Many labor strikes of the late nineteenth century were generally unsuccessful because —

The rapid and vast economic expansion of the post-Civil War years brought far-reaching social and cultural changes. Probably the most important was the transformation of the United States from a rural and agrarian nation to an urban and industrial one. "When we get piled upon one another in large cities," Jefferson had stated in 1787, 44 we shall become as corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there." More than a century later in 1899, one observer wondered why farm youth were so eager to "leave the country where homes are cheap, the air pure, all men equal, and extreme poverty unknown, and crowd into cities," where they seemed to find "in the noises, the crowds, the excitements, even in the sleepless anxieties of the daily struggle for life, a charm they are powerless to resist." Yet the growth of cities could not be checked, much less reversed, and Americans accepted the fact.

This urban growth can be strikingly seen in terms of statistics. In 1790 only 5.1 percent of the population lived in centers with more than 2,500 inhabitants. In 1860 this percentage had gone up to 19.8 and in 1900 to 39.7. A more significant feature of urbanization was the concentration of Americans in large metropolitan areas. The population of New York City and Brooklyn (which were consolidated in 1898) together grew from 1,200,000 in 1850 to over 3,000,000 in 1900. Chicago, which had only 30,000 inhabitants in 1850, shot up to 500,000 in 1880, and to 1,700,000 in 1900, to become the second largest city in the country. In the same period the population in Philadelphia increased from 560,000 to 1,300,000 and Pittsburgh from 67,000 to 450,000. Minneapolis rose from 2,500 in 1860 to 200,000 in 1900 and Los Angeles from 5,000 to 100,000.

This tremendous urban growth brought many problems. The poor lived in cold, cheerless tenements that often lacked sun and fresh air and running water. Tenements were built on the basis of crowding as many people as possible into the smallest possible space. For block upon block in the slum areas these ugly structures were to be found covering every inch of building space. The congestion was so great in some areas of New York, for example, that Jacob Riis, the housing reformer, estimated in 1890 that about 330,000 persons were living in one square mile in the Lower East Side. In the nineties, according to the federal commissioner of labor, one-tenth of the population of the sixteen largest cities in the country lived in these slums. Lack of adequate sanitation and public health services allowed contagious diseases-typhoid fever, scarlet fever, smallpox, diphtheria-to run rampant. As late as 1888, in a group of blocks in New York City's East Side, the death rate for children under five was 139.83 per 1,000, compared to 85 per 1,000 as the death rate for the same age group in the entire city. Fire hazards were numerous and flagrant. As the city grew there was a rapid increase in crime and general lawlessness.

Cities eventually provided some public services, although only those that were absolutely necessary. They did begin to dispose of sewage and to remove the garbage from the streets instead of leaving it to be eaten by pigs. They constructed gas mains and public waterworks, supplied some sort of transportation and lighting, and made police and fire protection available. Facilities for recreation and health, however, came only as afterthoughts, if at all. The first city board of health wag established in New York in 1866, and the first state board in Massachusetts in 1870. The American Public Health Association was founded in 1872.

In an age of laissez faire there was very little planning in urban growth. City development lay largely in the hands of the real estate men, who did what they pleased. They usually cut up the land into rectangular lots, and cities usually followed the gridiron design of straight streets running at right angles to each other. Little was done to set aside desirable sections for public use. Businessmen built factories and offices wherever they wished, they polluted streams and rivers, and made ugly slag heaps out of residential areas. Only gradually and reluctantly, and generally after irreparable harm had been done, did city governments abandon laissez-faire attitudes and take action.

The poor administration of cities was a serious blight upon American life, and, according to James Bryce, the English observer, "the one conspicuous failure in the United States." Andrew D. White, a prominent educator, wrote in 1890 that "with few exceptions, the city governments of the United States are the worst in Christendom-the most expensive, the most inefficient, and the most corrupt." Bryce found that city mismanagement resulted from crooked and incompetent officials and the control of local affairs by state legislatures unfamiliar with the needs of city government. But he also added:

In large cities we find an ignorant multitude, largely composed of recent immigrants, untrained in self-government; we find a great proportion of the voters paying no direct taxes and therefore feeling no interest in moderate taxation and economical administration; we find able citizens absorbed in their private businesses, cultivated citizens unusually sensitive to the vulgarities of practical politics, and both sets therefore specially unwilling to sacrifice their time and tastes and comforts in the struggle with sordid wire-pullers and noisy demagogues.

Into cities poured hordes of immigrants to meet some of the demands in nonagricultural employment that rose 300 percent between 1860 and 1900. With a rapid expansion of the American economy and improved ocean transportation facilities, Europeans came to the United States in unprecedented numbers, and a large proportion of them found work in American cities. In 1900 three-fourths of the population of Chicago was foreign-born. In the 1890s the Italian population in New York City equaled that of Naples; its German population equaled that of Hamburg; its Irish population was twice that of Dublin. In 1910 it was estimated that one-third of the inhabitants of the nation's eight largest cities was foreign-born, while more than a third was second-generation Americans. There were larger concentrations of foreign-born persons in some of the smaller industrial areas: in the coal and iron towns of Pennsylvania, for example, and in places like Paterson and Passaic, New Jersey. This trend alarmed many nativeborn Americans who expressed concern, as one of them did in the 1890s, "at the prospect of adding enormously to the burden of municipal governments in the large cities, already almost breaking down through corruption and inefficiency."

From the very beginning of American history, the character of the nation's people has been determined by the tides of Europeans coming to its shores. The colonies were peopled mainly by immigrants from England and northern Ireland (the Scotch-Irish), along with substantial numbers from Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, and France. The mixture of these peoples had gone so far before the Revolution that one French observer could write that a new national type-the American-had come into being. Between the end of the Revolution and the 1840s immigration continued, but at a fairly slow pace. Most newcomers during this period still came from England, Scotland, and northern Ireland.

A sudden shift in the tide of immigration occurred in the late 1840s. It began when a terrible famine swept over southern Ireland, and poor farmers by the hundreds of thousands began to flee to America to escape starvation. Once begun, this migration continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until by 1914 some four million Americans were of immediate Irish ancestry.

In far greater numbers came the Germans, beginning about 1848 and growing in volume during the 1850s and 1860s. Although the stream from Germany slowed down in the 1870s, it continued until the First World War. By 1914 there were between eight and ten million German-Americans in the United States. The last great tide of immigrants from northern Europe were the Norwegians and Swedes, around four million of them altogether, who came to the United States between 1860 and 1880.

These newcomers helped to build the country. Irish labor constructed the railroads and canals. Germans contributed farmers and professional people. Scandinavians opened up the frontier in Minnesota and the northern Plains states.

The immigrants also helped to change the social character of the nation. Sociologists describe the United States as a "pluralistic" nation, that is, as one with wide diversity in the racial, religious, and cultural backgrounds of its people. Actually the American people have always been "pluralistic," even from the earliest days of English settlement in North America. To cite an example, the presence of a significant minority of people of African descent made Americans pluralistic as early as the mid-seventeenth century. The coming of the Irish and to some extent the Germans had the result of transforming the United States from an almost exclusively Protestant country into one in which the Roman Catholic Church would play a more significant role.

Between 1860 and 1900 almost fourteen million immigrants came to the United States. Another fourteen and a half million followed between 1900 and 1915. The most important thing about this huge movement of peoples was not its size but the immigrants' origins. It reflected the shift in the tide of migration from northern Europe to southern and eastern Europe that began very quietly in the 1880s and then gained startling speed in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Previously, nearly all immigrants came from northern and western Europe-from Germany, Ireland, England, and Scandinavia. Now their numbers began to decline, and there was a rapid increase in those from southern and eastern Europe-particularly from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the 1860s these latter immigrants constituted only 1.4 percent of the total number coming to the United States, but their percentage rose to 7.2 percent in the seventies, to 18.3 percent in the eighties, to 51 percent in the nineties, and to 70 percent in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. This heavy influx is called the "new immigration," in contrast with the "old," and it brought a variety of new ethnic groups that had never been here before in appreciable numbers.

There was a contrast between the "old" and the "new" immigrants. Most of the former came from countries that were economically and culturally advanced; most of them could read and write; except for the Irish and some of the Germans, they were Protestants; and most of them settled on farms. The new immigrants came from "backward" countries; most of them were illiterate; most of them were Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish; and most of them turned to industry and settled in the cities.

The new immigrants, like so many of the colonists and the earlier immigrants, came primarily to improve their economic and social lot. Promoters of American industry recruiting cheap labor and agents of steamship companies seeking passengers spread the news that America was the land of opportunity and the haven of the oppressed. The glowing pictures they painted created an irresistible pull toward the United States. Their claims were amply substantiated in letters from immigrants already here and in stories told by immigrants who returned to their native lands. In addition, transportation was cheap, and wages by European standards were high; there was religious freedom and no compulsory military service. Moreover, there was the overpowering lure of freedom. "If it was a merit in 1620 to flee from religious persecution," said a woman who fled Russia in 1894, "and in 1776 to fight against political oppression then many of the Russian refugees of today after the uprising of 1905 are a little ahead of the Mayflower troops, because they have in their own lifetime sustained the double ordeal of fight and flights, with all the attendant risks and shocks... If it is the scum of Europe that we are getting in our present immigration it seems to be a scum rich in pearls."

Castle Garden, at the foot of Manhattan Island, became after 1855 the formal reception center for most of the immigrants reaching the United States, and in 1891 Ellis Island in New York harbor assumed this function. At both places the officials did little more than record the immigrant's arrival. A few immigrants were met by friends and relatives and some by representatives of welfare agencies and churches; but most were left to shift for themselves or were herded off to harsh employment by unscrupulous operators for industry. Strangers in a new world and ignorant of its language and customs, immigrants of the same nationality flocked together in the same areas, spoke the same language, and attempted to preserve their own customs and beliefs. This tendency resulted in a modification of American society. Crowding into large cities and often forming communities of their own, with their own institutions and traditions, and with newspapers and theatrical productions in their own languages, the new immigrants greatly complicated the process of assimilation.

While the immigrants peopled the American cities and furnished much of the manpower for the new industrialism, their coming in such large numbers gradually changed the attitude of the United States government and of native and older American stock from one of welcome to one of growing hostility. Because the new immigrants were so different in language, political background, and social customs, older Americans began to wonder whether they could ever be assimilated into the mainstream of national life. They also feared that the waves of new immigrants would annihilate the native American stock. The columnist Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" expressed one popular position of native Americans when he said: "As a pilgrim father that missed th' first boats, I must raise me claryon voice again th' invasion in this fair land by th' paupers an' anychists in effete Europe. Ye bet I must-because I'm here first." Important, too, were the objections of labor leaders. They contended that the new workers from abroad were degrading American labor standards by accepting lower wages, working longer hours, living in slums, and allowing themselves to be used as strike breakers. Labor leaders also found it difficult to unionize people speaking so many different languages. And some of the older Americans resented the fact that so many of the new immigrants were Roman Catholics and Jews. Others were sure that the immigration of so many "foreigners" spelled dangers for the country. A few frightened Americans thought that the new immigrants were inferior "racially" and that their assimilation would weaken the dominant "Nordic" stock. Such hostilities and fears provoked anti-immigrant movements that were unworthy of American traditions. They bore various names-for example, the United Order of Deputies, the American League, the Minute Men of 1886, and the Red, White and Blue. But the most powerful group during this period was the American Protective Association, which was organized in 1887 to rally Americans for a fight against Catholicism. It grew with startling rapidity after the onset of the Panic of 1893 and stirred hostilities that would affect American society for decades to come.

True, the new immigration was of the lower classes, but this did not set it apart from earlier immigration. Irish and German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century also were poor, so that poverty was not a trait peculiar to the new immigration. It is also true that the new immigration was hard to assimilate, but it is doubtful whether it was any more difficult than was German immigration of the mid-nineteenth century. Neither can the new immigration be held as a cause for unemployment, because this followed the business cycle and the demand for labor. Did the immigrants replace native workers? Statistics show that native labor increased in these years, especially in coal and steel where predictions were that native labor would be displaced. In fact, immigrants pushed up native labor to a new position of aristocracy. Nor did immigration reduce skilled labor, for this reduction was a consequence of new technical advances. In regard to the reduction of wages, the decline in the number of skilled workers proportionately affected the whole wage picture. The underpaid and unorganized laborers were Anglo-Saxon textile workers of the South where the new immigration had little effect. In respect to longer hours and dangerous work, American workers were used to these conditions before the arrival of the new immigrants. So also it was with sweatshops and poor living conditions. The new immigrants moved into those neighborhoods vacated by older immigrants. Neither sweatshops nor slums were new. Finally, the new immigration was not a deterrent to labor organization. On the contrary, the new immigration was often the backbone of labor unions.

For nearly a hundred years the federal government exercised no control over immigration. Then in 1875 it assumed its first responsibility in this area by excluding prostitutes and persons with prison records. In 1882 Congress forbade the immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years, a prohibition which subsequent legislation extended and which an act of 1902 made permanent. The act of 1882 also barred paupers, the insane, and others likely to become public charges; and it imposed a head tax of 50 cents upon each immigrant. Under pressure from organized labor, Congress in 1885 ended the importation of contract laborers but exempted professional, skilled, and domestic labor. Then attempts were made to restrict immigration on the basis of a literacy test. Such tests, said Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in 1896, would "bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all upon English-speaking immigrants or Germans, Scandinavians, and French."

Lodge maintained that "the mental and moral qualities which made what we call our race" could be protected only by preserving America from "the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past."

President Cleveland in 1897, President Taft in 1913, and President Wilson in 1915 and 1917 each vetoed a bill imposing a literacy test as a condition of entry to the United States. But in 1917 Congress passed over Wilson's veto an act by which any alien who could not read English or his own language was denied admittance to this country. Still more restrictive measures lay in the future as nativists' fears of the alien tide" were nurtured by developments during the First World War and the postwar decade.

The story of the growth of organized labor in the United State parallels almost exactly that of the development of economic enterprise. Industries and trades were local in character roughly down to the Civil War. So, too, were labor unions. Local unions of workers in the same crafts, such as carpenters, tailors, or shoemakers, had existed from the earliest days of the Republic. As early as 1799 the shoemakers of Philadelphia conducted a strike. An attempt was made in New York in 1834 to unite workers in various crafts into a general organization of "the productive classes of the country." The time was not yet ripe for such a movement however.

Nor was the time yet ripe for a labor movement such as we know today on any level. Class consciousness developed very slowly among American industrial workers. Most of them in the first half-century of the Industrial Revolution in the United States refused to regard factory work as a career, or themselves as a separate class apart from employers and consumers. Hence they concentrated in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s not upon organization for collective bargaining but upon various reform movements to achieve their goals. Even their goals-such as liberal land policies and abolition of imprisonment for debt-were those of other reform groups in society.

The beginning of what would be a momentous if slow change occurred in the 1850s. This decade saw the first important formation of trade unions primarily for the purpose of improving wages and conditions of employment. Among these trade unions were the National Typographical Union, the International Union of Machinists and Blacksmiths, and the Iron Molders International Union. They were the forerunners of a modern labor movement.

Laissez-faire principles almost invariably governed relations between capital and labor. While businessmen solicited government assistance in the form of tariff protection, they did not regard this aid as a form of government intervention in economic life. They bitterly opposed, however, any attempt to improve the condition of labor by legislation on the ground that such regulation represented "unwarranted" interference with the natural laws of the economic system. Most businessmen believed that wealth was a sign of favor from God and that there was some form of divine right upholding capital. For example, during the coal strike of 1902 George F. Baer, chief spokesman for the mine owners, declared, "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for-not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian man to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country."

Nevertheless, as business formed combinations, so did labor. Only three national unions (hatters, printers, and stonecutters) remained at the end of the Civil War. About the only national labor leader was Ira Stewart, who advocated an eight-hour day. His proposal attracted wide support, and hundreds of eight-hour leagues, including farmer groups, were established in the country. Although the movement had little practical success, it did provide a stimulus for bringing about the national labor organization which emerged into the National Labor Union.

The National Labor Union was mainly a reform organization which sought redress for grievances that had been in agitation since the mid-nineteenth century. It demanded an eight-hour day, abolition of slums, and establishment of cooperatives. It favored arbitration of labor disputes and opposed independent political action. William Sylvis of the Molders' Union assumed the presidency of the National Labor Union in 1868 but died the next year. Had he lived longer, the union might have played a more important role. After his death the union engaged in political activity, and the trade union aims became secondary. In 1872 the organization formed the National Labor Reform party and nominated David Davis of Illinois for president. But Davis withdrew, causing the collapse of both party and federation.

The National Labor Union was a loose federation of autonomous societies. When the societies withdrew their support, the movement broke down. Its leadership came from the top down, and there were few prominent leaders. The successors of the National Labor Union were to profit by avoiding these weaknesses. Thus, though the National Labor Union was short-lived, it did have a certain significance in the history of labor. It prepared the way for other more successful labor organizations.

The Knights of Labor was organized in Philadelphia in 1869 under the leadership of Uriah Stephens. Believing in the solidarity of labor, the Knights admitted almost everybody to membership, excluding only lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, liquor dealers, and professional gamblers. Their announced primary purpose was "to secure to the toilers a proper share of the wealth they create." They hoped to achieve their goals by secrecy, by the use of cooperatives, and by education and propaganda. Secrecy was of prime importance to the Knights. It was their means of defense against capital, which locked out workers belonging to unions. The Knights did not make public the name of their organization until 1881. Secrecy got the Knights into difficulty with the churches. Only the intercession of Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore kept the pope from excommunicating Catholics in the federation.

The Knights were of national prominence from 1879 to 1893, while Terence V. Powderly was their Grand Master Workman. Powderly was denounced by some as a revolutionary and by others as a faker who sold out labor. He never gave full attention to the union, for he considered it only a part-time job. He engaged in a number of activities-mayor of Scranton, 1878-1884; leader of the Irish Land League; and member of the Socialist party. He was a capitalist as well, for he owned a store. His greatest strength with the workers was his oratorical power. He supported land reform, temperance, and public education; he made wild pronouncements against wage slavery, opposed strikes, and was willing to come to terms with capital at almost any price.

The Knights of Labor hoped to do nothing less than to organize all workers, skilled and unskilled, black and white, into one big union for mutual protection against "the aggression of employers." Early mottoes expressed their basic ideas: "Injury to one is the concern of all," and "Harmonize the interests of labor and capital." The Knights worked for the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, settlement of industrial disputes by arbitration rather than by strikes, and encouragement of cooperative stores and factories. Officially the Knights opposed the use of strikes. Unions in the seventies generally opposed them, because most strikes had been unsuccessful. The depression of 1873 had dealt the unions some very severe blows. They lost strength and saw wages drop as much as 40 percent in textiles and on the railroads. They faced increasing unemployment, prosecution of strikers, and use of police and private detective agencies as strikebreakers. Employers resorted to lockouts (restricting employment to nonunion labor), to blacklisting (circularizing names of union leaders and members), and to yellow-dog contracts (pacts under which employees agreed not to join unions). Very few unions pulled through the depression. Out of 39 national unions, only 8 remained at the end of the depression in 1877.

The Knights took the position that, if employers did not recognize the union in a dispute, no effective solution was possible. Yet the Knights did engage in strikes and were so successful in winning them that by 1886, their peak year, their membership increased from 100,000 to 700,000 between July 1885 and June 1886, with local assemblies rising from 484 to 5,892 since 1882. Hard times of the mid-eighties led to railroad boycotts and strikes, notably on the Union Pacific Railroad in 1884 and Jay Gould's Wabash Railroad in 1885. These spontaneous strikes by shopmen and trainmen caught the companies off guard and compelled Powderly to support the strikers. They were labor's first major victories, and they forced Gould to negotiate with the Knights. An illusion of easy success arose, and a sudden flood of workers joined the Knights.

The Knights of Labor were weakened by the very same conflict over basic objectives that had earlier rent the National Labor Union. It was the division between a national leadership dedicated to general economic and political reform and the national trade unions that wanted to concentrate on the immediate economic betterment o workingmen. This controversy came to a head, ironically, during 1886, the year of the organization's most spectacular growth. But Powderly and other leaders of the union, instead of welcoming new members, reacted in alarm. They refused to support new strikes against the Missouri Pacific and Texas and Pacific railroads and certain Chicago meatpackers. These and other dissensions over immediate strategy and long-range goals led to the withdrawal of the national trade unions. From there on the Knights declined in numbers and influence, and by 1890 the membership had fallen to 100,000. Failure of their cooperatives and their identification with some of the labor violence of the eighties also contributed to the downfall of the Knights.

While the power and influence of the Knights of Labor were waning, a new labor organization was coming into its own under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. As an immigrant boy of 14, Gompers joined the Cigar Makers Union in Pittsburgh. In 1877, after his local had been all but ruined by a long strike, he and Adolph Strasser reorganized their unit. Gompers abandoned the ideal of labor solidarity. Pure trade unionism was his aim. His plan was to group laborers according to crafts. Appraising the vertical organization of the Knights of Labor as a structural weakness, Gompers adopted the horizontal approach of a separate union for each craft. His union pursued three practical objectives, higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. Gompers fought labor agitators and radicals, and he opposed direct affiliation of labor organizations with political parties. He favored cooperation with employers and advocated mediation of labor disputes.

Gompers's concept of the labor movement caught on throughout the country. In 1881 at Pittsburgh, he was active in the foundation of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. In 1886 he was chosen president when this national body was reorganized as the American Federation of Labor. At that date the AFL had nearly 550,000 members, or about 60 percent of the total membership of all labor organizations in the country. It was a decentralized organization with individual craft unions preserving local autonomy. The Knights of Labor and the AFL competed for supremacy in American labor, and by the end of the century the AFL had won.

It should be emphasized that all major labor organizations in these years rejected violence per se as a weapon in their struggle to improve the condition of labor. The AFL, the National Labor Union, and the Knights of Labor all worked through the democratic process.

There were some notable exceptions to this generalization, however. One was the Molly Maguires, an organization active among Pennsylvania coal miners from about 1865 to 1877. They resorted to violence, killing mine superintendents and destroying property until they were exposed by agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and destroyed. Another exception was the Anarchists, a small group that gave support to acts of terror aimed at destroying capitalism. The Haymarket Riot of 4 May 1886 was this period's worst instance of violence in the conflict between capital and labor involving the Anarchists. Strikers against International Harvester had assembled for a meeting in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest the shooting of several strikers. When police attempted to disperse the gathering, someone threw a bomb at the police killing seven of them and injuring seventy others. Guilt for throwing the bomb has never been established. Eight alleged Anarchists were arrested, tried, and convicted of inciting to murder, and four were hanged. Governor John P. Altgeld pardoned the survivors in 1893 on the ground that they had not received a fair trial.

Occasionally, there was violence in some of the strikes. A bloody episode occurred in a strike of steelworkers against Carnegie's Homestead plant near Pittsburgh in 1892. Pinkerton men, hired by the Carnegie company, and strikers met in armed battle in which a number of men was killed or wounded. The strike was finally broken when the governor of Pennsylvania called out the national guard. Another bloody episode occurred during the strike against the Pullman company in 1894. This violence and bloodshed occurred primarily because the industrialists of the day were determined to use every means to prevent the effective organization of labor and not because the labor unions themselves favored the use of violence.

Organized religion also had to adapt itself to industrialism. This adjustment proved to be difficult for the Protestant churches. Most of them had always regarded the Bible as the supreme authority. But the Darwinian theory of evolution had challenged belief in the authority of the Scriptures, and the rise of large corporations had weakened Protestant belief in the virtues of economic individualism.

In the eighties and nineties an increasing number of Protestant clergymen accepted the theory of evolution and sought to reconcile it with religious belief. The most notable convert was Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most celebrated preachers of the time, who declared that evolution was merely "the deciphering of God's thought as revealed in the structure of the world." A few clergymen went beyond his position to deny the supernatural character of miracles in Christianity, and this development alarmed the Fundamentalists who reasserted their belief in the supreme authority of the Bible as the only solid foundation for religious faith. A struggle developed in the Protestant churches between the Fundamentalists and their opponents, the Liberals, as they were called.

Throughout the Gilded Age most Protestant clergymen held conservative economic views and, believing that the existing economic system was just, they sanctified the cult of business success. Beecher, for instance, condemned the eight-hour day, insisted that poverty was a sign of sin, and advocated the use of force, if necessary, to put down strikes. The conservative views of some clergymen were influenced no doubt by wealthy businessmen in their congregations who made heavy contributions to church funds. Whatever the reason, the conservative attitude toward the workingman's demands for shorter hours and government regulation caused a falling off of working-class attendance at churches.

In the eighties a few socially conscious Protestant clergymen disagreed with Beecher's teachings on current economic questions and began to preach either the Social Gospel or Christian Socialism. Among the chief exponents of the Social Gospel were Josiah Strong and Washington Gladden. They declared that the problems of industrialism could only be solved by the universal application of the teachings of Christ. In many writings and sermons Gladden defended the rights of labor to organize and proposed that industrial disputes be eliminated by "an industrial partnership" that would allow workers to receive "a fixed share" of industry's profits. He espoused the idea of governmental ownership of public utilities although he rejected socialism as a system.

The Christian Socialists proposed a collective society, but they differed from the Marxists on how to achieve it. The Marxists sought their ideal through a class struggle; the Christian Socialists sought their ideal through a program based upon the law of God and the precepts of Christ. The leader and spokesman of Christian Socialism was Walter Rauschenbusch, professor of Church history at Rochester Theological Seminary. An ardent Socialist, he severely censured industrial capitalism as "a mammonistic organization with which Christianity can never be content."

The heavy flow of immigration caused the Catholic Church to expand in size and influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1860 there were 3,500,000 Catholics in the United States, representing 11 percent of the total population. In 1910 they numbered 16,000,000 or 16 percent of the total. As the Church grew, more schools and convents were built. The Irish dominated the leadership in the Church, a situation which rankled some of the new immigrants. A German Catholic, Peter Cahensly, in 1890 proposed that each national group should have its own priests, and bishops, but Cahenslyism was condemned by the Pope and made little headway. The Roman Catholic Church's attitude toward social reform was mostly negative, or at most one of toleration. Only in part was the hierarchy moved by considerations of justice and charity. James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, insisted that Catholics cultivate a patriotic citizenship in keeping with the nation's civil institutions and customs. Gibbons asserted, "The accusation of being un-American-that is to say, alien to our national spirit-is the most powerful weapon which enemies of the Church can employ against her."

Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul minimized the economic problems of the time and advocated only temperance and conservative trade unionism. In 1903 he said publicly, "I have no fear of great fortunes in the hands of individuals, nor of vast aggregations of capital in the hands of corporations." Ireland's friendship with James J. Hill, the railroad builder, and President McKinley brought him under the criticism of reformers. Yet he often expressed strong sympathy for organized labor, saying on one occasion, "Until their material condition is improved it is futile to speak to them of spiritual life and duties."

Through this indifference to social reform, the Church jeopardized its hold on the loyalty of its communicants. Catholics in large numbers lost interest in a Church which seemed indifferent, if not hostile, to movements for the promotion of their economic welfare. Many Catholics turned to socialism. As the Church began to lose its members to Protestantism and socialism, it developed a greater interest in social problems. Also helping to change the Church's attitude was Pope Leo XIII's famous encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), which condemned the exploitation of labor and asserted that it was the duty of the state to foster social justice.

America's most tragic problem in the post-Civil War years was the plight of the African-Americans who comprised one-tenth of the American population. Though the Civil War had settled the question of human slavery, it did not settle the problem of securing for all Americans the inalienable rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Nor did it alter the fact that white supremacy in the country was generally taken for granted. During Reconstruction significant constitutional and legislative steps such as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 were taken to insure the freedman's political and civil rights, but developments during the last quarter of the nineteenth century virtually destroyed these political gains.

When President Hayes removed the last of the federal troops and federal control from the South in April 1877, he left southern blacks to the custody of southern whites, such as Governor Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who promised to "secure to every citizen, the lowest as well as the highest, black as well as white, full and equal protection in the enjoyment of all his rights under the Constitution." Because of such promises Hayes believed that a new "era of good feeling" was developing in the South between the two races. Even before 1877 was over, he learned differently. "By state legislation, by frauds, by intimidation, and by violence of the most atrocious character, colored citizens have been deprived of the right of suffrage," he wrote in his diary. But he did practically nothing to correct the situation. And when these southern white pledges regarding the Negro were not kept, there was little protest from the African-Americans' former northern champions until well into the twentieth century.

The Republican party had emerged from the Civil War as the champion and protector of Southern blacks. It had emancipated and enfranchised them and had provided them with political and civil rights. In their campaign platforms in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Republicans promised to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But while they talked much about this, they did very little for the freedmen.

Actually, throughout most of this period the Republicans did not control Congress enough to enforce these amendments. But their abandonment of African-Americans was also part of a new political strategy they were using in the South. In an effort to develop a stronger party in the South and to compete with the Democrats in this section, the Republicans shifted their appeals in the South mainly from blacks to whites. While they wanted to maintain their black support their principal aim was to increase their ranks with southern whites. The Republicans of the post-Reconstruction years sought to conciliate Southern whites and to ingratiate the Republican party with them. This they attempted to do by removing the troops, by appointing southern whites to federal positions, by working with white Independent politicos in the South, and by subordinating African-Americans in the leadership of the Republican party in the South. While these moves failed to bring much Republican political success in the South they did result in the desertion of southern blacks whom the Republicans had publicly pledged themselves to protect.

The Republican abandonment of the African-Americans in these years was also part of a general abandonment of them by Northerners. By the end of Reconstruction most Northerners probably agreed with Southern whites that blacks were not prepared for equality and that the South should be allowed to deal with them in its own way. Northerners had also come to believe that the elimination of the issue of African-Americans from politics was necessary for a return to national reconciliation and a development of trade between the North and the South.

African-Americans were also abandoned by the courts. After 1877 practically every Supreme Court decision affecting blacks nullified or curtailed their rights. The Court drastically limited the powers of the federal government to intervene in the states to protect the rights of African-Americans. To all intents and purposes, it invalidated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as effective safeguards for black people. When in 1883 the Court set aside the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the ground that the Fourteenth Amendment was binding on states but not on individuals, it ended federal attempts to protect African-Americans against discrimination by private persons. There would be no federal civil rights legislation thereafter until 1957. And in the 1870s, when the Court held that the Fifteenth Amendment did not confer the right to vote upon anyone and that Congress did not have the authority to protect the right to vote generally, sections of the Enforcement Act of 1870 were declared unconstitutional because they provided penalties for hindering a person in voting. In 1894 Congress repealed the entire law. Again, there was no further legislation on the subject until 1957.

African-Americans had continued to vote after the return of white supremacy in the South though in reduced numbers. In some parts of the South they were prevented from voting by threats or intimidation, and in other parts their vote was nullified by artful means such as the use of tissue ballots and a complicated system of ballot boxes. In the 1890s, however, the southern states proceeded to disfranchise them with laws. Within two decades practically all black voters had been disfranchised by means of poll taxes, white primaries, and literacy or property qualifications that were enforced against African-Americans but not against whites. In the same years the southern states also passed numerous "Jim Crow" laws, segregating African-Americans in virtually every aspect of public life.

Most Northerners shared the Court's attitude toward African-Americans. They deplored agitation on behalf of African-Americans and were willing to accept the South's racial policies. Even educated, intelligent Northerners believed that black people were racially inferior, because most scientists at the time believed this. Most of the Northern press supported the decisions in the civil rights cases. And as Rayford W. Logan, a leading black historian, has shown, Northern newspapers usually described African-Americans in a derogatory manner, regardless of the actual circumstances, strengthening a stereotype of the "criminal Negro." The leading literary magazines of the North such as Harper's, Scribner's, and the Atlantic Monthly, mirroring the refined tastes of the upper classes, regularly used derisive terms when they referred to African-Americans.

Most Americans did not especially wish African-Americans ill, wrote John A. Garraty, a leading historian on the Gilded Age. "They simply refused to consider them quite human and consigned them complacently to oblivion, along with the Indians."

The position of black leader Booker T. Washington among his race from 1885 to his death in 1915 may have also contributed to the assault upon the rights of African-Americans. Washington, founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama was, according to Louis R. Harlan, a recent biographer, a "white man's black man" and a "safe, sane Negro" to Southern whites. In the Northern white world, Washington was "deferential but dignified," drawing philanthropy from such men as Carnegie. Among Southern whites, says Harlan, Washington made a point of not crossing the color line and sought to reduce social friction. He believed that for the time being African-Americans should forgo agitation for the vote and social equality and should devote their efforts to achieving economic security and independence. "In all things that are purely social," Washington said in a speech at the Atlantic Cotton Exposition of 1895, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as a hand in all things for mutual progress." This idea won the enthusiastic support of whites, and it had much to do with fixing the pattern of race relations in the country for the remainder of Washington's lifetime. While Washington accepted a subordinate position for southern Negroes he was convinced that it would have been folly at the time to ask for equal rights for African-Americans. While African-Americans then generally accepted Washington's view, a later generation would repudiate it as an "Uncle Tom's" attitude.

In view of the foregoing development it is no wonder that Logan could write, "At the beginning of the Twentieth Century what is now called second class citizenship for Negroes was accepted by presidents, the Supreme Court, Congress, organized labor, the General Federation of Women's Clubs-indeed the vast majority of Americans, North and South, and by the 'leader' of the Negro race." It was indeed the saddest aspect of American life. Congress had repudiated or abandoned the federal government's pledges on Negro rights. Civil rights for African-Americans were a dead letter; disfranchisement enjoyed federal approval and support; "separate but equal" was the law of the land; racism was not merely a regional but a national creed. In short, by 1900 there was a merging of the southern and national outlook and a general acceptance of the theory of white supremacy. This situation would persist without serious disturbance into the second half of the twentieth century.

While African-Americans were losing their rights women were struggling for more rights, opportunities, and privileges and for a more equal place with men in the participation in and conduct of American affairs. Much of this activity centered on the effort to win the vote.

There was considerable opposition to women's claims of equal political rights with men. Politicians insisted that the political arena was a male preserve, that politics itself was masculine, and that any attempt to change that situation was contrary to human nature. Politicians were not alone in holding this view. Francis Parkman, one of the era's most prominent historians, thought women's suffrage would leap over "Nature's limitations," disrupt the home and give women excitement and cares "too much for their strength." But a number of supporters of women's rights disagreed.

The two major political parties, Republican and Democratic, however, either ignored or opposed the demand for women's suffrage, and many women decided to take action themselves. They did several things. Under the leadership of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton they worked for the suffrage from the 1870s on. Then some women's groups, such as the Equal Rights party, took direct political action by nominating women for president of the United States-Victoria Claflin Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884 and 1888.

In the last part of the nineteenth century there was a battle for women's suffrage in the nation's magazines, public meetings, legislative assemblies, and state constitutional conventions. Prominent reformers such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and George William Curtis and John Greenleaf Whittier, a leading poet, as well as the two most important labor organizations of the day, the Knights of Labor and the AFL, supported the women's suffrage movement.

Women tried unsuccessfully to win the vote through the Fifteenth Amendment. At first they failed in efforts in the states, as seven states turned down women's suffrage proposals between 1867 and 1877. They also had a serious legal setback when the United States Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett (1875) refused to accept the argument that women could vote because they were citizens and unanimously rule that the Fourteenth Amendment had not conferred the vote upon women. Also, when some states barred women from the legal profession, the Supreme Court upheld such laws, with one justice saying, "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex, unfits it for many ... occupations." Women, he said, should stay with "the noble and benign offices of wife and mother."

In 1878, Senator Aaron Augustus Sargent of California introduced into Congress an equal suffrage amendment. During the remaining years of the century, Senate committees reported five times and House committees twice in favor of the amendment, but Congress never took action on it. Despite considerable effort by the suffragettes, the increasing militancy of the women's suffrage movement, and a growing sympathy and backing for it generally, only four states at the close of the nineteenth century had given the vote to women--Wyoming (1869), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896).

Women seemed to make more progress in other aspects of American life than they did politically. More women were working outside their homes and going to college than had been the case in earlier periods of American history. The old prejudice against self-support for women was beginning to weaken, and at the same time colleges and universities were preparing increasing numbers of women for positions previously held mainly by men. "We have reached a new era," asserted Harper's Bazaar, a leading women's magazine, in 1883. "Slowly as woman has come to her inheritance, it stretches before her now into illimitable distance, and the question of the hour is rather whether she is ready for her trust than whether that trust is hampered by conditions."

Though there had long been a large number of women who worked for a living outside the home, the great economic expansion of the late nineteenth century brought many more into the work force. From 1880 to 1900, the number of women workers went up from 2.5 million to 5.3 million. Unfortunately this was counterbalanced by women usually filling the lowest paid jobs and receiving unequal pay in virtually every position they held for work equal to that done by men.

Since unions did not pay much attention to working conditions for women, not much was done to correct the injustice of the unequal wage scale. One gain was made when Congress in 1872 enacted the Arnell Bill giving women government workers equal pay with men for equal work. Belva Ann Lockwood had much to do with this Act. She drafted the measure, and its passage was hastened by a petition she circulated at the meetings of the National and American Women's Suffrage Associations in New York in 1870. Another gain was that legislatures in the industrial states began in the 1880s to consider legislation regulating working conditions of women in factories.

Women also made progress in education in these years despite their being up against a generally held view, expressed by a clergyman in 1880, that women's emotional nature "painfully disqualifies" them from the effort to be educated. By this time women had been accepted in colleges for about twenty years, and by 1870 nearly one-third of American colleges were coeducational.

Most educational opportunities for women were in the Middle West and the South where new state universities began to admit them as well as men. President James B. Angell of the University of Michigan observed in the 1880s that "none of the ladies had found the curriculum too heavy for their physical endurance."

Angell's concern about women's physical stamina for the rigors of study was shared by other Americans, both women and men. M. Carey Thomas, a graduate of Cornell in 1877 and the first president of Bryn Mawr, expressed this concern when she said, "The passionate desire of the women of my generation for higher education was accompanied ... by the awful doubt, felt by women themselves as well as by men, as to whether women as a sex were physically and mentally fit for it.,,

Women clearly demonstrated their fitness for college, and coeducation grew rapidly in these years. Between 1880 and 1898 the proportion of coeducational colleges increased from 51 percent to 70 percent and the number of women students from 2,750 to more than 25,000. At the same time some women's colleges, on a level with the top ones for men, were established-Vassar (1861), Wellesley (1870), Smith (1871), and Bryn Mawr (1885). Mount Holyoke, a girl's seminary since 1836, became a college in 1893. Also, two of the country's leading universities, Harvard and Columbia, added women's colleges-Radcliffe in 1879 and Barnard in 1889. By the end of the nineteenth century, four out of every five colleges, universities, and professional schools in the country admitted women.

Women, especially of the upper middle class, also turned their attention to club activities and joined in large numbers the women's organizations springing up all over the country. These various associations provided a good way for women to find out more about the world in which they were now playing a larger role. In one decade, 1888-1897, three important groups were formed placing more women in public affairs-the National Council of Women, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. By the close of the nineteenth century, the General Federation of Women's Clubs claimed a membership of 150,000 and was supporting such reforms as child welfare, education, and sanitation.

Of course the participation of women in reforms was not new. Women had taken an active role in reform movements before the Civil War, and this momentum continued. Probably the strongest women's reform group of these years was the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) established in Cleveland in 1874 to fight the saloon and to promote prohibition. The prohibition movement had begun in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the time of the Gilded Age four states-Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Kansas-had prohibition laws. The United States Supreme Court upheld such laws in 1847 but reversed itself in 1888 on the grounds that the interstate control of liquor belonged to Congress.

Frances E. Willard became the head of the WCTU in 1879 and began to work through schools and churches to arouse public opinion against liquor. With pressure from the WCTU, virtually every state added the requirement of "scientific temperance instruction" to the school curriculum between 1882 and 1898.

Many women who saw the saloon as an implacable foe were also aware of other social problems such as child labor, unsanitary housing, lack of public health measures, and penal conditions that needed their support for reform. Not all women, however, agreed that increased activities of women meant progress for them. "What is this curious product of today, the American girl or woman?" asked one woman writer in 1880 in the Atlantic Monthly. "Is it possible for any novel, within the next fifty years, truly to depict her as a finality, when she is still emerging from new conditions..., when she does not yet understand herself...?"

Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, increasing economic independence and more educational opportunities for women had enlarged their social freedom and widened their range of activity. They had gone far, but they had much farther to go.

Source: Vincent P. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America: 1877-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Forum Press, 1989), 97-119.

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