Andrew Carnegie owned steel mills at Homestead, Pennsylvania, and wanted to run them without union contracts.
history
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CH 17 OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Homestead Strike
A. Andrew Carnegie owned steel mills at Homestead, Pennsylvania, and wanted to run them without union contracts.
B. In July of 1892, a pitched battle took place between 300 private company policemen and armed strikers, resulting in several lives lost and defeat for the union in the nation’s most famous labor strike.
II. The Populist Challenge
A. The Farmers’ Revolt
1. Farmers faced increasing economic insecurity.
2. Farmers sought to improve their condition through the Farmers’ Alliance.
B. The People’s Party
1. The People’s, or Populist, Party emerged from the Farmers’ Alliance in the 1890s.
a. Spoke for all the producing classes
2. The Populists embarked on a remarkable effort of community organization and education.
3. Populists embraced modern technologies—the railroad, the telegraph, and the national market—and pushed the federal government to regulate them in the public interest.
C. The Populist Platform
1. The Populist platform of 1892 remains a classic document of American reform.
D. The Populist Coalition
1. The Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political and economic program.
a. Colored Farmers Alliance
2. While many blacks refused to abandon Lincoln’s party, others were attracted by the Populist program.
3. The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of reform-minded women with farm and labor backgrounds.
a. Mary Elizabeth Lease
4. In 1892, presidential candidate James Weaver won over 1 million votes.
E. The Government and Labor
1. The severe depression that began in 1893 led to increased conflict between capital and labor.
a. Coxey’s Army
2. The Pullman Strike of 1894 saw the labor leader Eugene Debs jailed.
F. Populism and Labor
1. Populists made determined efforts to appeal to industrial workers but ultimately failed to get labor’s support.
2. Working-class voters in 1894 shifted en masse to the Republicans rather than the Populists.
G. Bryan and Free Silver
1. In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for the presidency.
a. Called for free silver
b. Condemned the gold standard
c. Championed a government helping ordinary Americans
H. The Campaign of 1896
1. Republicans nominated the Ohio governor William McKinley.
2. The election of 1896 is sometimes called the first modern presidential campaign.
a. Mark Hanna
3. McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate that had persisted since 1876 and created one of the most enduring political majorities in American history.
III. The Segregated South
A. The Redeemers in Power
1. Upon achieving power, the Redeemers moved to undo Reconstruction as much as possible.
a. Public school systems hardest hit
2. New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the penalties for petty crimes.
B. The Failure of the New South Dream
1. The region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty.
C. Black Life in the South
1. As the most disadvantaged rural southerners, black farmers suffered the most from the region’s condition.
a. Blacks owned less land in 1900 than they had at the end of Reconstruction.
2. Cities supported the growth of a black middle class.
3. Blacks were barred from skilled and supervisory positions, and the labor market remained rigidly segregated.
D. The Kansas Exodus
1. African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to education, and economic opportunity.
2. Most African-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the South.
a. Most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks.
E. The Transformation of Black Politics
1. Political opportunities became more and more restricted.
2. The banner of political leadership passed to black women activists.
a. The National Association of Colored Women
F. The Elimination of Black Voting
1. For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, black southerners continued to cast ballots.
2. Between 1890 and 1906, every southern state enacted laws or constitutional provisions meant to eliminate the black vote.
3. Numerous poor and illiterate whites also lost the right to vote.
4. The elimination of black and white voters could not have been accomplished without the approval of the North.
5. Booker T. Washington, a former slave, emphasized vocational education over political equality.
a. In writings and speeches such as the "Atlanta Compromise" (1895), Washington urged blacks to adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights.
G. The Law of Segregation
1. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court gave its approval to state laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites.
2. John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter on the Court.
H. Segregation and White Domination
1. States reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of southern life.
a. No black high school existed in the South by 1900.
2. The point was not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact with each other, whites held the upper hand.
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a section from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in which he calls for the recognition of blacks as full members of American society.
I. The Rise of Lynching
1. Those blacks who sought to challenge the system or who refused to accept the demeaning behavior that was a daily feature of southern life faced violence.
2. Many white southerners considered preserving the purity of white womanhood a justification of extralegal vengeance.
a. The charge of rape was a "bare lie."
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a portion of "Lynch Law in all Its Phases" (1893), a speech by Ida B. Wells on the evils of lynching.
J. Politics, Religion, and Memory
1. The Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans, in which slavery played a minor role.
2. School history books emphasized happy slaves and the evils of Reconstruction.
IV. Redrawing the Boundaries
A. The New Immigration and the New Nativism
1. In the 1890s, 3.5 million immigrants, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, arrived.
a. They were viewed as inferior by native-born Americans and a danger to democracy.
B. Immigration Restriction
1. The new immigration produced a resurgence of racial nationalism in the United States.
2. Talk of "race suicide" increased over the declining birth rate among the native-born.
3. Exclusion was central to efforts to build political communities as older sources of unity splintered.
a. Founded in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League distinguished between "old" and "new" immigrants and blamed the latter for national problems.
b. The League called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States.
4. Northern and western states experimented with ways to eliminate "undesirable" voters.
a. Nearly all the states during the 1890s adopted the secret, or "Australian," ballot to protect voters’ privacy and to limit the participation of illiterates.
5. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) features part of William Birney’s "Deporting Mohammedans" (1897), a letter he wrote protesting the deportation of Muslims from New York City.
C. Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights
1. The Page Act barred Chinese women from entering the country.
2. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the Chinese from the United States.
3. The Chinese resisted discrimination and fought for their rights in a variety of ways.
4. Chinese demands for equal rights forced the Supreme Court to define the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment.
a. Tape v. Hurley
b. Yick Wo v. Hopkins
c. United States v. Wong Kim Ark
5. Fong Yue Ting (1893) authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of law.
6. Exclusion profoundly shaped the experiences of Chinese-Americans.
D. The Rise of the AFL
1. The rise of the AFL reflected a shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals.
2. Samuel Gompers pioneered "business unionism."
3. During the 1890s, the labor movement became less and less inclusive.
E. The Women’s Era
1. Changes in the women’s movement reflected the same combination of expanding activities and narrowing boundaries.
2. Through a network of women’s clubs, temperance associations, and social reform organizations, women exerted a growing influence on public affairs.
a. Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
3. The center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an outlook more in keeping with prevailing racial and ethnic norms.
V. Becoming a World Power
A. The New Imperialism
1. America was a second-rate power in the 1880s.
2. After 1870, European powers, along with Japan, scrambled to dominate Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, justifying their imperialism as bringing "civilization" to the supposedly backward peoples of the non-European world.
B. American Expansionism
1. Territorial expansion had been a part of American life since well before independence. But the 1890s marked a significant turning point in America’s relationship with the rest of the world.
2. Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions.
C. The Lure of Empire
1. Religious missionaries spread the nation’s influence overseas during the late nineteenth century.
2. A small group of late nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism.
a. Josiah Strong
b. Alfred T. Mahan
3. Hawaii was long sought after by Americans and was annexed by the United States in 1898.
4. The depression that began in 1893 heightened the belief that a more aggressive foreign policy was necessary to stimulate American exports.
5. Unifying patriotism dates to the 1890s.
a. The cult of the flag
b. Yellow press
D. The "Splendid Little War"
1. Cuba had fought for independence since 1868.
2. The United States went to war with Spain to win Cuba’s liberty and freedom.
a. Teller Amendment
3. Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet at Manila Bay.
E. Roosevelt at San Juan Hill
1. Rough Riders took San Juan Hill in Cuba.
a. Black troops
2. National hero Teddy Roosevelt was elected governor of New York.
F. An American Empire
1. In the treaty with Spain ending the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam.
a. Platt Amendment for Cuba
2. America’s interest in its new possessions had more to do with trade than with gaining wealth from natural resources or from large-scale American settlement.
3. In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open-Door policy with China.
G. The Philippine War
1. Many believed that American participation in the destruction of Spanish rule would lead to social reform and political self-government.
2. Emilio Aguinaldo led a fight against American colonialism.
3. The McKinley administration justified U.S. intervention in the Philippines on the grounds that its aim was to "uplift and civilize and Christianize" the Filipinos.
H. Citizens or Subjects?
1. American rule also brought with it American racial attitudes.
a. White man’s burden
2. America’s triumphant entry into the ranks of imperial powers sparked an intense debate over the relationship between political democracy, race, and American citizenship.
3. The Foraker Act of 1900 declared Puerto Rico an "insular territory," different from previous territories in the West.
a. The Insular Cases
4. In the twentieth century, the territories acquired in 1898 would follow different paths.
a. Hawaii achieved statehood in 1959.
b. The Philippines got independence in 1946.
c. Puerto Rico is the "world’s oldest colony" as a commonwealth.
I. Drawing the Global Color Line
1. American racial attitudes had a global impact in the Age of Empire.
2. Chinese exclusion in the United States influenced anti-Chinese laws adopted in Canada.
3. American segregation and disenfranchisement became models for Australia and South Africa as they formed new governments.
J. "Republic or Empire?"
1. The Anti-Imperialist League argued that empire was incompatible with democracy.
2. Without any sense of contradiction, proponents of an imperial foreign policy also adopted the language of freedom.
a. Senator Albert Beveridge
3. Brooks Adams’s book The New Empire (1902) predicted that because of its economic power, the United States would soon "outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined."
