Why Did Millions of American Farm Families Migrate Westward From 1900 to 1910?
When in 1873 Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled their co-authored novel The Gilded Age, they gave the tardily nineteenth century its popular proper name. The term reflected the combination of outward wealth and dazzle with inner abuse and poverty. Given the menstruum'southward absence of powerful and charismatic presidents, its lack of a dominant central consequence, and its sometimes tawdry history, historians have often defined the period by negatives. They stress greed, scandals, and corruption of the Gold Historic period.
Twain and Warner were non incorrect about the era's corruption, but the years between 1877 and 1900 were also some of the most momentous and dynamic in American history. They set in motility developments that would shape the state for generations—the reunification of the South and North, the integration of 4 million newly freed African Americans, westward expansion, immigration, industrialization, urbanization. It was also a menstruum of reform, in which many Americans sought to regulate corporations and shape the changes taking identify all around them.
The End of Reconstruction
Reforms in the Due south seemed unlikely in 1877 when Congress resolved the previous autumn's disputed presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes on the backs of the nation's freed blacks. A compromise gave Hayes the presidency in return for the end of Reconstruction and the removal of federal military support for the remaining biracial Republican governments that had emerged in the former Confederacy. With that agreement, Congress abandoned one of the greatest reforms in American history: the try to contain ex-slaves into the republic with all the rights and privileges of citizens.
The The states thus accepted a developing system of repression and segregation in the South that would take the proper noun Jim Crow and persist for near a century. The freed people in the South found their choices largely confined to sharecropping and depression-paying wage labor, especially equally domestic servants. Although attempts at interracial politics would prove briefly successful in Virginia and North Carolina, African American efforts to preserve the citizenship and rights promised to black men in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution failed.
The West
Congress continued to pursue a version of reform in the Due west, however, as part of a Greater Reconstruction. The federal government sought to integrate the W into the country as a social and economic replica of the North. Land redistribution on a massive scale formed the centerpiece of reform. Through such measures every bit the Homestead and Railroad Acts of 1862, the regime redistributed the vast majority of communal lands possessed by American Indian tribes to railroad corporations and white farmers.
To redistribute that land, the regime had to subdue American Indians, and the wintertime of 1877 saw the culmination of the wars that had been raging on the Great Plains and elsewhere in the West since the cease of the Civil War. Following the American defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn the previous fall, American soldiers collection the Lakota civil and spiritual leader Sitting Bull and his followers into Canada. They forced the state of war leader Crazy Horse to surrender and subsequently killed him while he was held prisoner. Sitting Bull would somewhen return to the United States, but he died in 1890 at the easily of the Indian police during the Wounded Knee joint crisis.
The defeat of the Lakotas and the utterly unnecessary Nez Perce War of 1877 ended the long era of Indian wars. There would be other modest-scale conflicts in the W such as the Bannock War (1878) and the subjugation of the Apaches, which culminated with the surrender of Geronimo in 1886, but these were largely police actions. The slaughter of Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 did bring a major mobilization of American troops, merely information technology was a kind of coda to the American conquest since the federal government had already finer extended its power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The treaty system had officially ended in 1871, but Americans continued to negotiate agreements with the Indians. The goal of these agreements, and American state policy in full general, was to create millions of new farms and ranches beyond the West. Not satisfied with already ceded lands, reformers—the and then-called "Friends of the Indians" whose champion in Congress was Senator Henry Dawes—sought to dissever reservations into individual farms for Indians and and then open up up well-nigh or all of the remaining land to whites. The Dawes Human action of 1887 became their major tool, merely the piece of work of the Dawes Commission in 1893 extended allotment to the Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws in Indian Territory, which became the core of the land of Oklahoma. State allotment joined with the establishment of Indian schools and the suppression of native religions in a sweeping attempt to individualize Indians and integrate them 1 by 1 into American guild. The policy would fail miserably. Indian population declined precipitously; the tribes lost much of their remaining land, and Indians became the poorest group in American social club.
Immigration
Betwixt 1877 and 1900 immigrants prompted much more business organisation amidst native-born white Americans than did either black people or Indian peoples. During these years at that place was a cyberspace immigration of approximately 7,348,000 people into the United states. During roughly the same period, the population of the country increased by about 27 million people, from about 49 million in 1880 to 76 million in 1900. Before 1880 the immigrants came largely from Western Europe and Red china. Taking the menstruation between 1860 and 1900 as a whole, Germans comprised 28 per centum of American immigrants; the British comprised 18 percent, the Irish xv percentage, and Scandinavians 11 percent. Together they made upward 72 percent of the full clearing. At the end of the century, the and so-called "New Immigration" signaled the ascent of southern and eastern Europe as the source of most immigrants to America. The influx worried many native-born Americans who nevertheless thought of the United States equally a white Protestant republic. Many of the new immigrants did not, in the racial classifications of the day, count as white. As the century wore on, they were increasingly Catholic and Jewish.
Immigrants entered every section of the land in large numbers except for the South. They settled in northeastern and midwestern cities and on western and midwestern farms. The Pacific and mount Westward independent the highest percentage of immigrants of any region in 1880 and 1890.
The immigrants forged networks that shaped how and where they migrated and the kinds of communities they established. Chain migrations linked migrants to prior migrants. Early arrivals wrote home to bring family unit, friends, and neighbors to the The states. Over big swaths of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and elsewhere German was the primary language of daily life. Tensions between immigrants and the native born over the language to exist spoken in public schools, Sun closures of businesses (sabbatarianism), and temperance reform often put cultural issues and practices at the center of local and state politics.
Taken together, immigration and the finish of Reconstruction triggered an anti-democratic move to restrict access to the ballot box. By the 1870s proponents of restricting suffrage, having defeated an early push for women'southward suffrage, were calling republic a mistake. They advocated restrictions on voting every bit a way to check abuse, elevate political civilization, and marginalize those—they had in mind immigrants and blacks—whom they thought incapable of meeting the obligations of republican politics. They sought political changes that would make it far more difficult for the poor and immigrants to vote. Over time, through poll taxes, residence requirements, literacy requirements, and more, they would succeed. The mass politics and high voting rates characteristic of late nineteenth-century America would not outlive the era.
Attempts to restrict suffrage were office of a strong political and social backlash against immigrants that developed over the grade of the century. The United States welcomed immigrants because they were essential to its growing economic system, but nativists opposed immigrants as antithetical to American culture and social club. They thought of immigrants as exotic and inassimilable. In certain situations, even so, nativists had allies who were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Workers, both immigrant and native built-in, often feared that corporations were using contract labor—workers recruited abroad at lower wages than those paid American workers—to undermine American working weather and the American family, which they defined as a working man whose wife maintained the dwelling. They opposed sure kinds of immigration. One of the forgotten reforms of the period, the Foran Deed of 1885, outlawed contract labor, but the law proved hard to enforce.
Alliances of some native-built-in Americans with some immigrants against other immigrants proved nigh effective in the example of the Chinese. Roughly 180,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States between 1849 and 1882, and they became the personification of both the inassimilable immigrant and the contract worker. Although the Chinese came as complimentary laborers, they were often branded as coolies: abject semi-slaves, whose low standard of living allowed them to thrive on wages that could not support white families.
Racists had previously claimed that superior Anglo-Saxons would inevitably supersede "inferior" races. Only in the West, while Sinophobes saw the Chinese equally exotic and inferior, they too idea the Chinese would triumph over the supposedly superior white men because they were efficient workers. Immigrants and the native built-in formed mobs that attacked the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885 and expelled them from Tacoma, Washington, in 1885 and Seattle in 1886. Congress passed ten-year restrictions on Chinese immigration in 1882 and 1892 and a permanent exclusion act in 1902. Belatedly in the nineteenth century, those who opposed immigration from Italian republic, Hungary, and elsewhere compared those groups to the Chinese.
Some immigrants could wrap themselves in the drape of Americanism if they were "white" and Protestant. Protestant immigrants, peculiarly Scandinavians and Scots-Irish, joined the American Protective Association in 1887 to restrict Catholic clearing as it rode a larger wave of anti-Catholicism that swept over the country. Aimed initially at Irish and Cosmic schools, anti-Catholicism increased its range as new Catholic immigrants began to make it.
Agricultural, Commercial, and Industrial Evolution
Although not all of them intended to stay, virtually immigrants came to the United States for economic opportunity. Cheap land and relatively high wages, compared to their home countries, were bachelor regardless of citizenship. The Homestead Deed did not require that settlers filing for land be American citizens, and the railroads not only sold their state grants cheaply, they advertised widely in Europe.
The results of this distribution of fertile and largely accessible land were astonishing. Everything in the late nineteenth century seemed to move faster than always before. Americans brought more land under cultivation between 1870 and 1900 (225 meg acres) than they had since the English showtime appeared at Jamestown in 1607 (189 meg acres). Farmers abased small-scale, worn-out farms in the East and developed new, larger, and more fertile farms in the Midwest and Westward. They adult so much land considering they farmed extensively, not intensively. In terms of yields per acre, American farmers ranked far below Europe. Maintaining fertility demanded labor, which was precisely what American farmers were bent on reducing. They invested non in labor merely in technology, particularly improved plows, reapers, and threshers. With due west expansion onto the prairies, a single family unit with a reaper could increase acreage and thus product without large amounts of hired labor. Arable gratuitous lands grew scarcer during the 1880s, forcing more and more than land seekers west into barren lands beyond the 98th height. In many years these lands lacked acceptable rainfall to produce crops. "In God nosotros trusted, in Kansas nosotros disrepair" written on the side of a wagon cover by a family unit abandoning its homestead summed upwards the dangers of going as well far out onto the semi-arid and barren plains.
The expansion of agricultural lands led to what superficially seems a paradox: the more farmers there were—and the more productive farmers became—the smaller was agriculture's share of the economic system. Farmers had the largest share of the dollar value of American economic output until 1880 when commerce's 29 percentage of the gross national product edged out their 28 percent. In 1890 manufacturing and mining at 30 percent share of the GNP both exceeded agriculture'southward 19 percent share. During the same period, the percentage of workers employed in agronomics fell. A bulk of the nation's workers were farmers or subcontract laborers in 1860, merely by 1900 the figure had declined to 40 percent.
Such statistics seemed to reflect a decline in the importance of farming, just in fact, they reflected its significance and efficiency. Farmers produced more than than the country could consume with smaller and smaller percentages of its available labor. They exported the excess, and the children of farmers migrated to cities and towns. Where at the beginning of the century exports composed nigh x pct of farm income, they amounted to between xx and 25 pct by the cease of the century. What farmers sold abroad translated into savings and consumption at dwelling that fueled the nation's industry. Migration from rural to urban areas dwarfed both foreign migration and w migration. American agricultural productivity immune it to remain the world'due south greatest agricultural economy while it became the earth's largest industrial producer.
The ascension of industrial America, the potency of wage labor, and the growth of cities represented perhaps the greatest changes of the flow. Few Americans at the end of the Civil War had predictable the rapid rising of American manufacture. For the first time in the nation'south history, wage earners had come to outnumber the self-employed, and by the 1880s these wage earners were condign employees of larger and larger corporations. As the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics and Labor declared in 1873, wage labor was universal: "a arrangement more widely diffused than whatever form of religion, or of regime, or indeed, of any linguistic communication."[1]
Skilled workers proved remarkably successful at maintaining their position through the 1880s, but they had to fight to practice so. The relatively high wages for skilled workers led employers to seek ways to replace skilled with unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Mechanization provided the all-time tactic for deskilling piece of work and lowering wages. Many of the bitterest strikes of the period were attempts to control working rules and to maintain rather than raise wages. Commencement with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, through the Great Upheaval of 1886 that culminated in the slaughter at Haymarket Square, then through the Homestead Strike (1892), Pullman Strike (1894), and more, the largest confrontations often involved violence and the intervention by country or federal governments to repress the strikes.
Railroads
Many of these strikes involved the railroads; the whole economy seemed to revolve around the railroads. At the terminate of the 1870s the railroads renewed their expansion. With a brief break in the 1880s, expansion continued at a reckless pace until 1890. At the cease of 1890 more than xx percent of the 161,000 miles of railroad in the Usa had been synthetic in the previous iv years. By the stop of the century the railroad corporations rivaled the United States authorities in size. In 1891 the Pennsylvania Railroad had 110,000 employees, almost 3 times the number of men in all the armed forces of the United states of america. Its capitalization of $842 million was only $150 million less than the national debt. Nationally, 418,957 people worked for railroads in 1880 and virtually 800,000 in 1890: most iii percent of the entire work forcefulness of the nation. By 1900 roughly ane-sixth of all capital investments in United States were in the railroads.
The railroads powered the industrial economy. They consumed the majority of atomic number 26 and steel produced in the United states earlier 1890. As late every bit 1882, steel rails accounted for xc percent of the steel product in the United states. They were the nation's largest consumer of lumber and a major consumer of coal. They also distributed these bolt across the country.
At times, however, railroads threatened to haul the American economy into the abyss. Rail corporations overbuilt, borrowed recklessly, and were often atrociously managed. They ricocheted wildly betwixt charge per unit wars and the creation of pools to fix prices, and they encouraged other industries to follow. Wheat, silver, timber, cattle, and other commodities flooded the market place, sent prices tumbling, and dragged many producers into defalcation. The signal of every economic collapse in the late nineteenth century was the descent of railroads and the banks associated with them into receivership.
The Economy
The railroads were typical of the economic contradictions of the era. Over the period as a whole, American industry avant-garde apace. By 1900 the United States had one half the globe's manufacturing capacity. At the end of the century, information technology had overtaken Great Britain both in iron and steel product and in coal production. The United States made such great gains because information technology was the fastest runner in a relatively wearisome race. The entire menstruation from 1873 to the plough of the century became known as the Long Depression in western Europe. The Usa grew faster than European economies, although no faster than nations with similar British colonial backgrounds—Australia and Canada. Information technology actually grew more than slowly than Argentina. None of these economies, however, were remotely as large.
The growth was not even. Periods of prosperity alternated with deep downturns in a nail/bosom blueprint. The economy came out of the low post-obit the Panic of 1873 at the terminate of that decade, lurched into a short, sharp depression in 1882–1883, and and then brutal into a much more than severe depression from 1893 to 1897. Until the 1930s this was known as the Smashing Depression.
Such fluctuations in the American economy were linked to the larger world economic system. Important sectors of the American economic system globalized, putting American businesses and farmers in competition with other places in the world. I result was a steady downward force per unit area on prices. The Republican policy of maintaining tariff protection for American industry mitigated deflation on the domestic marketplace, only the return to the gold standard with the Resumption Act of 1875, which later became a major political issue, created compensatory deflationary pressure level that contributed to the full general reject in prices. This benefitted workers only every bit long as they were able to maintain their wages.
Economic changes manifested themselves in rates of immigration (which rose during good times and declined during bad), urbanization, types of work, family organization, and more. Social and cultural patterns, in turn, afflicted the economic system by determining who held certain jobs, how those jobs were valued, and where and how piece of work took place. The cumulative furnishings of these changes were staggering, and many Americans worried that immigration, urbanization, wage labor, and the ascension of large corporations undermined values that they thought divers the country itself.
Social Modify
The Civil War had seemed to secure the triumph of a earth of pocket-size producers and the values of costless labor, individualism, and contract freedom. Many Americans desperately wanted to believe that those values survived and withal ensured success inside the new industrial society. Sometimes they attached the old values to new theories. Herbert Spencer, the British author and philosopher, had many American disciples, of whom William Graham Sumner of Yale was probably the most prominent. Spencer and his disciples tried to empathize homo social change in terms of Darwinian evolution, utterly obfuscating the mechanisms of biological evolution in the procedure.
Other Americans merely tried to portray the new economy as essentially the same as the old. They believed that individual enterprise, difficult work, and gratis contest in open markets even so guaranteed success to those willing to work hard. An evolving mass print culture of cheap newspapers, magazines, and dime novels offered proselytizers of the old values new forms of communication. Horatio Alger, whose publishing career extended from the end of the Civil War to the finish of the century, wrote juvenile novels that reconciled the new economy with the quondam values of individualism. In his novels, an private's fate was even so in his hands.
Politics
Many other Americans did not think and then. They formed a lengthened reform motion contemporaries referred to as antimonopolism. Antimonopolists, including farmers, small businessmen, and workers in the Knights of Labor and other organizations, agreed on the problem, but frequently differed on the solution. They lamented the rise of large corporations, which to them were synonymous with monopoly. They worried about the dependence on wage labor, the growth of unemployment, particularly during the frequent panics and depressions, the proliferation of tramps as the poor who wandered in search of work were known, and the refuse of private independence. In the 1870s Walt Whitman lamented the homo casualties of the new economy. "If the United States, similar the countries of the Former World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations such equally we meet looming upon us of late years—steadily, fifty-fifty if slowly, eating into us like a cancer of lungs or stomach—then our republican experiment, however all its surface successes, is at centre an unhealthy failure."[ii]
Antimonopolists agreed that the purpose of a republican economic system was to sustain independent and prosperous republican citizens, simply how to restore the economy to that status was the problem. Some, probably a majority in the 1870s, sought government intervention to restore competition. Others, who grew in numbers in the 1880s and 1890s, accepted the inevitability of large corporations but desired that they be more tightly regulated. By the 1890s, the Populists, an antimonopolist third party centered on the Southward and West, advocated regime ownership of the railroads and the telegraphs.
In many ways the antimonopolists were successful. They comprised large factions inside both the Democratic and Republican Parties and created new third parties from the Greenbackers (1874–1884) to the Populists of the 1890s. In 1896, the climactic election of the catamenia pitted the antimonopolist William Jennings Bryan confronting the Republican William McKinley. Bryan lost, just many of the reforms antimonopolists advocated would be enacted over the next twenty years.
Many others were already in place. The inevitable compromises involved in passing legislation left a contradictory reform legacy. Some measures sought to restore competition past breaking upward trusts or holding companies while others accepted the existence of large corporations but enforced regulations to restrain them. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 initiated a movement to break up the largest trusts. Country railroad commissions, the most effective of which were in Iowa and Texas, and the Interstate Commerce Commission created in 1887 represented attempts to regulate corporations.
Symbols of Their Age
Certain people became meliorate known and meliorate remembered than the presidents of the menses because they came to stand for both the economy itself and people'south ideological views of it. Thomas Edison emerged as mayhap the nearly admired American of the age because he seemed to represent the triumph of individualism in an industrial economy. He congenital his famous lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876. The public regarded Edison as the "sorcerer of Menlo Park," simply information technology was ironically the lab—a cooperative enterprise—that produced the inventions from a workable electric light to the phonograph and more than. And when in 1890 Edison merged his lab and other businesses into General Electric, the human being who was a symbol of economic individualism became the head of a large corporation. That the corporate course captured Edison was not surprising because large corporations that commencement arose with the railroads before the Ceremonious War were coming to dominate the American economy during the Great Merger move of the 1890s.
John D. Rockefeller symbolized the darker view of the economy. His Standard Oil became the best-known and the best-hated corporation of the day. Rockefeller ruthlessly consolidated a competitive oil industry, absorbing rivals or driving them out of business. He was unapologetic, and he had simply disdain for those who still thought of the economy equally depending on individualism and contest. Organization and consolidation was the future. "The day of the combination is here to stay," he proclaimed. "Individualism has gone never to return."[3]
What was also gone was the U.s. as a purely continental nation. In many ways, the American acquisition of an overseas empire was a continuation of its continental expansion at the expense of American Indian peoples. But with the annexation of Hawaii (1898) and the subsequent annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico following the Castilian American War (1898), the United States extended its military machine and governmental reach across its continental boundaries. The state of war, like so many things, marked the vast changes that took identify in a neglected era.
[ane] Quoted in Amy Dru Stanley, From Chains to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market place in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62.
[2] Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), 330.
[three] Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller [1959], 1:622.
Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford Academy and a by president of the Organization of American Historians. His books include It'southward Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (1991), The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Not bad Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991), which won the Parkman Prize, and most recently Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).
Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essays/rise-industrial-america-1877-1900
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