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Political Cartoon #10

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From Don't Know Much About History

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What Was The Cross of Gold  from Don't Know Much About History

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Who were the Populists?
What was the Cross of Gold

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Reading Selection

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website

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1896, a collection of political cartoons from the watershed presidential campaign that marked America's transition to the twentieth century. Cartoons from around the country and from three parties in the election--Republican, Democratic, and Populist--with party platforms, contemporary comment, and explorations of campaign themes.

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Agricultural Problems and Gilded Age Politics

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Agricultural Problems and Gilded Age Politics

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Background Info

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"Agricultural Problems and Gilded Age Politics"

In the years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the turn of the century some thirty-five years later, Americans witnessed the death of a rural and agricultural America dominated by farmers and the birth of an urban and industrial America dominated by bankers, industrialists, and city dwellers. This transformation of the United States made the country richer and more powerful than it had ever been before. It was accomplished, however, only with tremendous difficulty, especially for those in the American agricultural community. Farmers, large and small, witnessed numerous problems and dislocations during the era with which they found themselves unable to cope successfully. As the transformation of America took place, distressed farmers became angrier and angrier and would eventually participate in the most influential third political party movement ever.

I. Problems of the American Farmer during the Gilded Age
Without question the most vexing problem and the one that surpassed all others in both its negative effect and its difficulty to adjust to successfully was the problem of agricultural overproduction. In short, the American farmer produced far too much for his own good. In the years following the Civil War, agricultural production levels skyrocketed. The opening up of the Great Plains to the plow, the use of farm machinery which allowed the individual farmer to grow more, new farming techniques, and the spreading of the railroads (which made areas remote from rivers agriculturally viable by reducing transportation costs) all led to the flooding of the American market with agricultural produce.
As more and more crops were dumped onto the American market, it depressed the prices farmers could demand for their produce. Farmers were growing more and more and making less and less. If one looks at cotton production and prices during the Gilded Age, one can see the problem facing the farmer quite clearly. Between 1873 and 1894 cotton production doubled while the price of cotton fell from about 15 cents a pound to less than 6 cents a pound. The same phenomenon occurred in all other sectors of the agricultural economy.

Of all the problems facing the farmer, I believe that overproduction was the gravest because it caused so many other difficulties. Not making enough to recoup expenses because of depressed crop values, farmers attempted to compensate by growing more and more. This only made the problem worse. Furthermore, inadequate income drove farmers into ever-deepening debt and exacerbated problems in other areas.
Farmers fell victim as well to the tariff policy of the United States during the Gilded Age. They were forced to buy all the manufactured goods they needed for survival on a market protected by tariff legislation at artificially high prices while selling what they produced on a largely unprotected and highly competitive market at depressed prices because of oversupply and foreign competition. Thus, the tariff policy of the country often worked a double hardship on agricultural interests.
The aim of American protective tariffs during the Gilded Age was to try to guarantee the American market to the American manufacturer of finished products at a profit. The federal government consciously sought to achieve this aim as a means of encouraging the industrial revolution after the Civil War. By putting an import tax or duty on manufactured goods being imported into the United States by foreign manufacturers , the government hoped to make them more expensive than the similar American manufactured goods. This virtually guaranteed that American consumers, seeking to maximize their disposable income, would buy American goods. Protective tariffs were one of the many reasons why American industry grew so quickly during the final third of the nineteenth century.

Industrial manufacturers and the people who invested in American industry as well as some of their employees were the strongest supporters of this protectionist tariff policy. They argued that protective tariffs were temporarily necessary to encourage investment in industrial concerns by making them less risky. They also claimed that infant industries in the United States needed this form of protection from more powerful and well established European competitors. They conceded that such a policy would raise costs to consumers in the short run. Only with tariff protection, however, could the United States be rapidly industrialized. In the long run, Americaís dependence on foreign manufacturers would be ended, American dollars would be kept in America, consumers would benefit from newer and better products, and more jobs would be created for laborers.

Opponents of the countryís tariff policy included consumers, farmers, small businessmen, etc. They argued that tariffs were simply rip-offs of the consumer by greedy robber barons and the bankers who supported them. They laughed at the idea that American big businesses were fledgling, infantile operations that needed protection. Farmers felt doubly discriminated against because they felt the tariffs were applied primarily to manufactured goods while agrarian interests were left to fend for themselves.
During the Gilded Age, the federal government pursued a monetary policy that contracted the amount of money in circulation, making money scarcer and thus driving up its purchasing power and worth over time. This was done by limiting currency to gold rather than gold and silver or gold, silver, and greenbacks or paper money.
When the amount of money in circulation is contracted (such as occurred following the Civil War when silver was demonitized), purchasing power goes up. When the amount of money in circulation is expanded, purchasing power goes down. The first is referred to as "hard money" while the second is known as "soft money". Contraction or hard money equals deflation while expansion or soft money equals inflation.

Bankers, businessmen, investors and lenders supported hard money, arguing that it was a prerequisite to industrialization. Unless money retained its worth, people with money would not invest in risky industrial ventures and bankers wouldnít lend.

Farmers and debtors were the strongest advocates of soft money. They felt it was insane to limit currency to gold while Western silver mines were turning out tons of equally acceptable metal for currency. By coining both gold and silver, Americans who lived in areas where banks and money were scarce would have a better chance of obtaining currency. Farmers and debtors argued that soft money or inflation would provide badly-needed debtor relief. It would mean that those constantly in debt could repay in dollars that were easier to come by and worth less than in dollars, as was presently the case, that were harder to obtain and worth more.

The hard money policy the government pursued during the Gilded Age worked a real hardship on debtors such as farmers. Not only did they have to repay principal and interest on debt but had to do so with dollars that were increasingly harder to come by and that had greater purchasing power than those they had originally borrowed. Farmers, who were constantly in debt because of the nature of agriculture and its problems during this era, found themselves caught in this double bind year after year.
The government, once again to encourage rapid industrialization, gave significant tax break to industries that were not given to farmers. As industry became more and more profitable and agriculture less so, banks were increasingly reticent to lend money to agrarians. When they did, it was at a higher rate of interest. Farmers also suffered from the fact that most of the banks were located in the urban, industrial Northeast while there were fewer in rural agricultural areas. Thus farmers were driven to the credit merchant in the crop-lien system. The urban, industrial Northeast was the recipient as well of low railroad rates because it was the most overbuilt area of the country. Since the roads were losing money because of excessive competition in that region, owners often tried to make it up in less competitive areas such as the farming areas of the South and the Midwest by charging more for rail service. Thus, farmers felt that the higher transportation costs they were forced to pay and which made agriculture less rewarding were in order to subsidize the industrial interests they increasingly detested. As agriculture became less rewarding, more and more farm owners lost their farms when they could not repay bank loans and their mortgages were foreclosed on or they could not pay their tax liabilities and their farms were auctioned off as a result. During the Gilded Age, more and more farmers lost their land and slipped down the agricultural ladder into tenant farming, sharecropping, and the crop-lien system.
Tenant farmers rented the right to farm someone elseís land for a cash payment. Since money was so scarce (especially in the South following the loss of the Civil War), landless farmers would farm someone elseís land and at the end of the growing season would give up a predetermined share of whatever they grew as the rental payment - 1/3 of any cotton crop and 1/4 of any grain crop.

Since food and clothing were necessary during the growing season and because of poverty and a scarcity of money in rural areas, the crop-lien system emerged and spread during the Gilded Age and beyond. A sharecropper could obtain food, clothing, and other necessities of life on credit from either the landowner or a credit merchant during the growing season in return for a contractual lien against whatever share of the crop in the field was sufficient to meet the credit they were extended plus interest. The landowner or credit merchant charged a credit purchase price that was approximately 60% higher than the cash purchase price. Interest rates were generally unspecified until the end of the growing season but averaged nearly 25% annually.

By the time the crop came in, it was all gone to the landowner for the right to farm the land and to the credit merchant for food and clothing. Indeed, most sharecroppers under the crop-lien system ended the year in debt to the credit merchant and were thus legally obligated to continue the relationship the next year to pay off the debt. Year after year, the landless farmer fell deeper in debt. Many were trapped for life.

The system hurt all the more because the credit merchant could dictate the crop that would be grown by croppers he extended credit to. In the South, that meant cotton because it was non-perishable and could always be sold somewhere at some price. This, however, exacerbated the problem of overproduction and depressed the price of cotton even further. It was an endless cycle.
One of the factors hardest for farmers to deal with was the recognition that a rural and agricultural America dominated by farmers had given way to an urban and industrial American dominated by those interests. Farmers found the major political parties of the Gilded Age unresponsive to their demands that government deal with their problems. Farmers no longer controlled the social, economic, or political systems and this was a bitter pill to swallow. II. The Unresponsiveness of the Republican and Democratic Parties to Agrarian Needs
During the Gilded Age from 1877-1896, political competition between the two major parties was incredibly intense and close. Elections were more often than not decided by less than 1% of the popular vote and what happened in a string of key swing states determined which party would control the White House for the next four years. Given these circumstances, it was incumbent on the parties to anger as few voters as possible. The Republican and Democratic parties, therefore, refused to take firm public stances on the major issues of the day - currency policy and tariff policy - which were both divisive and polarized. While the government pursued a "hard" money policy and protective tariffs in general, the parties tried to cloud their issue stances by appealing to party loyalty and using "bloody shirt" oratory or nominating favorite son candidates from the key swing states. While smart politically, it ignored the plight and demands of agrarians.

The Gilded Age also witnessed intense population increases from urbanization and immigration in the industrial states of the Northeast. In the American political system, population equals political power. Gaining more and more seats in the House of Representatives and votes in the Electoral College, the Northeast had the votes to swing the country, Congress, and the presidency in favor of urban and industrial interests. Farmers therefore found little receptivity to their demands either in Congress or from the major political parties.

III. The Agrarian Reaction: Self-Help Programs to Political Demands
In the 1870s, a farm organization known as the Patrons of Husbandry, but more popularly called the Grange, arose and instituted a cooperative program to help farmers help themselves. The buying and selling coops founded by the Grange attempted to put more money into farmersí pockets by eliminating middlemen from these economic transactions.
Despite heroic efforts by Grangers, the cooperative movement failed for a variety of reasons. The middlemen - the targets of the movement - fought back by refusing to let farmers sharecrop land they owned, denying the farmers credit at mercantile stores they ran, or refused to buy or process the farmersí crops at any price whatsoever. The cooperative stores set up by the Grange also failed because they were underfinanced and could not afford to offer goods for sale on a credit basis. This forced poor farmers into the hands of credit merchants who charged higher prices but made credit available under the crop-lien system. The selling cooperatives also failed because farmers were unable, given their poverty, to wait for everyoneís crop to be collected, processed, transported, and sold at a higher price. Farmers, desperate to convert their remaining crop into cash to meet debts and live between growing seasons, were forced to sell to a local buyer at whatever price they could get.
Because of the failure of the Grange to solve agrarian problems through its self-help programs, farmers began to become more militant. The Farmers Alliance, a much more politically-oriented organization, began to attract more and more support in the 1880s as it demanded a governmental response to the plight of the farmer.
The Farmers Alliance called upon the federal government to institute a "subtreasury program" to help farmers avoid being forced to sell their non-perishable crops on a glutted market when they could command the least for their labors. Farmers hoped to wait until the glut which occurred at the end of each growing season and temporarily depressed prices to their lowest point had dissipated and given way to scarcity when prices would rise. This, however, would require financial subsidization from the federal government. Theoretically, when farmers placed their crop on deposit in federal storage facilities, the Treasury Department would loan the farmer up to 80% of the cropís current value and hold on to the crop as collateral. When scarcity drove prices up, the farmer would sell and repay the government with a nominal rate of interest. Not surprisingly given the temper of the times, the proposal was considered revolutionary and rejected by Congress and the political parties.

The subtreasury plan was far from the only demand of the Alliance, which realized that agrarian difficulties could never be solved by the farmers themselves. The situation was so grave that the organization demanded a complete agenda of programs and laws which would give justice and perhaps prosperity to the beleaguered farming community. Among these demands were the abolition of national banks, the free coinage of silver to inflate the currency system and provide debtor relief, the enactment of a progressive income tax to shift the tax burden to rich industrialists, the lowering of protective tariffs on manufactured goods, the direct election of U. S. senators, and governmental regulation or nationalization of the railroad and telegraph industries.

During the middle and late 1880s the Farmers Alliance pressured the Republican and Democratic parties and Congress to deal with the situation by meeting their political demands. When the parties and government refused or passed laws that farmers viewed as ineffective shams, such as the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the members of the Alliance made the decision to abandon traditional politics and form a third party of their own making. That party and the agrarian challenge of the status quo resulted in a political realignment and an end to the Gilded Age political system.

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"Agricultural Problems and Gilded Age Politics"

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"Agricultural Problems and Gilded Age Politics" In the years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the turn of the century some thirty-five years later, Americans witnessed the death of a rural and agricultural America dominated by farmers and the birth of an urban and industrial America dominated by bankers, industrialists, and city dwellers.

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The Cross of Gold speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former United States Representative from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In the address, Bryan supported bimetallism or " free silver", which he believed would bring the nation prosperity.

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Audio Recording

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American Rhetoric: William Jennings Bryan - A Cross of Gold

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Full text and audio clip of William Jenning's Bryan Cross of Gold Speech

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A Party of Patches

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Farmer McKinley Takes Off His Coat

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Textbook

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Hip Hughes History Video

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Populism and the Populist Movement in America for Dummies

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Populist Party (Taylor Swift's "Style" Parody) - @MrBettsClass

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Populist Party (Taylor Swift's "Style" Parody) - @MrBettsClass

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You can NEVER unsee this!

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Populist Party (Taylor Swift's "Style" Parody) - @MrBettsClass

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Video

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Hip Hughes History

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Wizard of Oz: Social Commentary on the Populist  Movement

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Wizard of Oz: Social Commentary on the Populist  Movement

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Conspiracy Theory

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The Wizard of Oz: Social Commentary on the Populist Movement

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Analysis

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Close Read

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Ch 16 Capital and Labor

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The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads' financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers' wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends). Workers struck from Baltimore to St. Louis, shutting down railroad traffic-the nation's economic lifeblood-across the country.

Panicked business leaders and friendly political officials reacted quickly. When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called out state militias to break them and restore rail service. Many strikers destroyed rail property rather than allow militias to reopen the rails. The protests approached a class war. The governor of Maryland deployed the state's militia. In Baltimore, the militia fired into a crowd of striking workers, killing eleven and wounding many more. Strikes convulsed towns and cities across Pennsylvania. The head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, suggested that if workers were unhappy with their wages, they should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."Law enforcement in Pittsburgh refused to put down the protests, so the governor called out the state militia, who killed twenty strikers with bayonets and rifle fire. A month of chaos erupted. Strikers set fire to the city, destroying dozens of buildings, over a hundred engines, and over a thousand cars. In Reading, strikers destroyed rail property and an angry crowd bombarded militiamen with rocks and bottles. The militia fired into the crowd, killing ten. A general strike erupted in St. Louis, and strikers seized rail depots and declared for the eight-hour day and the abolition of child labor. Federal troops and vigilantes fought their way into the depot, killing eighteen and breaking the strike. Rail lines were shut down all across neighboring Illinois, where coal miners struck in sympathy, tens of thousands gathered to protest under the aegis of the Workingmen's Party, and twenty protesters were killed in Chicago by special police and militiamen.

Courts, police, and state militias suppressed the strikes, but it was federal troops that finally defeated them. When Pennsylvania militiamen were unable to contain the strikes, federal troops stepped in. When militia in West Virginia refused to break the strike, federal troops broke it instead. On the orders of the president, American soldiers were deployed all across northern rail lines. Soldiers moved from town to town, suppressing protests and reopening rail lines. Six weeks after it had begun, the strike had been crushed. Nearly 100 Americans died in "The Great Upheaval." Workers destroyed nearly $40 million worth of property. The strike galvanized the country. It convinced laborers of the need for institutionalized unions, persuaded businesses of the need for even greater political influence and government aid, and foretold a half century of labor conflict in the United States.

Growing labor unrest accompanied industrialization. The greatest strikes first hit the railroads only because no other industry had so effectively marshaled together capital, government support, and bureaucratic management. Many workers perceived their new powerlessness in the coming industrial order. Skills mattered less and less in an industrialized, mass-producing economy, and their strength as individuals seemed ever smaller and more insignificant when companies grew in size and power and managers grew flush with wealth and influence. Long hours, dangerous working conditions, and the difficulty of supporting a family on meager and unpredictable wages compelled armies of labor to organize and battle against the power of capital.

The post-Civil War era saw revolutions in American industry. Technological innovations and national investments slashed the costs of production and distribution. New administrative frameworks sustained the weight of vast firms. National credit agencies eased the uncertainties surrounding rapid movement of capital among investors, manufacturers, and retailers. Plummeting transportation and communication costs opened new national media, which advertising agencies used to nationalize various products.

By the turn of the century, corporate leaders and wealthy industrialists embraced the new principles of scientific management, or Taylorism, after its noted proponent, Frederick Taylor. The precision of steel parts, the harnessing of electricity, the innovations of machine tools, and the mass markets wrought by the railroads offered new avenues for efficiency. To match the demands of the machine age, Taylor said, firms needed a scientific organization of production. He urged all manufacturers to increase efficiency by subdividing tasks. Rather than having thirty mechanics individually making thirty machines, for instance, a manufacturer could assign thirty laborers to perform thirty distinct tasks. Such a shift would not only make workers as interchangeable as the parts they were using, it would also dramatically speed up the process of production. If managed by trained experts, specific tasks could be done quicker and more efficiently. Taylorism increased the scale and scope of manufacturing and allowed for the flowering of mass production. Building on the use of interchangeable parts in Civil War-era weapons manufacturing, American firms advanced mass production techniques and technologies. Singer sewing machines, Chicago packers' "disassembly" lines, McCormick grain reapers, Duke cigarette rollers: all realized unprecedented efficiencies and achieved unheard-of levels of production that propelled their companies into the forefront of American business. Henry Ford made the assembly line famous, allowing the production of automobiles to skyrocket as their cost plummeted, but various American firms had been paving the way for decades.

Cyrus McCormick had overseen the construction of mechanical reapers (used for harvesting wheat) for decades. He had relied on skilled blacksmiths, skilled machinists, and skilled woodworkers to handcraft horse-drawn machines. But production was slow and the machines were expensive. The reapers still enabled massive efficiency gains in grain farming, but their high cost and slow production times put them out of reach of most American wheat farmers. But then, in 1880, McCormick hired a production manager who had overseen the manufacturing of Colt firearms to transform his system of production. The Chicago plant introduced new jigs, steel gauges, and pattern machines that could make precise duplicates of new, interchangeable parts. The company had produced twenty-one thousand machines in 1880. It made twice as many in 1885, and by 1889, less than a decade later, it was producing over one hundred thousand a year.

Industrialization and mass production pushed the United States into the forefront of the world. The American economy had lagged behind Britain, Germany, and France as recently as the 1860s, but by 1900 the United States was the world's leading manufacturing nation. Thirteen years later, by 1913, the United States produced one third of the world's industrial output-more than Britain, France, and Germany combined.

Firms such as McCormick's realized massive economies of scale: after accounting for their initial massive investments in machines and marketing, each additional product lost the company relatively little in production costs. The bigger the production, then, the bigger the profits. New industrial companies therefore hungered for markets to keep their high-volume production facilities operating. Retailers and advertisers sustained the massive markets needed for mass production, and corporate bureaucracies meanwhile allowed for the management of giant new firms. A new class of managers-comprising what one prominent economic historian called the "visible hand"-operated between the worlds of workers and owners and ensured the efficient operation and administration of mass production and mass distribution. Even more important to the growth and maintenance of these new companies, however, were the legal creations used to protect investors and sustain the power of massed capital.

The costs of mass production were prohibitive for all but the very wealthiest individuals, and, even then, the risks would be too great to bear individually. The corporation itself was ages old, but the actual right to incorporate had generally been reserved for public works projects or government-sponsored monopolies. After the Civil War, however, the corporation, using new state incorporation laws passed during the Market Revolution of the early nineteenth century, became a legal mechanism for nearly any enterprise to marshal vast amounts of capital while limiting the liability of shareholders. By washing their hands of legal and financial obligations while still retaining the right to profit massively, investors flooded corporations with the capital needed to industrialize.

But a competitive marketplace threatened the promise of investments. Once the efficiency gains of mass production were realized, profit margins could be undone by cutthroat competition, which kept costs low as price cutting sank into profits. Companies rose and fell-and investors suffered losses-as manufacturing firms struggled to maintain supremacy in their particular industries. Economies of scale were a double-edged sword: while additional production provided immense profits, the high fixed costs of operating expensive factories dictated that even modest losses from selling underpriced goods were preferable to not selling profitably priced goods at all. And as market share was won and lost, profits proved unstable. American industrial firms tried everything to avoid competition: they formed informal pools and trusts, they entered price-fixing agreements, they divided markets, and, when blocked by antitrust laws and renegade price cutting, merged into consolidations. Rather than suffer from ruinous competition, firms combined and bypassed it altogether.

Between 1895 and 1904, and peaking between 1898 and 1902, a wave of mergers rocked the American economy. Competition melted away in what is known as "the great merger movement." In nine years, four thousand companies-nearly 20 percent of the American economy-were folded into rival firms. In nearly every major industry, newly consolidated firms such as General Electric and DuPont utterly dominated their market. Forty-one separate consolidations each controlled over 70 percent of the market in their respective industries. In 1901, financier J. P. Morgan oversaw the formation of United States Steel, built from eight leading steel companies. Industrialization was built on steel, and one firm-the world's first billion-dollar company-controlled the market. Monopoly had arrived.

Industrial capitalism realized the greatest advances in efficiency and productivity that the world had ever seen. Massive new companies marshaled capital on an unprecedented scale and provided enormous profits that created unheard-of fortunes. But it also created millions of low-paid, unskilled, unreliable jobs with long hours and dangerous working conditions. The notion of a glittering world of wealth and technological innovation masking massive social inequities and deep-seated corruption gave the era its most common label, the Gilded Age, which drew from the title of an 1873 satirical novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Warner. Industrial capitalism confronted Gilded Age Americans with unprecedented inequalities. The sudden appearance of the extreme wealth of industrial and financial leaders alongside the crippling squalor of the urban and rural poor shocked Americans. "This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times," economist Henry George wrote in his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty.

The great financial and industrial titans, the so-called robber barons, including railroad operators such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, oilmen such as J. D. Rockefeller, steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie, and bankers such as J. P. Morgan, won fortunes that, adjusted for inflation, are still among the largest the nation has ever seen. According to various measurements, in 1890 the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned one fourth of the nation's assets; the top 10 percent owned over 70 percent. And inequality only accelerated. By 1900, the richest 10 percent controlled perhaps 90 percent of the nation's wealth.

As these vast and unprecedented new fortunes accumulated among a small number of wealthy Americans, new ideas arose to bestow moral legitimacy upon them. In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution through natural selection in his On the Origin of Species. It was not until the 1870s, however, that those theories gained widespread traction among biologists, naturalists, and other scientists in the United States and, in turn, challenged the social, political, and religious beliefs of many Americans. One of Darwin's greatest popularizers, the British sociologist and biologist Herbert Spencer, applied Darwin's theories to society and popularized the phrase survival of the fittest. The fittest, Spencer said, would demonstrate their superiority through economic success, while state welfare and private charity would lead to social degeneration-it would encourage the survival of the weak.

"There must be complete surrender to the law of natural selection," the Baltimore Sun journalist H. L. Mencken wrote in 1907. "All growth must occur at the top. The strong must grow stronger, and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to uplift the weak." By the time Mencken wrote those words, the ideas of social Darwinism had spread among wealthy Americans and their defenders. Social Darwinism identified a natural order that extended from the laws of the cosmos to the workings of industrial society. All species and all societies, including modern humans, the theory went, were governed by a relentless competitive struggle for survival. The inequality of outcomes was to be not merely tolerated but encouraged and celebrated. It signified the progress of species and societies. Spencer's major work, Synthetic Philosophy, sold nearly four hundred thousand copies in the United States by the time of his death in 1903. Gilded Age industrial elites, such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, inventor Thomas Edison, and Standard Oil's John D. Rockefeller, were among Spencer's prominent followers. Other American thinkers, such as Yale's William Graham Sumner, echoed his ideas. Sumner said, "Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence."

But not all so eagerly welcomed inequalities. The spectacular growth of the U.S. economy and the ensuing inequalities in living conditions and incomes confounded many Americans. But as industrial capitalism overtook the nation, it achieved political protections. Although both major political parties facilitated the rise of big business and used state power to support the interests of capital against labor, big business looked primarily to the Republican Party.

The Republican Party had risen as an antislavery faction committed to "free labor," but it was also an ardent supporter of American business. Abraham Lincoln had been a corporate lawyer who defended railroads, and during the Civil War the Republican national government took advantage of the wartime absence of southern Democrats to push through a pro-business agenda. The Republican congress gave millions of acres and dollars to railroad companies. Republicans became the party of business, and they dominated American politics throughout the Gilded Age and the first several decades of the twentieth century. Of the sixteen presidential elections between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Republican candidates won all but four. Republicans controlled the Senate in twenty-seven out of thirty-two sessions in the same period. Republican dominance maintained a high protective tariff, an import tax designed to shield American businesses from foreign competition. Southern planters had opposed this policy before the war but now could do nothing to stop it. It provided the protective foundation for a new American industrial order, while Spencer's social Darwinism provided moral justification for national policies that minimized government interference in the economy for anything other than the protection and support of business.

The ideas of social Darwinism attracted little support among the mass of American industrial laborers. American workers toiled in difficult jobs for long hours and little pay. Mechanization and mass production threw skilled laborers into unskilled positions. Industrial work ebbed and flowed with the economy. The typical industrial laborer could expect to be unemployed one month out of the year. They labored sixty hours a week and could still expect their annual income to fall below the poverty line. Among the working poor, wives and children were forced into the labor market to compensate. Crowded cities, meanwhile, failed to accommodate growing urban populations and skyrocketing rents trapped families in crowded slums.

Strikes ruptured American industry throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers seeking higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions had struck throughout the antebellum era, but organized unions were fleeting and transitory. The Civil War and Reconstruction seemed to briefly distract the nation from the plight of labor, but the end of the sectional crisis and the explosive growth of big business, unprecedented fortunes, and a vast industrial workforce in the last quarter of the nineteenth century sparked the rise of a vast American labor movement.

The failure of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 convinced workers of the need to organize. Union memberships began to climb. The Knights of Labor enjoyed considerable success in the early 1880s, due in part to its efforts to unite skilled and unskilled workers. It welcomed all laborers, including women (the Knights only barred lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers). By 1886, the Knights had over seven hundred thousand members. The Knights envisioned a cooperative producer-centered society that rewarded labor, not capital, but, despite their sweeping vision, the Knights focused on practical gains that could be won through the organization of workers into local unions.

In Marshall, Texas, in the spring of 1886, one of Jay Gould's rail companies fired a Knights of Labor member for attending a union meeting. His local union walked off the job, and soon others joined. From Texas and Arkansas into Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois, nearly two hundred thousand workers struck against Gould's rail lines. Gould hired strikebreakers and the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a kind of private security contractor, to suppress the strikes and get the rails moving again. Political leaders helped him, and state militias were called in support of Gould's companies. The Texas governor called out the Texas Rangers. Workers countered by destroying property, only winning them negative headlines and for many justifying the use of strikebreakers and militiamen. The strike broke, briefly undermining the Knights of Labor, but the organization regrouped and set its eyes on a national campaign for the eight-hour day.

In the summer of 1886, the campaign for an eight-hour day, long a rallying cry that united American laborers, culminated in a national strike on May 1, 1886. Somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand workers struck across the country.

In Chicago, police forces killed several workers while breaking up protesters at the McCormick reaper works. Labor leaders and radicals called for a protest at Haymarket Square the following day, which police also proceeded to break up. But as they did, a bomb exploded and killed seven policemen. Police fired into the crowd, killing four. The deaths of the Chicago policemen sparked outrage across the nation, and the sensationalization of the Haymarket Riot helped many Americans to associate unionism with radicalism. Eight Chicago anarchists were arrested and, despite no direct evidence implicating them in the bombing, were charged and found guilty of conspiracy. Four were hanged (and one died by suicide before he could be executed). Membership in the Knights had peaked earlier that year but fell rapidly after Haymarket; the group became associated with violence and radicalism. The national movement for an eight-hour day collapsed.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) emerged as a conservative alternative to the vision of the Knights of Labor. An alliance of craft unions (unions composed of skilled workers), the AFL rejected the Knights' expansive vision of a "producerist" economy and advocated "pure and simple trade unionism," a program that aimed for practical gains (higher wages, fewer hours, and safer conditions) through a conservative approach that tried to avoid strikes. But workers continued to strike.

In 1892, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers struck at one of Carnegie's steel mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania. After repeated wage cuts, workers shut the plant down and occupied the mill. The plant's operator, Henry Clay Frick, immediately called in hundreds of Pinkerton detectives, but the steel workers fought back. The Pinkertons tried to land by river and were besieged by the striking steel workers. After several hours of pitched battle, the Pinkertons surrendered, ran a bloody gauntlet of workers, and were kicked out of the mill grounds. But the Pennsylvania governor called the state militia, broke the strike, and reopened the mill. The union was essentially destroyed in the aftermath.

Still, despite repeated failure, strikes continued to roll across the industrial landscape. In 1894, workers in George Pullman's Pullman car factories struck when he cut wages by a quarter but kept rents and utilities in his company town constant. The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, launched a sympathy strike: the ARU would refuse to handle any Pullman cars on any rail line anywhere in the country. Thousands of workers struck and national railroad traffic ground to a halt. Unlike in nearly every other major strike, the governor of Illinois sympathized with workers and refused to dispatch the state militia. It didn't matter. In July, President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of American soldiers to break the strike, and a federal court issued a preemptive injunction against Debs and the union's leadership. The strike violated the injunction, and Debs was arrested and imprisoned. The strike evaporated without its leadership. Jail radicalized Debs, proving to him that political and judicial leaders were merely tools for capital in its struggle against labor. But it wasn't just Debs. In 1905, the degrading conditions of industrial labor sparked strikes across the country. The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw over twenty thousand strikes and lockouts in the United States. Industrial laborers struggled to carve for themselves a piece of the prosperity lifting investors and a rapidly expanding middle class into unprecedented standards of living. But workers were not the only ones struggling to stay afloat in industrial America. American farmers also lashed out against the inequalities of the Gilded Age and denounced political corruption for enabling economic theft.

"Wall Street owns the country," the Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease told dispossessed farmers around 1890. "It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street." Farmers, who remained a majority of the American population through the first decade of the twentieth century, were hit especially hard by industrialization. The expanding markets and technological improvements that increased efficiency also decreased commodity prices. Commercialization of agriculture put farmers in the hands of bankers, railroads, and various economic intermediaries. As the decades passed, more and more farmers fell ever further into debt, lost their land, and were forced to enter the industrial workforce or, especially in the South, became landless farmworkers.

The rise of industrial giants reshaped the American countryside and the Americans who called it home. Railroad spur lines, telegraph lines, and credit crept into farming communities and linked rural Americans, who still made up a majority of the country's population, with towns, regional cities, American financial centers in Chicago and New York, and, eventually, London and the world's financial markets. Meanwhile, improved farm machinery, easy credit, and the latest consumer goods flooded the countryside. But new connections and new conveniences came at a price.

Farmers had always been dependent on the whims of the weather and local markets. But now they staked their financial security on a national economic system subject to rapid price swings, rampant speculation, and limited regulation. Frustrated American farmers attempted to reshape the fundamental structures of the nation's political and economic systems, systems they believed enriched parasitic bankers and industrial monopolists at the expense of the many laboring farmers who fed the nation by producing its many crops and farm goods. Their dissatisfaction with an erratic and impersonal system put many of them at the forefront of what would become perhaps the most serious challenge to the established political economy of Gilded Age America. Farmers organized and launched their challenge first through the cooperatives of the Farmers' Alliance and later through the politics of the People's (or Populist) Party.

Mass production and business consolidations spawned giant corporations that monopolized nearly every sector of the U.S. economy in the decades after the Civil War. In contrast, the economic power of the individual farmer sank into oblivion. Threatened by ever-plummeting commodity prices and ever-rising indebtedness, Texas agrarians met in Lampasas, Texas, in 1877 and organized the first Farmers' Alliance to restore some economic power to farmers as they dealt with railroads, merchants, and bankers. If big business relied on its numerical strength to exert its economic will, why shouldn't farmers unite to counter that power? They could share machinery, bargain from wholesalers, and negotiate higher prices for their crops. Over the following years, organizers spread from town to town across the former Confederacy, the Midwest, and the Great Plains, holding evangelical-style camp meetings, distributing pamphlets, and establishing over one thousand alliance newspapers. As the alliance spread, so too did its near-religious vision of the nation's future as a "cooperative commonwealth" that would protect the interests of the many from the predatory greed of the few. At its peak, the Farmers' Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances.

The alliance's most innovative programs were a series of farmers' cooperatives that enabled farmers to negotiate higher prices for their crops and lower prices for the goods they purchased. These cooperatives spread across the South between 1886 and 1892 and claimed more than a million members at their high point. While most failed financially, these "philanthropic monopolies," as one alliance speaker termed them, inspired farmers to look to large-scale organization to cope with their economic difficulties.But cooperation was only part of the alliance message.

In the South, alliance-backed Democratic candidates won four governorships and forty-eight congressional seats in 1890. But at a time when falling prices and rising debts conspired against the survival of family farmers, the two political parties seemed incapable of representing the needs of poor farmers. And so alliance members organized a political party-the People's Party, or the Populists, as they came to be known. The Populists attracted supporters across the nation by appealing to those convinced that there were deep flaws in the political economy of Gilded Age America, flaws that both political parties refused to address. Veterans of earlier fights for currency reform, disaffected industrial laborers, proponents of the benevolent socialism of Edward Bellamy's popular Looking Backward, and the champions of Henry George's farmer-friendly "single-tax" proposal joined alliance members in the new party. The Populists nominated former Civil War general James B. Weaver as their presidential candidate at the party's first national convention in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892.

At that meeting the party adopted a platform that crystallized the alliance's cooperate program into a coherent political vision. The platform's preamble, written by longtime political iconoclast and Minnesota populist Ignatius Donnelly, warned that "the fruits of the toil of millions [had been] boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few." Taken as a whole, the Omaha Platform and the larger Populist movement sought to counter the scale and power of monopolistic capitalism with a strong, engaged, and modern federal government. The platform proposed an unprecedented expansion of federal power. It advocated nationalizing the country's railroad and telegraph systems to ensure that essential services would be run in the best interests of the people. In an attempt to deal with the lack of currency available to farmers, it advocated postal savings banks to protect depositors and extend credit. It called for the establishment of a network of federally managed warehouses-called subtreasuries-which would extend government loans to farmers who stored crops in the warehouses as they awaited higher market prices. To save debtors it promoted an inflationary monetary policy by monetizing silver. Direct election of senators and the secret ballot would ensure that this federal government would serve the interest of the people rather than entrenched partisan interests, and a graduated income tax would protect Americans from the establishment of an American aristocracy. Combined, these efforts would, Populists believed, help shift economic and political power back toward the nation's producing classes.

In the Populists' first national election campaign in 1892, Weaver received over one million votes (and twenty-two electoral votes), a truly startling performance that signaled a bright future for the Populists. And when the Panic of 1893 sparked the worst economic depression the nation had ever yet seen, the Populist movement won further credibility and gained even more ground. Kansas Populist Mary Lease, one of the movement's most fervent speakers, famously, and perhaps apocryphally, called on farmers to "raise less corn and more Hell." Populist stump speakers crossed the country, speaking with righteous indignation, blaming the greed of business elites and corrupt party politicians for causing the crisis fueling America's widening inequality. Southern orators like Texas's James "Cyclone" Davis and Georgian firebrand Tom Watson stumped across the South decrying the abuses of northern capitalists and the Democratic Party. Pamphlets such as W. H. Harvey's Coin's Financial School and Henry D. Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth provided Populist answers to the age's many perceived problems. The faltering economy combined with the Populist's extensive organizing. In the 1894 elections, Populists elected six senators and seven representatives to Congress. The third party seemed destined to conquer American politics.

The movement, however, still faced substantial obstacles, especially in the South. The failure of alliance-backed Democrats to live up to their campaign promises drove some southerners to break with the party of their forefathers and join the Populists. Many, however, were unwilling to take what was, for southerners, a radical step. Southern Democrats, for their part, responded to the Populist challenge with electoral fraud and racial demagoguery. Both severely limited Populist gains. The alliance struggled to balance the pervasive white supremacy of the American South with their call for a grand union of the producing class. American racial attitudes-and their virulent southern strain-simply proved too formidable. Democrats race-baited Populists, and Populists capitulated. The Colored Farmers' Alliance, which had formed as a segregated sister organization to the southern alliance and had as many as 250,000 members at its peak, fell prey to racial and class-based hostility. The group went into rapid decline in 1891 when faced with the violent white repression of a number of Colored Farmers' Alliance-sponsored cotton picker strikes. Racial mistrust and division remained the rule, even among Populists, and even in North Carolina, where a political marriage of convenience between Populists and Republicans-fusion-resulted in the election of Populist Marion Butler to the Senate. Populists opposed Democratic corruption, but this did not necessarily make them champions of interracial democracy. As Butler explained to an audience in Edgecombe County, "We are in favor of white supremacy, but we are not in favor of cheating and fraud to get it."

By the middle of the 1890s, Populism had exploded in popularity. The first major political force to tap into the vast discomfort of many Americans with the disruptions wrought by industrial capitalism, the Populist Party seemed poised to capture political victory. And yet, even as Populism gained national traction, the movement was stumbling. The party's often divided leadership found it difficult to shepherd what remained a diverse and loosely organized coalition of reformers toward unified political action. The Omaha platform was a radical document, and some state party leaders selectively embraced its reforms. More importantly, the institutionalized parties were still too strong, and the Democrats loomed, ready to swallow Populist frustrations and inaugurate a new era of American politics.

William Jennings Bryan (March 19, 1860-July 26, 1925) accomplished many different things in his life: he was a skilled orator, a Nebraska congressman, a three-time presidential candidate, U.S. secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and a lawyer who supported prohibition and opposed Darwinism (most notably in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial). In terms of his political career, he won national renown for his attack on the gold standard and his tireless promotion of free silver and policies for the benefit of the average American. Although Bryan was unsuccessful in winning the presidency, he forever altered the course of American political history.

Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, in 1860 to a devout family with a strong passion for law, politics, and public speaking. At twenty, he attended Union Law College in Chicago and passed the bar shortly thereafter. After his marriage to Mary Baird in Illinois, Bryan and his young family relocated to Nebraska, where he won a reputation among the state's Democratic Party leaders as an extraordinary orator. Bryan later won recognition as one of the greatest speakers in American history.

When economic depressions struck the Midwest in the late 1880s, despairing farmers faced low crop prices and found few politicians on their side. While many rallied to the Populist cause, Bryan worked from within the Democratic Party, using the strength of his oratory. After delivering one speech, he told his wife, "Last night I found that I had a power over the audience. I could move them as I chose. I have more than usual power as a speaker. . . . God grant that I may use it wisely."He soon won election to the House of Representatives, where he served for two terms. Although he lost a bid to join the Senate, Bryan turned his attention to a higher position: the presidency of the United States. There, he believed he could change the country by defending farmers and urban laborers against the corruptions of big business.

In 1895-1896, Bryan launched a national speaking tour in which he promoted the free coinage of silver. He believed that bimetallism, by inflating American currency, could alleviate farmers' debts. In contrast, Republicans championed the gold standard and a flat money supply. American monetary standards became a leading campaign issue. Then, in July 1896, the Democratic Party's national convention met to choose their presidential nominee in the upcoming election. The party platform asserted that the gold standard was "not only un-American but anti-American." Bryan spoke last at the convention. He astounded his listeners. At the conclusion of his stirring speech, he declared, "Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." After a few seconds of stunned silence, the convention went wild. Some wept, many shouted, and the band began to play "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Bryan received the 1896 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Republicans ran William McKinley, an economic conservative who championed business interests and the gold standard. Bryan crisscrossed the country spreading the silver gospel. The election drew enormous attention and much emotion. According to Bryan's wife, he received two thousand letters of support every day that year, an enormous amount for any politician, let alone one not currently in office. Yet Bryan could not defeat McKinley. The pro-business Republicans outspent Bryan's campaign fivefold. A notably high 79.3 percent of eligible American voters cast ballots, and turnout averaged 90 percent in areas supportive of Bryan, but Republicans swayed the population-dense Northeast and Great Lakes region and stymied the Democrats.

In early 1900, Congress passed the Gold Standard Act, which put the country on the gold standard, effectively ending the debate over the nation's monetary policy. Bryan sought the presidency again in 1900 but was again defeated, as he would be yet again in 1908.

Bryan was among the most influential losers in American political history. When the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party nominated the Nebraska congressman in 1896, Bryan's fiery condemnation of northeastern financial interests and his impassioned calls for "free and unlimited coinage of silver" co-opted popular Populist issues. The Democrats stood ready to siphon off a large proportion of the Populists' political support. When the People's Party held its own convention two weeks later, the party's moderate wing, in a fiercely contested move, overrode the objections of more ideologically pure Populists and nominated Bryan as the Populist candidate as well. This strategy of temporary "fusion" movement fatally fractured the movement and the party. Populist energy moved from the radical-yet-still-weak People's Party to the more moderate-yet-powerful Democratic Party. And although at first glance the Populist movement appears to have been a failure-its minor electoral gains were short-lived, it did little to dislodge the entrenched two-party system, and the Populist dream of a cooperative commonwealth never took shape-in terms of lasting impact, the Populist Party proved the most significant third-party movement in American history. The agrarian revolt established the roots of later reform, and the majority of policies outlined within the Omaha Platform would eventually be put into law over the following decades under the management of middle-class reformers. In large measure, the Populist vision laid the intellectual groundwork for the coming progressive movement.

American socialists carried on the Populists' radical tradition by uniting farmers and workers in a sustained, decades-long political struggle to reorder American economic life. Socialists argued that wealth and power were consolidated in the hands of too few individuals, that monopolies and trusts controlled too much of the economy, and that owners and investors grew rich while the workers who produced their wealth, despite massive productivity gains and rising national wealth, still suffered from low pay, long hours, and unsafe working conditions. Karl Marx had described the new industrial economy as a worldwide class struggle between the wealthy bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, such as factories and farms, and the proletariat, factory workers and tenant farmers who worked only for the wealth of others. According to Eugene Debs, socialists sought "the overthrow of the capitalist system and the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery." Under an imagined socialist cooperative commonwealth, the means of production would be owned collectively, ensuring that all men and women received a fair wage for their labor. According to socialist organizer and newspaper editor Oscar Ameringer, socialists wanted "ownership of the trust by the government, and the ownership of the government by the people."

The socialist movement drew from a diverse constituency. Party membership was open to all regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or religion. Many prominent Americans, such as Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London, became socialists. They were joined by masses of American laborers from across the United States: factory workers, miners, railroad builders, tenant farmers, and small farmers all united under the red flag of socialism. Many united with labor leader William D. "Big Bill" Haywood and other radicals in 1905 to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "Wobblies," a radical and confrontational union that welcomed all workers, regardless of race or gender. Others turned to politics.

The Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901, carried on the American third-party political tradition. Socialist mayors were elected in thirty-three cities and towns, from Berkeley, California, to Schenectady, New York, and two socialists-Victor Berger from Wisconsin and Meyer London from New York-won congressional seats. All told, over one thousand socialist candidates won various American political offices. Julius A. Wayland, editor of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, proclaimed that "socialism is coming. It's coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it . . . you can feel it in the air." By 1913 there were 150,000 members of the Socialist Party and, in 1912, Eugene V. Debs, the Indiana-born Socialist Party candidate for president, received almost one million votes, or 6 percent of the total.

Over the following years, however, the embrace of many socialist policies by progressive reformers, internal ideological and tactical disagreements, a failure to dissuade most Americans of the perceived incompatibility between socialism and American values, and, especially, government oppression and censorship, particularly during and after World War I, ultimately sank the party. Like the Populists, however, socialists had tapped into a deep well of discontent, and their energy and organizing filtered out into American culture and American politics.

The march of capital transformed patterns of American life. While some enjoyed unprecedented levels of wealth, and an ever-growing slice of middle-class workers won an ever more comfortable standard of living, vast numbers of farmers lost their land and a growing industrial working class struggled to earn wages sufficient to support themselves and their families. Industrial capitalism brought wealth and it brought poverty; it created owners and investors and it created employees. But whether winners or losers in the new economy, all Americans reckoned in some way with their new industrial world.
1. William Graham Sumner on Social Darwnism (ca.1880s) William Graham Sumner, a sociologist at Yale University, penned several pieces associated with the philosophy of Social Darwinism. In the following, Sumner explains his vision of nature and liberty in a just society. 2. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Selections (1879) In 1879, the economist Henry George penned a massive bestseller exploring the contradictory rise of both rapid economic growth and crippling poverty. 3. Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth (1889) Andrew Carnegie, the American steel titan, explains his vision for the proper role of wealth in American society. 4. Grover Cleveland's Veto of the Texas Seed Bill (1887) Amid a crushing drought that devastated many Texas farmers, Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill designed to help farmers recover by supplying them with seed. In his veto message, Cleveland explained his vision of proper government. 5. The "Omaha Platform" of the People's Party (1892) In 1892, the People's, or Populist, Party crafted a platform that indicted the corruptions of the Gilded Age and promised government policies to aid "the people." 6. Dispatch from a Mississippi Colored Farmers' Alliance (1889)
The Colored Farmers' Alliance, an African American alternative to the whites-only Southern Farmers' Alliance, organized as many as a million Black southerners against the injustices of the predominately cotton-based, southern agricultural economy. Black Populists, however, were always more vulnerable to the violence of white southern conservatives than their white counterparts. Here, the publication The Forum publishes an account of violence against Black Populists in Mississippi.
7. Lucy Parsons on Women and Revolutionary Socialism (1905) Lucy Parsons was born into slavery in Texas, married a white radical, Albert Parsons, and moved to Chicago where they both worked on behalf of radical causes. After Albert Parsons was executed for conspiracy in the aftermath of the Haymarket bombing, Lucy Parsons emerged as a major American radical and vocal advocate of anarchism. In 1905, she spoke before the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). 8. "The Tournament of Today" (1883) "Print shows a jousting tournament between an oversized knight riding horse-shaped armor labeled "Monopoly" over a locomotive, with a long plume labeled "Arrogance", and carrying a shield labeled "Corruption of the Legislature" and a lance labeled "Subsidized Press", and a barefoot man labeled "Labor" riding an emaciated horse labeled "Poverty", and carrying a sledgehammer labeled "Strike". On the left is seating "Reserved for Capitalists" where Cyrus W. Field, William H. Vanderbilt, John Roach, Jay Gould, and Russell Sage are sitting. On the right, behind the labor section, are telegraph lines flying monopoly banners that are labeled "Wall St., W.U.T. Co., [and] N.Y.C. RR"." 9. Lawrence Textile Strike (1912) In 1912, The Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or the "Wobblies") organized textile workers in Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. This photo shows strikers, carrying American flags, confronting strikebreakers and militia bayonets.
This chapter was edited by Joseph Locke, with content contributions by Andrew C. Baker, Nicholas Blood, Justin Clark, Dan Du, Caroline Bunnell Harris, David Hochfelder Scott Libson, Joseph Locke, Leah Richier, Matthew Simmons, Kate Sohasky, Joseph Super, and Kaylynn Washnock.
Recommended citation: Andrew C. Baker et al., "Capital and Labor," Joseph Locke, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
Recommended Reading

Beckert, Sven. Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Cameron, Ardis. Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Chambers, John W. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Fink, Leon. Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Green, James. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America. New York City: Pantheon Books, 2006.

Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944.

Johnson, Kimberley S. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Knopf, 2006.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Lamoreaux, Naomi R. The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. New York: Norton, 1987.

Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

End Notes

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The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 heralded a new era of labor conflict in the United States. That year, mired in the stagnant economy that followed the bursting of the railroads' financial bubble in 1873, rail lines slashed workers' wages (even, workers complained, as they reaped enormous government subsidies and paid shareholders lucrative stock dividends).

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Printable Version At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. In the South, one third of all landholdings were operated by tenants. Approximately 75 percent of African American farmers and 25 percent of white farmers tilled land owned by someone else.

Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to 30 cents by 1897. Farmers made less money planting 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did planting 9 million acres in 1873. Facing high interests rates of upwards of 10 percent a year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and purchase additional land could successfully compete, but smaller, more poorly financed farmers, working on small plots marginal land, struggled to survive.

Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railroad rates, monopoly prices charged for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unfair tax structure, an inflexible banking system, political corruption, corporations that bought up huge tracks of land. They considered themselves to be subservient to the industrial Northeast, where three-quarters of the nation's industry was located. They criticized a deflationary monetary policy based on the gold standard that benefited bankers and other creditors.

All of these problems were compounded by the fact that increasing productivity in agriculture led to price declines. In the 1870s, 190 million new acres were put under cultivation. By 1880, settlement was moving into the semi-arid plains. At the same time, transportation improvements meant that American farmers faced competitors from Egypt to Australia in the struggle for markets.

The first major rural protest was the Patrons of Husbandry, which was founded in 1867 and had 1.5 million members by 1875. Known as the Granger Movement, these embattled farmers formed buying and selling cooperatives and demanded state regulation of railroad rates and grain elevator fees.

Early in the 1870s the Greenback Party agitated for the issue of paper money, not backed by gold or silver, with the idea that a depreciating currency would make it easier for debtors to meet their obligations.

Another wave of protest grew out of the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union (the Southern Farmers Alliance) formed in Lampedusa County, Texas in 1875, and the Northwestern Farmers' Alliance, founded in Chicago in 1880. By the late 1880s, the cooperative business enterprises set up by the Farmers' Alliances had begun to fail due to inadequate capitalization and mismanagement. By 1890, the Farmers Alliances had begun to enter politics. In 1892 the Alliance formed the Peoples' or Populist Party. Among other things, the Populists financed commodity credit system that would have allowed farmers to store their crop in a federal warehouse to await favorable market prices and meanwhile borrow up to 80 percent of the current market price.

The Populist platform also sought a graduated income tax, public ownership of utilities, the voter initiative and referendum, the eight-hour workday, immigration restrictions, and government control of currency.

In the presidential election of 1892, the Populist candidate, James B. Weaver of Iowa, received more than a million popular votes (8.5 percent of the total) and 22 electoral votes. The Populists also elected 10 representative, 5 senators, and 4 governors, as well as 345 state legislators.

Copyright 2021 Digital History

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Printable Version At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer.

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Printable Version A little more than a century ago, a grassroots political movement arose among small farmers in the country's wheat, corn, and cotton fields to fight banks, big corporations, railroads, and other "monied interests." The movement burned brightly from 1889 to 1896, before fading out. Nevertheless, this movement fundamentally changed American politics.

The Populist movement grew out of earlier movements that had emerged among southern and western farmers, such as the Grangers, the Greenbackers, and the Northern, Southern, and Colored Farmers Alliances. As early as the 1870s, some farmers had begun to demand lower railroad rates. They also argued that business and the wealthy--and not land--should bear the burden of taxation.

Populists were especially concerned about the high cost of money. Farmers required capital to purchase agricultural equipment and land. They needed credit to buy supplies and to store their crops in grain elevators and warehouses. At the time, loans for the supplies to raise a crop ranged from 40 percent to 345 percent a year. The Populists asked why there was no more money in circulation in the United States in 1890 than in 1865, when the economy was far smaller, and why New York bankers controlled the nation's money supply.

After nearly two decades of falling crop prices, and angered by the unresponsiveness of two political parties they regarded as corrupt, dirt farmers rebelled. In 1891, a Kansas lawyer named David Overmeyer called these rebels Populists. They formed a third national political party and rallied behind leaders like Mary Lease, who said that farmers should raise more hell and less corn. The Populists spread their message from 150 newspapers in Kansas alone.

Populist leaders called on the people to rise up, seize the reins of government, and tame the power of the wealthy and privileged. Populist orators venerated farmers and laborers as the true producers of wealth and reviled blood-sucking plutocrats. Tom Watson of Georgia accused the Democrats of sacrificing "the liberty and prosperity of the country...to Plutocratic greed," and the Republicans of doing the wishes of "monopolists, gamblers, gigantic corporations, bondholders, [and] bankers. The Populists accused big business of corrupting democracy and said that businessmen had little concern for the average American "except as raw material served up for the twin gods of production and profit." The Populists blamed a protective tariff raised prices by keeping affordable foreign goods out of the country.

The party's platform endorsed labor unions, decried long work hours, and championed the graduated income tax as a way to redistribute wealth from business to farmers and laborers. The party also called for an end to court injunctions against labor unions. "The fruits of the toil of millions," the Party declared in 1892, "are boldly stolen to build up the fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind." The Populists also called for a secret ballot; women's suffrage; an eight-hour workday, direct election of U.S. Senators and the President and Vice President; and initiative and recall to make the political system more responsive to the people.

The party put aside moral issues like prohibition in order to focus on economic issues. "The issue," said one Populist, "is not whether a man shall be permitted to drink but whether he shall have a home to go home to, drunk or sober." A significant number of Populists were also willing to overcome racial divisions. As one leader put it, "The problem is poverty, not race."

In the 1892 presidential election, Populist candidate James Weaver of Iowa received a million votes and 22 electoral votes. Five Populist Senators and ten Representatives were elected, along with three governors, and 1,500 state and county officials.

The Populists embraced government regulation to get out from the domination of unregulated big business. The platform demanded government ownership of railroads, natural resources, and telephone and telegraph systems. Even more radically, some Populists called for a coalition of poor white and poor black farmers.

Populism had an unsavory side. The Populists had a tendency toward paranoia and overblown rhetoric. They considered Wall Street an enemy. Many Populists were hostile toward foreigners and saw sinister plots against liberty and opportunity. The party's 1892 platform described "a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world." After their crusade failed, the embittered Georgia Populist Tom Watson denounced Jews, Catholics, and African Americans with the same heated rhetoric he once reserved for "plutocrats."

But in the early 20th century, many of the Populist proposals would be enacted into law, including the secret ballot; women's suffrage; the initiative, referendum, and recall; a Federal Reserve System; farm cooperatives, government warehouses; railroad regulation; and conservation of public lands.

The Populists also provided the inspiration for later grassroots movements, including the Anti-Saloon League, which helped make Prohibition a part of the Constitution; and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which persuaded millions of auto workers, stevedores, and steel workers to unionize with its call for industrial democracy.

Populist rhetoric still plays an important role in contemporary American politics. Politicians speak the language of populism whenever they defend ordinary people against entrenched elites and a government dominated by special interests. During the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt hailed "the forgotten man" and railed against "economic royalists" and in 1992 Bill Clinton ran for the presidency by pledging to "put people first."

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Printable Version A little more than a century ago, a grassroots political movement arose among small farmers in the country's wheat, corn, and cotton fields to fight banks, big corporations, railroads, and other "monied interests." The movement burned brightly from 1889 to 1896, before fading out. Nevertheless, this movement fundamentally changed American politics.

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Printable Version Not since the election of 1860 were political passions so deeply stirred. At stake appeared to be two very different visions of what kind of society America was to become.

Rarely in American history had conditions seemed so unsettled. The financial panic of 1893 was followed by four years of high unemployment and business bankruptcies. The panic led Jacob Coxey, a businessman from Massillon, Ohio, to organize the first mass march on Washington. Coxey's army demanded a federal public works program. As rumors of revolution swept Washington, the government responded by jailing the march's leaders.

The violent steel strike at Homestead mills near Pittsburgh in 1892 and the intervention of federal troops in the Pullman Strike and the imprisonment of labor leader Eugene V. Debs in 1894 stirred the public passions. By 1896, the situation of many southern and western farmers was desperate.

At the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, delegates repudiated the leadership of President Grover Cleveland, seized the Free Silver issue from the Populists, and nominated William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Bryan won his party's nomination with one of the most famous speeches ever delivered at a political convention. "The boy orator of the Platte" was viewed by his supporters as the champion of the plain people, the prairie avenger who promised financial relief to hard-pressed farmers. Bryan's supporters viewed his campaign as a continuation of the old American struggle between producers and exploiters, debtors and creditors. To hard-pressed farmers, Bryan's program of financial relief offered hope that they might survive financially.

Bryan's radical attacks on Wall Street, banks, and railroads frightened many prosperous farmers and businessmen. The gulf between populist farmers and immigrant and urban laborers made it impossible for the Populists to forge successful ties with the urban working class. The Populist movement was deeply imbued with the values of Evangelical Protestantism, alienating many Catholics.

Bryan's opponent, Republican William McKinley, campaigned on a platform of jobs and sound money, promising a "full dinner pail."

Business interests spent nearly $16 million to elect McKinley, allowing the Republicans to adopt a new style of campaigning. Instead of relying on party organization to turn out the vote, Republicans relied increasingly on advertisements.

Unlike some earlier Republican candidates, McKinley rejected moralistic crusades, like prohibition, that alienated ethnic groups. In 1896, McKinley assembled a political coalition that included both the new industrialists and their workers. Most of industrial America voted Republican, including most workers in factories, mines, mills, and railroads. As a result the Republican Party went on to dominate the presidency for most of the next three decades.

During the late 1890s, two solutions appeared to the nation's monetary problems. New discoveries of gold in South Africa and Australia greatly increased the world's gold supply. At the same time, bankers created a new "currency"--bank checks. More and more of the nation's business transactions took place through checks rather than through paper money and gold coins.

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Printable Version Not since the election of 1860 were political passions so deeply stirred. At stake appeared to be two very different visions of what kind of society America was to become. Rarely in American history had conditions seemed so unsettled. The financial panic of 1893 was followed by four years of high unemployment and business bankruptcies.

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Printable Version Is the Wizard of Oz just a fairy tale about a girl from Kansas transported to a colorful land of witches and munchkins? Or does the story have a political dimension? Scholars still disagree about whether L. Frank Baum's great children's story was about the collapse of the Populist movement.

Henry Littlefield, a teacher in Pebble Beach, California, was the first person to suggest that the story was about Populism. He argued that:

the Scarecrow (who has no brain) represented the farmers;

the Tin Man (who had once been a human wood-cutter, but chopped his body parts off and replaced them with metal) represented industrial workers;

the Cowardly Lion represented northern reformers;

the Emerald City represented Wall Street, greenback colored; and

the Wizard represented the Money Power, whose influence rests on manipulation and illusion.

Littlefield interpreted the yellow brick road as representing gold and Dorothy's silver slippers (which were changed in the movie to ruby slippers) as representing the Populist call for backing the dollar with silver. Oz was the abbreviation for ounces, a reference to the Populist call for the government to coin.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

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Printable Version Is the Wizard of Oz just a fairy tale about a girl from Kansas transported to a colorful land of witches and munchkins? Or does the story have a political dimension? Scholars still disagree about whether L. Frank Baum's great children's story was about the collapse of the Populist movement.

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The Populist Crusade and Restrictions on African Americans

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The Populist Crusade and Restrictions on African Americans

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Printable Version During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a million African Americans joined the Colored Farmers Alliance. At one of their conventions, black farmers argued that "land belong to the sovereign people," and should not be treated as private property. As the Populist movement divided the South's white population, a number of black leaders saw a chance to forge an alliance with poorer whites.

The threat of this bi-racial alliance led many upper-class conservative Democrats to play the "race card." They appealed to white farmers to vote Democratic in order to maintain a system of white supremacy. The appeal to racism proved highly effective in undermining Populism's appeal. Upper-class conservative Democrats took the lead in calling for legalized segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans. But the reforms they offered, such as the poll tax and literacy tests, had the practical effect of taking the vote away from many poor whites.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a million African Americans joined the Colored Farmers Alliance. At one of their conventions, black farmers argued that "land belong to the sovereign people," and should not be treated as private property.