Chapter 18: The Politics of Late Nineteenth-Century AmericaThe Politics of the Status Quo, 1887-1893

I. Where defenders of the Union had once envisioned a social order and an economic system reshaped by an activist state, now, in the 1880s, the nation’s political leaders retreated to a more modest conception of state power. The dominant rhetoric celebrated the government that governed least.

The Passive PresidencyI. The president’s biggest job was to dispense political patronage. Under the spoils system, government

appointments were treated as rewards for those who had served the victorious party.A. Reform of this system became an urgent issue after President Garfield was killed in 1881.

Advocates of civil reform blamed his assassination on the poisonous atmosphere of the spoils system that left many disappointed in the scramble for government jobs.

B. The resulting Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 created a list of civil service jobs to be filled on the basis of examinations administered by the Civil Service Commission. The standards of public office did rise considerably, but there was no American counterpart to the elite professional civil services taking shape in GB and Germany.

II. The executive branch had very modest functions. The question of how to reduce the federal surplus ranked as one of the most troublesome issues of the 1880s.

Party PoliticsI. On matters of national policy the president took a backseat to Congress. But Congress functioned badly.

Procedural rules frequently stymied legislative business.A. Neither party stayed in power long enough to push through a coherent legislative program, and in

any case congressional leaders lacked the power to keep party members in line.II. Historically, Democrats and Republicans represented somewhat different traditions. The Democrats

favored states’ rights and limited government; the Republicans were heirs to the Whig enthusiasm for federally assisted economic development.

A. After reconstruction, the Republicans backed away from the activist position, and party lines became blurred.

The Tariff QuestionI. Only free trade remained a real fighting issue. From Lincoln’s day onward, high duties had protected

American industry against imported goods.A. The Democrats, free-traders by tradition, regularly attacked Republican protectionism.B. In practice, however, the tariff was a negotiable issue like any other. Congressmen voted their

constituents’ interests, regardless of party rhetoric. As a result, every tariff bill was a patchwork of bargains among special interests.

II. In 1887 President Cleveland cast off his reluctance to lead the nation and took up the tariff issue. Ardently opposed to protectionism, Cleveland devoted his entire annual message to Congress to tariff reform and campaigned on that basis for reelection in 1888.

Campaign PoliticsI. Issues were treated gingerly partly because the parties were so equally balanced.

A. The Democrats, in retreat immediately after the Civil War, quickly regrouped and by the end of Reconstruction stood on virtually equal terms with the Republicans.

B. Every presidential election from 1876-1892 was decided by a thin margin, and neither party gained any seats in Congress.

II. The weakening of principled politics was evident in the Republican’s retreat from their Civil War legacy.A. The major unfinished business after 1877 involved the plight of former slaves. The Republican

agenda called for federal funding to combat illiteracy and federal protection for black voters in southern congressional elections. Neither measure managed to make it through Congress.

B. Republican gradually backpedaled on the race issue and left blacks to their fate.III. That did not stop the Republicans from “waving the bloody shirt” against the “treasonous” Democrats.

A. Service in the Union army gave candidates a strong claim to public office, and veterans’ benefits always stood high on the Republican agenda.

B. The Democrats played the same game in the South as the defenders of the Lost Cause.IV. The characteristics of public life in the 1880s—the inactivity of the federal government, the evasiveness of

the political parties, and the absorption in politics for its own sake—derived ultimately from the conviction that little was at stake in public affairs.

A. Government activity in itself was considered a bad thing.The Ideology of Individualism

I. Americans believed that any man, however humble, could rise as far as his talents would carry him; every person received his just award; and the success of the individual contributed to the progress of the whole.

The Gospel of WealthI. Russell Conwell’s lecture—and its notion of wealth as stewardship—served as a text for what became

known as the Gospel of Wealth. Its leading exemplar, Andrew Carnegie, argued that the rich had a duty to put their money to special use.

A. They should not coddle the less privileged, but provide the libraries, education, and cultural and scientific institutions by which the worthy poor might prepare themselves for life’s challenges.

Social DarwinismI. American individualism drew strong intellectual support from science.II. Drawing on Darwin, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer developed an elaborate analysis of how

human society evolved through constant competition and “survival of the fittest.”A. Social Darwinism was championed in America by William Graham Sumner. He said that

competition was a law of nature.III. Social Darwinists regarded with horror any government interference with social processes.

The Supremacy of the CourtsI. Suspicion of activist government not only paralyzed political initiative; it also shifted power away from the

executive and legislative branches.A. From 1870 onward the courts increasingly accepted the role that Sumner assigned to them,

becoming the guardians of the rights of private property.II. Under the federal system as it was understood in the late 19th century, the states retained primary

responsibility for social welfare and economic regulation. They were responsible for exercising their police powers to ensure the health, safety, and morals of their citizens.

A. The leading question in American law was where to strike the balance between state responsibility for the general welfare and the liberty of the individuals to pursue their private interests.

B. Most states found themselves cutting back on expenditures and public services.III. Increasingly it was federal judges who took up the battle against state activism.

A. The Supreme Court’s crucial weapon in this campaign was the 14th amendment, which prohibited states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law.” The due process clause had been adopted during Reconstruction to protect the civil rights of former slaves.

B. Due process protected the property rights and contractual liberty of any “person,” and legally, corporations counted as people. So interpreted, the 14th amendment became by turn of the century a powerful means of restraining the states in the use of their police powers to regulate private business.

IV. The Supreme Court similarly hamstrung the federal government by a narrow reading of its constitutional powers.

A. In 1895 the Court ruled that the federal power to regulate interstate commerce did not cover manufacturing and struck down a federal income tax law.

B. Judicial supremacy reflected how dominant the ideology if individualism had become in industrial America, and also how low American politicians had fallen in the esteem of their countrymen.

Sources of Popular ParticipationI. For all the criticism leveled against it, politics figured centrally in the nation’s life. Proportionately more

voters turned out in presidential elections from 1876-1892 than at any other time in American history. People voted Democratic or Republican for life. Many actively participated.

Cultural Politics: Party, Religion, and EthnicityI. In the late 19th century, politics was a vibrant part of the nation’s culture. It became one of the American

forms of entertainment.II. Party loyalty was a serious matter, and emotions ran high. Beyond sectional differences, the most important

determinants to party loyalty were religion and ethnicity. A. Northern Democrats tended to be foreign-born and Catholic, while Republicans tended to be

native-born and Protestant. (The South was driven more by race than ethnicity.)B. Among Protestants, the more pietistic a person’s faith was, the more likely he was to be a

Republican, and to favor using the powers of the state to legislate public morality and regulate individual behavior.

III. During the 1880s ethnic tensions began to build up in many cities. Education became an arena of bitter conflict.

A. One issue was whether instruction would be in English in the schools. Immigrant groups often wanted their children to be taught in their native languages. In response, native-born Americans passed laws making English the language of instruction.

IV. Religion was an even more explosive educational issue.A. Catholics fought a losing battle over public funding of parochial schools. In Boston a furious

controversy broke out in 1888 over the use of an anti-Catholic history textbook.V. There was also the regulation of public morals. In many states, blue laws restricted activity on Sundays.

But German and Irish Catholics considered blue laws a violation of their personal freedom.VI. Ethnocultural conflict also flared over the liquor question.

A. Many states adopted strict licensing and local-option laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol.

B. These issues lent deep significance to party affiliation. And because these issues were fought mostly at the state and local levels, they hit very close to home.

C. Methodists thought of the Republican Party as the party of morality. Irish and German Catholics saw the Democratic Party as the defender of their freedoms.

Organizational PoliticsI. Political life was also important because of the remarkable organizational activity in generated. By the

1870s both major parties had evolved formal, well-organized structures.A. At the base lay the precinct or ward, whose meetings could be attended by all party members.

County, state, and national committees ran the ongoing business of the parties. Conventions determined party rules, adopted platforms, and selected each party’s candidate.

B. At election time the party’s main job was to get out the vote. Wherever elections were close and hard fought, parties mounted intensive efforts organized down to the individual voter.

II. Only professionals could manage such a highly organized political system. People began to regard politics as a “vocation.” This factor, above all else, gave American politics its special character.

A. The party system required professionals, and professionalism created careers. Politics served as an avenue for upward mobility for many whose ethnic or class background barred them from the opportunities open to other Americans.

Machine PoliticsI. Party administration seemed, on its face, highly democratic, since in theory all power derived from the

party members in the precincts and wards. In practice, however, the parties were run by unofficial internal

organizations—machines—that consisted of insiders willing to accept discipline and do party work in exchange for getting on the public payroll or pocketing bribes.

A. The machines tended toward one-man rule, although the “boss” ruled more by the consent of the secondary leaders than by his own absolute power.

II. Absorbed in the tasks of power brokerage, machine bosses treated public issues as somewhat irrelevant. The high stakes of money, jobs, and influence made for intense factionalism.

A. At the national level, the Republicans fought bitterly among themselves after Grant left office. For the next 6 years the party was divided into 2 warring factions—the Stalwarts, who followed Senator Roscoe Conkling, and the Halfbreeds, led by James Blaine. The split was sparked by a personal feud between Conkling and Blaine, but it persisted because of a furious struggle over patronage.

B. The Halfbreeds represented a newer Republican generation that was more inclined to pay lip service to political reform and was less committed to the old Civil War issues.

III. Machine politics raised the standards of government in certain ways. Disciplined professionals, veterans of machine politics, improved the performance of state legislatures and the Congress because they were more experienced in the system of politics.

A. Party machines filled a void in the nation’s public life. They did informally much of what the government left undone in this era, especially in the cities.

The MugwumpsI. Machine politics never managed to win the respect of the general public. Many of the nation’s social elite

resented a politics that excluded people like themselves. There was also a genuine clash of values.A. Political reformers called for “disinterestedness” and “independence”—the opposite of self-

serving careerism and party regularity fostered by the machine system.II. In 1884 Carl Schurz, Edwin Godkin, and Charles Francis Adams left the Republican Party because they

associated its presidential candidate, James Blaine, with corrupt politics.A. Mainly from NY and MA, these Republicans became known as Mugwumps.B. The Mugwumps threw their support to Grover Cleveland and may have ensured his victory by

giving him the margin to carry NY.III. After the 1884 election, the enthusiasm for reform spilled over into local politics, spawning good-

government campaigns across the country.A. Although they won some municipal victories, the Mugwumps were more effective at molding

public opinion. Controlling the newspapers and journals read by the educated middle class, the Mugwumps defined the terms of debate and denied the machine system public legitimacy.

IV. The Mugwumps registered their biggest success in the campaign for the secret ballot. Under this reform, citizens, in the privacy of a voting booth, would mark and official ballot listing the candidates in all parties instead of submitting a party-supplied ticket in public view at the polling place.

V. The Mugwumps were reformers, but not on behalf of social justice. The problems of working people did not evoke their sympathy, nor did they favor using the powers of the state to ease the suffering of the poor.

A. As far as the Mugwumps were concerned, that government was best which governed least.Women’s Political Culture

I. In attacking organizational politics, the Mugwumps were challenging one of the bastions of male society. Politics was considered man’s territory.

II. The woman suffrage movement met with fierce opposition. Blocked in their efforts to get a constitutional amendment introduced in Congress, suffragists concentrated on state campaigns. However, any voting gains they made were minor.

A. Women tried to create their own sphere of government.III. In 1869, Sorosis, a women’s professional club in NY, convened a Women’s Parliament in the hope of

launching a parallel government responsible for public matters of concern to women.

A. Nothing came of the Women’s Parliament, but it did indicate the degree to which the women’s sphere could take political form.

B. If not a parallel government, the social activism of women certainly gave rise to a female political culture that made itself felt in the public life.

IV. No issue joined the home and politics more poignantly than did the liquor question. Widespread opposition to drinking led to the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which after its formation in 1874 rapidly blossomed into the largest organization of women in the country.

V. Because it excluded men, the WCTU was the spawning ground for a new generation of women leaders.A. It expanded to cover a wide array of social issues.B. The WCTU was drawn to woman suffrage. Women needed the vote, Willard—its president—

argued, to fulfill their social responsibilities as women. This was different from the claim made by the suffragists—that voting was an inherent right of all citizens—and was less threatening to masculine pride.

VI. Not much changed in the short run. The WCTU was internally divided on the suffrage issue and did not become a major participant in the later struggles for women’s right to vote.

A. By linking women’s social concerns and political participation, the WCTU helped lay the groundwork for a fresh, broader-based attack on male electoral politics in the early 20th century.

B. The WCTU demonstrated how potent a voice women could find in the public realm, and how vibrant a political culture they could build.

The Crisis of American Politics: the 1890sI. Over the years following the election of 1888 the tide went heavily against the Republicans. These losses

can be partially explained by the lackluster performance of the Harrison administration and by the success of the Democrats at tarring the protectionist McKinley Tariff of 1890 as a giveaway for the vested interest.

A. Less visible but more ominous for the Republicans was an erosion of grass-root support.B. The Prohibition Party, which had first appeared in national elections in 1876, made inroads among

evangelical Protestants, while the Democrats gained among moderates in local battles over education and public morality.

II. By the time of Cleveland’s inauguration, rising farm foreclosures and railroad bankruptcies signaled economic trouble. On May 3, 1893, the stock market crashed.

III. As the economic crisis of the 1890s set in, which party would prevail—and on what platform—became an open question.

The Populist RevoltI. Farmers were by necessity joiners. They needed organization to overcome their social isolation and to

obtain crucial economic services—hence the enormous appeal of the Patrons of Husbandry, which had spread across the Midwest after 1867.

A. From diffuse organizational beginnings, two dominant organizations emerged. One was the Farmers’ Alliance of the Northwest, which was confined mainly to the Midwestern states.

B. More dynamic was the National Farmers’ Alliance, which in the mid-1880s spread rapidly from Texas onto the Great Plains and eastward into the cotton south.

C. While thus recapitulating Granger resentment against railroads and merchants that had fueled earlier third-party movement, the alliances conceived of themselves as agents of social and economic reform rather than as new political parties.

II. The Texas alliance established a massive cooperative, the Texas Exchange, that marketed the crops of cotton farmers and provided them with cheap credit.

A. When cotton prices fell in 1891, the Texas Exchange failed. The Texas alliance then proposed a new scheme: a sub-treasury system that would enable farmers to store their crops in public warehouses. Farmers would be able to borrow against those crops from a federally supplied fund at low interest rates until prices rose enough so that their cotton could be profitably marketed.

B. The sub-treasury plan would provide the same credit and marketing functions as had the Texas Exchange, but with a crucial difference: the federal government would play the key role.

C. When the Democratic Party declared the sub-treasury plan too radical, the Texas alliance decided to strike out in politics independently.

III. These events in Texas revealed a process of politicization that went on throughout the alliance movement.A. Rebuffed by the established parties, alliancemen more or less reluctantly abandoned their

Democratic and Republican allegiances.B. Across the South and West, as state alliances grew stronger and more impatient, they began to

field independent slates.C. Their successes led to the formation of the national People’s Party.

IV. Populism was distinguished by the number of women in the movement. In the established parties, the grass-roots organizations were for men only. Populism, by contrast, arose from a network of suballiances that had formed for largely social purposes and welcomed women.

V. Although women participated actively and served as speakers and lecturers, only a handful achieved high office in the alliances, and their role diminished once the Populist Party entered politics.

Populist IdeologyI. Populism was driven as much by ideology as by the quest for political power. The problems afflicting

farmers, Populists felt, could stem only from some basic evil. They identified this evil as the “money power” over the levers of the economic system.

II. By this reasoning, farmers and workers formed a single producer class.A. Thus the Southern Farmers’ Alliance renamed itself in 1889 the National Farmers’ Alliance and

Industrial Union.B. Organized in Knights of Labor assemblies, Texas railroad workers and Colorado miners

cooperated with the farmers’ alliances, got their support in the strikes, and actively participated in forming state Populist parties.

C. The platform of the national party contained strong labor planks, and party leaders earnestly sought the support of the labor movement.

III. In an age dominated by laissez-faire doctrine, what most distinguished Populism from the major parties was its positive attitude toward the state.

IV. The Omaha platform, adopted at the founding convention of 1892, called for nationalization of the railroads and communications; protection of the land, including natural resources, from monopoly and foreign ownership; a graduated income tax; the creation of postal savings banks; the Texas alliance’s sub-treasury plan; and free coinage of silver.

Free SilverI. Cotton and grain farmers were especially vulnerable to falling commodity prices. Under the pressure,

farmers turned to free silver, which they hoped, by increasing the money supply, would raise farm prices and enable them to pay back their debts with cheaper dollars.

A. In addition, free silver would bring in hefty contributions to the Populist Party from the silver-mining interests. These mine operators, scornful though they might be of Populist radicalism, yearned for the day when the government would buy at a premium price all the silver they could produce, and to that end they were prepared to support the Populists.

II. Free silver was opposed by urban social reformers and by agrarian radicals. They argued that free silver would undercut the broader Populist program and drive away wage earners, who had no enthusiasm for inflationary measures.

A. Any chance of a farmer-labor alliance that might transform Populism into an American version of the social democratic parties of Europe would be doomed.

III. Despite the fierce debate within the party, the outcome was never in doubt. The political appeal of free silver was simply too great. But once Populists made that choice, they fatally compromised their party’s capacity to maintain an independent existence.

A. For free silver was not an issue over which the Populists held a monopoly. Free silver was, on the contrary, a question at the very center of mainstream politics in the 1890s.

Money and PoliticsI. Before the Civil War the main source of the nation’s money supply had been the banknotes circulated by

several thousand state banks. Although subject to state regulation, these banks issued notes in their private role as providers of credit to their customers.

A. The banknotes they gave to borrowers circulated as money until presented to the banks for redemption.

B. The economy’s need for money was amply met by state banks, although the goodness of the banknotes—the ability of the issuing banks to stand behind their notes and redeem them at face value—was always uncertain.

C. During the Civil War this freewheeling system came to an end. The Banking Act of 1863 sharply curtailed the freedom of the state banks to create money. They could still issue banknotes, but insofar as these notes were backed by US government bonds.

II. The economic impact of this nationalizing action was not immediately felt because the Lincoln administration itself was printing large amounts of paper money to finance the Civil War.

A. After the war, however, the sound money interests lobbied powerfully for a return to the bimetallic policy prevailing ever since the founding of the republic, which was to base the federal currency on specie—gold and silver—held by the US treasury.

B. The issue was debated for a decade, but in 1875 the inflationists were defeated, and the circulation of paper bills as legal tender—that is, backed by nothing more than the good faith of the federal government—came to an end.

C. With the state banknotes also in short supply, the country entered an era of chronic deflation and tight credit.

III. This was the context out of which the silver question emerged. The country had always operated on a bimetallic standard, but the supply of silver had gradually tightened, and as silver became more valuable as metal than as money, silver coins disappeared for circulation.

A. In 1873 silver was officially dropped as a medium of exchange. Soon afterward, great silver discoveries occurred in the west, and silver prices fell.

B. Inflationists began to agitate for a resumption of the traditional bimetallic policy: if the government resumed buying silver at the fixed ratio prevailing before 1873—16 ounces of silver equaling 1 ounce of gold—silver would flow into the treasury and greatly expand the volume of currency.

IV. With so much at stake for some many, the currency question became one of the staple issues of post-Reconstruction politics.

A. The Bland-Allison Act of 1878 required the US Treasury to purchase and coin between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver each month.

B. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 required 4.5 million ounces of silver bullion to be purchased monthly to serve as the basis for new issues of notes.

V. These legislative battles, though hard fought, cut across party lines in the characteristic fashion of post-Reconstruction politics. But in the early 1890s, silver suddenly became a defining issue between the parties. It had a radicalizing effect on the Democratic Party.

The Cleveland Administration and the Silver QuestionI. When the crash of 1893 hit, the Democrats held power in Washington. Cleveland made things worse for the

Democrats.

A. When jobless marchers—known as Coxey’s Army—arrived in Washington in 1894 to appeal for federal relief, Cleveland’s response was to disperse them forcibly and arrest their leader, Jacob Coxey. His brutal handling of the Pullman strike further alienated him the labor vote.

B. Nor was he able to deliver on his campaign promise of tariff reform.C. Cleveland lost control of the battle when the unpopular McKinley Tariff of 1890 came up for

revision in Congress. The resulting Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894, which Cleveland allowed to pass into law without his signature, caved in to special interests and left the most important rates mostly unchanged.

II. Most disastrous was Cleveland’s rigidity on the silver question. He repeatedly denounced the recklessness of free silver coinage.

III. Economic pressures soon pushed him to abandon altogether a silver-based currency. The problem was a persistent drain on US gold reserves held by the treasury, caused partly by transfers of gold overseas to cover an unfavorable balance of international payments, and partly by redemptions of gold by holders of US Treasury notes.

A. To help preserve the government’s gold reserves, Cleveland persuaded Congress in 1893 to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, effectively sacrificing the country’s painfully crafted effort at maintaining a partial bimetallic standard.

IV. As his administration’s difficulties deepened, Cleveland turned in 1895 to a syndicate of private bankers led by J.P. Morgan to finance the gold purchases needed to replenish the Treasury’s depleted reserves.

A. These secret negotiations with Wall Street, once discovered, enraged Democrats and completed Cleveland’s isolation from his party.

William Jennings Bryan and the Election of 1896I. At their national convention in Chicago in 1896, the Democrats repudiated Cleveland and turned left. The

leader of the triumphant silver Democrats was William Jennings Bryan.A. With biblical, Bryan swept up his audiences when he joined the debate on free silver at the

Democratic convention. He had been quietly building up delegate support while distancing himself from convention politicking.

B. Bryan locked up the presidential election with a stirring attack on the gold standard.II. Bryan’s nomination meant that the Democrats had become the party of free silver; the money issue would

turn into a national crusade.A. Silver Republicans bolted their party; gold Democrats went for a splinter Democratic ticket or

supported the Republican Party; even the Prohibition Party split into gold and silver wings.B. The Populists accepted Bryan as their candidate. The free silver issue had become so vital that

they could not do otherwise. The populists found themselves for all practical purposes absorbed in the Democratic silver crusade.

III. The Republicans took up the challenge. Their key leader was Mark Hanna, who orchestrated an unprecedented money-raising campaign among America’s corporate interests for McKinley.

A. McKinley supported property, high tariffs, and sound money.IV. For the middle class, sound money stood symbolically for the soundness of the social order. With jobless

workers in the streets and bankrupt farmers up in arms, Bryan’s assault on the gold standard struck fear in many hearts.

V. Though little noticed at the time, ehtnocultural issues also figured prominently in the campaign. The Republicans, the party of morality, beat a strategic retreat from temperance and Sunday laws.

A. In appealing to the immigrant and working-class constituents, McKinley had learned the art of easy tolerance.

B. Bryan, with his biblical rhetoric and moral righteousness, presented the more alien image to traditional Democratic voters in the big cities.

VI. The paralyzing equilibrium of American politics ended in 1896. The Republicans had skillfully handled both the economic and the cultural challenges. They persuaded the nation that they were the party of prosperity and shifted some of the burdens of morality politics onto the Democrats.

A. In 1896, too, electoral politics regained its place as an arena for national debate, setting the stage for the reform politics of the Progressive Era.

The Decline of Agrarian RadicalismI. Populism faded away. Fusion with the Democrats in 1896 deprived the People’s Party of its identity and

undermined its organizational structure. After the election, the issue on which Populism had staked its fate—free silver—vanished.

A. A newfound gold supply took the sting out of the lost battle for free silver.B. In 1897 the world market for agricultural commodities turned favorable. Farm prices rose faster

than prices of other products, and as a result, so did the real income of farmers.II. The farmers’ sense of inferiority and deprivation began to subside after 1900. The new prosperity meant

that more farmers could afford labor-saving home appliances and farm machinery.A. Other inventions eased the isolation and monotony of rural life.B. Telephones and cars gave farmers an increased sense of communication and mobility.C. The Country Life Commission, formed in 1908, took an optimistic view of farm society.

III. By the opening of the 20th century farmers were no longer a majority of the population. Agriculture had long been at the heart of American life. In the 20th century it became just one more economic interest—important but subordinate in the larger scheme of the modern industrial order.

Race and Politics in the SouthI. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, so did the hopes of African Americans that they would enjoy the

equal rights of citizenship promised them by the 14th and 15th amendments.A. Southern schools were strictly segregated. Access to jobs, justice, and social welfare were racially

determined and unequal.B. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, declaring that private

citizens were not subject to the antidiscriminatory provisions of the 14th amendment.C. Southern railroads became after 1887 the first public accommodation subject to segregation laws.

II. In politics, the situation in the early 1880s was even more fluid. Blacks participated in government but not on equal terms with whites.

A. In the Black Belt—areas where African Americans were heavily concentrated—whites gerrymandered the districts to ensure that while blacks got some electoral representation, political control remained in white hands.

B. Blacks were routinely intimidated during political campaigns. Even so, an impressive majority remained Republican.

III. Whatever hope blacks entertained for better days faded during the 1880s. Black disfranchisement and rigid segregation stemmed directly from the crisis of the 1890s and, in particular, from a political upheaval that briefly challenged Democratic Party rule in the South.

The Triumph of White ConservatismI. The Civil War severely challenged the 2-party system because, in both the north and south, political

opposition came to be seen as treasonous.A. In the north, despite the best efforts of the Republicans, the Democrats shed their disgrace and

reclaimed their status as a major party. In the south, the scars of war cut deep, and Reconstruction cut even deeper.

B. The struggle for “home rule” empowered the Democrats. They had “redeemed” the south from black Republican domination—hence the name the southern Democrats adopted: Redeemers. They claimed a monopoly on political legitimacy.

II. The Republican Party did not fold up. It soldiered on, sustained by southern black loyalty, a hard core of white supporters, patronage from Republican national administrators, and a key Democratic vulnerability.

A. This was the gap between the universality the Democrats claimed as the party of redemption and the reality that the Democratic Party was controlled by an economic elite indifferent to the plight of poor whites.

III. Class antagonism, though often muted by sectional patriotism, was never absent from Southern society. The Civil War had brought out long-smoldering differences between planters and hill-country farmers, who had little to gain from the slave-holding system they were called to defend.

A. Fresh sources of conflict now arose from the sharecropping system—which increasingly included whites as well as black—and from an emerging industrial.

B. Unable to loosen the grip of the conservative elite, economically distressed white southern broke with the Democratic Party in the early 1880s and mounted independent movements across the south. Most successful were the Readjusters, who briefly gained power in Virginia by opposing full repayment of Reconstruction debts, which would enrich bond-holding speculators while leaving the state destitute.

C. Elsewhere, conservative Democrats also faced substantial challenges from disaffected farmers organized in Granges and acting through Independent or Greenback parties or by utilizing the Republican Party.

D. After subsiding briefly, this agrarian discontent revived in the mid-1880s with a vengeance, welling out of the farmers’ alliances that sprang up across the south, and spawning the Populist challenge to Democratic rule.

E. Refusing to accept any opposition as legitimate, the ruling democrats stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated black voters, murdered opponents, and stirred up racial animosity.

IV. Populists were also nervous about black participation. Racism cut through southern white society and, so some thought, most infected the lowest rungs. Yet when times got bad enough, hard-pressed whites could see blacks as fellow victims.

A. Southern populists never fully reconciled these contradictory impulses. They never questioned the conventions of social inequality.

B. Nor were the economic interests of white landowning farmers and black tenants and laborers always in concert. But once agrarian protest turned political, the logic of racial solidarity became hard to deny.

V. Kept out of the Southern Farmer’s Alliance, black farmers had organized separately into the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, thereby gaining a certain amount of leverage with the emerging Populist movement.

A. The Knights of Labor, which accepted blacks, argued for interracial unity. B. The realities of partisan politics, once the alliances had taken that step, clinched the argument.

Where the Populists fused with the Republican Party, they automatically became allies of black leaders and gained a black constituency. Where fusion did not happen and the Populists fielded independent tickets, they needed to appeal to black voters.

C. By making this interracial appeal, even if not always wholeheartedly, the Populists put at risk the foundations of conservative southern politics.

VI. In the face of this challenge, conservative Democrats played the race card to the hilt, parading as the “white man’s party” while denouncing the Populists. Yet at the same time they shamelessly competed for the black vote.

A. In this, they had many advantages: money, control of the local power structures; a paternalistic relationship to the black community.

Black DisfranchisementI. In the midst of these deadly struggles the Democrats decided to settle matters once and for all.

Disfranchising the blacks, hitherto pursued hesitantly, now turned into a potent movement throughout the south.

A. Literacy tests, registration laws, property qualifications, a secret ballot, and a poll tax were widely enacted during the late 1890s, but none matched the literacy test as a flexible and efficient instrument for driving blacks from the polls.

II. The race issue helped to bring down the Populists; now it helped to reconcile them to defeat.A. Embittered poor whites, deeply ambivalent all along about interracial cooperation, turned their

fury on the blacks. Insofar as disfranchising measures asserted militant white supremacy, poor whites approved.

B. It was important that their own vulnerability be partially protected by lenient enforcement and by exemptions. However, poor whites were not protected from property and poll-tax requirements, and many stopped voting.

III. Poor whites might have objected more had their spokesmen not been given a voice within the Democratic Party.

A. A new brand of southern politician came forward to speak for them, appealing not to their class but to their racial prejudices.

B. Tom Watson rebuilt his political career as a practitioner of race baiting. Starting in the 1900s, he and other racial demagogues thrived throughout the South.

The Ascendancy of Jim CrowI. With the collapse of Populism, a brand of white supremacy emerged that was more virulent than anything

blacks had faced since Emancipation. The color line became rigid and comprehensive.A. Segregated seating in trains, already in force generally since first being enacted in Florida in 1887,

provided a precedent for the legal separation of the races.B. The enforcing legislation, known as Jim Crow laws, soon applied to every type of public facility.

In the 1890s the south became for the first time a society fully segregated by law.II. The Supreme Court soon ratified the South’s decision. In the case of Plessy v Ferguson, the Court ruled

that segregation was not discriminatory provided that blacks had accommodations equal to those of whites.A. In Williams v Mississippi the court validated the disfranchising devices of the southern states; so

long as race was not a specified criterion for disfranchisement, the 15th amendment was not being violated, even though the practical effect was the virtual exclusion of blacks from politics in the south.

III. Race hatred became an accepted part of southern life, manifested in a wave of lynchings and race riots and in the public abuse of blacks.

A. This racism came from several sources, including intensified competition between whites and blacks for jobs during the depression of the 1890s and white anger against a less submissive black generation born after slavery. The rage against blacks served as a way of reasserting a traditional sense of southern “manhood” that was under assault by rapid social and economic change.

B. Lynching occurred most often in developing areas and the new cotton country where the population was thinly spread, community ties were weak, and blacks and whites were strangers to one another.

IV. What had triggered the antiblack offensive was the crisis in the south over Populism. From then on, white supremacy propped up the one-party system that the Redeemers had been fighting for ever since Reconstruction.

A. If the southern elite had to share political power with the demagogic poor white leaders, this sharing would be on terms agreeable to them—the exclusion from the political arena of any serious challenge to the economic status quo.

The Case of Grimes CountyI. In 1899 defeated Democratic office seekers and prominent citizens of Grimes County organized the secret

White Man’s Union. Armed men prevented blacks from voting in town elections that year.II. When the Populist sheriff proved incapable of enforcing the law, the game was up. The White Man’s Union

became the county Democratic party in a new guise.

A. The Democrats won Grimes county by an overwhelming vote in 1900 then laid siege to the Populist sheriff’s office.

III. The White Man’s Union ruled Grimes county for the next 50 years. The whole episode was the handiwork of the county’s “best citizens,” suggesting how respectable the use of terror had become in the service of white supremacy.

Forms of Black ResistanceI. Southern blacks in many places resisted white oppression as best they could. Some were drawn to the back-

to-Africa movement. It was a sign of their despair that Africa was again seen as a place for black salvation.The Atlanta Compromise

I. Booker T. Washington, the foremost black leader of his day, marked the path with a speech in Atlanta in 1895. Washington retreated from the defiant stand of an older generation of black abolitionists exemplified by Frederick Douglass. Washington was conciliatory towards the south; it was a society that blacks understood and loved.

A. He accepted segregation, provided that blacks had equal facilities. He accepted educational and property qualifications for the vote, provided that they applied equally to blacks and whites.

II. Washington’s doctrine became known as the Atlanta Compromise. His approach was “accommodationist” in the sense that it avoided a direct assault on white supremacy.

A. The Compromise, while abandoning the field of political protest, opened up second front on the economic struggle.

III. Booker T. Washington sought to capitalize on a southern dilemma about the economic role of the black population. Racist dogma dictated that blacks be kept down and conform to their image as lazy, shiftless workers.

A. To prosper, the south needed an efficient labor force. Washington made this need the target of his efforts.

B. As founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881, Washington advocated industrial education—manual and agricultural training. He preached the virtues of thrift, hard work, and property ownership.

C. Washington’s industrial education program won generous support from northern philanthropists and businessmen and applause from progressive leaders in the New South.

IV. Washington assumed that black economic progress would be the key to winning political and civil rights. He regarded members of the white southern elite as crucial allies, because ultimately only they had the power to change the south.

A. When it was in their economic interest, when they had grown dependent of black labor and black enterprise, white men of business and property would recognize the justice of black rights.

The Limits of Self-HelpI. Employers did not discriminate very much over wage rates—that is, they did not pay whites higher wages

than they paid blacks for the same work. But racial barriers certainly prevented blacks from moving into better-paid and more highly skilled jobs.