contradictions of the era. Over the period as a whole, American industry
advanced rapidly. By 1900 the United States had one half the world’s
manufacturing capacity. At the end of the century, it had overtaken Great
Britain both in iron and steel production and in coal production. The United
States made such great gains because it was the fastest runner in a relatively
slow race. The entire period from 1873 to the turn of the century became known
as the Long Depression in western Europe. The United States grew faster than
European economies, although no faster than nations with similar British
colonial backgrounds—Australia and Canada. It actually grew more slowly than
Argentina. None of these economies, however, were remotely as large.
The growth was not even. Periods of
prosperity alternated with deep downturns in a boom/bust pattern. The economy
came out of the depression following the Panic of 1873 at the end of that
decade, lurched into a short, sharp depression in 1882–1883, and then fell into
a much more severe depression from 1893 to 1897. Until the 1930s this was known
as the Great Depression.
Such fluctuations in the American economy
were linked to the larger world economy. Important sectors of the American
economy globalized, putting American businesses and farmers in competition with
other places in the world. One result was a steady downward pressure on prices.
The Republican policy of maintaining tariff protection for American industry
mitigated deflation on the domestic market, but the return to the gold standard
with the Resumption Act of 1875, which later became a major political issue,
created compensatory deflationary pressure that contributed to the general
decline in prices. This benefitted workers only as long as they were able to
maintain their wages.
Economic changes manifested themselves in
rates of immigration (which rose during good times and declined during bad),
urbanization, types of work, family organization, and more. Social and cultural
patterns, in turn, affected the economy by determining who held certain jobs,
how those jobs were valued, and where and how work took place. The cumulative
effects of these changes were staggering, and many Americans worried that
immigration, urbanization, wage labor, and the rise of large corporations
undermined values that they thought defined the country itself.
SOCIAL CHANGE
The Civil War had seemed to secure the
triumph of a world of small producers and the values of free labor,
individualism, and contract freedom. Many Americans desperately wanted to
believe that those values survived and still ensured success within the new
industrial society. Sometimes they attached the old values to new theories.
Herbert Spencer, the British writer and philosopher, had many American
disciples, of whom William Graham Sumner of Yale was probably the most
prominent. Spencer and his disciples tried to understand human social change in
terms of Darwinian evolution, utterly obfuscating the mechanisms of biological
evolution in the process.
Other Americans simply tried to portray the
new economy as essentially the same as the old. They believed that individual
enterprise, hard work, and free competition in open markets still guaranteed
success to those willing to work hard. An evolving mass print culture of cheap
newspapers, magazines, and dime novels offered proselytizers of the old values
new forms of communication. Horatio Alger, whose publishing career extended
from the end of the Civil War to the end of the century, wrote juvenile novels
that reconciled the new economy with the old values of individualism. In his
novels, an individual’s fate was still in his hands.
POLITICS
Many
other Americans did not think so. They formed a diffuse reform movement
contemporaries referred to as antimonopolism. Antimonopolists, including
farmers, small businessmen, and workers in the Knights of Labor and other
organizations, agreed on the problem, but often differed on the solution. They
lamented the rise of large corporations, which to them were synonymous with
monopoly. They worried about the dependence on wage labor, the growth of
unemployment, particularly during the frequent panics and depressions, the
proliferation of tramps as the poor who wandered in search of work were known,
and the decline of individual independence. In the 1870s Walt Whitman lamented
the human casualties of the new economy. “If the United States, like the
countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate,
dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations such as we see looming upon
us of late years—steadily, even if slowly, eating into us like a cancer of
lungs or stomach—then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its
surface successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure.”[2]
Antimonopolists agreed that the purpose of a
republican economy was to sustain independent and prosperous republican
citizens, but how to restore the economy to that condition was the problem.
Some, probably a majority in the 1870s, sought government intervention to
restore competition. Others, who grew in numbers in the 1880s and 1890s,
accepted the inevitability of large corporations but desired that they be more
tightly regulated. By the 1890s, the Populists, an antimonopolist third party
centered on the South and West, advocated government ownership of the railroads
and the telegraphs.
In many ways the antimonopolists were
successful. They comprised large factions within both the Democratic and
Republican Parties and created new third parties from the Greenbackers
(1874–1884) to the Populists of the 1890s. In 1896, the climactic election of
the period pitted the antimonopolist William Jennings Bryan against the
Republican William McKinley. Bryan lost, but many of the reforms antimonopolists
advocated would be enacted over the next twenty years.
Many others were already in place. The
inevitable compromises involved in passing legislation left a contradictory
reform legacy. Some measures sought to restore competition by breaking up
trusts or holding companies while others accepted the existence of large
corporations but enforced regulations to restrain them. The Sherman Anti-Trust
Act of 1890 initiated a movement to break up the largest trusts. State railroad
commissions, the most effective of which were in Iowa and Texas, and the
Interstate Commerce Commission created in 1887 represented attempts to regulate
corporations.
SYMBOLS OF THEIR AGE
Certain people became better known and better
remembered than the presidents of the period because they came to represent
both the economy itself and people’s ideological views of it. Thomas Edison
emerged as perhaps the most admired American of the age because he seemed to
represent the triumph of individualism in an industrial economy. He built his
famous lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. The public regarded Edison as
the “wizard of Menlo Park,” but it was ironically the lab—a cooperative
enterprise—that produced the inventions from a workable electric light to the
phonograph and more. And when in 1890 Edison merged his lab and other
businesses into General Electric, the man who was a symbol of economic
individualism became the head of a large corporation. That the corporate form
captured Edison was not surprising because large corporations that first arose
with the railroads before the Civil War were coming to dominate the American
economy during the Great Merger movement of the 1890s.
John
D. Rockefeller symbolized the darker view of the economy. His Standard Oil
became the best-known and the best-hated corporation of the day. Rockefeller
ruthlessly consolidated a competitive oil industry, absorbing rivals or driving
them out of business. He was unapologetic, and he had only disdain for those
who still thought of the economy as depending on individualism and competition.
Organization and consolidation was the future. “The day of the combination is
here to stay,” he proclaimed. “Individualism has gone never to return.”[3]
What
was also gone was the United States as a purely continental nation. In many
ways, the American acquisition of an overseas empire was a continuation of its
continental expansion at the expense of American Indian peoples. But with the
annexation of Hawaii (1898) and the subsequent annexation of the Philippines
and Puerto Rico following the Spanish American War (1898), the United States
extended its military and governmental reach beyond its continental boundaries.
The war, like so many things, marked the vast changes that took place in a
neglected era.
[1] Quoted
in Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage
to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave
Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62.
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