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William McKinley served in the U.S. Congress and as governor of Ohio before running for the presidency in 1896. As a longtime champion of protective tariffs, the Republican McKinley ran on a platform of promoting American prosperity and won a landslide victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan to become the 25th president of the United States. In 1898, McKinley led the nation into war with Spain over the issue of Cuban independence; the brief and decisive conflict ended with the U.S. in possession of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. In general, McKinley's bold foreign policy opened the doors for the United States to play an increasingly active role in world affairs. Re-elected in 1900, McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901.

Early Life and Career

William McKinley was born January 29, 1843, in Niles, Ohio. As a young man, he briefly attended Allegheny College before taking a post as a country schoolteacher.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, McKinley enlisted in the Union Army, where he eventually earned the rank of brevet major of volunteers. Returning to Ohio after the war, McKinley studied law, opened his own practice in Canton, Ohio, and married Ida Saxton, the daughter of a local banker.

After the deaths, in quick succession, of her mother and her two young daughters early in their marriage, Ida's health rapidly deteriorated, and she spent the rest of her life as a chronic invalid. McKinley patiently catered to his wife throughout his burgeoning political career, winning praise from the public for his loving devotion to her.

Did you know? During the Civil War, McKinley served on the staff of Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, a fellow Ohioan who would become his lifelong mentor and friend. His ties to Hayes helped McKinley rise through Ohio's political ranks and win election to Congress in 1876, the same year Hayes was elected as the nation's 19th president.

McKinley entered Ohio politics in 1869 and rose through the ranks of the Republican Party, winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1876. Over nearly 14 years in Congress, he served as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee and became known as a proponent of economic protectionism, in the form of high tariffs on imported goods.

After a tariff measure bearing his name passed in 1890, voters rejected McKinley and other Republicans due to rising consumer prices, and he returned to Ohio. The following year, he ran for governor, winning by a narrow margin; he would serve two terms in that post.

President William McKinley

After the so-called Panic of 1893 led to a crippling economic depression in the United States, McKinley and his fellow Republicans regained the political advantage over the Democrats.

McKinley won the Republican presidential nomination in 1896 thanks to his congressional and gubernatorial experience, his longtime support of protectionism and the skilled maneuvering of his chief supporter, the wealthy Ohio industrialist Marcus Alonzo Hanna.

In the general election, McKinley faced William Jennings Bryan, who ran on a platform attacking the gold standard and supporting the coinage of silver as well as gold. Touted by Hanna as the "advance agent of prosperity" and the protector of America's financial interests in contrast to Bryan's radical policies, McKinley won the popular vote by a margin of some 600,000, the largest victory in 25 years; he also won more electoral votes than Bryan.

Domestic Agenda

Soon after taking office, McKinley called a special session of Congress in order to raise customs duties, an effort he believed would reduce other taxes and encourage the growth of domestic industry and employment for American workers. The result was the Dingley Tariff Act (sponsored by the Maine congressman Nelson Dingley), the highest protective tariff in American history.

McKinley's support for the Dingley Tariff strengthened his position with organized labor, while his generally business-friendly administration allowed industrial combinations or "trusts" to develop at an unprecedented rate.

Spanish-American War

It was foreign affairs that would determine McKinley's presidential legacy, beginning with an ongoing conflict in Cuba, where Spanish forces were attempting to repress a revolutionary movement. Though the American press and public were outraged by the bloodshed, McKinley hoped to avoid intervention, and pressed Spain to make concessions.

After the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in Havana's harbor in February 1898, McKinley asked Congress for the authority to intervene in the conflict; a formal declaration of war came on April 25. The Spanish-American War lasted from early May to mid-August, until U.S. forces defeated Spain near Santiago harbor in Cuba, occupied Puerto Rico and seized Manila in the Philippines.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898 and narrowly ratified by Congress the following February, officially ended the Spanish-American War. In it, Spain ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States and Cuba gained its independence.

While opponents of the treaty derided it as "imperialist," McKinley took his cue from the majority of Americans who supported it, sending troops to quell a nationalist insurgency that broke out in the Philippines shortly after the war ended.

McKinley's administration also pursued an influential "Open Door" policy aimed as supporting American commercial interests in China and ensuring a strong U.S. position in world markets. In 1900, McKinley backed up this policy by sending American troops to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, a nationalist uprising against foreign intervention in China.

Reelection in 1900

In 1900, McKinley again faced William Jennings Bryan, who ran on an anti-imperialism platform, and was reelected with an even greater margin of victory than he obtained four years earlier. The outcome reflected the American public's satisfaction with the outcome of the Spanish-American War and the country's economic prosperity.

After his second inauguration in March 1901, McKinley embarked on a tour of western states, where he was greeted by cheering crowds. The tour ended in Buffalo, New York, where he gave a speech on September 5 in front of 50,000 people at the Pan-American Exposition.

Assassination

At the Pan-American Exposition, McKinley was standing in a receiving line when a unemployed Detroit mill worker named Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley twice in the chest at point-blank range. Czolgosz, an anarchist, later admitted to the shooting and claimed to have killed the president because he was the "enemy of the people." He was executed in October 1901.

Rushed to a Buffalo hospital, McKinley initially received a hopeful prognosis, but gangrene set in around his wounds and he died eight days later. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him.

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PHOTO GALLERIES

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William McKinley served in the U.S. Congress and as governor of Ohio before running for the presidency in 1896. As a longtime champion of protective tariffs, the Republican McKinley ran on a platform of promoting American prosperity and won a landslide victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan to become the 25th president of the United States.

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The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and resulted in U.S. acquisition of territories in the western Pacific and Latin America.

Causes: Remember the Maine!

The war originated in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain, which began in February 1895.

Spain's brutally repressive measures to halt the rebellion were graphically portrayed for the U.S. public by several sensational newspapers engaging in yellow journalism, and American sympathy for the Cuban rebels rose.

Did you know? The term yellow journalism was coined in the 19th century to describe journalism that relies on eye-catching headlines, exaggeration and sensationalism to increase sales.

The growing popular demand for U.S. intervention became an insistent chorus after the still-unexplained sinking in Havana harbor of the American battleship USS Maine, which had been sent to protect U.S. citizens and property after anti-Spanish rioting in Havana.

War Is Declared

Spain announced an armistice on April 9 and speeded up its new program to grant Cuba limited powers of self-government.

But the U.S. Congress soon afterward issued resolutions that declared Cuba's right to independence, demanded the withdrawal of Spain's armed forces from the island, and authorized the use of force by President William McKinley to secure that withdrawal while renouncing any U.S. design for annexing Cuba.

Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, followed by a U.S. declaration of war on the 25th, which was made retroactive to April 21.

Spanish American War Begins

The ensuing war was pathetically one-sided, since Spain had readied neither its army nor its navy for a distant war with the formidable power of the United States.

In the early morning hours of May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey led a U.S. naval squadron into Manila Bay in the Philippines. He destroyed the anchored Spanish fleet in two hours before pausing the Battle of Manila Bay to order his crew a second breakfast. In total, fewer than 10 American seamen were lost, while Spanish losses were estimated at over 370. Manila itself was occupied by U.S. troops by August.

The elusive Spanish Caribbean fleet under Adm. Pascual Cervera was located in Santiago harbor in Cuba by U.S. reconnaissance. An army of regular troops and volunteers under Gen. William Shafter (including then-former assistant secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and his 1st Volunteer Cavalry, the "Rough Riders") landed on the coast east of Santiago and slowly advanced on the city in an effort to force Cervera's fleet out of the harbor.

Cervera led his squadron out of Santiago on July 3 and tried to escape westward along the coast. In the ensuing battle all of his ships came under heavy fire from U.S. guns and were beached in a burning or sinking condition.

Santiago surrendered to Shafter on July 17, thus effectively ending the brief but momentous war.

Treaty of Paris

The Treaty of Paris ending the Spanish American War was signed on December 10, 1898. In it, Spain renounced all claim to Cuba, ceded Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States and transferred sovereignty over the Philippines to the United States for $20 million.

Philippine insurgents who had fought against Spanish rule soon turned their guns against their new occupiers. The Philippine-American War began in February of 1899 and lasted until 1902. Ten times more U.S. troops died suppressing revolts in the Philippines than in defeating Spain.

Impact of the Spanish-American War

The Spanish American War was an important turning point in the history of both antagonists. Spain's defeat decisively turned the nation's attention away from its overseas colonial adventures and inward upon its domestic needs, a process that led to both a cultural and a literary renaissance and two decades of much-needed economic development in Spain.

The victorious United States, on the other hand, emerged from the war a world power with far-flung overseas possessions and a new stake in international politics that would soon lead it to play a determining role in the affairs of Europe and the rest of the globe.

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Spanish-American War: Causes, Battles & Timeline | HISTORY

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The Spanish-American War was an 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain that ended Spanish colonial rule in the Americas.

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Hailed as one of the great achievements of the 20th Century, the Panama Canal connects 160 countries and 1,700 ports around the world.

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Historian Yohuru Williams talks about the Plessy v. Ferguson case and its effects on the Civil Rights Movement.

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On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. A commentary on the ruling explores

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Watch Jacob Riis Clip - America the Story of Us | HISTORY

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Learn how photographer Jacob Riis changed the lives of New York Citiy's poor by exposing how they were forced to live.

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The Postwar Booms

Historians use the word "boom" to describe a lot of things about the 1950s: the booming economy, the booming suburbs and most of all the so-called "baby boom." This boom began in 1946, when a record number of babies-3.4 million-were born in the United States. About 4 million babies were born each year during the 1950s. In all, by the time the boom finally tapered off in 1964, there were almost 77 million "baby boomers."

After World War II ended, many Americans were eager to have children because they were confident that the future promised peace and prosperity. In many ways, they were right. Between 1945 and 1960, the gross national product more than doubled, growing from $200 billion to more than $500 billion, kicking off "the Golden Age of American Capitalism." Much of this increase came from government spending: The construction of interstate highways and schools, the distribution of veterans' benefits and most of all the increase in military spending-on goods like airplanes and new technologies like computers-all contributed to the decade's economic growth. Rates of unemployment and inflation were low, and wages were high. Middle-class people had more money to spend than ever-and, because the variety and availability of consumer goods expanded along with the economy, they also had more things to buy.

Moving to the Suburbs

The baby boom and the suburban boom went hand in hand. Almost as soon as World War II ended, developers such as William Levitt (whose "Levittowns" in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most famous symbols of suburban life in the 1950s) began to buy land on the outskirts of cities and use mass production techniques to build modest, inexpensive tract houses there. The G.I. Bill subsidized low-cost mortgages for many returning soldiers, which meant that it was often cheaper to buy one of these suburban houses than it was to rent an apartment in the city.

These houses were perfect for young families-they had informal "family rooms," open floor plans and backyards-and so suburban developments earned nicknames like "Fertility Valley" and "The Rabbit Hutch."

Though the G.I. Bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn't deliver on that promise for veterans of color. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill's implementation ended up driving growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans.

Suburban homes, meanwhile, weren't always so perfect for the (mostly white) women who lived in them. In fact, the booms of the 1950s had a particularly confining effect on many American women. Advice books and magazine articles ("Don't Be Afraid to Marry Young," "Cooking to Me Is Poetry," "Femininity Begins At Home") urged women to leave the workforce and embrace their roles as wives and mothers. The idea that a woman's most important job was to bear and rear children was hardly a new one, but it began to generate a great deal of dissatisfaction among women who yearned for a more fulfilling life. (In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, women's rights advocate Betty Friedan argued that the suburbs were "burying women alive.") This dissatisfaction, in turn, contributed to the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Movement

A growing group of Americans spoke out against inequality and injustice during the 1950s. African Americans had been fighting against racial discrimination for centuries; during the 1950s, however, the struggle against racism and segregation entered the mainstream of American life. For example, in 1954, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities" for black children were "inherently unequal." This ruling was the first nail in Jim Crow's coffin.

Many Southern whites resisted the Brown ruling. They withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in all-white "segregation academies," and they used violence and intimidation to prevent blacks from asserting their rights. In 1956, more than 100 Southern congressmen even signed a "Southern Manifesto" declaring that they would do all they could to defend segregation.

Despite these efforts, a new movement was born. In December 1955, a Montgomery activist named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white person. Her arrest sparked a 13-month boycott of the city's buses by its black citizens, which only ended when the bus companies stopped discriminating against Black passengers. Acts of "nonviolent resistance" like the boycott helped shape the civil rights movement of the next decade.

Did you know? When Rosa Parks died in 2005, she was the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

The Cold War & The Korean War

The tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cold War, was another defining element of the 1950s. After World War II, Western leaders began to worry that the USSR had what one American diplomat called "expansive tendencies"; moreover, they believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened democracy and capitalism everywhere. As a result, communism needed to be "contained"-by diplomacy, by threats or by force.

This policy is what drew American forces into the Korean War in July 1950. A month earlier, some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. As far as American officials were concerned, fighting on behalf of the Republic of Korea was pushback against forces of international communism itself.

The United States never formally declared war on North Korea. Instead, President Harry Truman referred to the addition of ground troops as a "police action." The Korean War armistice, signed on July 27, 1953, drew a new border between North Korea and South Korea, granting South Korea some additional territory and demilitarizing the zone between the two nations.

Cold War tensions shaped domestic policy as well. Many people in the United States worried that communists, or "subversives," could destroy American society from the inside as well as from the outside. Between 1945 and 1952, Congress held 84 hearings designed to put an end to "un-American activities" in the federal government, in universities and public schools and even in Hollywood. These hearings did not uncover many treasonous activities-or even many communists-but it did not matter: Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs, as well as their families and friends, in the anti-communist "Red Scare" of the 1950s.

1950s Pop Culture

In the 1950s, televisions became something the average family could afford, and by 1950 4.4 million U.S. families had one in their home. The Golden Age of Television was marked by family-friendly shows like I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Twilight Zone and Leave It To Beaver. In movie theaters, actors like John Wayne, James Stuart, Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe dominated the box office. The Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning signaled a new age in art, paving the way for the Pop Art of artists like Andy Warhol in the 1960s.

1950s Music

Elvis Presley. Sam Cooke. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. Buddy Holly. The 1950s saw the emergence of Rock 'n' Roll, and the new sound swept the nation. It helped inspire rockabilly music from Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. People swayed to The Platters and The Drifters. Music marketing, changed, too: For the first time, music began to target youth.

On February 3, 1959, American musicians Buddy Holly. Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson died in a plane crash over Clear Lake, Iowa, in what became known as " The Day The Music Died "-an event immortalized in Don McLean's 1972 song "American Pie."

Shaping the 1960s

The booming prosperity of the 1950s helped to create a widespread sense of stability, contentment and consensus in the United States. However, that consensus was a fragile one, and it splintered for good during the tumultuous 1960s.

Sources

The Elvic Oracle. The New Yorker.
1950s Rock 'n' Roll. Rolling Stone.
The Day The Music Died. Biography.
The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. Douglas T. Miller and Marion Novak.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The 1950s - American Culture & Society | HISTORY

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During the 1950s, the United States was the world's strongest military power. Its economy was booming, and the fruits of this prosperity-new cars, suburban houses and other consumer goods-were available to more people than ever before. However, the 1950s also saw great conflict.

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Table of Contents

1. Emancipation and Reconstruction

2. Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

3. Radical Reconstruction

4. Reconstruction Comes to an End

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive " Black Codes " to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans.

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces-including the Ku Klux Klan -would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War, to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln's troops marched through the South.

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the "peculiar institution"-that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage-and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war's end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan.

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people-including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military-deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states' rights. In Johnson's view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level.

Under Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen's Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson's leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the " black codes," which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states.

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills-causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868-the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson's policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson's veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting "equal protection" of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region's history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South's first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned.

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874-after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty-the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery's eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date.

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

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Reconstruction - Civil War End, Changes & Act of 1867

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Reconstruction, the turbulent era following the U.S. Civil War, was an effort to reunify the divided nation, address and integrate African Americans into society by rewriting the nation's laws and Constitution. The steps taken gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan and other divisive groups.

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13th, 14, and 15th

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Table of Contents

1. Emancipation and Reconstruction

2. Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

3. Radical Reconstruction

4. Reconstruction Comes to an End

Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive " Black Codes " to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans.

Outrage in the North over these codes eroded support for the approach known as Presidential Reconstruction and led to the triumph of the more radical wing of the Republican Party. During Radical Reconstruction, which began with the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, newly enfranchised Black people gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces-including the Ku Klux Klan -would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

At the outset of the Civil War, to the dismay of the more radical abolitionists in the North, President Abraham Lincoln did not make abolition of slavery a goal of the Union war effort. To do so, he feared, would drive the border slave states still loyal to the Union into the Confederacy and anger more conservative northerners. By the summer of 1862, however, enslaved people, themselves had pushed the issue, heading by the thousands to the Union lines as Lincoln's troops marched through the South.

Their actions debunked one of the strongest myths underlying Southern devotion to the "peculiar institution"-that many enslaved people were truly content in bondage-and convinced Lincoln that emancipation had become a political and military necessity. In response to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which freed more than 3 million enslaved people in the Confederate states by January 1, 1863, Black people enlisted in the Union Army in large numbers, reaching some 180,000 by war's end.

Did you know? During Reconstruction, the Republican Party in the South represented a coalition of Black people (who made up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters in the region) along with "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags," as white Republicans from the North and South, respectively, were known.

Emancipation changed the stakes of the Civil War, ensuring that a Union victory would mean large-scale social revolution in the South. It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan.

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people-including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military-deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Andrew Johnson and Presidential Reconstruction

At the end of May 1865, President Andrew Johnson announced his plans for Reconstruction, which reflected both his staunch Unionism and his firm belief in states' rights. In Johnson's view, the southern states had never given up their right to govern themselves, and the federal government had no right to determine voting requirements or other questions at the state level.

Under Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen's Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners. Apart from being required to uphold the abolition of slavery (in compliance with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off war debt, southern state governments were given free rein to rebuild themselves.

As a result of Johnson's leniency, many southern states in 1865 and 1866 successfully enacted a series of laws known as the " black codes," which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force. These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states.

In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and formerly enslaved people, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens who were to enjoy equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills-causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868-the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

Radical Reconstruction

After northern voters rejected Johnson's policies in the congressional elections in late 1866, Radical Republicans in Congress took firm hold of Reconstruction in the South. The following March, again over Johnson's veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized. The law also required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, which broadened the definition of citizenship, granting "equal protection" of the Constitution to formerly enslaved people, before they could rejoin the Union. In February 1869, Congress approved the 15th Amendment (adopted in 1870), which guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region's history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery.

Southern Black people won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress during this period. Among the other achievements of Reconstruction were the South's first state-funded public school systems, more equitable taxation legislation, laws against racial discrimination in public transport and accommodations and ambitious economic development programs (including aid to railroads and other enterprises).

Reconstruction Comes to an End

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned.

Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874-after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty-the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South.

The Compromise of 1876 marked the end of Reconstruction as a distinct period, but the struggle to deal with the revolution ushered in by slavery's eradication would continue in the South and elsewhere long after that date.

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

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Reconstruction - Civil War End, Changes & Act of 1867

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Reconstruction, the turbulent era following the U.S. Civil War, was an effort to reunify the divided nation, address and integrate African Americans into society by rewriting the nation's laws and Constitution. The steps taken gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan and other divisive groups.

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Led by civil rights pioneer Daisy Bates, these nine brave Arkansas teenagers broke through racial barriers to become the first black students to attend Little

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On the night of January 27, 1956, when he was just 27 years old, Martin Luther King Jr. received a threatening phone call that would cause his life to change forever.

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Find out more about the huge - and hugely influential - generation of Americans born during the post-World War II period between 1946 and 1964.

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Watch The Men Who Built America: Andrew Carnegie Clip - The Men Who Built America | HISTORY

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The rags to riches story of a Scottish immigrant who became one of America's greatest entrepreneurs and philanthropists.

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Watch John D. Rockefeller Clip - The Men Who Built America | HISTORY

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John D. Rockefeller built an oil empire by guaranteeing a uniform quality for his Standard Oil kerosene.

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Watch Cornelius Vanderbilt Clip - The Men Who Built America | HISTORY

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Discover how a steamboat captain built a railroad empire.

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Watch J.P. Morgan Clip - The Men Who Built America | HISTORY

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Get the story of how one man went from buying railroads to bailing out the U.S. government.

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Theodore Roosevelt fought to control the influence big business had on government policy.

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Watch The People vs. Standard Oil Clip - The Men Who Built America | HISTORY

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The break-up of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust set a precedent for the future of monopolies in America.

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For over 60 years, Ellis Island was the gateway for millions of Americans to the United States. Explore the legacy of this symbol of American immigration.

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Seen from inbound ships, the Statue of Liberty was an emotional welcome for immigrants coming to America. Hear from those who remember their first glimpse of this symbol of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Seen from inbound ships, the Statue of Liberty was an emotional welcome for immigrants coming to America. Hear from those who remember their first glimpse of this symbol of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Archduke Ferdinand's assassination caused the outbreak of World War I, but what caused the assassination itself? It may have been something as simple as a wrong turn.

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After running on the campaign, “He Kept Us Out of the War,” Woodrow Wilson brings the United States into World War I in April 1917.

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A look back at the legacy of World War I nearly 100 years after the conflict began.

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Did you know that the first-ever tanks, chemical weapons and blood banks were introduced during World War I? Get all the facts behind the conflict known as the

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Table of Contents

1. Origins of Temperance Movement

2. From State to Federal Prohibition Legislation

3. Unexpected Events

4. Calls for Prohibition's Repeal

By the late 1800s, prohibition movements had sprung up across the United States, driven by religious groups who considered alcohol, specifically drunkenness, a threat to the nation. The movement reached its apex in 1919 with the ratification of the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors. Prohibition proved difficult to enforce and failed to have the intended effect of eliminating crime and other social problems-to the contrary, it led to a rise in organized crime, as the bootlegging of alcohol became an ever-more lucrative operation. In 1933, widespread public disillusionment led Congress to ratify the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition.

Origins of Temperance Movement

A wave of intense religious revivalism that swept the U.S. during the 1820s and 30s led to the formation of a number of prohibition movements driven by religious groups who considered alcohol, specifically drunkenness, a "national curse." (This revivalism also helped inspire the movement to end slavery.) The first temperance legislation appeared in 1838, in the form of a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of spirits in less than 15-gallon quantities. Though it was repealed two years later, Maine passed the first state prohibition law in 1846, and by the time the Civil War began, a number of other states had followed suit.

Did you know? Prohibition was known as "the noble experiment." The phrase was coined by President Herbert Hoover, who wrote to an Idaho senator in 1928: "Our country has deliberately undertaken a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose."

As early as 1873, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of Ohio called for the abolition of the sale of alcohol. They were soon joined in the fight by the even more powerful Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in 1893 in Ohio but later expanded into a national organization that endorsed political candidates and lobbied for legislation against saloons. Beginning around 1906, the ASL led a renewed call for prohibition legislation at the state level. Through speeches, advertisements and public demonstrations at saloons and bars, prohibition advocates attempted to convince people that that eliminating alcohol from society would eliminate poverty and social vices, such as immoral behavior and physical violence. One prominent temperance advocate, Kentucky-born Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (she called herself "Carry A. Nation"), became known for particularly violent tactics against what she called "evil spirits." In addition to making protest speeches, Nation was known for breaking saloon windows and mirrors and destroying kegs of beer or whiskey with a hatchet. She was arrested numerous times, and became a household name across the country for her "saloon-smashing" campaign.

From State to Federal Prohibition Legislation

By 1916, 23 of 48 states had passed anti-saloon legislation. Many went further, prohibiting the manufacture of alcoholic beverages as well. After the congressional elections that year, "dry" members (as those who favored a national prohibition of alcohol became known) won a two-thirds majority over "wet" in the U.S. Congress. On January 16, 1919, the requisite number of states ratified the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacturing, transportation and sale of alcohol within the United States; it would go into effect the following January.

Later in 1919, the National Prohibition Act-popularly known as the Volstead Act, after its legislative sponsor, Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota-was enacted in order to provide the government with the means of enforcing Prohibition. Loopholes in this act-such as the fact that liquor used for medicinal, sacramental or industrial purposes remained legal, as did fruit or grape beverages prepared at home-as well as varying degrees of government support throughout the 1920s hampered the enforcement of Prohibition, and it would remain more of an ideal than a reality.

Unexpected Events

Under Prohibition, the illegal manufacture and sale of liquor-known as "bootlegging"-occurred on a large scale across the United States. In urban areas, where the majority of the population opposed Prohibition, enforcement was generally much weaker than in rural areas and smaller towns. Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of Prohibition was the effect it had on organized crime in the United States: as the production and sale of alcohol went further underground, it began to be controlled by the Mafia and other gangs, who transformed themselves into sophisticated criminal enterprises that reaped huge profits from the illicit liquor trade.

When it came to its booming bootleg business, the Mafia became skilled at bribing police and politicians to look the other way. Chicago's Al Capone emerged as the most notorious example of this phenomenon, earning an estimated $60 million annually from the bootlegging and speakeasy operations he controlled. In addition to bootlegging, gambling and prostitution reached new heights during the 1920s as well. A growing number of Americans came to blame Prohibition for this widespread moral decay and disorder-despite the fact that the legislation had intended to do the opposite-and to condemn it as a dangerous infringement on the freedom of the individual.

Calls for Prohibition's Repeal

If public sentiment had turned against Prohibition by the late 1920s, the advent of the Great Depression only hastened its demise, as some argued that the ban on alcohol denied jobs to the unemployed and much-needed revenue to the government. The efforts of the nonpartisan group Americans Against Prohibition Association (AAPA) added to public disillusionment. In 1932, the platform of Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt included a plank for repealing the 18th Amendment, and his victory that November marked a certain end to Prohibition.

In February 1933, Congress adopted a resolution proposing the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed both the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. The resolution required state conventions, rather than the state legislatures, to approve the amendment, effectively reducing the process to a one-state, one-vote referendum rather than a popular vote contest. That December, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the necessary majority for repeal. A few states continued statewide prohibition after 1933, but by 1966 all of them had abandoned it. Since then, liquor control in the United States has largely been determined at the local level.

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Prohibition - Definition, Amendment & Era

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The ratification of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution-which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of intoxicating liquors-ushered in a 13-year period in American history known as Prohibition.

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Women's Rights Movement Begins

The campaign for women's suffrage began in earnest in the decades before the Civil War. During the 1820s and '30s, most states had extended the franchise to all white men, regardless of how much money or property they had.

At the same time, all sorts of reform groups were proliferating across the United States- temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti- slavery organizations-and in many of these, women played a prominent role.

Meanwhile, many American women were beginning to chafe against what historians have called the "Cult of True Womanhood": that is, the idea that the only "true" woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family.

Put together, all of these contributed to a new way of thinking about what it meant to be a woman and a citizen of the United States.

Seneca Falls Convention

In 1848, a group of abolitionist activists-mostly women, but some men-gathered in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the problem of women's rights. They were invited there by the reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.

Most of the delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention agreed: American women were autonomous individuals who deserved their own political identities.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," proclaimed the Declaration of Sentiments that the delegates produced, "that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What this meant, among other things, was that they believed women should have the right to vote.

Civil Rights and Women's Rights During the Civil War

During the 1850s, the women's rights movement gathered steam, but lost momentum when the Civil War began. Almost immediately after the war ended, the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution raised familiar questions of suffrage and citizenship.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, extends the Constitution's protection to all citizens-and defines "citizens" as "male"; the 15th, ratified in 1870, guarantees Black men the right to vote.

Some women's suffrage advocates believed that this was their chance to push lawmakers for truly universal suffrage. As a result, they refused to support the 15th Amendment and even allied with racist Southerners who argued that white women's votes could be used to neutralize those cast by African Americans.

In 1869, a new group called the National Woman Suffrage Association was founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They began to fight for a universal-suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Others argued that it was unfair to endanger Black enfranchisement by tying it to the markedly less popular campaign for female suffrage. This pro-15th-Amendment faction formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association and fought for the franchise on a state-by-state basis.

Gallery: The Progressive Campaign for Suffrage

This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the organization's first president.

By then, the suffragists' approach had changed. Instead of arguing that women deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men because women and men were "created equal," the new generation of activists argued that women deserved the vote because they were different from men.

They could make their domesticity into a political virtue, using the franchise to create a purer, more moral "maternal commonwealth."

This argument served many political agendas: Temperance advocates, for instance, wanted women to have the vote because they thought it would mobilize an enormous voting bloc on behalf of their cause, and many middle-class white people were swayed once again by the argument that the enfranchisement of white women would "ensure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained."

Did you know? In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited all discrimination on the basis of sex. The so-called Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified.

Winning the Vote at Last

Starting in 1910, some states in the West began to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.

Still, southern and eastern states resisted. In 1916, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt unveiled what she called a "Winning Plan" to get the vote at last: a blitz campaign that mobilized state and local suffrage organizations all over the country, with a special focus on those recalcitrant regions.

Meanwhile, a splinter group called the National Woman's Party founded by Alice Paul focused on more radical, militant tactics-hunger strikes and White House pickets, for instance-aimed at winning dramatic publicity for their cause.

World War I slowed the suffragists' campaign but helped them advance their argument nonetheless: Women's work on behalf of the war effort, activists pointed out, proved that they were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men.

Finally, on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. And on November 2 of that year, more than 8 million women across the United States voted in elections for the first time.

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Women's Suffrage - The U.S. Movement, Leaders & 19th Amendment

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The women's suffrage movement was a decades-long fight to win the right to vote for women in the United States. On August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

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New Deal - Programs, Social Security & FDR

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The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. A Second New Deal was put in place shortly thereafter as a way to continue the country’s economic recovery.

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Watch Dust Bowl Clip - America the Story of Us | HISTORY

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Families were driven out of the once fertile great plains by massive dust clouds--one that rose to 10,000 feet and reached as far as New York City.

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It was all hands on deck as Americans pitched into a second World War effort after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

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After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt committed American forces to the Allied cause in World War II.

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Europe After World War II

Post-war Europe was in dire straits: Millions of its citizens had been killed or seriously wounded in World War II, and in related atrocities such as the Holocaust.

Many cities-including the industrial and cultural centers of London, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, Liverpool, Birmingham and Hamburg-had been partly or wholly destroyed. Reports provided to Marshall suggested that some regions of the continent were on the brink of famine because agricultural and other food production had been disrupted by the fighting.

In addition, the region's transportation infrastructure-railways, electric utilities, port facilities, roads, bridges and airports-had suffered extensive damage during airstrikes and artillery attacks, and the shipping fleets of many countries had been sunk. In fact, it could be argued that the only world power not structurally damaged by the conflict had been the United States.

The reconstruction coordinated under the Marshall Plan was formulated following a meeting of the participating European states in the latter half of 1947. Notably, invitations were extended to the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

However, they refused to join the effort, allegedly fearing U.S. involvement in their respective national affairs.

Truman Approves the Marshall Plan

President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan on April 3, 1948, and aid was distributed to 16 European nations, including Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany and Norway.

To highlight the significance of America's largesse, the billions committed in aid effectively amounted to a generous 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product at the time.

What Was the Marshall Plan?

The Marshall Plan provided aid to the recipients essentially on a per capita basis, with larger amounts given to major industrial powers, such as West Germany, France and Great Britain. This was based on the belief of Marshall and his advisors that recovery in these larger nations was essential to overall European recovery.

Still, not all participating nations benefitted equally. Nations such as Italy, who had fought with the Axis powers alongside Nazi Germany, and those who remained neutral (e.g., Switzerland) received less assistance per capita than those countries who fought with the United States and the other Allied powers.

The notable exception was West Germany: Though all of Germany was damaged significantly toward the end of World War II, a viable and revitalized West Germany was seen as essential to economic stability in the region, and as a not-so-subtle rebuke of the communist government and economic system on the other side of the "Iron Curtain" in East Germany.

In all, Great Britain received roughly one-quarter of the total aid provided under the Marshall Plan, while France was given less than one fifth of the funds.

Cold War

In addition to economic redevelopment, one of the stated goals of the Marshall Plan was to halt the spread of communism on the European continent.

Implementation of the Marshall Plan has been cited as the beginning of the Cold War between the United States, its European allies and the Soviet Union, which had effectively taken control of much of central and eastern Europe and established its satellite republics as communist nations.

The Marshall Plan is also considered a key catalyst for the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance between North American and European countries established in 1949.

Impact of the Marshall Plan

Interestingly, in the decades since its implementation, the true economic benefit of the Marshall Plan has been the subject of much debate. Indeed, reports at the time suggest that, by the time the plan took effect, Western Europe was already well on the road to recovery.

And, despite the significant investment on the part of the United States, the funds provided under the Marshall Plan accounted for less than 3 percent of the combined national incomes of the countries that received them. This led to relatively modest growth of GDP in these countries during the four-year period the plan was in effect.

That said, by the time of the plan's final year, 1952, economic growth in the countries that had received funds had surpassed pre-war levels, a strong indicator of the program's positive impact, at least economically.

Political Legacy of the Marshall Plan

Politically, however, the legacy of the Marshall Plan arguably tells a different story. Given the refusal to participate on the part of the so-called Eastern Bloc of Soviet states, the initiative certainly reinforced divisions that were already beginning to take root on the continent.

It's worth noting, too, that the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA), the secret service agency of the United States, received 5 percent of the funds allocated under the Marshall Plan. The CIA used these funds to establish "front" businesses in several European countries that were designed to further U.S. interests in the region.

The agency also allegedly financed an anti-communist insurgency in Ukraine, which at the time was a Soviet satellite state.

By and large, though, the Marshall Plan was generally lauded for the desperately needed boost it gave America's European allies. As the designer of the plan, George C. Marshall himself said, "Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos."

Still, efforts to extend the Marshall Plan beyond its initial four-year period stalled with the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. The countries that received funds under the plan didn't have to repay the United States, as the monies were awarded in the form of grants. However, the countries did return roughly 5 percent of the money to cover the administrative costs of the plan's implementation.

Sources

Department of State. Office of the Historian. Marshall Plan, 1948. History.state.gov.
The Marshall Plan. The George C. Marshall Foundation.
Truman and the Marshall Plan. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum.

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The Marshall Plan: Definition, Date & Cold War - HISTORY

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The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II.

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Table of Contents

1. North vs. South Korea

2. The Korean War and the Cold War

3. 'No Substitute for Victory'

4. The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate

5. Korean War Casualties&nbsp;

The Korean war began on June 25, 1950, when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion was the first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea's behalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of international communism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled and casualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously to fashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a wider war with Russia and China-or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the Korean War came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in what many in the U.S. refer to as "the Forgotten War" for the lack of attention it received compared to more well-known conflicts like World War I and II and the Vietnam War. The Korean peninsula remains divided today.

North vs. South Korea

"If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, "the unanimous choice would have been Korea." The peninsula had landed in America's lap almost by accident. Since the beginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire, and after World War II it fell to the Americans and the Soviets to decide what should be done with their enemy's imperial possessions. In August 1945, two young aides at the State Department divided the Korean peninsula in half along the 38th parallel. The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the United States occupied the area to its south.

Did you know? Unlike World War II and Vietnam, the Korean War did not get much media attention in the United States. The most famous representation of the war in popular culture is the television series "M*A*S*H," which was set in a field hospital in South Korea. The series ran from 1972 until 1983, and its final episode was the most-watched in television history.

By the end of the decade, two new states had formed on the peninsula. In the south, the anti-communist dictator Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) enjoyed the reluctant support of the American government; in the north, the communist dictator Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) enjoyed the slightly more enthusiastic support of the Soviets. Neither dictator was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, however, and border skirmishes were common. Nearly 10,000 North and South Korean soldiers were killed in battle before the war even began.

The Korean War and the Cold War

Even so, the North Korean invasion came as an alarming surprise to American officials. As far as they were concerned, this was not simply a border dispute between two unstable dictatorships on the other side of the globe. Instead, many feared it was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world. For this reason, nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision makers. (In fact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 had recommended that the United States use military force to "contain" communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to be occurring, "regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.")

"If we let Korea down," President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, "the Soviet[s] will keep right on going and swallow up one [place] after another." The fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of the global struggle between east and west, good and evil, in the Cold War. As the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, the South Korean capital, the United States readied its troops for a war against communism itself.

At first, the war was a defensive one to get the communists out of South Korea, and it went badly for the Allies. The North Korean army was well-disciplined, well-trained and well-equipped; Rhee's forces in the South Korean army, by contrast, were frightened, confused and seemed inclined to flee the battlefield at any provocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and desperately thirsty American soldiers were often forced to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with human waste. As a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other illnesses were a constant threat.

By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), the commander in charge of the Asian theater, had decided on a new set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, the Korean War was an offensive one: It was a war to "liberate" the North from the communists.

Initially, this new strategy was a success. The Inch'on Landing, an amphibious assault at Inch'on, pushed the North Koreans out of Seoul and back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary and headed north toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinese started to worry about protecting themselves from what they called "armed aggression against Chinese territory." Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) sent troops to North Korea and warned the United States to keep away from the Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war.

'No Substitute for Victory'

This was something that President Truman and his advisers decidedly did not want: They were sure that such a war would lead to Soviet aggression in Europe, the deployment of atomic weapons and millions of senseless deaths. To General MacArthur, however, anything short of this wider war represented "appeasement," an unacceptable knuckling under to the communists.

As President Truman looked for a way to prevent war with the Chinese, MacArthur did all he could to provoke it. Finally, in March 1951, he sent a letter to Joseph Martin, a House Republican leader who shared MacArthur's support for declaring all-out war on China-and who could be counted upon to leak the letter to the press. "There is," MacArthur wrote, "no substitute for victory" against international communism.

For Truman, this letter was the last straw. On April 11, the president fired the general for insubordination.

The Korean War Reaches a Stalemate

In July 1951, President Truman and his new military commanders started peace talks at Panmunjom. Still, the fighting continued along the 38th parallel as negotiations stalled. Both sides were willing to accept a ceasefire that maintained the 38th parallel boundary, but they could not agree on whether prisoners of war should be forcibly "repatriated." (The Chinese and the North Koreans said yes; the United States said no.)

Finally, after more than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed an armistice on July 27, 1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a new boundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; and created a 2-mile-wide "demilitarized zone" that still exists today.

Korean War Casualties

The Korean War was relatively short but exceptionally bloody. Nearly 5 million people died. More than half of these-about 10 percent of Korea's prewar population-were civilians. (This rate of civilian casualties was higher than World War II's and the Vietnam War's.) Almost 40,000 Americans died in action in Korea, and more than 100,000 were wounded. Today, they are remembered at the Korean War Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a series of 19 steel statues of servicemen, and the Korean War memorial in Fullerton, California, the first on the West Coast to include the names of the more than 30,000 Americans who died in the war.

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Korean War - Causes, Timeline & Veterans

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On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People's Army poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. Explore the war's causes, timeline, facts and end.

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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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Lyndon Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act of 1964

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education,

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Table of Contents

1. The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

2. The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

3. The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

4. The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

5. The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

Berlin's Animal Arms Race

As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany's territories. They split the defeated nation into four "allied occupation zones": The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.

The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, "stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat," as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in 1949.

Did you know? On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called "a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.

After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets-emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before during the " Space Race " and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers)-blustered and made threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution.

Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed-the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall -the Berlin Wall-that divided one side of the city from the other.

Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt ("Checkpoint Alpha" in American military parlance), at Dreilinden ("Checkpoint Bravo") and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse ("Checkpoint Charlie"). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.

The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.") Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most famous addresses of his presidency to a crowd of more than 120,000 gathered outside West Berlin's city hall, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Kennedy's speech has been largely remembered for one particular phrase. "I am a Berliner."

In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in his city's relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting "Tor auf!" ("Open the gate!"). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, "the greatest street party in the history of the world." People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall-they became known as "mauerspechte," or "wall woodpeckers"-while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. "Only today," one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, "is the war really over."

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

HISTORY Vault: Declassified: Rise and Fall of the Wall

Mine formerly guarded vaults and archives around the world to reveal untold stories about the brutal life and catastrophic death of the Berlin Wall, a central symbol of the 20th century's longest and deadliest war.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of the Berlin Wall was to keep Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West.

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Theodore Roosevelt - Facts, Presidency & Death | HISTORY

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Theodore Roosevelt became the 26st U.S. President in 1901, and was elected for a second term in 1904. Roosevelt’s complex legacy includes his achievements as a progressive reformer and conservationist who regulated big business and established the national park system. He died in 1919.

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On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin in Moscow for the last time. Representatives from Soviet republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus,

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The three branches of the U.S. government are the legislative, executive and judicial branches. According to the doctrine of separation of powers, the U.S. Constitution distributed the power of the federal government among these three branches, and built a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one branch could become too powerful.

Separation of Powers

The Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu coined the phrase "trias politica," or separation of powers, in his influential 18th-century work "Spirit of the Laws." His concept of a government divided into legislative, executive and judicial branches acting independently of each other inspired the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who vehemently opposed concentrating too much power in any one body of government.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote of the necessity of the separation of powers to the new nation's democratic government: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Legislative Branch

According to Article I of the Constitution, the legislative branch (the U.S. Congress) has the primary power to make the country's laws. This legislative power is divided further into the two chambers, or houses, of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Members of Congress are elected by the people of the United States. While each state gets the same number of senators (two) to represent it, the number of representatives for each state is based on the state's population.

Therefore, while there are 100 senators, there are 435 elected members of the House, plus an additional six non-voting delegates who represent the District of Columbia as well as Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories.

In order to pass an act of legislation, both houses must pass the same version of a bill by majority vote. Once that happens, the bill goes to the president, who can either sign it into law or reject it using the veto power assigned in the Constitution.

In the case of a regular veto, Congress can override the veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses. Both the veto power and Congress' ability to override a veto are examples of the system of checks and balances intended by the Constitution to prevent any one branch from gaining too much power.

Executive Branch

Article II of the Constitution states that the executive branch, with the president as its head, has the power to enforce or carry out the laws of the nation.

In addition to the president, who is the commander in chief of the armed forces and head of state, the executive branch includes the vice president and the Cabinet; the State Department, Defense Department and 13 other executive departments; and various other federal agencies, commissions and committees.

Unlike members of Congress, the president and vice president are not elected directly by the people every four years, but through the electoral college system. People vote to select a slate of electors, and each elector pledges to cast his or her vote for the candidate who gets the most votes from the people they represent.

In addition to signing (or vetoing) legislation, the president can influence the country's laws through various executive actions, including executive orders, presidential memoranda and proclamations. The executive branch is also responsible for carrying out the nation's foreign policy and conducting diplomacy with other countries, though the Senate must ratify any treaties with foreign nations.

Judicial Branch

Article III decreed that the nation's judicial power, to apply and interpret the laws, should be vested in "one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish."

The Constitution didn't specify the powers of the Supreme Court or explain how the judicial branch should be organized, and for a time the judiciary took a back seat to the other branches of government.

But that all changed with Marbury v. Madison, an 1803 milestone case that established the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, by which it determines the constitutionality of executive and legislative acts. Judicial review is another key example of the checks and balances system in action.

Members of the federal judiciary-which includes the Supreme Court, 13 U.S. Courts of Appeals and 94 federal judicial district courts-are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Federal judges hold their seats until they resign, die or are removed from office through impeachment by Congress.

Implied Powers of the Three Branches of Government

In addition to the specific powers of each branch that are enumerated in the Constitution, each branch has claimed certain implied powers, many of which can overlap at times. For example, presidents have claimed exclusive right to make foreign policy, without consultation with Congress.

In turn, Congress has enacted legislation that specifically defines how the law should be administered by the executive branch, while federal courts have interpreted laws in ways that Congress did not intend, drawing accusations of "legislating from the bench."

The powers granted to Congress by the Constitution expanded greatly after the Supreme Court ruled in the 1819 case McCulloch v. Maryland that the Constitution fails to spell out every power granted to Congress.

Since then, the legislative branch has often assumed additional implied powers under the "necessary and proper clause" or "elastic clause" included in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Checks and Balances

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself," James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. To ensure that all three branches of government remain in balance, each branch has powers that can be checked by the other two branches. Here are ways that the executive, judiciary, and legislative branches keep one another in line:

· The president (head of the executive branch) serves as commander in chief of the military forces, but Congress (legislative branch) appropriates funds for the military and votes to declare war. In addition, the Senate must ratify any peace treaties.

· Congress has the power of the purse, as it controls the money used to fund any executive actions.

· The president nominates federal officials, but the Senate confirms those nominations.

· Within the legislative branch, each house of Congress serves as a check on possible abuses of power by the other. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have to pass a bill in the same form for it to become law.

· Once Congress has passed a bill, the president has the power to veto that bill. In turn, Congress can override a regular presidential veto by a two-thirds vote of both houses.

· The Supreme Court and other federal courts (judicial branch) can declare laws or presidential actions unconstitutional, in a process known as judicial review.

· In turn, the president checks the judiciary through the power of appointment, which can be used to change the direction of the federal courts

· By passing amendments to the Constitution, Congress can effectively check the decisions of the Supreme Court.

· Congress can impeach both members of the executive and judicial branches.

Sources

Separation of Powers, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government.
Branches of Government, USA.gov.
Separation of Powers: An Overview, National Conference of State Legislatures.

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The three branches of the U.S. government are the legislative, executive and judicial branches. According to the doctrine of separation of powers, the U.S. Constitution distributed the power of the federal government among these three branches, and built a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one branch could become too powerful.

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March on Washington - Date, Facts & Significance | HISTORY

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The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered i…

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Table of Contents

1. Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

2. What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

3. Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable-most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.

Working Conditions in The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building, on the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place, in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English and worked 12 hours a day, every day. In 1911, there were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances.

Did you know? Exactly 79 years to the day after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, another tragic fire occurred in New York City. The blaze, at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killed 87 people, the most deadly fire in the city since 1911.

The danger of fire in factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist was well-known, but high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government generally ensured that no useful precautions were taken to prevent fires. Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.

Added to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris' notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours a day, every day. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris' company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

What Started The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire?

On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire began in a rag bin. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful, as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it could hold only 12 people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amid the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises-when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.

Those workers who were on floors above the fire, including the owners, escaped to the roof and then to adjoining buildings. As firefighters arrived, they witnessed a horrible scene. The girls who did not make it to the stairwells or the elevator were trapped by the fire inside the factory and began to jump from the windows to escape it. The bodies of the jumpers fell on the fire hoses, making it difficult to begin fighting the fire. Also, the firefighters ladders reached only seven floors high and the fire was on the eighth floor. In one case, a life net was unfurled to catch jumpers, but three girls jumped at the same time, ripping the net. The nets turned out to be mostly ineffectual.

Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 146 people were killed by the fire.

Importance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The fire helped unite organized labor and reform-minded politicians like progressive New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner, one of the legislative architects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. Frances Perkins, who served on a committee that helped to set up the Factory Investigating Commission in New York in the wake of the fire, would later become Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor. The workers union set up a march on April 5 on New York's Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire. It was attended by 80,000 people.

Despite a good deal of evidence that the owners and management had been horribly negligent in the fire, a grand jury failed to indict them on manslaughter charges. To settle lawsuits against them, they eventually paid $75 in compensation to each victim's family-a fraction of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Still, the massacre for which they were responsible did finally compel the city to enact reform. In addition to the Sullivan-Hoey Fire Prevention Law passed that October, the New York Democratic set took up the cause of the worker and became known as a reform party. Both were crucial in preventing similar disasters in the future.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable.