Доклад: History of the USA

Oregon on the Pacific Coast. Fed by a high birthrate and by the heavy

immigration from Ireland and Germany that surged dramatically during the

1840s, the nation's population was leaping upward: from 9.6 million in 1820

to 23 million in 1850 and 31.5 million in 1860.

Domestic Politics: 1815-46

In a nationalist frame of mind at the end of the War of 1812, Congress

chartered the Second Bank of the United States in 1816, erected the first

protective tariff (see TARIFF ACTS), and supported internal improvements

(roads and bridges) to open the interior. President James MONROE presided

(1817-25) over the so-called Era of Good Feelings, followed by John Quincy

ADAMS (1825-29).

Chief Justice John MARSHALL led the Supreme Court in a crucial series of

decisions, beginning in 1819. He declared that within its powers the federal

government could not be interfered with by the states (MCCULLOCH V. MARYLAND)

and that regulation of interstate and international commerce was solely a

federal preserve (GIBBONS V. OGDEN and BROWN V. MARYLAND). In 1820, in the

MISSOURI COMPROMISE, Congress took charge of the question of slavery in the

territories by declaring it illegal above 36 deg 30 min in the huge region

acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. Witnessing the Latin American revolutions

against Spanish rule, the American government in 1823 asserted its

paramountcy in the Western Hemisphere by issuing the MONROE DOCTRINE. In

diplomatic but clear language it stated that the United States would fight to

exclude further European extensions of sovereignty into its hemisphere.

During the presidency of Andrew JACKSON (1829-37), a sharp bipolarization

occurred again in the nation's politics. Of Scots-Irish descent, Jackson

hated the English, and he was, in turn, as thoroughly disliked by New

Englanders, who thought him violent and barbaric. He made enemies in the

South, as well, when in 1832 South Carolina, asserting superior STATE RIGHTS,

attempted to declare null and void within its borders the tariff of 1828 (see

NULLIFICATION). In his Nullification Proclamation (1832), Jackson declared

that the federal government was supreme according to the Constitution. He

skillfully outmaneuvered the South Carolinians, forcing them to relent. In

1832 he vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States on

the grounds that it caused the booms and busts that so alarmed the country

and that it served the wealthy while exploiting the farmers and working

people. To oppose him, the old Federalist coalition was reborn in the form of

the American WHIG PARTY. With a DEMOCRATIC PARTY emerging behind Jackson and

embodying the old Jeffersonian Democratic- Republican coalition, two-party

rivalries appeared in every state. By the 1840s modern mass political

parties, organized down into every ward and precinct, had appeared.

Led by Henry CLAY and Daniel WEBSTER, the Whigs called for protective

tariffs, a national bank, and internal improvements to stimulate the economy.

Moralists in politics, they also demanded active intervention by state

governments to maintain the sanctity of the Sabbath, put down alcoholic

beverages, and "Americanize" the immigrants in the public schools. Yankees,

who by now had migrated in great numbers into the Midwest, leaned strongly

toward the Whigs. Many southerners admired Yankee ways and tended to vote for

Whig candidates, too.

Democrats continued to condemn banks and tariffs as sources of corruption and

exploitation, and in Jefferson's tradition insisted on cultural laissez-

faire, the freedom of people to live as they desired. The minority out-

groups--Irish Catholics and Germans--concurred, voting strongly Democratic in

order to ward off the imposition of Yankee morals. During the presidency of

Martin VAN BUREN (1837-41), Democrats succeeded in entirely separating

banking and government in the INDEPENDENT TREASURY SYSTEM, by which the

government stored and controlled its own funds. A brief Whig interlude under

William Henry HARRISON (1841) and John TYLER (1841-45) was followed by the

presidency of the Democrat James K. POLK (1845-49), who in the Walker Tariff

(1846) brought the United States closer to a free-trade basis.

Growing Sectional Conflicts

President Polk's war with Mexico ripped open the slavery question again. Was

it to be allowed in the new territories? The WILMOT PROVISO (1846), which

would have excluded slavery, became a rallying point for both sides, being

voted on again and again in Congress and successfully held off by

southerners. Abolitionism, led by William Lloyd GARRISON and others and now

strong in many northern circles, called for the immediate emancipation of

slaves with no compensation to slaveowners. Most northern whites disliked

blacks and did not support abolition; they did want to disallow slavery in

the territories so they could be preserved for white settlement based on

northern ideals: free labor, dignity of work, and economic progress.

In 1848 northerners impatient with both of the existing parties formed the

FREE-SOIL PARTY. By polling 300,000 votes for their candidate, Martin Van

Buren, they denied victory to the Democrats and put the Whig Zachary TAYLOR

in the White House (1849-50; on his death Millard FILLMORE became president,

1850- 53). The COMPROMISE OF 1850 seemed to settle the slavery expansion

issue by the principle of POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, allowing the people who lived

in the Mexican cession to decide for themselves. A strong FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

was also passed in 1850, giving new powers to slaveowners to reach into

northern states to recapture escaped slaves.

THE CIVIL WAR ERA

As the 1850s began, it seemed for a time that the issue of slavery and other

sectional differences between North and South might eventually be reconciled.

But with the westward thrust of the American nation, all attempts at

compromise were thwarted, and diverging economic, political, and

philosophical interests became more apparent. The resulting civil war

transformed the American nation.

Political Fragmentation

In 1854 the KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT threw open the huge unorganized lands of the

Louisiana Purchase to popular sovereignty, repealing the Missouri Compromise

line of 1820. The North exploded in rage. Thousands defected from the Whig

party to establish a new and much more antisouthern body (and one wholly

limited to the northern states), the REPUBLICAN PARTY. The Republicans were

aided by an enormous anti-Catholic outburst under way at the same time, aimed

at the large wave of Irish Catholic immigration. Anti-Catholicism was already

draining away Whigs to a new organization, the American party, soon known as

the KNOW-NOTHING PARTY. When in 1856 it proved unable to hold together its

members, north and south, because of disagreements over slavery, the anti-

Catholics joined the Republicans.

In Kansas civil war broke out between pro-slavery and anti- slavery

advocates, as settlers attempted to formalize their position on the

institution prior to the territory's admission as a state. The Democratic

presidents Franklin PIERCE (1853-57) and James BUCHANAN (1857-61) appeared to

favor the pro-slavery group in Kansas despite its use of fraud and violence.

In 1857 the Supreme Court, southern dominated, intensified northern alarm in

its decision in the case of DRED SCOTT V. SANDFORD. The Court ruled that

Congress had no authority to exclude slavery from the territories and thus,

that the Missouri Compromise line had been unconstitutional all along.

Thousands of northerners now became convinced that a "slave conspiracy" had

infiltrated the national government and that it intended to make slavery a

nationwide institution.

In 1860 the political system became completely fragmented. The Democrats

split into northern and southern wings, presenting two different candidates

for the presidency; the small CONSTITUTIONAL UNION PARTY attempted to rally

the former Whigs behind a third. The Republicans, however, were able to

secure the election of Abraham LINCOLN to the White House.

Southerners had viewed the rise of the Yankee-dominated Republican party with

great alarm. They were convinced that the party was secretly controlled by

abolitionists (although most northerners detested the abolitionists) and that

Yankees believed in using government to enforce their moralistic crusades. In

1859, John BROWN led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va.,

hoping to incite a slave insurrection. His action--and his subsequent

deification by some northerners- -helped persuade southerners that

emancipation of the slaves, if northerners obtained control of the country,

was sooner or later inevitable.

Secession

Southern leaders had threatened to leave the Union if Lincoln won the

election of 1860. Many South Carolinians, in particular, were convinced that

Republican-sponsored emancipation would lead to bloody massacres as blacks

sought vengeance against whites. In order to prevent this horror South

Carolina seceded in December 1860, soon after the victory of Lincoln, an

undeniably sectional candidate; it was optimistic about the eventual outcome

of its action. Before Lincoln's inauguration (March 1861) six more states

followed (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas). In

February their representatives gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to form the

CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA. On Apr. 12, 1861, when President Lincoln moved

to reprovision the federal troops at FORT SUMTER, in Charleston Harbor,

Confederate shore batteries launched a 34-hour battering of the installation,

forcing its surrender. The U.S. CIVIL WAR had begun.

The War between the States

Lincoln moved swiftly. On April 15 he called the remaining states to provide

75,000 troops to put down the Confederacy; Virginia, Arkansas, North

Carolina, and Tennessee reluctantly seceded. The capital of the Confederacy

moved to Richmond. On July 21, 1861, the first major battle between Union and

Confederate forces occurred--at Bull Run (see BULL RUN, BATTLES OF), south of

Washington, D.C.--resulting in a dramatic southern victory. Thereafter, both

sides settled down to a long conflict.

It became an immense struggle. With a total U.S. population of fewer than 32

million, the number of dead reached 620,000 (360,000 northerners out of an

army of about 1.5 million and 260,000 southerners in an army of about 1

million). In contrast, during World War II, when the American population was

135 million and its military forces fought for 4 years throughout the world,

the total dead reached 400,000. In 1861 about 22 million people lived in the

North, as against some 9 million people in the South, of whom 3.5 million

were black. Although the North possessed a vigorous system of industry and a

well-developed railroad network, Europeans were highly skeptical of a

northern victory because the Confederacy was practically as large as Western

Europe and fought with a determined passion for its independence. The North

had to invade and defeat the opposition in order to win; the South had only

to defend its borders. The conflict was not so uneven as it seemed.

Lincoln launched an all-out effort: he declared a naval blockade of the

Confederacy; worked hard to maintain the loyalty of the slaveholding border

states (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri); invaded Tennessee to

gain a base of power in the heart of the Confederacy; cut the South in two by

taking the Mississippi River; and looked for a general who could win. This

last task took him 2 years. Gen. George B. MCCLELLAN proved disappointingly

conservative, and his successors were bumblers. After Gen. Ulysses S. GRANT

won major victories in the western theater, Lincoln brought him to Washington

in 1864 to face the brilliant Confederate commander, Robert E. LEE.

By mid-1863 the South was in desperate straits, lacking both food and

supplies. A great northward thrust was turned back at Gettysburg, Pa., in

July of that year (see GETTYSBURG, BATTLE OF). Thereafter, Grant mounted a

relentless campaign that hammered down toward Richmond, at hideous cost in

casualties. Union Gen. William T. SHERMAN, meanwhile, was slashing through

Georgia to the sea, leaving a wide swath of total destruction, and then

turning northward through the Carolinas. By April 1865, Grant had finally

rounded Lee's flank, and on the 9th of that month, Lee surrendered at

APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE. Confederate president Jefferson DAVIS intended to

fight on, but it was hopeless. The Civil War was over.

A Nation Transformed: The North

The war had transformed both North and South. On Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln had

issued his EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, declaring slavery dead wherever

rebellion existed (in the border states, it was terminated by later local

action). In addition, the enormous war effort taught the North lessons in

modern organization and the use of large corporations. In Washington the

Republican majority enacted a classically Hamiltonian program: high

protective tariffs, lavish aid to capitalists to build railroads and exploit

natural resources, free homestead grants for settlers, and banking and

currency legislation that created one national system of paper money. The

MORRILL ACT of 1862 provided grants of land for the establishment of land-

grant universities in each state to train the agriculturalists, engineers,

and other professionals needed to run an industrialized economy.

The two-party system survived in the North despite the war. Democrats never

sank below 40 percent of the vote because many northerners opposed the

conflict, or at least Republican policies. In the DRAFT RIOTS of 1863, Irish

Catholics and other New Yorkers fiercely protested the new conscription law,

which seemed a special hardship to poor people. The rioters, as well as many

other northerners, were hostile toward abolition; they feared that Republican

policies would send hordes of freed slaves northward to compete for jobs.

Democrats also opposed the powerful centralizing tendencies of the programs

pushed by the Republicans, as well as their aid to capitalists.

Reconstruction

A week after Appomattox, Lincoln was assassinated. Now Andrew JOHNSON assumed

office and moved quickly to establish a plan for RECONSTRUCTION. He asked

southern whites only to repudiate debts owed by the Confederacy, declare

secession null and void, and ratify the 13TH AMENDMENT (which declared

slavery illegal). When Congress convened in December 1865, newly elected

southerners were already on the scene waiting to be admitted to their seats.

Many of them had been elected on the basis of BLACK CODES, established in the

southern states in 1865-66 to restore a form of quasi-slavery. To the shocked

and angered North, it seemed that the sufferings endured in the war had been

in vain: politics as before the war--only now with a powerful southern

Democratic bloc in Congress--would resume.

The Republican majority in Congress refused to admit southern legislators to

their seats until a congressional committee reexamined the entire question of

Reconstruction. Soon, Radical Republicans (those who wished to use the

victory as an opportunity to remake the South in the Yankee image) were in

open conflict with Johnson. He attempted to terminate the FREEDMEN'S BUREAU

(an agency established in 1865 to aid refugees) and to veto legislation aimed

at protecting the civil rights of former slaves (see CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS). In

the congressional election of 1866 a huge majority of Republicans was

elected, and the Radicals gained a precarious ascendancy. Senator Charles

SUMNER of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus STEVENS (New England-

born) of Pennsylvania were among the leaders of the Radical cause.

The 14TH AMENDMENT (enacted in 1866; ratified in 1868) made all persons born

or naturalized in the country U.S. citizens and forbade any state to

interfere with their fundamental civil rights. In March 1867 all state

governments in the South were terminated and military occupation established.

Federal commanders were charged with reconstructing southern governments

through constitutional conventions, to which delegates were to be elected by

universal male suffrage. After a new state government was in operation and

had ratified the 14th Amendment, its representatives would be admitted to

Congress. In February 1868 an impeachment effort sought unsuccessfully to

remove President Johnson from office.

The Republican majority in Congress made no significant effort to create

social equality for blacks, but only to give them the vote and to ensure them

equal protection under the law (trial by jury, freedom of movement, the right

to hold office and any employment, and the like). This political equality

would give blacks an equal start, Republicans insisted, and they would then

carry the burden of proving themselves equal in other ways. Yet Republicans

well knew that antiblack attitudes persisted in the North as well as in the

South. Until ratification (1870) of the 15TH AMENDMENT, which made it illegal

to deny the vote on the grounds of race, most northern states refused blacks

the vote.

A Nation Transformed: The South

Like the North, the South was transformed by the Civil War and its aftermath.

Southerners had learned lessons in the effectiveness of a strong central

government and realized the impossibility of continuing the old ways of the

antebellum period. Former Whigs in the South, often called Conservatives,

pushed eagerly to build industry and commerce in the Yankee style. Meanwhile,

reconstructed southern state governments enacted many reforms, establishing

free public schools for all, popular election of all officials, more

equitable taxes, and more humane penal laws.

Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868 with electoral

votes gained in occupied southern states. Democrats alleged that Radical

Reconstruction was not genuinely concerned with aiding black people, but with

using southern black votes to keep the Republicans in power in Congress and

to retain their protective tariffs and other aids to industrialists. When

evidence of corruption surfaced during the Grant administration, Democrats

declared that it proved that the outcome of Republican friendliness to

capitalists was graft and plunder.

By 1870 the antisouthern mood that had supported Radical Reconstruction had

faded, as had the surge of concern for southern blacks. New domestic problems

were pushing to the fore. A resurgence of white voting in the South, together

with the use of violence to intimidate blacks and their white sympathizers,

brought southern states back into Democratic hands. Northerners, awakened to

economic questions by the great depression that began in 1873 and lasted for

5 years, tacitly agreed to return the race issue to the control of southern

whites.

After the disputed election of 1876, amid evidence of electoral corruption,

the Republican presidential candidate promised to withdraw the last federal

occupation troops from the South. The election was decided by a congressional

electoral commission, and Rutherford B. HAYES became president. As promised,

he withdrew (1877) the troops; Reconstruction was over.

THE GILDED AGE

The era known as the GILDED AGE (1870s to 1890s) was a time of vigorous,

exploitative individualism. Despite widespread suffering by industrial

workers, southern sharecroppers, displaced American Indians, and other

groups, a mood of optimism possessed the United States. The theories of the

English biologist Charles Darwin--expounded in The Origin of Species (1859)--

concerning the natural selection of organisms best suited to survive in their

environment began to influence American opinion. Some intellectuals in the

United States applied the idea of the survival of the fittest to human

societies (SOCIAL DARWINISM) and arrived at the belief that government aid to

the unfortunate was wrong.

Industrialization and Large-Scale Exploitation of NaturalResources

During the Gilded Age ambitious and imaginative capitalists ranged the

continent looking for new opportunities. Business lurched erratically from

upswings to slumps, while the country's industrial base grew rapidly.

Factories and mines labored heavily through these years to provide the raw

materials and finished products needed for expansion of the railroad system.

In 1865 (as construction of the first TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD was underway;

completed 1869) approximately 56,000 km (35,000 mi) of track stretched across

the United States; by 1910 the total reached about 386,000 km (240,000 mi) of

interconnected uniform-gauge track. By 1890 the United States contained one-

third of the world's railroad trackage.

After new gold and silver discoveries in the late 1850s, until about 1875,

individual prospectors explored the western country and desert basins in

search of mineral riches. Then mining corporations took over, using hired

laborers and eastern- trained engineers. Indians were either brutally

exterminated or placed on small reservations. Warfare with the Great Plains

Indians broke out in 1864; these INDIAN WARS did not entirely subside until

after the slaughtering of the buffalo herds, the basis of Indian life, which

had occurred by the mid-1880s. Through the DAWES ACT of 1887, which forced

most Indians to choose 160-acre (65-ha) allotments within their reservations,

reformers hoped to break down tribal bonds and induce Indians to take up

sedentary agriculture. Unallocated reservation lands were declared surplus

and sold to whites.

Cattle ranching was the first large-scale enterprise to invade the Great

Plains beginning in the late 1860s. By the 1880s, however, the open range

began to give way to fenced pastureland and to agriculture, made possible by

the newly invented barbed- wire fence and by "dry farming," a technique of

preserving soil moisture by frequent plowing. Millions of farmers moved into

the high plains west of the 100th meridian. So huge was their grain output

that slumping world prices beginning in the mid- 1880s put them into severe

financial straits. Meanwhile, the vast continental sweep between Kansas and

California became filled with new states.

By the early 1900s the nation's economy, tied together by the railroads into

a single market, was no longer composed primarily of thousands of small

producers who sold to local markets. Rather, it was dominated by a small

number of large firms that sold nationwide and to the world at large. With

great size, however, came large and complex problems. In 1887, Congress

created the INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION to curb cutthroat competition

among the railroads and to ensure that railroad rates were "reasonable and

just." In 1890, on the other hand, Congress attempted to restore competition

through passage of the SHERMAN ANTI-TRUST ACT, which declared illegal trusts

and other combinations that restrained trade. The U.S. Supreme Court favored

laissez-faire and consistently blocked both federal and state efforts to

regulate private business. The so-called robber barons and their immense

fortunes were practically unscathed as they exploited the nation's natural

resources and dominated its economic life.

New Social Groupings: Immigrants, Urbanites, and UnionMembers

In 1890 the American people numbered 63 million, double the 1860 population.

During these years the nation's cities underwent tremendous growth. Many new

urbanites came from the American countryside, but many others came from

abroad. From 1860 to 1890 more than 10 million immigrants arrived in the

United States; from 1890 to 1920, 15 million more arrived (see IMMIGRATION).

Most were concentrated in northern cities: by 1910, 75 percent of immigrants

lived in urban areas, while less than 50 percent of native-born Americans did

so. In the 1880s the so-called new immigration began: in addition to the

Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, and others of the older immigrant groups,

there came such peoples as Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, Greeks,

and Jews (from central and eastern Europe, especially Russia). Roman

Catholics grew in number from 1.6 million in 1850 to 12 million in 1900,

producing a renewed outburst of bitter anti-Catholic nativism in the 1880s.

The large cities, with their saloons, theaters, dance halls, and immigrant

slums, were feared by many native American Protestants, who lived primarily

in small cities and the rural countryside.

The outbreak of labor protests from the 1870s on, often characterized by

immigrant workers opposing native-born employers, intensified the hostility.

In 1878 the KNIGHTS OF LABOR formed, opening its ranks to all working people,

skilled or unskilled. The Knights called for sweeping social and economic

reforms, and their numbers rose to 700,000 in 1886. Then, as the organization

broke apart because of internal stresses, the American Federation of Labor,

under Samuel GOMPERS, formed to take its place. Concentrating on skilled

craftworkers and tight organization, it endured.

Domestic Politics

Gilded Age politics became a contest between evenly balanced Republicans and

Democrats. Winning elections by small margins, they alternated in their

control of Congress and the White House. Five men served as Republican

presidents: Hayes; James A. GARFIELD (1881); Chester A. ARTHUR (1881-85), who

succeeded Garfield on his assassination; Benjamin HARRISON (1889-93); and

William MCKINLEY (1897-1901). Their party regarded industrial growth and

capitalist leadership with approval, believing that they led to an ever-

widening opening of opportunity for all.

Grover CLEVELAND rose from obscurity to become Democratic governor of New

York in the early 1880s and then U.S. president (1885-89; 1893-97; although

he won a popular-vote plurality in the election of 1888, he lost to Harrison

in the electoral college). Reared a Jacksonian Democrat, he believed that

society is always in danger of exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. A

vigorous president, he labored to clean up government by making civil service

effective; took back huge land grants given out fraudulently in the West; and

battled to lower the protective tariff.

In the Great Plains and the South, grain and cotton farmers, suffering from

falling crop prices, demanded currency inflation to raise prices. By 1892 a

POPULIST PARTY had appeared, to call for free coinage of silver to achieve

this goal. Cleveland resisted, stating that such a monetary policy would

destroy confidence, prolong the great depression that began in 1893, and

injure city consumers. In 1896 the Democrats, taken over by southern and

western inflationists, ran William Jennings BRYAN on a FREE SILVER platform.

Ethnic voters surged into the Republican ranks--for the depression was a

disastrous one and the Republican party had always urged active government

intervention to stimulate the economy. In addition, as city dwellers they

feared inflation. William McKinley's election began a long period of one-

party (Republican) domination in the northern states and in Washington.

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

During the period known as the Progressive Era (1890s to about 1920) the U.S.

government became increasingly activist in both domestic and foreign policy.

Progressive, that is, reform- minded, political leaders sought to extend

their vision of a just and rational order to all areas of society and some,

indeed, to all reaches of the globe.

America Looks Outward

During the 1890s, U.S. foreign policy became aggressively activist. As

American industrial productivity grew, many reformers urged the need for

foreign markets. Others held that the United States had a mission to carry

Anglo-Saxon culture to all of humankind, to spread law and order and American

civilization. In 1895 the United States intervened bluntly in the VENEZUELA

BOUNDARY DISPUTE between Venezuela and imperial Britain, warning that, under

the Monroe Doctrine, American force might be used if Venezuela were not

treated equitably. A Cuban revolution against Spain, begun in 1895, finally

led to the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR (1898), undertaken to free Cuba. From that

war the United States emerged with a protectorate over Cuba and an island

empire consisting of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The United

States also annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898, completing a bridge to the

markets of the Far East. In 1900 the American government announced the OPEN

DOOR POLICY, pledging to support continued Chinese independence as well as

equal access for all nations to China's markets.

William McKinley's assassination brought Theodore ROOSEVELT to the presidency

in 1901. A proud patriot, he sought to make the United States a great power

in the world. In 1903 he aided Panama in becoming independent of Colombia,

then secured from Panama the right for the United States to build and control

a canal through the isthmus. In 1904, in the Roosevelt Corollary to the

Monroe Doctrine, he asserted the right of the United States to intervene in

the internal affairs of Western Hemisphere nations to prevent "chronic

wrongdoing." The following year his good offices helped end the Russo-

Japanese War. Having much strengthened the navy, Roosevelt sent (1907) the

Great White Fleet on a spectacular round-the-world cruise to display American

power.

Progressivism at Home

Meanwhile, the Progressive Era was also underway in domestic politics. City

governments were transformed, becoming relatively honest and efficient;

social workers labored to improve slum housing, health, and education; and in

many states reform movements democratized, purified, and humanized

government. Under Roosevelt the national government strengthened or created

regulatory agencies that exerted increasing influence over business

enterprise: the Hepburn Act (1906) reinforced the Interstate Commerce

Commission; the Forest Service, under Gifford PINCHOT from 1898 to 1910,

guided lumbering companies in the conservation of--and more rational and

efficient exploitation of--woodland resources; the Pure Food and Drug Act

(1906; see PURE FOOD AND DRUG LAWS) attempted to protect consumers from

fraudulent labeling and adulteration of products. Beginning in 1902,

Roosevelt also used the Justice Department and lawsuits (or the threat of

them) to mount a revived assault on monopoly under the Sherman Anti-Trust

Law. William Howard TAFT, his successor as president (1909-13), drew back in

his policies, continuing only the antitrust campaign. He approved passage of

the 16TH AMENDMENT (the income tax amendment, 1913), however; in time it

would transform the federal government by giving it access to enormous

revenues.

Republicans were split in the election of 1912. The regular nomination went

to Taft, and a short-lived PROGRESSIVE PARTY was formed to run Theodore

Roosevelt. Democrat Woodrow WILSON (1913-21) was therefore able to win the

presidency. Attacking corporate power, he won a drastic lowering of the

tariff (1913) and establishment of a Tariff Commission (1916); creation of

the FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM (1913) to supervise banking and currency; a

broadened antimonopoly program under the CLAYTON ANTI-TRUST ACT (1914);

control over the hours of labor on the railroads (Adamson Act, 1916); and

creation of a body to ensure fair and open competition in business (Fair

Trade Commission, 1914).

During the Progressive Era, southern governments imposed a wide range of JIM

CROW LAWS on black people, using the rationale that such legalization of

segregation resulted in a more orderly, systematic electoral system and

society. Many of the steps that had been taken toward racial equality during

the Reconstruction period were thus reversed. The federal government upheld

the principle of racial segregation in the U.S. Supreme Court case PLESSY V.

FERGUSON (1896), as long as blacks were provided with "separate but equal"

facilities. In the face of the rigidly segregated society that confronted

them, blacks themselves were divided concerning the appropriate course of

action. Since 1895, Booker T. WASHINGTON had urged that blacks should not

actively agitate for equality, but should acquire craft skills, work

industriously, and convince whites of their abilities. W. E. B. DU BOIS

insisted instead (in The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) that black people

ceaselessly protest Jim Crow laws, demand education in the highest

professions as well as in crafts, and work for complete social integration.

In 1910 the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE

(NAACP) was founded to advance these ideals.

Intervention and World War

President Taft continued to stress the economic aspects of Roosevelt's

interventionist spirit. Under Taft's foreign policy (called dollar diplomacy)

U.S. firms were encouraged to increase investments in countries bordering the

Caribbean in the hope that the American economic presence would ensure

political stability there. President Wilson went a step further, seeking not

simply to maintain order, but to advance democracy and self-rule. In 1915 he

sent troops into Haiti to put an end to the chaos of revolution--and to

protect U.S. investments there--and in 1916 he did the same in the Dominican

Republic; the two countries were made virtual protectorates of the United

States. With Nicaragua he achieved the same end by diplomacy. In hope of

tumbling the Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, Wilson at first denied him

diplomatic recognition, then in April 1914 sent troops to occupy the Mexican

port city of Veracruz and keep from Huerta its import revenues. The Mexicans

were deeply offended, and in November 1914, Wilson withdrew American forces.

The bloody civil war that racked Mexico until 1920 sent the first large

migration of Mexicans, perhaps a million people, into the United States (see

CHICANO).

After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Wilson sought vainly to

bring peace. In early 1917, however, Germany's unrestricted use of submarine

attacks against neutral as well as Allied shipping inflamed American opinion

for war (see LUSITANIA). Wilson decided that if the United States was to have

any hope of influencing world affairs, it was imperative that it enter the

war and fight to protect democracy against what he called German autocracy.

America's entry into the war (April 1917) was the climax of the Progressive

Era: Wilson's aim was the extension of democracy and the creation of a just

world order. In January 1918 he issued his FOURTEEN POINTS as a proposed

basis for peace: freedom of the seas and removal of all barriers to trade; an

end to secret diplomacy; general disarmament; self-government for the

submerged nationalities in the German and Austro- Hungarian empires; and a

league of nations. The addition of more than a million American troops to the

Allied armies turned the balance against the Germans in 1918, and an

armistice on November 11 ended the war. At the PARIS PEACE CONFERENCE,

however, Wilson failed in much of his program, for the other Allies were not

interested in a "peace without victory." The British would not agree to

freedom of the seas; tariffs did not tumble; self-determination was often

violated; key negotiations were kept secret; but in the end Wilson obtained

his greatest objective, establishment of the League of Nations to provide

collective security against future aggression. Many at home, however,

preferred to return to America's traditional isolation from world affairs.

When Wilson tried imperiously to force the Senate to accept the entire

treaty, he failed. The United States never became a member of the League of

Nations.

THE UNITED STATES TURNS INWARD: THE 1920S AND 1930S

After its participation in the conflagration then known as the Great War, the

American nation was ready to turn inward and concentrate on domestic affairs

(a "return to normalcy," as 1920 presidential candidate Warren Harding called

it). Private concerns preoccupied most Americans during the 1920s until the

Great Depression of the next decade, when increasing numbers turned, in their

collective misfortune, to government for solutions to economic problems that

challenged the very basis of U.S. capitalistic society.

The 1920s: Decade of Optimism

By the 1920s innovative forces thrusting into American life were creating a

new way of living. The automobile and the hard- surfaced road produced

mobility and a blurring of the traditional rural-urban split. The radio and

motion pictures inaugurated a national culture, one built on new, urban

values. The 19TH AMENDMENT (1920) gave women the vote in national politics

and symbolized their persistence in efforts to break out of old patterns of

domesticity. The war had accelerated their entrance into business, industry,

and the professions and their adoption of practices, such as drinking and

smoking, traditionally considered masculine. So, too, young people turned to

new leaders and values and sought unorthodox dress, recreations, and morals.

Traditional WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America fought the new ways.

The adoption of PROHIBITION in 1919 (with ratification of the 18TH AMENDMENT)

had been a victory of Yankee moral values over those of immigrants, but now

many of the great cities practically ignored the measure. The Russian

Revolution of 1917 sent a Red Scare shivering through the country in 1919-20;

suspicion centered on labor unions as alleged instruments of Moscow. The KU

KLUX KLAN, stronger in the northern Republican countryside than in the South,

attacked the so-called New Negro, who returned from the fighting in France

with a new sense of personal dignity (the HARLEM RENAISSANCE expressed this

spirit through the arts), and the millions of Roman Catholics and Jews who

had been flooding into the country since the 1890s. The Immigration Law of

1924 established a quota system that discriminated against all groups except

northern and western Europeans. In 1925 the spectacular SCOPES TRIAL in

Dayton, Tenn., convicted a high school science teacher of presenting

Darwinian theories of evolution, which fundamentalist Protestants bitterly

opposed.

New ideas, however, continued to inundate the country, and optimism remained

high. The U.S. population delighted in the "miracles" that new inventions had

brought them--electric lights, airplanes, new communication systems. The solo

flight to Paris of Charles LINDBERGH in 1927 seemed to capture the spirit of

the age. The business community was praised for its values and productivity.

Henry Ford (see FORD family) and his system of cheap mass production of

automobiles for people of modest incomes was regarded as symbolic of the new

era.

Three Republican presidents occupied the White House during the 1920s. Warren

HARDING, a conservative, was swept into office by a landslide victory in

1920. He proved an inept president, and his administration was racked by

scandals, including that of TEAPOT DOME. Calvin COOLIDGE, who succeeded to

the office on Harding's death (1923), worshiped business as much as he

detested government. Herbert HOOVER, an engineer, brought to the presidency

(1929-33) a deep faith in the essential soundness of capitalism, which to him

represented the fullest expression of individualism. In 1920 the U.S. census

showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans lived in cities of

2,500 people or more.

The 1930s: Decade of Depression

The stock market crash of October 1929 initiated a long economic decline that

accelerated into a world catastrophe, the DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s. By 1933,

14 million Americans were unemployed, industrial production was down to one-

third of its 1929 level, and national income had dropped by more than half.

In the presence of deep national despair, Democratic challenger Franklin D.

ROOSEVELT easily defeated Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. After his

inauguration, the NEW DEAL exploded in a whirlwind of legislation.

A new era commenced in American history, one in which a social democratic

order similar to that of Western European countries appeared. The federal

government under Roosevelt (and the presidency itself) experienced a vast

expansion in its authority, especially over the economy. Roosevelt had a

strong sense of community; he distrusted unchecked individualism and

sympathized with suffering people. He nourished, however, no brooding rancor

against the U.S. system. He sought to save capitalism, not supplant it.

Recovery was Roosevelt's first task. In the First New Deal (1933-35) he

attempted to muster a spirit of emergency and rally all interests behind a

common effort in which something was provided for everyone. Excessive

competition and production were blamed for the collapse. Therefore, business

proprietors and farmers were allowed to cooperate in establishing prices that

would provide them with a profitable return and induce an upward turn (under

the NATIONAL RECOVERY ADMINISTRATION and the AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT

ADMINISTRATION). By 1935, however, 10 million were still unemployed, the

economy seemed lodged at a new plateau, and the U.S. Supreme Court was ruling

such agencies unconstitutional.

The Second New Deal (1935-38) was more antibusiness and proconsumer.

Roosevelt turned to vastly increased relief spending (under the WORKS

PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION) to pump up consumer buying power. In 1933 he had

decided to take the nation off the gold standard, except in international

trade. Setting the price at which the government would buy gold at $35 an

ounce, he induced so massive a flow of gold into the country that its basic

stock of precious metal increased by one-third by 1940 (expanding by much

more the currency available in the economy). This monetary policy and the

spending to aid the unemployed succeeded in moving the economy toward

recovery before 1940, when the impact of war-induced buying from Europe

accelerated such movement.

The impact of the New Deal was perhaps strongest and most lasting in its

basic reform measures, which profoundly altered the American system. Farm

prices were supported and farm plantings centrally planned; the money supply

became a federal, not private, responsibility under a strengthened Federal

Reserve Board; and stock exchanges were put under regulation of the

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION. The FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION

insured bank deposits, and banking practices were closely supervised under

the Banking Act of 1933; the NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT made relations

between employers and employees a matter of public concern and control; and

under the direction of agencies such as the TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY

government facilities supplied electrical power to entire regions, providing

a standard for private utilities. Private utility monopolies were broken

apart and placed under public regulation; antitrust efforts were reenergized;

and economic recessions, then and afterward, were monitored by the federal

government, which was ready to increase public spending to provide employment

and ward off the onset of another depression.

For the majority of the population, New Deal legislation defined minimum

standards of living: the Fair Labor Standards Act set MINIMUM WAGE and

maximum hour limitations and included a prohibition on child labor in

interstate commerce; the Social Security Act (see SOCIAL SECURITY) made

provisions for old-age and disability pensions, unemployment insurance,

monthly payments to mothers living alone with dependent children, and direct

assistance to the blind and crippled.

In addition, the New Deal helped make it possible for organized unions to

gain higher wages; in 1938 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was

formed; members were organized by industry rather than by craft. The New Deal

also provided a sense of confidence that in a time of disaster the federal

government would take positive action.

Meanwhile, totalitarian movements abroad were inducing world crisis.

Congress, mirroring public opinion, had grown disenchanted with the U.S.

entry into World War I. This spirit of isolationism led to the passage (1935-

37) of a series of neutrality acts. They required an arms embargo that would

deny the sale of munitions to belligerents during a time of international war

and prohibited loans to belligerents and the travel of Americans on ships

owned by belligerents. Congress thus hoped to prevent involvements like those

of 1914-17.

A WORLD POWER

The spirit of isolationism eroded steadily as Americans watched the

aggressive moves of Adolf Hitler and his allies. President Roosevelt and the

American people finally concluded that the United States could not survive as

a nation, nor could Western civilization endure, if Hitler and fascism gained

dominance over Europe. During the world war that followed, the American

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