Chapter 20 - Democracy and Empire 1870-1900

20.1: Toward a National Governing Class

• Local governments were primarily involved in promoting and regulating businesses before the civil war and relied on private enterprise to provide vital services such as fires and public access to water.
• Republicans and Democrats only gradually adapted to the demands for the expansion of the government.
  • The Republican Party has continued with its record in the civil war, showing its success in bringing the nation together and adopting new reform laws
• The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was adopted by a bipartisan majority in January 1883.
  • This measure permitted the president to set up a committee of three persons for executive and legislative appointments with the approval of the Senate.

20.2: Farmers and Workers Organize Their Communities

• The headquarters of the local chapter, known as "the Grange," was the main social centre, the venue of summer dinners and winter dances in many farming communities.

• A series of so-called Granger laws, establishing maximum shipping rates, responded by several Mid-Western states in 1874 to pressure.

  • Grangers also complained to their legislators that grain wholesalers and grain elevator operators were setting price policies.

• In the 1880s, in addition to the cooperative commodity trade of crops, the South Farmers' Alliance founded cooperative storage plants which were a viable alternative to the capitalist market – only temporarily.

• More than six million workers would strike before the end of the century in industries from New England textiles to southern tobacco plants to western mines.

• She presided over the Christian Woman's Temperance Union from 1878 to her death in 1897.

  • Most of WCTU's members in the Midwest preached their total withdrawal of alcohol, but ultimately endorsed the "do all" agenda of Willard.

• The Farmers Alliance convened a meeting in Ocala, Florida in December 1890 to press for the establishment of the national third party

  

20.3: The Crisis of the 1890s

• By the spring of 1893 the nation had become a depression in Europe since the late 1880s.
  • Mine owners formed a "protective association" in order to stop organized labour, and announced a wage cut in the entire district of Coeur d'Alene in March 1892.
• The Minister of Congregationalism was warning Washington Gladden to turn Churches into institutions that were only intended to preserve the obscure rituals of superstitions, if churches continued to ignore pressing social problems.

20.4: Politics of Reform, Politics of Order

• The Sherman Silver Purchases Act of 1890 was readily approved by the farmers, which required the Treasury to increase its money mined from western silver and allowed the U.S. Government to print silver-backed paper currency.

• The Populists realized that the Democrats had robbed their thunder by nominating Bryan.

  • They were concerned too that the increased emphasis on monetary affairs would overlook their more important plans for the ownership of railways and communications systems by the government in the nation.

• In the South, local and state administrations codified racist ideology by adopting discriminatory and segregationist legislation known as Jim Crow legislation.

  • By the end of the century, Jim Crow referred to the customs of segregation secured by laws across the South.

• "The grandfather clauses," which were invented in Louisiana, excluded those who had the right to vote, together with their sons and grandsons, on 1 January 1867 from all restrictions, which effectively expanded whites while excluding African Americans.

  

20.5: The path to Imperialism

• In Chicago, the World's Exposition of Columbians celebrated Columbus's "A show about civilisation's progress in the New World" four hundredth anniversary.
• In 1885 a prestigious comment was made by the Social Gospeler Josiah Strong, minister of the congregation.
  • He promoted a "imperialism of justice" in connection with economic and spiritual expansion.
• Not only missionaries were focusing on distant lands, businesses and political leaders, meaning new markets.
• The independence movement started in Cuba in the mid-1860s, when Spain, its ruined empire, started to impose steep tax on the island.
• There was no mass movement to prevent U.S. expansion, but prominent figures such as MarkTwain, Andrew Carnegie, William Jennings Bryan, and Harvard philosopher William James strongly expressed their opposition.