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THESE
UNITED
STATES
DONT GMCONDINGHTION VEN CNG
—«31890 TO THE PRESENT &—

GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE

ind THOMAS J § SUGRUE,
ISBN 978-0-393-23952-2 USA $39.95
SAN. $50.95

A POWERFUL HIS?“ RY OF
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING
OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
AND GLOBAL POWER, TOLD
IN SWEEPING SCOPE AND
INTIMATE DETAIL.

n the winter of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt

| remarked in a radio address, “I do not
look upon these United States as a fin-
ished product. We are still in the making.”
Certainly apt in the midst of the Depression,
the idea of a nation in the making still reso-
nates today as we measure the achievements
and shortcomings of our democracy. Over
the long twentieth century, Americans have
worked, organized, marched, and fought to
make the nation’s ideals a reality for all. This
shared commitment to achieving an Ameri-
can democracy is the inspiring theme of
These United States.
Acclaimed historians Glenda Elizabeth
Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue forge the
panoramic and the personal into an authori-
tative narrative. They give us insightful
accounts of the century’s large events— war,
prosperity, and depression, astute leader-
ship and arrogant power, the rise and
decline of a broad middle class. And they
ground the history in the stories of every-
day Americans such as William Hushka,
a Lithuanian immigrant who makes and
loses an American life; Stan Igawa, a
Japanese-American who never doubts his
citizenship despite internment during
World War II; and Betty Dukes, a Wal-Mart
cashier who takes on America’s largest
corporation over wage discrimination.
The history begins and ends in periods
of concentrated wealth immigration

(con, hack flap)

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2021 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/theseunitedstateOO00gilm
WITHDRAWN
ALSO BY GLENDA ELIZABETH GILMORE

Defying Dixie:
The Radical Roots of Civil Rights,
1919-1950 (2008)

Who Were the Progressives?

(2002, editor)

Jumpin’ Jim Crow:

Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights
(2000, co-editor)

Gender and Jim Crow:

Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina 1896-1920 (1996)

ALSO BY THOMAS J. SUGRUE

Not Even Past:

Barack Obama and the Burden ofRace (2010)

Sweet Land ofLiberty:

The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights
in the North (2008)

The New Suburban History (2005, co-editor)

WE.B. DuBois, Race, and the City:

The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy
(1998, co-editor)

The Origins of the Urban Crisis:

Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996)
Ta oe
UNITED
STATES
A Nation in the Making,
cba
I to the Present
vevestacaanani enn
oe

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

Thomas J. Sugrue

DT
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

NEW YORK ° LONDON
 “Jim Crow’s Last Stand” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston
Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor, copyright
© 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an
imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. All rights reserved. Additional rights by permission of Harold Ober
Associates Incorporated.

Copyright © 2015 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
First Edition

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write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
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Manufacturing by Quad Graphics Fairfield

Book design by BT Dnyc
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Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

| 293 4 SOG 7 262950

 To Ben,
my anam cara.

and

To Brittany
I do not look upon these United States as a finished product.
We are still in the making.
—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, 1936
 swiye, frat ean Delius At
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Suibae Atpeate se
ve. STavA ra © scien mises
7.

/
 CONTENTS

IES
A ONE IVUIRS, 0 ochit

PRE PAGES) W/E eAR ETS UWI DING TEE eViAK

TN G26 xv,

petite
ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY « 1

The World’s Columbian Exposition, 2 Building an Industrial Nation, 7 °

Mobilizing Farmers: The Populist Movement, 19 Building American Unions,
27 © The Color Line, 33

CHAPTER 2

“LOSTART TOMAKE THIS WORLD OVER”:

IMPERIALISM AND PROGRESSIVISM, 1898-1912 * 41

The Spanish-American War, 43 * U.S. Foreign Engagement at the Turn of the

Century, 48 * The Roots of Progressivism, 59 * Progressive Era Reform, 65 °
Federal Progressivism, 72 * Progressivism at High Tide, 78

CHAPTER 3

REFINING AND EXPORTING PROGRESSIVISM:

WILSON’S NEW FREEDOM AND THE GREAT WAR, 1913-1919 © 83

The Fight for Woman Suffrage, 85 * Wilson’s Economic Reforms, 90 * Civil

Rights and the New Freedom, 95 * The Great War, 99 ¢ U.S. Involvement in the
Great War, 109 * The Treaty and the League, 116
xe CON TEEINMES

CHA

THE PARADOXES
OF THE 1920S * 124

Domestic Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War, 126 ¢ Affluence and Its
Discontents, 132 * A Nation on the Move, 141 * The Politics of Prosperity, 148
* The Great Depression, 154 * What Should Government Do?, 157

CHAPTER5

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY PRESIDENT:
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT’S FIRST TERM, 1932-1936 * 165

Between Election and Inauguration, 167 * The First Hundred Days: Emergency
Medicine, 172 ¢ The First Hundred Days: Lasting Reform, 177 * Radical Solu-
tions for an Intractable Depression, 186 * The New Deal State, 192 * Cementing
the Democratic Ascendancy, 201

ae
A RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY, 1936-1941 * 206

The New Deal at High Tide, 208 * Fascist Ambitions, American Neutrality, 215
¢ Preparing a Neutral Nation, 225 * The March to War, 232 * The Shock of
Attack in the Air, 238

CHAPTER 7

THE WATERSHED OF WAR:

AT HOME AND ABROAD, 1942-1945 © 245

Enter the United States, 246 * Mobilizing the Home Front, 258 * Human Rights
at Home and Abroad, 265 * The War in Europe, 268 * Victory and Realpolitik,
276 © War’s End, 279

CHAPT

A RISING SUPERPOWER, 1944-1954 «© 288

Truman and the Postwar World Order, 289 © The Origins of the Cold War,
295 * Reconversion: The Home Front, 298 * Cold War, First Moves, 305 °
 CONTENTS ® xi

The Election of 1948, 310 * Anti-Communism at Home, 315 ¢ An Escalating

Cold War, 320

CHAPTER 9

IN AT LEAST MODEST COMFORT:

POSTWAR PROSPERITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS ®* 328
Postwar Prosperity, 330 * The Baby Boom, 334 * A Nation of Homeowners, 336
¢ Life in the Consumers’ Republic, 338 * Eisenhower’s Middle Ground, 343
God's Country, 348 * Teens, Sex, Anxiety, 349 * The Black Freedom Struggle,
355 * The Covert Cold War, 366 * Security and Insecurity, 370

A SEASON OF CHANGE:
LIBERALS AND THE LIMITS OF REFORM, 1960-1966 © 371

Kennedy and the Liberal Revival, 373 * Civil Rights, 377 * Cold War Crises,
381 * “Where’s the PEN, Mr. President?”, 384 ¢ President Johnson, 390 * The
New Right, 395 * The War on Poverty, 401 * Expanding the Boundaries of
Citizenship: Voting Rights and Immigration, 405 * Jobs and Freedom, 409 °
Black Power, White Backlash, 411

MAY DAY:
VIETNAM AND THE CRISIS OF THE 1960S * 414

The Origins of the Vietnam War, 416 * Lyndon Johnson’s War, 420 * The Anti-
war Movement, 427 * A Working-Class War, 434 * War at Home: The Urban
Rebellions, 437 ¢ The Collapse in Public Support for the War, 440 * Tet and
Bloody 1968, 442 * The Spirit of Rebellion, 448

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON:?:

THE BATTLE FOR MIDDLE AMERICA, 1968-1974 * 454

The Election of 1968: Democratic Fracture, 455 * Nixon and the “Silent
Majority”, 462 * Nixon in Power, 465 ¢ Rebellion and Repression, 466 ¢
xii © CONTENTS

Undermining Integration, 471 The Personal Is Political, 476 * The Election

of 1972 and Watergate, 488

Ae
“A SEASON OF DARKNESS”:
THE TROUBLED 1970S ¢ 495

The War’s End, 497 * New Directions in the Cold War , 500 * Economic Shifts,
503 ¢ The Oil Shock, 507 * Recession and Disillusionment, 511 * The Environ-
mental Crisis, 517 * The Urban Crisis, 521 * Political Reform, 525 ¢ The Carter
Presidency, 527 * The Turn to the Right, 534

eA ae
THE NEW GILDED AGE, 1980-2000 * 536

The Reagan Revolution?, 538 * The Social Safety Net, 543 * Religious Revivals,
549 © “Peace Through Strength”, 556 * America in the World, 558 * G. H. W.
Bush and the Currents of Republicanism, 565 * From Cold War to Gulf War, 566
¢ The Low-Wage Economy, 569 * Immigration, 571 * Politics and the Slumping
Economy, 573 * Clinton and Political Triangulation, 576 * The Contract with
America and Welfare Reform, 579 * The Boom and Income Inequality, 582 °¢
Impeachment, 584 * Foreign Affairs, 586 * At Century’s End, 587

CHAPTER 15

UNITED WE STAND, DIVIDED WE FALL,

SINCE 2000 « 589

‘The Election of 2000, 591 ¢ Bush in Office, 595 © 9/11, 600 © The Wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, 603 * The Limits of Conservatism, 610 * The Election of
2008, 615 * Obama and the World, 618 * Obama and the Limits of “Change,”
619 © The Burden ofHistory, 623

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ® 627
NOTES °651
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS «+ 682
INDEX * 683

ILLUSTRATIONS FOLLOW PAGES 200 AND 360

 LIST OF MAPS

Cities and Towns That Elected Socialists 63

State Adoption of Woman Suffrage to 1914 89
Military Action in the Great War 115
World War II in the Pacific 250
Japanese American Internment Camps 23
World War II in Europe and North Africa 2)
Cold War Europe 306
The Vietnam War, 1964-1975 444

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 THE MAKING”

{ HE THIRTY-SECOND PRESIDENT ofthe United States, Frank-

lin Delano Roosevelt, spoke on the radio from his childhood
home at Hyde Park, New York, on February 23, 1936. It was
Brotherhood Day, an event sponsored by the National Confer-
ence of Christians and Jews as a time for Americans to honor their common
interests and values. “I am happy to speak to you from my own home on the
evening of a Sabbath Day,” the president told a nation shivering in single-
digit temperatures over much of its expanse. His voice warmed them. “I like
to think of our country as one home in which the interests of each member
are bound up with the happiness of all.” He assured his listeners, who had
endured years of economic hardship, that they would not be abandoned:
“the welfare of your family or mine cannot be bought at the sacrifice of our
neighbor’s family ... our wellbeing depends, in the long run, upon the
wellbeing of our neighbors.” With public confidence at a low ebb, FDR
promised that the government would act to restore prosperity. “I do not look
upon these United States as a finished product,” he told his audience. “We
are still in the making.”
It is safe to say that most of the nation was listening that night, since
Roosevelt regularly captured an audience of up to 70 percent of Americans
when he spoke in his intimate fashion to them. Saul Bellow, the novelist,
recalled an occasion when he was “walking eastward on the Chicago Midway
on asummer evening. . . . drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper,
and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the win-
dows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern
accent... . You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by.””

e KAY ®
XVi © PREFACE

From the depths of the Depression, Roosevelt and his listeners could
see that the American dream of expanding opportunity was not the inevi-
table result of markets and elections. It took work, legislation, organization,
and planning, to build a strong democracy. The twentieth century as a
whole, however, permits different perspectives on the dynamics of American
democracy. From the Progressive era to the Great Society, with the excep-
tion of the Great Depression, the United States established a solid, prosper-
ous middle class that perpetuated its ability to make life better for each
succeeding generation. By the 1950s, many observers considered it inevita-
ble that this achievable dream would extend to almost all Americans. Pov-
erty would diminish, affordable educational institutions would flourish, and
social conflict would become a vestige of the past.
But this was not to be. These United States starts and ends in periods of
massive inequality. Experts conclude that the arc of inequality in the United
States over the long twentieth century resembles an upside-down bell curve:
the maldistribution of income starts out high in the 1890s, dips in the mid-
century, and begins rising again in the 1970s.° In 1900, the top 10 percent
of earners took home about 41 percent of the nation’s income. The figure rose
to a high of 45 percent in 1930, but the Great Depression, New Deal mea-
sures, and the economic leveling of World War II reduced the top decile’s
share to 33 percent in 1950, where it stayed for the next twenty years.
Contemporary economists predicted that this equalization of income
would continue. They attributed the maldistribution of income and wealth
at the beginning ofthe century to the shock of rapid industrialization in the
United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, they reasoned, the mature industrial
economy would deliver consistent growth, which would in turn ameliorate
income disparities and expand the middle class. The American dream would
inexorably unfold. In the immediate post-World War II decades, the coun-
try seemed on track to fulfill their rosy predictions.
Instead, income inequality began to grow after 1970. The top 10 per-
cent, who took home 34 percent of the wages in 1970, collected almost 48
percent in 2010, a higher share than at any time in the twentieth century.
‘The strong middle class built during the midcentury period began to weaken
after 1970 as the percentage of wages claimed by the top 10 percent rose by
a steady 5 percent per year through the end of the century.° The share of
wages claimed by the top | percent of earners is even more striking: 18
percent in 1910, 8 percent in 1970, and 18 percent in 2010.’
 PREFACE ® xvii

Many of those who listened to FDR over the radio in February 1936
had lost their homes; others had saved them through New Deal programs
such as the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation or the Emergency Farm
Mortgage Act. Their children would purchase homes through Veterans
Administration loans or with help from the Federal Housing Administra-
tion. Some of their great-grandchildren would lose their homes in the 14
million foreclosures that took place during the Great Recession of 2007-
2009.° The twentieth-century history of the United States raises the ques-
tion of whether the American dream of an expanding middle class was a
historical accident, the contingent result of an industrial nation coming of
age, the growth of a federal social safety net, and the spending on the
military-industrial complex that began in World War II.
Roughly one out of every ten people who listened to Roosevelt that
night was African American. Since they occupied the lowest-paying jobs,
the Great Depression hit black Americans harder overall than white Amer-
icans. Seven months after FDR’s speech, they would abandon the Republi-
can Party en masse to vote for the Democrats’ New Deal. These United States
opens in the 1890s as African Americans mount a vigorous movement to
fight Jim Crow segregation and the loss of the voting rights that Reconstruc-
tion had guaranteed them. The book ends with an African American in his
second term as president. During his first run for the presidency in 2008,
on the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, death, Senator Barack
Obama quoted King, himself paraphrasing a white abolitionist in 1853: “the
arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Obama
added, in an echo of FDR, “But here is the thing; it does not bend on its
own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on the arc
and we bend it in the direction ofjustice.”
From Jim Crow to Ferguson, These United States chronicles African
Americans with their “hand[s] on the arc.” A long civil rights movement
spans our pages. We meet a young black woman, Ida B. Wells, handing out
brochures in protest of African Americans’ exclusion from the nation’s 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition; a young couple, William and Daisy Myers,
facing jeering white protesters as they integrated Levittown, Pennsylvania,
in 1957; and John Lewis, the son of sharecroppers, in a Nashville jail cell in
1960, speaking from the rostrum at the presidential inauguration in 2009.
Like an expanding middle class, the drive for racial equality gives us another
measure of America’s success in developing a strong democracy across the
XVill ® PREFACE

twentieth century. In These United States, we present African American his-

tory not as a separate story but as American history itself.
The long twentieth century was also pivotal for this nation of immi-
grants. Debates over immigration policy consumed voters and elected ofh-
cials repeatedly over the century. Politics, prejudice, and labor demands
usually drove these debates, which often flared into violence. Anti-Chinese
actions in the West culminated in exclusion laws once the foundation for
the nation’s railroads had been laid. And when fears of immigrant radical-
ism outweighed the need for unskilled labor, Congress adopted laws to curb
immigration from southern and eastern Europe in 1924. During the 1930s,
the government limited Mexican immigration, but when it needed workers
during World War II and into the 1960s, authorities brought them into the
country through the bracero program. In 1965 immigration reform lifted
the 1924 quotas and led to a strong increase in newcomers from Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Asia. By 1990, 20 million legal immigrants
lived in the United States. Millions more came without documentation. In
1990 the United States removed 30,039 “inadmissible or deported aliens”
from the country. By 2000, that number had grown to 188,467; by 2010, it
reached 383,031.'° In a rapidly globalizing world, citizenship issues and
immigration policies continue to divide communities and political parties.
By the time FDR spoke on Brotherhood Day, Eleanor Roosevelt was
the “foremost political woman in the United States.”!' Twenty-five years
earlier, her husband’s endorsement of woman suffrage had surprised her. She
believed that women could implement social change without the ballot.
After women won the right to vote in 1920, she became a politician in her
own right. By 1980, women who reported voting outnumbered men by 6.4
million. By 2012, that gap had grown to 10.3 million.'* Through traditional
party politics and social movements, women expanded American democ-
racy over the long twentieth century.
The patterns of women’s work also changed over the period. When
These United States opens, most Americans, including many women, thought
that working women took jobs away from men who needed to support
entire families. This idea of the “family wage” and the lone male breadwin-
ner eroded over the century. The female component of the labor force, 17
percent in 1890, grew to 47 percent in 2010.'° During World War I and
afterward, women organized to improve working conditions, increase their
wages, and get the support that they needed to raise families while bringing
 PREFACE ® xix

home paychecks. In the 1940s a young labor journalist, Betty Friedan,

argued that unionization would provide economic security for women
workers, and in the 1960s she helped found the National Organization for
Women to push for equal pay for equal work and to prevent discrimination
by sex in the workplace. There has been progress on this front, though a gap
remains still to close: in 1979 women working full time earned 62 percent
of men’s earnings; in 2012 they earned 81 percent. '4
Other women activists called for a stronger safety net to help young
mothers stay at home and raise their children, and they fought against ste-
reotypes, proffered by the New Right, that they were nothing but “welfare
queens.” Beginning in the 1970s, feminist activists calling for women’s
reproductive freedom faced a formidable challenge from other women who
argued for the preservation of the “traditional family.” The struggle over
family, morality, and sexuality shaped everyday life and national politics in
the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond.
Most of Roosevelt’s 1936 listeners looked to the New Deal—and hence
to the federal government—for access to their country’s political, economic,
and social promise. They grappled, as we do, with the responsibility of the
government to its people. In 1890 the federal government was small, with
unenforceable antitrust regulations. The Progressive era and the New Deal
expanded the role of the federal government, which now acted to regulate
commerce, support decent working conditions and workers’ rights, and
build programs such as Social Security to protect people from hardship. By
midcentury, the federal government had the tools to manage the economy
and regulate financial institutions.
During the post-World War II years, as federal regulation and the
sheer size of government grew, a well-funded and well-organized conserva-
tive insurgency rose to challenge the New Deal state and liberalism. Busi-
ness leaders like General Electric's Lemuel Boulware and his spokesman,
actor Ronald Reagan, celebrated free enterprise and argued that social wel-
fare sapped Americans’ work ethic, while regulation and taxation endan-
gered individual liberty. They were joined by a growing group of religious
conservatives who saw godliness as the antidote to Communism. Oppo-
nents of civil rights joined the cause, on the grounds that antidiscrimination
laws represented government intrusion into individual rights to freedom of
association.
By the 1960s, that New Right had become a major insurgent move-
ROG Oe PREACH

ment within the Republican Party. Fueled by opposition to urban riots and
black power in the 1960s and by growing unease at new norms regarding
personal sexuality unleashed by the liberation movements of the period, the
New Right gained adherents. By the late 1970s and 1980s, those insurgents
pushed aside moderate Republicans, turning the GOP rightward and lead-
ing many Democrats to reinvent liberalism. Democratic and Republican
presidents embraced deregulation, arguing that government rules on food
production, air traffic control, banking, and home mortgage lending
impeded competition and growth. Ronald Reagan promoted supply-side
economics on the theory that cutting taxes and regulatory controls would
increase corporate profits, which would “trickle down” to poor and middle-
class Americans. By the end of the century, the mainstream of the Demo-
cratic Party had accepted much of the conservative critique of the New Deal
and called for less government and lower taxes, although they held their
ground on the questions of reproductive rights and individual liberties.
Ideological arguments hardened, producing a weaker state, less effective
commercial regulation, a frayed social safety net, and deeper inequality.
Less than two weeks after FDR’s Brotherhood Day address, Adolf Hit-
ler ordered German troops into the Rhineland, violating the terms of the
Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. The U.S. Congress, domi-
nated by isolationist sentiment, passed a series of neutrality acts designed to
keep the nation out of developing conflicts. Differences over the nation’s
interests abroad have buffeted American foreign policy since 1898, when the
Spanish-American War raised issues of interventions in foreign conflicts.
Indeed, after 1914, as war spread through Europe, many Americans opposed
U.S. intervention for the sake of markets or empire. President Woodrow
Wilson changed the tenor of that debate by asserting the U.S. responsibility
to “make the world safe for democracy.” In 1917 he used this sense of mis-
sion to persuade a reluctant public to enter the war. After the Central Pow-
ers’ defeat, the isolationists in Congress refused to accept Wilson’s global
mission and declined to join the League of Nations. Isolationism kept the
country from intervening against Nazi aggression until the Japanese attack
at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The last war’s lessons often overshadow the realities
oflater confrontations.
The American troops who achieved victory in World War II believed
that they were indeed making the world safe for democracy. After the “good
war, the founding of the United Nations, the successful occupation of
 PREFACE ® xxi

Japan, and the rebuilding of Europe, most Americans believed that they had
a duty actively to export democracy, in part to ensure national security. This
belief in triumphant democracy infused Americans with the will to chal-
lenge the USSR throughout the Cold War. The Korean conflict and the
Vietnam War represented tangible commitments to that belief: U.S. security
depended, many thought, upon stopping Communism in far-flung nations.
During the Vietnam War, massive resistance at home grew and even spread
to the military itself, forcing President Richard Nixon to announce a pro-
gram of Vietnamization of the war and simultaneously a pullout of Ameri-
can troops. The loss in Vietnam brought to the forefront questions not only
about the country’s purpose but also about its ability to perpetuate its global
power. Conversely, the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union inspired new hope that
the United States could proceed to democratize the world.
Our current debates are driven by the legacies of decades of interven-
tion in the Middle East. From Eisenhower’s decision to back a coup in Iran
in 1953 to the oil crises after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the United
States has been diplomatically, militarily, and economically entangled with
the region. In the 1980s the United States intervened in the Iraq-Iran War,
empowering Saddam Hussein, and provided military and economic aid to
Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union. Many of them were Islamic fun-
damentalists who later became active in the terrorist group Al Qaeda. For
twenty-five years, beginning in 1991, the United States paid the price of
those interventions in two wars against Irag (1991 and 2003-11), a war in
Afghanistan (2001-14), and struggles against extremist organizations
throughout the region.
The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the Bush
administration’s war on terror, raised questions of intervention, human
rights, and national security to high relief. In a moment ofintense fear and
moral outrage, the United States created clandestine prisons, tortured sus-
pected terrorists, and rejected many of the conventional laws of war in the
name of a national emergency. But the targets of the war on terror proved
to be elusive, and the costs considerable. Many Americans now argue that,
with limited resources and growing problems of domestic inequality, mili-
tary intervention endangers the country as never before. Economic global-
ization, with its attendant costs to the domestic prosperity, threatens the
United States’ ability to sustain itself as a global power.
Throughout These United States, we track the connections between
XXii © PREFACE

erassroots actions and elite power. Woman suftragists confronted President

Woodrow Wilson through mass demonstrations in the streets of the capital.
Their promise to help mobilize for the Great War secured his commitment
to support a national suffrage amendment. Civil rights demonstrators pro-
duced clashes across the South that helped persuade President Lyndon John-
son to sponsor the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The electoral victories of
activists on the right helped shape the agenda of Congress and presidents
from Nixon to Obama. Rights and access won by one movement laid legal,
structural, and aspirational foundations for the next. The debates of the
twentieth century remain the debates of the twenty-first.
Finally, in the spirit of FDR’s observation, we share a commitment to
the individual lives, well known and unknown, who join together to make
history. You will meet some unforgettable characters in the pages that fol-
low. William Frank Fonvielle, a hopeful African American college student,
sets off on a trip through the South in 1893 to report on the strange new
phenomenon of segregation. Lew Sanders, in 1936 a bored radio salesman,
learns to fly and leads a heroic band of college-age men through every
major air battle of the Pacific theater during World War II. Lawrence James
Merschel, the all-American son of a World War II veteran, lands in Viet-
nam twenty days after the Tet Offensive and a month before Lyndon John-
son decides to pull back his commitment to the war. Betty Dukes, a black
California woman, discovers the limits of race and gender equality when
she tries to advance in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation. Through
these and many more twentieth-century lives, we root the broad history of
the United States in the intimacy of personal experience. Here we find a
nation in the making.
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 CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS OF THE
AMERICAN CENTURY

“S| RIEND PITTS WILLIAMS packed his brand-new diary as he set out
d with his dad on a high school graduation trip to visit the World’s
© Columbian Exposition in Chicago in August 1893. The exposition
honored the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Colum-
bus’s “discovery” of America, and its designers planned it to demonstrate the
modern and powerful nation that the United States had become. Called
“the greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War,” it
became the greatest event in Friend Williams’s life so far.!
The country’s most prominent architects—Frederick Law Olmsted,
Daniel Burnham, and Louis Sullivan—had designed a fairground on Chi-
cago’s southern lakefront to be a city in itself, one fit for a thriving, demo-
cratic nation and industrial powerhouse. They hoped that the exposition’s
architecture, especially the collection of Roman and Greek marble buildings
that they called the White City, would uplift and inspire visitors. The 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition celebrated the country’s post—Civil War
industrial and technological revolution and announced that it was one of
the most powerful nations in the world. It shaped public perception of what
the United States was and forged expectations of what it could be.
Even as it touted the United States’ successes, the exposition inadver-
tently exposed its shortcomings. Since the Civil War, an industrial revolu-
tion had changed daily life in profound ways. Fueled by a cheap workforce
of European and Asian immigrants, the U.S. economy generated extreme
wealth for a narrow sector ofindustrial and financial leaders. Most observers
attributed the nation’s rapid economic growth to an unregulated business
climate and believed that it rewarded the strong over the weak. A serious
2 © THESE UNITED STATES

recession began even as the exposition opened and gave impetus to a bud-
ding labor movement. Some unions questioned the basis of capitalism itself,
but the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, accepted capital-
ism and worked to improve working conditions and pay. It grew to be the
country’s largest labor union. The economy, tied to a global gold standard,
disadvantaged the majority of Americans who continued to farm the land
and limited credit for agricultural improvements. Farmers fought back, first
by joining in a national alliance and then by forming a third party, the
People’s Party. Discrimination against African Americans kept an impover-
ished farm labor force in place, and in the South, where 80 percent of black
Americans lived, states moved to strip them of the civil rights they had
gained in Reconstruction. Much had been accomplished in the United
States since the Civil War, as the exposition testified, but much had been
sacrificed for those triumphs.

THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION

Boarding the evening train in Buffalo, New York, one evening about nine
p.m. Friend Williams slept all night, arrived in Chicago by eleven the next
morning, and “set out to see the big show.” It cost him fifty cents to get in,
a price he felt cheap for the “grand sight.”* Williams’s first grand sight was
the White City itself on the shores of Lake Michigan: rows of neoclassical
buildings up and down two broad boulevards with a lake in the middle. At
one end was a colossal statue—The Republic—a toga-clad woman, holding
aloft an eagle perched on a globe signifying the U.S. role in spreading
democracy. The Republic might have mixed America’s metaphors, but the
nearby Peristyle mangled them. Commemorating Columbus’s voyage, a col-
onnade marked the Peristyle’s perimeter and surrounded Christopher
Columbus himself, who was portrayed as charging, for some inexplicable
reason, on a horse-drawn Roman chariot.

Celebrating the Nation’s Grandeur

The grand architecture of the White City was meant to awe the 27 million
people who visited it. It marked a departure for a nation that had long cel-
ebrated its humble beginnings, one where presidents boasted of growing up
in log cabins. The White City’s palaces certainly awed Williams, who mar-
veled at the elevated electric train running around its 215 buildings. The
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY ® 3

Palace of Electricity, with a moving sidewalk and thousands of lights,

boasted that the United States “eclipsed by her dazzling light every other
nation.”> Thomas Edison, who had started his own laboratory in 1876,
served as an example of what one gifted man could do. He invented the
phonograph and the motion picture camera, and he perfected the incandes-
cent light bulbs that dazzled Williams. Close by stood Machinery Hall,
stuffed with new inventions. In the Horticulture Building, a huge globe
turned, surrounded by American-made farm machinery, the kind that
many southern and midwestern farmers had already gone into debt to buy.
The fair represented agriculture as an industry rather than as the small farm-
ers husbandry.
Williams inspected the replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria, scrambled
over one of the U.S. Navy’s new battleships, and boarded a Viking vessel
that had actually sailed to Chicago from Norway. Elsewhere people boarded
a mock ocean liner, where they fancied themselves sailing around the world.
The India Building with its rajas and the Swedish Building with its gymna-
sium dazzled Williams. Suddenly the rest of the world seemed very close.
The United States was taking its place among the global powers. In 1893 the
country had not followed European nations into settler colonialism in
Africa and Asia, but the exposition portrayed it as capable of doing so.
The markedly more prosaic exhibitions in the Women’s Building pro-
moted a role for women in the commercial world. Its Board of Lady Man-
agers included 117 women, representatives from each state, who planned the
exhibitions. The board members were almost all elite white women who did
not work outside the home, but the exhibits demonstrated women’s practical
skills. The board chair defended women’s right to work for wages. The pre-
vailing family wage concept dictated that women should stay in the home,
to reserve wages for male heads of households, but the chair countered that
“there is, unfortunately, not a home for each woman to preside over; most
men are unable to maintain one.”*

Frederick Law Olmsted’s Dream

Three men named Fred—Frederick Law Olmsted, Frederick Douglass, and
Frederick Jackson Turner—embodied the exposition’s energy and themes.
Frederick Law Olmsted saw the nation’s future as a triumph of planning and
design. Frederick Douglass, born in slavery, fought for fairer representation
of African Americans at the exposition. The historian Frederick Jackson
4 © THESE UNITED STATES

Turner argued that the closure of the frontier in 1890 had brought to an end
the opportunity to attain a family farm, which would change the country’s
character and perhaps threaten democracy.
As Olmsted watched people like the Williams mill about the White
City, he noticed that they seemed overwhelmed and ill at ease. Observers
described visitors as “shy, very much overdressed,” or contained in “a quiet
uncomfortable dignity.” The exhibits conveyed a “scholastic formality” that
“took all the life out of sight-seeing.”® Far from being uplifted by their coun-
try’s grandeur, the crowds seemed bored. The architects had built palaces to
celebrate the nation, but such grandiosity simply distanced the people from
their own role in democracy. It made them dull spectators.

The People’s Pleasures

The adjacent Midway Plaisance dashed the White City’s lofty cultural ambi-
tions and foretold the hold of anew, robust—and less lofty—global culture.
Much to Olmsted’s chagrin, the crowd came alive when it exited the White
City for the Midway. Restaurants, shops, theaters, and displays stretched out
a mile long. If the White City was white, the Midway decidedly was not. It
was foreign, chaotic, crowded, and dirty—and much more interesting to
Williams and most of the other visitors. Crowds packed the World Congress
of Beauty, which boasted women from 140 nations. Most of the beauties
were probably locals, many of them African Americans.
The Midway surpassed P. T. Barnum’s circuses, and the people loved
it. The longest lines formed in front of the Persian Palace of Eros, where
Little Egypt performed the dance that soon swept the nation, the hootchy-
kootchy. The Ferris wheel ran second in popularity. Designed by George
W. G. Ferris for the exposition, this triumph of U.S. ingenuity operated
solely for fun. Williams pronounced it the “most satisfactory thing on the
Midway.”°
But it was not the only thing he saw there, since he talked his dad into
walking through the Midway each night as they made their way back to
their hotel. “Some will call it a wild scene as they walk down it at night,” he
confided to his diary. It was always “thronged” until midnight. “Several
nationalities are planted side by side in this one street until nearly all the
great countries of the world have a spot ornamented with some building
typical of its native land.” Music and strange languages assaulted Williams’s
senses, and here visitors formed “a jolly crowd.”” An Irish village flourished
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY ® 5

alongside a Blarney Castle replica, and 125 Javanese occupied a mock vil-
lage. Samoans danced at the South Sea Theater. Cairo’s Arab street repli-
cated sixty-two shops and hosted two parades each day and a “Danse du
Ventre” every night. Egyptians juggled. Africans drummed. Hungarian
Gypsies told fortunes. The Turks built a mosque; the Algerians a bazaar. At
the Dahomey Village, West Africans sang, danced, and reenacted battles,
led by women warriors. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, set up adjacent to
the exposition, reminded visitors that the Wild West had moved from real-
ity to fantasy.

Frederick Douglass’s Dream Deferred

Seventy-five-year-old African American Frederick Douglass found both the
Midway and the White City troubling. An ex-slave who had escaped to
freedom to become a leading abolitionist, Douglass had been U.S. ambas-
sador to Haiti and now served as the island nation’s representative to the
fair. He noticed at once that the White City contained exhibits from United
States, Central and South America, and Europe, relegating Africa to the
Midway. The Republic of Haiti sponsored a building, but African Ameri-
cans were not represented in the White City at all. As for the Midway’s
Dahomey Village, Douglass charged that exploiters had brought “African
savages here to act the monkey.”®
Ida B. Wells, a young black woman, urged African Americans to boy-
cott the exposition’s promotional “Colored People’s Day,” since African
Americans held only menial jobs on the exposition staff and the exhibitions
excluded them. The previous year Wells had been teaching and working as
a journalist in Memphis; she had then fled whites who threatened her life
because of acolumn she wrote protesting the lynching ofthree friends. Now
internationally known, Wells argued that foreign visitors would ask, “Why
are not the colored people, who constitute so large an element ofthe Amer-
ican population, and who have contributed so large a share to American
greatness, more visibly present and better represented in this World's Expo-
sition?” In answer, Douglass and Wells coauthored a brochure entitled “The
Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Expo-
sition.” It documented U.S. racism.
Instead of boycotting “Colored People’s Day,” Douglass spoke on the
portico of the Haitian Building. White men at the back of the crowd began
heckling him. He looked up from his text, fixed them in his glare, and said,
6G © THESE UNITED STATES

“Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem
is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patri-
otism enough, to live up to their own constitution.” Douglass allowed
Wells to set up a desk at the Haitian Building, from which she handed out
ten thousand copies of their brochure. °

Frederick Jackson Turner’s Vanishing Frontier

As the exposition banished African Americans, it also erased Native Amer-
icans from American history. Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian,
addressed a new organization of professional historians, the American His-
torical Association, which met in Chicago in conjunction with the exposi-
tion. His topic, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”
became one of the most famous speeches by a historian and one of the most
influential interpretations of American history. Turner told his mostly male,
white audience that the line of American settlement—the frontier—had
reached its end at the Pacific Ocean three years earlier, in 1890. Since the
frontier had operated as a social safety valve for the young country, its end
marked a turning point in American history. Thomas Jefferson had pre-
dicted that small farmers who owned their own land—yeomen—would
maintain their economic and political independence and ensure a demo-
cratic country. Now without the frontier, Turner argued, future generations
of Americans would have to find other ways to keep democracy alive.
But the American West through which Turner’s frontier moved had
not been an empty wilderness. Historians’ and ethnologists’ estimates of the
numbers of Native Americans in the continental United States vary
widely—from 1.8 million to 18 million upon European contact. Decades
of warfare, peaking in the 1860s and 1870s, had decimated the Plains Indi-
ans, and white settler attacks had wiped out many California Indian tribes.
The Dawes Act of 1887 cut across tribal authority and allowed Native
Americans to keep small, often arid landholdings if they would give up
tribal ties and become American citizens. The government settled others on
reservations. In 1890, the same year cited by Turner as marking the end of
the frontier, the Indian wars culminated in the massacre by U.S. troops of
more than 150 Lakota, mostly women and children, at Wounded Knee
Creek in South Dakota. By 1900 only 250,000 American Indians lived in
the United States.
While Turner’s thoughts lingered on the loss of a vital source for Amer-
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY °& 7

ican democracy, young men like Friend Williams did not pause to mourn
the frontier’s passing. Williams believed that the country’s industrial might
would raise living standards and propel the United States to global great-
ness. Some argued that Americans would have to look abroad to find new
markets, now that the country had settled all available land. Perhaps the
United States should export new democracies to faraway places.

BUILDING AN INDUSTRIAL NATION

The White City at the World’s Columbian Exposition touted one side of an
industrial revolution that had reordered the nation’s economy since 1863.
Some Americans had become very rich, and a few had garnered the unflat-
tering nickname “robber baron.” The country that had repudiated European
aristocracy suddenly seemed have its own commercial aristocracy. The writ-
ers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the nineteenth centu-
ry’s last three decades the “Gilded Age.” The name stuck.
The independent farmer, beholden to no one and voting his conscience,
gave way to a generation of employees—wage slaves, some thought. Some
wondered how the political system—a republic with powers derived from
the consent of the governed—could stand up to the concentration of wealth
among the few. Although most Americans still expected future presidents
to arise from the ranks of rough, knobby boys who came of age splitting logs
in the heartland, some feared that presidents might be drawn exclusively
from the ranks of the pampered elite.

The Self-Made Man: Andrew Carnegie

To counter this fear, Americans clung to the idea that theirs was a country
in which anyone who had enough initiative could become a millionaire. The
stories of three exceptional boys—Dick, Andrew, and John—demonstrate
the possibilities of the selfmade man in this period. Andrew and John had
grown up in the boom and bust economy of the mid-nineteenth century,
with minimal business regulation and abundant natural resources.
But Dick never grew up at all. He existed only in Horatio Alger novels
and in the imaginations ofAlger’s millions of readers. Dick’s full name was
Ragged Dick. He was born so poor that he could not support a last name,
and by depriving Dick of one, Alger implied that elite family ties mattered
little. Alger’s 120 books reached more than 17 million people in the last
8 © THESE UNITED STATES

thirty years of the nineteenth century. His characters tended to be orphans,

cast out onto uncaring city streets as prepubescent boys, to live by their own
wit. They made their own luck, often through acts of bravery or by demon-
strating exceptional honesty, usually in the presence of a millionaire who
himself turned out to be a self-made man. The millionaire who discovered
Ragged Dick on the streets proclaimed that “in this free country poverty is
no bar to a man’s advancement.”"
If Dick lived only in fiction, Andrew and John lived in the real world.
The extraordinary lives of Andrew Carnegie and John Davison Rockefeller
reinforced the mythology that any boy could make it in America. Less des-
perate than Ragged Dick’s impoverished beginnings, their nonetheless
humble origins belied—or perhaps foretold, depending on whether you
embraced the self-made-man myth—their later success. Carnegie struck out
at the age of thirteen; Rockefeller left home at fifteen. Carnegie did not
graduate from high school; Rockefeller graduated but did not go to college—
instead, he took a short commercial course. Their extraordinary success
sprang in part from the moment in which they lived. Carnegie was born in
1835 and Rockefeller in 1839.
When Carnegie’s family emigrated from Scotland to Allegheny City,
Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1848, the thirteen-year-old went to work
in a factory. His first break came two years later, when he landed a job as an
office boy in a telegraph company. Samuel Morse had invented the telegraph
eleven years earlier, and wires now hummed up and down the East Coast,
carrying messages in Morse code. Operators listened, wrote down on paper
dots and dashes, and then translated those odd marks into letters and words.
As Carnegie went about his duties—fetching supplies, sharpening pencils,
and emptying rubbish—the click click click of Morse code filled his ears.
Soon he realized that he could instantly translate the clicks into words,
without writing them out first. He became a blisteringly fast telegraph oper-
ator and worked his way up in the firm. He saved every nickel and invested
his savings. In 1861, Carnegie and a partner bought a Pennsylvania farm
where oil seeped up in the fields. They channeled it into a depression called
Carnegie’s Pond, expecting the pond to fill up a couple of times before the
supply exhausted itself. But the oil kept bubbling up for over a century.
During the Civil War, Carnegie coordinated Union rail transportation and
bought a steel mill that produced railroad ties.
In the West, railroads became the symbol of the age, iron rivers that
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY @® 9

created, rather than answered, consumer demand. In Nebraska, a vast open

plain before the rails came through, railroad officials jumped off the train
every few miles and founded “towns,” naming them alphabetically from
east to west. Settlers followed. Rails stretched across wide-open spaces, so
managers needed systems and communications that would extend their
oversight up and down the lines. All this would have been impossible with-
out the telegraph, whose lines spanned the country by 1861. The railroads
never functioned as purely capitalistic enterprises: they required government
support at every stage. Building railroads took enormous capital, a cheap
labor force, and above all, land. The federal government donated 129 mil-
lion acres in land grants, made loans, and executed favorable land leases for
the privately owned railroads.
All this came at a cost. Many railroads failed and lost their investors’
money. Railroad lawyers obliterated landowners’ opposition, and railroad
lobbyists bribed politicians at the state and federal levels. The writer Henry
Adams quipped that his generation was “mortgaged to the railroads.”'* The
first transcontinental line reached California in 1869, following existing
connections from the Midwest. In 1870 the United States had 35,000 miles
of track, and by 1900 mileage exceeded 200,000. On the East Coast, the
rails linked communities, moved raw materials and labor, and sped products
to markets. They created the commercial infrastructure that brought the
West into the national economy and accelerated industrial growth.
The iron and steel industry grew dramatically, partly because of rail-
road construction, and Andrew Carnegie became the nation’s richest man
by 1900. By 1890 his Edgar Thomson Steel Works, twelve miles from Pitts-
burgh, was the country’s largest steel mill. In 1892 the empire acquired two
more mills, including the famous Homestead.
Carnegie also owned a plethora of companies that cornered, extracted,
supplied, and produced everything that a steel mill might need. He described
making steel this way:

The eighth wonder of the world is this: two pounds of iron-stone

purchased on the shores of Lake Superior and transported to
Pittsburgh; two pounds of coal, mined in Connellsville and
manufactured into one and one-fourth pounds of coke and brought
to Pittsburgh; one half pound of limestone mined east of the
Alleghenies and brought to Pittsburgh; a little manganese ore,
10 © THESE UNITED STATES

mined in Virginia and brought to Pittsburgh, and these four and one
half pounds of material manufactured into one pound of solid steel
and sold for one cent! That’s all that needs be said about the steel
business.!?

Controlling production from start to finish—known as a vertical trust—

helped make a one-cent pound of steel profitable. Carnegie owned the coal
mine, the coke manufacturing facility, the limestone and manganese mines,
and the Pittsburgh mill. Someone observed that “such a magnificent aggre-
gation ofindustrial power has never before been under the domination of a
single man.”'* Carnegie’s accumulation of wealth was astonishing. Then he
began giving it away.
When Andrew Carnegie turned sixty-two, he sold his business inter-
ests for more than $300 million and spent the rest ofhis life as a philanthro-
pist. He donated money to towns and colleges across the English-speaking
world to build more than 2,500 libraries, and he established the Carnegie
Endowment for World Peace in 1910. Denouncing inherited wealth as a
corrupting force, he argued that “the lot of the skilled workman is far better
than that of the heir to an hereditary title, who is likely to lead an unhappy
wicked life.” Horatio Alger could not have said it better. But most indus-
trialists lacked Andrew Carnegie’s fear of inherited wealth.

The Self-Made Man: John D. Rockefeller

While Carnegie perfected the vertical trust, Rockefeller specialized in the
horizontal trust, combining competitors into one company to monopolize
a type of business and control a market. For Rockefeller, that business was
oil refining. When the sixteen-year-old completed his ten-week business
course in Cleveland, Ohio, a head for figures was his only asset. Starting off
as a bookkeeper, he then began his own produce company, which turned
out to be small potatoes compared to oil refining. Like Carnegie, Rockefel-
ler worked for the Union during the Civil War and bought oil fields close to
Carnegie Pond. In 1863 he built an oil refinery in Cleveland. There, by
1870, he consolidated several companies under the name Standard Oil.
With the rapid growth of the railroads, Rockefeller could ship oil and ker-
osene across the country quickly. Because he was a high-volume shipper, he
negotiated low rates. John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil became house-
hold names. By 1882 he had subsumed forty companies’ stock under the
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY ©®* 11

Standard Oil Trust, which by 1900 controlled 90 percent of the nation’s oil
refineries and made more than $45 million a year. Dubbed Wreck-a-feller
by other oil refiners, Rockefeller set his own prices below cost until his
competitor's customers vanished. Facing bankruptcy, the competitor often
agreed to sell his company to Standard Oil. After eliminating the competi-
tion, Rockefeller would raise prices again.
With a fortune of a billion dollars in 1913, Rockefeller outdistanced
Carnegie as the richest man in America. Unlike Carnegie, Rockefeller
passed down his wealth to his children, and his son, John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., persuaded his father to found the Rockefeller Foundation. The very
magnitude of the foundation meant that Rockefeller philanthropy shaped
U.S. social policy for decades in some sectors, for example, education and
medicine. Within the realms that it funded, the foundation could set poli-
cies that states followed.
By 1900 many of the corporations that would grow to be the largest in
the twentieth century already existed: Goodyear Tire, General Electric,
Nabisco, Coca-Cola, and DuPont. Competition disappeared when sub-
jected to an oil trust, a steel trust, a sugar trust, and a leather trust. A
reporter quipped, “The average citizen was born to the profit of the milk
trust and dies to the profit ofthe coffin trust.”'° In 1902 Ida Tarbell, a Penn-
sylvanian, wrote nineteen articles in McClure’s Magazine that exposed
Rockefeller’s business methods. The federal government had only lightly
regulated business in the past, and Tarbell’s evidence of Rockefeller’s busi-
ness tactics enraged citizens.

Regulation, Laissez-Faire, and Social Darwinism

The federal government had little motivation to introduce reform in any
sector. The Republican Party had held the White House and controlled
Congress for thirty-five years after 1869, with the exception of the eight
years when Democrat Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms.
Captains of
industry and midwestern farmers alike were Republicans, and
during elections the party constantly invoked the great sacrifices of Union
soldiers for Republican principles, a tactic called “waving the bloody shirt.”
The Democratic Party claimed some support among northern workers,
especially immigrants, along with the unwavering allegiance of southern
ex-Confederates. Thus Republican officials glided into power easily with
only a few positive programs.
12 © THESE UNITED STATES

Sometimes scandals interrupted the pattern. Cleveland won the presi-

dency in 1884 when it was revealed that his Republican opponent, James G.
Blaine, a wheeler-dealer congressman from Maine, had granted railroads
special favors. Blaine denied misconduct, but the publication of his letter to
a business executive showed him to be-an unctuous dissembler comfortably
inhabiting the pockets of the rich. The best part was that he wrote on the
bottom: “Burn this letter!” Across the country, little girls skipped rope to
the rhyme:

James G. Blaine, James G. Blaine,

Continental liar from the State ofMaine!
Burn this letter.

When politicians did propose mild business regulation, the conserva-

tive Supreme Court thwarted them. Business regulation fell to the states,
and in 1886 alone the court struck down 230 state commercial laws. Unable
to regulate, the federal government turned to fact-finding. Moved in 1882
by labor unrest, Congress organized the Blair Committee to explore rela-
tions between capital and labor, and the federal government established the
Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884. President Cleveland and Congress bent
to pressure to curb the railroads’ power and established the Interstate Com-
merce Commission (ICC) in 1887, based on the explicit constitutional pro-
vision of federal power to regulate commerce among states. The ICC ended
large shippers’ railroad discounts, tied rates to distance, and ordered the
publication of railroad fares. Farmers and small businessmen began to pay
lower shipping rates as railroad prices became tied to distance, not to
volume.
Cleveland then lost the 1888 presidential election to Republican Ben-
jamin Harrison, who worked with Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust
Act in 1890. It outlawed “every contract, combination . . . or conspiracy in
restraint of trade or commerce.” Congressmen characterized the act as con-
sumer protection: “preventing arrangements designed to advance the cost of
the consumer.” The vague language—“restraint of trade” and “arrangements
designed” —described intentions rather than concrete actions and made it
difficult to define or prosecute malfeasance. Lawsuits that tested the Sher-
man Act only confused the matter.
Cleveland regained the presidency in 1893, becoming both the twenty-
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY °® 13

second and twenty-fourth president, the only one to serve nonconsecutive

terms. Using the Sherman Antitrust Act, he directed the Department of
Justice to break up the American Sugar Refining Company trust, which
controlled 98 percent of U.S. sugar manufacturing. However, the Supreme
Court ruled in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895) that the Constitu-
tion’s commerce clause allowed federal regulation only of the distribution of
goods, not of their manufacture. Celebrating the ruling, one New York
banker proposed a toast to “the Supreme Court of the United States—
guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, sheet anchor of the
Republic.””” After that debacle, the Sherman Antitrust Act remained largely
untested for years.
Like many others in business and politics, the New York banker who
toasted the Supreme Court believed that a healthy economy needed no
government interference. Lack of regulation, or laissez-faire economics
(translated as “leave it alone”) became at this time an intellectual principle
undergirding the argument that democracy and free enterprise depended on
each other. Economists reasoned that in a democracy the people ruled
themselves; so it followed that commerce must regulate itself. Laissez-faire
advocates celebrated two Supreme Court rulings in 1886 and 1888 that
extended citizens’ rights in the Fourteenth Amendment (designed to make
freed people citizens) to corporations.
There were links between laissez-faire economics and a new cultural
strain, Social Darwinism, an offshoot of Charles Darwin’s work in biologi-
cal evolution. According to Social Darwinists, society progresses by accu-
mulating wealth, rewarding a few deserving people, and weeding out the
weak. When a man became rich, it proved that the biological principle of
survival of the fittest worked in society. The strongest citizens formed a
talented aristocracy to lead the rest up civilization’s ladder. Poverty and its
trappings—child labor or slums—represented sad but inevitable, even nec-
essary, conditions. Hard times would winnow the masses by limiting their
ability to have children or bringing about an early death. A few worthy poor
individuals—Ragged Dick, perhaps—would rise to the top through Dar-
win’s principle of natural selection. As the weak withered and died, the
ranks of the poor would diminish.
William Graham Sumner, a Skull and Bonesman as a student at Yale
and later a professor there, saw himselfas one of the fittest, despite the fact
that he had started on top. Sumner argued in 1883:
14 © THESE UNITED STATES

Certain ills belong to the hardships of human life. They are

natural... . The fact that my neighbor has succeeded in this struggle
better than I constitutes no grievance for me. . . . The aggregation of
large fortunes is not at all a thing to be regretted. On the contrary,
it is a necessary condition of many forms of social advance... .
Society... does not need any care or supervision.

When Sumner wrote that the “right to the pursuit of happiness is

nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence,” he was right
on one thing: laborers had little time to pursue happiness outside their
struggle for existence.'* In 1894 the novelist Hamlin Garland wondered
how the rules of Social Darwinism were working out at Carnegie’s Home-
stead Steel Mill. He reported, “Everywhere [at Homestead] . . . were pits
like the mouth of hell, and fierce ovens giving off a glare of heat . . . horrible
stenches of gases... steam sissed and threatened.” In intense heat, men
worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Unskilled laborers, many of
them new immigrants, brought home an average of $1.70 per day (or about
$42.00 currently). Homestead’s skilled workers could make an average of
$5.50 a day (about $130 today), a large sum compared to other skilled pro-
fessions, at $3.57. Despite the skilled workers’ good wages, one observer
commented, “you don’t notice any old men here.” The young men seemed
“discouraged and sullen.” As for the town, “everywhere the yellow mud of
the streets lay kneaded into a sticky mass, through which groups of pale,
lean men slouched in faded garments.””” Within a single month, Homestead
Steel reported seven deaths. Perhaps natural selection actually did eliminate
the weak. But it is less clear that the fittest rose at Homestead.
In 1910 at least 35,000 American workers died on the job. In Pitts-
burgh’s steel and iron mills, 195 workers died in a single year. Other dangers
lurked in the shadows. Most physicians understood that inhaling coal dust
or using dangerous chemicals on the job would bequeath workers long, slow
deaths. Exhaustion also contributed to the annual death toll. In 1910 the
average industrial employee worked six days a week and more than nine
hours a day. Advocates oflaissez-faire economics taught that a person had a
right to work as many hours as he or she chose. ‘They called it “liberty of
contract.” State-mandated caps on hours would limit individual decision
making, they argued.
The state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly honored lib-
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY ® 15

erty of contract and struck down laws limiting hours. Often state legisla-
tures had drafted those laws to protect certain occupations—for example,
bakers, who had to begin work in the predawn hours. However, the Supreme
Court in Lochner v. New York (1905) found bakers’ demands for an eight-
hour day to be unconstitutional. The justices declared that limiting working
hours was “mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the
individual.
»20

Chinese Immigration and the Exclusion Acts

Employers could draw on an abundant supply of cheap labor and fire work-
ers at will because of the continual influx of immigrants. Chinese immi-
grants, mostly male, began coming to the American West in the 1840s
during the Gold Rush. Driven by crushing poverty and an indenture sys-
tem, some 300,000 people had left China for the United States by 1882.
Upon arrival, the Chinese also faced discriminatory hurdles. In 1854 Cali-
fornia classed Chinese men with African Americans and Native Americans
to forbid them to testify in court against white men. Black Californians
protested, to no avail, that they were citizens and deserved fair judicial pro-
cess. After the Civil War, the Central Pacific Railroad found the California
Chinese laborers to be such hard workers that they went directly to China
to bring back thousands more. For the most part, they did not rise and
prosper but remained segregated in the worst jobs.
In the 1870s northern California’s economic growth slowed, and
another set of immigrants, Irish laborers in San Francisco, many of whom
had worked on the Union Pacific Railroad, began to complain that Chinese
labor depressed wages for everyone. The Chinese, they argued, did not have
to support families (they were mostly single males) and accepted terrible
working and living conditions. Having been victims of discrimination
themselves did not deter Californians from making immigration restriction
a political issue. By 1880, 75,000 Chinese people lived in the state. In 1882,
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which drastically restricted
Chinese immigration. Australia and Canada passed similar laws, and Con-
gress renewed the act in 1892. Ten years later Congress voted to extend the
Chinese Exclusion Act permanently.
The Exclusion Act specifically prohibited only “skilled and unskilled
laborers and Chinese employed in mining,” so a few Chinese professionals,
teachers, students, and merchants, became U.S. residents. Wong Fay, a
16 * THESE UNITED STATES

thirty-year-old doctor and druggist, obtained permission to live in Red-

lands, California, sometime after 1892. His immigration card noted that he
was “other than laborer.”
In 1905 the federal government established an immigration station on
Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay to process Pacific immigrants. Angel
Island operated as a fortified gate, not as an open door. Officials detained
eligible immigrants for weeks and interrogated them, searching for the
slightest discrepancy in their records. In 1916, when Louie Gar Fun, a mer-
chant who had immigrated earlier, traveled from Boise, Idaho, to meet his
wife and son at Angel Island, immigration officials kept them there for three
months. They interrogated the family about life in China (to prove that they
were actually married) and required copious documentation from Boise (to
prove that he was an upstanding merchant).”' The exclusion of Chinese
around the Pacific Rim by English-speaking countries owed a good deal to
racism, but it also reflected the growing interconnectedness of the global
economy in an industrial age. Growth required cheap, movable labor, but it
had to be the right kind at the right time.

European Immigration on the East Coast

Between 1860 and 1880, some 13.5 million people entered the United States
through East Coast ports, most of them from northern Europe and the British
Isles. In 1892 the federal government opened an immigration station on Ellis
Island in New York harbor. When fourteen-year-old Annie Moore boarded
the steamship Nevada in Cork City, Ireland, she had no idea that fifteen days
later—on New Year’s Day 1893—she would be the first immigrant processed
through Ellis Island. Perhaps she earned the honor because she was a “rosy-
cheeked Irish girl”; perhaps because she was sympathetic, journeying with her
younger brothers to join their parents in New York. She alighted on Ellis
Island amid a cacophony of ships’ whistles on a transport decked out in bun-
ting. An immigration official presented her with a ten-dollar gold piece.
In the subsequent decades, between 1892 and 1930, 19 million more
emigrants, many from Scandinavia and southern and eastern Europe, fol-
lowed Annie Moore. One million arrived each year between 1900 and 1906.
Four million Italians came before 1924, along with three million Russians,
many of them Jews. Eastern immigration peaked as 1,285,349 new Ameri-
cans went through Ellis Island in the twelve-month period that ended in
June 1907. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, unrestricted Mexican
 ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY @ 17

immigrants arrived to work on the railroads to replace Chinese workers, and

their numbers reached 100,000 by 1900. By 1920, 478,000 Mexican citi-
zens resided in the United States.
European immigrants fled their farms as their countries moved to large-
scale agricultural production and free trade across national borders. Govern-
ments eliminated common land, and landlords drove away tenants. Some
immigrants—for example, eastern European Jews and Irish Catholics—left
their homes because of religious persecution. Others fled compulsory national
military service. They traveled on new, fast steamships at low fares.
Upon their arrival in America, these “uprooted peasants” mostly lived
in cities. By 1910 the population of the country’s twelve largest cities com-
prised 40 percent first-generation immigrants and 20 percent second-
generation immigrants. First-generation immigrants included more men than
women, and the majority were fifteen to forty-five years old. Two-thirds of
East Cost immigrants settled in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic states.
Chicago became their midwestern center. Far fewer made their way to the
South, but Scandinavians settled on the Great Plains, where inhospitable land
remained affordable.
Urban immigrants clustered in neighborhoods and worked in indus-
tries with their fellow country people, enabling them to circumvent language
barriers, find employment, and learn the ropes. In early twentieth-century
New York, Jews made up 70 percent of garment workers. Slavs worked in
Pennsylvania coal mines. The immigration wave from 1890 to 1924 trans-
formed the country from a mostly Protestant nation to a nation of Protes-
tants, Catholics, and Jews. In cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, and
Milwaukee, Catholic immigrants and their children approached a majority
of the population. The kind of nativism—fear of immigrants—that Califor-
nians had reserved for the Chinese in the 1880s became directed at other
ethnic groups. Speaking and reading languages other than English at school
or at work was often banned. Protestants feared that Catholic candidates for
public office would owe allegiance to the church over American law.

Women and Children at Work

For all the labor power that industry gained from immigrant men, the new
industrial working class included many other sorts of people. Women found
work in dressmakers’ shops, food preparation, textile mills, and garment
factories, and as sales clerks in burgeoning retail stores. In garment factories,
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