9
In August 1870 James Bryce stepped off the SS Scotia at Battery Point in New York Harbor. The thirty-two-year-old Englishman had come to see America. A newly appointed professor of law at Oxford University, Bryce already knew a lot about the United States. Nonetheless, he wasted no time on his first day, taking in Broadway’s theater district and visiting E. L. Godkin, the Irish-born editor of the Nation, one of America’s most influential magazines. The next day he visited Long Branch, New Jersey, a favorite summer haunt of affluent New Yorkers and Philadelphians.
Armed with introductions, Bryce headed next to New England, where he called on some of America’s most celebrated intellectuals. He chatted with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and dined with Oliver Wendell Holmes of Harvard Law School (and later a US Supreme Court justice). He traveled to the White Mountains in New Hampshire, where he encountered philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Then Bryce set out for the Midwest, first by railroad and then by steamer across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee. He took a train across Wisconsin to La Crosse, where he rode a paddle wheeler up the Mississippi River to Minneapolis and St. Paul. After touring the Twin Cities and glimpsing the great prairies to the west, he returned via Chicago, which he called “the handsomest city we have seen in America.”
En route east he stopped to observe the New York State Democratic Party convention, over which William Marcy Tweed, the notorious boss of New York City’s Tammany Hall, presided. Bryce never forgot the scramble for “place and power” he witnessed there. Returning to Massachusetts, he spent the weekend on an island off Cape Cod owned by railroad financier John Murray Forbes. In the last days of his nine-week tour he visited Yale and Columbia Law Schools. Upon his departure he reflected, “There is a sort of freedom and spirit about the place and the people which one doesn’t get in England.”
Bryce visited again in 1881, arriving amid speculation about President James Garfield’s chances of surviving the recent assassination attempt (he died that September). Anxious to see the West, Bryce took the Santa Fe Railroad from Chicago to San Francisco and then sailed up the coast to Seattle. He visited Yosemite in California (then a state park) and later toured the South. Last on his itinerary were lectures at Johns Hopkins, the new university in Baltimore that had inaugurated a Ph.D. in history in the United States, and a visit to Washington, DC. Now a member of the British Parliament, Bryce felt quite at home conversing with US senators and representatives at the Capitol.
Bryce visited the States a third time in 1883. He attended a lavish celebration in Idaho commemorating the completion of Henry Villard’s Northern Pacific Railroad. Bryce then sailed to Hawaii, not yet officially part of the United States, and climbed Kilauea to view the volcano’s eruptions. His return to the mainland took him through the Southwest and New Orleans en route to Baltimore, where he conducted a seminar at Johns Hopkins. One of the young scholars in attendance was Woodrow Wilson, a budding historian and future president. Bryce had previously met Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, also destined to occupy the White House. These eminent figures and Bryce’s other well-educated hosts influenced how he viewed America. As the Englishman sailed home, he was already gathering his thoughts for a book about American government.
Drawing on his experiences in the United States as well as research in documents, contemporary publications, and correspondence with Americans, Bryce published The American Commonwealth in 1888. Several editions and many reprintings followed over the next several decades. A work of extraordinary breadth, the book painted a panoramic portrait of American government and society. Reviewers showered the author with praise. Theodore Roosevelt, a competent historian, gave it high marks. Woodrow Wilson, a professor of history and government, called it “a great work.” Bryce admired much about the way Americans conducted their civic affairs and marveled at the influence of public opinion in politics. In New England town meetings, “No better school of politics can be imagined,” he wrote. Yet Bryce was sharply critical of other elements of American governance. He saw state governments as administratively inept and heaped scorn on “the extravagance, corruption, and mismanagement” of city governments, which he called America’s “one conspicuous failure.”1
NATIONALISM
Bryce’s travels gave him clues to Americans’ feelings about their homeland. Nationalistic pride is a critical component of statebuilding yet one of the hardest to reconstruct. We know a lot about the outward prompts for patriotism but less about the extent to which most people based their identities on them. There is abundant evidence of efforts by famous elites, prominent groups (e.g., veterans’ organizations), and the government to foster devotion to the country. The circulation of national banknotes, which replaced unreliable state banknotes, gave Americans a uniform currency. In all likelihood, these efforts reinforced emotional ties to the nation and its symbols, which differed among social groups and regions. James Bryce remarked that European visitors to America were surprised at the amount of national pride they observed. A generation later, Woodrow Wilson accentuated the observation, contending, “We have come to full maturity with the new century and to full self-consciousness as a nation.” Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong cheerleader for American patriotism, began his 1910 speech titled “The New Nationalism,” which advocated federal action to tame corporations, by recalling the sacrifices of Washington and Lincoln.2
The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was also a celebration of America’s emergence as an industrializing nation. Subsequent world’s fairs—Chicago in 1893, St. Louis in 1904, and San Francisco in 1915—boasted similar themes of American industrial, technological, and national advances. President Ulysses Grant took part in opening the 1876 exposition, which was attended by a young Woodrow Wilson. Grover Cleveland traveled to Chicago for the opening ceremony of the 1893 fair, where he turned on the lights; Wilson flipped a switch to initiate a wireless transmission from New Jersey to San Francisco to open that city’s world’s fair. These presidents clearly saw the connection between the celebration of American materialism and the development of the nation.
By the late 1870s a turn toward historical memory leavened this materialist conception of the country’s essence. Congress used the 1876 centennial as the occasion to assume responsibility for completing the Washington Monument, a project initiated by private citizens before the Civil War but not finished until 1885. The celebration of older American virtues and its heroes was interwoven with the “colonial revival” that thrived during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The movement spawned a proliferation of Washingtonian fervor in the form of calendars, magazine art, advertising, and portraits, including on national banknotes. The famed general and first president was the most popular image among Currier and Ives prints.3 He was seldom ignored in Fourth of July orations. Memorial Day, which commemorated the sacrifices of the Civil War, arose simultaneously in northern and southern communities in 1866; by 1891 every northern state had made it a legal holiday. In 1911 Congress authorized the construction of the Lincoln Memorial, which was dedicated in 1922. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial became must-see landmarks in the nation’s capital for generations of schoolchildren.
The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), formed immediately after the Civil War, worked assiduously during the Gilded Age to keep the memory of the Union cause alive. The organization lobbied to make Memorial Day a holiday (in each state, as Congress did not address the matter), pushed for the display of the American flag at public schools, and urged the teaching of American history and civics. It encouraged local communities’ efforts to erect statues and monuments to Civil War soldiers. Congress responded to the movement by establishing several national battlefields in the 1890s, places that had already hosted reunions of veterans’ groups. Gettysburg, designated a national military park in 1895, attracted thousands of visitors each year. The GAR’s campaign to fly the flag at schoolhouses became linked to the Pledge of Allegiance, which was first published in Youth’s Companion in 1892. The magazine spearheaded the Columbian Public School Celebration, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Americas. State laws requiring public schools to display the American flag were enacted beginning in 1889; seventeen states had done so by 1903 and twenty-nine by 1916, none in the former Confederacy. In 1919, in the wake of the upsurge in patriotism during World War I, Washington State inaugurated the movement to require children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. These efforts to promote patriotism pinpointed local governments as the incubators of American nationalism.4
Compulsory education tightened the link between schooling and patriotism. Laws requiring school attendance first appeared in the 1860s and had spread to all the states outside the South by 1900. Besides displaying the flag, schools taught American history, which in the Gilded Age was written largely by Protestant New Englanders, who emphasized national politics (supplanting state-based orientations) and patriotism. The authors of one school history text, originally written in 1871 and revised through 1900, expressed the hope that America’s story would inspire “a love for our common country” and that, through the “wonderful history of their native land,” American youths would “learn to prize their birthright . . . their patriotism must be kindled.” Thirty states required the teaching of US history by 1903. The writers of popular histories during the Gilded Age, when college-based academic history became a discipline, were nationalists who championed both conservative politics and national unity. The American Historian Association, organized in 1884, called for a synthesis of national history, which materialized as a multivolume series published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Most volumes were written by academic historians, with the word “national” appearing in many of their titles. The legacy of this nationalization of American history was the “presidential thesis,” in which the nation’s evolution was traced within the framework of presidential administrations. This orientation became the standard for American history textbooks.5
Geography was once called the “mother of all sciences.” By the turn of the twentieth century, when the subject was widely taught, it had become nationalist in tone. Atlases of the period were explicitly oriented around national states and their political subdivisions. A more proactive prompt for nationalism was the requirement that English be the official language of instruction in the common schools. Lawmakers and editors who touted the Edwards law in Illinois (1889), which mandated instruction in English and the teaching of American history, stressed the need to inculcate patriotism among the children of immigrants. Many parents in immigrant communities saw the law as a cultural affront. In most communities, the majority likely shared a general set of values that venerated individualism, a morally based view of the polity, an economy built on private initiative, and primacy of the English language. Some scholars argue that high enrollment of school-age children in rural communities reflected their embrace of these firmly held principles.6
Private organizations were instrumental in cultivating national sentiments. Arguably no entity rivaled the railroad in welding parts of the country together, at least in a physical sense if not an emotional one Train travel enabled people from far and wide to visit the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the national monuments in Washington, DC. Railroads increasingly encouraged travel for leisure and recreation. Prior to the Civil War, only the very adventurous or the very rich traveled long distances for pleasure. In later decades, many in the growing middle class joined the affluent in touring scenic locations and summering at resorts. New England and the mid-Atlantic states, where the well-heeled were concentrated, developed scores of vacation destinations such as Bar Harbor, Maine; Newport, Rhode Island; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Oyster Bay (Theodore Roosevelt’s hometown) and the Hamptons on Long Island, New York; the New Jersey shore; upstate New York; and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. President Grant made Long Branch, New Jersey, his summer White House; President Cleveland vacationed at Buzzards Bay on Cape Cod. The railroad connected northeasterners to Florida in the 1890s and sponsored grand hotels on the Atlantic coast. Artist Winslow Homer was one of the first snowbirds to flee Maine winters for Florida and the Bahamas. Inventor Thomas Edison and automaker Henry Ford built vacation homes in Fort Myers, Florida, while John D. Rockefeller wintered on the state’s Atlantic coast.
Railroads aggressively promoted the American West. Aided by travel agencies and guidebook writers, railroads advertised their western routes and built fancy hotels to accommodate travelers lured by the grandeur of the Rockies and the California coast. Yellowstone, designated a national park in 1872, was within a carriage ride of the Northern Pacific line in 1883. The Santa Fe Railroad build a lodge at the edge of the Grand Canyon, which was designated a national forest reserve in 1893 before being upgraded to a national park in 1919. Several lines promoted the California coast’s stunning vistas and healthy air and put Yosemite’s spectacular beauty within reach. Much of what James Bryce described in The American Commonwealth he saw through the window of a railroad car or learned in conversations along the way.7
Western travel had a marked impact on Americans’ patriotism. The Rocky Mountains and the national parks, especially Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon, were advertised as just as spectacular as Europe’s famed rivers and mountains. Paintings that romanticized western landscapes were widely reproduced, and by the 1870s photographers provided realistic confirmation of the West’s natural wonders. In William Goetzmann’s opinion, the artists and photographers of western landscapes enlarged “the American vision of itself and its own continent to proportions beyond that of any other nation.” The West became “an emblem of America’s pride in itself.” The western movie, a genre originating in the 1910s, fused the vastness and rawness of the western landscape with mythical masculine qualities, turning that imagery into a staple of American self-definition. Much like Daniel Boone and the mountain men of an earlier era, film stars like Tom Mix and John Wayne became icons of American values, displaying resolute individualism, enormous courage, and an unflinching sense of fair play.8
The movies thrived on conflict and aggression, qualities that were clearly on display in international politics. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, European powers engaged in a new surge of imperialism, seizing colonial possessions in Asia and Africa and broadening their commercial footholds around the globe, all stimulated by heightened expressions of nationalism. Great Britain led this international race, followed by France, the Netherlands, and Germany. Japan caught the fever by the end of the century. Atlases of the day conveyed the new political geography, depicting each country’s territorial possessions in the same color. The British Empire, embracing 390 million people in 1900, was usually shaded pink. International competition and conquest had changed the map by 1900.9
The color coding of maps offered a visual confirmation of western Europe’s commercial and military power. Trade routes, underwater telegraph cables, and coaling stations around the world certified the role of Great Britain’s powerful navy. Internationally minded Americans like Theodore Roosevelt were keenly aware of the link between technological advances (e.g., steel-plated battleships with rapid-firing guns) and status among the world’s great powers. Many Americans, Roosevelt in particular, saw national competition for economic and military dominance as part of a Darwinian struggle for survival and mastery. The inauguration of a modernization program for the US Navy in 1882 and the declaration of war against Spain in 1898 occurred in the context of this global competition and Darwinian thinking. America’s decisive 1898 victory in the “splendid little war” (Spanish-American War) confirmed the utility of possessing a modern navy and resulted in the acquisition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. The United States annexed Hawaii the same year, five years after marines helped resident Americans overthrow the native government. Despite the denials of American expansionists, the United States was an imperial power. The Spanish-American War spiked a surge of patriotic fervor at the end of the century that was probably unmatched until America entered World War I. Early in the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt proudly asserted, “We have become a great nation.”10
PATRIOTISM ON THE CULTURAL PERIPHERY
Despite technical advances and military victories, Americans’ patriotic identification around the turn of the century remains blurred. By most reckonings, nationalist pride was most widely disseminated among white males of northern European, Protestant backgrounds—that is, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs)—who resided in the North and the West. Opinion leaders, such as authors, newspaper editors, and clergy, as well as most Republican Party officials and leaders of big business, usually had WASP-ish lineages and decidedly patriotic leanings. With the memory of the Civil War still burning, white southerners maintained a much lower identity with national symbols, at least until sectional reconciliation was fully under way in the 1890s. But even with varying degrees of civic healing, many southerners remained indifferent about patriotic unity, seeing their region as distinct and separate.11 African Americans, women (especially in the working class), unnaturalized immigrants from non-English-speaking places, individuals of Mexican birth or lineage, and Native Americans were also on the periphery of the white Protestant culture. A reasonable conjecture is that most of these groups were less likely than WASPs to feel patriotic toward the national state.
African Americans, most of whom resided in states where slavery had been legal, held Abraham Lincoln in esteem as the Great Liberator. But after Reconstruction, most southern blacks were systematically reduced to rural peonage, and beginning in the 1890s, they were stripped of the right to vote. This racist subjugation was reinforced by lynching, an extralegal form of execution that had de facto approval of southern white officials (see “The Coercive State” later in this chapter). Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, Native Americans, and labor radicals experienced similar outbreaks of violence in the West.12
Women in America possessed a truncated form of citizenship. Most were barred from voting in general elections before the twentieth century. How disfranchisement influenced female attitudes toward the nation and the state is unclear. Women, especially middle-class WASPs outside the South, were active in numerous social and charitable organizations, including an entity linked to the GAR, and many joined clubs that campaigned for political candidates. After women’s failure to be included in the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the use of race but not gender as a criterion for voting, leaders of the female suffrage movement emphasized their cultural links to white males and gravitated toward a race-based conception of republican ideology. In a more applied setting, women who became schoolteachers assumed a position in which an emphasis on citizenship and patriotism was common. In all likelihood, women, especially those from WASP families, followed the male head of household in identifying with the national community.13
Attitudes among immigrants varied considerably, depending on when they arrived in America, their homeland culture, and their employment circumstances. Protestants from the British Isles and northern Europe assimilated rapidly into the general culture. Some states (mainly in the Midwest and West) allowed unnaturalized (male) immigrants to vote if they declared their intention to become citizens, a concession that probably served as an incentive to embrace American norms. Yet ethnic hostilities flared between core and peripheral cultures, as evidenced by conflict between Yankees and Germans in nineteenth-century Wisconsin. A public campaign in the 1880s to require all schools, including institutions sponsored by Catholics and Lutherans, to teach basic subjects only in English reflected resentment of nonnative cultures.14
Newcomers from southern and central Europe who arrived after 1890 and Mexicans who immigrated during World War I faced greater hurdles to acculturation. The welcome mat for immigrants got smaller after 1900. Calls to restrict immigration from Asia, especially China, began in the 1880s; later, immigrants from southern and central Europe, particularly Poles, Italians, and Russian Jews, faced mounting intolerance. Most of these newer immigrants entered the industrial and agricultural working classes. The majority retained emotional and social ties to their ethnic communities yet tried to fit into their new homeland. Employers, social welfare organizations such as settlement houses and the YMCA, and some labor unions provided instruction in navigating American society by teaching English and the essentials of American democracy.15
The rising tide of immigrants from nontraditional countries sparked a campaign to restrict admission to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. This intolerance fed pressures to raise the bar on certain legal privileges, particularly the right to vote. Adoption of the Australian ballot, which states prepared and local governments administered, made it difficult for non-English readers to vote. Numerous states retracted the franchise from nonnaturalized immigrants and passed stricter voter registration laws; a few jurisdictions made literacy a criterion for suffrage. The national immigration law of 1891 allowed federal officials to bar admission on moral, economic, and physical grounds, such as insanity or the likelihood of becoming impoverished. The 1903 act excluded anarchists. The 1906 naturalization law made it much more difficult to attain citizenship and authorized federal officials to oversee this administrative process. Washington, however, left the job of preparing newcomers for citizenship to local governments. Beginning with New York at the start of the twentieth century, cities began to sponsor classes in English, civics, and American history. State governments joined the Americanization effort in 1907, expanding their programs in cooperation with the US Bureau of Naturalization.16
How these carrot-and-stick policies affected immigrant identity before World War I is unclear. The evidence suggests that most immigrants accepted the ideological premises of American republicanism, such as equality and justice for all, as well as middle-class norms such as thrift and hard work; they looked forward to citizenship, if only for practical reasons. Native-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) latched onto national values more readily than their immigrant parents. According to immigration historian Marcus Lee Hansen, most newcomers in the upper Midwest were “capitalist at heart” and stood firmly behind the concept of political democracy.17
The restrictions on naturalization and suffrage reflected middle- and upper-class outlooks that linked “new” immigrants with political radicalism. Worker strikes and protests in the late nineteenth century, such as occurred during the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s and the 1886 Haymarket Square riot in Chicago, fanned the flames of anti-immigrant nativism. Officials during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era commonly pushed a law-and-order response to strikes, which often pitted recent immigrants, many of whom did not speak English, against employers that had the backing of local politicians and law enforcement officials. An outgrowth of this backlash was the Immigrant Restriction League, founded in 1894. The league advocated a literacy test for admission to the country, a proposal that was enacted in 1917.18
Segments of the immigrant population, therefore, had legitimate reasons to express indifference toward if not actual rejection of patriotic loyalty. A small cadre of workers aligned with the Socialist Party preached international solidarity but not outright disloyalty to the United States. The Industrial Workers of the World (whose members were known as Wobblies) was an avowedly anticorporatist organization, denouncing capitalism as an economic system. Yet Socialists and Wobblies were small, marginal groups in American politics, and most of them rejected violent revolution. Workers’ resentment in the United States was directed at employers and corporations rather than the state, although some radical labor leaders saw little difference between these groups when the government took employers’ side.
For most residents, the American version of revolution involved the ballot box rather than the barricade, despite frequent violence at strikers’ picket lines. The electoral record is suggestive on this point: voter turnout reached an all-time high during the last decades of the nineteenth century. With the exception of the South, where official intimidation of voters (blacks and poor whites) was effective in depressing turnout, 80 to 90 percent of the eligible electorate voted in national and state elections, considerably higher than twentieth-century rates. The close competition between the Republican and Democratic Parties in national elections and in some northeastern and midwestern states—sometimes animated by third parties that could act as spoilers—accounts for some of this surge. Attention to federal issues in party platforms for both state and national elections suggests how partisan competition fed national identity. Despite being an imperfect indicator of political sentiment, turnout data suggest widespread acquiescence to the American national state. The decline in voter turnout during the Progressive Era apparently reflected stricter regulations and the inflow of migrants from places with weak or nonexistent democratic traditions, as well as weakening bonds of partisanship, not a slump in nationalism.19
THE COERCIVE STATE
A key attribute of a national state is its legal monopoly on the use of coercive force. This power can promote a state’s stability and influence attitudes about it. Officials at all levels of government regularly exercised coercive power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and frequently acquiesced when private citizens took the law into their own hands. Reliance on court orders to cease an activity; deployment of the army, militia, and police; and extralegal intimidation are tools of a coercive state. The application of coercion is commonly justified in nationalist terms, especially when “foreign” groups are targeted. Coercive actions may dampen patriotic sentiments of harassed populations, especially when violence is directed at specific ethnic groups or striking workers.
Deployment of the US military represented the chief form of national coercive force in the Gilded Age. The army remained an occupying presence in the South during Reconstruction. It invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, while the navy defeated Spanish fleets off the coast of Puerto Rico and in Manila Bay. A large American ground force remained in the Philippines, where anticolonial resistance lasted until 1902 and cost ten times more US fatalities than the fighting in Cuba. American armed forces occupied several Central American countries during the Progressive Era, including forays into Mexico between 1914 and 1916. Campaigns in the Caribbean and Asia that engaged indigenous natives were sometimes justified in racist (nonwhite) terms. The army also launched numerous expeditions to pacify Indians in the trans-Mississippi West in the late nineteenth century.
Regular troops of the US Army were summoned to suppress rioters and maintain law and order during labor disputes. President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the army to help state militiamen quell rioting at numerous locations during the great rail strike of 1877. The largest deployment of the US Army between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War occurred during the Pullman strike of 1894, when railroad workers and others blocked rail access throughout the Northeast, the Midwest, and portions of the West. All rail traffic in and out of Chicago was halted. President Grover Cleveland authorized the intervention of federal troops, under the guise of protecting the mail. At the height of the conflict, 14,000 federal troops and marshals, state militia, and local police patrolled the streets and rail yards of Chicago. Up to thirty-four demonstrators, none of them strikers, were killed; Eugene Debs, the railroad union leader who purportedly led the uprising, was convicted in federal court and sentenced to prison. Policing of a different order occurred in connection with federal immigration enforcement in the early twentieth century, resulting in the deportation of aliens, sometimes on the basis of their alleged subversive beliefs.20
State militias (increasingly called the National Guard) were mobilized on hundreds of occasions during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to quell strikes and riots, often using lethal force to do so. Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War won him national notoriety and aided his election as governor of New York. Known as a staunch law-and-order man, Roosevelt called out the militia (which had been uniformed at his instruction) to intervene when Italian construction workers walked off the Croton Dam project in a dispute over wages. The New York militia arrested the Italian labor leaders, protected the workers who had been hired to replace the strikers, and suppressed the strike. This was one of many instances when business elites persuaded elected officials to use organized force (militia, police, sheriffs, and sometimes deputized private contractors such as Pinkerton guards) to break strikes and protect business interests. Accusing the “riotous Italians” of assassinating a militia-man, Governor Roosevelt justified his intervention with the statement that “order must be maintained.” Labor violence worried elites and many in the middle class. Shaken by the great rail strike of 1877, middle-class New Yorkers built a massive new armory for the city militia. Similar efforts occurred around the country over the ensuing decades.21
The most frequent use of coercive force occurred at the local level, frequently at the hands of city police who were called upon to monitor the “dangerous class” and control worker protests in an era when picketing and boycotting were illegal. In the Tompkins Square “riot” (1874), New York City police, some on horseback, attacked a crowd of workers who had assembled in support of public works projects during the 1870s depression. Police dispersed the demonstrators in a bloody melee. Another clash between police and demonstrators that had enormous political reverberations occurred during the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago (1886). Workers and social activists had gathered in the square to protest police brutality and the killing of six workers during a strike in support of an eight-hour workday. After an anonymous person threw a bomb at the police, officers fired on the crowd, killing several people. Officials convicted local labor radicals of conspiracy and hung several of them. The Illinois legislature enacted antiriot laws that criminalized conspiracy to cause violence to human life or property and held cities and counties responsible for the destruction of property by mobs. Most policing action, however, occurred on an individual level and was characterized by the use of the billy club, usually in working-class neighborhoods. Police arrested people without jobs as vagrants, as well as those operating illegal saloons. African Americans were hounded regularly by police in the South.22
States invested heavily in prison construction in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The 1,800 cells in the prison at Columbus, Ohio, made it the largest jail in the world in the 1890s. Before authorizing the construction of its own prisons in 1891, the federal government rented space in state facilities or county jails. By the early twentieth century approximately seventy-eight state prisons and 3,000 city and county jails housed more than 100,000 individuals, including those confined to juvenile institutions, according to the US census. But a much larger number, perhaps half a million, spent some time in local, state, or federal lockups in 1910. This count excludes convicts who were leased to private contractors in the South. Incarceration was a growing dimension of statebuilding in the post–Civil War decades.23
State prisons were the usual sites for executions, which numbered in the thousands during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Although the use of capital punishment declined after the 1870s, illegal executions probably increased during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Commonplace in the West and the South, lynching was an extralegal death sentence at the hands of a mob, frequently with the tacit support of local officials. Blacks, labor activists, immigrants from central Europe and Asia, and Hispanics were the most likely victims. In the South, blacks were executed at a much higher rate than whites, both within the justice system and by mob action. Rates of capital punishment in the South were the highest in the nation and far exceeded the number of executions in Europe.24
Coercion and incarceration were part of a governmental endeavor to suppress behaviors believed to be immoral or dangerous. There were two major efforts at social control: shuttering saloons and limiting the availability of alcoholic beverages, and enforcing compulsory education, a task assigned to truant officers. Numerous statutes made vagrancy a crime; these laws were used in the South to force African Americans into legally sanctioned peonage. Although the regulation of cultural mores was primarily a local function, the federal government was authorized to suppress certain obnoxious behaviors, such as polygamy in federal territories (1869 and later) and among immigrants (1891). US marshals took action against Mormons in the West who violated the law prohibiting multiple marriages; Congress stripped Mormon offenders of the right to vote. Postal officials restricted the use of the mails to disseminate obscene materials, such as pornography, and lotteries.25
National control of immigration and naturalization tightened during the late nineteenth century. The immigration law of 1891 authorized officials to expel aliens who had violated the rules for admission to the country. Congress added anarchists to the barred list in 1903 and prostitutes in 1907. The 1917 codification of the immigration statute specified thirty-three qualitative and physical attributes that barred newcomers. Thousands of aliens were deported, often without full judicial review, during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The US Treasury Department maintained a fleet of vessels with armed crews to enforce customs collections and immigration and quarantine laws and to suppress mutinies on ships. In the early 1890s James Bryce concluded that the forces maintaining order in the United States were as strong “as anywhere else in the world.”26 These laws and their application demonstrate that the American federal state acquired and exercised greater coercive power at home and abroad in the decades after Reconstruction.
POLITICAL PARTIES
The principles underlying American politics, many have said, constituted the nation’s civic religion. At the center of this ideological vision was republican liberty, which allowed the popular election of officials at all levels of government. Short terms in office meant a constant churning of officeholders for thousands of jurisdictions. At the national level, only candidates for the House of Representatives were directly elected. US senators were chosen by state legislators until 1913. Elections abounded at the state and local levels. All forty-five governors and 6,600 state legislators were elected directly by voters in 1900, as were constitutional officers such as attorney generals and treasurers, as well as judges, in most states. The penchant for democracy was most visible at the local level, where tens of thousands of candidates ran for mayor and city council positions, as well as for township offices and school boards in rural areas. Besides selecting their mayor, Boston voters chose twelve aldermen and seventy-two city councilors; Philadelphia’s city council had 143 members. Reference to a “national” electorate in America is a literary euphemism; the foundation of participatory politics rested at the local level.
The presidency was the only office that could claim a national constituency. The seven presidential canvasses between 1876 and 1900 elected five individuals: four Republicans—Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley—and one Democrat—Grover Cleveland, who was elected in 1884, lost as the incumbent in 1888, and returned to the White House after the 1892 election. Cleveland was the only president during this period who had not served in the Civil War. Three of the elected Republicans plus Chester Arthur, who replaced Garfield (assassinated in 1881), had risen to the rank of general; a young William McKinley had left service in the Union army as a brevetted major. Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency following McKinley’s assassination, had been a colonel in the army volunteers during the Spanish-American War.
Gilded Age presidents have received low grades from historians, who tend to describe them as undistinguished personalities who exercised little influence on policy. This characterization is part of the indictment thesis that has long labeled Gilded Age governance as corrupt and tone-deaf to societal needs. But it bears noting that none of the Gilded Age presidents was involved in a major political or personal scandal while in office. It is also true that they largely supported the status quo and accepted existing constitutional limits on national power, which goes a long way toward explaining why they gained their party’s nomination and perhaps why voters supported them. They largely deferred to Congress concerning administrative reform. The idea that executives should exercise policy leadership by laying out a comprehensive agenda and pressing for its enactment had not yet taken hold. Nonetheless, by the 1880s American presidents and governors had signed legislation that expanded the federal government’s public role. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s ascension to the White House in 1901 and continuing with William Taft and Woodrow Wilson, presidents became more active policy advocates.27
The partisan makeup of the House of Representatives provides a rough index of national electoral trends, although the winner-take-all system of selecting a victor in single-member districts magnified the partisan proportion of seats won in relation to the party distribution of the national vote. The House contained 293 seats in 1871, 391 in 1901, and 435 in 1913, as it still does today. State legislatures draw up congressional district lines. Affiliation with one of the two major parties is the most conspicuous characteristic of House members. The southern states’ reintegration into national politics in the 1870s helped Democrats become a competitive factor in control of the House between 1870 and 1894, when they held a majority of seats in eight of fifteen sessions. Democrats’ sweeping defeat in the congressional elections of 1894 inaugurated an eighteen-year Republican reign as the majority party (see figure 9.1). Democrats managed to control the Senate in only five sessions between 1871 and 1919.
Figure 9.1. Republican seats (%) in the US House of Representatives and the Illinois and New York Assemblies, 1870–1928. Sources: Author’s data collections; for the House, Harold W. Stanley and Richard G. Neimi, Vital Statistics on American Politics, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1995), table 3-16.
Several factors drove these partisan patterns. The dismantling of Reconstruction-era governments in the South launched Democratic political dominance in the region, which greatly increased the party’s chances of winning a majority in the House. Republicans had a solid foothold in the West, benefiting from the admission of new states, which helped the party control the Senate. A second influence on elections was the condition of the economy. The business slump following the Panic of 1873 cost Republicans nearly half their seats in the House of Representatives in 1874, producing substantial losses in all sections of the country.28 Outsider third parties, principally the Greenback Party, lured Republican defectors, partially on the basis of economic appeals. The GOP regained the majority in the House in 1880, only to lose badly in 1882. A mild economic downturn during the mid-1880s helped Democrats regain seats, and various political factors catapulted the party to a large congressional majority in 1890. Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House following Cleveland’s election in 1892, only to suffer a sweeping loss (116 House seats) in 1894, largely due to the worst industrial slump of the nineteenth century. Republicans retained majorities in the House until 1910, when a combination of economic stagnation and the defection of insurgent Republicans fueled a Democratic resurgence.
Partisan fortunes in the states roughly corresponded to national trends. Figure 9.1 compares lower house seats held by Republicans in the Illinois and New York Assemblies with Republican seats in Congress. The rise and fall of Republican victories in New York followed a similar but not identical pattern. In Illinois, Republicans’ hold on seats shadowed the trend in the US House but with much less volatility, largely because of the Prairie State’s system of three-member districts, which essentially guaranteed a seat for the minority party candidate in each district. Other northern states’ legislative races ranged from close to faint correspondence with congressional races, indicating that state elections were not wholly coordinate with national elections. Some regions and states, such as New England, Iowa, and Oregon, habitually returned large Republican majorities to their legislatures. The fate of Republican gubernatorial candidates in the northern states mimicked the surges and declines in electoral outcomes for Congress, with the GOP normally winning a majority of state contests.29 The parties also ran candidates for mayor and municipal legislators (councilmen and aldermen) in large cities, although it is unclear how closely those results corresponded to state and national trends. The evidence suggests that local circumstances could have a decisive influence on local elections. Young Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, the Republican candidate for New York City mayor in 1886, came in third behind the Democratic winner and Henry George, a critic of unregulated capitalism who ran on the Labor Party ticket.30
Generally, most voters stuck with a single party during the Gilded Age, which raises the question of how each party wooed its supporters. Republicans emphasized their devotion to the Union during the Civil War, a refrain known as “waving the bloody flag.” The GOP was also willing to use governmental power to promote economic development, principally through the support of high tariff rates that “protected” American manufacturers and supposedly boosted wages. The party favored measures of social control, such as restricting liquor-related businesses and embracing puritanical standards of personal morality. Republicans pushed for laws that mandated English as the language of instruction for basic subjects in schools; this triggered a backlash in Illinois and Wisconsin that cost the party control of these states in 1890. Republicans won the support of most Yankee voters (Americans of English descent), as well as recent British, Scottish, and Swedish immigrants. The majority of the urban middle class and business owners voted Republican, except in the South. Southerners moved steadily toward the Democrats, particularly after the farmer-based Populist surge in the mid-1890s.
Democrats were the party of small government and white supremacy during the late nineteenth century. The Democratic Party opposed Republican efforts to protect the rights of African Americans and to impose cultural regulations, calling itself the party of personal liberty. Democrats emphasized respect for states’ rights as the proper approach to federalism and urged an economic policy that provided no special benefits; this included high tariffs, which, according to President Cleveland, rewarded selfish interests. Cleveland’s party was more insistent about low taxation and frugal spending than the Republicans were, although both parties preached the virtues of fiscal discipline. The Democratic agenda appealed to whites in the South and to southern transplants in the Midwest, Catholics, large segments of the German community (immigrants and their American-born descendants), and a majority of big-city residents, most of whom were working class but also included a small segment of business elites.
Democratic and Republican agendas did not appeal to all Gilded Age voters. Dissenters bolted to smaller third parties throughout the period. The Greenback Party, which complained about a restricted money supply, won seats in Congress and in state legislatures in the 1870s. In the 1890s the Populist Party attracted voters from the major parties in the South and West with its critique of the constricted money supply, corporate monopolies, and inattention to the needs of rural America. Prohibitionists worked to control if not eliminate the “liquor interests,” but they also advocated other moral reforms throughout the late nineteenth century. Small worker-oriented parties appeared during these years as well, centered largely in cities. Independents disturbed by self-serving partisanship defected from the Republican Party in the 1880s—notably, the mugwumps, who supported Grover Cleveland in 1884. Given the close competition in many jurisdictions and nationally, each party wrestled to keep its coalitions intact; even small voter defections could doom a candidate’s chances.31
Unexpected events could upset the conventional electoral calculus, as illustrated by William McKinley’s victory over William Jennings Bryan in 1896, in the face of a lingering depression. A Nebraskan, Bryan attacked eastern-based business and supported agrarian interests, currency inflation, and prohibition. These positions resonated poorly with urban workers, who wanted a more rapid economic recovery. The Republican surge in 1896 anchored the party’s majority position in Congress and the presidency for the next fifteen years. Bryan lost again in 1900, and in his final run for the presidency in 1908, voters preferred William Howard Taft as Theodore Roosevelt’s successor. By 1910, however, the GOP faced a rebellion by reform-oriented Republicans, a development that blossomed into the Progressive Party. Progressives encouraged Theodore Roosevelt to return to politics, giving him the party’s presidential nomination in 1912. His candidacy siphoned votes from President Taft, the Republican incumbent, and handed the victory to Woodrow Wilson. Governor of New Jersey and a southerner by birth, Wilson had been assured of capturing all the electoral votes of the South, virtually eliminating Republican and third-party chances in the region. Wilson narrowly won reelection in 1916 but saw Democrats lose control of the House, largely due to the recession triggered by the outbreak of World War I.32
Electoral dynamics in the Progressive Era shifted incrementally away from the straight party-line voting and close partisan competition that had characterized the Gilded Age and animated high voter turnout. Split-ticket voting became more common, especially in state and municipal elections. Growing complaints about excessive partisanship discredited legislatures and increased the appeal of executives, who were seen as more likely to restore honest and efficient government and stop collusion between special interests and corrupt politicians.
The rising resentment over political corruption and corporate monopolies was accentuated by a faltering economy. A financial panic struck the country in 1907, causing a sharp recession in 1908. The Republican Party largely weathered this downturn because voters apparently considered Taft and the Republicans more likely to restore prosperity than Bryan and the Democrats. But the shoe was on the other foot in 1910 and 1912, when a stalemated recovery was exacerbated by rising consumer prices, a combination now called stagflation. The increased cost of living discredited Republicans’ support of high tariff rates, the party’s main panacea for economic growth. A rash of labor strikes in 1909 and 1910 reflected the strain on family budgets. The 1910 elections catapulted Democrats into the majority in the House of Representatives and boosted the party’s fortunes in the northern states. Democrats widened their control of the House and state legislatures in 1912, put Woodrow Wilson in the White House, and gave him a Democratic majority in the Senate. This shift in party control was instrumental in enacting Progressive Era reforms between 1911 and 1916.33
The condition of a democratic state depends largely on the inhabitants’ acceptance of the legitimacy of their leaders. During the Gilded Age political parties were the primary tool for marshaling popular support for governing regimes, with private groups such as religious organizations, commercial interests, labor and farmer groups, and publishing entities playing important supporting roles. After 1900 parties lost some of their hold on voter loyalty, while nonpolitical interests such as business groups, labor organizations, and citizens’ reform-oriented groups, as well as more assertive executives at all levels, assumed more influential leadership roles. These post-1896 shifts were evolutionary and incremental, however, and did not disturb the basic cultural and structural foundations on which the American national state rested.
The historical evidence suggests that a substantial majority of residents (adult citizens and aliens) accepted the principles that formed the nation’s ideological foundation. Clearly, the vast majority of Americans remained loyal to the national regime, in the sense that no violent (i.e., unconstitutional) revolution or palace coup occurred during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Support for the federal state rested heavily on a popular embrace of classic American tenets—individual rights, equality, and economic opportunity—as frayed as these principles were in practice. Numerous cultural groups and disgruntled labor activists were relegated to secondary status by white Protestant males. Where persuasion failed, power holders wielded coercive force to extract compliance from dissidents. Behind the celebration of political rights and individualism lurked the reality of American insistence on law and order, particularly for people of color and those with marginal incomes. The American state consisted of a noncentralized structure held together by popular consent for its democratic principles as articulated by the core cultural establishment, the competitive arrangement of its party system, and leaders’ willingness to force compliance from social and political deviants.