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John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972) First Wave of Revision
Argument: “Based largely on the autobiographies of fugitive slaves and survivors of slavery, The Slave Community shatters the notion
that slaves were molded by a common experience into a common mold of suffling subserviency, Blassingame shows that the experience
of slavery was by no means the same experience for all salves at all times and places.” 132, Rose
• “Inside the plantation community there existed a black-white symbiosis with its own peculiar demands on everybody; beneath
the hairshirt of slavery were restless beings too often generalized about and too seldom identified by name.” 132, Rose
• “But by-and-large slaves were allowed room for the development of individual attributes and even talents; otherwise the
exploitation of their labor would have been incomplete. The slave’s family, his work, his community role, his religion and
culture, contributed to the maintenance of sanity and individuality.” 132, Rose
• Blassingame did not utilize the WPA’s slave narratives.
• “Blassingame broke with historiographical tradition by accepting antebellum slave narratives as the most useful source for
understanding the slave community. Viewing the slave quarter from the cabin step rather than the Big House vernada allowed
him to revise the prevailing interpretations of Sanley Elkins and Kenneth Stampp.” 148, Piersen
• “The typical bondsman emerges as a bridge between the stereotypes of Sambo and Nat, and the slave institution fluctuates
between the extremes of oppression and leniency. Such a position leaves considerable room for individual enterprise…” 114,
Mills
• “This book describes and analyzes the life of the black slave: his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior,
religion, and personality.” Xi
• “The ethnic origins of the first slaves are important primarily in relation to the extent to which native culture and economic
organization prepared the African for one facet of plantation life: systematic labor.” 6
• “The similarities between many European and African cultural elements enabled the slave to continue to engage in many
traditional activities or to create a synthesis of European and African cultures.” 20
• “The Africans retained enough manhood to rebel because the Southern plantation was not a rationally organized institution
designed to crush every manifestation of individual will or for systematic extermination.” 47
• “The key determinants in the acculturation of bondsmen historically have been the length of their servitude, the parallels
between their culture and that of their masters, the role of the masters’ governmental and religious leaders in protecting, training,
and converting the slaves to their faith, and the treatment and labor of bondsmen.” 49
• The Revolution and the Great Awakening created abolition parties in some Southern churches. G.A. also led many to free slaves
• “There is overwhelmingly convincing evidence that a substantial number of Southern slaveholders never rested easy with their
black species of property. While guilt was neither the South’s biggest nor smallest crop, it grew to sizable proportions among
women allied to slaveholding families.” 79
• Religion was given to slaves so they would be more docile and work harder. Slaves told to view slavery as God’s service 82
• “Shouting, singing, and preaching, the slaves released all of their despair and expressed their desires for freedom.” 135
• “The white man’s fear of the slave was so deep and pervasive that it was sometimes pathological.” 231
• Stereotypes of Nat, Mammies, and Sambo relieved whites as having to think of slaves as men and women.” 230
• “The typical slave used his wits to escape from work and punishment, preserved his manhood in the quarters, feigned humility,
identified with masters and worked industriously only when he was treated humanely, simulated deference, was hostilely
submissive and occasionally obstinate, ungovernerable, and rebellious. 322
• “While the concentration camp differed significantly from the plantation, it illustrates how, even under the most extreme
conditions, persecuted individuals can maintain their physical balance because of group solidarity, prior experience in similar
institutions, religious ideals, a culture differing greatly from that of their oppressors, prior referents for self-esteem, and physical
stamina.” 331
Sources: Slave autobiographies, secondary sources, psychological sources
Connections: Genovese, Roll, White, Ar’n’t
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972) First Wave of Revisionism: Fix Elkins
Argument: “In this book I refer to the “black nation” and argue that the slaves, as an objective social class, laid the foundations for a
separate black national culture while enormously enriching American culture as a whole. But that separate black national culture has
always been American, however much it has drawn on African origins or reflected the distant development of black people in America.
White and black southerners, however different they may claim to be and in some ways are, have come to form one people in vital
respects.” Xv
• “Genovese argues that American slavery must be viewed as a paternalistic institution. But that paternalism of slavery, he
maintains, was much more complex that the simple beneficence depicted in the pages of white southern folklore. Paternalism
created a mutual dependency that allowed blacks considerable opportunity for asserting rights and developing autonomous
cultural institutions. The masters’ need to see themselves as paternal figures required certain responses from their slaves, and the
blacks’ understanding of this essential fact gave them considerable room for self-assertion. In their very act of distinguishing
between good and bas masters, for example, the slaves revealed their understanding of the ambiguities of paternalism.” 162, Zil
• “The most significant area in which slaves asserted their autonomy was religion. Genovese makes an important contribution by
demonstrating the ways in which blacks created a religion that was a crucial resource for fostering individual self-respect and
group survival. Blacks created a new faith, combining Christianity with African traditions, rejecting the Christian concept of sin,
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and emphasizing the African “irrepressible affirmation of life.” The slaves’ religion blended the “image of Moses, the thisworldly leader of his people out of bondage, and Jesus, the otherworldly Redeemer.” Afro-Americans thereby transformed
Christianity “into a religion of resistance—not often of revolutionary defiance, but of a spiritual resistance that accepted the
limits of the politically possible.”” 162, Zilversmit
• “Genovese recognizes the subtleties and the ambiguities involved in developing ways of coping with an oppressive institution.
He argues, that “the legacy of paternalism, no matter how brilliantly manipulated to protect their own interests, kept the slaves
and generations of later blacks from a full appreciation of [their]…individual strength. And the intersection of paternalism with
racism worked a catastrophe, for it transformed elements of personal dependency into a sense of collective weakness.”” 162, Zil
• “[Genovese] is a Marxist who repudiates economic determinism. [Genovese maintains that] social classes have cultures and
“worldviews” that transcend their material interests.” 131, Fredrickson
• “The heart of Genovese’s interpretation of Afro-American slavery is his concept of paternalism. For him paternalism is a system
of mutual duties and obligations between social classes, as exemplified in the classic feudal formulations of the concept by
distinguishing the master’s view of the relationship from that of the slaves. The masters saw their role as one of providing
protection for helpless dependents, and they expected gratitude from their charges; the slaves saw the relationship as involving
genuine reciprocity. By fulfilling their obligation to work for the masters, they established a claim to “customary rights,” which
included a certain level of material well being, reasonable standards of discipline, and, most important, some breathing space in
which to assert their cultural autonomy and sense of community. They generally had their way, Genovese suggests and felt no
reason to be grateful for what was only their due. The slaves accepted paternalism on their own terms, which meant that they
asserted their humanity and rejected slavery; for slavery by definition denies any rights or independent will to the enslaved.” 132
• “Placing the southern “domestic institution” in the broad context of labor arrangements elsewhere in the nineteenth-century
world, Genovese draws effectively from the works of Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, and many others in the
European structuralist tradition.” 240, Brown
• “The central thesis: the interrelatedness of black accommodation and resistance in the authoritarian framework. Rather than
serving as points of paradox or fain irony, slave acquiescence and self-assertiveness move rhythmically together throughout the
work like a brooding, percussive line in a symphonic score.” 240, Brown
• “Analysis of slave weddings and burials, work habits and family exchange, and all the other rituals that lent black experience a
meaning beyond the immediacy of bondage. Rejecting old and recent stereotypes of race behavior, Genovese honors such
maligned figures as the black preacher, the household “mammy,” the slave driver, as well as the ordinary members of
families…slave assumed leadership as occasion or duty required but usually rejected outright rebellion so that they and their
kindred could make the best of a sad existence.” 240, Brown
• “[Genovese’s] conclusion is that, though far less bellicose and modernistic than we of more blessed times might wish, the
antebellum black southerner…endured.” 240, Brown
• “Eloquently, Roll, Jordan, Roll demonstrates how accommodation merged into resistance, and rebellion into acceptance of what
could not be overturned, only modified, hour by hour.” 240, Brown
• “I hope I have shown that slaves made an indispensable contribution to the development of black culture and black national
consciousness as well as to American nationality as a whole.” xvi
• “I have chosen to stay close to my primary responsibility: to tell a storey of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible.”
Xvi
• “Slavery, especially in its plantation setting and in its paternalistic aspect, made white and black southerners one people while
making them two. As in a lasting although not necessarily happy marriage, two discrete individuals shared, for better or worse,
one life.” Xvi-xvii
Sources: theory, secondary sources, sermons, diaries, correspondence, laws, court records
Connections: Blassingame, Slave Community, Oakes, Ruling Race, White, Ar’n’t
James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982) 2nd wave of revisionism: Scope Expans of Slave System
Argument: “I have been guided by two priorities: First, I have tried to establish an accurate portrait of the entire slaveholding class, and
to demonstrate that the slaveholders were a more diverse group that has generally been appreciated. Second, I have tried to elicit larger
patterns of political, ideological, economic, and demographic development without doing violence to the evidence of diversity within the
slaveholding class.” Xv
• “How, I asked, did race and class interact in the daily lives and lifelong careers of the slaveholders themselves?...The
slaveholders were a ruling class if ever there was one, but they justified their power by defining themselves as a superior race.” x
• “ I set out in this book to explore, through the history of the slaveholders, America’s simultaneous commitment to slavery and
freedom. I wanted to see how the slaveholders, as founds and heirs of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, fit racial slavery
into their conception of the world.” Xi
• “Most slaveholders believed that through hard work and fugal habits they could accumulate more land and more slaves. They
thus saw slavery as a means to what we now call upward mobility. They claimed, albeit with little evidence to back themselves
up, that industrious yeomen farmers could rise from slavelessness to slaveownership.” XI
• “Every historian of the Old South knows that while the majority of slaves lived on units with more than twenty bondsmen, the
majority of slaveholders owned five slaves or fewer. Thus, the “typical” slaveholder did not necessarily own the “typical” slave.
Most historians have used this fact to justify their emphasis on large plantations.” Xvi
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“paternalism is the ideological legacy of a feudal political system with no fully developed market economy; liberalism developed
alongside political democracy and free-market commercialism. The two systems are thus intrinsically antagonistic, and this
antagonism will be heightened when a paternalistic social order finds itself virtually isolated in an increasingly liberal world.
These appear to be Genovese’s assumptions; they are mine also.” Xviii
“I see paternalism giving way to liberalism throughout colonial, revolutionary, and pre-Civil War America. Genovese finds a
reversal of centuries of historical development in the wake of America’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, after
which the South retreated rapidly into a highly sophisticated paternalistic social order such as the New World had never before
known. Genovese argues that slaveholders were temperamentally hostile to the political democracy in which they operated.”
Xviii
“I have found some slaveholders who articulated a paternalistic world view with increasing stridency as the Civil War
approached; some slaveholders who were overtly and increasingly hostile to democracy; and one who went so far as to repudiate
free trade.” Xviii
“Genovese…indeed argues something like the opposite: that paternalism flourished in direct proportion to the expansion of the
cotton economy. In so arguing, he ignores—almost completely—the profound impact of the market economy on the nature of
slavery, and it is this issue on which our disagreement is deepest.” Xix
“Virtually every recent historian of slave life argues that Afro-American culture provided the means by which bondsmen
successfully resisted the dehumanizing tendencies of the slave regime. I have tried to complement these studies by showing how
often unstated assumptions and daily behavior of the slaveholders contributed to the dehumanization to which Afro-Americans
were forced to adapt.” Xx
“Born to an age that rewarded wealth with political power, the master class eventually thrust itself into the struggle for
democracy. Slaveholders took the lead in the American Revolution, authored its most cherished documents, and carried the
struggle into the nineteenth century. Taking its name from one of America’s wealthiest planters, the “age of Jackson” saw the
principles of democratic egalitarianism implemented by slaveholding politicians who made the white man’s freedom the black
man’s burden.” 226
“The slaveholding experience coincided with the American experience at large. Except for its defense of bondage, the
slaveholders’ ideology was strikingly similar to the Republican party ideology of the 1850’s. Indeed it was this closeness that so
frightened the master clas. Free soil and free labor were for most slaveholders the inalienable rights of free white men.
Furthermore, they were the rights that the institution of slavery sustained.” 227
“[Slaveholders] viewed human bondage as the basis of their entire civilization. The president of the Florida secession
convention declared that “at the south, with our people of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that
destroys all that is property.” Mississippi secessionists publicly announced that their position was “thoroughly identified with
the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”…By placing slavery at the heart of their society, the
master class came into conflict with a northern tradition that claimed the same ideological heritage.” 227
“From 1815 to 1839 the cotton trade provided much of the export capital to finance northeastern economic growth. But, after
1840, slavery’s importance to the northern economy declined even as the southern slave economy continued to prosper. Indeed,
so successfully had the American economy developed outside the South that the rest of the nation was increasingly able to
prosper independently of the cotton trade.” 228
“Thus, just when the South’s predominance was declining, western lands became increasingly important to northern economic
growth. That the traditionally expansive slave economy should come into conflict with the North over the issue of western lands
was hardly surprising. For both the North and the South, territorial expansion spoke directly to the great questions of slavery and
freedom.” 228
“The basis of the slaveholders’ authority had always been the capacity of the slave economy to distribute its wealth, however
unequally, to a significant fraction of the southern white population. But, beginning around 1830, that population began to
expand so quickly as to create demands that the slave economy could no longer meet. The percentage of slaveholding families
in the South was shrinking, and with increasing velocity in the 1850’s…But whatever its ultimate cause, the declining proportion
of slaveholders threatened to undermine their authority by closing off popular avenues of material advancement, thus
jeopardizing the masters; ability to sustain the loyalty of the nonslaveholdig whites.” 229
“If the slaveholders felt compelled to advocate measures that would ensure the survival of slavery, abolitionists opposed those
measures precisely because they hoped to see slavery die. In so doing, they brought to the surface the gravest fear of the
slaveholding class: that emancipation of the slaves would so threaten the “purity” of whites as to raise the specter of a bloody
race war across the South.” 233
“The slaveholders could not conceive of a society in which blacks and whites lived in equality and harmony. This powerful
conviction informed their actions throughout the sectional crisis.” 234
“Whereas Genovese argues that slavery was a precapitalist social system which generated a ruling class with aristocratic
pretensions and an emerging world-veiw antithetical to bourgeois values, Oakes argues that slavery was capitalistic and that the
slaveholders eagerly embraced the values of the marketplace and political democracy (for whites). Whereas Genovese argues
that the master-slave relationship became increasingly paternalistic over time, Oakes argues that it became decreasingly
paternalistic. Whereas Genovese argues that wealthy planters achieved hegemony within the slaveholding class and the larger
civil planters achieved hegemony within the slaveholding class and the larger civil society and moved toward a defense of
4
slavery in the abstract, Oakes argues that small slaveholders were politically, as well as numerically, dominant within their class
and held fast to a racial and economic defense of bondage.” 220, Hahn
• “[Oakes’] main themes are that owners of small umbers of slaves were far more numerous than planters, and typically they were
restless, accumulating, middle-class farmers, much more comfortable with the democratic ideologies of the nineteenth century
than with antiquated doctrines of patriarchy and paternalism.” 691, Wright
Sources: journals, estate papers, correspondence, court records, secondary sources
Connections: Genovese, Roll, Blassingame, Slave Community
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) 2nd wave of Slavery revisionism: Scope
Argument: “This present study takes a look at slave women in America and argues that they were not submissive, subordinate, or
prudish and that they were not expected to be so. While the focus is primarily Southern antebellum plantation life it does not ignore
bonded women in the colonial and early American South. Women, it will be seen, had different roles from those of men and they also
had a great deal in common with their African foremothers, who, in many precolonial West African societies, held positions not inferior
but complementary to those of men. This study also argues that mutual respect characterized relationships between the sexes. If the male
supremacy of the Big House did not infiltrate the quarters it was in part because the jobs and services performed by slave women for the
community were not peripheral but central to slave survival. Evidence presented here also suggests that slave women had a high degree
of sex consciousness and that it was encouraged by the plantation work regimen, which required women and girls to work together in
groups and which made black women highly dependent on each other.” 22
• We cannot consider who black women are as black people without considering their sex, nor can we consider who they are as
women without considering their race.” 6
• “African and African-American women were not born degraded but rendered so by enslavement.” 8
• “As part of this revisionist history Ar’n’t I a Woman? argued that “despite the brutality and inhumanity, or perhaps because of it,
a distinct African-American culture based on close-knit relationships grew and thrived, and that it was this culture that sustained
black people.” Like others I focused on the community of the quarters and the slave family, but I also highlighted the network of
enslaved women, their will to quietly resist and avoid total domination. I held then and still believe that “in the assimilation of
culture, in the interaction of blacks and whites, there were gray areas and relationships more aptly described in terms of black
over white.” 8
• “The slave woman’s condition was just an extreme case of what women as a group experienced in America. Many activities
were circumscribed and hopes blunted by the conventional wisdom that a woman’s place was in the home. Women were
overworked and underpaid in factories and other work places because the were denied the legal and social sanctions necessary to
fight unjust and intolerable working conditions.” 15
• “For antebellum black women, however, sexism was but one of three constraints. Most were slaves, and as such were denied the
“privilege,” enjoyed by white feminists, of theorizing about bondage, for they were literally owned by someone else. They were
slaves because they were black and even more than sex, color was the absolute determinant of class in antebellum America.” 15
• “The feeling in antebellum America was that women needed male guidance because women were fickle and weak-willed. Slave
women demonstrated that sex was not an absolute determinant of skill, will power, aptitude, or even strength. Undoubtedly they
wanted the whip off their backs and an end to all other iniquities that came with slavery, but did they want America’s ideas about
a woman’s place to envelop them?” 16
• “American white women were expected to be passive because they were female. But black women had to be submissive
because they were black and slaves. This made a difference in the sex roles of black and white women, as well as in the
expectations that their respective societies had of them.” 17
• “The direction that the research took, however, was in large part predetermined because Elkins’ Slavery defined the parameters
of the debate. In a very subtle way these parameters had more to do with the nature of male slavery than with female slavery.”18
• “However, both sexes did not travel the [middle] passage the same way. Women made the journey on the quarter and half
decks.” 19
• “That Elkins seemed to omit women altogether was accentuated by his description of slaves whom he identified as part of an
American “underground,” those who never succumbed to Sambosim. Among those mentioned were Gabriel, who led the revolt
of 1800, Denmark Vessey, leading spirit in of the 1822 plot in Charleston, and Nat Turner, the Virginia slave who fomented
rebellion in 1831. An omission, conspicuous by its absences, was Harriet Tubman, a woman who in her own way waged a
successful little private war against Souther slaveholders. If Elkins had really been thinking of slaves of both sexes he would
hardly forget this woman, who became known widely as the Moses of her people.” 19-20
• “Following the lead of E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Stampp, Elkins maintained that women were allowed the alternative role
of mother…The etiquette of plantation life, explained Elkins, even deprived the black male of the honorific attributes of
fatherhood. Since Elkins’ Sambo theory rested, in part, on the absence of significant alternative roles for a slave, to recognize
the role of mother was tantamount, on Elkins’ part, to arguing that black women escaped Samboism.” 20
• “But the byword for blacks at the time Elkins’ Slavery was circulating was “militancy,” the ideology was black power. If the
stage Elkins set for the debate over slavery was one that reemphasized the femininity of race, those who did most of the debating
were bent on defemininizing black men, sometimes by emphasizing the masculine roles played by slave men, and sometimes by
imposing the Victorian model of domesticity and maternity on the pattern of black female slave life.” 21
5
“John Blassingame’s The Slave Community, Plantation Life in the Antebellum South [is a class work] but much of it deals with
male status. For instance, Blassingame stressed the fact that many masters recognized the male as the head of the family. He
observed that during courtship men flattered women and exaggerated prowess. There was, however, little discussion of the
reciprocal activities of slave women. Blassingame also described how slave men gained status in the family and slave
community, but he did not do the same for women.” 21
• “Eugene Genovese argued in Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World that Slave Made, that female slaves did not assert themselves,
protect their children, or assume other normally masculine activities.” 21
• “Much of what is important to black Americans is not visible to whites, and much of what is important to women is not visible to
men. Whites wrote most of antebellum America’s records and African-American males wrote just about all of the antebellum
records left by blacks. To both groups the female slave’s world was peripheral. The bondwoman was important to them only
when her activities somehow involved them.” 23
• “Women, like slaves, and servants, deliberately dissemble their objective reality. Like all who are dependent upon the caprices
of a master, they hide their real sentiments and turn toward him a changeless smile or an enigmatic impassivity.” 24
• “It is unfortunate, but so much of what we would like to know about slave women can never be known because they masked
their thoughts and personalities in order to protect valued parts of their lives from white and male invasion.” 24
• “As White points out in her opening chapter, when the dominant white society did look at black women, all it could see were
self-serving stereotypes—reflection of its own desires. Some black women were seen as “Jezebels,” sex-crazed females who
could conveniently be blamed for white males’ lust. Other black women were thought to be “Mammies,” loyal servants and
surrogate mothers whose selfless love for white children conveniently demonstrated the absence of oppression and the bonds of
affection which united the races.” 252, Greenberg
• Slave experiences differed: “While male slaves came to the new world in disproportionately large numbers during the early
colonial period, by the middle of the eighteenth century the pattern began to equalize. Masters realized the economic value of a
slave force which could reproduce itself. Although women continued to be used as field laborers, their ability to bear children
gave them added value. Ironically, according to White, the master’s desire to encourage female childbearing and childcare
coincided with a role traditionally assumed by West African women. Hence, the economic desires of masters and the traditions
of enslaved Africans reinforced each other to shape a unique female experience of slavery.” 253, Greenberg
• “White also points out that the close connections between black women and children meant that mothers were less likely to resist
slavery by running away. To run from a master usually mean abandoning a child.” 253, Greenberg
• “Slave women rarely left their farms for any reason. If they were involved in an “abroad” marriage, the many usually visited the
wife.” 253, Greenberg
• “Women spent most of their time with other women and they forged the closest bonds among themselves. Women did field
work in sex-segregated gangs. Some of the happiest experiences of a slave woman’s life centered around such female group
activities as doing laundry or quilting. In matters of health, black women usually relied on other black women with abilities as
midwives or herb doctors. Childcare responsibilities were shared by the community of women. Cooks, seamstresses, midwives,
and others learned their distinctive skills from other black women. According to White, with husbands often on other plantations
and always subject to the threat of sale, the closest and most stable relationships often developed between black female kin.” 254
Sources: WPA narratives, ex-slave narratives (men), plantation ledgers, plantation records, owner correspondence, African research
Connections: Blassingame, The Slave Community, Genovese, Roll, Jacobs, Incidents
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Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) 2nd Wave of Revisionism: Scope Expans. Slave System
Argument: “Every one of the two million human-selling transactions which outlined the history of the antebellum South proved a way
into it deepest secrets: into the aspirations of southern slaveholders and the fears of southern slaves; into the depth of the slaveholders’
daily dependence on their slaves, despite claims of lofty independence; into the dreams of resistance that often lurked within the hearts of
slaves; into the terrible density of the interchange between masters and slaves, whose bodies and souls were daily fused into common
futures in the slave market.” 17
• “The history of the antebellum South was made (and occasionally unmade) in the slave pens. There, through the black arts of the
trade, people were turned into products and sold at a prices; there, human bodies were stripped, examined, and assigned meaning
according to the brutal anatomy lessons of slaveholding ideology; there, slaveholders daily gambled their own fantasies of
freedom on the behavior of people whom they could never fully commodify; there, enslaved people fashioned commodities and
identities that enabled them to survive on of the most brutal forcible dislocation of human history; and there, sometimes, slaves
were able to shape a sale to suit themselves. In the slave market, slaveholders and slaves were fused into an unstable mutuality
which made it hard to tell where one’s history ended and the other’s began.” 214
• “The fact that slaveholders included so much about the slave market in their letters is absolutely central to one of the arguments
of this book: that slave holders often represented themselves to one another by reference to their slaves.” 13
• “The closing of the Atlantic slave trade did not mean that North American slavery would wither away through the high mortality
and low birth rates that characterized slavery elsewhere in the New World. It meant, instead, that any expansion of slavery into
the western states would take the shape of a forcible relocation of American-born slaves. In the seven decades between the
Constitution and the Civil War, approximately one million enslaved people were relocated from the upper South to the lower
South according to the dictates of the slaveholders’ economy, two thirds of these through a pattern of commerce that soon be
came institutionalized as the domestic slave trade.” 5
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“In its earliest years the domestic slave trade was probably not recognizable as such. By the end of the eighteenth century slave
coffles were a common enough sight on the roads connecting the declining Chesapeake—its soil exhausted by a century of
tobacco planting—to the expanding regions of post-Revolutionary slavery, the Carolinas to the south and Kentucky and
Tennessee to the west. But in these years the trade was a practice without a name or a center, a series of speculations made
along the roads linking the small towns of the rural South into an attenuated political economy of slavery. As the coffles
traveled south, slaves were sold at dusty crossings and roadhouses through informal rural networks of traders and chance
encounters that continued to characterize much of the trade throughout its massive nineteenth-century expansion.” 5
“As the end of the eighteenth century, the slave trade began to follow the international demand curve for cotton. Although
slaves continued to cultivate tobacco, rice, and indigo that funded the first expansion of American slavery, the invention of the
cotton gin in 1793, the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, and the subjugation of southern Indians, finalized along the Trail of Tears
in 1838, opened new regions of the South to cultivation and slavery.” 5
“the price, of slaves tracked the price of cotton to such a degree that it was commonplace in the years after 1840 that the price of
slaves could be determined by multiplying the price of cotton by ten thousand (seven cents per pound for cotton yielding seven
hundred dollars per slave). Only in the 1850s did slave prices seem to cut loose from cotton prices in a cycle of speculation that
made entry into the slaveholding class prohibitively expensive.” 6
“Those hundreds of thousands of people were revenue to the cities and states where they were sold, and profits in the pockets of
landlords, provisioners, physicians, and insurance agents long before they were sold. The most recent estimate of the size of this
ancillary economy is 13.5% of the price per person—tens of millions of dollars over the course of the antebellum period.” 6
“Along with the two thirds of a million people moved through the interstate trade, there were twice as many who were sold
locally. Slaves from neighbor to neighbor, state-supervised probate and debt sales, or brokered sales within a single state do not
show up in the statistics that have been used to measure the extent and magnitude of the slave trade.” 6-7
“This project takes the form of a thrice-told tale: the story of a single moment—a slave sale—told from three different
perspectives…this book began with the idea that the history of any struggle, no matter how one-sided its initial appearance, is
incomplete until told from the perspectives of all those whose agency shaped the outcome.” 8
“In what follows I have used three strategies to accomplish the dual task of reading the history of the many in the stories of the
few and separating the experience of slavery form the ideology of anti=slavery. First, I have read the narratives in tandem with
sources produced by slaveholders and visitors to the South…Second, I have read the narratives for traces of the experience of
slavery antecedent to the ideology of antislavery, for the “facts” provided by Frederick Douglass without which William Lloyd
Garrison could not have fashioned his “philosophy”…”Third, I have read the narratives for symbolic truths that stretch beyond
the facticity of specific events...In addition to the slave narratives, I have relied heavily on the docket records of approximately
two hundred cases of disputed slave sales that came before the Louisiana [Supreme C.] in the 19th century.”10-12
“Finally, I have relied on the chillingly economical descriptions of slave sale generated by the trade itself: the notarized Acts of
Sale by which a sale was given legal standing, and the traders’ slave record books, price lists, and advertisements.” 14
“This history, then, is not organized around “change over time” in the traditional sense. It does not begin at one time (say 1820)
and progress toward another (say 1860), providing an overview of the history of the slave trade in between…Instead, it begins
with the efforts of various historical actors—traders, buyers, or slaves—to imaging, assimilate, respond to, or resist the slave
trade, with the desires and fears that gave the trade its daily shape. The scope and scale of the chapters shifts according to the
efforts of the participants to understand and control the history in which they were joined.” 15
“Even as the traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” oiling their bodies, and dressing them in new clothes, they were
forced to rely on the slaves to sell themselves, to act as they had been advertised to be. Likewise, even as slave buyers, and
asked them questions, they depended on the slaves to give them answers that would help them look beyond the traders’ arts. The
stakes were high, for their identities as masters and mistresses, planters and paternalists, hosts and hostesses, slave breakers and
sexual predators were all lived through the bodies of people who could be bought and sold in the market.” 16
“During their time in the trade, the slaves had come to know and trust one another, and in the market they could share their
observations of the slaveholders and collectively (and sometimes violently) resist them. Even those who did not revolt found
ways to resist the trade. In the way they answered questions, characterized their skills, and carried their bodies—in the way they
performed their commodification—slaves could use the information unwittingly provided them by the traders’ preparations and
the buyers’ examinations to select the best among the poisoned outcomes promised them by the trade.” 16-17
“This, then is a book not only about Louisiana, or the slave market in New Orleans, or the domestic slave trade as a whole,
although it is all those things. This is the story of the making of the antebellum South.” 18
“As they were driven south and west by people they called “soul drivers,” those slaves carried with them the cultural forms—the
songs, the stories, the family names, and the religion—out of which they forged the commonalities that supported their daily
struggle against slavery.” 215
“Even as it transformed the geography of both white and black life in the South, the criss-crossed pattern of the slave trade knit
the political economy of slavery into a cohesive whole. Long after intensive tobacco farming had eroded the fertility and
profitability of the slave-cultivated fields of the Chesapeake, the slave trade enabled Virginia and Maryland planters to retain
their ties to the political economy of slavery…the planters of the Chesapeake were slave farmers who held onto their wealth and
status by supplying the cotton boom with the offspring of slaves idled by the decline of tobacco….in the 1850s, when for a time
it seemed that the upper South was being overtaken by a renewed tobacco boom, the trade began to flow northward as well as
southward.” 215
7
“The crude spectacle that was daily on view in the slave pen—a human body publicly stripped, examined, priced, and sold—thus
became an image that stood for the whole of slavery. The daily process of the trade provided a template through which
opponents of slavery could establish the connections between the upper South and the Lower, between kind affection for their
slaves and the unmistakable material reality of a person with a price. By thinking their way through the slave trade, critics of
slavery like Pennington could articulate the links that joined individual slaveholders to the broader system and argue that the
essence of slavery lay in the worst of its abuses rather than the rosiest of its promises.” 219
• “Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul…refines the paternalist interpretation of slavery. The slave system’s pervasive violence belied
the presence of a set of reciprocal duties and responsibilities. The daily history of slavery, Johnson contends, began in the slave
market’s showrooms as a contest between the slaveholder’s efforts to beat their slaves into submission and the slaves’ collective
will to resist.” 650, Bell
Sources: slave narratives, antislavery propaganda, proslavery propaganda, court records, sale ledgers, newspaper advertisements
Connections: Blassingame, The Slave Community, Genovese, Roll, Oakes, Ruling, White, Ar’n’t
•
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877 (1993) Synthesis of 2nd Wave Revisionism
Argument: “Kolchin argues that slavery in British North America did not result from a predetermined plan. Rather, the British, who
were “color blind” in their initial effort to fill the demand for labor, with Europeans and a smaller number of Indians providing much of
the labor, did not switch to African labor until the European labor well had run dry. The use of black labor was therefore not
ideologically motivated [very Edmund Morganesque]. By the 1680s Africans had replaced Europeans and Indians as the dominant
group.” 93, Johnson
• “In writing this volume, I have had several goals in mind. First, I have sought to creat an account of slavery that is at the same
time substantive and historiographical. Because historical reinterpretation is a continuing process, any understanding of slavery
requires coming to grips with the diverse and changing ways in which historians have treated the institution. I thus combine a
primary focus on the evolution of slavery itself with frequent brief (and I hope unobtrusive) discussions of historical
controversies over slavery.” X
• “Second, I have aimed for a balanced approach that pays attention to the slaves, the slave owners, and the system that bound
them together. For years, historians treated slaves primarily as objects of white action rather than as subjects in their own right,
and largely ignored the behavior and beliefs of the slaves themselves…I believe that neither slaves nor slave owners can be
understood in isolation from each other: a well-rounded study of slavery must come to grips with slaves as both subjects and
objects and must consider slavery from their perspective of both the masters and the slaves while adopting the perspective of
neither.” x-xi
• “Third, I have striven to show how slavery changed over time…Finally, although this is a study of American slavery, I have
placed that slavery within a broad comparative context…In the modern era, American slavery was part of a larger system of
New World slavery that reached its height of development in the Caribbean and Brazil and emerged contemporaneously with the
widespread use of forced labor in Eastern Europe, the most notable example of which was provided by Russian serfdom. The
comparative approach to slavery has yielded important insights, enabling scholars both to note common patterns and to probe the
ways in which geographically varied historical conditions shaped differing social relations.” Xi-xii
• “The new revisionism is both less well known and harder to summarize succinctly, in part because its practitioners are pursuing
a less unified goal: rather than aiming to refute notions of slave docility, they seek in a wide variety of different ways to refine
and add complexity to our understanding of slavery.” 239
• “The current scholarship in general exhibits a more cautious tone than that of the 1970s. Many of the most influential works of
that decade were big and bold; typically, they dealt with the entire South…With some exceptions, the most notable of which are
Ira Berlin’s sweeping surveys Many Thousands Gone and Generations of Captivity, most recent and current historians of slavery
have tended to shy away from establishing new paradigms or from making claims concerning slavery in general throughout the
entire South, in favor of exploring particular dimensions or angles or geographic areas [Like Philip D. Morgan].” 244-245
• “This more muted tone [by current historians] is not entirely surprising; indeed, it is what one might very well expect in the
refining and filling-in stage of scholarship that has followed the pathbreaking but less nuanced works of the first revisionist
wave…As slavery scholarship has become more cautious, more balanced, more narrowly focused, more sophisticated, and more
voluminous, it has also become less familiar, less noteworthy, and perhaps less accessible, to those who are not experts in the
field.” 245
• “This ambitious book has some good qualities. It covers a great deal of ground in relatively few pages, is clearly, simply,
straightforwardly written, and pays attention to changes over time and to some extent over space.” 575, Hall
• “Although Kolchin is correct that slaves culture(s) cannot be discussed in isolation from white culture(s) and the institution of
slavery, his image is of an orderly world in which the cultural influence went largely one way: from knowledgeable whites to
ignorant blacks. In fact, most of the crops cultivated in the Americas were domesticated in or introduced into and widely
cultivated in Africa long before the United States was colonized.” 575, Hall
• “Most of the book is devoted to an examination of how American slavery changed over time—from the colonial period, to the
American Revolution, to the antebellum period, and concluding with a discussion of Reconstruction. During the colonial period,
“slavery acquired some common features that distinguished it in significant ways from slavery elsewhere” (29). The
Revolutionary War had a major impact on slavery. After the war, differentiation between the Upper and Lower South became
greater and slave autonomy increased in both sections. Changes continued during the antebellum period; slavery became more
8
rigid and paternalistic, at the same time it became increasingly distinctive, and masters interfered in the lives of their slaves to an
“extraordinary” degree.” 93, Johnson
• “[Kolchin] argues, instead, that “slaves did not really form communities in the sense that peasants did..they did develop a
common identification that substituted for—and has often been confused with—a sense of community” (153).” 93, Johnson
• “Southerners according to Kolchin, were Americans just like northerners, but “Southerners lived in a slave society whose history
differed in important ways from that of other Americans” (171).” Finally, Kolchin argues that Reconstruction was, indeed, an
“extraordinary departure.” 93-94, Johnson
• “The book, moreover, devotes little attention to the practice of slavery in the northern colonies as well as to urban slavery, and
ignores the early republic as a distinct period of American history.” 94, Johnson
Sources: Secondary—it’s a synthesis
Connections: Blassingame, The Slave Community, Genovese, Roll, Oakes, Ruling, White, Ar’n’t, Johnson, Soul
Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1974)
Argument: “Wood seems to cast his vote more on the side of those who emphasize rebelliousness than of those who stress the
psychologically induced docility of the slave population [by climaxing his book with the Stono Rebellion (1739)]…Wood seems to adopt
the version of the position advanced by Oscar and Mary Handlin in their 1950 article, namely, that slavery was less a result of racial
antipathy toward blacks than a product of the demands of a plantation system that reduced blacks to slavery to meet its need for labor and
then regarded slavery as a badge of inferiority.” 63, Tate
• 1st wave of revision
• “”The literature about slavery in the British North American colonies is sparse, and nowhere has the dearth bee more
unfortunate than in regard to South Carolina, where blacks early constituted a majority of the population.” 335, Weir
• “By employing modern concepts of epidemiology [Wood] is able to substantiate the early belief that Africans were more
resistant than whites to the fevers endemic in the lowland swamps. In addition, Wood believes that blacks, many of whom had
long been familiar with the rice plant, probably contributed much of the know-how as well as the labor necessary to its
successful cultivation. Skilled in raising livestock, fishing, and woodcraft many Africans also proved to be adept as artisans.
Initially, therefore, they engaged in a wide range of occupations that often permitted a considerable degree of independence and
intimate contact with whites. But their increasing numbers led to greater anxieties in the white community, which then
tightened restrictions. In turn slaves ran away and plotted insurrection with greater frequency. Ultimately, these forms of
resistance culminated in the Stono Rebellion, when perhaps as many as one hundred slaves set out for St. Augustine and
freedom. But the revolt failed, and, according to Wood, the resulting repression systematized in Negro Act of 1740 was
successful in preventing further serious rebellions during the remained of the colonial period.” 335, Weir
• “Wood sensibly describes the transferal of West African culture to the New World. The West Africans’ skills at husbandry,
boating, farming, and ready acclimation to the subtropical environment worked mightily toward the colony’s wealth and
prominence in the eighteenth century. The author also convincingly shows that in spite of enslavement, the first blacks enjoyed
a great deal of freedom during the pioneer period. Whites and blacks lived and worked together in the mutual dependence
implicit in pioneer existence.” 103, Walsh
• “In fact, the colonial ancestors of present-day Afro-Americans are more likely to have first confronted North America at
Charlestown than at any other port of entry. It has been estimated that well over 40 per cent of the slaves reaching the British
mainland colonies between 1700 and 1775 arrived in South Carolina, while most of the remained were scattered through
northern ports.” XIV
• “As one might expect, it became increasingly clear that the role of the black majority was major rather than minor, active rather
than passive. Negro slaves played a significant and often determinative part in the evolution of the colony.” Xvii
• “It appeared that the transition to an African work force at the start of the eighteenth century, due to the interweaving of
variables which are widely familiar, may also have depended in part upon several factors explored here in detail for the first
time. A number of Africans possessed prior familiarity with rice cultivation, which could have greatly enhanced the value of all
blacks as workers, particularly in the years when this commodity was first being established. Furthermore, West Africans, like
Scilians and others who have lived in malarious climates for centuries, had retained a high incidence of sickle-cell trait, a
genetic characteristic the negative effects of which were balanced by is positive contribution: the ability to inhibit malaria
among humans constantly exposed to infectious mosquitoes.” Xvii-xviii
• “Although the fraction of this wider migration that embarked for Carolina was never large, those who traveled to that coast from
Barbados—both blacks and whites—were to make up a significant segment of the first permanent colony in that region after
1670. And even during the preceding decade, the activities of a group of Barbadian Adventurers helped lay out the terms under
which the Carolina coast would eventually be colonized.” 9
• “While I have not limited my sources racially, I have made an effort to confine them chronologically. Too often Afro-American
history has been read backward, with nineteenth-century life.” Xviii
• “Scholars leave “the impression that the institution [of slavery] was a static one, and that the records for studying its evolution
from the beginning of settlement do not exist.” Too, [Wood] reminds us that Africans were “the earliest of any major contingent
of ethnic immigrants” and that “the proportion of Negroes in the population would never again be so high as it was during the
eighteenth century.” (xviii) 59, Tate
9
“Black Majority obviously continues the tradition of separate studies on individual colonies as has much of the other recent
work…If colonial historians of slavery are, however, still writing its history colony by colony…” 60, Tate This was how it was
written in the beginning, colony by colony rather than broad, synthesizing works.
• “In his computation of slave importations into the colony, which goes beyond the evidence compiled by Elizabeth Donnan,
[Wood] finds a particularly heavy flow of Africans in the 1730s, largely from the single region of Angola, which proves to bear
directly upon the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the climactic event of the book.” 60, Tate
• “The organizing principle of the book is that a tree-stage development of slavery in South Carolina from the founding of the
colony in 1670 to about 1740, in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion, Wood concludes, slavery had been set upon a course
from which there was little change of turning back.” 60, Tate
• “The first settlers came largely from Barbados, brining with them blacks who had been part of the slave system already
established there.” 61, Tate
• “The second phase extend from 1690 to the beginning of royal government in 1720. It, too, was a period of “pioneering,” on a
larger scale than before but with the same variety of economic pursuits—timber cutting, naval stores, fishing, cattle raising, and,
of course, some agriculture. To Wood, however, it was a time in black-white relations that still had a good bit of the spirit of
“we are all in this together.” Black men and women were valued not as a mass of unskilled labor to be used in the dull, backbreaking cultivation of a staple crop but rather for the variety of skills they could bring to the diversified tasks involved in
establishing the colony. Blacks and whites shared an admittedly difficult life, worked together, enjoyed sexual relationships
with one another certainly more openly and perhaps more frequently than in later years, and functioned virtually as interracial
family units. Blacks were freely armed in periods of Indian war and trusted in occupations that required great freedom of
movement about the colony and its waters, such as fishing of the Indian trade.” 61, Tate
• “[Wood] has to concede that reality was not always so idyllic. The number of free blacks remained small, their condition was
more likely to decline than improve, and what appears to have been the first concerted period of discriminatory legislation
against blacks followed almost immediately in the 1720s.” 61, Tate
• In the “third of Wood’s periods [from 1720 through Stono] of slavery development begins. Rice cultivation had now been
perfected, and with its removal in 1731 from the enumerated list of commodities the colonies could ship only within the Empire,
the way was open for South Carolinians to tap the all-important Mediterranean market. Slavery continued to expand, but more
now from fresh importation of Africans and less from increase in American-born blacks, who were at the moment not
reproducing themselves. White South Carolinians, alternately wanting more black labor and decrying its predominance in the
population, developed exaggerated, but, perhaps self-fulfilling, fears of being overwhelmed. Growing hostility with the Spanish
on the southern border and apprehension at Spanish encouragement to slave resistance added to their uneasiness.” 62, Tate
• “Whether more the result of the transient phenomena of the rice boom and the Spanish menace or the longer-range circumstance
of population ration, the two races grew steadily apart ad life became harsher for the slave. The “dehumanizing” tendencies of
the rice plantations, concentrating the slaves in larger work gangs, removing them from contact with their masters, putting them
to more difficult labor, require little comment, nor is the ineffectiveness of humanitarian efforts, largely by S.P.G. missionaries,
surprising.” 62, Tate
• “In their anxiety and determination to maintain control whites tried to confine blacks more and more to work on staple crops,
despite the variety of skills they possessed, and to restrict their mobility, possession of firearms, or wearing of fine clothing.
They began to demonstrate hostility to overt interracial sexual relations and obsession with physical violation of their own
persons, and they punished slaves more cruelly. All these efforts, of course, received the sanction of stricter black codes and the
means of enforcement in patrols and nightwatches. The black response, as Wood reminds us, ran the whole spectrum from
abject submission to total resistance, but it produced a large number of runaways, increasing acts of individual violence, by
poisoning or arson in particular, and, ultimately, the Stono Rebllion. The armed uprising was, of course, abortive, though more
than twenty whites died on the first day, and the last recorded execution of a black participant took place fully three years later.”
62, Tate
• “For Wood, however the rebellion failed in another sense, since the slaves, although brining the colony closer to upheaval than
its historians have recognized, produced “a concerted counterattack” from the whites. As a result, “the new social equilibrium
which emerged in the generation before the Revolution was based upon a heightened degree of white repression and a reduced
amount of black autonomy.” Had the resistance of the South Carolina blacks, he concludes, “been less abortive, the subsequent
history of the new nation might well have followed an unpredictably different path.” (326) 63, Tate
Sources: Journals, papers, census records, court records, government laws
Connections: Blassingame, The Slave Community, Genovese, Roll, Oakes, Ruling, Johnson, Soul, White, Ar’n’t
•
James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976)
Argument: “Its thesis is that opponents of slavery made an understandable, logical, perhaps even inevitable response to those trends as
did the defenders of slavery, given the parameters of their own society.” 458, Fladeland
• “[Holy Warriors] outstanding contribution is that it presents the crusade of the “Holy Warriors” in the context of the dynamic
social, economic, intellectual, and political currents which influenced it.” 458, Fladeland
• “Its titles to the contrary, there are neither heroes nor villains in the book; all are natural products of cultural influences, with
both flaws and virtues but not psychopathic aberrations. It presents a dispassionate compound of the passionate defenses-of-orattacks-on approach that flourished at the height of the civil rights movement. Consideration of ideas, personalities, and
activities is also well balanced.’ 458, Fladeland
10
Stewart “has placed the origins of the American antislavery movement in its international setting: the rise of commercial
capitalism, religious awakenings, the growth of benevolent sensitivities, and the spirit of revolution. Although he indicates some
British influences on the progress of American abolitionists into the nineteenth century, one does not get a sense of the full
impact of continuing support.” 458, Fladeland
• “The book also reflects a trend of recent years in giving more weight to the pre-Garrisonian efforts, even to colonization as a
training ground for budding abolitionists. Stewart acknowledges that progression from gradualism to immediatism might have
resulted from frustration with the failure of piecemeal efforts but gives greater emphasis to the impact of “cosmopolitan forces”:
economic interdependence, urbanization, democratic politics, and mass communication.” 458, Fladeland
• “A bit of psychohistory is utilized in examining the question of parental influence and youthful alienation as factors in producing
a generation of abolitionist leaders. The thesis of psychological self-liberation is tied to the “vibrant romantic radicalism” of the
1830s, and so supports the theme of the antislavery movement as being within the context of the intellectual and social currents
of the times.” 458, Fladeland
• “Stewart credits the fugitive slave with forcing the major issue of the 1850s, which was to lead to a growing acceptance of
violence and eventually to a rationalization of emancipation through war.” 458-459, Fladeland
• “Stewart characterizes the eighteenth-century Anglo-American intellectual legacy as a set of traditions serviceable to most of the
diverse participants in the nineteenth-century debate over slavery.” 343, Friedman
• “Stewart synthesizes the findings of historians like Bertram Wyatt-Brown and John L. Thomas regarding the abolitionist
commitment to immediate emancipation during the early Jacksonian period. Immediatism, Stewart notes, came from a desire for
moral self-liberation from a world of apparent hypocrisy and impurity…Stewart then discusses the mob violence that
immediatist abolitionist encountered in the 1830s and how the suppression of abolitionists’ civil liberties caused many white
northerners to fear for their own freedom.” 343, Friedman
• “In his middle chapters Stewart draws together recent studies tending to undercut David Donald’s claim…that abolitionists came
from families of declining socioeconomic status.” 343, Friedman
• “Stewart clearly distinguishes Garrisonian abolitionists who favored reform by operating within existing structures…Stewart
points out that even conservative abolitionists wanted earthly man-made institutions to conform to God’s command, and they felt
that slavery did not conform to God’s command. Whenever earthly institutions did not conform, conservatives joined with
Garrisonians in refusing to honor them.” 343-344, Friedman
• Strongly favoring black civil rights, white abolitionists nonetheless demanded that their black colleagues conform to white
middle class models of propriety.” 344, Friedman
• “Holy Warriors closes with a discussion of the transformation of immediatist abolitionists during the 1850s and 1860s…Stewart
identifies specific intellectual “loopholes” that allowed broadly pacifist abolitionists to endorse organized violence against the
southern slaveocracy. Form there, they had little difficulty approving relatively “orthodox” institutional weapons directed at
slavery—the Republican party, the Lincoln administration, and the Union army.” 344, Friedman
• “Stewart contends that during the Civil War and the postwar decades, abolitionists continued to campaign for civil rights and for
de facto emancipation. They were increasingly concerned, however, with the mundane practicalities of reform; their piety and
fervor had at least somewhat receded.” 344, Friedman
• “Because Holy Warriors is a synthesis of abolitionist historiography, it inevitably reflects the two primary concerns of most
recent analysts of the abolitionists—their role in Civil War causation and the reasons why, as radicals they failed to exert
significant influence. With respect to Civil War causation, Stewart maintains that abolitionists did much to mobilize northern
parties as radical agitators, Garrisonians persuaded many supporters of the major parties to cast ballots for antislavery
candidates. Meanwhile, the efforts of more conservative abolitionists within the Liberty party “gave enormous stimulus to
sectionalism within the major parties.” On the other hand, Stewart incorporates into his synthesis the long-standing concern of
historians with the failure of abolitionists to influence the North. He characterizes as valid observations the comments Frederick
Douglass and Ann Greene Phillips on the absence of abolitionist influence. Stewart, moreover, concludes his book:
“Abolitionists could not really claim that their thirty-year movement led directly to the destruction of slavery…Generals
Sherman and Grant, not Garrissonians and Liberty men; warfare between irreconcilable cultures, not moral suasion, had
intervened between the master and his slave.” Thus, Holy Warriors perpetuates the conflicting historical appraisal of
abolitionists. The abolitionists who greatly influenced northern society had only indirect and relatively insignificant influence.”
344-345, Friedman
Sources: Journals, papers, speeches, secondary sources
Connections: Walters, American Reformers, Douglass, Narrative, Jacobs, Incidents, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson, Shopkeeper
•
Ronald G. Waters, American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978)
Argument: “I hope it shows that there terms “radical” and “reformer” have meaning only within particular historical contexts, and that
we can understand our own positions, and the alternatives available to us, only in relation to other positions, including those of the past.”x
• “Some scholars dismissed reformers and radicals as cranks; others presented them as noble, farseeing men and women; still
other saw them as resolving their own “status anxiety” by engaging in reform. In all these cases, it seemed—and it still seems—
inadequate to me to reduce reform and radicalism to the character and motivation, good or bad, of reformers and radicals. Still
other scholars presented antebellum reform as the product of evangelical Protestantism, a view that persists and has merit. The
problem with these interpretations, as far as I was concerned, was their failure to explain the existence of non-evangelical
reformers, of anti-reform evangelicals, and of reformers who moved away from their evangelical heritage over the course of
11
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their causes. Finally, there were scholars who saw antebellum reform as “social control” on the part of elites bent on making
working class and ethnic “others conform to their code of morality and accept the discipline of an emerging capitalist order. The
social-control theory struck me as less wrong than self-evident. Of course reformers and radicals want others to conform to their
beliefs; it is hard to imagine a reform or radical movement based on anything else.” X
“By 1814—the year the War of 1812 ended—a combination of theological and economic developments led many men and
women to assume that the world did not have to be the way it was and that individual effort mattered.” 3
“The religious revivalism of the 1820s encouraged this optimistic and activist spirit by teaching that good deeds were the mark
of godliness and that the millennium was near. Other significant new ideas, attitudes, and systems of thought jostled around in
the public press and likewise encourage reform.” 3
“The manner in which the population grew had as many implications for reform as did the growth itself. Reproduction, as usual,
played the major role. But the antebellum birth rate, although high by present-day standards, declined steadily after 1800. That
trend coincided with subtle but substantial alterations in family patterns, a matter of significance for understanding why
reformers were so concerned about home life and why so many of them were women. 4
“Many of these new Americans were hostile to reform crusades, particularly to temperance, and a large number of them were
Catholic. For reformers, these hordes of poor, religiously suspect aliens were one of several indications that America was
changing rapidly and that decent men and women had to act quickly to keep it on a morally true course.” 4-5
“Even more spectacular evidence of change came from the performance of the American economy after 1814. Precise figures
are impossible to give, but it is clear that the standard of living for more free Americans was improving and that the scale and
location of industry was changing dramatically. The proportion of the workforce in agriculture declined while that in
manufacturing and commerce rose.” 5
“America’s economic development provided reformers with problems in need of solutions. Troubled by the pains and
dislocations of sudden expansion, cities were especially ripe for moral crusades. Reformers regarded them—with only a bit of
exaggeration—as dismal swamps of vice, disease, and misery. Urbanization and industrialization also helped turn the attention
of reformers toward slavery after 1830. As Northern and Southern ways of life became increasingly different, abolitionists saw
the South’s “peculiar institution” as a relic of barbarianism and the North’s mixture of farming, commerce, and industrial growth
as the course of civilization and progress. Economic difference between the sections, from their point of vew, reinforced moral
judgments.” 6
“Prosperity meant that their were middle-class men and women with education, income, and leisure to devote to social causes.
New technology put powerful weapons in the hands of such people. The same transportation revolution that brought goods to
distant markets also carried lecturers to widely dispersed audience they could not have reached a generation before. Innovations
in printing reduced the cost of producing propaganda to the point where a person could make a living editing a reform newspaper
or writing books and pamphlets for a limited but national readership.” 6
“in 1824, only three states restricted suffrage for white men in any meaningful way and in many areas even recent immigrants
found it easy to cast ballots. This may have been democracy, but it also permitted anyone, including the worst sort of rascals, to
help select the nation’s leaders. Reformers complained that a degraded and sinful majority, manipulated by political machines,
had more of a voice in the nation’s affairs than they, the godly minority, did…Politicians confirmed reformers’ dour view of
them by seeking the electorate’s lowest common denominator. No promise was too extreme, no spectacle too extravagant, if it
got votes.” 8
“Yet reformers did not entirely reject politics. The Jacksonian political system itself made their propaganda effective by linking
“public opinion” and governmental action. As reformers perceived, winning hearts and minds had become the essential first step
toward political change, for better as well as for worse. Many reform crusades, moreover, explicitly sought political
consequences. If everything worked according to plan, temperance, Sunday schools, and public education, for instance, would
produce a morally responsible electorate.” 8
“What we have here are four things—anti-Masonry, proslavery, mobs, and nativisim—more or less seeming to be unrelated to
one another or to antebellum reform (although anti-Masonry and nativism attracted some reformers). Yet each of the four, in
common with reform movements, represented an assessment of what was wrong with America and of what needed correcting.
Each, also like reforms, focused upon a supposedly disruptive element in American society: Masons, the North, whoever
angered rioters, and foreigners. Reformers, naturally, had different lists of villains—heathenism, the competitive impulse,
slavery, war, alcohol, ignorance, and so forth. But the pattern of thought was the same: old values were being lost and whatever
was at fault had to be eliminated or controlled if America was to fulfill its destiny.” 10
“Behind that reasoning was a suspicious mentality characteristic of many antebellum reformers, as well as non-reformers, that
attributed the nation’s troubles to conspiracies of one sort or another—by slaveholders, liquor dealers, Masons, the Catholic
Church, or politicians and clergy serving special interests.” 10
“When political hacks and chronic office seekers climbed aboard the bandwagon, the movements lost credibility and support.
Their temporary success and long-run failure are a sign that much of the electorate, not simply reformers, was uneasy with the
party-oriented political system of Jacksonian America and responsive to people and organizations claiming moral detachment
from it.” 12
“The decisive factor in making, or not making, a reform commitment was how the transformation of America played upon
individual’s life history and connected it, or failed to connect it, to some larger cause…Most people involved in reform…were
obscure men with regular employment, single women, or women with family responsibilities. They drifted out of reform after a
12
few years or, at most, stayed on the periphery of it throughout their adulthood. Although their participation, dues, and
consumption of propaganda kept reforms alive, they made little mark in the historical record.” 12-14
• “It does not demean reform to say that it did a great deal for reformers. It was no small blessing for individuals to have been
able to put their lives in order, to have created emotional bonds with others, and to have done some good in the process.” 15
• “It was the responsibility of those with moral and financial advantages to ameliorate suffering, without any expectation that the
millennium was at hand or that social relationships would be fundamentally changed. Antebellum reformers saw things
differently. Some men and women, consistent with their evangelical Protestantism, insisted that change could be total, that
perfection was possible for people and for society, and that it began with the individual, no matter how lowly. Making a sinner’s
heart yearn for good behavior, not imposing morality by fore of giving charity, was the task of reform.” 16
• “The majority of reformers lived north of the Mason-Dixon line and most were drawn to the Northern cause, willing to
subordinate their programs and swallow their doubts in order to help it triumph. They had, moreover, to reconsider their belief
that the individual could be a force in history. Despite acts of heroism, humans seemed irrelevant in modern war, when large
organizations deliver men and materiel to the front lines and care for the sick and wounded. It was a massive army rather than
sanctified hearts that won the war.” 17
• “Part of the change came about because of what had not been accomplished in decades of agitation. Sinners were harder to
reach than anyone imagined; drunkards remained drunkards, the insane were not made sane, and so it went. Reformers had been
far too optimistic about what propaganda and moral suasion could do. If nothing else, fatigue and a lack of results began
dampening enthusiasm for reform by 1860. When success did come, it proved to have as much of a chastening effect as failure.
The destruction of slavery in 1865 deprived reformers of their most emotionally compelling issue. Few white Americans could
bring to the cause of civil rights for blacks the same passion they invested in anti-slavery.” 17
• “As hopes for humanity declined, so did the rationale for reform. Political corruption in the 1870s provided more reasons for
morally sensitive people to retreat in disgust from social involvement: the most meaningful of wars ended with elected officials
wallowing in the public trough. Perhaps human nature was fatally flawed and mankind was beyond redemption in this world.”
• “[Walters’] book has three main purposes: (1) to argue that America’s antebellum reformers were not unique to their time but
were—complete with strengths and weaknesses—“more representative of their period than they seem to have been at first
glance” (2) to demonstrate the interrelated nature of the various reform movements; and (#) to synthesize recent research into a
broad explanatory overview to supplant the still useful but badly outdated Alice Felt Tyler’s Freedom’s Ferment.” 275, Wheeler
• “[Watlers] correctly perceives the reformers—an admitted minority of the population—as being men and women responding to
economic and ideological shifts which affected most of the nonreformers as well, shifts such as economic modernization, the
creation of a fairly comfortable middle class (from which to draw reformers), an anti-elitist mentality of suspicion toward
traditional figures of authority and institutions, and an upsurge of evangelical Protestantism.” 275, Wheeler
Sources: Secondary
Connections: Stewart, Holy, Douglass, Narrative, Jacobs, Incidents, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson, Shopkeeper
John L. Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865” American Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1965)
Argument: “The central fact in the romantic reorientation of American theology was the rejection of determinism. Salvation, however
variously defined, lay open to everyone. Sin was voluntary: men were not helpless and depraved by nature but free agents and potential
powers for good.” 658
• “Out of a seemingly conservative religious revival there flowed a spate of perfectionist ideas for the improvement and
rearrangement of American society. Rising rapidly in the years after 1830, the flood of social reform reached its crest at midcentury only to be checked by political crisis and the counterforces of the Civil War. Reform after the Civil War, though still
concerned with individual perfectibility, proceeded from new and different assumptions as to the nature of individualism and its
preservation in an urban industrial society. Romantic reform ended with the Civil War and an intellectual counterrevolution
which discredited the concept of the irreducible self and eventually redirected reform energies.” 656-657
• “Romantic reform in America traced its origins to a religious impulse which was both politically and socially conservative.
With the consolidation of independence and the arrival of democratic politics the new nineteenth-century generation of
American churchmen faced a seeming crisis. Egalitarianism and rising demands for church disestablishment suddenly appeared
to threaten an inherited Christian order and along with it the preferred status of the clergy. 657
•
“The initial thrust of religious reform, then, was moral rather than social, preventative rather than curative. Nominally rejecting
politics and parties, the evangelicals looked to a general reformation of the American character achieved through a revival of
piety and morals in the individual. By probing his conscience, by convincing him of his sinful ways and converting him to right
conduct they hoped to engineer a Christian revolution which would leave the foundations of the social order undisturbed. The
realization of their dream of a nonpolitical “Christian party” in America would ensure a one-party system open to moral talent
and the natural superiority of Christian leadership.” 658
•
“Perfectionism, on the contrary, as an optative mood demanded total commitment and immediate action. A latent revolutionary
force lay in its demand for immediate reform and its promise to release the new American from the restraints of institutions and
precedent. In appealing to the liberated individual, perfectionism reinforced the Jacksonian attack on institutions, and precedent.
In appealing to the liberated individual, perfectionism reinforced the Jacksonian attack on institutions, whether a “Monster
Bank” or a secret Masonic order, entrenched monopolies or the Catholic Church. But in emphasizing the unfettered will as the
proper vehicle for reform it provided a millenarian alternative to Jacksonian politics.” 659
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“As the sum of individual sins social wrong would disappear when enough people had been converted an rededicated to right
conduct. Deep and lasting reform, therefore, meant an educational crusade based on the assumption that when a sufficient
number of individual Americans had seen the light, they would automatically solve the country’s social problems. Thus
formulated, perfectionist reform offered a program of mass conversion achieved through educational rather than political
means.” 660
“By far the most profound change wrought by perfectionism was the sudden emergence of abolition.” 660
“The abolitionist pioneers were former coloniationists who took sin and redemption seriously and insisted that slavery
constituted a flat denial of perfectibility to both Negroes and whites. They found in immediate emancipation a perfectionist
formula for casting off the guilt of slavery and bringing the Negro to Christian freedom. Destroying slavery, the abolitionists
argued, depended first of all on recognizing it as sin; and to this recognition they bent their efforts.” 661
“From the beginning, then, the abolitionists mounted a moral crusade rather than an engine of limited reform. For seven years,
from 1833 to 1840, their society functioned as a loosely coordinated enterprise—a national directory of antislavery opinion.
Perfectionist individualism made effective organization difficult and often impossible.” 661
“In 1840 the Garrisonians seized control of the society and drove their moderate opponents out. Thereafter neither ultras nor
moderates were able ot maintain an effective national organization.” 661
“Thus romantic perfectionism altered the course of the reform enterprise by appealing directly to the individual conscience. Its
power stemmed from a millennial expectation which proved too powerful a moral explosive for the reform agencies.” 662
“Something very much like a conversion experience seems to have forged the decisions of the humanitarians to take up their
causes, a kind of revelation which furnished them with a ready-made role outside politics and opened a new career with which
they could become completely identified. With the sudden transference of a vague perfectionist faith in self-improvement to
urgent social problems there emerged a new type of professional reformer whose whole life became identified with the reform
process.” 663
“Pushed to its limits, the perfectionist assault on institutions logically ended in the attempt to make new and better societies as
examples for Americans to follow.” 665
“There was thus a high nostalgic content in the plans of humanitarians who emphasized pastoral virtues and the perfectionist
values inherent in country living. Their celebration of the restorative powers of nature followed logically form their assumption
that the perfected individual—the truly free American—could be created only by the city. A second assumption concerned the
importance of the family as the primary unit in the reconstruction of society.” 667
“A new feudalism threatened; and unless a drastic remedy was discovered, the “hideous evils” of unequal distribution of wealth
would cause class war…Diffusion of education, he pointed out, mean wiping out class lines and with them the possibility of
conflict. As the great equalizer of condition it would supply the balance-wheel in the society of the future.” 670
“Transcendentalism, as its official historians noted, claimed for all men what a more restrictive Christian perfectionism extended
only to the redeemed. Seen in this light, self-culture—Emerson’s “perfect unfolding of our individual nature”—appeared as a
secular amplification of the doctrine of personal holiness. In the transcendentalist definition, true reform proceeded from the
individual and worked outward through the family, the neighborhood and ultimately into the social and political life of the
community. The transcendentalist, Frothingham noted in retrospect, “was less a reformer of human circumstances than a
regenerator of the human spirit…” 671
“Accordingly the transcendentalists considered institutions—parties, churches, organizations—so many arbitrarily constructed
barriers on the road to self-culture. They were lonely men, Emerson admitted, who repelled influences.” 671
“Accepting for the most part Emerson’s dictum that one man was a counterpoise to a city, the transcendentalists turned inward to
examine the divine self and find there the material with which to rebuild society. They wanted to avoid at all costs the mistake
of their Jacksonian contemporaries who in order to be useful accommodated themselves to institutions without realizing the
resultant loss of power and integrity.” 671
“Both transcendentalism and perfectionist moral reform, then, were marked by an individualist fervor that was disruptive of
American institutions. Both made heavy moral demands on church and state; and when neither proved equal to the task of
supporting their intensely personal demands, the transcendentalists and the moral reformers became increasingly alienated. The
perfectionist temperament bred a come-outer spirit. An insistence on individual moral accountability and direct appeal to the
irreducible self, the faith in self-reliance and distrust of compromise, and a substitution of universal education for partial reform
measures, all meant that normal political and institutional reform channels were closed to the perfectionists.” 674
“With an increasing number of reformers after 1840 perfectionist anti-institutionalism led to heavy investments in the
communitarian movement. The attraction that drew the perfectionists to communitarianism came from their conviction that the
good society should be simple. Since American society was both complicated and corrupt, it was necessary to come out from it;
but at the same the challenge of the simple life had to be met. Once the true principles of social life had been discovered they
had to be applied, some way found to harness individual perfectibility to a social engine.” 674-675
“Communitarians agreed in rejecting class struggle which set interest against interest instead of uniting them through
association.” 675
“The most striking characteristic of the communitarian movement was not its apparent diversity but the fundamental similarity
of educational purpose. The common denominator or “main idea” Noyes correctly identified as “the enlargement of home—the
extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations.”…Thus the problem for radical
communitarians was to solve the conflict between the family and society.” 677
14
“The communitarian experiments in effect were anti-institutional institutions. In abandoning political and religious institutions
the communitarians were driven to create perfect societies of their own which conformed to their perfectionist definition of the
free individual.” 678-679
•
“The collapse of the communitarian movement in the 1850s left a vacuum in social reform which was filled by the slavery
crisis. At first their failure to consolidate alternative social and educational institutions threw the reformers back on their old
perfectionist individualism for support.” 679
• “But slavery, as a denial of freedom and individual responsibility, had to be destroyed by institutional forces which could be
made to sustain these values. The antislavery cause during the secession crisis and throughout the Civil War offered reformers
an escape from alienation by providing a new identity with the very political institutions, which they had so vigorously assailed.”
• “The effects of the Civil War as an intellectual counterrevolution were felt both in a revival of institutions and a renewal of an
organic theory of society. The war brought with it a widespread reaction against the seeming sentimentality and illusions of
perfectionism. It saw the establishment of new organizations like the Sanitary and the Christian Commissions run on principles
of efficiency and professionalism totally alien to perfectionist methods. Accompanying the wartime revival of institutions was a
theological reorientation…The extreme individualism of the antebellum reformers was swallowed up in a Northern war effort
that made private conscience less important than saving the Union…Those reformers who contributed to the war effort through
the Sanitary Commission or the Christians Commission found a new sense of order and efficiency indispensable…Young
Emersonians returned from combat convinced that professionalism, discipline and subordination, dubious virtues by
perfectionist standards, were essential in a healthy society. A new emphasis on leadership and performance was replacing the
benevolent amateurism of the perfectionists.” 680
Sources: Writings, journals, revival narratives
Connections: Stewart, Holy and Walters, American, Johnson, Shopkeeper’s
•
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (1840ish) (1993)
Argument: Slavery is bad: “Close readings of the Narrative uncover not only Douglass’s rhetorical strategies, which are many and
complicated, but also a good deal about the moral and economic nature of slavery, the master-slave relationship, the psychology of
slaveholders, the aims and arguments of abolitionists, and the impending political crisis between North and South.” 3
• “Although Douglass lived long and witnessed many great events, perhaps his most important contribution to American history
was the repeated telling of his personal story. Above all else, this book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, is a great
story told, like most other great stories, out of the will to be known and the will to write. This tale of a young African
American’s journey into and out of slavery provides a remarkable window on America’s most compelling nineteenth-century
social and political problem.” 2
• “Douglass saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation. Likewise, the multiple meanings
for freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—and of the consequences of its denial were his great themes. 2
• “Douglass probed his past throughout his life, seeking to understand the relentless connection of past and present, telling his
story in relation to the turbulent history of his time, and hoping to control or stop time itself.” 2
• “Douglass saw his mother for the last time when he was seven, making him in every practical way an orphan. The actual
identity of his father is still unknown, but he was undoubtedly white, as Douglass declares in the Narrative. Douglass was,
therefore, of mixed racial ancestry, including part American Indian…Douglass’s twenty years in slavery were marked in stark
contrasts between brutality and good fortune, between the life of a favored slave youth in Baltimore and that of a field hand on
an Eastern Shore farm, and between the power of literacy and the despair born of its suppression.” 3
• “In 1845 Douglass felt compelled by many factors to write his story. His extraordinary life as a slave, the circumstances of his
escape, his emergence as a skillful abolitionist lecturer in the early 1840s, and suspicious as well as bigoted denials that so
talented a voice could ever have been a chattel slave combined with the sheer popularity of slave narratives prompt him to tell
his tale.” 3
• “On September 3, 1838, at the age of twenty, Douglass, disguised as a sailor and having obtained the papers of a free seaman,
escaped from slavery on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake in Maryland. Within a week he was joined by his fiancée, Anna
Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore.” 3
• “In its content and strategies, therefore, Douglass’s Narrative belonged to the world of abolitionism and to the national political
crisis over slavery from which it sprang. Douglass’s autobiographies are our principal sources for major aspects of his life,
especially his early years. Bur they are perhaps as revelatory of the history of the times through which he lived as they are of his
personality and his psychology.” 3
• “Douglass had been a practicing abolitionist of a kind—out of self-interest and for his fellow bondsmen—even while he was a
slave. He had read the Bible extensively, and he had discovered and modeled his ideas on a remarkable 1797 book, The
Columbian Orator, by Caleb Bingham.” 4
•
“But in the Narrative he sought authentication. He wanted the world to know that fugitive slave had histories. His book would
make witness to the fact, contrary to popular attitudes, that blacks too were people, whose struggles and aspirations mattered in
human society.” 5
• “Although antislavery sentiment emerged in a variety of ways during the age of the American Revolution, the formative decades
of organized abolitionism were the 1820s and 1830s, the period in which Frederick Bailey grew up a slave in Maryland.” 6
15
“Under the influence of evangelical religion, a growing realization of southern commitment to slavery, and especially the British
antislavery movement, American abolitionists found their ideological roots in the 1820s. The campaign to end slavery in the
British Empire profoundly shook the increasingly active defenders of slavery in the American South and helped to cause a steady
radicalization of antislavery tactics in the North.” 7
• “Under new influences, especially the New York abolitions and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, Douglass came to believe that the
Constitution could be used to exert federal power against slavery, especially its expansion into the West. He also embraced the
use of political parties, and eventually even certain instances of violence, as a means of destroying slavery.” 8
• “Sophia Auld, Douglass’s “kind and tender-hearted” mistress in Baltimore who first taught him to read…becomes Doughlass’s
principal example that slaveholding is a learned behavior, and presumably can therefore be unlearned. In a document so full of
anti-slavery propaganda, physical violence, and suffering, it may come as some surprise that Douglass could conclude that, for
Sophia, “slavery proved as injurious to her as id did to me.” But such is the complex argument of this highly crafted narrative: It
is a picture of a world that not only involved brutal dehumanization but also operated by the cunning and negotiation of human
relationships.” 12
• Common for master’s to humiliate their slaves before punishing them for insubordination. 43
• Masters were sneaky about disguising themselves and finding out how slaves felt about them. In the case of Colonel Lloyd he
sold a disgruntled slave down to Georgia without the slave knowing that he did wrong. 49
• Slaves measure their self-confidence and worth by the attributes of their masters. 50
• Slaveholders paranoid about slaves and hire spies to find out about possible revolts.” 50
• Not all whites own slaves and those that do are changed by the experience. 57
• City slaves are better off. 58
• Religious slaveholders are the worse they use the scripture to defend their actions and often times they beat slaves more harshly
because they believe in the power of their religious justification. “Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own depravity to
shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his
slaveholding cruelty.” 69
Connections: Jacob’s, Incidents
•
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, 1987)
Argument:
• “Like all slave narratives, Incidents was shaped by the empowering impulse that created the American Renaissance. Jacobs’s
book expressed democratic ideals and embodied a dual critique of nineteenth-century America: it challenged the institution of
chattel slavery with its supporting ideology of white racism, as well as traditional patriarchal institutions and ideologies.
Jacobs’s achievement was the transformation of herself into a literary subject in and through the creation of her narrator, Linda
Brent.” Xv-xvi
• “This narrator tells a double tale, dramatizing the triumph of her efforts to prevent her master from raping her, to arrange for her
children’s rescue from him, to hide, to escape, and finally to achieve freedom; and simultaneously presenting her failure to
adhere to sexual standards in which she believed. Unmarried, she entered into a sexual liaison, became pregnant, was
condemned by her grandmother, and suffered terrible guilt. She writes that still, in middle age, she feels her youthful distress.
But she also questions the condemnation of her behavior; reaching toward an alternative judgment, she suggests that the sexual
standards mandated for free women were not relevant to women held in slavery. Further, by balancing her grandmother’s
rejection with her daughter’s acceptance, she shows black women overcoming the divisive sexual ideology of the white
patriarchy and establishing unity across the generations.” Xvi
• “It is the voice of a woman who, although she cannon discuss here sexual past without expressing deep conflict, nevertheless
addresses this painful personal subject in order to politicize it, to insist that the forbidden topic of sexual abuse of slave women
be included in public discussions of the slavery question.” Xvi
• “Learning that her [master] planed to move her son and daughter from her grandmother’s home to [the plantation at] Auburn, she
resolved to rescue them from plantation slavery. Believing that if she were gone her master might find the children troublesome
and sell them, she ran away…for years [she] was hidden in a tiny crawlspace above a storeroom in her grandmother’s house. She
succeeded in protecting her children. Shortly after she went into hiding, their father [a white lawyer], Sawyer, bought them and
her brother. Sawyer allowed the children to continue to live with her grandmother, an later he took Louisa Matilda to a free
state, but he failed to keep his promise to Jacobs to emancipate the children.” Xvii
• “In 1842m after nearly seven years in hiding, she escaped to the North.” Xii-xviii
• “In Rochester Harriet Jacobs met her brother’s circle of antislavery activists, and early in March 1849 she ban working in the
antislavery reading room, office, and bookstore they had established.” Xix
• “With her brother often on the road lecturing, Jacobs lived for nine months in the home of the Quaker reformers Isaac and Amy
Post. A participant in the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in July 1848, Amy Post had helped organize the
follow-up Rochester Convention. Jacobs later admitted, “when I first came North I avoided the Antislavery people as much as
possible because I felt that I could not be honest and tell the whole truth.” In Rochester, however, with slavery years behind her,
she made Post her confidante. Post urged her to make her personal history public to aid abolitionism.” Xix
• “Jacobs quickly became known among abolitionists as the author of Incidents. She used this limited celebrity to further a new
project: relief work with the “contraband”—slaves behind the lines of the Union Army--and the freedmen. AS an agent of the
16
Philadelphia and New York Quakers, she worked in Washington D.C, in 1862, in Alexandria from 1863 to 1865, and in
Savannah from 1865-1866, distributing clothing and supplies and organizing schools, nursing homes, and orphanages.
Throughout these years Jacobs used the public press to raise money for her work and to report back to the reformers on
conditions in the South.” Xxvii
• But Incidents, perhaps the most comprehensive slave narrative by an Afro-American woman, presents a heroic slave mother
struggling for freedom and a home. She runs away to save her children—and particularly her daughter—from slavery. Men and
women were valued for contrasting qualities in nineteenth-century America, and recent critics have pointed out that Frederick
Douglass’s classic 1845 Narrative presents its protagonist in terms of physical bravery, an important “masculine” attribute. It is
not surprising that Jacobs presents Linda Brent in terms of motherhood, the most valued “feminine” role.” Xxviii
• “Instead of coupling female sexual activity with self-destructions and death, Incidents presents it as a mistaken tactic in the
struggle for freedom. Jacobs’s narrator does not characterize herself conventionally as a passive female victim, but asserts
that—even when young and a slave—she was an effective moral agent. She take full responsibility for her actions: “I will not
try to screen myself behind the plea of compulsion from a master; for it was not so. Neither can I plead ignorance or
thoughtlessness…I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation.” Xxxii
• “Nor does this narrator mouth the standard notion that a woman’s self-esteem is a simple function of her adherence to
conventional sexual behavior…Denied the protection of the laws, denied even an extralegal marriage to a man she loved, she
writes that in a desperate attempt to protect her hated master from forcing her into concubinage, she relinquished her “purity” in
an effort to maintain her self-respect”; she abandoned her attempt to avoid sexual involvements in an effort to assert her
autonomy as a human being, to avoid being “entirely subject to the will of another.” Xxxii
• “Jacob’s Linda Brent does not seek to inspire her audience to overcome individual character defects or to engage in reformist
activity within the private sphere, but urges them to enter the public sphere and work to end chattel slavery and white racism.
Informed not by “the cult of domesticity” or “domestic feminism” but by political feminism, Incidents is an attempt to move
women to political action.” Xxxiv
Connections: White, Ar’n’t, Douglass, Narrative
Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (1978)
Argument: “revivals were above all the outgrowth of class tensions.” 926, Bushman
• “[Shopkeeper’s] was addressed most explicitly to Lee Benson, whose Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (1961) “scientifically”
demonstrated that ethnic and cultural divisions shaped the beginnings of two-party politics in the North more decisively than did
questions of social class. In particular, Benson found that an activist evangelical Protestantism was at the heart of the Whig
Party in New York State. My own reading convinced me that Benson was right. But evangelical politics was new in the 1830s.
I wanted to “test” whether it was the result of cultural inheritance or of the well-known revivals of the 1820s and 1830s.” xiv
• “The result was a book that traced Rochester’s middle-class revivals (and thus local Whig electorate) to problems of legitimacy
and moral order that attend the making of modern work. More broadly, the revival was bound up with the making of a middleclass culture within the transformations of the market revolution. I concluded that Benson’s ethnocultural division had its
historical roots in the rise of modern social classes.” Xv
• “A Shopkeeper’s Millennium explains religious revivals in terms of social change, and it has been attacked as “reductionist”: it
reduces religion to something else.” Xvi
• “The alternative, in the case of this book, would be to talk about the rise of the American middle class and its religion without
mentioning class—with no other classes, no structured inequality, no market revolution, northing of what we used to call
history—nothing but middle-class psyches, feelings, imaginations, and interior decoration. Too much recent scholarly literature
has chosen that alternative.” Xvii
• “I argued that changes in relations between work and domestic life were at the heart of religious change in Rochester; then I
followed evangelical men out into male politics and male public life. New studies in women’s history quickly called my strategy
into question: they stayed indoors pointing out that women far outnumbered men in evangelical churches, and disclosing the
domestic character of the message preached in those churches. These studies argued forcefully that middle-class evangelicalism
(and middle-class culture generally) was about gender, not class. They argued just as forcefully that most of the cultural work
that made the middle class was performed by women. I nodded to all that, but not with the emphasis that could have warded off
justifiable criticisms of my male-centered study. Yet I continue to argue that the privatization and feminization of the middleclass domestic life is unthinkable without reference to larger transformations in society, that the middle-class family and its
culture were deeply implicated in those transformations and in the ways in which they worked out in history.” Xix
• “The revival made new hearts in hundreds of thousands of middle-class men and women, and set them off on a massive and
remarkably successful crusade to remake society in God’s name. This book attempts to explain why it happened.” 4
• “The awakening of 1831 climaxed a generation of revivals that historians have called the Second Great Awakening…The
awakening began near the turn of the century in the villages of New England and in isolated Yankee colonies in western New
York. Within that region enthusiasm sputtered for twenty years, arbitrarily descending on one congregation or community while
neighboring churches slept.” 4
• “Within a few years free agency, perfectionism, and millennialism were middle-class orthodoxy. They were powerful idea, and
in the 1830s they underlay a missionary crusade that transformed society and politics in the United States. It was Gilbert Barnes,
a historian of the antislavery movement writing in the 1930s, who “discovered” the revival of 1831. Barnes wanted to explain
why, in the 1830s, critics of slavery rejected gradualist techniques, recruited thousands of new supporters, and attacked the
17
South’s peculiar institution as a national evil that demanded immediate abolition...[Barnes] argued convincingly that antislavery
immediatism was a direct outgrowth of the revival of 1830-1831.” 5
• “Since then, Barnes’s discovery has been extended to the whole array of antebellum reform. The temperance, moral reform, and
missionary societies of the 1820s had been organizations of gentlemen who wished to slow the course of social and political
change and reinforce their domination over a hopelessly godless multitude. IN the early 1830s newly converted evangelicals
invaded all of these organizations and took most of them over. The new reformers did not want to control the inevitable
excesses of drunkards and prostitutes and Jacksonian Democrats. They wanted to liberate them from their sins. Through
individual conversion and public example, and increasingly through mass politics and outright coercion, they promised to
eliminate sin from society and pave the way for the Second Coming.” 6
• “The 1820s witnessed the beginnings of large-scale manufacturing in American cities, and with it came attempts to subject farm
boys and preindustrial artisans to the discipline and monotony of modern work. Historians of labor are finding that in the 1830s
proto-industrialists fought that battle with religious weapons. Their most favored means of combating drunkenness, spontaneous
holidays, and inattention to work were the temperance society, the Sunday school, and the revival. Indeed many masters and
manufacturers saw industrialization as a civilizing mission: they believed in their hearts that in proletarianizanizing workmen
they were rescuing them from barbarism and granting them the benefits of Christian discipline. The workingmen, of course, saw
things differently, and the crucial first generation of industrial conflict in this country was fought largely along religious lines.” 6
• “Whig politicians, industrial moralizers, temperance advocates, missionaries, and family reformers worked tirelessly to build a
world that replaced force, barbarism, and unrestrained passion with Christian self-control. That was not the idea of a few
visionaries and cranks and political opportunists. It was the moral imperative around which the northern middle class became a
class.” 8
• “To put it simply, the middle class became resolutely bourgeois between 1825 and 1835. And at every step, that transformation
bore the stamp of evangelical Protestantism…An explanation of how the middle class became modern, must come to terms with
revival religion.” 8
• “Revivals were a means of building order and a sense of common purpose among sovereign, footloose, and money-hungry
individualists.” 9
• “The sequence of rapid urbanization, religious revival, and political and social reorganization struck that community with
uncommon force. Rochester was the first of the inland cities created after 1815 by the commercialization of agriculture. In 1812
the site of Rochester was unbroken wilderness. By 1830 the forest had given way to a city of 10,000, the marketing and
manufacturing center for a broad and prosperous agricultural hinterland. Rochester was the capital of western New York’s
revival-seared “Burned-over District,” and a clearinghouse for religious enthusiasms throughout the 1820s and 1830s.” 13
• “The focus is upon the biographies of the converts themselves, reconstructed from church records, newspapers, genealogical
materials, tax lists, city directories, census schedules, petitions sent from Rochester to various agencies of government, and a
surprising number of diaries and letters left by participants in the revival. These materials are used to place Finney’s converts
within four crucial spheres of social experience: domestic life, work, community relations, and politics.” 14
• “In a society that lacked external controls, revivals created order through individual self-restraint.” 136
• “The Rochester revival served the needs not of “society” but of entrepreneurs who employed wage labor…In towns and cities all
over the Northern United States, revivals after 1825 were tied closely to the growth of a manufacturing economy.” 137
• “Canal towns that were devoted to commerce were relatively immune to revivals. So were the old seaport cities. But in mill
villages and manufacturing cities, evangelicalism stuck as hard as it had at Rochester.” 137
• “We must conclude that many workmen were adopting the religion of the middle class, thus internalizing beliefs and modes of
comportment that suited the needs of their employer…Evangelicalsim was a middle-class solution to problems of class,
legitimacy, and order generated in the early stages of manufacturing. Revivals provided entrepreneurs with a means of imposing
new standards of work discipline and personal comportment upon themselves and the men who worked for them, and thus they
functioned as powerful social controls.” 138
• “The revival of 1831 healed divisions within the middle class and turned businessmen and masters into an active and united
missionary army.” 140
Sources: church records, tax lists, city directories, newspapers, revival sermons, secondary sources
Connections: Walters, American, Thomas “Romantic Reform,” Stewart, Holy, Cross, Burned Over
Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York,
1800-1850 (1950)
Argument: “S.D. Clark, perhaps Crosse’s most astute reviewer, highlighted this aspect of Cross’s thesis: “The Yankee settler brought
with him an attitude of mind favorable to the growth of such [religious and reform] movements, but, so long as frontier conditions
existed, the population was too much occupied with securing a livelihood to devote much energy to religious affairs. With the coming of
prosperity conditions became favorable to the burgeoning of a great variety of religious movements” 170, Wellman
• “Burned-over district was a name applied to a small region, during a limted period of history, to indicate a particular phase of
development. It described the religious character of western New York during the first half of the nineteenth century.” Vii
• “As far as time goes, this book is an illustration of the way in which the minds of one era help to form the destinies of
succeeding generations. Neither the causes of the Civil War nor the origins of national prohibition, to cite only two prominent
examples, can be thoroughly understood without reference to the Burned-over District.” Vii
18
“Cross called his book both an intellectual and a social history. In terms of intellectual history, the book revolved essentially
around the rise and decline of an idea, the idea of ultraism, which Cross defined as “a combination of activities, personalities,
and attitudes creating a condition of society which could foster experimental doctrines” (73).” 159, Wellman
• “[Cross] based his central theme (ultraism and its spread) on provocative nuggets of social and economic explanations. Areas
which supported ultraism, Cross argued, were economically mature, agrarian regions. They had a stable population that hovered
at a high point about sixty persons per square mile, with a heavy infusion of Yankee settlers, a steep decline of household
production of cloth, with often a surplus of women and a relatively large proportion of single women. They also had widespread
education and literacy and a large number of newspapers and magazines, especially religious periodicals.” 160, Wellman
• “It was nothing short of genius which led Cross to choose as a title The Burned-Over District. Not only did this title make the
book itself memorable; it also brought a clear identity to the upstate region before the Civil War.” 164, Wellman
• “Neither Cross nor his mentors seemed to perceive a second problem f focus, although contemporary historians must deal with
it: that is Cross’s emphasis on some movements while virtually ignoring others. He dealt at length with Finney and John
Humphrey Noyes, for example, but barely mentioned the Shakers. He gave credit to women as the “paramount” influence in “a
history of enthusiastic movements” (84), but devoted less than one page to women’s rights activities per se. He argued that “only
after the ultraist phase has passed could the women’s rights enterprise take form, and that movement had very little connection
with western New York’s religious history” (287). Yet he dealt at length with the establishment of Fourieristic communities in
the region, which themselves were not part of a strictly religious movement.” 165, Wellman
• “[Cross] explained to an editor at Alfred Knopf in April 1948, that “my aim has been to explain these movements in terms of the
civilization which produced them, and to synthesize them as symbols of intellectual trends of the day.” 166, Wellman
• “When the book appeared, Cross gave equal weight to both fields in the subtitle…yet he presented not a synthesis of social and
intellectual history but a study of a state of mind, of ultraism, set in its social and intellectual context.” 166, Wellman
• “And ultraism itself was the key to understanding the whole burned-over district phenomenon, [according to Cross].” 167, Well
• “Once the economic situation had stabilized, Cross argued, transplanted Yankees would turn to concerns of religion and reform.
In this formulation, it is the presence of Yankees that is the key to ultraist enthusiasm, but the Yankee propensity for isms will be
unleashed only against the background of a mature rural society.” 170, Wellman
•
“Similarly [Cross] argued that “the proportion of married women to the total of females declined with the maturity of town and
countryside alike” (62). Yet only in the dissertation footnote did he give some sense of what this meant.” 171, Wellman
• “The result is an intimate account of a relatively small area within the limits of the early nineteenth century which he calls The
Burned-Over District, a title derived from the contemporary records of the religious enthusiasm which blazed across this region
in a period when revivals, new creeds, and strange beliefs were phenomena of American cultural history.” 82, Tyler
• “The district had its full share of each of the religious obsessions and vagaries of the ear—the earlier and the Finney revivals, the
beginnings of Mormonism annd of spiritualism, the Antimasonic movement, the Oneida Community, and a host of perfectionist
ideas and other agitations of a social and religious nature.” 82, Tyler
• “Garisson’s “root and branch” abolitionism, extreme pacifism in the peace movement, and “teetotalism” in the temperance
crusade all are evidence of ultraism in reformers, and the subdivision of churches in the period into many sects was observed as
early as the 1830’s by de Tocqueville and called “rienism”… Mr. Cross’s conclusion that “Men cannot remain long poised on
the logical absolute of any doctrine” is proved over and over in this study of one small area and would be equally true of others.”
83, Tyler
• “One of Professor Cross’s more interesting ideas is that the continual emphasis upon the individual sinner and the personal
nature of the “sin” of slavery or of intemperance, for instance, led men away from consideration of society and its needs and
delayed rather than furthered real advancement. The author’s final conclusion is that “the American tradition has been greatly
enriched by the legacies of radicalism.” “Courageous nonconformity,” he says, “ought of itself to constitute a precious heritage
to the twentieth century.” 83, Tyler
• “But the Yankees had a strong ascendancy, and these people Professor Cross sees as more inquisitive, independent,
“experimenting” than the New Englanders who stayed at home, and as also highly literate. Here he finds light on the peculiar
mentality of the Burned-over District.” 95, Nichols
• “”The ultraist state of mind rose from an implicit…reliance upon the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit.” It took up one or
another religious or moral cause with uncritical enthusiasm and intense activity, confident that the triumph of righteousness in
the world would be attained through the movement in hand, full of inconsistencies, intolerant.” 95, Nichols
Sources: sermons, census data, revival newspapers, maps
Connections: Johnson, Shopkeepers, Stewart, Holy Warriors, Walters, American, Johnson and Wilentz, Kingdom, Hatch,
Christianization, Thomas “Romantic Reform”
•
Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (1994)
Argument: “The story of Matthias and his Kingdom…[and its] characters appeared to be emblematic of a more general social type; and
almost every twist in the plot seemed indicative of some larger cultural trend. The story was shocking but it was also significant…one
writer observed, eccentric but dead-serious commentary on the contests over family life, sexuality, and social class that accompanied the
rise of the market society.” 11
• “The United States, [Matthias] said, had promised union, freedom, and equal rights but in fact produced political and religious
confusion—a nightmare world where the wicked spirit separated what God had joined and joined what God had split apart.” 5
19
“Unembarrassed, Matthias showed up for yet another meeting with [Joseph] Smith the next morning, when he described some of
his own spiritual history. He proclaimed himself a direct descendant of the Hebrew prophets and patriarchs, of Jesus Christ, and
of Matthias the Apostle. He possessed the souls of all these Fathers, for that was the way of everlasting life: the transmigration
of spirits from Father to son. He was, in short, the incarnate Spirit of Truth.” 5
• “The meeting of the Prophets Matthias and Joseph Smith was one of hundreds of strange religious events that occurred all across
the United States from the 1820s through the 1840s. These were the peak years of the market revolution that took the country
from the fringe of the world economy to the brink of commercial greatness. They were also (not coincidentally) years of intense
religious excitement and sectarian invention, the culmination of what historians have called the Second Great Awakening.” 6
• “Building on more that two centuries of occultism and Anglo-American millenarian speculation, the seers of the new republic set
the pattern for later prophetic movements down to our own time and gave birth to enduring religious institutions, including
Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” 6
• “Matthias and Smith, poor men who were rooted socially and emotionally in the yeoman republic of the eighteenth century, had
been diminished by that revolution; both of them detested the emerging Yankee [Northern] middle class and its new moral
imperatives. They thus fell outside of what respectable northern opinion considered the main currents of religious change in the
decades before the Civil War, currents that most closely identified with the evangelical reformism of Yankee revival preachers
like Charles Grandison Finney” 7
• “Having abandoned the gloomy Calvinist determinism of their parents’ generation, they understood that every human being was
a moral free agent, and that individuals could overcome inherited human selfishness and be saved through repentance and
prayer.” 7
• “The reassessment began at home. In the wake of the great Finneyite revivals, businessmen whose fathers and grandfathers had
assumed unquestioned control over their households began to pray with their wives and to give themselves over to a gentle,
loving Jesus. Finneyite men worked honestly and hard, prayed for release from anger and passion, used their money for
Christian purposes, and willingly delegated day-to-day authority over child-rearing and other household affairs to their wives.
Evangelical women, for their part, taught their children (and very often their husbands) how to pray, how to develop an
instinctive knowledge of right and wrong, and how to nurture the moral discipline that would prepare them for conversion and
lifelong Christian service.” 7
• “their fervor and organizational skills turned the Whig party in revival-soaked regions into an arm of Finneyite reform.” 8
• “If perfection began in individual autonomy, they reasoned, then all coercive human relations were sinful.” 8
• “Against the Finneyites’ feminized spirituality of restraint, Smith and Matthias (each in his own way) resurrected an ethos of
fixed social relations and paternal power. Yet as they saw things, they were defenders of ancient truth against the perverse
claims of arrogant, affluent, and self-satisfied enemies of God. And a majority of those Americans who were exposed to
Finneyite evangelicalism apparently shared their anti-Finneyite views, if not their spiritual inventions and revalations. Southern
evangelicals of all classes and colors were either untouched by Finneyite revivals or actively hostile to them. And in the North,
as historians have only begun to discover, the great democratic revivals of the early nineteenth century emerged primarily not
from the new middle class but from Americans whom the market revolution had either bypassed or hurt. These plebian
Christians—including most Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ, the members of smaller evangelical sects like the
Freewill Baptists, and prophets like Matthias and Joseph Smith—resented the Finneyites’ wealth, their education, their aptitude
for organization, and their self-assigned roles as the cultural vanguard of market society and moral reform. So did the relatively
tiny groups of American free-thinkers and deists, along with uncounted other Americans who were indifferent to any form of
religion.” 9-10
• “The story revolves around the interaction of two would-be prophets. The first, Elijah Pierson, was a Manhattan merchant who
had experience a heavy dose of evangelical perfectionism and had rejected traditional religious authority. Unable to raise his
wife form the dead, Pierson (who renamed himself Elijah the Tishbite) was vulnerable to a visionary with even greater selfproclaimed powers. Robert Mathews, a frustrated carpenter, was the second prophet. Mathews was enraged over his declining
fortune, the success of bourgeois evangelicals, and the demise of the patriarchal family. Rejected by the evangelical churches,
Mathews found a new direction for his religious enthusiasm. He proclaimed himself the Prophet Matthias, defender of
patriarchy, and incarnation of the male spirit of God the Father.” 1679, Johnson
• “Soon after the two prophets met, Mathews absorbed Pierson and a number of his acquaintances into a small religious
community. The Kingdom of Matthias was notable for its pre-commercial habits and customs, bizarre doctrines, sexual
eccentricities, and obedience to the whims of its authoritarian patriarch. The kingdom lurched from crisis to crisis until the
sudden death of Pierson led to Mathews’s indictment for murder.” 1679, Johnson
• “this narrative reminds us that the Second Great Awakening was more than a series of evangelical religious revivals. It was, as
William McLoughlin wrote in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform (1978), a paradigm shift in which people sought new ways to
order their lives…Second, this book broadens our understanding of American religious history. Not all religious mutations
survive—Matthews was a spectacular failure since his innovations challenged conventional morality as well as the new middleclass family—but unsuccessful experiments are also part of our religious past. Third, the epilogue offers some somber warnings
as it connects Matthews to similar leaders (Jim Jones and David Koresh) in the late twentieth century. Religion does not always
ennoble and enlighten; American cults have a long history of twisting, distorting, and even extinguishing lives that full under a
prophet’s spell” 1679, Johnson
Sources: journals, newspapers, court records, pamphlets
•
20
Connections: Cross, Burned-Over, Walters, American, Stewart, Holy, Hatch, Christianization, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Johnson,
Shopkeepers
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)
Argument: “Nathan O. Hatch argues that between 1775 and 1845 a host of evangelical populists led a religious revolt against learned
theologians, gentlemen preachers, decorous congregations, and centralized ecclesiastical institutions. They repudiated Calvinist creeds,
sedate forms of signing, formal orders of worship, and polite styles of preaching, preferring rough and ready theologies that accentuated
human freedom, popular sons and ditties sung to fiddle tunes and jigs, spontaneous exuberance in church services, and earlthy sermons by
uneducated exhorters. And they revolutionized American religion.” 633, Holifield
• “This book argues that the transitional period between 1780 and 1830 left indelible an imprint upon the structures of American
Christianity as it did upon those of American political life. Only land, Robert Wiebe has noted, could compare with Christianity
as the pulse of a new democratic society.” 6
• “This book is about the cultural and religious history of the early American republic and the enduring structures of American
Christianity. It argues both that the theme of democratization is central to understanding the development of American
Christianity, and that the years of the early republic are the most crucial in revealing that process.” 3
• “Starting from scratch just prior to the Revolution, Methodism in America grew at a rate that terrified other more established
denominations. By 1820 Methodist membership numbered a quarter million; by 1830 it was twice that number. Baptist
membership multiplied tenfold in the three decades after the Revolution; the number of churches increased from five hundred to
over twenty-five hundred.” 3
• “Between the American Revolution and 1845, the population of the United States grew at a staggering rate: two and a half
million became twenty million in seventy years. This unprecedented growth was due to a high birth rate and the availability of
land, rather than to heavy immigration.” 4
• “This book examines five distinct traditions, or mass movements, that developed early in the nineteenth century: the Christian
movement, the Methodists, the Baptists, the black churches, and the Mormons. Each was led by young men of relentless energy
who went about movement-building as self-conscious outsiders. They shared an ethic of unrelenting toil, a passion for
expansion, a hostility to orthodox belief and style, a zeal for religious reconstruction, and a systematic plan to realize their ideals.
However diverse in their theologies and church organizations, they all offered common people, especially the poor, compelling
visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence. Like the Populist movement at the end of the nineteenth
century, these movements took shape around magnetic leaders who were highly skilled in communication and group
mobilization.” 4-5
• “Abstractions and generalities about the Second Great Awakening as a conservative force have obscured the egalitarianism
powerfully at work in the new nation. As common people became significant actors on the religious scene, there was increasing
confusion and angry debate over the purpose and function of the church.” 5
• Deep and powerful undercurrents of democratic Christianity distinguish the United States from other modern industrial
democracies. These currents insure that churches in this land do not withhold faith from the rank and file…Religious populism,
reflecting the passions of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among the oldest and
deepest impulses in American life.” 5
• “Above all, the Revolution dramatically expanded the circle of people who considered themselves capable of thinking for
themselves about issues of freedom, equality, sovereignty, and representation. Respect for authority, tradition and education
eroded.” 6
• “A diverse array of evangelical firebands went about the task of movement-building in the generation after the Revolution. Intent
on bringing evangelical conversion to the mass of ordinary Americans, they could rarely divorce that message from contagious
new democratic vocabularies and impulses that swept through American popular cultures. Class structure was viewed as
society’s fundamental problem. There was widespread disdain for the supposed lessons of history and tradition, and a call for
reform using the rhetoric of the Revolution. The press swiftly became a sword of democracy, fueling ardent faith in the future of
the America republic.” 7
• “America’s nonrestrictive environment permitted an unexpected and often explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and
popular sovereignty. It was this engine that accelerated the process of Christianization within American popular culture,
allowing indigenous expressions of faith to take hold among ordinary people, white and black.” 9
• “The rise of evangelical Christianity in the early republic is, in some measure, a story of the success of common people in
shaping the culture after their own priorities rather than the priorities outlined by gentlemen such as the framers of the
Constitution.” 9
• “The democratization of Christianity, then, has less to do with the specifics of polity and governance and more with the
incarnation of church into popular culture. In at least three respects the popular religious movements of the early republic
articulated a profoundly democratic spirit. First, they denied the age-old distinction that set the clergy apart as a separate order
of men, and they refused to defer to learned theologians and traditional orthodoxies. All were democratic or populist in the way
they instinctively associated virtue with ordinary people rather than with elites, exalted the vernacular in word and song as the
hallowed channel for communicating with and about God, and freely turned over the reigns of power. These groups also shared
with the Jeffersonian Republicans an overt rejections of the past as a repository of wisdom. By redefining leadership itself, these
movements reconstructed the foundations of religion in keeping with the values and priorities of ordinary people.” 9-10
21
“Second, these movements empowered ordinary people by taking their deepest spiritual impulses at face value rather than
subjecting them to the scrutiny of orthodox doctrine and the frowns of respectable clergymen.” 10
• “The early republic was also a democratic movement in a third sense. Religious outsiders, flushed with confidence about their
prospects, had little sense of their limitations. They dreamed that a new age of religious and social harmony would naturally
spring up out of their efforts to overthrow coercive and authoritarian structures. This upsurge of democratic hope, this passion
for equality, led to a welter of diverse and competing forms, many of them structured in highly undemocratic ways.”10-11
• “”What had been defined as “enthusiasm” was increasingly advocated from the pulpit as an essential part of Christianity. Such a
shift in emphasis, accompanied by rousing gospel singing rather than formal church music, reflected the common people’s
success in defining the nature of faith for themselves. In addition, an unprecedented wave of religious leaders in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century expressed their openness to a variety of signs and wonders, in short, an admission of increased
supernatural involvement in everyday life.” 10
• “these populist religious leaders were intoxicated with the potential for print. The rise of a democratic religious culture in print
after 1800 put obscure prophets such as Elias Smith, Lorenzo Dow, and Theophilus Gates or black preachers such as Richard
Allen or Daniel Coker on an equal footing with Jonathan Edwards and Timothy Dwight.” 11
• “This is a book about popular religion which focuses, ironically, upon elites—or at least upon those persons who rose to
leadership positions in a wide range of popular American churches and religions movements. Using democratic leadership as an
organizing principle complements other approaches: the evolution of individual denominations; the clash of theological debate;
the outworking of ethnic and regional patters; the dynamics of recurring revival; or the flourishing of popular religion outside
Christian institutions. The theme of democratic leadership brings into sharper focus certain deep and recurring patterns in
American religious history.” 12
• “In the same vein, I focus on common developments rather than those characteristic of a given region…The choice to study
common developments springs from a conviction that certain underlying cultural dynamics of this period are not reducible to
distinct regional characteristics. The flowering of Methodism, of the Christian movement, or of black Christianity cannot be
explained by focusing attention on a single section of the country.” 12
• “This work focuses upon the religious leaders themselves, particularly those who mastered the democratic art of persuasion and
on that rock built significant religious movements. The agitations of these insurgents brought them into being new churches and
denominations in which authority depended not on the ability to move people and retain their confidence.” 12
• “the fundamental religious debates in the early republic were not merely a clash of intellectual and theological difference but
also a passionate social struggle with power and authority. Deep-seated class antagonism separated clergy from clergy. The
learned and orthodox disdained early Methodism’s new revival measures, notions of free will, and perfectionism.” 14
• “It is the intent of this study to tell at least part of this complicated story: how ordinary folk came to distrust leaders of genius
and talent and to defend the right of common people to shape their own faith and submit to leaders of their own choosing.” 14
• “This story also provides new insight into how America became a liberal, competitive, and market-driven society. In an age
when more ordinary Americans expected almost nothing from government institutions and almost everything from religious
ones, popular religious ideologies were perhaps the most important bellwethers of shifting worldviews. The passion for equality
during these years equaled the passionate rejection of the past. Rather than looking backward and clinging to an older moral
economy, insurgent religious leaders espoused convictions that were essentially modern and individualistic. These convictions
defied elite privilege and vested interests and anticipated a millennial dawn of equality and justice. Yet, to achieve these visions
of the common good, they favored means inseparable from the individual’s pursuit of spiritual and temporal well-being. They
assumed that the leveling of aristocracy, root and branch, would naturally draw people together in harmony and equality. In this
way, religious movements eager to preserve the supernatural in everyday life had the ironic effect of accelerating the break-up of
traditional society and the advent of a social order of competition, self-expression, and free enterprise.” 14
• “The early republic was the most centrifugal epoch in American church history. It was a time when the momentum of events
pushed toward the periphery and subverted centralized authority and professional expertise.” 15
• “Attempting to erase the difference between leaders and followers, Americans opened the door to religious demagogues.” 16
• “What then is the driving force behind American Christianity if it is not the quality of its organization, the status of its clergy, or
the power of its intellectual life? I have suggested that a central force has been it democratic or populist orientation. America
has lived in the shadow of a democratic revolution and the liberal, competitive culture that followed in its wake. Forms of
popular religion characteristic of that cultural system bound paradoxical extremes together: a reassertion of the reality of the
supernatural in everyday life linked to the quintessentially modern values of autonomy and popular sovereignty. American
Christians reveled in freedom of expression, refused to bow to tradition or hierarchy, jumped at opportunities for innovative
communication, and propounded popular theologies tied to modern notions of historical development.” 213
Sources: Sermons, journals, newspapers, pamphlets
Connections: Cross, Burned-Over, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Johnson and Wilentz, Kingdom, Thomas, “Romantic Reform,” Walters,
American, Stewart, Holy
Comment: The Second Great Awakening has an impact because of the historical memory. Americans follow no tradition and the heirs
of the Revolution are trying to figure out exactly who they are and one way they do this is religion. At the same time, they have the right
to self-rule and they do not really want to be like Europe.
•
Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (1997)
22
Argument: “This book does not pretend to be comprehensive. It seeks to merge the institutional focus of the old labor history with the
special social and cultural insights of the new labor history. It is chiefly concerned with organized workers and their politic and more
especially with the major labor movements of the nineteenth century—the Working Men’s parties and General Trades’ Union in the late
1820s and 1830s and the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and 1890s—but not in isolation. It deals with
organized workers in their larger world, their relations to unorganized males, women, and blacks as well as with employers and
government. It also attempts to tell us something about the unfolding of capitalism in the countryside as well as the city. And it strives to
demonstrated ho the making and unmaking of the American working class influenced the country’s history.” 13-14
• Laurie shows the specific development from skilled artisans into relatively unskilled factory workers.
• “Laurie’s view is that American workers’ critiques were commonly fueled by a “radicalism” that, while often militant, remained
linked to an underlying “free labor” vision of the American economy as open, dynamic, and capable of yielding wealth and
independence to all who worked hard.” 138-139, Prude
• “In sum, Laurie concludes, “socialism…was so weak because radicalism was so strong.” And then, after 1865, the corrosive
force of “radicalism” was supplemented by overt, and often government-sanctioned, repressions of labor organizations—a
development making dreams of beneficent stat-run socialism even harder to credit.” 139, Prude
• By socialism [John R.] Commons [the father of American Labor History] and his students meant both class consciousness and a
socialist party speaking for the working class.” 3
• “But Commons considered American workers indifferent or averse to socialism by comparison with Europeans, who had formed
socialist parties earlier and were more demonstrably class-conscious.” 3
• “ [Selig] Perlman [Common’s student] argued that conditions peculiar to the United State imbued social relations and worker
consciousness with two fundamental distinctions. First, during the nineteenth century American workers in the name of
antimonopoly made common cause in politics with the “producing classes” of farmers and small businessmen. Labor’s romance
with independent politics defeated the primary function of trade unionism by diverting attention to fruitless third-party political
campaigns that necessarily relegated workplace activity to a “sunshine” enterprise, an avocation undertaken between electoral
initiatives. Second, in the long run, employers were able to keep their employees satisfied and contented with wage labor. This
enhanced the stature of the employer so that his “individualistic spirit” penetrated “the ranks of his employees.” 4
• “A deeply ingrained respect for property rights, “bred into the American community from the very beginning,” nurtured “social
and economic conservativism” and produced a nation of expectant capitalists. Geographic mobility destabilized working-class
communities and disrupted workers’ organizations, no the least of which, of course, were trade unions. Mainstream political
parties, on the other hand, were more durable and popular than unions. And because (white male) American workers were
awarded the “free gift” of the right to vote, they were more firmly integrated into the political order than European workers, who
could not exercise the franchise for most of the nineteenth century. In addition, constant waves of immigrants made the
American working class “the most heterogeneous.” 4
• “Job-conscious workers saw themselves not as the political companions of petty producers or members of a class with common
concerns but as practitioners of individual crafts, a constellation of interest groups with the narrow aims of increasing wages,
reducing the length of the workday, and safeguarding their jobs through enforced apprenticeship training and work rules.” 4-5
•
“It is my purpose to show that the development of the American working class differed from its European counterpart in two
critical respects. First, the ideology of radicalism persisted longer than in any continental nation….to emphasize the dualism in
the radical tradition before the Civil War and indeed long afterward. At the workplace it encouraged a form of class
consciousness, a belief that employers illegitimately accumulated profit from the toil of labor. It justified struggle for immediate
gain and proposed the long-term solution of cooperative production. IN politics, however, radicalism operated as a force for
integration because of its loose compatibility with free laborism and because of the adaptability and social openness of the
established parties. The durability of radicalism also inhibited the transition to socialism that took place in some European
nations.” 12
• “Equally important, radicalism never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt
government. It never fully greeted government as a class ally or instrument for class liberation, and as a result could not easily
accept the role that socialism demanded of the state. One reason why “there was no socialism” in the late nineteenth century, or
to be more accurate, why socialism was comparatively weak, is that radicalism was so persistent.” 12
• “Second, Gilded Age workers not only ran up against an arrogant and callous class of industrialists fiercely antipathetic to
unions. They also encountered ruthless resistance from state and federal government. Judges freely gutted labor laws and stifled
job actions with crippling injunctions. Armed militiamen, sometimes bolstered by federal troops, were aggressive and shot
down strikers not just during the major strikes of the mid-1870s, the general strike for the eight-hour day in 1886, the Homestead
strike, and the Pullman boycott were not simply dramatic clashes in which each side exchanged blows, ministered to the
wounded, buried the dead, and repaired to the bliss of the Victorian home. They were formative events widely discussed,
assessed, and reassessed in corner taverns, party headquarters, and union halls. And they proved decisive in the development of
the labor movement.” 13
• “Evangelical Protestantism, a frequent companion of paternalism, could also soften early industrialism. Evangelicalism, to be
sure, offered a contradictory message. The 1840s found workers invoking the injunction “in the sweat thy brow shalt thou eat
bread” to attack selfishness and inequality; they quoted passages from Genesis to assail mandatory labor on the Sabbath and
excessive hours during the week. At the same time, evangelicalism imbued workers with the individualistic spirit of the
entrepreneur, with distrust of collective action to redress job-related grievances and with suspicion of nonbelievers as well as
virulent anti-Catholicism. The church was also a social center, a place where employee and employer met as equals in the eyes
23
of God and sometimes worked out mutually beneficial arrangements to serve Mammon. Poorer churchgoers patronized the
shops of wealthier parishioners who hired fellow congregants or helped ambitious journeymen establish their own businesses.”
• “Few antebellum workers, however, were evangelicals. Only a fraction of working people in the North or South regularly
attended church before the popular revivals during the economic slump of the late 1830s. These outbursts of holiness were
followed by a great influx of European immigrants that fundamentally changed the composition of the work class in both
regions.” 212
• “The intensification of economic change, marked by the rise of the sweating system and expansion of factory production, set off
the first sustained attacks on the industrial revolution and systematic programs for equality drafted by artisans for artisans. The
radical essayists and pamphleteers of the 1820s brought together two strands of thought, an older political convention and a new
economics. The first was rooted in the traditional republican wisdom that vilified government as oppressive and exploitative and
entrusted mechanics an small farmers with preserving equality and republican rule. The political vigilance of the plain people
grew out of their economic autonomy and self-sufficiency, which inculcated a fierce sense of independence and deep distrust of
those who depended on government, whether for subsistence or for economic well-being invested political radicalism with a
critical perspective on the commercial aand industrial revolutions, but not with concepts that grasped economic affairs in
economic terms.” 213
• “Political radicalism told the artisan he was a citizen and, within the context of political democracy, the peer of every (white)
man. It asserted through political action that would clear the field of privilege and favoritism.” 214
• “The economics of radicalism, on the other hand, told the worker he was an economic being, a producer with interests separate
and distinct from such parasitic accumulators as merchants, financiers, and large employers. Economic radicalism pointed the
worker toward unionism in a more emphatic way than political radicalism.” 214
• “Unions were the foundation of the movement culture that arose in the major cities of the North in the 1830s. The General
Trades’ Unions of those years combined cultural with economic functions, supporting labor papers, debating societies, reading
rooms, and other cultural resources while standing behind union men seeking better pay and shorter workdays. They were
remarkably successful on the economic front, perhaps more so than any other union movement in the century. The vast majority
of the general strikes in 1835 either achieved the ten-hour day or ended in compromise settlements, and most of the strikes for
wage increases in 1836 won their demand.” 214
• “It is an idle exercise to suppose what might have been had the panic of 1837 not stopped the momentum of cooperation in its
tracks and then brought about the collapse of the labor movement itself. We can be certain that the destruction of unions and
cooperatives gave the initiative to the politics of radicalism. In the immediate aftermath of the panic, labor advocates fell back
on the politics of hard money; they lampooned bankers and speculators in language consistent with the received politics of the
Democratic party. By midpoint in the depression labor had leaders without a movement; with few exceptions the leaders had
become minor functionaries in the Democratic party.” 215
• “Except for the building trades and pockets of industrial craftsmen in the old crafts and new industries, the typical wage warned
in manufacturing was turned into a semiskilled machines operative without much discretion on the job. The supple artisan
culture of the small shop was swept into the industrial periphery and paternalistsic management declined or fell apart.” 215-216
Sources: newspapers, union records, pamphlets, church records
Connections: Wilentz, Chants, Sellers, Market, Cross, Burned, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Walters, American, Hatch, Democratization
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Argument: “The overall argument of Chants Democratic is easily summarized. From the revolutionary period to the Jacksonian era
New York City’s artisans formulated a collective identity unifying masters, journeymen, and apprentices and setting them apart from
other social groups, a unique blend of egalitarianism and revolutionary ideology that Wilentz calls “artisan republicanism.” By the 1820s,
however, the transformation of journeymen into wage earners had proceeded sufficiently in some trades to raise questions about the
mechanics’ solidarity. Masters and employees increasingly extracted and emphasized different themes from their shared republican
heritage, a divergence that accelerated rapidly with the emergence of the Workingmen’s movement of 1829 and the General Trades’
Union of the early 180s. While the depression of 1837-1843 forced many workers to seek comfort in their own distinctively plebian
visions of nativism, temperance, and land reform, the labor crisis of 1850 once again revealed how thoroughly industrialization had
shattered artisan republicanism and how workingmen understood their ordeal in terms of class.” 460, Steffen
• “In New York City—by 1850 the most productive manufacturing economy in the United States—the great leap in production
was neither a function of technological innovation nor a triumph of the factory system. The development of industry was
uneven, with small manufactories in the finishing consumer trades, such as garments, outnumbering heavier, more fully
mechanized industries. Throughout the period smaller master craftsmen abounded, while larger manufactures traced their roots
to artisan shops, not to a merchant elite. The most important transformation was in the allocation and organization of labor, the
increasing subdivision tasks, the utilization of cheap labor, and the resort to “out work”—all hallmarks of a sweated system of
industrial production. By 1850 the world of the independent craftsman had disintegrated into what Wilentz calls the “bastard
workshop,” where artisan journeymen were replaced by exploited wage workers.” 140-141, Ryan
•
“Until the 1820s, manufacturers in New York City were a unified if hierarchically differentiated class. Masters, journeymen,
and apprentices all shared a republican identity, loyally advocating the five principles of commonwealth, virtue, independence,
equality, and citizenship, as described by Pocock.” 141, Ryan
• “By the third decade of the century this harmonious workshop had been supplanted by the bastard system of production…As
Wilentz shows us, “1829 was an extraordinary year,” marked by depression, the explosion of Jacksonian politics, and the birth of
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a radical popular movement. The movement began with a protest by journeyman and culminated in the formation of the
Working Men’s Party. Yet, it is an event along the way—a mass meeting called by Thomas Skidmore in April—that Wilentz
finds most revealing. This mass democratic assemblage, composed primarily of militant journeymen, endorsed a radical critique
of private property and questioned the very legitimacy of banking and credit…Coincident with the degradation of artisan labor at
a moment when the second party system was not fully in place, New York workers mounted a militant political and ideological
challenge to the established powers.” 141, Wilentz
“In fact, the 1830s brought us many as two out of three industrial workers into New York’s General Federation of Trade Unions.
Moreover, the reports of the GFU, as well as their parades, revealed the clear formulation of a new class identity. Some twentysix trades united in the GFU, and almost all of them demanded their right as producers to control wages and the conditions of
work. In so doing, the journeymen of New York adopted a new language of class. Large employers were no longer master
craftsmen; now they were set apart as “capitalists,” intent on maximizing profits by cheapening wages and abrogating the
workers’ right to property in their own labor. At the same time employers were also refining a class identity. Masters,
represented by associations like the American Institute and the Mechanics Intitute, articulated a theory of capitalism as a
republican utopia, where anything that contributed to economic advancement ultimately helped the whole society and polity.
The artisans, according to Wilentz, saw things differently. To them it had become clear that the inordinate power of the master
in a capitalist marketplace contradicted republicanism itself, especially in its tenets of equality and independence. Journeymen
and increasing numbers of unskilled laborers could no longer march in unison with their masters on ceremonial days; instead
they walked defiantly out on strike.” 141-142, Ryan
“The organizational center of the labor crisis of 1850 was the New York Industrial Congress, which by the end of the year
enrolled some ninety different trade unions composed almost entirely of propertyless workers from the poorer wards of the
city…Wilentz adduces ample evidence to demonstrate that the workers of 1850 had become a class unto themselves. Not only
did they demand wage increases and call for the eight-hour day, but by founding scores producer cooperatives, they aimed to
“Be Forever rescued from the control of the capitalist.”” 142, Ryan
“It was a distinctly American heritage that inspired those workers assembled at City Hall. They rose in 1850 to uphold
republicanism amidst the ravages of metropolitan industrialization, to champion the now well-honed doctrines of the worker
contempt for nonproducing capitalistsm, and the recognition of the antirepublican implications of wages. By 1850 these values
were posed in direct confrontation with those of the capitalists, who in turn had solidified their class position so adamantly that
they could resort to police power to subdue the strikers….the obvious conclusion…metropolitan producers of American
manufactured goods had become a self-conscious, separate class, capable of radical though and militant action.” 143, Ryan
Strikes and labor unrest seem to stop in periods of economic downturn.
“Gradually, from the sixteenth century through the early nineteenth, merchant capitalists and master craftsmen restructured the
social relations of production, transformed wage labor into a market commodity and established the basis for new sets of class
relations and conflicts. In America, colonial rule, slavery, the weakness of mercantilist guilds, and an abundance of land created
a different economic matrix; nevertheless, a similar process of occurred at an accelerated rate beginning in the late eighteenth
century in the New England countryside and the established northern seaboard cities. Along with the destruction of plantation
slavery, this disruption of the American artisan system of labor ranks as one of the outstanding triumphs of nineteenth-century
American capitalism, part of the reordering of formal social relations to fit the bourgeois ideal of labor, market, and man.” 5
“So by 1850…New York, although no longer a political capital, had become the metropolis of America.” 6
“Progressives like [William] Trimble, [Dixon Ryan] Fox, and [Arthur] Schlesinger, Jr., thought that the heart of the matter lay in
party politics—that the early industrial revolution and the advent of the Jacksonian Democrats market the political rise of
“proletarian,” liberal forces, centered in New York and Massachusetts, which aimed to curb the excesses of conservative
“capitalists.” 7
“The Progressives’ insistence that political parties, in New York and elsewhere, directly embodied class interests—that the
Whigs were the party of business, the Democrats the party of farmers and labor, or simply “the people”—led them in turn to
ignore the plain truth that in New York and in the rest of the country, both major parties were led by established and emerging
elites and their professional allies, unusually lawyers. By then looking at employers and workers primarily through the
distorting lens of party politics, the Progressives further narrowed their understanding of popular social consciousness, virtually
equating it with the ideas espoused by either the Whigs or the Democrats; simultaneously, they took the politicians’ most fiery
“class” rhetoric at face value, as a full and accurate expression of the politicians’ social views and allegiances.” 7
“In place of a static, instrumentalist economic determinism, they [New Social Historians] have treated class as a dynamic social
relation, a form of social domination, determined largely by changing relations of production but shaped by cultural and political
factors (including ethnicity and religion) without any apparent logic of economic interest.” 10
“In short, they [New Social Historians] insist that the history of class relations cannot be deduced by some “economic” or
sociological calculus and imposed on the past; nor can it be ignored if it does not appear just as the historian thinks it should,
either in or out of politics. It must be examined as part of a human achievement in which men and women struggle to
comprehend the social relations into which they were born and in which, by the collective exercise of power, they sustain or
challenge those relations, in every phase of social life.” 10
“The final product approaches the problem through a series of interconnected middle-range themes. The first will come as no
surprise: the central role of the crafts. Craft workers—sometimes treated by labor historians as a working-class elite, the
aristocracy of urban labor—were in fact at the heart of New York’s emerging working class from the 1790s until mid-century,
embracing wide range of people, form well-paid skilled journeymen to outworkers getting by on starvation wages. Clerks and
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unskilled laborers represented a numerous but decided minority of male metropolitan workers before the Civil War; except for
domestic servants, a very special group, the vast majority of female wage earners as well were craft workers. Although male
laborers and dockhands did organize on their own behalf, it was the craft workers (including the women) who, in concert with
radical small producers, elaborated the first articulate forms of plebian radicalism, and who dominated the most powerful labor
organizations of the era.” 10-11
• “The history of class and class formation is the history of the “process of confrontation” between classes, then the terms of
confrontation were set by the ideals, aspirations, rationalizations, and activities, of New York’s employers and independent small
producers as well as by the city’s workers. To make sense of the emerging middle class in this context is to begin to
comprehend the dialects of power and social change.” 12
• “The subjects of this book turned to the language of the Republic to explain their views, attack their enemies, and support their
friends…this discourse rested largely on four interlocking concepts: first, that the ultimate goal of any political society should be
the preservation of the public good, or commonwealth; second, that in order to maintain the commonwealth, the citizens of a
republic had to be able and willing to exercise virtue, to subordinate private ends to the legislation of the public good when they
conflicted; third, that in order to be virtuous, citizens had to be independent of the political will of other men, lest they lose sight
of the common good; fourth, that in order to guard against the encroachments of would-be tyrants, citizens had to be active in
politics, to exercise their citizenship. To these concepts, eighteenth-century Americans, above all “middling” merchants and
artisans, added equality, the liberal idea that all citizens should be entitled to their natural civil and political rights under a
representative, democratic system of laws.” 14
• “Faced with profound changes in the social relations of production, ordinary New Yorkers began to reinterpret their shared
ideals of commonwealth, virtue, independence, citizenship, and equality, and struggled over the very meaning of the terms. In so
doing, they also revealed the social meanings of republicanism for urban producers—and how they changed. Formal republican
thought was a political ideology, a world view that distinguished sharply between society and government and held that social
disorder stemmed from political corruption. Nevertheless, it bore close associations to social relations outside of politics,
associations that were severely tested as Americans came to consider their own way of life as peculiarly conducive to a proper
republican order.” 14-15
• “By 1850, with the erosion of the artisan system, that shared vision had virtually collapsed and been replaced by new and
opposing conceptions of republican politics and the social relations that would best sustain them. This process of social
reformation and ideological transformation was neither simple nor linear; to trace its sometimes baffling course form the most
direct of class confrontations through nativism and immigration, political intrigue, gang warfare, and numerous reform
movements, is the greatest challenge for the historian of early-nineteenth-century urban labor.” 15
• “Rather, between 1829…and 1850, both a process and a strain of consciousness emerged in numerous ways from the swirl of
popular politics, in which people came at various points to interpret social disorder and the decline of the Republic at least partly
in terms of class divisions between capitalist employers and employees. More specifically, workers and radicals elaborated a
notion of labor as a form of personal property, in direct opposition to the capitalist conceptions of wage labor as a market
commodity. For much of the period, this consciousness of class appeared within a broader defense of the “producing classes,”
an amalgam of “honorable” anticapitalist small masters and wage earners; in moments of particularly acute crisis, however, as in
the mid-1830s and in 1850, critiques of wage relations came to the fore, usually in trade-union movements.” 17
•
“If new forms of class relations and social consciousness arose, as I believe they did, they should show up in redefinitions of
gender, sexuality, and family, in the conduct of politics, in childhood, in household patterns, in the meanest transactions of
everyday life. No such total history is attempted here.” 17
• “But a new order of human relations did emerge, primarily in the North and West, defined chiefly by the subordination of wage
labor to capital. What is more, men and women came in the same period to understand that this was happening, and they began
to think and act, in E.P. Thompson’s phrase, in new “class ways,” unlike those of the mid-eighteenth century.” 18
Sources: court records, ceremonial speeches, contemporary prints and drawings, and accounts of parades and festivals.
Connections: Laurie, Arisans, Sellers, Market, Cross, Burned, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Hatch, Democatization, Thomas “Romantic
Reform,” Walters, American, Stewart, Holy
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991)
Argument: “the crucial catalyst [of the market revolution], rather, is the National Republicans, a small yet “purposeful” group of
seaboard gentry which included John C. Calhoun, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. In Seller’s account, it was the
National Republicans, and not the great majority of ordinary Americans, ho pssesset “nteeneurial vision” necessary to bring this
transformation about.” 302 John
• “Central to Seller’s account is the concept of the “market revolution,” by which he means the transformation of the American
economy, polity, and culture through the expansion of commercial agriculture. Sellers uses this concept to divide American
history into three major phases. In the first phase, most Americans lived in a pre-capitalist world in which agricultural
production remained geared to the immediate needs of family subsistence. Around 1815, all this would change. The hinterland
would be rapidly transformed by the same commercial pressures that had already triumphed along the coast. By 1846, this
transformation was largely complete. By this time, the “use-value world” of the subsistence farmer had been almost entirely
supplanted by the “market world” within which Americnas have lived ever since.” 302, John
• “Fundamental to the National Republicans achievement was their self-conscious manipulation of public polity to promote the
commercial exploitation of the hinterland.” 303, John
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“Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution marks an ambitious effort to narrate and explain the triumph of capitalism in
antebellum America. Unlike most historians of the “capitalist transition,” Sellers insists that politics lay at the center of that
process, and narrates the political struggles that, he argues, largely determined the shape of America’s economic and social
order. The Market Revolution serves as a capstone to efforts to revive, in far more sophisticated from, the Progressive historians’
belief that the fierce political struggles of the Jacksonian era were rooted in class conflict.” 413, Huston
• “According to Sellers, capitalist development was the defining issue of Jacksonian politics. At the heart of the era’s political
conflicts lay overriding struggle between the market ethos of the capitalist seaboard and the cash crop frontier and the
“subsistence culture” of the rural majority.” 414, Huston
•
By 1815, Sellers argues, entrepreneurs and their representatives had won control of Jefferson’s Republican party—and, through
that party, the federal government. These National Republicans pursued a program of state-sponsored capitalist development
and national consolidation through a national bank, territorial expansion, internal improvements, and protective tariffs. This
program sparked a political insurgency among farmers and urban mechanics, who found their way of life threatened by the
market revolution and who remained dedicated to local autonomy and limited government.” 414, Huston
• “Long before the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Sellers argues, anticapitalism and democracy were inextricably linked. The
National Republican program also led to a defection among southern slave owners, who came to fear northern National
Republicans’ hostility to slavery and saw the national party’s extension of federal power a threat to human property.” 414, Hust
• “These class-based insurgencies found their national leader in Andrew Jackson. Antibank farmers and mechanics throughout the
nation flocked to the hero of New Orleans in 1824 and 1828, imbuing his candidacy with a popular, democratic, and
anticapitalist ethos.” 414, Huston
• “By 1840, Sellers argues, “democracy proved safe for capitalism. With this political defeat, popular anticapitalism lost its
power. Gradually, the farmer-worker majority accommodated itself to the ways of the market. The class solidarity exhibited by
producers during the 1820s and 1830s gave way to racial and ethnic fragmentation; popular politics came to reflect ethnic and
cultural divisions rather than class aspirations.” 415, Huston
Sources: Store records, journals, court records, land grants, migration records, census data, company records
Connections: Wilentz, Chants, Laurie, Artisans, Walters, American, Cross, Burned, Stewart, Holy, Thomas, “Romantic,” Johnson,
Shopkeepers, Hatch, Democratization
•
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln 2005)
Argument: “Democracy was on the rise throughout the United States in the antebellum era, even in some sectors of the South. And, as
he writes, eloquently, at its end the conflict left the victors “to define and implement democracy,” as the United States boiled over with
“all sorts of ideas about how equality might best be expanded—or curtailed” (p 793-794) 175, Altshuler
• “the book has a few major themes. One…is that democracy, at the nation’s inception, was highly contested, not a given, and
developed piecemeal, by fits and starts, at the state and local as well as the national level. A second theme is that social changes
barely foreseen in 1787—the rapid commercialization of the free labor North and the renaissance of plantation slavery in the
South—deeply affected how democracy advanced, and retreated after 1815. Third, Americans perceived these social changes
primarily in political terms and increasingly saw them as struggles over contending ideas of democracy...A fourth theme
concerns the constancy of political conflict: democracy in America was the spectavle of Americans arguing over
democracy…Fifth, the many-sided conflicts over American democracy came, in the 1840s and 1850s, to focus on an issue of
recognized importance since the republic’s birth: the fate of American slavery. Throughout the decades after the Revolution,
free-labor democracy of the North and the slaveholders’ democracy of the South—distinct political systems as well as bodies of
thought…The book’s final theme is implied in the others: the idea of democracy is never sufficient unto itself.” Xxi
(While I always love the political, I think one has to go with an economic argument here—the world was changing, primarily
through the economy and people kept searching for ways to deal with that change through social and political movements.)
• “A republic—the res publica, or “public thing”—was mean to secure the common good through the ministrations of the most
worthy, enlightened men. A democracy—derived from demos krateo, “rule of the people”—dangerously handed power to the
impassioned, unenlightened masses…Yet by the 130s, as Alexis de Tocqueville learned, most Americans proclaimed that their
country was a democracy as well as a republic.” Xvii
• “Today, democracy in America means enfranchisement, at a minimum, of the entire adult citizenry. By that standard, the
American democracy of the mid-nineteenth century was hardly a democracy at all: women of all classes and colors lacked
political and civil rights; most blacks were enslaved; free black men found political rights they had once enjoyed either reduced
or eliminated; the remnant of a ravaged Indian population in the eastern states had been forced to move west, without
citizenship.” Xviii
• “Before Schelsinger, historians thought of American democracy as the product of an almost mystical frontier or agrarian
egalitarianism. The Age of Jackson toppled that interpretation by placing democracy’s origins firmly in the context of the
founding generation’s ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy’s expansion as an outcome of struggles
between classes, not sections.” Xix
• “Thomas Jefferson, more than any other figure in the early republic, established (and was seen to have established) the terms of
American democratic politics. Abraham Lincoln self-consciously advanced an updated version of Jefferson’s egalitarian ideals,
and his election to the presidency of the United States caused the greatest crisis in American democracy has yet known.” Xx
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“One of the book’s recurring themes is how ordinary Americans, including some beyond the outermost reaches of the country’s
political leaders did not create American democracy out of thin air, so the masses of Americans did not simply force their way
into the corridors of power.” Xx
“For [Noah] Webster, Jackson was reborn Thomas Jefferson, accomplishing what Jefferson had only imagined accomplishing
when the philosophizing mood was upon him. Jackson himself, not known for philosophizing, called his political beliefs an
extension of “good old Jeffersonian Democratic republican principles.” And if Jackson came to symbolize a fulfillment of
Jeffersonian desires, his path had been cleared long before he took office.” 4
The mysterious rise of American democracy was an extraordinary part of the most profound political transformation in modern
history: the triumph of popular government and of the proposition—if not, fully, the reality—that sovereignty rightly belongs to
the mass of ordinary individual and equal citizens.” 5
“Bits and pieces of the English plebeian radicalism of the 640s and 1650s crossed the Atlantic and survived to help inspire the
American revolutionaries and frighten their opponents over a century later.” 6
“The radicalism of the seventeenth century belongs to the genealogy of American democracy…Colonial charters installed
property requirements for voting, usually landed freeholds, but in newly settled colonial areas where land was cheap, anywhere
from 70 to 80 percent of white adult men could meet the qualification. It was far easier for an American man of middling means
than for his British counterpart to hold local and even legislative office….Americans’ experience of town meetings (where, in
New England, humble men won election to local offices) and of independent, parish-run dissenting churches gave them a strong
taste of direct political engagement.” 6
“In older settled rural areas of the colonies, as in the coastal towns and early cities, the proportion of eligible voters among white
men was much smaller than elsewhere, as little as two in five. Those proportions probably declined during the years
immediately preceding the Revolution, when the rate of property ownership in the colonies was falling. The famous townmeeting democracies of New England were often run as means to ratify decisions already made by locals leaders, and to give the
air of amiable consensus.” 6
“The major claims on democracy’s behalf before the Revolution rested on the rising power, in many colonies, of the lower
houses of the colonial legislatures, in imitation of the rising power of the Commons in England after the Glorious Revolution of
1688-89. In principle, these assemblies represented the common middling sort, the small farmers, artisans, and petty merchants
who made up the great bulk of the colonial free male population.” 7
“If the unelected had any other political voice, it came in the form of extralegal mob violence and crowd disturbances—forms of
protests condoned and even instigated by established political leaders when it suited their political advantage.” 8
“Among the many surprises in the book is its placement of politics, politicians, and parties at the center of American history.
Like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in The Age of Jackson (1945), Wilentz sets the rise of democracy in the context of conflict between
classes. But, he argues, most American viewed social and economic developments through a partisan political prism, fighting
for (and over) democracy, broadly conceived, at the local, state, and national level.” 169, Altschuler
“Wiltenz gives strikes and social movements their innings in The Rise of American Democracy, with vivid descriptions and
Workies and Washingtonians (p. 588). But presidents, senators, and congressmen command the stage.” 169, Altschuler
“In the early national period, the Democratic Party, with a push from farmers and urban workers, Wilentz suggests, turned
democratic aspirations into political realties. Thomas Jefferson battled the elitist, aristocratic, “unrepublican perversions” of the
Federalists in the 1790s (p. 104).” 170, Altshuler
“As chief executive, Wilentz asserts, Jefferson gave voice to “the axioms of free society,” encouraged ordinary folk to stand for
political office, gave a measure of influence to the emerging city and country democracies, and “vindicated the political equality
of the mass of American citizens” (pp. 790, 138).” 170, Altshuler
“The end of the War of 1812, Wilentz writes, cleared the way “for new permutations of American democracy” (p. 142). The
Federalist Party disappeared. Anti-democratic assumptions persisted, at the national level, in the politics of John Quincy Adams,
who warned representatives in his first message to Congress, not to “slumber in ignorance or fold up on our arms and proclaim
to the world that we are palsied by the will of our constituents” (p. 216) He won 56 percent of the popular vote, with four times
as many Americans casting ballots in 1828 than 1824.” 171, Altshuler
“Jackson created the first mass political party. He took as his democratic credo a fear of encrusted privilege and a conviction
that if anyone deserved the favor of government it was farmers, mechanics, and other hardworking men. And he insisted that the
presidency was the office most responsible for—and responsive to—them.” 172, Altshuler
“Most historians, Wilentz, believes have not taken sufficiently seriously Jackson’s claim that he made war on the Second Bank
of the United States “to liberate democratic government from the corrupting power of exclusive private business interests”…the
Jacksonians sought to minimize speculation and boom-and-bust cycles, while giving the sovereign people, not banks or Biddles,
power over the distribution of the money held by government…Jackson vetoed the bill renewing the charter of his bank.
Biddle’s use of the resources of the Bank to support the Whig Party in 1832, Wilentz writes, constituted “definitive proof of the
Bank’s pollution of American democracy” (p. 394). The adverse impact of deposits in “pet banks,” he adds, has been
exaggerated. Jackson’s hard money policies “were not so much the triggers for the subsequent distress as they were reforms that
came into existence too late…to have much effect” (p. 445).” 172, Altshuler
“Acknowledging that the president ultimately reneged on his promises about voluntary and compensated relocation and set in
motion an “insidious policy,” he suggests that Jackson “was not a simple-minded Indian hater,” but a “benevolent, if realistic
paternalist.” Wilientz takes, at face value, Jackson’s assertion that he wished “to preserve this much-injured race” and his
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argument that, since full tribal sovereignty was unconstitutional,” removal was the only way to safeguard both the Indians’
future and the Constitution of the United States.” In this context, Wilentz’s admission that “the realities of Indian removal belied
Jackson’s rhetoric” seems a sufficient critique of his own uneasy, improbably defense of Old Hickory.” 172, Altshuler
Organization: “The first section…covers the years from the Revolution to 1815, with Thomas Jefferson as its central actor…Wilentz
stress the role of what he called city and country democrats—urban artisans and yeomen farmers—in initiating the Revolution…Section
2…covers the rise of Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonians and ends with Martin Van Buren’s defeat in 1840. This section s the core of
the book and is superior in many ways to the equivalent account in…The Age of Jackson…Wilentz’s third section…tells the familiar
story of the growing sectional split over slavery and slavery extension between 1840 and 1861.” Holt
Comparison with Schlesinger: “Wilentz provides a much fuller analysis of the 1820s than did Schlesinger, properly citing the Panic of
1819and the Missouri Crisis as key events that shaped the decade…Wilentz is also faiere…to the Antimasons and Whigs. Whereas
Schlesinger associated virtually every reform movement between 1820 and 1860 with Jackson, Wilentz correctly insists hat humanitarian
reformers often opposed Jackson. Unlike Schlesinger, he also confronts Jackson’s Indian removal policies, the results of which he labels
“insidious,” and he devotes far more space to the section tensions within the Democratic party over slavery than did Schlesinger…” Holt
Connections: Schlesinger, The Age, Cross, Burned, Walters, American, Sellers, Market, Johnson, Shopkeepers
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945)
Argument: “The tradition of Jacksonian democracy was primarily a reform tradition, dedicated to a struggle against the entrenched
business interests of the national community.” 510, Nye
• “In this contest [between entrenched business interests and the national community]…the political strength of the eastern
workingman, and not the intermittent radicalism of the West and South, formed the backbone and sinews of Jacksonian power;
by reason of this support, Jackson added economic freedom to the political freedom that Jeffersonianism had already established
as a demand.” 510, Nye
• “The West, Mr. Schlesinger points out, furnished ideas and leaders—Benton, Polk, and Tappan, among others, and of course
Jackson himself—but the real driving force in the practical application of Jacksonian reform principles came from workingmen
of the seaboard and their political leaders, from the areas where corporate interests were more powerful and arrogant, and where
the substratum of revolt against wealth was strong enough and consistent enough to maintain a program, execute it, and make
Jacksonianism a vital facto in politics and political theory 510-511, Nye
• “The Jacksonian tradition split on the rock of slavery, its pressing economic issues submerged in moral arguments and its force
lost in the wave of interest aroused by the new controversy.” 511, Nye
• “It is clear from the author’s statement of his thesis that he considers the impetus of Jacksonian principles as chiefly stemming
from economics, as the awakening of the have-nots in the period of 1830 to 1860 to the encroachments haves upon American
political and economic life, and that he believes the history of the era to be read in terms of party battles but of economic and
social cleavages. The fact that the West wanted some things, and the East others, and that the Jacksonian program was able to
satisfy and retain the support of both, provides the book one of its most provocative sections and one of its keenest analyses of
political motivations.” 511, Nye
• “[Jackson’s] opposition to federal subsidization of internal improvements, for example, while unsatisfactory to the West, was
balanced by his fiscal policy, equally unsatisfactory to the eastern workingman. The antistatism of the old Jeffersonian tradition,
from which Jackson inherited much of his southern support, fitted ill with the strong-government predilections of Old Hickory
and with the demands of the East for a national ally against banking and industry.” 511, Nye
• “The trend of Jackson’s administration, its spirit, its emphasis on rights of the masses and the workers, and its advocacy of
general reform, seemed all things to all who supported it. Because it embraced within it the essential doctrines of one great
stream of the American political tradition, it succeeded in consolidating divergent forces and personalities. It gave expression to
what Mr. Schlesinger calls the “basic meaning” of American liberalism, that is, the eternal struggle of the many for political and
economic freedom from the power of the entrenched conservatism of the economically dominant few.” 511, Nye
• “ “American History,” remarks the author, “has been marked by recurrent swings of conservatism and liberalism.” Mr.
Schlesinger is clearly on the side of society to restrain the power of the business community.” 512, Nye
• “For Bancroft the American Revolution was a prelude to Jacksonian Democracy; for Schlesinger Jacksonian Democracy,
including the contributions of Bancroft, was a prelude to the New Deal.” 151, Cole
• “Rejecting the standard Progressive view that Jacksonianism was a sectional movement led by western frontiersmen, Schlesinger
argued that the movement should be “regarded as a problem not of sections but of classes,” and that its ideas came from eastern
workingmen and intellectuals.” Schlesinger later insisted that “The Age of Jackson [did] not argue that there was a ‘class
conflict between great capitalists on one side, and a mass of propertyless wage-earners on the other,’ but he believed that
Jacksonian Democracy was a “struggle of non-business groups against business domination of the government” on behalf
of urban workers.” 151, Cole
• “Nevins praised Schlesinger for treating the Jackson movement “as the outgrowth not of frontier development but of new
economic strains and tensions” and for recognizing that the movement “brought up from the depths of American life a powerful
set of new forces” that “revitalized our politics by the impact of profound impulses from below.” 152, Cole
• “The Age of Jackson is almost as striking for what it is not as for what it is. Although the best-known books ever written about
the era of Andrew Jackson, it is not a book about Jackson himself. Aside from an eight-page sketch of Jackson’s early political
career, there is little direct treatment of the Old Hero, and the index carries more references to Martin Van Buren than to
29
Jackson. In addition there is surprisingly little analysis of Jackson’s eight years in office, for Schlesinger ignores the
nullification crisis, the tariff bills, the Maysville veto, and Jackson’s diplomacy. He, furthermore, gives almost no attention to
women, blacks, and American Indians. In an index of some 1,100 citations only ten are to women, eight of which are brief
references in which the woman is used to describe a male politician. Only the notorious Fanny Wright and Peggy Eaton receive
more than passing attention. Although there is a lengthy discussion of the political issue of slavery, there is little concern for the
social issue of race. Indians are omitted completely; even the Indian Removal Act fails to make it. The son of Arthur
Schlesinger, Sr., who pioneered in the field of social history, did not show much interest in that field in The Age of Jackson.” 153
Organization: “The Age of Jackson is a work of intellectual history. The author begins with a graceful essay sketching in the
background of Jacksonian Democracy with a graceful deal of attention to the Old Republicans John Randolph, John Taylor, and
Nathaniel Macon. He follows with an extended description of the Bank War, interpreted in terms of class conflict, and with that he is
done with the administration of Andrew Jackson. Next comes Jacksonian Democracy at the local level—the Loco Focos, the Albany
Regency, and the Massachusetts Democratic Party—after which he returns to the struggle over banking, especially the Independent
Treasury bill, during Van Buren’s term in office. Schlesinger concludes with a lengthy analysis of Jacksonian Democracy as manifested
in such nonpolitical areas as law, industry, religion, and literature, and a narrative of the Jacksonians during the coming of the Civil War.”
154, Cole
• “Schlesinger describes him as “the first national leader really to take advantage of the growing demand of the people for more
active participation in the decisions of government,” and praises him for furnishing “the practical mechanisms which transferred
Jackson’s extraordinary popularity into the instruments of power” and without which “the gains of Jacksonian Democracy would
have been impossible.” Schlesinger makes Van Buren, not Jackson, the hero of The Age of Jackson, devoting more space to Van
Buren’s one term than he does to Jackson’s two. The high point of the book and of Jacksonian Democracy comes on July 4,
1840, when Van Buren signed the independent treasury bill, which separated the government from the nation’s banks and which
Francis Preston Blair called the second Declaration of Independence.” 154, Cole
• Schlesinger’s detractors “argued that workers were just as likely to vote Whig as Democratic and that Jacksonians were more
interested in making money than in helping the underdog. Instead of being arrayed in two rival camps, Americans were united
in a common selfish drive for the acquisition of property.” 155, Cole
• “Although Schlesinger’s class conflict view of Jacksonian Democracy has not stood up, his concern for social classes, his skill in
linking them with political history and his ability to deal with symbols gives The Ages of Jackson a modern flavor.” 158, Cole
Sources: political tracts from politicians, speeches, bills, judicial decisions, government records, secondary sources for synthesis
Connections: Wilentz, The Rise, Wilentz, Chants, Laurie, Artisans, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Hatch, Democratization, Sellers, Market
Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843-1852 (1972)
Argument: “Dalzell argues that Webster’s twin concerns [political ambition and nationalism] had stood in balance, each complementing
other, through most of his career. The tariff, the bank, and similar questions had all been largely political issues on which Webster could
express his nationalism in a legal and conservative framework. About 1843, however, a shift began. In Massachusetts and elsewhere,
slavery was quickly becoming a moral question, one involving conscience and emotion rather than reason; for many, slavery could no
longer be tolerated. Webster had but the gap between Webster’s concept of balanced interests and the abolitionists’ moralism was wide
and impassable.” 474, Moser
• “The focus of Dalzell’s study is limited to the last decade of Webster’s career, the period of time when for Webster an the nation
slavery became the paramount issue…Dalzell develops Webster as a man motivated by a “duality” of concerns. One was
ambition—the furthering of his political career and his hopes of gaining the White House. The other was nationalism, which
Webster envisioned as a “viable balance of sections, interests, and rights,” founded on “reason, not the heart.”” 473, Moser
• “When, in 1843, [John] Tyler pressed for the annexation of Texas, Webster resigned as Secretary of State to retire to his home at
Marshfield. In Massachusetts, he found a divided Whig party…Meanwhile, slavery had swept aside all other issues; and by
1850, in the North and the South, emotion had replaced reason, political parties had splintered, and party alignments had become
meaningless. That was the situation when Webster made his famous Seventh of March speech in support of the Compromise of
1850.” 474, Moser
• “The author convincingly argues that the controversial speech was a piece of “disinterested” and “interested” statesmanship. It
was premised on his view of the “nation as he sincerely believed it ought to be, the nation his rhetoric had always celebrated, and
the only nation in which Daniel Webster could ever hope to be elected President.” The speech was aimed at placing slavery
completely outside the “province of the federal government.” At the time, Webster did not believe the Union endangered by
secession, but he gambled that if the divisive issue of slavery could be removed from the political arena, Americans would
concentrate on renewed national feelings. Webster’s gamble failed. His concept of the nation was no longer applicable in 1850,
and the Whig convention passed over him in 1852 to nominate General Winfield Scott for the presidency.” 474, Moser
• “Dalzell, who began his study as an analysis of the rhetoric of Webster’s nationalism, uses the Bunker Hill Monument oration of
1843 as a take-off point. That day, Webster called for union, not necessarily unity, and at the same time encapsulated a
definition of American nationalism.” 82, Gatell
• “Dalzell readily admits that Webster swung no votes in 1850, and that Douglas shepherded the compromise bills through
Congress, but he holds fast to the symbolic importance of Webster’s role: people thought of him and Clay as the power brokers;
thus their stands, Webster’s especially, take on added significance.” 82, Gatell
• “Webster’s readoption of the Politics of Union, his role in the Compromise of 1850, his presence in the Fillmore cabinet, and his
support for the Fugitive Slave Law killed him in Massachusetts.” 82, Gatell
30
“I chose Webster’s nationalism because it stands as his most significant contribution to American political and intellectual life.”x
“Webster was ambitious and he was a nationalist, and if he was a nationalist at least in part because he was ambitious, over most
of his career there had been no necessary conflict between the two. He chose the course he did in 1850 because to a greater
extent than any of the others open to him it satisfied the requirements of both politics and ideology.” Xi
• “What made the [7th of March] speech so controversial then and afterward was the question of Webster’s motivation.” 157
• “Webster offered his own version of “the most expedient course to pursue at the present moment in regard to the Territories of
California and New Mexico.” Basically it amounted to the recognition of whatever law existed in the area as a temporary basis
of authority. Since the law in question was Mexican law and Mexican law prohibited slavery, the plane would have had the
same effect as the [Wilmot] Proviso—a fact that escaped no one.” 163
• “For many people, particularly Southerners, the problem reduced itself to simple arithmetic. There were fifteen slave and fifteen
free states in the Union; the addition of California would place the slave states in a minority. Practically speaking they were
already outnumbered in the House, in the Electoral College, and in the nominating conventions of the major political parties.
Only in the Senate had they retained an equal footing, but that made all the difference.” 168
• “The quarrel over slavery had its origin in the realm of emotion, and its chief support still lay there, [Webster] argued; if
harmony was to be restored they must heal the breach at its source. This mean a regime of restraint for both sides, but
particularly the North.” 189
Sources: Speeches, personal papers, Senate minutes
Connections: Schlesinger, The Age, Wilentz, The Rise
•
•
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970)
Argument: “At the center of the Republican ideology was the notion of “free labor.” This concept involved not merely an attitude toward
work, but a justification of ante-bellum northern society, which appeared both different and inferior to their own. Republicans also
believed in a conspiratorial “Slave Power” which had seized control of the federal government and was attempting to pervert the
Constitution for its own purposes. Two profoundly different and antagonistic civilizations, Republicans thus believed, had developed
within the nation, and were competing for control of the political system. These central ideas will provide the initial focus for this study of
Republican ideology. The study will then examine the distinctive ideological contribution of each of te elements which made up the
Republican party—radicals, former Democrats, and moderate and conservative Whigs…Finally, the Republican response to the
competing ideology of nativism will be discussed, as well as their attitude toward race, an issue which illuminated many of the virtues
and shortcomings of the Republican world view.” 10
• “The book argued, in brief, that the Republican party before the Civil War was united by a commitment to a “free labor
ideology,” grounded in the precepts that free labor was economically and socially superior to slave labor and that the distinctive
quality of Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence. From this
creed flowed Republicans’ determination to arrest the expansion of slavery and place the institution on what Lincoln called the
road to “ultimate extinction.” ix
• “Foner focuses his study on the Republican party during its formative years prior to the onset of the war. More specifically, he is
concerned with the ideology or “world view” of the party during this period.” 505, Miller
• “the definition of free labor depended on juxtaposition with its ideological opposite, slave labor. Under the rubric of free labor,
Northerners of diverse backgrounds and interests could ally in defense of the superiority of their own society, even as other
voices questioned whether the contrast with slavery did no disguise the forms of compulsion to which free laborers were
themselves subjected. The dichotomy between slave and free labor masked the fact that “free labor” itself referred to two
distinct economic conditions—the wage laborer seeking employment in the marketplace, and the property-owning small
producer enjoying a modicum of economic independence. Despite large differences in their economic status, these groups had
in common the fact that they were not slaves, that the economic relationships into which they entered were understood as
“voluntary” rather than arising from personal dependence.” X-xi
• “The economic depression of the 1760s seems to have persuaded many employers that the flexibility of wage labor, which could
be hired and fired at will, made it economically preferable to investment in slaves or servants. But the market in wage labor
remained extremely unpredictable, and employers were bedeviled by frequent shortages of workers.” Xii
• “The metaphor of wage slavery (or, in New England, its first cousin, “factory slavery”) drew on immediate grievances, such as
low wages, irregular employment, the elaborate and arbitrary work rules of the early factories, and the inadequacy of contract
theory to describe the actual workings of the labor market. But at its heart lay a critique of economic dependence. Workers,
wrote one labor leader, “ do not complain of wages slavery solely on account of the poverty it occasions…They oppose it
because it holds the laboring classes in a state of abject dependence upon capitalists.” Xviii
• “It has recently been argued that North as well as South, the rhetoric of wage slavery implicitly rested on a racist underpinning.
Slavery was meant for blacks, freedom for whites, and what was degrading in wage labor was reducing white men to the same
level as African-Americans.” Xix
• “In the effort of antebellum economists to reconcile belief in economic progress with the rise of a large number of wage
earners…they turned to Adam Smith and other exponents of eighteenth-century liberalism who had insisted that slavery was far
more costly and inefficient means of obtaining labor than the payment of wages, since it prevented the laborer’s self-interest
from being harnessed to the public good….The ever-expanding wants stimulated by participation in the marketplace offered the
most effective incentive for productive labor. While lamenting the effects of the division of labor upon workmen consigned to
mindless repetitive tasks, Smith nonetheless insisted that in a commercial society, wage laborers were genuinely “independent”
31
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since the impersonal law of supply and demand rather than the decision of a paternalistic master determined their remuneration
and they could dispose of their earnings as they saw fit. In the 1850s, the Republican party would hammer home Smith’s antislavery message: freedom meant prosperity and slavery retarded economic growth.” Xx
“The dignity of labor was a constant theme of ante-bellum northern culture and politics…In a party which saw divisions on
political and economic matters between radicals and conservatives, between former Whigs and former Democrats, the
glorification of labor provided a much-needed theme of unity.” 11-12
“Contemporaries and historians agree that the average American of the ante-bellum years was driven by an inordinate desire to
improve his condition in life, and by boundless confidence that he could do so. Economic success was the standard by which
men judged their social importance, and many observers were struck by the concentration on work, with the aim of material
advancement, which characterized Americans.” 13
“The foremost example of the quest for a better life was the steady stream of settlers who abandoned eastern homes to seek their
fortunes in the West. The westward movement reached new heights in the mid-1850s, and it was not primarily the poor who
migrated westward, but middle class “business-like farmers,” who sold their farms to migrate, or who left the eastern farms of
their fathers.” 14
“The Republican ideology of free labor was product of this expanding, enterprising, competitive society. It is important to
recognize that in ante-bellum America, the word “labor” had a meaning far broader than its modern one, Andrew Jackson, for
example, defined “the producing classes” all those who work was directly involved in production of goods—farmers, planters,
laborers, mechanics, and small businessmen. Only those who profited from the work of others, or whose occupations were
largely financial or promotional, such as speculators, bankers, and lawyers, were excluded form this definition.” 15
“In the free labor outlook, the objective social mobility was not great wealth, but the middle-class goal of economic
independence. For Republicans, “free labor” meant labor with economic choices, with the opportunity to quit the wage-earning
class.” 16-17
“There was a substantial body of Republicans—the former Democrats—who came from a political tradition which viewed the
interests of capitalists and laborers as being in earnest conflict…the political rhetoric of Jacksonian Democrats involved a series
of sharp antagonisms. They insisted that there existed real class differences between rich and poor, capital and labor, and
consciously strove to give their party an anti-wealth persuasion. Democrats traditionally opposed measures like the protective
tariff, which they viewed as government said to the capitalist class, and paper money, which they claimed robbed the laborer of a
portion of his wages by depreciating in value.” 18
“For while it was true that the Republicans insisted on opening the opportunity for social advancement to all wage earners, it
must be borne in mind that as true disciples of the Protestant ethic, they attributed an individuals success or failure in the North’s
“race of life” to his own abilities or shortcomings. Given the equality of opportunity which the Republicans believed existed in
northern society, it followed that economic success was, as Horace Greeley argued, a reflection of the fact that a man had
respected the injunctions to frugality, diligent work, and sobriety of the Protestant ethic.” 23
“What the homestead policy did propose to do was to aid the poor in achieving economic independence, to raise them into the
middleclass. If the policy of free land were adopted, said Greeley’s Tribune, every citizen would have the essential economic
alternative “of working for others or for himself.” 29
“But even educated slaves would not be as productive as free labor, Republicans maintained, because slaves lacked the incentive
which inspired free laborers—the hope of improving their social condition and that of their families.” 46
“The comparative lack of a middle class effectively blocked any hope of social advancement for the mass of poor whites, for it
was all but impossible for a non-slaveholder to rise into the southern aristocracy.” 48
“The idea that free labor was degraded by slavery, and the corollary that if slavery were allowed to expand into the territories,
northern laborers would be effectively barred from settling there because of the invariable stigma attached to labor in slave
society, formed vital parts of the Republican appeal in the 1850s.” 58-59
“[George] Fitzhugh divided northern society into four classes: the rich, the highly skilled professionals, the poor thieves, and
“the poor hardworking people, who support everybody, and starve themselves.” For this last class there was no hope of
advancement—not one in a hundred, as South Carolina’s Chancellor Harper said, could hope to improve his condition.” 66
“[Salmon P.] Chase developed an interpretation of American history, which convinced thousands of northerners that anti-slavery
was the intended policy of the founders of the nation, and was fully compatible with the Constitution. He helped develop the
idea that southern slaveholders, organized politically as a Slave Power, were conspiring to dominate the national government,
reverse the policy of the founding fathers, and make slavery the ruling interest of the republic.” 73
“Publicly and privately, Chase insisted, the founders deplored the institution and hoped for its early abolition. They regarded
freedom and equality as the natural condition of men, and viewed slavery as a temporary and abnormal state…Jefferson, Chase
argued, had set forth the common law and political faith of the United States I the Declaration of Independence, dedicating the
new nation to the inviolability of personal liberty. By his anti-slavery activities in Virginia and his authorship of the Northwest
Ordinance, which barred slavery from the original territories of the United States, Jefferson demonstrated his hope that the
institution would die out. According to Chase, Jefferson planned to prevent the extension of slavery, to mitigate its excesses,
and finally to secure abolition by the action of the individual states.” 75
“Chase shifted the immediate attention of the Liberty party to all the places where slavery could constitutionally be reached and
challenged by the federal government—the District of Columbia, the territories, the interstate slave trade, and the fugitive slave
law.” 79
32
“Chase’s interpretation of the Constitution thus formed the legal basis for the political program which was created by the Liberty
party and inherited I large part by the Free Soilers and Republicans.” 87
• “The Slave Power idea came to symbolize for northerners all the fears and resentments they felt toward slavery and the South.
There were many reasons why the Slave Power was such an effective political symbol. For one thing, Americans of the midnineteenth century retained the distrust of centralized power, which had characterized the revolutionary period. In addition, the
idea of a Slave Power emphasized the southern threat to the interests and rights of northern white men, and thus had a far greater
appeal than arguments focusing on the wrongs done the slave. Finally, its widespread acceptance was aided by the American
penchant for viewing historical events in conspiratorial terms.” 99
• “Like other Republicans, the radicals did disavow any intention of promoting abolition by unconstitutional means.” 115
• “The fact that a sizable portion of the party’s leadership and mass support was composed of former Democrats had considerable
impact on the emergence of distinctive Republican political program and ideology. We have already seen how the exDemocrats’ ideas influenced the free labor ideology of the Republican party. Equally important were their contributions to the
party’s anti-southern and pro-unionist outlook and to the way in which it dealt with economic issues in the 1850s.” 149-150
• “The largest and most influential group of Democrats who entered the Republican party were the self-styled “heirs of Jackson,”
close friends and advisors of Old Hickory who felt they had been displaced in the Democratic leadership during the 1840s.” 150
• “1844 had marked the end of the traditional politics of the Jacksonian era, because “Slavery upon which by common consent no
party issue had been made was then obtruded upon the field of party action.”” 152
• “By 1847, the New York Van Burenites, or Barnburners as they were called, walked out of the Democratic state convention
when the pro-administration Hunkers refused to endorse the principle of the non-extension of slavery, and in the next year
helped organize the Free Soil party, with Van Buren as its presidential nominee.”152-153
• “Indeed n many states, factional bitterness over issues other than slavery—internal improvements, temperance, nativism, and the
perennial disputes over patronage—were slowly tearing the [Democratic] party apart. The stage was therefore set for the mass
defections which took place between 1854 and 1856; yet it is difficult to imagine the party chaos or reorganization which
marked these years having occurred without the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in January, 1845 and the subsequent
warfare in Kansas.” 155
• “Between 1856 and 1860, the moderate Republicans held the balance of power within the Republican party, and they used it to
maintain the party’s integrity and purpose against attacks from both the right and left. On the one hand, they upheld the ideal of
party regularity against radicals who sometimes threatened to desert conservative Republican nominees at the polls.” 205
• “In many states, moderates worked to confine the Republican platform to the simple principle of non-extension, instead of the
radicals’ denationalization of slavery or the conservative’ restoration of the Missouri Compromise.” 205-206
• “The moderates, with Lincoln at their head, refused to abandon either of their twin goals—free soil and the Union.” 219
• “Studies of modern sate and presidential elections have demonstrated that immigrants and Catholics are much more likely to
vote Democratic than native-born Protestants, an such findings have also appeared in analyses of nineteenth century voting
behavior.” 226
• “Samuel P. Hays, for example, argues that party ideologies never reflect the major concerns of grass-roots voters, and that on the
local level ethno-cultural issues are much more effective in mobilizing electoral support than such national questions as the tariff
and trusts.”227
• “Another cause of Republican resentment against immigrants was that many blamed the newcomers for the social ills of the
large cities.” 231
• “Federal law prescribed a five-year naturalization period before immigrants could attain citizenship, but in some Democratic
states even this waiting period was waived, and resident aliens who declared their intention to become citizens were given the
vote. Whigs and Republicans strongly believed that the immigrants’ increasing political power was being wielded by the
Catholic Church and the Democratic bosses, especially since they thought foreigners were “by education and custom…more
submissive, to the voice of authority” than native-born Americans.” 230
• “Political nativism reached its peak in 1845 and 1855, partly because it was able to fill the political vacuum left by the
dissolution of the Whigs, partly because it was in some respects a genuine reform movement, attacking real abuses, and partly
because of fears aroused by the great influx of European immigrants.” 260
• “Several recent historical studies have show that racial prejudice was all but universal in ante-bellum northern society. Only five
state, all in New England, allowed the black men equal suffrage, and even there he was confined to menial occupations and
subjected to constant discrimination.” 261
• “During the 1850s, Republicans accepted the idea that the Negro should be given an “equal chance” to prove himself capable of
economic advancement, and their actions in state legislatures and in Congress had the effect of breaking down some of the legal
inequalities which surrounded the black citizen.” 299
• “It was its identification with the aspirations of the farmers, small entrepreneurs, and craftsmen or northern society which gave
the Republican ideology much of its dynamic, progressive, and optimistic quality. Yet paradoxically, at the time of its greatest
success, the seeds of the later failure of that ideology were already present. Fundamental changes were at work in the social and
economic structure of the North, transforming and undermining many of its free-labor assumptions. And the flawed attitude of
the Republicans toward race, and the limitations of the free labor outlook in regard to the Negro foreshadowed the mistakes and
failures of the post-emancipation years.” 316-317
Source: letters, speeches, bills, diaries, newspapers
•
33
Connections: Dublin, Women, Laurie, Artisans, Wilentz, Chants,
Thomas Dublin, Women At Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1979)
Argument: “Dublin argues that the young women in his sample were drawn to mills by the prospect of social and economic
independence from their families. Although letters and diaries sometimes reveal daughters torn between a feeling of obligation to their
families and a sense of individual entitlement to their wages, Dublin finds little evidence that young women sent money home, and cites
some letters to show that parents supported their daughters’ expectations of economic independence. At the same time, women in Lowell
maintained other connections to their rural communities: kin networks linked workers in the mills, while visits and letters sustained
emotional ties to family and friends.” 352, Melosh
• “For the first time Dublin has systematically trace a group of Lowell mill workers back to their origin in Merrimack County,
New Hampshire. He finds that they came initially from middling farm families, and were often elder daughters, with kinship ties
to other workers, who regarded factory work as a financial and social opportunity. When they left the mills, Dublin finds they
usually marred men about their own age (on the average 10 months younger) and settled in urban places. The Lowell experience
appears to have generally fulfilled their expectations, at least until 1834 when wage cuts began. Periodically thereafter, working
conditions became more demanding, as management required increased productivity.” 415, Brown
• “For a decade, quasi-independent Yankee mill women, calling on the same revolutionary tradition as workingmen, protested
when pay was cut or work increased. Peer pressure in the mills and boardinghouses reinforced their solidarity. But after the
failure of their ten-hour movement in 1845 and the almost simultaneous arrival of Irish men, women, and children in the mills,
the pattern changed. A dependent labor force, one which was mixed in terms of ages, sexes, ethnicity, and living arrangements,
was not conducive to worker solidarity.” 415, Brown
• “[Dublin] points to a number of overlapping circumstances that made the mills less attractive to Yankee women, especially the
lure of other opportunities and careers (e.g., teaching), and the harder, less genteel working conditions of the 1840s and 1850’s.
By the latter decade the corporate paternalism of the original Lowell was dead.” 415, Brown
• “As hard-pressed Irish families gradually replaced young Yankee women in the mills, owners revised the work process, reducing
skill and wages and accelerating the work pace with new technology. Labor agitation declined in the 1850s, limited by the low
expectations and desperate economic need of Irish families, and by the sharp ethnic divisions between Yankee and Irish
workers.” 353, Melosh
• “Dublin’s study reveals the strength or protest based instead on mutual support at work and peer culture in the boardinghouse.
Rather than the defense of “manhood” which moved nineteenth-century male workers to resistance, Lowell women drew
strength from the bonds of sisterhood.” 353, Melosh
• “The work force of early Lowell stood out in its own time: far more common was the so-called Rhode Island system, which
drew labor from men, women, and children living in families. The young, single Yankee women of Lowell were an anomaly
even in the city’s own history, soon replaced by Irish families.” 354, Melosh
• “Dublin poses the importat question, “Did Lowell make any difference in their later lives?” In terms of their marriage ages, their
husbands’ vocations, and where they later settled, he concludes that, for more than a third of them, work in Lowell “constituted
an entry into the urban industrial world and signaled a permanent departure from the one in which they had grown up.” (54)”
538, Armstrong
• “Although new Irish workers lacked the independence of the Yankee women (and were resented by them), and although they
experienced discrimination in job placement, pay, and housing, their position in the Lowell mills improved significantly in the
1850s, as the Yankees’ advantages diminished. The most striking development was the new residential diversity and dispersal
that “removed an important element in the shared experience of women workers” (167)” 538, Armstrong
Sources: Hamilton mill records, census records, newspapers
Connections: Foner, Free
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1982)
Argument: “Shrewd little girls, truculent housewives, feckless domestic servants, astute trade unionists. All these women played a part
in the thoroughgoing changes in work, family and politics in nineteenth-century New York, initiating and responding to change in ways
that were often different from both men of their class and their sisters in the middle class.” xiii
• “Within the propertied classes, women constituted themselves the moral guardians of their families and their nation, offsetting
some of the inherited liabilities of their sex. Laboring women were less fortunate: The domestic ideals from which their
prosperous sisters profited did little to lighten the oppressions of the sex and class they suffered. They were also more
troublesome, since their actions—indeed, their very existence as impoverished female workers—violated some of the dearest
held genteel precepts of “woman’s nature” and “woman’s place.”” Xi
• “Class formation was related to, but not synonymous with, the thoroughgoing transformation of the gender system in the first
half of the nineteenth century: that is, the changes in all those arrangements of work, sexuality, parental responsibilities,
psychological life, assigned social traits and internalized emotions through which the sexes defined themselves respectively as
men and women.” Xii
• “Designating themselves moral guardians of their husbands and children, women became the standard-bearers of piety, decorum
and virtue in Northern society. They claimed the home as the sphere of society where they could most effectively exercise their
power. In their consignment to the household as the sole domain of proper female activity, women suffered a constriction of
34
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their social engagements; at the same time, they gained power within their families that also vested them with greater moral
authority in their communities.” Xii
“In confronting the working poor, reformers created and refined their own sense of themselves as social and spiritual superiors
capable of remolding the city in their own image. From the ideas and practices of domesticity they drew many of the materials
for their ideal of a society that had put to rest the disturbing conflicts of class.” Xii
“Female class relations, then, were central to the tremendous efflorescence and self-confidence of bourgeois life in the first half
of the nineteenth century. It was the ladies who expanded on its possibilities and the workingwomen who bore the brunt of its
oppressions. Female needleworkers and domestic servants fashioned the clothes, stitched the fancywork and tended the homes
that together formed the physical basis of gentility; the burgeoning female occupations provided much of the discretionary
money and leisure that allowed reform-minded men and women to undertake their energetic forays out into the city to
investigate and admonish. Women, as self-appointed exemplars of virtue, were especially fitted to make that trek, since it was
often members of their own sex who seemed most in need of moral correction—all the varieties of working-class women whose
sexual and social demeanor subverted strict notions of female domesticity and propriety.” Xiii
“Earlier in the eighteenth century, poverty had usually been associated with the inability to work—with the crippled, the aged
and the very young. By the early nineteenth century, poverty was becoming connected to the changing structure of work itself—
to the difficulties laboring people had in supporting themselves in manufacturing employments that paid insufficient wages and
gave insufficient work.” 4
“These rearrangements also involved changes between men and women. Within the swelling ranks of the laboring poor, urban
migration and the beginnings of urban manufacturing spelled the disintegration of the customary household economies that had
formerly absorbed the energies and loyalties of women. The growing uncertainty of employment for may men eroded the older,
familiar configuration of male provider and female household manager, an actuality for many laboring families up to the
Revolution and a reasonable expectation for many more. The disruption of household economies fostered new forms of
insecurity: for women, uncertainties about men’s support and commitment; for men, the loss of accustomed kinds of authority
within their households and workplaces.” 4
“The necessity of furnishing goods in bulk encouraged them to abandon traditional methods of handicraft and to implement
rudimentary methods of mass production. In their workshops, they began to use their journeymen as hired wage laborers rather
than as craftsmen due an accustomed price for their work. In changing around their workshop arrangements, the masters laid the
groundwork for urban industrialization.” 5
“Although wage rates rose for journeymen and unskilled laborers between 1790 and 1830, seasonal and intermittent
unemployment undercut these gains. High prices made periods of unemployment all the more difficult, especially since saving
was nearly impossible. In those trades where the shift to entrepreneurial, profit-accumulating methods of production was
pronounced, journeymen suffered increased competition for work, irregularity of employment and a lowering premium of skill
(which resulted in the breakdown of apprenticeship and the hiring of semiskilled and unskilled workers).” 6
“The problems of poverty were becoming a continuing crisis. From 1790 to 1800, the population of New York nearly doubled;
in the next twenty years it doubled again. The pressures strained the old municipal relief system nearly o the point of collapse.”
7-8
“As the livelihoods of many men became less dependable, families increasingly needed women’s cash earnings to get by.” 11
“The working poor, however, lacked such domestic resources. Some poor journeymen’s wives who lived on the outskirts of
town might still keep gardens and poultry. But the well-stocked larder of the respectable artisan’s wife was unattainable for the
wives of poor artisans and causal laborers who crowded into the tenements and for many destitute female immigrants who had
once kept their own pigs and spun their own yarn in Irish and English villages.” 12
“Domestic service was probably the most common waged employment. “Helps” (a more common term than “servant” in the
early nineteenth century ) worked alongside mistresses in the demanding routines of household crafts and the labor-intensive
tasks of housekeeping in the age before utilities like running water and gaslight were available.” 12
“Family situations propelled women into the working class, and the relations of gender gave a distinct shape to the female
experience of proletarianization. A woman’s age, marital status, the number and age of her children, and, above all, the presence
or absence of male support determined her position in working-class life. Any woman, whether the wife of a prosperous artisan
or a day laborer’s daughter, was vulnerable to extreme poverty if, for some reason, she lost the support of a man.” 45
“The loss of housekeeping services, along with whatever income they contributed, created hardships for widowers and deserted
husbands. Nonetheless, a woman’s absence alone was not sufficient to imperil a husband’s livelihood, while a wife cast on her
own faced the specter of the Almshouse.” 45
“For all laboring women, native-born and immigrant, black and white, wives of skilled men and daughters of the unskilled,
working-class life meant, first and foremost, the experience of living in the tenements. The tenements were remote from the
middle-class home, and they were also different the households of the urban laboring classes in the late eighteenth century.” 46
“Washing and cleaning were difficult [in tenements], since all water had to be carried up the stairs. People tracked in dirt from
the muddy streets; plaster crumbled; chimneys clogged and stoves smoked. The winter wind blew through broken windows and
scattered ashes about. Children knocked over slop pails; rains flooded basement rooms….For all the lack of substantial
household effects, domestic labor in these tiny rooms absorbed the energies of women morning to night. The poorer the family,
the heavier the woman’s work. Cleaning was only a small part of complicated and arduous family economies. The major effort
went into acquiring necessities—food, fuel, and water—a task that took up hours of the day and entailed scores of errands out of
35
the house. This work was by nature public, knitting together the household with the world of the streets. It generated its own
intricate network of exchange among neighbors and between parents and children and created the material bases for a dense
neighborhood life.” 49
• “It was, in part, the consolidation of these domestic networks that contributed to the evangelicals’ perceptions of the
“concentration” of wickedness in the city. As they came to identify working-class mores as inherently vice-ridden, the
neighborhood took on the appearance of the breeding ground of sin. The ways laboring women helped one another, raised their
children and played out their pleasures and grievances on the streets only seemed to the pious to manifest a belligerent iniquity.”
75
• “In a city where it was difficult for any woman to support herself and where no mother could earn a living wage, women needed
men more than men needed women. He fact of female economic dependency continued to breed hostility on both sides. As in
other areas of domestic life, however, the working-class neighborhoods gave women leverage in their dealings with men.
Neighbor women often challenged, if not misogynistic ideology, then at least the ways in which men turned sexual hostilities
into physical abuse.” 76
• “The neighborhood was an alternative court, judge and jury, that, although predisposed to look favorably on women, did not
always render verdicts in their favor. In pursuit of justice it could be cruel and vengeful. Nonetheless, the collective power that
women found there, for all its terrors, counterposed itself to men’s privileges.” 83
•
“By dispersing female workers among thousands of individual workplaces, outside employers made it virtually impossible for
women to combat the low wages and exploitative conditions which set the terms of their employment. Yet sex segregation and
its associated forms of exploitation were consequences, not causes, of women’s inferior position in the labor market. Sex
segregation grew out of a deeper political economy of gender, founded in the sexual division of labor in the household. It
resulted from the incorporation of patterns of female subordination within the family into those of capitalist exploitation.” 106
• “By the 1850s, the promising beginnings of cooperation between men and women n the 1830s had disappeared, and the labor
movement had almost completely excluded women. Laboring women’s tentative expressions of their particular dilemmas in
supporting themselves had dissolved amidst a masculine rhetoric that posed marriage as the answer to their problems.” 131
• “Since the early nineteenth century, service had increasingly tended to be women’s work; by 1840 it was entirely so in bourgeois
homes. But it was also work that women did not much like, and they abandoned it whenever they had the chance.
Manufacturing employments, outside and inside, brought their own hardships, but women often preferred them to domestic
service, with its relatively high wage but claustrophobic conditions. As other female employments opened, the women who
knew where to seek them did so, and domestic service increasingly became work for those just off the boat.” 155
• “By 1860, both class struggle and conflicts between the sexes had created a different political economy of gender in New York,
one in which laboring women turned certain conditions of their very subordination into new kinds of initiatives…But
immigration, widespread misery and the casualization of male labor made those dependencies all the more precarious and forced
women to seek other means of support. They did so by becoming family heads themselves and utilizing their children’s labor,
by depending on other women and by pressing their needs upon the municipality. The problems of supporting women and the
problem of controlling them overstripped the boundaries of family and entered into formal politics, to be taken up by city
officials, social reformers, and trade unionists.” 217-218
Sources: reform notes, almshouse roles. Censuses, journals, newspapers, magazines, manufacturing records, government records
Connections: Ryan, Cradle, Cross, Burned, Wilentz, Chants, Sellers, Market, Laurie, Artisans, Dublin, Women
Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (1981)
Argument: “Early in the nineteenth century the American middle class molded its distinctive identity around domestic values and family
practices. At any rate, it is this intuition, this kernal of a reinterpretation of the making of the modern family that this book seeks to
elaborate.” 15 The making of the middle class began and ended at home—Gross Men and women worked together to raise the family.
• “First of all, examination of the basic biological relationships that constitute traditional family status, the differences in age and
sex, were found to extend outside the household into schools, reform associations, clubs, and women’s networks. Second, the
central functions of the modern family—the socialization of children, the care and feeding of the population, the development of
personality, the regulation of sexuality—all take shape in a larger social universe and, theoretically at least, can be transferred
outside the conjugal unit. These tasks, whereby people, rather than goods, are created, are encompassed in the term social
reproduction, which sets the wider conceptual boundaries of the subject matter of this book.” 15
• “This book will focus on one manifestation of this dynamic relationship, the role played by changes in social reproduction in the
making of the middle class.” 15
• “Utica and its environs recommended themselves for analysis for a variety of reasons. The region replicated a process of
historical development that characterized many American communities in the antebellum era, that is, rapid advancement from a
sparsely populated frontier through a bustling stage of small-scale commercial capitalism and on toward industrialization.” Xii
• “It was a regional publishing center and the portal through which countless volumes of literature on domestic subjects sped their
way through the Burned-Over District and beyond. One set of such publications especially piqued my curiosity. Two of the first
American mothers’ magazines bore Utica imprints and traced their origins to one of the city’s first, but least studied, reform
movements, the maternal associations.” Xii
• “This cult of domesticity is too effusive in the celebration of an intensely privatized home to economic functions of nineteenthcentury women have exposed gender divisions that cut through society and introduced an emotional complexity to American
households.” 4
36
“By the middle of the nineteenth century the economic life of Oneida County had been integrated into a national and
international market system whose regional focal point was now the city of New York. This regional network that centered
around Utica and maintained some measure of economic autonomy early in the century will set the serpentine boundaries of this
study.” 7
• “When three turnpikes met in front of Bagg’s door in 1805, the boom was on in the newly incorporated village of Utica. By
1817, when the village broke off from Whitestown to form an independent township, the population numbered nearly three
thousand inhabitants, most of whom earned their livelihoods as shopkeepers, merchants, and handcraftsmen. As the construction
of the Erie Canal stretched westward, reaching Utica in 1820 and Lake Erie in 1825, the town’s population tripled and its
shopkeepers and artisans flourished.” 8
• “The organization of temperance suggests that society was being reorganized along the lines of age and sex; segregated groups
of young men filed out of their families and into the Cadets of Temperance, and mothers and sisters congregated outside the
home in groups like the Martha Washington Total Abstinence Society. At the same time, revivals and reform movements
seemed to conspire to draw family members together again on a new basis; mothers were especially active in the evangelical
churches and moral reform societies where they took particular concern to convert and to rehabilitate their own sons, daughters,
and husbands.” 12
• “Consequently, hardly a laborer could be found in the ranks of the evangelicals, and the richest manufacturer among them was
merely a prosperous and enterprising hat maker. There is ample reason to entertain the hypothesis, then, that those who joined
the evangelical churches and reform crusades along the route of the Erie Canal were responding to the inducements of their kin
as much as of their employers and were often involved in an exercise in “self-control” rather than “social control.” 13
• “The towns along the canal, like the revival churches and the reform societies, were inundated with youthful migrants between
1820 and the mid-1840s. Many of the young men would find their first jobs as apprentices, clerks, and junior partners in small
retail stores. They were, in other words, only beginning to find positions for themselves in the urban structure.” 13
• From the frontier family life into the city family life, the church increasingly intruded upon the private lives of families in the
home. Moral authority of church helped dictate family relationships. 39
• Factories pitched as contributing to the family farm income by putting idle women and children to work. “The factory was as
tightly integrated into the communal network of the church as was the family economy.” 46-47
• “Thus the frontier family system had acquired both definition and breadth by the third decade of the nineteenth century. Its
distinguishing characteristics could be found in the industrial village of New York Mills and the commercial town of Utica as
well as in the original agricultural settlement of Whitestown. Foremost among the family’s attributes was a corporate economic
structure that was based on the organization of production around the social categories of sex and age and a stem pattern of
inheritance. The internal relations and ideology of the family were colored by these economic imperatives and gave prominence
to notions of hierarchy, authority, and patriarchy rather than either warm mutual ties or the free play of individual interests.” 51
• “The rapid proliferation of “societies” in Whitestown is one indication of the dynamic historical element of the frontier: the
commingling of primitive social organization with contemporary culture in such a way as to produce genuine innovations in
collective life. The goals and the ideology of the benevolent and religious societies were basically congruent with the New
England way and supportive of the family economy.” 52
• “Like the benevolent society, the nuclear family itself seemed to be subtly subversive of the balanced placement of households
within the community.” 54
• Oneida County families were tight-knit, they did not put their children out like in old New England. 56
• The course of revivals paralleled the course of trade routes.
• “As the supply of unimproved land dwindled and the cost of farm real estate rose, many small farmers were forced to distribute
their agricultural property in an arbitrary and unequal fashion, perhaps even excluding some offspring form the family
patrimony. Alternatively, the profits reaped in commercial agriculture may have allowed more prosperous farmers to educate
their sons or set them up in some nonagricultural business.” 63-64
• “Mothers joined fathers, sons, and daughters in the heavy traffic streaming out from the homes of Oneida County and into
voluntary associations. The traffic was so voluminous and so diverse as to age, sex, and class background that the old
boundaries between household, church, and society seemed blurred by a flurry of associations.” 105
• “The family and the association coexisted quite equanimously in the thirties and forties. In fact, it will be argued that the
voluntary associations actually served as the crucibles of new domestic values and new relationships between the ages, sexes,
and classes that would in the end heighten the importance of the conjugal family. The mothers of Oneida would, in the end,
return form “society” to the home, bringing with them out of the associations more intense bonds with their children.” 106
• 1850s and 1860s saw women retreating back into the home, as it was seen as unseemly for them to be outside. As a result
reform groups dwindled.
Sources: Magazines, literature, newspapers, art, reform group records, government papers
Connections: Stansell, City, Cross, Burned, Sellers, Market, Walters, American, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Dublin, Women
•
Roy Rosenzwieg, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (1983)
Argument: “This study argues, Worcester workers successfully protected their leisure time and space from outside encroachment.
Although they exercised very limited control over their work time, workers effectively managed to preserve their nonwork hours as a
relatively autonomous sphere of existence.” 5
37
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“And in industrial communities across America workers fought not only for the right to time and space for leisure but also for
control over time and space in which that leisure was to be enjoyed. This study examines how workers struggled to maintain
“eight hours for what we will” and what that “eight hours” meant.” 1
“The study of popular recreation helps to explain some of the distinctive features of American working-class development: the
absence of a mass-based labor and socialist party, the weakness of working-class consciousness and solidarity, and the late
emergence of industrial unions.” 2
“Thus this study of working-class recreational patterns in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 1870 to 1920 attempts to contribute to
a more comprehensive history of the American working class in its broadest social, economic, and political context. To do this,
it seeks not simply to describe the pastimes and amusements of Worcester workers but to shed light on three central questions
about American labor and social history. First, what have been the central values, beliefs, and traditions of the American
working class, and how have they shaped workers’ views of themselves and the society at large? Second, what are the interclass
bonds and conflicts within America’s industrial communities? Third, how did both working-class culture and class relations
change in the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century? 3
“Trade unions and political parties are not, however, the only forms of working-class organization. Ethnic communities and
institutions—churches, clubs, saloons, groceries, schools—have often provided an alternative organizational focus for the lives
of America’s immigrant working class.” 10
“The opening of the Blackstone Canal in 1828 and, more important, the development of extensive railroad connections between
1835 and 1847 made new markets accessible to Worcester products. At the same time, the adoption of steampower around 1840
freed Worcester from reliance on its limited waterpower. Industry and population boomed.” 11
“Worcester workers created tight ethnic communities with elaborate organizational infrastructures—churches, clubs, kinship
networks, saloons—which served as alternatives to trade unions and political parties. These ethnic communities offered
Worcester workers a sphere in which they could carry out a mode of life and express values, beliefs, and traditions significantly
different from those prescribed by the dominant industrial elite.” 27
“Yet while the factory workers of the 1870s faced a more structured work regimen than the artisans of the 1820s, they also more
generally had more free time in which to pursue some of the socializing that had been removed from their workday. The
drinking that manufacturers like Washburn repressed on the job now found a new temporal and physical locus in public,
commercial leisure-time institutions known as saloons. Thus, it was in response to a complex set of social forces—tightened
work discipline, shorter workdays, intensified regulation of public recreation, increased working-class incomes—that the saloon
emerged as a center of working-class social life.” 36
“When leisure was removed from the home or its immediate vicinity, it became predominately a male privilege. While some
women continued to patronize saloons, these public leisure spaces increasingly became male preserves.” 45
“Public toilets, food, warmth, clean water, meeting spaces, check-cashing services, newspapers—often otherwise unavailable to
workers in the late nineteenth century city—could be found free of charge in the saloon. Often the saloon served as a
communications center, a place where workers picked up their mail, heard the local political gossip, or learned of openings in
their trade.” 53
“On the one hand, these celebrations [for 4th of July] offered an occasion for workers to express their own values, affirm their
ethnic and religious autonomy, escape from the oppressive burdens of the workplace, and even occasionally voice discontent. In
their celebrations they expressed a vision of a better life—of a less regimented, less restrictive world. They also affirmed their
commitment to values of mutuality, reciprocity, collectivity, and community…On the other hand, this world view—admirable in
so many respects—failed to transcend the insular confines of a particular ethnic group or even a particular congregation. As a
result, workers found themselves divided against each other not only on the Fourth but also at the ballot box, on the picket line,
and on the shop floor.” 90
“The temperance crusade was, in part, an efforts by the city’s middle and upper classes to reform, reshape, and restrict workingclass recreational practices.” 93
“Just as the playground movement had confronted—and tried to reshape—existing and autonomous traditions of working-class
play, so the effort to reform Independence Day celebrations—what came to be called the Safe and Sane July Fourth movement—
commemorations by the working class of the nation’s birthday.” 153
The more movie theaters there were the fewer saloons because people were now spending money on movies not booze. 191
“The birth and triumph of the movies heralds this slow, gradual, and incomplete process of change for ethnic working-class
culture. It would be foolish to see the movies as the triggering device for this glacial process of change. Deeper social and
economic forces—the coming of age of the second-and third-generation immigrants, the emergence of an ethnic middle class,
the development of mass-production and mass-marketing techniques—are at the root of the transformation of working-class
culture.” 215
“At the Rialto more than at the rum shop, young workers were likely to meet members of other ethnic groups and these
recreational associations could begin to facilitate some of the workplace organizing that had proven so difficult in earlier
decades. In addition, although desires for fashions and furnishings might divert workers from the labor movement, the
frustration of those desires by an unequal social and economic system might prompt some questioning of that system. Finally,
the worker’s new perception of themselves as “Americans” could lead them to expect a good deal more than their parents had
ever received form the larger society. Consequently, workers who had spent their time in the movie theater in the 1920s might
find their way to the union hall in the 1930s and 1940s, as they sought to achieve what the movies promised but the large society
38
failed to deliver as they became increasingly able to make common cause with workers from different ethnic and religious
groups.” 228
Sources: liquor licenses, park records, union literature, newspapers, mill records
Connections: Laurie, Artisans, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Dublin, Women, Ryan, Cradle, Blumin, The Emergence, Wilentz, Chants,
Stansell, City, Kasson, Amusing
Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989)
Argument: “that a middle class was not fully formed before the [Civil] war, and that developments of the postwar period—most notably,
widening differences between the worlds of nonmanual and manual work, the expansion of middle-class suburbanization, and the
resumption and expansion of social and economic conflict that was phrased in class terms—contributed to the further articulation of the
American middle class.” 13
• “This book, then, is a study of middling folk, and of the proposition that Americans (or at least urban Americans) of middling
economic and social position were formed and formed themselves into a relatively coherent and ascending middle class during
the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It should be noted that this is not one subject but three. The ascendancy, or
elevations , of the nineteenth-century middle class to a level of affluence, prestige, and power distinctly higher than that of
eighteenth-century “middling sorts” is at once interconnected with and separate from the formation of a more distinct middle
class.” 12
• “This book is rooted in a somewhat different tradition, one that emphasizes the variations that spring from specific social
contexts, and that focuses upon the ways in which unequal distributions of wealth, income, opportunity, workplace tasks and
authority, political power, legal status, and social prestige have organized the lives and consciousness of specific groups of
Americans.” 2-3
• “It is becoming increasingly clear, in short, that Americans diverged widely in their economic circumstances, and that they
translated their economic differences into significant differences in lifestyle, outlook, and aspiration.” 3
• “The discovery of definable social classes at the top and bottom of society lends plausibility to the proposition that such a class
or classes also may be found in its middle, and accentuates the relative neglect of middling folk by the very historians who have
advanced our understanding of nineteenth-century urban and industrial revolutions by focusing upon urban elites and industrial
workers as distinct historical groups.” 3
• “The temporal focus of this study is the tree or four decades preceding the Civil War, which a number of historians have already
identified as the period in which classes began to take shape in American cities, but its boundaries extend beyond the antebellum
period—backward to the final third of the eighteenth century, and forward into the final third of the nineteenth century.” 13
• “The structure of eighteenth-century society on both sides of the Atlantic—that society was organized primarily into vertically
arranged interests (religious and political as well as economic) rather than into horizontally layered, antagonistic classes; that
“ranks” identified the flow of influence, patronage, and deference within this system of interests, rather than the experiences and
consciousness of separate classes; and that society as a whole was profoundly elitist in its recruitment of political leadership and
in its assignment of social prestige.” 17-18
• “It is worth noting that in eighteenth-century America “class” was used to specify a wide variety of such groups—sexes, races,
age groups, political factions, types of personal temperament, even, on occasion, levels of society.” 19
• “It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this prejudice to our understanding of the social meaning of middling rank,
for the vast majority of those deemed to be middling sorts were in fact hardworking artisans…But at least 50% were artisans,
two and a half times the number of middling storekeepers and clerks, and a proportion quite sufficient to establish a close
identification of middling status with skilled manual work.” 30
• “The term “mechanic” was indeed used in eighteenth-century America to specify the limits of legitimate social aspiration from
men who worked at manual trades.” 31
• “ “Middling rank” did refer, on balance, to a rather humble position in society, one easily conflated with that of “inferior” sorts
by elites who stood so far above both.” 38
• “In sum, it is the strength of the culture of rank, not its weakness, that stands out in the political and social history of the
American port cities during and after the Revolution. Artisans asserted themselves, especially during the Revolution, in ways
that had not done before, but they did not succeed in elevating themselves much above the modest rank that separated them from
the better sort, and “middling rank” and its equivalents remained terms suggestive of the limits of prestige that could attach to a
social stratum numerically dominated and largely defined by handworking mechanics.” 64
• “I argue that even if the consideration of other aspects of social life and thought later compels us to set limits on the idea of
middle-class formation, changes in nonmanual work and workplace relations constituted a significant though hitherto largely
unchronicled component of that broad revolution that historians have located in American society (perhaps I should say
American urban society) during the second quarter or middle third of the nineteenth century.” 67
• “Changes in commercial work did occur, and we will take note of them, but the most significant elements of change lay not in
the structure or technology of specific tasks, but in a number of somewhat broader relations: first, in the increasing alignment of
nonmanual work with entrepreneurship and salaried (as opposed to wage-earning) employment, and, to cite the well-known
reverse of the coin, the increasing alignment of manual work with employment for wages; second, in the increasing
specialization of firms in the nonmanual sector; and third, in the increasing physical separation of manual from nonmanual work,
the increasing distinctiveness of manual and nonmanual work environments, and the rapid elevation of nonmanual work
environments by means of architecture, interior design, and the location of firms within urban space.” 68
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“We must note that most clerical employees were young men who, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, continued to be
regarded and to regard themselves as businessmen-in-training rather than as permanent employees. In this and in other easy, not
the least significant of which was that they were paid a salary rather than a wage, nonmanual employees were distinguished from
manual workers. Actually, the work clerks performed was not always cleaner or more “mental” than the work performed by
skilled manual workers, although sweeping the shop, stocking shelves, delivering merchandise to customers, and distributing
handbills in the streets were chores reserved mainly for the youngest and most clerks. And ther were signs even in this era of the
emergence of a more permanent “white collar” work force.” 77
“The contribution that the manual-nonmanual dichotomy made to the ways in which antebellum Americans defined their society
and assumed individual identities within it. More specifically, they suggest, that large numbers of previously humble or
ambiguously placed “middling folk” were elevated by the redrawing of society’s most critical boundary below, rather than
above, the smaller businessmen, now that so many of them no longer shared the social stigma of manual labor with wageearning mechanics.” 107
“I will argue here that American values had not changed in this respect—that Americans who did not work with their hands did,
despite the currency of the “image of the respectable worker,” continue to consider as socially inferior those who performed
manual work. Indeed, the emerging structures of work and well-being almost certainly revitalized this old prejudice by making
it more reasonable in the light of underlying economic realities.” 122
“These men had become nonmanual proprietors, but their tobacco shops, groceries, newsstands, and taverns were not vehicles
for the journey out of the working class. Their mobility was lateral rather than upward, and in their life-styles and personal
associations, and presumably their sentiments as well, they remained unexceptional figures in the working-class community,
even though they no longer worked with their hands. And just as there were nonmanual proprietors who remained in the working
class, there were mechanics who did not.” 134
“The urban middle class, whose members experienced a domestic revolution during these years that went beyond the acquisition
and furnishing of a larger and more elegant home (completely separated, we might add, from the male household head’s place of
business) to the sanctification of the home and of domestic affairs, the redefinition of child nurturance and education, the whole
constituting, to Mary Ryan critical to the formation and perpetuation of the middle class.” 139
“The most dramatic changes in the production of consumer goods were those that made ordinary goods cheaper. Hence, those
mechanics who were able to find work fairly often, and who maintained their skill levels in the face of industrialization, were
able to take advantage of significant price reductions in cloth, clothing, and a number of household goods that previously had
been available only to people with larger incomes.” 140
“The city had acquired a variety of new institutions that clearly expressed the styles and ambitions of specific and very different
clienteles. In the evening as well as during the workday, the city was sorting its classes of people into increasingly distinct
institutions and spaces.” 146
“Artisans were more vulnerable to year-to-year and seasonal variations in income and, especially in those trades requiring heavy
physical labor, could be less certain of performing any manual work at all past middle age.” 162
“Middling families, then, reasonably perceived their homes and their domestic strategies and habits to be distinct from those of
manual workers, as well as from those of the fashionables who did not even aspire to the domestic ideals. If this was an
achievement—and it was often described that way by contemporary writers—it was one that should be attributed largely to the
women who shaped the middle-class home, sometimes with and sometimes without the cooperation of the men ho provided the
financial means…In this respect we may say that middle-class formation was a phenomenon that went beyond the realignment
of work, workplace relations, incomes, and opportunities. Events on the other side of the retail sales counter, and in the “separate
sphere” of domestic womanhood, were influential, perhaps even crucial, in generating new social identities. To this extent,
middle-class formation was woman’s work.” 191
“The concept of class, which refers first and foremost to the sources and the consequences of manifest in differentials of power,
wealth, and prestige—provides the obvious principle of this synthesis.” 231
“Social networks, by which I mean the arrays of interactions characteristically experienced by the members of specific groups of
people in their daily rounds—within the home, at work, on the streets and in public markets, in stores, taverns, restaurants, and
theaters, at church, within the meeting rooms of voluntary societies, at the homes of friends, and in whatever other public and
private spaces people confront and interact with one another.” 231
“”The transition from a “pre-class” to a “class” society was primarily a shift in the nature of inequality and of unequal social
relations as the personalized, face-to-face hierarchies of the eighteenth century gave way to the more distant, categorical
hierarchies of the nineteenth century, particularly within the larger cities. Hence, the experience of class in the nineteenthcentury city can be understood in no small degree as the process by which people were brought together and kept apart, attracted
to one another and repelled, and as the effect that resulting social networks had on the way people lived and perceived
themselves as living in society.” 231
“Social networks were shaped in specifiable ways by industrialization and other aspects of economic development (changes in
modes of production, to be sure, but also changes in retailing and other forms of economic activity), by the changing scale of the
city, by the redistribution of people and institutions within increasingly specialized urban space, and by the development of
greater numbers of more formalized institutions within that space.” 231-232
“Middle-class identity, in sum, should not be thought insignificant because it did not usually manifest itself in explicit ways in
politics, however important the latter may have been in this first era of mass partisanship. Its significance was expressed in other
40
ways, in the physical milieux and social round of daily life, in new styles and manners, and in a changing though not yet clarified
and still half-apologetic taxonomy of social class.” 257
Sources: directories, census, government papers, reform society records, secondary sources
Connections: Laurie, Artisans, Ryan, Cradle, Johnson, Shopkeepers, Wilentz, Chants, Rosenzweig, Eight, Sellers, Market, Dublin,
Women, Stansell, City
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001)
Argument: “Blight’s central argument, that race profoundly shaped the development of the Civil War in American memory and, in turn,
that ways of remembering—and forgetting—the Civil War contributed to the political, economic, and social significance of race in the
post-Emancipation United States.” 498, Clark
• “Most Americans have a storehouse of “lessons” drawn from the Civil War. Exactly what those lessons should be, and who
should determine them, has been the most contested questions in American historical memory since 1863, when Robert E. Lee
retreated back into Virginia, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to explain the meaning of the war, and Frederick Douglass
announced “national regeneration” as the “sacred significance” of the war.” 1
• “This book is a history of how Americans remembered their most divisive and tragic experience during the fifty-year period after
the Civil War. It probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and society
from the turning point in the war (1863) to the culmination of its semicentennial in 1915…I am primarily concerned with the
ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory, and not in a developing professional historiography
of the Civil War.” 1-2
• “Reconstruction politics, reunion literature, soldiers’ memory, the reminiscence industry, African American memory, the origins
and uses of Memorial Day, and the Southern Lost Cause receive considerable attention in this work, while other important forms
and voices of memory do not, such as monument-building, late-nineteenth-century presidential politics, business enterprise, or
the gendered character of America’s romance with reunion…but in every chapter have kept my eye on race as the central
problem in how Americans made choices to remember and forget their Civil War.” 2
• “Three overall visions of Civil War memory collided and combined over time: one, the reconciliationist vision, which took root
in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than
the history of Reconstruction has allowed us to believe; two, the white supremacist vision, which took many forms early,
including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn of the century delivered the
country to a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms; and third, the emancipationist vision, embodied African
Americans’ complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war
as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. In the end this is a
story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the
inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race.” 2
• “Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship
between two profound ideas—healing and justice. On some level, both had to occur; but given the potency of racial
assumptions and power in the nineteenth-century America, these two aims never developed in historical balance.” 3
• “Americans have had to work through the meaning of their Civil War in its rightful place—in the politics of memory. And as
long as we have a politics of race in America, we will have a politics of Civil War memory.” 4
• “In many ways, this is a story of how American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over
ideological memory. For Americans broadly, the Civil War has been a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity
and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled
conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.” 4
• “In the half century after the war, as the sections reconciled, by and large, the races divided. The intersectional wedding that
became such a staple of mainstream popular culture, especially in the plantation school of literature, had no interracial
counterpart in the popular imagination. Quite the opposite: race was so deeply at the root of the war’s causes and consequences,
and so powerful a source of division in American social psychology, that it served as the antithesis of a culture of reconciliation.
The memory of slavery, emancipation, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments never fit well into a developing narrative
in which the Old and New South were romanticized and welcomed back to a new nationalism, and in which devotion along
made everyone right, and no one truly wrong, in the remembered Civil War.” 4
• “It was a white man’s experience and a white nation that the veterans and the spectators came to celebrate [at Gettysburg] in July
1913. Any discussion of the war’s extended meanings in America’s omnipresent “race problem” was simply out of place.
Wilson’s “righteous peace” was far more the theme than Lincoln’s “rebirth of freedom.” At this remarkable moment when
Americans looked backward with deepening nostalgia and ahead with modern excitement and fear, Jim Crow, only half-hidden,
stalked the dirt paths of the veterans’ tent city at Gettysburg. He delivered supplies, cleaned the latrines, and may even have
played the tunes at the nation’s feast of national memory.” 387
• “Press reports and editorials about the Gettysburg reunion indicate just how much a combination of white supremacist and
reconciliationist memories had conquered all others by 1913. The issues of slavery and secession, rejoiced the Washington Post,
were “no longer discussed argumentatively. They are scarcely mentioned at all, except in connection with the great war to
which they led, and by which they were disposed of for all time.” 387
• “The war, said the Outlook, had been fought over differing notions of “idealism”; “sovereignty of the state” versus “sovereignty
of the nation.” Demonstrating the degree to which slavery had vanished from understandings of the Civil War causation in
41
serious intellectual circles, the Outlook announced that “it was slavery that raised the question of State sovereignty; but it was
not on behalf of slavery, but on behalf of State sovereignty and all that it implied, that these men fought.”” 388
• “Naturally, monuments and reunions had always combined remembrance with healing, and, therefore, with forgetting. But
racial justice took a different fork on the road to reunion. Not out of over conspiracy, not by subterfuge alone, did white
supremacist memory combine with reconciliation to dominate how most Americans view the war.” 389-390
• “Black newspapers of the era were weary, even resentful, of the celebration at Gettysburg in 1913. As segregation deepened and
lynching persisted, many black opinion leaders observed history and memory wielded in such a way as to write blacks out of the
story.” 390
• “By 1913 racism in America had become a cultural industry, and twisted history a commodity. A segregated society required a
segregated historical memory and a national mythology that could blunt or contain the conflict at the root of that segregation.
Most Americans embraced an unblinking celebration of reunion and accepted segregation as a natural condition of the races. 391
Sources: journals, newspapers, photos, artwork, movies, monuments, books, accounts
Connections: McPherson, Battle, Mitchell, Civil War, Williams, Lincoln, Douglass, Narrative, Jacobs, Incidents, Foner, Free, Sears,
Landscape
James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)
Argument: “The central plot…is the political and military defeat of the defenders of slavery. In Battle Cry of Freedom, the real war took
place not on the hospital cots visited by Whitman, but in the capitals, the congresses, the tents of field commanders, and the firing lines.
The outcome was not the profound amnesia that troubled Whitman. Instead, it was victory, sweet and good, though costly.” 215, Johnson
• “The Civil War “was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.” (332) 261, Hyman
• “The first third of the book surveys the politics of sectional strife from the Mexican War to Fort Sumter.” 214, Johnson
• “McPherson makes clear that freedom came from battle, not birth. He utterly rejects the Civil War revisionists’ interpretation of
the war as a senseless squandering of life and treasure. Instead, he stands in the tradition of post-World War II historiography
that views the war as a bloody and courageous affirmation of the nation’s highest ideals. McPherson’s argument illustrates
several major tendencies in that historiography since the 1960s.” 216, Johnson
• “By putting slavery at the center of the war, McPherson emphasizes the principle of freedom at stake in the conflict. He points
out that in the beginning both sides “shoved slavery under the rug” (312). Lee, not Lincoln, exposed slavery to the vicissitudes
of the battle. Lee’s success at the Seven Days doomed slavery, McPherson notes: “If McClellan’s campaign had succeeded, the
war might have ended. The Union probably would have been restored with minimal destruction in the South. Slavery would
have survived in only slightly modified form, at least for a time. By defeating McClellan, Lee assured a prolongation of the war
until it destroyed slavery, the Old South, and nearly everything the Confederacy was fighting for.” (490) Lee’s victories began
the South’s demise because they stirred the North to a policy of total war that eroded reservations about emancipation while
casualties mounted and conscription reached deeper into northern communities.” 216, Johnson
• “The Emancipation Proclamation represented a turning point not just because it committed the Union to freeing slaves in rebel
territory but, more decisively, because it permitted blacks to enlist in the army and navy.” 216, Johnson
• “McPherson acknowledges the racism that pervaded nineteenth-century American and repeatedly notes its impact on wartime
politics. However, the accelerating toll of battle steadily undermined the influence of racism. In the North, racist opponents of
freedom were concentrated in the Democratic party, McPherson argues. Unlike many other scholars, McPherson contends that
the Democrats’ strength in the wartime North has been exaggerated. In the 1862 elections, for example, Republicans retained
control of all but two free-state governorships and three legislatures, while adding five U.S. Senate seats and retaining a 25-vote
majority in the House—an index, McPherson implies, of the strength of an emerging Republican constituency for freedom.” 216
• “Battle Cry of Freedom is at peace with the concept of nationhood that emerged from the war. “Union victory in the war
destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision,” McPherson
concludes. That vision grew out of an “ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor, capitalism” embraced by “the northern
majority.” 218, Johnson
• “But the North did not first fight to free the slaves. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the
States where it exists,” said Lincoln early in the conflict. The Union Congress overwhelmingly endorsed this position in July
1861. Within a year, however, both Lincoln and Congress decided to make emancipation of slaves in Confederate states a Union
war policy. By the time of the Gettysburg Address, in November 1863, the North was fighting for a “new birth of freedom” to
transform the Constitution written by the founding fathers, under which the United States had become the world’s largest
slaveholding country, into a charter of emancipation for a republic where, as the northern version of “The Battle Cry of
Freedom” put it, “Not a man shall be a slave.” Vii-viii
• “The multiple meanings of slavery and freedom, and how they dissolved and re-formed into new patterns in the crucible of war,
constitute a central theme of this book.” Viii
• “In 1882 Samuel Clemens found that the Civil War remained at the center of southern consciousness; it was “what A.D. is
elsewhere; they date from it.” This was scarcely surprising, wrote Twain, for the war had “uprooted institutions that were
centuries old…transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that
the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”” Viii
• “The North had a potential manpower superiority of more than three to one (counting only white men) and Union armed forces
had an actual superiority of two to one during most of the war. In economic resources and logistical capacity the northern
42
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
advantage was even greater. Thus, in this explanation, the Confederacy fought against overwhelming odds; its defeat was
inevitable.” 855
“Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory
against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not
formidable. Rather, as another category of interpretations has it, internal divisions fatally weakened the Confederacy; the staterights conflict between certain governors and the Richmond government; the disaffection of non-slaveholders from a rich man’s
war and poor man’s fight; libertarian opposition to necessary measures such as conscription and the suspension of habeas
corpus; the lukewarm commitment to the Confederacy by quondam Whigs and unionists; the disloyalty of slaves who defected
to the enemy whenever they had the chance; growing doubts among slaveowners themselves about the justice of their peculiar
institution and their cause.” 855
“In any case the “internal division” and “lack of will” explanations for Confederate defeat, while not implausible, are not very
convincing either. The problem is that the North experienced similar internal divisions, and if the war had come out differently
the Yankees’ lack of unity and will to win could be cited with equal plausibility to explain that outcome. The North had its large
minority alienated by the rich man’s war/poor man’s fight theme; its outspoken opposition to conscription, taxation, suspension
of habeas corpus, and other war measures; its state governors and legislatures and congressmen who tried to thwart
administration policies…One critical distinction between Union and Confederacy was the institutionalization of obstruction in
the Democratic party in the North, compelling the Republicans to close ranks in support of war policies to overcome and
ultimately to discredit the opposition, while the South had no such institutionalized political structure to mobilize support and
vanquish resistance.” 856
“A number of historians have looked instead at the quality of leadership both military and civilian. There are several variants of
an interpretation that emphasizes a gradual development of superior northern leadership. In Beauregard, Lee, the two Johnstons,
and Jackson the South enjoyed abler military commanders during the first year or two of the war, while Jefferson Davis was
better qualified by training and experience than Lincoln to lead a nation at war. But Lee’s strategic vision was limited to the
Virginia theater, and the Confederate government neglected the West, where Union armies developed a strategic design and the
generals to carry it out, while southern forces floundered under incompetent commanders who lost the war in the West. By 1863,
Lincoln’s remarkable abilities gave him an edge over Davis as a war leader, while in Grant and Sherman the North acquired
commanders with a concept of total war and the necessary determination to make it succeed…the Union developed superior
managerial talent to mobilize and organize the North’s greater resources for victory in the modern industrialized conflict that he
Civil War became.” 856-857
Most attempts to explain southern defeat or northern victory lack the dimension of contingency—the recognition that at
numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently. Four major turning points defined the
eventual outcome. The first came in the summer of 1862, when the counter-offensives of Jackson and Lee in Virginia and Bragg
and Kirby Smith in the West arrested the momentum and intensification of the conflict and created the potential for Confederate
success, which appeared imminent before each of the next three turning points. The first of these occurred in the fall of 1862,
when battles at Antietam and Perryville threw back Confederate invasions, forestalled European mediation and recognition of
the Confederacy, perhaps prevented a Democratic victory in the northern elections of 1862 that might have inhibited the
government’s ability to carry on the war, and set the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation which enlarged the scope and
purpose of the conflict. The third critical point came in the summer and fall of 1863 when Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and
Chattanooga turned the tide toward ultimate northern victory.” 858
“One more reversal of that tide seemed possible in the summer of 1864 when appalling Union casualties and apparent lack of
progress especially in Virginia brought the North to the brink of peace negotiations and the election of a Democratic president.
But the capture of Atlanta and Sheridan’s destruction of Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley clinched matters for the North.
Only then did it become possible to speak of the inevitability of Union victory. Only then did the South experience an
irretrievable “loss of will to fight.”” 858
“Of all the explanations for Confederate defeat, the loss of will thesis suffers most from its own particular fallacy of
reversibility—that of putting the cart before the horse.” 858
“But certain large consequences of the war seem clear. Secession and slavery were killed, never to be revived during the century
and a quarter since Appomattox. These results signified a broader transformation of American society and polity punctuated if
not alone achieved by the war…The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun. The “Union” also became
the nation, and Americans now rarely speak of their Union except in the historical sense.” 859
“The old federal republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average citizen except through the post-office
gave way to a more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes,
drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system,
and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to
the Constitution had limited the powers of the national government; six of the next seven, beginning with the Thirteenth
Amendment in 1865, vastly expanded those powers at the expense of the states.” 859
“Thus when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They
fought to protect their constitutional liberties against the perceived northern threat to overthrow them. The South’s concept of
republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had.” 860
“ “We are not Revolutionists,” insisted James B.D DeBow and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, “We are resisting
revolution…We are conservatives.” 861
43
“Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the
American vision. Until 1861, however, it was the North that was out of the mainstream, not the South. Of course the northern
states, along with Britain and a few countries in northwestern Europe, were cutting a new channel in world history that would
doubtless have become the mainstream even if the American Civil War had not happened. Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861
to complete the dissolution of this ancient institution of bound labor in Europe. But for Americans the Civil War marked the
turning point.” 861
Sources: journals, government records, military manuals, military maps, secondary sources
Connections: Mitchell, Civil, Foner, Free, Blight, Race, Douglass, Narrative, Jacobs, Incidents, Williams, Lincoln, Sears, Landscape,
McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack
•
T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and his Generals (1952)
Argument: Williams puts forth two “new and somewhat basic contentions: first, that Lincoln prove himself “a great natural strategist, a
better one than any of his generals,” including Grant, over whom he continued to exercise his guidance as commander-in-chief; and
second, that, in the years between 1861 and 1865, Lincoln evolved the command system, which had been “archaic.” Into a “modern
command system for a modern war” that was, in fact, “the first of the modern total wars.” 508, Potter
• “Professor Harry Williams’ study of the development of the command system of the Union armies with special emphasis on
President Lincoln as the central controlling figure—“a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.”” 991,Henry
• “As commander in chief the President had a double responsibility, both of directing the grant strategy of the war and of
“choosing the generals to manage the armies.” 991, Henry
• “From Professor Williams’ analysis it appears that the President made twelve unfortunate, or at least unsatisfactory, choices of
commanders during the first two and a half years of the war. As a result, his “patience with the generals wore very thin” and he
“came to doubt and even score the capabilities of the military mind,” the author says. Fortunately for Mr. Lincoln, however,
and for the Union cause, he had in superior numbers and resources a margin of strength, and in a fixed four-year term a margin
of time, within which he was able to keep on working at his problem of command until he found the right answer.” 991, Henry
• “For Professor Wiliams does not accept “Grant’s vision of himself conducting the war with a free hand.” He was allowed more
latitude than earlier generals, the author says, because “Grant conformed his plans to Lincoln’s own strategic ideas.
Fundamentally, Grant’s strategy was Lincolnian.” 992, Henry
• “My theme is Lincoln as a director of war and his place in the high command and his influence in developing a modern
command system for this nation.” Vii
• “Judged by modern standards, Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great
natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals. He was in actuality as well as in title the commander in chief who, by is
large strategy, did more than Grant or any general to win the war for the Union.” Vii
• “Lincoln tried to use McClellan; but rightly distrusting the General’s ability, he intervened frequently in the management of
military matters. Rightly trusting in Grant’s competence, Lincoln intervened less after Grant became general in chief, but even
then he always exercised an over all authority and never hesitated to check Grant when he thought the General was making a
mistake. It might be said that before Grant, Lincoln acted as commander n chief and frequently as general in chief and that after
Grant, he contented himself with the function of commander in chief.” Viii
Sources: personal papers, journals, military orders
Connections: Foner, Free, McPherson, Battle, Mitchell, Civil, Blight, Race, Sears, Landscape, McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack
Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (1988)
Argument: ““Professor Mitchell, like most of the invader, blames what northerners considered the sins of the South on slavery. “An
economy largely dependent on slavery was radically different form one that relied on free labor,” he suggests (2). “Economic opportunity
and the South’s distinctive culture both rested on the fact of slavery” (4). Mitchell stresses slavery—“racism” (4), and “paranoia” (5)
over possible slave rebellions—as the cause of the war. He notes that by 1865 “slavery no longer seemed worth fighting for (204) and
quotes a Confederate as saying “for man to have property in man was wrong, and that the Declaration of Independence meant more than
they and ever been able to see before” (205). “The Civil War was as bloody as any war Americans ever fought,” concludes Mitchell.
“As bloody as slavery” (190).” 125, McWhiney
• “This is a book about the soldiers who fought during the Civil War. It uses the most personal of document, their letters and
diaries, to re-create their wartime experiences. It is also a book about the meaning of the Civil War, written in the belief that
establishing what the war meant to that generation will help us decide what it means for us.” Vii
• “So I come to the letters and diaries left by Civil War soldiers with the questions I would have asked the writers if they had been
alive. Why did you fight? What did you think of your enemy, your American enemy? How did you feel about slavery and race
and all the unfinished business that means in some way the war you fought is still not over? What was it like to be in battle?
Were your frightened; how did you overcome your fear? How did you face death—how did you give meaning to violence and
destruction? How did you accept that you yourself were a killer? What did you take home from the war? What legacy have you
left us?” vii-viii
• “With an eye o what the United States in 1861-65 had been and was to become, the author probes for answers to questions that
have intrigued military historians for decades.” 910, Gallaway
• “But the author concludes that on many issues soldiers on both sides agreed far more than they differed.” 910, Gallaway
44
“Mitchell focuses throughout the first half of his book on the similarities between northerners and southerners. “Family honor,”
he says, “was a powerful incentive for enlistment, North and South” (17); Yaks and Rebs shared “a pervasive American
identity,” and “the Confederate flag was an image of how much the Confederacy shared the common American culture” (22);
“the North and South were two regions separated by a common culture” (23); both sides “believed that they fought an
uncivilized enemy” (26); “similarities between the Confederate image of the North and the Northern image of the Confederacy
are striking” (35); both sides “had trouble keeping its army motivated” (42); “North and South, the soldier of the 1860s was most
likely an independent farmer or a farmer’s son,” and “Americans found military regimentation hard to accept” (57); “volunteers
[North and South] also feared what might best be called dehumanization” (59); finally, both sides “could agree [that] the
ultimate cause of the Civil War was American sin” (89).” 124, McWhiney
• “After emphasizing the similarities of Rebs and Yanks for nearly one hundred pages, Mitchell then contradicts the first half of
his work by showing that northerners and southerners were quite different... “Northern soldiers went to war convinced of the
industry and virtue of “Union Boys,” admits Mitchell. “They also had a corresponding belief in the superiority of Northern
civilization. They thought that Southerners and the culture that had produced them were inferior” (90), and they never changed
their minds. Mitchell notes that Union soldiers often treated the South “as if it were a foreign country.” He emphasizes that
“cultural contempt—the sense that one was in a foreign or backward country—made such actions easier.” Yanks “came to think
of the war itself as a war against the Southern way of life” and wished “to remake the South in the North’s image. That desire
too could be justified only by a belief in the South’s cultural and moral inferiority.” (91)” 125, McWhiney
Sources: Journals, diaries
Connections: McPherson, Battle, Blight, Race, Williams, Lincoln, Foner, Free, Douglass, Narrative, Jacobs, Incidents, Sears, Landscape
•
Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (1983)
Argument: Part 1: McClellan bad. Part two: “Sears points to Antietam and the ensuing Emancipation Proclamation as marking the
transformation from a limited war aimed at rapid reconciliation with slavery preserved to a total war designed to subdue the South and
destroy the peculiar institution. Ironically, it was McClellan, the advocate of limited war, who by battling Lee to a standstill permitted
this transition to take place—and then found himself the first casualty of it.” 371, Simpson
• “Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September
17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never
exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history.” Xi
• “By almost any measure, too, Antietam was pivotal in the history of the Civil War. In September 1862 events across a broad
spectrum—military, political, social, diplomatic—were rushing toward a climax. The battle in Maryland would affect all of
them radically, turning the course of the war in new directions.” Xi
• “It may be true, as Sears says, that the ending of Lee’s offensive convinced the British ministry to withhold recognition of the
Confederacy.” 484-485, Adams
• “Sears believes that Lee intended to force the Union army into an all-out fight, whereas Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones in
the recent How the North Won maintain that his motive was not to fight a major battle but to garner supplies from untouched
regions, taking pressure off war-torn Virginia.” 485, Adams
• “Sears shows conclusively that T. Harry Williams was correct in castigating McClellan as criminally slow and that my belief in
the rebels’ psychological mastery of their opponents operated in every phase of the Maryland campaign.” 485, Adams
• “One of Sears’s original points is that Lee’s army was so traumatized by the battle that he abandoned a contemplated second
northward movement in 1862.” 485, Adams
• “Transformation of the conflict from limited to total war but of how that transformation was embodied in contrasting characters
of McClellan and Grant.” 369, Simpson
• “The book concentrates on the North’s response to Lee’s decision to invade Maryland, at times rendering the story of the
Antietam campaign in terms of explaining McClellan’s failure to do more than drive Lee back across the Potomac. Indeed,
Lee’s audacity appears less remarkable in light of his opponent’s caution; the Confederate’s great achievement was his insight
into the workings of McClellan’s mind and soul—at times Lee seemed in command of both armies.” 369, Simpson
• “It is a damning indictment of McClellan, who T. Harry Willimas once labeled “the problem childe of the Civil War.” Sears
follows Williams, Canton, and Kenneth P. Williams in condemning the creator of the Army of the Potomac, building a case
against McClellan supporters will be hard pressed to counter. In every way McClellan seems the antithesis of Grant, although
both men were fond of smoking cigars as they watched the progress of battle. Yet such a negative portrain inevitably causes the
reader to wonder why McClellan was idolized by so many of his soldiers.” 370, Simpson
• “Sears is at a loss to make sense of McClellan’s charisma, in part because to do so moves beyond the questions of McClellan’s
psychology and personal flaws into much more difficult territory.” 371, Simpson
Sources: First historian to use personal records of soldiers and generals for this battle
Connections: Williams, Lincoln, McPherson, Battle, Blight, Race, Mitchell, Civil, McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack
Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (1982)
Argument: “Briefly, the book argues that Confederate officers and soldiers were excessively prone to offensive tactics and that the
officers, including those of the highest rank, failed to appreciate the significance of the greatly increased range and killing power of the
war’s basic weapon, the rifled musket. Put another way, the Confederates used outmoded, eighteenth-century tactics against nineteenth-
45
century technology. They bled themselves to defeat as an army and a nation, as well as to death individually in almost one hundred
thousand instances.” 475, Roland
• “We contend that the Confederates bled themselves nearly to death in the first three years of the war by making costly attacks
more often than did the Federals. Offensive tactics, which had been used so successfully by Americans in the Mexican War,
were much less effective in the 1860s because an improved weapon—the rifle—had vastly increased strength of defenders. The
Confederates could have offset their numerical disadvantage by remaining on the defensive and forcing the Federals to attack; on
man in a trench armed with a rifle was equal to several outside it. But Southerners, imprisoned in a culture that rejected careful
calculation and patience, often refused to learn form their mistakes. They continued to fight, despite mounting casualties, with
the same courageous dash and reckless abandon that had characterized their Celtic ancestors for two thousand years. The
Confederates favored offensive warfare because the Celtic charge was an integral part of their heritage.” xv
• “There are nearly as many explanations of Confederate defeat as there are historians writing about the Civil War. They have
blamed excessive southern localism, poor diplomacy, the blockade, financial problems, weak administration, an unsound
political system, excessive democracy, inadequate resources, misuse of the black population, better northern leadership, loss of
the will to fight, and a host of other things.” Xiii
• “The tragedy of the Confederates was that they rushed confidently and courageously against the more numerous Yankees but
failed to defeat them.” Xiii
• “[The authors] demonstrate that in the first twelve major campaigns of the war (those taking place through the autumn of 1863)
the Confederate armies suffered almost forty thousand more casualties than their opponents, and that because of the relative
smallness of the Confederate forces they incurred proportionately almost twice as many casualties (24.6 percent Confederate to
only 13.9 percent Union).’ 475, Roland
• “The authors contend persuasively that the rifled musket, “effective at 1000 yards,” rendered obsolete many of the tactical
operations that had been successful in the recent Mexican War, which was fought largely with smoothbores; that cavalry charges
and the employment of field artillery on line with the infantry were now prohibitively costly in lives; and that, more important,
so were infantry attacks in close formation.” 475, Roland
• “In part, they say, Confederate generals attacked because they had been taught at West Point to do so and were too “fossilized”
to break with their training. But there was a deeper and more pervasive cause. The Celtic makeup of the Southern population
(Scotch-Irish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish) produced Confederate soldiers who were extremely courageous but equally
impetuous, just as their Celtic forebears had been throughout recorded history. The charge was the Celtic way of war.” 475, Rol
Sources: military manuals, battle maps, rifle manufacturing information, ethnic history
Connections: McPherson, Battle, Williams, Lincoln, Sears, Landscape
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (1990)
Argument: “Nonetheless, whether measured by the dreams inspired by emancipation or the more limited goals of securing blacks’ rights
as citizens and free laborers and establishing an enduring Republican presence in the South, Reconstruction must be judged a failure.
Among the host of explanations for this outcome, a few seem especially significant. Conditions far beyond the control of Southern
Republicans—such as the national credit and banking systems, the depression of the 1870s, and the stagnation of world demand for
cotton—severely limited the prospects for far-reaching economic change. The early rejection of federally sponsored land reform left in
place a planter class far weaker and less affluent than before the war, but still able to employ its prestige and experience against
Reconstruction. Factionalism and corruption, although hardly confined to Southern Republicans, undermined their legitimacy and
complicated their efforts to respond to attacks by resolute opponents. The failure to develop a lasting appeal to white voters made it nearly
impossible for Republicans to combat the racial politics of the Redeemers. None of these factors, however, would have proved decisive
without the campaign of violence that turned the electoral tide in many parts of the South and the weakening of Northern resolve, itself a
consequence of social and political changes that undermined the free labor and egalitarian precepts at the heart of Reconstruction policy.”
255
• “But no period of the American experience has, in the last twenty-five years seen a broadly accepted point of view so completely
overturned as Reconstruction—the dramatic, controversial era that followed the Civil War.” xi
• “The interpretation elaborated by the Dunning school may be briefly summarized as follows: When the Civil War ended, the
white South accepted the reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all a
quick reintegration into the fabric of national life. Before his death, Abraham Lincoln had embarked on a course of sectional
reconciliation, and during Presidential Reconstruction (1865-1867) his successor, Andrew Johnson, attempted to carry out
Lincoln’s magnanimous policies. Johnson’s efforts were opposed and eventually thwarted by the Radical Republicans in
Congress. Motivated by an irrational hatred of Southern “rebels” and the desire to consolidate their party’s national ascendancy,
the Radicals in 1867 swept aside the Southern governments Johnson had established and fastened black suffrage on the defeated
South. There followed the sordid period of Congressional or Radical Reconstruction (1867-77), an era of corruption presided
over by unscrupulous “carpetbaggers” from the North, unprincipled Southern white “scalawags,” and ignorant blacks unprepared
for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. After much needless
suffering, the South’s white community banded together to overthrow these governments and restore “home rule” (a euphemism
for white supremacy).” Xi-xii
• “In the 1960s, the revisionist wave broke over the field, destroying, in rapid succession, every assumption of the traditional
viewpoint. First, scholars presented a drastically revised account of national politics. New works portrayed Andrew Johnson as
a stubborn, racist politician incapable of responding to the unprecedented situation that confronted him as President, and
46
acquitted the Radicals—reborn as idealistic reformers genuinely committed to black rights—of vindictive motives and the
charge of being the stalking-horses of Northern capitalism. Moreover, Reconstruction legislation was shown to be not simply
the product of a Radical cabal, but a program that enjoyed broad support in both Congress and the North at large.” Xiii
• “By the end of the 1960s, Reconstruction was seen as a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blacks. If the era
was “tragic,” it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform.” Xiii
• “Over a half-century ago, Charles and Mary Beard coined the term “the Second American Revolution” to describe a transfer in
power wrought by the Civil War, from the South’s “planting aristocracy” to “Northern capitalists and free farmers.” Xiv
• “Modern scholars tend to view emancipation itself as among the most revolutionary aspects of the period.” Xiv
• “The magnitude of the Redeemer counterrevolution underscored both the scope and the transformation Reconstruction had
assayed and the consequences of its failure.” 254
• “Without Reconstruction, it is difficult to imagine the establishment of a framework of legal rights enshrined in the Constitution
that, while flagrantly violated after 1877, created a vehicle for future federal intervention in Southern affairs.” 254-255
• “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be
obscured by the accomplishments that endured. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that
deeply affected the course of its development. If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, so also Reconstruction’s
demise and the emergence of blacks as disenfranchised dependent laborers accelerated racism’s spread, until by the early
twentieth century it pervaded the nation’s culture and politics.” 256
• “Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region ruled by a reactionary elite that continued to employ
violence and fraud to stifle internal dissent. An enduring consequence of Reconstruction’s failure, the Solid South helped define
the contours of American politics and weaken the prospects not simply of change in racial matters but of progressive legislation
generally.” 256
• “Yet the institutions created or consolidate after the Civil War—the black family, school, and church—provided the base from
which the modern civil rights revolution sprang. And for its legal strategy, the movement returned to the laws and amendments
of Reconstruction.” 259
• “This book is an abridgement of my Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, a comprehensive modern
account of the period. The larger work necessarily touched on a multitude of issues, but certain broad themes unified the
narrative and remain crucial in this shorter version.” xv
o “The first is the centrality of the black experience. Rather than passive victims of the actions of others or simply a
“problem” confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction whose quest for
individual and community autonomy did much to establish the era’s political and economic agenda.” Xv
o “A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled, and to do so without
neglecting the local variations in different parts of the South. By the end of Reconstruction, a new Southern class
structure and several new systems of organizing labor were well on their way to being consolidated. The ongoing
process of social and economic change, moreover, was intimately related to the politics of Reconstruction, for various
groups of blacks and whites sought to use state and local government to promote their own interests and define their
place in the region’s new social order.” Xv
o “The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the complex interconnection of race and class in the
postwar South, form a third theme of this book. Racism was pervasive in mid-nineteenth-century America and at both
the regional and national levels constituted a powerful barrier to change. Yet despite racism, a significant number of
Southern whites were willing to link their political fortunes with those blacks, and Northern Republicans came, for a
time, to associate the fate of the former slaves with their party’s raison d’etre and the meaning of Union victory in the
Civil War. Moreover, in the critical, interrelated issues of land and labor and the persistent conflict between planters’
desire to reexert control over their labor force and blacks’ quest for economic independence, race and class were
inextricably linked.” Xv
o “The book’s fourth theme is the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing
vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national
citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race. Originating in wartime exigencies, the
activist state came to embody the reforming impulse deeply rooted in postwar politics. And Reconstruction produced
enduring changes in the laws and Constitution that fundamentally altered federal-state relations and redefined the
meaning of American citizenship.” Xvi
o “Finally, this study examines how changes in the North’s economy and class structured affected Reconstruction. That
the Reconstruction of the North receives less attention than its Southern counterpart reflects, in part, the absences of a
detailed historical literature on the region’s social and political structure in these years. Nonetheless, Reconstruction
cannot be fully understood without attention to its distinctively Northern and national dimensions.” Xvi
(For more notes, see book underlining.)
Sources: legislation, journals, WPA records, newspapers
Connections: Foner, Free, Blight, Race, McPherson, Battle, Woodward, Origins of the New South, Ayers, Promises of the New South
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951)
Argument: Change in the South resulted from the efforts of the industrial-entrepreneurial class of carpetbaggers and was constricted by
its economic and political status as an internal colony.
47
The ““New South” was a slogan for Henry Grady and the Redeemers who were converted to the Yankee gospel of
industrialism, and tried to make the South over in the image of a middle-class North.” 141, Shugg
• “Neither Confederates nor Radicals were so influential in shaping the modern South as the Redeemers. In the Compromise of
1877 they sought not only home rule but economic privileges.” 141, Shugg
• “The Redeemers were not all honorable man; the defalcations of many who held office show that corruption did not end with
Reconstruction. The industrial revolution which they promoted, largely as agents for northern capitalism, went far beyond
textiles and was not benevolent in character. In agriculture, although labor and capital were greatly changed, the plantation
system did not break up. For a generation the southern people—white as well as colored—endured a numbing poverty, starved
of education and of their share in the nation’s prosperity until the present century.” 141-142, Shugg
• “The political consequence was agrarian revolt…the southern farmers fought for power and prosperity. The forked road to
reunion had led them to combine with the West. But their fundamental challenge to the new order was crushed in every state,
not only by the cry of white supremacy but—perhaps more effectively by economic forces and adroit conservative opposition.
Out of the political turmoil of the 1890’s emerged the Democracy of a white minority, allied again with the North in support of
a colonial economy at the South.” 142, Shugg
• “The “Redeemers” of the South after Reconstruction were middle-class heirs of the old Whig tradition.” 994, Hesseltine
• “[Woodward] examines the industrial revolution of the 1880’s, and concludes that with all the achievements, the South
remained rural.” 994, Hesseltine
• “The core of the book is a penetrating discussion of southern Populism—its rise from the rural protest against urban and eastern
exploitation, its betrayal by is leaders, and its aftermath of discrimination, disfranchisement, and disillusion.” 994, Hesseltine
• “By the South I mean the eleven former Confederate states plus Kentucky and, after it became a state, Oklahoma.” X
• “Politically the South achieved, on the surface at least, a unity that it had never possessed in ante-bellum times. Economically it
was set apart from the rest of the nation by differentials in per capita wealth, income, and living standards that made it unique
among the regions. War and Reconstruction, while removing some of the South’s peculiarities, merely aggravated others and
gave rise to new ones.” X
• “Published more than forty years ago, this still great book advanced a sociological model of the New South that attributed
change both to the influence of an ascendant, entrepreneurial-industrial class and to the constraints imposed by the South’s
political and economic status as an internal colony. Fifteen years ago, Woodward’s model was challenged by revisionist…who
argued instead that what made the New South regionally distinct was the persistence of the class relations of the
postemancipation plantation system and its still dominant planter class…Ayers takes a decidedly postmodern turn by focusing
instead on the diverse and contradictory local stories of Southern experience.” 815-816, Billings
• “Woodward, while rooting for the people acted upon, told the story of the powerful men who prevailed in the public realm.”
697, Lewis
• “[Woodward] championed outsiders and dissenters; he punctured the pretensions of the South’s self-proclaimed leaders.
Because he sympathized with the underdogs, Woodward focused on the errors, self-delusion, and duplicity of the public men of
the South. As he confided to a friend, “my sympathies were obviously not with the people who ran things, and about whom I
wrote most, but [with] the people who were run, who were managed, and maneuvered and pushed around.” Ayers, vii
Sources: journals, newspapers, manufacturing records, government papers
Connections: Ayers, The Promise, Foner, Reconstruction, Foner, Free, Blight, Race, Cashman, America, Sanders, Roots
•
Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992)
Argument: “The history of the New South was, accordingly, a history of continual redefinition and renegotiation, of unintended and
unanticipated consequences, of unresolved tensions. People experienced conflict within their own hearts and minds; classes, races, and
partisans clashed. The New South was an anxious place, filled with longing and resentment, for people had been dislodged from older
bases of identity and found no new ones ready at hand. People worried about the inability of both the young and old to appreciate the
other’s concerns and hopes. People worried that the tenuous compromises and local arrangements struck between whites and blacks, rich
and poor, the worldly and the godly would not hold. People remained ambivalent about the spread of commercial values and institutions,
certain that the South needed to be more prosperous yet fearful that economic change would dissolve whatever stability their society
could claim. Southerners often managed to persuade themselves, despite all this, that the new era held out unprecedented promise for the
region. People of both races hoped that emancipation had given the South a fresh start, a chance to catch up with the rest of the nation
while avoiding the mistakes of the North.” viii
• “Post-Reconstruction politics, I argue, was extremely unstable. Apparently antagonistic groups fused while erstwhile allies split;
most men cared passionately about politics though government did little; black men voted in large numbers and in many
combinations; women played important roles in reform efforts; politics in the North and the South bore deep similarities.
Economically, too, the South was far more fluid and active than we have thought. Advertising, name brands, and mass-produced
products flowed into the South in a widening current. Some capitalists in the region managed to create businesses of national and
international impact. Each year, manufacturing, mining, and lumbering pulled more blacks and whites, men and women, adults
and children into wage labor. Villages and towns appeared by the thousands where none had appeared before. People of both
races moved restlessly through the South and often beyond its borders. Churches proliferated, establishing a presence in private
and public life they had never known before, meeting disaffection and resentment along the way. Relations among black
Southerners and white Southerners embodied every tension and conflict in the region.” Ix-x
48
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Ayers provides the other half of C. Vann Woodward’s classic account. Woodward, while rooting for the people acted upon,
told the story of the powerful men who prevailed in the public realm. Ayers, while cognizant of the contributions of the socially
and politically powerful, included the voices and perspectives of non-elite southern men and women. In a region where the
topography varied greatly, the notion of a unified South was illusory at best. But the South did exist, defined and redefined by
its many citizens through a process of negotiation.” 697, Lewis
“Trains furthered—and symbolized—the great themes of this [1877-1913] era: the struggle to reverse economic disaster, the
yearning to find lives free from racism, the plans for flourishing cities, the curiosity about other places.” 951, Stowe
“More than forty years ago, C. Vann Woodward, looking at this period, was uneasy with the term “New South,” worrying that it
might be simply a rallying cry of southern boosters. Ayers attempts to get past this concern by going beyond the political
deceptions and delusions that preoccupied Woodward to an understanding on “what it meant to live in the American South” in
this time.”” (vi). 951, Stowe
“Ayers aggress with those who see the Populists as genuine reformers, leaning toward modernity rather than nostalgia, and he
argues that the South’s economy was potentially dynamic enough to respond. But whites’ racist fears and blacks’ traditions of
careful survival combined to snuff out Populist hopes.” 952, Stowe
“What was the “promise” of the New South, and how did literary and political change influence or mirror everyday life?
Sometimes the promise seems to be in modernity, in southerners’ capacity to imagine and define the temper of the twentieth
century. At other times it seems that trace relations held the promise of renewal even when renewal failed. At still other points,
Ayers hints at a broader unifying theme, an understanding of how difficult it was for southerners of all descriptions to grasp the
complexity of living in a region that has so promiscuously embraced history and myth.” 952, Stowe
“War, emancipation, Reconstruction, the return of white dominance, and depression followed on another in quick succession
between 1861 and 1877. Slavery ended more abruptly and more violently in the South than anywhere else in the modern world.
Politics lurched from one regime to the next between 1865 and 1877, recrimination and bitterness marking the transitions.
Blacks and whites withdrew into their own houses, churches, and neighborhoods, watching the other warily. Death and
separation weighted on many families. After 1877, Southerners had no choice but to create a new society, one without precedent
or blueprint.” Viii
“Southerners lived with stunted economic growth, narrow political alternatives, poisoned race relations, confined roles for
women, and shallow intellectual life. In the process of exploring those shortcomings, however, an unintended thing has
happened: we have focused so much on the limitations Southerners endured that we have lost sight of the rest of their lives. The
people of the New South have become synonymous with the problems they faced. Southerners of both races have become
reduced to objects of pity, scorn, romance, or condescension.” Viii-ix
“This book tries to convey some of the complexity and experience in the New South. Account books, love letters, memoirs, and
sermons offer clues; computers reveal submerged patterns; photographs permit glimpses of the way things looked.” Ix
“Change did not displace the past or standardize the present. The South did not become more homogenous as modern institutions
worked within the region nor did it lose its distinctiveness within the nation. Differences among people and places widened
rather than narrowed; violence and distrust found new sources and new expressions; some Southerners tested new ways only to
return to the old.” X
“The home of the antebellum South’s most lucrative plantations, the Black Belt declined in the New South.” 6
“Quickly evolving systems of commerce heightened difference among places and people even as the systems tied them together.
Although railroads, stores, and towns came into sudden prominence throughout the South, each place had its own local
chronology. Any given year would find some places in a buoyant mood as a railroad approached or a new mill opened, while
others, bypassed by the machinery of the new order, fell into decline. The arrival of a railroad could trigger many consequences:
rapid population growth or population decline, a more diversified economy or great specialization, the growth of a city or the
death of small towns.” 7
“The New South era began in the mid- to late 1870s when the biracial and reformist experiment of Reconstruction ended and the
conservative white Democrats took power throughout the Southern sates. Then, in the early 1890s, the largest political revolt in
American history, Populism, redrew the political boundaries of the South and the nation. Business cycles, too, created common
experiences across the South. The 1880s saw town and industrial growth in the South but steady economic pressure on farmers.
The 1890s began with a terrible depression that lasted through half the decade, followed by a decade of relative prosperity.
Within these broad patterns, the people of the New South lived lives of great variation and contrast.” 7
“Reconstruction’s final gasp came in 1877, when Congress declared victory for the Democrats in contested elections in
Louisiana and Florida.” 8
“The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they were not. Unlike Republicans, the Redeemers were
not interested in biracial coalition. The Democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would not invert the racial
hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which white longed. Unlike Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the
state government as an active agent of change. Democrats scoffed not only at Republican support for railroads and other
businesses, but also at Republican initiatives in schools, orphanages, prisons, and asylums. Democrats assured landowning
farmers that the party would roll back taxes. The Democrats saw themselves as the proponents of common sense, honesty, and
caution where the Republicans offered foolishness, corruption, and impetuosity. The Democrats explained away their own
violence and fraud, both of which soon dwarfed that of Reconstruction, as fighting fire with fire. Democratic policies
encouraged economic growth not through active aid, as the Republicans had done, but through low taxes on railroads and
49
farmland, with few restrictions on business and few demands on government. Democrats realized, as hard the Republicans, that
railroads were the key to economic growth in the last half of the nineteenth century.” 8-9
• “Sores sped the reorientation of plantation-belt economic life. Many freedpeople, at the demand of their landlords, concentrated
on growing cotton and abandoned their gardens; they turned to stores for everything they needed. Other freedpeople, working
for wages and having some say over how they would spend their money, also turned to the store, eagerly purchasing symbols of
their independence. Many planters used plantation stores to wring extra profit from their tenants, marking up goods substantially
and doling out credit to keep tenants on the farm throughout the season.” 13
• “In the late 1880s and early 1890s, the railroads became the scenes of the first statewide segregation laws throughout the South.”
18
• “Every measure of industrial growth raced ahead in the New South, the rates of change consistently outstripping national
averages…Productivity actually grew faster in the South than it had in New England during its industrial revolution fifty years
earlier.” 22
• “In fact, many more whites than blacks fled the South. While the thirteen Southern states saw a net loss of 537,000 blacks
between 1880 and 1910, the loss of whites totaled 1,243,000 in those same decades. After 1900, when land in Texas and
Louisiana became harder to get, Southern whites began to move to California and other parts of the Far West, places to which
relatively few blacks had the means to go. All along, the South lost white population to every other part of the union.” 24
Organization: “Ayers devotes seven chapters to what he calls “the landscape of everyday life.” Here he describes the diverse and
contradictory experiences of black and white Southerners who lived in the countryside or small towns, worked in mines and mills,
worshipped in segregated churches, and began, literally to buy into mass consumer culture. Three subsequent chapters…describe the
promise and the failure of the Southern Populist movement to point the region in the direction of greater equality and the Jim Crow South
that eventuated. Finally, in an innovative departure from canonical traditions o Southern historiography, Ayers describes ho New South
experiences were creatively translated as new cultural expressions in literature, music, and Pentecostal-holiness religion.” 815, Billings
Sources: quantitative data, maps, novels, sermons, diaries, government records
Connection: Woodward, Origins of the New South, Foner, Reconstruction, Foner, Free, Blight, Race, Cashman, America, Sanders, Roots
Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1984)
Argument: “in short, some political and cultural attitudes of the Gilded Age long survived the close of the nineteenth century when the
period itself had ended.” 6
• “This book, intended as an introduction to the Gilded Age and Industrial America, offers a general account of the industrial and
economic, social and political history of the period from 1865 to 1901…The book aims at a clear, concise presentation of
essential facts but does not attempt to record the history of high society or the complex and diverse stories of education and
religion, arts and letters.” xvi
• “Economic development took center stage in this period, as the country passed suddenly from a society based on farms, small
towns, and small mercantile and manufacturing enterprises to one boasting concentrated power in every sphere of life. Cashman
focuses on prominent entrepreneurs and their corporations, using terms such as robber barons and monopolies where others
might be less pejorative.” 599, Morgan
• “Cashman retains much of the inherited view that the major parties were basically alike, that innovative ideas came from the
fringes, especially the Populists. This has been the hardest stereotype about the period to alter, but historians would do well to
remember that most people at that time saw profound differences between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats still
represented southernism, but were also the party of parochialism and city bossism. The Republicans generally spoke for the
rising middle class, for prosperous farmers with ready markets in the industrial sector, and for some skilled labor. The political
wars revealed a balance because the economy and society were balanced between old and new ideals, not because the issues
debated were irrelevant. At heart, the party debate was about differing conceptions of development. Both parties accepted
competition and individualism. The Republicans were willing to temper them with some government action, and were more
tolerant of large enterprises than were the Democrats or Populists.” 599, Morgan
• “Industrialism’s promotion of mass culture was bound to raise dissent from those who saw their inherited order fade. None were
more vocal than the Populists. Cashman sees their grievances as rooted in real economic distress, but that movement also
involved sectional resentments and a potent sense of individual inequity. Cashman is probably too favorable toward Populist
remedies. The currency manipulation they advocated would have been disastrous. Subsidy programs for farm surpluses would
have increased the public costs without solving the farm problem. Government ownership of railroads and communication
systems probably would have stagnated those enterprises.” 600, Morgan
• “There were formative years. The Industrial Revolution and the development of commercial monopolies, Reconstruction and
the New South, the settlement of the West and closing of the frontier—all brought to the fore of politics a cast of characters that
was very different from the statesmen, soldiers, and slaves of the Civil War. This was the heyday of the robber barons. Perhaps
the most damaging accusation against Lincoln after his assassination was that to win the war he had been ready to sacrifice the
ideals of the Republican party to spoilsmen and profiteers.” 1-2
• “The West was settled at a fatal cost to Native Americas. The South was tied back to the Union at a humiliating cost to AfricanAmericans. There were two depressions, in 1873 and 1893, each with devastating effects on the economy. The amazing
industrial expansion of the United States was accomplished with considerable exploitation of factory artisans. The splendors of
the new cities arose amid the squalor of industrial slums. The most damning indictment of this postwar American society was
attributed to the future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who lived for a time in New York and New England.
50
Noting is undoubted problems, he could claim the United States had gone from a stage of barbarism to one of decadence without
achieving any civilization between the two.” 3
• “Society was obsessed with invention, industrialization, incorporation, immigration, and, later, imperialism. It was indulgent of
commercial speculation, social ostentation, and political prevarication but was indifferent to the special needs of immigrants and
Indians and intolerant of African-Americans, labor, unions, and political dissidents.” 4
• “Each period benefited from a boom in transportation—after 1865, the railroad; in the 1920s, the mass production of the
automobile; from the late 1940s on, widespread commercial use of the airplane. Each enjoyed a revolution in communication—
the Gilded Age, telegraph and telephone; the 1920s, motion pictures and radio; in the 1950s, long-playing vinyl phonograph
records and television; in the 1980s, personal computers and compact discs. Innovations in transportation and communication
together worked for a more homogeneous culture and a more informed citizenry, as well a shaving undisputed industrial and
commercial significance in their own right.” 4
• “In the 1870s and 1880s labor unions were tainted by presumed association with anarchists, and the Haymarket anarchists of
1886 were tried without justice.” 5
Sources: some primary, mostly secondary—a synthesis
Connections: Foner, Reconstruction, Woodward, Origins, Ayers, Promises, Blight, Race, Sanders, Roots
Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (1999)
Argument: “It is the contention of this book that agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the
development of the American national state in the half century before World War I. And by shaping the form of early regulatory
legislation and establishing the centrality of the farmer-labor alliance to progressive reform and the Democratic Party, the agrarian
influence was felt for years thereafter. Indeed, its characteristic ideological conceptions and language are still with us.” 1
• “The alliance between farmers and the workers who staffed the nation’s industries, mines, and railroads was a difficult one to
effect and maintain, and it existed more in the farmers’ perception than in the workers’. Nevertheless, its legislative fruits were
more abundant than is commonly realized, and the vision of this alliance of “producers against plutocrats” was central to the
Populist and Progressive Eras and to subsequent reform efforts as well.” 1
• “What this rich literature has not provided is an account of the political interaction of these two sectors and the extent to which
Progressive Era national state expansion embodied the demands of farmers and workers.” 2
• “My argument is that the dynamic stimulus for Populist and Progressive Era state expansion was the periphery agrarians’ drive
to establish public control over a rampaging capitalism. The periphery generated the bulk of the reform agenda and furnished
the foot soldiers that saw reform though the early-twentieth-century periphery was innately antagonistic to the designs of core
industrial and financial capitalism and had no effective means with which to fight it other than the capture and expansion of state
power.” 4
• “The agrarians hoped, through their control of the national state, to restructure the domestic market and to slow or reverse the
concentration of wealth and power that was the legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization. Periphery representatives sought
neither to impose a general collectivism nor to restore a mythical state if laissez-faire. Rather, they believed that the mass of
citizens would benefit if powerful government mechanisms were created to restrain rapacious corporations, prevent excessive
concentration of wealth and market power, and publicly provide certain goods and services that either would not be sufficiently
furnished by private enterprise or would be supplied only through monopolistic exactions. Within the decentralized market to be
fostered and policed by the state, they hoped that a genuinely free commerce would flourish and believed that both individual
and collective efforts would yield a more just and broadly prosperous society.” 4
• “The capitalist response to this challenge was reactive and largely negative, it did, however, establish the outer limits of reform
and succeeded in significantly modifying the agrarian statist agenda. The force of capitalist resistance was all the more powerful
because of the failure of the labor movement in the industrial North to meaningfully challenge corporate political hegemony in
its local bastions. That failure has been variously attributed to federalism, immigration, judicial intervention, conservative
leadership, internal ideological division, and other factors that weakened labor’s organizational force. In my view, labor’s
tentative and ineffective political mobilization must also be viewed in juxtaposition to the greater programmatic cohesion and
intuitional strength of agrarian interests.” 4
• “The existing two-party system, not rigidly bound by partisan discipline or centralized around a unitary government, was flexible
enough to accommodate rising political demands from new quarters. But the Democratic Party of the post-1896 period was an
overwhelmingly agrarian vehicle that carried the legacy of populism. The periphery farmers’ enthusiasm for politics an the
territorial nature of their political demands interacted with the structure of Congress and the electoral system to give them a
driving force and an institutional strength that workers could not match. Thus labor was offered a subordinate role in a party
coalition, the content of whose program, because of its strong agrarian bias, could be labeled by its opponents as a threat to the
health of the northern industrial economy.” 4-5
• “In the early twentieth century the alliance with the cotton South in the Democratic Party was a problematic one for northern
labor, not because (as some scholars have argued) the party served the interests of a Bourbon elite antagonistic to labor by virtue
of its class position but because the party embodied the political demands of export-oriented agricultural producers whose
position in the national economy differed fundamentally from that of northern industrial workers.” 5
• “Nevertheless, the farmer-labor political alliance did succeed in constructing a rudimentary interventionist state that limited
corporate prerogatives in ways that seemed genuinely frightening to capitalists at the time.”5
51
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“In addition to tracing the political-economy roots of the modern interventionist state, this book will describe the sources of a
major anomaly in American political development; social forces profoundly hostile to bureaucracy nevertheless instigated the
creation of a bureaucratic state.” 6
“(core, diverse, and periphery)…regionalism was based on the nature of production, but equally significant for politics was the
market destination of goods produced—which distinguished, for example, farm economies that were linked by tariff sensitivity
and interdependency with domestic industry from those agricultural regions heavily involved in international trade.” 6-7
“An extensive body of evidence will be presented to support my contention that the main contours of Progressive Ear state
expansion were direct results of the pressing of agrarian claims in the national legislature: the redefinition of trade policy; the
creation of an income tax; a new, publicly controlled banking and currency system; antitrust policy; the regulation of agricultural
marketing networks; a nationally financed road system; federal control of railroads, ocean shipping, and early
telecommunications; and agricultural and vocational education. These constituted the core of the agrarian political agenda.
When regulation appeared insufficient to achieve the aims of the agrarian regions, direct state control of production and
transportation was urged, refuting the popular image of the agrarians as antistatists hamstrung by a constricting “states’ rights”
ideology.” 7-8
“The argument that these farmers were nevertheless the principal instigators of progressive reform and of correlative efforts to
construct a farmer-labor alliance in the three decades before World War I sets this book apart from most pervious works and
from popular constructions of the past.” 410
“One of the purposes of this book is to reclaim the agrarian radical heritage and even to suggest that its goals and methods have
some relevance today.” 410
“The farmers’ goal was to use the expanded regulatory, social, and infrastructure-building capability of the national state to level
the economic playing field and effect a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power. Farmers took the lead in this political
transformation because their grievances were numerous, their commitment to politics unflagging, and their position in the
territorially based national legislature advantageous.” 411
“The principal labor movement organization had a much longer life (and in fact is with us still), but the farmers’ movement had
a much greater impact on national state development. Farmer and labor organizations were internally distinct and were shaped to
create an alternative cooperative economy and, failing that, to press on the state a great variety of market-shaping powers to be
exercised for the good of the large number of ordinary producers. The AFL, on he other hand, accepted the concentrated
structure of the modern industrial economy and, as an alternative to politics, focused its efforts on achieving power in the
workplace, vis-à-vis employers—an alternative that farmers, after the failure of their cooperatives, did not have.” 411
“Workers’ organizations, repelled by the difficulties of political mobilization and maneuver that confronted them, were
halfhearted and cross-pressured in their approach to politics and, in the Progressive Era, as likely to spend political energy on
behalf of particularistic ethnic concerns as on more universal working-class benefits. Farmers’ organizations were somewhat
more inclusive in their occupational definition of eligibility for membership, which recognized only the division between
“producers “ and controllers, exploiters and plutocrats—the latter all grouped together.” 411
“By contrast, most labor organizations (after the demise of the wonderfully inclusive and producerist Knight of Labor) were
narrowly divided along craft lines and paid little attention to immigrant and unskilled workers. Farmers’ organizations in the
South were, for the most part, racially segregated, though farmer organizations differed from labor groups in having more
gender-egalitarian membership and leadership. This quality lent a considerable advantage to farmers’ social and political
mobilization. However, both farmer and worker movements were undeniably rent by class, ethnic, and regional political
economy differences that diminished their capacity for economic and political mobilization and—particularly in the case of
southern racial segregation—their moral authority.” 412
“The farmers’ movement enjoyed more unity and collective purpose than, in particular, the AFL. The latter combined state and
local fragmentation with a national leadership that possessed little capacity to mobilize the membership but significant autonomy
to go its own way in high-level, corporatists negotiation and to take political and social positions at variance with the inclinations
of the rank and file. There was more political consensus and less distance between members and leaders in farm organizations.”
“In the post-Civil War era, farmers were always committed to politics, whereas workers were profoundly ambivalent about the
relationship of politics—particularly national politics—to their economic interests and skeptical about their ability to participate
effectively in a winning national and political coalition. Farmers’ interests converged easily and naturally on the national state;
workers’ goals were strongly local, and the forces of judicially maintained constitutional rules, political economy, and the twoparty system worked against their national political mobilization.” 412
“Workers were concentrated in the core industrial region of the Northeast and Great Lakes, a region dominated by corporate
capital through the Republican Party. To win against capitalists in national political contests, they had to make alliance with the
periphery farmers, who not only were numerous and determined antagonists of core capital but also enjoyed strategic legislative
advantage. But at critical junctures—in 1894, 1896, and 1908—capitalists were able to convince core industrial workers that the
interests of farmers were antithetical to the interests of all residents of the core industrial regions.” 413
“The electoral support the workers offered to the farmers’ party ( in return for the latter’s acceptance of labor’s limited national
political agenda) was always very feeble, never enough to maintain sufficient control of the national state to implement the key
protections that workers needed for their organizations and workplace collective actions. The farmer-labor alliance could and
did flourish within states in the periphery and diverse regions, but it could not sustain an effective cross-regional alliance in
national politics. Labor was caught in a political economy that produced and sustained a two-party system, with one party
52
dominated by core capital and the other by periphery farmers. Workers could not comfortably ally with either, and this
realization was the major reason for labor’s apolitical, voluntarist strategy.” 413
• “The farmers’ natural forum was the legislature. The needed change in the national legal structure, and Congress was much
more responsive to grassroots social movements and more willing to deny large capitalists their cherished goals than the
executive branch of the courts.” 414
• “With the decline of indigenous organization for both farmers and workers in the 1920s and the shift of policy initiative
definitely to the executive branch, neither farmers nor workers were able to dictate terms in national politics. When the
economic crisis of the 1930s arrived, the stage was set for state actors and public-service-oriented intellectuals to propose and
impose a program that offered to do a lot for farmers and workers, according to the interpretation of their interests developed
within the state, but to grant them little autonomy from national administrative control.” 417
• “ The decline of indigenous labor organizations resulted from state repression of radical trade-union organizations during World
War I (repression that the AFL, feeling secure in its corporatist arrangements, did not oppose) and from the failure of workers to
wrest definitive organizational rights from the grasp of hostile courts and employers….Organizational rights would finally be
won in the 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, a legislative legacy of the farmer-labor alliance. Agrarians had been trying to
emancipate labor from antitrust prosecution since 1890, but labor was never able to elect enough industrial Democrats to sustain
the alliance or the anti-trust exemption. Farmers had provided the crucial less that labor would no learn: the Supreme Court
would inevitably pick apart your legislation. You had to keep coming back, again and again, to patch it up and plug loopholes—
as the farmers did with railroad legislation in 1906, 1910, and 1913 and also with antitrust and commodity futures regulation and
as the farmer-labor alliance finally did for labor in 1932.” 417
• “For farmers, the decline of indigenous organizations after 1917 was in part a result of agrarian legislative victories in the
Wilson era and the commodity price increases of the war years, but there was another, ironic development. One of the
Progressive Era legislative victories of the farmers’ movement was the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 creating an agricultural
extension service. As the system developed, it created a powerful, state-spawned competitor to the Grange and the Farmers’
Union—the groups that had fought for the 1914 act. Faced with determinedly localistic administrative structure of the act and the
food-production needs of World War I, the Extension Service encouraged the growth of local “farm bureaus” to support its
agents and then backed their federation into state and national organizations.” 417
• The United States is divided into three regions by Sanders; “an industrial “core” based primarily in the Northeast, a “periphery”
in the South and West, and several “diverse” localities mostly in the Midwest.” 177, Vaught
Sources: legislative journals
Connections: Foner, Free, Foner, Reconstruction, Ayers, Promise, Woodward, Origins, Cashman, America
Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Short History, 1877-1898 (1992)
Argument: “Populism developed among people who were deeply rooted in the social and economic networks of rural communities, not,
as some would have it, among isolated and disoriented individuals.” 17
• “My own telling of their story pays close attention to the economic distress of farmers and workers in the South, the Great
Plains, and the Mountain West, and especially to those sharp and unexpected jolts that struck the farming regions in the decade
between 1886 and 1896, leading people to believe that the great economic and political institutions of the United States and
Europe were aligned against them. This telling of the story also follows closely the careers of the grass-roots organizations
through which rural men and women interpreted those personal and collective crises and out of which they fashioned a
movement of protest. By chronicling these organizations, their battles with the dominant institutions of an industrializing nation,
and their own internal struggles, we can move beyond thee sometimes static question of who joined to explore the dynamics of
the movement. And though my sympathies are with the Populists, I do not ignore the dark and irrational side of their
movement.” 16-17
• “The Great Strike of 1877 ushered in an era that would divide Americans along lines of wealth and occupation for the next two
decades. Spawned by the nation’s worst depression to date, this bloody strike revealed the sharp edge of class conflict in
industrializing America. Much of the nation’s rail network was paralyzed, and in cities from Baltimore to San Francisco, from
Chicago to Galveston, railroad men were joined by other workers in angry confrontation with company representatives and local
militia units. In Pittsburgh militamen sent to protect private property joined the mob in attacking the hated Pennsylvania
Railroad. In St. Louis workers called a general strike and briefly established what they called the nation’s only “genuine
commune.” 3
• “But by 1877 the farmers and merchants of western New York were hurting. They believed themselves to be the victims of
discrimination in freight rates at the hands of the trunk-line railroads that were the connecting the East Coast and the new grain
belt of the Midwest. In March 1877, F. P. Root, a prominent Monroe County farmer and a leader of the Patrons of Husbandry
(the Grange), convened a meeting of wheat farmers and cattlemen at the Rochester courthouse for the purpose of establishing a
Farmer’s Alliance. Its aim was to join representatives of existing agricultural organizations (the Grange, the Western New York
Farmers Club, and the State Agricultural Society) in a loose alliance to lobby the state legislature for redress of grievances.” 5
• “This New York Farmers’ Alliance was short-lived. Dominated as it was by large landowners and focusing on relief from high
property taxes and freight rates, the Alliance never won a mass following. Farmers and laborers who were impatient with its
nonpartisan approach and its concentration on the transportation issue found a more congenial home in the Greenback Party
(1878) and in the new Antimonopoly League (1881).” 5
53
“The founders who gathered at the Rochester courthouse and at John Allen’s farm did not invent Populism. Neither the form nor
the content of their movements were brand-new. Both drew upon techniques for mobilizing people and for channeling their
enthusiasm that were understood in communities across the land…Both struggled with a political dilemma that had bedeviled
workingmen’s organizations since the 1830s: in a nation where a two-party system prevailed and where individual citizens took
partisan identity very seriously, how could an interest group express its grievances politically without being destroyed by
partisan controversy, and what happens when both major parties ignore its petitions? Finally, these two short-lived organizations,
like scores and even hundreds of other community-based movements, were called into being by the transformation of American
capitalism amidst the economic social trauma of the 1870s.” 7
• “since Populism was a major force in three very different regions of the country (the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain
West), the answer to the question “Who were the Populists? depends on where you look.” 9
• “John D. Hicks…Located the source of Populism in the economic distress of farmers on the Great Plains frontier and in the
depressed kingdoms of cotton and tobacco. In the 1880s and 1890s southern and western farmers, already locked into an
agricultural market economy over which they exercised little control, were hit hard by a series of financial shocks: falling
commodity prices, high freight rates, and expensive credit, compounded by capricious acts of nature, especially crippling
droughts that parched the West from Texas to Canada in the mid-1880s.” 10
• “If The Populist Revolt made the case that Populism was on movement with branches in the South and West, C. Vann
Woodward’s biography of a leading southern Populist confirmed that view…Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel made the case the
southern farmers, like their western counterparts, were driven to Populism by legitimate economic grievances. Economic selfinterest could bring farmers from the late Confederacy into political alignment with farmers who had made war on the South. IT
was even possible, despite the racial “settlement” symbolized by President Hayes’s withdrawal of troops, that white Southerners
would make common cause with former slaves.” 10
• “Populists, we must acknowledge, were not immune to the racism that saturated American culture.” 11
• “Where Hicks and Woodward saw a rational reform-minded protest movement, Viereck detected something more sinister:
“Beneath the sane economic demands of the Populists of 1880-1900 seethed a mania of xenophobia, Jew-baiting, intellectualbaiting and thought-controlling lynch-spirit. Rural people, worried about their declining social status in an urbanizing society,
were drawn to an irrational crusade that fanned their prejudices and led to scapegoating and even violence rather than to
legislative remedies for economic grievances.” 12
• “Farmers had willingly entered the modern world of commerce in pursuit of the main chance, but when the terms of trade went
against them they sought comfort in the agrarian myth of an earlier and simpler time when those who toiled in the earth were
thought to be closest to God. It is in this irrational retreat from the consequences of their own actions that Hofstadter finds the
Populist movement “to foreshadow some great aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservativism of our time.” Status anxiety made
people Populists, Hofstadter concluded.” 12-13
• “Hofstadter’s own analysis has been subject to four challenges. First, critics have charged that the study of Populist rhetoric
from which he drew his negative conclusions was restricted to a handful of texts that were not proven to be representative of the
movement…Second, most social historians now agree that rural America was not a disorganized, atomistic “mass society” ripe
for the demagoguery of an American Hitler, but was in fact blanketed by a thick network of community and familial
associations. Third, while the Populists’ cultural traditions did look backward to an earlier rural America, they were not
“dysfunctional.” Their values and beliefs were part and parcel of the radical republicanism that was, even in the late nineteenth
century, a vital force among working people in America. And fourth, the theoretical perspective upon which Hofstadter’s work
rested assumes that the natural state of society is one of harmony among its constituent parts. Conflict and protest occur when
there are temporary strains in the social structure caused by rapid social change. The source of protest is thus located in the
protesters themselves: protest is an irrational response to change.” 13
Sources: organizational literature, speeches, platforms, journals, newspapers, county records
Connections: Woodward, Origins, Ayers, Promise, Hosfstadter, Age, Sanders, Roots, Cashman, America, Sinclair, Prohibition, Cronon,
Nature’s, Faragher, Sugar, West, Contested, Limerick, Conquest, Johnson, Roaring, Rauchway, Murdering, Blessed, Hays, Response,
Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, Atlantic, Willrich, City, Wiebe, Search
•
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991)
Argument: “My contention is that no city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the mid-continent
during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago.” Xv
• First nature is composed of concrete ideas; geography, ecology, and frontier.
• Second nature an abstraction—capital infrastructure built into exploit 1st nature-railroads, telegraph, stockyards, grain elevators.
• First and Second nature concepts try to avoid the declensionist interpretation but they aren’t completely successful. He is
declensionist in that these system are corrupt—he tries to be neutral but you can tell that he feels that environmental degradation
is bad.
• Class is important in this book but not as important as it should be given the Populist Movement, labor strife, he dismisses
manufacturing that is not done with nature. He talks about the forces that create the Populist Movement such as railroads, wheat
demand for Chicago, producing more for less, and people away from the rail lines get charged more to ship for the market.
• Capitalism is the driving force of environmental change.
54
He introduces the concept of Second Nature into the historiography, he also introduces urban factories as a factor in rural
development and before this environmental history had not done urban history before—you cannot divorce the urban
environment from rural environment.
• Consumers become distanced from the products they produce which makes them more distant from nature. He also rejects the
“Frontier Thesis” and agrees with Van Thunen, which means that at the center of the city the land is most expensive and the land
gets cheaper as you go out. Therefore you need to have high profit industries in cities. Van Thunen is also like center-periphery
theory—Central Place Theory.
• Cronon does have a revulsion for the city but this book is an attempt to overcome this.
• Grain altered into a liquid commodity with new technology of the grain elevator. By making grain liquid in Chicago merchants
made it abstract and removed it from the landscape—Grain was no longer tied to a geographic place but to a grade.
• Modifies Turner by showing how Chicago became bustling city from nothing avoiding Turner’s sequence of events. Chicago
develops with nothing in the middle. Turner states that everything before Chicago should have developed first. Then in rings
civilization follows the railroad East and West in the middle. Chicago is started by Eastern Capital to get people to go west and
grow items for their factories and populations.
• In the city life is labor intensive. On the country farms its land intensive work.
• Alison thinks that the critical point here is that Chicago developed before the railroad, thereby challenging Turner’s thesis, and
that labor in the city became labor intensive while labor on farms became land intensive. Also, as city land became more
expensive, rings of urbanization developed around the city. As the railroad expanded, more and more people were in contact
with the city. Also as Chicago set the price of grain and other farm goods, the Populists get mad because speculators on liquidity
of crops, not the producer of crops, gets the profit.
Sources: Financial records, catalogs, railroad records
Connections: McMath, American, Sanders, Roots, Isenberg, Destruction, West, Contested, Limerick, Legacy, Faragher, Sugar, Warren,
Buffalo Bill, Leach, Land, Monkkonen, America, Smith, Urban Disorder
•
Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (2000)
Argument: “This book is a history of the interactions among ecology, economy, and culture that led to the near-extermination of the
bison, the dominant species of the historic Great Plains.” 4 Indians, Euroamericans, and nature contributed the bison’s demise. The US
government encouraged destruction of the bison to remove the Indians from the Plains and make them sedentary.
• “A host of economic, cultural, and ecological factors herded the bison toward their near-extinction. That diverse assembly of
factors first emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century from ongoing encounters among Indians, Euroamericans, and the
Great Plains environment. Those encounters were both a process of intercultural and ecological exchange and an interaction
between people and a place, the nonhuman natural environment.” 1
• “Indian and Euroamerican hunters pushed the [bison] species to the brink of extinction for commercial profit.” 2
• “More than a capitalist economy’s demand for natural resources caused the near-extinction of the bison. The volatile grassland
environment itself was a factor; drought, cold, predators, and the competition of other grazing animals accounted for much of the
decline.” 2
• “Largely in reaction to the European’s introduction of the horse (which facilitated bison hunting), Old World diseases (which
discouraged a sedentary life), and the fur trade (which encouraged specialization as hunters), some Indian groups reinvented
themselves as equestrian nomads in the high plains. These adaptations left the newly nomadic societies dependent on the bison,
a species vulnerable to depletion by overhunting and drought. In the mid-nineteenth century, the combination of Indian
predation and environmental change decimated the bison.” 2-3
• “Beginning in the 1840s, the presence of increasing numbers of Euroamericans in the plains displaced the bison from their
customary habitats. Livestock belonging to Euroamerican emigrants on the Oregon-California and Santa Fe trails degraded the
valleys of the Platte and Arkansas rivers. More important, between 1870 and 1883, Euroamerican hunters slaughtered millions
of bison. Federal authorities supported the hunt because they saw the extermination of the bison as a means to force Indians to
submit to the reservation system. “ 3
• “Although Eastern preservationists at the turn of the century decided the wastefulness of the hid hunters, they nonetheless
yearned for the bygone era that the hide hunters had epitomized. Their desire to preserve the bison as a living memorial to a
romanticized frontier in Euroamerican conquest animated their mission to save the species from extinction.” 3
• “In the 1870s and early 1880s, the effort by the newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to halt
Euroamerican hid hunters’ destruction of the bison reflected the emergence of a feminized rhetoric of moral reform. The
installation of bison in managed preserves in the early twentieth century by the American Bison Society emerged from a concern
by the officers of that organization that masculine virtues were on the wane in urban America. To reverse that decline, the
Society resolved to preserve the bison as a reminder of frontier manliness.” 5
• “The destruction of the bison was party of a global decline of mammalian diversity in the nineteenth century.” 6
• “Indians in the plains initiated the decline of bison when they adopted the most useful of Old World domesticated species, the
horse. In the plains, horses not only facilitated hunting, but they competed with the bison for scarce water and forage. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bison preservationists saw their work as a repudiation of the commercial slaughter of
the herds. Yet in important ways they were complicit in the transformation of plains fauna from feral to domesticated. The
55
enclosed, managed preserves they established made semi-domesticates of the remnant bison who had survived the nineteenth
century.” 6
• “Environmental factors such as overgrazing and diseases brought by domestic livestock certainly contributed to the destruction
of the bison, but they were inextricably connected to the human economies that introduced domesticated species to the plains.
Human societies were so bound to the plains environment in the nineteenth century that there were few purely environmental or
anthropogenic causes of the bison’s destruction.” 6
• The bison were constantly moving. “This mobility was the greatest challenge to the bison hunters’ subsistence. The inevitable
consequence of the western plains Indians’ year-round reliance on the bison was nearly year-round mobility.” 9
• “They knew their land well, defended it from outsiders, and made ingenious use of resources to maximize productivity: for
example, firing grasses to attract game and anticipating the bison’s seasonal movements between river valleys and high plains.
Like nomads of Eurasia and Africa, they did not exist in isolation from sedentary societies; indeed, they relied on trade contacts
with agriculturalists. They had not permanent homes, but they were not homeless; they made habitual use of their favorite sites
for winter and summer camps. The Indians’ mobility was not primitive but a creative use of the land.” 10
• “Insofar as the nomads of the western plains were concerned, the notion of aboriginal environmentalism holds that the Indians
hunted bison only when necessary and wasted no parts of their kills. Mounted bison hunting was not a time-honored practice,
however, but rather an eighteenth-century improvisation that the western plains Indians continued to revise during the nineteenth
century. Moreover, like other Native American groups that relied on the hunting of large mammals—whales, seals, and
caribous, for instance—the nomadic bison hunters sometimes wasted large amounts of their kills.” 10
• “The hardy short grasses endured despite low precipitation; the bison survived on the meager carbohydrates and the sparse water
that the region offered. When Euroamericans first came to the Great Plains, the bison—short-grasses environment was well over
10,000 years old. Yet the semi-arid climate also periodically wreaked havoc on its dominant plant and animal species. In wet
years tall grasses invaded the western plains. During droughts, both shortgrasses and considerable numbers of bison died. The
western plains, form this perspective, were prone to frequent and pronounced ecological instability.” 11
• “The environmental history of the destruction of the bison thus united two meta-narratives of eighteenth and nineteenth-century
history. First, imperial expansion brought Europeans, their economic system, an their biota into worldwide contact with nonEuropeans. The conquest of indigenous peoples in North America was duplicated in South America, southern Africa, Australia,
New Zealand and elsewhere. Second, the migration of European people, plants, animals, and economies overseas occasioned a
global decline in biological diversity. Ultimately, European domesticated animals supplanted indigenous wildlife in many parts
of the world. Domesticated livestock’s displacement of bison in the Great Plains was but one example of this pattern of
ecological simplification.” 193
• “The causes of the destructions of the bison were inextricably both anthropogenic and environmental. The rise if Indian
commercial hunting, for instance, was rooted in a host of ecological forces, including the incursion of horses and disease into the
western plains. In the 1870s, drought was most devastating to the bison where cattle ranches prevented the bison from migrating
in search of forage.” 196
Sources: ecological, anthropological
Connections: Cronon, Nature’s, McMath, American, West, Contested, Limerick, Legacy, Faragher, Sugar, Warren, Buffalo Bill
Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (1998)
Argument: “The great stampeded changed the plains at least as much as the mountains, and yet we have kept our gaze on what was
rushed to rather than what was rushed over…The Indians’ disaster could not possibly be explained simply by the sudden invasion of
goldseekers and townmakers. Indians were partly responsible for their own difficulties…A few themes run clearly through this story: the
ancient past of he plains and the mountains, the dense connections between Indian and white histories, and the continuous conversation
between human action and its wondrously varied environment.” Xvii-Xviii
• “In 1858 gold was discovered along streams flowing out of the Rockies, and the next year more than 100,000 persons flooded
across the plains to the new diggings. The Colorado gold rush attracted more than twice the number of persons who crossed to
California in 1849. The scale of the event was impressive, the results profound, the details colorful.” Xv
•
“The eastern Kansas that Sumner found on his return was not the one he had left. During the Cheyenne campaign American
financial centers were swept by one of the most severe business panics of the century. The trouble started in midsummer with a
calamitous decline of gold reserves in English banks, a hemorrhaging of specie that drove up London discount rate to such
delicious levels that investors began shedding American securities and buying short-term English bonds. That drove down the
prices of U.S. stocks, especially those in railroads. These investments represented many of the assets beneath most major banks
and financial houses, and as the market nosed steadily downward, directors of these institutions grew increasingly nervous.” 6
• “By the end of the year, the nation was in a full-blown depression. The panic alone was not to blame. The economy was badly
overextended. The enormous output of California gold had doubled the amount of money in circulation and pushed prices
steeply upward. The lusty growth of the 1850s had produced more goods than the public could buy, while the orgy of railroad
construction far surpassed the needs of the day, and people invested merely on an imagined future. The panic of 1857 simply
made the collapse more rapid and dramatic.” 6-7
• “The devastation was much worse in some areas than in others. The South, protected by healthy prices for cotton on the
Continent, suffered the least; secessionists soon would point to their immunity as proof the Dixie could go its own way. The
middle Atlantic states and the Northeast were hit much harder, especially major financial centers. In New York City 40,000
56
jobless workers marched through the streets with banners reading “We Want Work” and “Hunger Is a Sharp Thorn.” In
November the US district attorney called in troops to protect government property.” 7
• “The full cuff of the depression was felt in the Midwest and the middle border. Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were
hit hard, and Iowa, Missouri, and the new state of Kansas even harder. By a rough justice, these states suffered most because
they had prospered most during the past several years. If the United States grew prodigiously during the 1850s, far and away its
lustiest expansion came in the lower Ohio valley and especially on the middle border.” 7
• “From the 1820s to the 1850s, the Anglo-American frontier pressed out of the trans-Appalachian country and poured its families
into the lower Ohio valley, western Great Lakes, the Mississippi valley, and the first tier of states beyond it.” 7
• “Beginning tentatively in the early 1840s, then surging in 1849, emigrants to the Pacific Coast and Utah traveled up the Platte
River on the great overland trail, also called the California and Oregon Trail. River ports on the Missouri saw themselves as
launching places for traders and travelers. In 1854 this region felt a new surge of growth when Kansas and Nebraska were
organized as territories.” 7
• “The great majority of settlers stayed within 100 miles of the Missouri line…the region immediately to the east was growing
almost as rapidly...Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Indiana grew by another million. Encouraging this headlong rush was the rising
price of farm products, which were higher between 1854 and 1857 than they had been since 1818 and would be until the middle
of the Civil War.” 8
• “These years also saw an extraordinary expansion of the nation’s railroad system, and again the most frenzied growth was in the
Midwest and the middle border. Indiana and Illinois together added more miles of track than the five mid-Atlantic states;
Missouri and Iowa laid more than New England. Virtually all this construction ran generally to the west, linking the wellestablished systems of New York and Pennsylvania with cities of the Ohio valley and beyond. By the late 1850s, eight railroads
offered passage to the Mississippi River…Construction in the South, though less vigorous, had a similar effect. A new line out
of Chattanooga linked systems of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia with Memphis, and the Illinois Central connected New
Orleans and Mississippi with Memphis and St. Louis.” 8-9
•
“Unfortunately, this feverish development came with a cost. Like all rapidly growing regions, the middle border lived by credit.
Farmers were “buying more land, buying machinery, carriages, sewing machines, melodeons, and fine furniture and generally
running into debt”…farms were heavily mortgaged, businesses financed by loans, and keeping up with this debt demanded a
brisk exchange of goods. Much of that business, furthermore, was done with notes issued by western banks, and the commercial
flow relied partly on faith that those banknotes were worth what they said they were. Ultimately, everything was buoyed by a
general optimism; things kept going because people believed they would keep going.” 9
•
“But the battle on the Solomon and the panic of 1857 are reminders that no clean frontier existed between ways of life, between
change and stasis, except in the minds of people.” 12
• “The collapsing banks and frantic speculators were just one result of the explosive growth that for generations had unsettled the
American interior. That turbulence had brought both crisis and opportunity to the Cheyennes and to other plains tribes and
indeed had drawn them into the country they now considered their rightful homes. Various details of the clash along the
Solomon—the Cheyennes’ horses and weapons and clothing, the cavalry’s methods, the presence of Delaware scouts, and even
the name they went by—were grown from stories, folded together, that tied bison hunters to bond agents.” 12-13
• “Sumners scrap and the panic of 1857, however, had more in common than a general involvement in the shared history of the
continent’s peoples. They were preludes to a transforming moment in western and American history. Sumner’s victory at first
hit painfully at the Cheyennes, but its influence, as usual, bled into white society to the east. It persuaded people there that the
plains and the mountains beyond were suddenly a much safer and more alluring place to look for the main chance, whatever that
might be. Whites thought they could probe western Kansas for possibilities without ending up as a story around a Cheyenne
campfire. Simultaneously, the panic and depression gave tens of thousands of persons good reason to chase whatever
possibilities came from reaching into this latest frontier.” 13
• “One of the continent’s most remarkable stories, that of the nomadic plains Indians and their brilliantly imaginative culture, took
a cataclysmic turn. In less than a decade the region was re-shaped—and more important, re-envisioned. The manic quest for
gold and the rapidly spreading consequences gave mid-America a wholly new meaning within the continent and the nation.” 13
• “In the summer of the gold rush a vicious drought set in, and in some places virtually no rain fell between June 1859 and
February 1861. The more thickly settled counties close the Missouri suffered, but the worse effects were to the west among new
emigrants on the edge of the plains. Fields in some areas yielded fewer than three bushels of corn and acre. Farther west cavalry
reported Walnut and Cow Creeks and the Smoky Hill perfectly dry and the highland forage wispy at best; they often walked toe
save their weakened, wobbly horses. As one rainless month followed another, farmers deserted the land. Many headed east,
many for the goldfields, some onto the plains.” 327
Sources: anthropologic, newspapers, military papers, booster propaganda
Connections: Cronon, Nature’s, Isenberg, Destruction, McMath, American, Limerick, Legacy, Faragher, Sugar, Warren, Buffalo Bill
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
Argument: With no Revolution or Civil War-like watershed moment, Western historians needed to create a pivotal moment on which the
history of the American West could be based. Turner created that moment with the closing of the frontier in 1890 in his “Frontier
Thesis.” “”Population in the West,” Harold Simonson wrote, “had reached the figure of at least two persons per square mile, the basis for
calling an area settled.” This is an odd definition. If population density is the measure of a frontier condition, then the existence of a city,
a town, or even a small mining camp closes the frontier for that site. One could easily argue the opposite—that a sudden concentration of
57
population marks the opening stage and that a population lowered through, for instance, the departure of people from a used-up mining
region marks the end of the frontier and its opportunities.” 23
• “The three big afflictions burdening the field [of Western American History]: [1] A focus on the westward movement of white
men had obscured the fact that people converged on the American West from every starting point on the planet. The remedy
was an easy one: reallocate attention to minorities, Indian people, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and
African Americans, and pay attention to the difference between women’s and men’s experiences, whatever their ethnicity…[2]
A misguided and widespread preoccupation with the “end of the frontier” in 1890 has broken Western history into two
disconnected parts: the distinctive frontier West (sometimes known as the Old West or even the Wild West) and the
homogeneous, just-one-part-of-the-nation West. Here, too, an antidote quickly offered itself: recognized that the events of the
nineteenth century shaped every dimension of Western life in the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century, and then put this
reconnection to work in helping us to understand our own times. [3] The fuzzy and forgiving term “frontier” had drawn our
attention from what westward expansion had meant to native people, as well as citizens of the Mexican North, and to the natural
environment. But a quick dose of honesty could cure this problem: accept the applicability of the sharp and honest term
“conquest” to the United States’ westward expansion, and national self-understanding would be beneficially enhanced.” 6-7
• “Behind these diagnoses and prescriptions were two primary goals: to assert the value and vitality of the field of Western history
by freeing it of tired and anachronistic habits of thought, and to present a more honest and revealing version of the past to public
audiences, challenging the tyranny of academic jargon and specialization.” 7
• “When Western historians yielded to a preoccupation with the frontier and its supposed end, past and present fell apart, divided
by the watershed of 1890.” 18
• “Like slavery, conquest tested the ideals of the United States. Conquest deeply affected both the conqueror and the conquered,
just as slavery shaped the slaveholder and slave. Both historical experiences left deep imprints on particular regions and on the
nation at large. The legacy of slavery and the legacy of conquest endure, shaping events in our own time.” 18
• “The center of American history, [Frederick Jackson] Turner had argued, was actually to be found at its edges. As the American
people proceeded westward, “the frontier [was] the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and
civilization” and “the line of most effective and rapid Americanization.” The struggle with the wilderness turned Europeans into
Americans, a process Turner made the central story of American history: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” But American development
came to an unsettling close when the 1890 census revealed the no vast tracts of land remained for American conquest. “And
now,” Turner noted at the conclusion of his essay, “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years
of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has come the first period of American history.”” 20-21
• From “the concept “frontier”…Exploration, fur trade, overland travel, farming, mining, town founding, merchandising, grazing,
logging—the diverse activities in the nineteenth-century West were all supposed to fit into the category.” 21
• “English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best
supporting actors and at worse invisible. Nearly as invisible were women, of all ethnicities. Turner was also primarily
concerned with agrarian settlement and folk democracy in the comparatively well watered Midwest. Deserts, mountains, mines,
towns, cities, railroads, territorial government, and the institutions of commerce and finance never found much of a home in his
model.” 21
• “Thus, a central irony: the very vitality of Western research, by exploding the [frontier thesis] model, made mainstream
historians declare that the field [of Western History] was dead.” 22
• “The fact remained: the West never went to war for its independence. There is, of course, plenty of revolutionary rhetoric:
complaints of exploitation and colonialism; comparisons of the Department of the Interior to the ministers of George III; laments
over autonomy lost to meddling bureaucrats—but no confederation of Western states, no war for independence, and thus no
watershed comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War.” 23
• “Left without a major turning point, Western historians had to create one. The opening and closing of the frontier were set up
like flags marking the start and finish of a racecourse, to give the West its significant chronology.” 23
• “The frontier is obviously worth studying as a historical artifact. The idea played an enormous role in national behavior, but so
did the ideas of savagery and civilization, concepts that are currently not well respected as analytic terms…My point is that the
historian is obligated to understand how people saw their own times, but not obligated to adopt their terminology and point of
view. That one may study how Westerners depended on the Colt repeating revolver is not an argument for using a gun in
professional debate.” 25
• “If we give up a preoccupation with the frontier and look instead at the continuous sweep of Western American history, new
organizing ideas await our attention, but no simple, unitary model. Turner’s frontier rested on a single point of view; it required
that the observer stand in the East and look to the West.” 25-26
• “Reorganized, the history of the West is a study of a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences. In
these terms, it has distinctive features as well as features it shares with the histories of other parts of the nation and the planet.”26
• “First, the American West was an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America,
Afro-America, and Asia intersected. In race relations, the West could make the turn-of-the-century Northeaster urban
confrontation between European immigrants and American nativists look like a family reunion. Similarly, in diversity of
languages, religions, and cultures, it surpassed the South.” 27
58
“Second, the workings of conquest tied these diverse groups into the same story. Happily or not, minorities and majorities
occupied a common ground. Conquest basically involved the drawing of lines on a map, the definition and allocation of
ownership (personal, tribal, corporate, state, federal, and international), and the evolution of land from matter to property. The
process had two stages: the initial drawing of the lines (which we have usually called the frontier stage) and the subsequent
giving of meaning and power to those lines, which is still under way. Race relations parallel the distribution of property, the
application of labor and capital to make the property productive, and the allocation of profit.” 27
• “The contest for property and profit has been accompanied by a contest for cultural dominance. Conquest also involved a
struggle over languages, cultures, and religions; the pursuit of legitimacy in property overlapped with the pursuits of legitimacy
in way of life and point of view. In a variety of matters, but especially in the unsettled questions of Indian assimilation and in
the disputes over bilingualism and immigration in the still semi-Hispanic Southwest, this contest for cultural dominance remains
a primary unresolved issue of conquest.” 27
• “Western American history carried considerably significance for American history as a whole…Cultural pluralism and responses
to race form primary issues in American social relations, and the American West—with its diversity of Indian tribes, Hispanics,
Euro-Americans of every variety, and blacks—was a crucial case study in American race relations. The involvement of the
federal government in the economy and the resulting dependence, resentment, and deficit have become major issues in American
history and in contemporary politics, and the American West was the arena in which an expanded role for the federal
government first took hold. Cycles of prosperity and recession have long characterized the American economy, and in that longrunning game of crack-the-whip, the West has been at the far end of the whip, providing the prime example of boom/bust
instability of capitalism.” 27-29
• “Beyond its national role, Western America has its own regional significance. Remoteness from both New York and
Washington D.C; the presence of most of the nation’s Indian reservations; proximity to Mexico; ports opening to the Pacific
Basin and Asia; dependence on natural-resource extraction; the undergoing of conquest at a time when the American nation was
both fully formed and fully self-conscious; the association of the region with a potent and persistent variety of nationalistic myth;
the aridity of many areas; all these factors give Western America its own, intrinsic historical significance.” 30
Sources: Secondary, it’s a synthesis
Connections: Cronon, Nature’s, Isenberg, Destruction, West, Contested, McMath, American, Faragher, Sugar, Warren, Buffalo Bill
•
John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prarie (1986)
Argument: “Refuting the tradition view that pioneers were highly individualistic, Faragher contends that most of the early settlers of
Sugar Creek had a strong commitment to community and that subsequent generations continued that commitment.” 205, Smith
• “Faragher maintains that kinship was extremely important in the early development of Sugar Creek. Cooperation in all kinds of
activities by closely related families was the rule rather than the exception. As the community grew, however, certain families
acquired greater wealth, prestige, and influence than others. Not surprisingly, the more successful families played a greater role
in community affairs. Members of these families became church leaders, occasionally successful merchants, and local and
county officials. Their landholdings increased while those of some newcomers and children and grandchildren of less fortunate
earlier settlers declined. By 1850 many fo the area’s poorest farmers were tenants.” 206, Smith
• “Whereas Turner emphasizes the independence of the pioneer and the “unique and exceptional” aspects of westering, Faragher
prefers to view the settlement process as “folk migration.” Individual mobility was high, but he maintains that migration was a
family process and that representatives of departing families remained in the community in sufficient numbers to provide a
persistent core.” 440, Bouge
• Faragher’s “book is divided into five parts that focus on the dispossession of Algonquin-speaking peoples (Kickapoo) from the
Sugar Creek region, the process of European settlement, family life and relations between men and women, the communal nature
of frontier society, and the transition to commercial agriculture.” 1348, Merrill
• “First, the European settlers did not simply have to clear the land of trees to grow their first crops. They had also to uproot a
people who were keenly attached to the land as the new settlers would become. Second, the communities those “pioneers”
(“foot-soldiers who cleared the way for an army”) created were based on fellowship, both figuratively and literally…The
newcomers depended on that social support to establish themselves in the first years of settlement. Still, the frontier was a man’s
world, and the dominant forms of fellowship were a male preserve…(Faragher is careful to point out that frontier women
develop their own forms of conviviality and social support. Even so, he acknowledges, the farmer had a point.) Finally,
Faragher helps locate the transition to commercial agriculture within the real history of the American countryside, in particular
by showing that the most prosperous and successful farm families were not necessarily the most commercialized. On the
contrary, small property holders of relatively modest ambitions and members of large extended families were far less vulnerable
to the vagaries of the market than either the unpropertied laboring classes or the monied entrepreneurs for whom enough was
never enough.” 1348-1349, Merrill
• “Westerners confronted the pressing realities of a settler society and an encroaching market. There were also the challenges of
mass, democratic politics and religious diversity. But there was also much that was traditional. As they had been for centuries,
the family and the household were the building blocks of society. The household was also the workplace, and the sexual
division marked a line of great stratification in the ordering of work and authority. Endogamy resulted in kin relations that
bound local households into what some have called “kinship relations that bound local households into what some have called
“kinship communities.” Religion and the local church were of overwhelming importance for the way people thought and acted.”
Xv
59
“Sugar Creek was a settler society, a minor example of the dynamic and fearful expansion of European civilization. As such, its
very foundation anticipated change and transformation—from Algonquin to Anglo-American, from subsistence to commerce,
from “wilderness” to “civilization.” Change, development, “improvement” were aspects of Sugar Creek’s history that have
continued unabated to our own time.” 234
• “The interstate highway has superseded the railroad, and ease of travel has turned much of local society into an anachronism.”
235
• “The persistence of Irwin’s Grove as a site for extraordinary community gatherings for over a century and a half may stand as a
symbol of the persistence of the original settler families themselves. In the Drennan’s Prairie neighborhood east of the grove,
old families continued to hold substantial portions of the arable land and to participate in community institutions. From 1854 to
1913, half of the directors of the “Cherry Grove School,” near Irwin’s Park, were men from the Dodds, Barnes, Hutton, Irwin,
and Mason families. And despite the influx of large numbers of Polish immigrants into the neighborhood to work the mines, at
least a third of all the graduates of the school over the same period were descendants of original settlers. In 1914, half the land
of Drennan’s Prairie remained in their hands.” 236
• “By the second half of the nineteenth century…the settlers had accomplished much. They had transported a traditional social
order to a new environment and had progressively transformed the landscape in way compatible with their own priorities. The
“semi-barbarism” that Fordham and others found amid the egalitarian conditions of the frontier had developed into the
“civilization and refinement” of a society divided into classes of owner-operators, tenants, and hired laborers. The development
of community was not contradicted by the regular turnover in the population of the creek. The community, in fact, assured the
success of the persistent and the continuity of their culture amid the flux of change. Community did not “break down” with the
approach of the modern world; community, in fact, provided a means of making the transition to it. Like the society that bound
the households together, cultural sentiments along the creek were essentially traditional and conservative. Family and household
remained the essential social building blocks; community continued to be constructed from the relations among kinship,
neighborhood, and church. The individual, the celebrated achievement of western American culture, was surely important; but it
was the community along Sugar Creek which prevailed.” 237
Sources: demographic sources, court records, early newspapers, memoirs of prominent Illinois citizens, and travel accounts
Connections: Cronon, Nature’s, Limerick, Legacy, West, Contested, Isenberg, Destruction, McMath, American, Warren, Buffalo Bill
•
Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000)
Argument: “Indeed the Gold Rush was not only among the most demographically male events in human history, it also—particularly as
it transpired in the Southern Mines—was among the most multiracial, multiethnic, multinational events that had yet occurred within the
boundaries of the United States.” It was also very gendered. 12
• “It is the task of this book to both interrogate and to dismantle the stories white Americans have told themselves about the
California Gold Rush, and to offer instead a pastiche of tales that will help us think as complexly and critically about the
conquest of history as we have begun to think about the history of conquest.” 11
• “I focus on the region that Gold Rush participants called the Southern Mines, or that area in the Sierra Nevada foothills drained
by the San Joaquin River. The Southern Mines are particularly illuminating for my purposes because the region’s population
was more diverse than that of the Northern Mines (the foothill area drained by the lower Sacramento River).” 11-12
• “It is my contention that the Southern Mines have been neglected because the area fits dominant cultural memory of the Gold
Rush—as it has evolved in the United States—less well. First, the south was by far the more demographically diverse region, in
that Native Americans, Latin Americans, African Americas, East Asians, and Europeans frequently outnumbered Anglo
Americans there. Second, it was the area that was less successful in following what came to be the expected trajectory of
industrialization in western mining. The unruly history of the Southern Mines has stories of progress and opportunity that are
linked to financial gain and identified with people racialized as white and gendered as male.” 316
• “That one collective memory suggest the ways in which people named Murrieta have conceived of their past and the ways in
which historians might further understand it. First, it is a past lived by women and men related to one another by marriage and
by what is called blood; that is, it is a familial past of cousins, siblings, spouses, grandparents. Second, it is a past remembered
primarily through the activities of men—mining, ranching, warring—and only incidentally through the deeds of women. Third,
a historian might note, the Murrieta past is one of people living on the periphery, making commodities of natural resources and
sending them off to more populated areas. Finally, it is a past of frontier people, of those in the New World who vied with
native peoples for control of the land. This is the background against which occurred the troubles in California.” 29
• “Mexicans from Sonora were among the first to arrive following on the heels of Californios and South Americans, as well as
assorted North Americas and Europeans already in the territory.” 30
• “Mexican women accompanied their menfolk to the diggings more frequently than women of any other immigrant group. After
all, California was not women of any other immigrant group. After all, California was not only close to Mexico; until recently it
had been part of Mexico. Once the gold region, the Murrieta clan, like a majority of Mexican gold seekers, went to work in the
Southern mines.” 30
• “Chances are, these women were not full-time gold washers; an ounce a day was not a particularly high take for 1848, and
frustration at a half-dollar pan indicates that the second woman was hoping for a quick bonanza. Both probably mined in the
time they could spare from their other tasks.” 30
• “The other tasks must have been formidable, too. Although Mexican women were not so rare as Anglo American or European
women in the mines, even among Mexicans, men made up the majority of immigrants. As a result, women’s perceived
60
capabilities were in demand…a female servant not only cooked for her own party but sold frijoles and tortillas to other minors
for one peso a plate…Both Mexican and non-Mexican men ate food prepared according to Mexican practices…Likewise,
Mexican women not only washed the clothing of those with whom they had come to the mines but sold their laundry services to
men who traveled without women.” 30-31
• “The story of nativist agitation in the diggings is a complicated one, but Anglo American opposition to Mexicans in the mines
took three basic forms: individual incidents of harassment; mining district “laws” that excluded Mexicans and other non-U.S.
citizens from particular areas; and a statewide foreign miners’ tax, approved in 1850, that charged foreign nationals twenty
dollars a month to work the placers.” 31-32
• “If any group of people suffered most at the heads of thieves and murderers, it was the newest immigrants to the Southern
Mines: Chinese men.” 34
• “The process by which Anglo Americans came to terms with Asian immigration in part by assimilating Chinese men to
dominate notions of female gender is a complicated one, but one aspect of the invidious process began here, where white men
momentarily proclaimed themselves defenders of Chinese miners.” 35
• “To Anglos, particularly those from the northeastern United States, Joaquin had all the fortitude and bravery of a man, but none
of the conscience, all of the lively impulses of a man, but none of the self-control. He was both “daring and reckless,” his deeds
both “bold and heartless.” His thieving ways further challenged the emerging discourse of manliness by lampooning the belief
that success, increasingly defined as economic gain, resulted from hard work and prudent plans.” 35
• “For Anglo Americans, Joaquin must have been a sort of gender nightmare, embodying the potency of manhood without its
customary restraints…For Anglo men, Joaquin was like their own worst selves set loose in the diggings—dark, sensual,
impulsive, out of control.” 35
• “The short-lived foreign miners’ tax of 1850, which similarly had sought to contain and control the Mexican presence in the
diggings, had been a fiasco; so many Sonorans simply headed for home that commerce in the Southern Mines collapsed.” 37
• “All sorts of U.S. men—northern men, free blacks, and displaced American Indians—had gone to California in search of gold,
and most likely many sorts of American men joined the war on Joaquin. The particular discourse of manliness that pervaded
newspaper accounts of 1853 indicates that northern, white, aspiring middle-class men were prominent actors in the struggle not
only to catch the bandits but to mold perceptions of the problem of banditry as well.” 41
• “I have tried to create a vivid but also mercurial picture of the decade at its midpoint in order to persuade you that the Gold
Rush, particularly as it occurred in California’s Southern Mines, marked a time and place of tremendous contest about maleness
and femaleness, about color and culture, and about wealth and power…All over the gold regions, the relative absence of women,
the overwhelming presence of men of many nations and colors and creeds, and the wild fluctuation of local ecnomies ensured
that white, American-born, Protestant men who aspired to middle-class status would be anxious about issues of gender, of race
and culture, and of class. After all, many such men assumed that they, collectively, should subdue and rule the newest territorial
acquisition of the United States.” 51
• “By 1858, enough stories had been told about the Gold Rush that the event had been domesticated in both sense of the word:
Anglo Americans had come to understand the Gold Rush in the context of nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and they also
had claimed the event as a domestic episode—an episode in national history. That is to say that the diggings became as familiar
a trope for fevered coupling of material gain and moral hazard as the city had become—a place where a man might “make
himself,” but where he also might lose himself and his moral bearings to the excesses of a changing economy.” 322
Sources: journals, newspapers, pamphlets, novels, trials
Connections: Limerick, Legacy, West, Contested, Isenberg, Destruction, Warren, Buffalo Bill
Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005)
Argument: “Thus, Buffalo Bill’s show community became a touchstone for Americans seeking to understand their own rapidly
urbanizing, racially conflicted, industrial communities and country, and for Europeans contemplating a host of concerns, including
industrialism, colonialism, race progress, and race decay.” xv
• “For generations of Americans and Europeans, Buffalo Bill defined the meaning of American history and American identity.
From California to Main, and from Wales to Ukraine, crowds who came to see Buffalo Bill’s Wilde West show spoke so widely
and fervently about it for years afterward that it became a defining cultural memory—or dream—of America.” Xi
• “Where the frontier centaur was wonderful to nineteenth-century Americans, to the generation raised on Vietnam he became,
like so many frontiersmen, a very different type of monster. For many, his role in the wars against American Indians and in the
near extermination of the buffalo made him a figure of revulsion. In Arthur Penn’s 1970 film, Little Big Man, his character
made a cameo appearance as a crass destroyer of Indian lifeway and a grasping materialist.” Xi
• “This book explores Cody’s real achievements, but also his many fabrications, less with an air of categorizing Cody as a real or
fake than to understand how and why he mixed the two. Contemporary arguments over Cody’s truthfulness or heroism (or lack
thereof) mirrored much wider debates about the meaning of the Far West, and the trustworthiness of the organs of popular
culture through which most Americans learned about it: newspapers, advertising, literature, painting, and theater. William
Cody’s method of promoting his real achievements was to mingle them with colorful fictions, making his own life and myth
almost (but not quite) indistinguishable to a public that was sometimes awestruck, sometimes skeptical, but almost invariably
amused by his artistic pose as the real embodiment of public fantasy.” Xiii
• “A key feature of my approach is to explore the most intimate social bond in Cody’s life, his marriage, which began during his
time in frontier Kansas and continued through all his years in show business. Having a respectable family was fundamental to
61
Cody’s appeal for his earliest entertainment patrons. As he developed a public image as defender of the white family, his private
life as patriarch of a real family became wedded to his authenticity. Thus the tensions and divisions within that marriage, which
was often troubled, offer us a valuable, and seldom seen, window into the personal cost of maintaining the illusion of a life lived
in accordance with national myth.” Xiv
• “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show could not have functioned had it not become the destination for dozens of Pawnee Indians, and
subsequently for hundreds of Lakota Souix (including Sitting Bull, who toured with the show in 1885). Just as important was
the show’s appeal to American cowboys, Mexicans vaqueros, women (including not only Annie Oakley but Indian women, too),
and, later, Cossacks, gauchos, and others. These show performers necessarily shaped Cody’s performance imagination, leading
him to reshape his personal mythology and his life story accordingly.” Xiv
• “This traveling show community, which required three trains to move the cast, props, animals, and equipment, including electric
generators and a traveling kitchen, was more racially integrated than any real western towns.” Xv
Sources: newspapers, dime novels, poems, movies, court proceedings, journals
Connections: Johnson, Roaring Camp, Limerick, Legacy, West, Contested, Isenberg, Destruction, Faragher, Sugar, Cronon, Nature’s
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)
Argument: “The making of the Atlantic era in social politics hinged on a new set of institutional connections with the industrializing
nations of Europe. It required new sorts of brokers to span that connection. It required, finally, an intellectual shift, a sense of complicity
within historical forces larger than the United States: a suspension of confidence in the peculiar dispensation of the United Stats from the
fate of other nations.” 4
• “The first aim of these pages, then, is to reconstruct a distinctive era in the American past, in which American social politics
were tied to social political debate and endeavors in Europe through a web of rivalry and exchange.” 5
• “Atlantic-era social politics had its origins not in its nation-state containers, not in a hypothesized “Europe” nor an equally
imagined “America,” but in the world between them.” 5
• “A key outpost for European trade and a magnet for European capital, the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century United States
cannot be understood outside the North Atlantic economy of which it was a part.” 1-2
• What Rodgers is saying is that the members of the liberal consensus were outward not inward looking. New Dealers wanted to
borrow ideas and make them American.
• Rodgers does not talk about populists because they are not looking toward Europe.
• “Modern Liberalism in the United States—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it by saying, “there emerged the conception of a
social welfare state, in which the national government had the express obligation to maintain high levels of employment in the
economy, to supervise standards of life and labor, to regulate the methods of business competition, and to establish
comprehensive patterns of social security.” Wikipedia
• Liberalism—popular sovereignty, consent of the governed. You can opt out of the social contract by leaving. Unlike 17th
century England the social contract is not enforced by the military.
• How is the social contract renewed over the generations? Nothing has absolute democracy. The Constitution just represents a
bunch of promises. Liberalism is a necessary tool to get what you want done in the US.
• Liberalism is associated with the bourgeoisie or middle-class because they tend to be too rich to be poor and too poor to be
rich—money but not power—tend to be urban dwellers and merchants.
• Working class complicates liberalism because they are too rich to be poor and too poor to be middle-class. These people own no
means of production, they are not connected to their product, and the have no hope of social mobility.
• Americans were born liberal and have had no feudal past nor absolutism to rebel against.
• Rodgers wants everyone to see that everything that happens occurs in a trans-national world.
• In 1900 a conference was held by the Musee Sociale to find answers to social questions like apprenticeship, protection of child
workers, wages and profit sharing, workers’ and employers’ associations, farm credit, regulation of work conditions, worker
housing, co-op stores, institutions to develop workers’ intellect and morals, savings and insurance institutions, hygiene, poor
relief, etc. 12
• Social politics comes from “compassion, outrage, exposure, publicization, agitation, mobilization, invention, lobbying,
pacification, preemption, calculation, bargaining, compromise, enforcement, administration, and manipulation.” 25
• The welfare state was not a forgone conclusion and should not be taught as such—the “welfare state” term was coined by
Republicans who were attacking the programs and the remnants of the New Deal. 28
• The German Verein fur Sozialpolitik mapped the terrain of “social politics” before the First World War, studied strikes, and
labor unions to housing and city administration, usury and credit agricultural conditions, trade and taxation. 29
• North Atlantic Progressive Connection: 1. Convergent economic development of key nations 2. Emerging of transnational
social-political networks. 33
• As the New World, America was thought to be exceptional, US had almost full, white male suffrage, Europe did not. 35
• No one is immune from the market revolution; uprooted peasants of North Atlantic economy ended up in the US 49
• Vocabulary about social everything developed to characterize market capitalism 51
• “Underneath the political and aesthetic contrasts, there was neither Old nor New World, but a common, economy-driven-NewWorld-in-the-making.” 52
62
Bureau of Labor was founded as a sop to the labor vote in 1885, but emerged s the key social investigative agency in
Washington—making international queries into living standards, labor conditions, workmen’s comp policies, child labor laws 62
• Jane Addams got ideas for Hull House from England in Stanton Coit’s Neighborhood Guild in the Lower East Side 64
• First line of extended American contact with European social politics was in the seminars and lectures of the late 19th century
Germany—in the mid-1870s-1890s, Americans go to Germany for postgraduate education in economics. 76
• Great cities were labs for social experiment. Young ambitious social-political reformers were drawn to cities 112-113
• Maniciplaization was first important Atlantic-wide progressive program 159
• 2 New Deals: 1. New Deal 1933-1934 2. New Deal 1935-1938. The New Deal was a time of extraordinary compassion for the
poor and unemployed and it was shaped by the class and racial prejudices of white southerners who dominated the Democratic
Party; the New Deal drew attention of European Progressives to the United States. 410
Sources: pamphlets, treatises, journals, government papers
Connections: McMath, American, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed Sinclair, Prohibition, Willrich, City, Wiebe, Search, Hays,
Response, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”
•
Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003)
Argument: “The Municipal Court of Chicago, established in 1906, was the first modern, metropolitan court system. It was the product
of a series of factors, ranging from explosive urban growth and the influx of immigrants; to the birth of social science with its embrace of
expertise; and to the growing belief among social reformers and leading jurists that individuals were not solely responsible for their
actions and that society bore at least some of the burden for crime.” 292, Welke
• “Willrich treats the larger significance of the reform of municipal court systems across the nation during the Progressive Ear,
making three important points: first, that tracing the roots of modern state formation requires looking at the local, not the federal,
level; second, that legal institutions’ preeminence as sites of social governance increased, not withered, at the turn of the
twentieth century; and, third, that at the core of socialized justice rested a paradox: Liberation of individuals from the burden of
autonomous guilt paved the way for greater incursions against liberty by the state.” 293, Welke
• “Willrich’s argument is divided into an elegant three-part structure. In Part I (“Transformation”), he provides a fascinating,
nitty-gitty glimpse into the workings of the justice of the peace courts and traces the intellectual and instructional journey that
led to their replacement by the Municipal Court of Chicago. In Part II (“Practices”), Willrich explores the legal and social
rationale for, and the workings of, four of the specialized courts—the court of domestic relations, the morals court, he boys’
court, and the psychopathetic laboratory. In Part III (“Misgivings”), he traces the challenge that America’s first “War on Crime”
in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s presented to socialized justice.” 293, Welke
• Chicago shows us in concentrated form of what is important in America. It is also the modern social science birthday and has
the 2 most corrupt political machines. Everything that make sup the progressive era is in Chicago
• Progressivism is the non-socialist response to the evils of capitalism.
• “A progressive understanding of the criminal implied a social conception of crime and criminal responsibility: a recognition that
much of the human behavior called “crime” was in fact caused by forces of biological destiny or socioeconomic circumstance
beyond the individual’s control.” Xxi
• Chicago led the nation in pioneering new approaches to crime an urban self governance. Xxii
• Formal Victorian understanding of crime—the product of the freely willed choices, flawed characters, or sinful natures of
autonomous individuals. Xxvi
• At the local level, courts were the laboratories of progressive democracy. Xxvi
• Urban court systems incorporated therapeutic disciplinary techniques of psychiatry, medicine, and social work. Xxix
• Progressivism refers to 1. Rise of pluralistic, issue-centered politics of social responsibility and 2. An ideological commitment to
professionalization, scientific rationalization, and administrative governance. Xxxviii
• Caseloads in court represent tensions of unprecedented industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. 4
• It was said that the Justice of the Peace system was designed for farms, not for cities. Attacks on the Justice of the Peace system
were filled with nativist sentiment as many 1st and 2nd generation Americans made up the fastest growing segments of the bar—
19-20
• Municipal court movement achieved the Municipal Court Act of 1905, it was a cultural urban movement. Municipal Court
Movement played into “self-ownership “ of city resources. 30-31
• Municipal reformers turned court movements into a larger cause: broad based movement to win a home rule charter for Chicago
from Illinois state legislature. New Charter Convention met in 1902 to create a “more simplified, compact, and scientific plan of
local government, adapted to the situation and wants of this great and growing city.” 33
•
“American court reforms also wanted to remove the power to make civil procedure from legislatures and hand it over to judges
themselves. The democratic theory behind legislature-made procedure was that it would provide an important check upon the
extraordinary power that judges wielded over the citizen…The Municipal Court Act of 1905 broke with American tradition by
giving judges as a body power to make the court’s procedural rules.” 54
•
“The theory of specialized courts was that judges assigned to them would become experts in handling specific kinds of cases,
and the wheels of justice would spin more swiftly.” 57
• “Much of the pressure for legal change came from the cities, where local courts, buckling under hug civil and criminal caseloads,
began to reach beyond individual defendants in order to address the root social causes of crime. Social activists and judges
63
championed new approaches to criminality and dependency, turning city courts into flexible, administrative instruments of social
governance.” 60
• “A crime had two elements: an act expressly forbidden by law and intent to do wrong. Lacking either, an act might be morally
wrong, but not a crime.” 70-71
• Prisons had become overcrowded and were falling apart and reformers insisted that the “treatment” of prisoners ought to be
designed with an eye to the forces of heredity and environment as they lay at the root of criminality. Reformers gave lots of
criticism towards convict labor and the new penology arrived with new disciplinary techniques at precisely the moment that
prison officials needed new ways to control inmates. 75
• The invention of the world’s first juvenile court occurred in Chicago in 1899. The rhetoric of the juvenile court campaign
illustrates the strong connection between social conception of crime and the emerging progressive politics of needs. 79-80
• Juvenile courts opened up the homes and lives of dependent and delinquent children and exposed to the public the effects of
structural factors such as unhealthy housing and low wages surrounding children’s’ ability to go bad. The women reformers
from Hull House created a new reform group called the Juvenile Protective Association or the JPA. 81
• The Adult Probation Act of 1911 promised a system of penalty without punishment by giving criminal courts discretionary
powers to release convicted lawbreakers if they agreed to comply with a system of state surveillance. 93
• The liberal ideal of rule of law—“a government of laws, not of men”—was a pillar of America’s constitutional tradition and a
core tenet of classical legal thought.” 100
• Legal progressivism involved a fertile encounter of law with social science—especially the empirical science of economics,
statistics, and sociology. (In the 1920s, a rising movement of law school academics, dubbed “legal realists,” would carry forth
this progressive struggle to transform law into a social science.) 108
• Progressive called upon local courts to make productive citizens of juvenile delinquents, to administer new state programs of aid
to mother-headed families, to institutionalize hereditary mental defectives, and not least, to compel errant husbands to support
their families. 130
• Eugenics owed its considerable political success to the same broad progressive reorientation of law, liberalism, and democratic
practice that had enabled reformers to turn the criminal courts of the great cities into experimental stations of modern social
governance. 242
Sources: newspapers, court records, city legislation, reform propaganda
Connections: Sinclair, Prohibition, Rodgers, Atlantic, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Wiebe, Search, Hays, Response,
Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess (1962)
Argument: “Mr. Sinclair concludes that the wet lobbies performed a similar if less sweeping disservice to the country by insisting upon
absolute repeal and thus replacing overstrained and ineffective controls with no federal controls at all.” Viii, Hofstadter The compromise
would have been to legalize only hard liquor and allow the government to control sales of wine and beer.
• “Sinclair is primarily concerned with the ugly aftermath to the constitutional ban on drinking, although he devotes one-third of
his amply documented volume to the ideational roots of prohibition.” 97, Rischin
• “As Sinclair sees it, the prohibition movement succeeded because of the exploitation of the anxieties of the mass of the people,
the rural mythology, the psychology of excess, the findings of science and medicine, the temper of reform, the efficiency of the
dry pressure groups and their mastery of propaganda, the stupidity and self-interest of the brewers and distillers, the inevitable
trimming of politicians and the weakness of elective representatives. In short, the prohibition movement has been the prime
example of extremism triumphant in America.” 97, Rischin
• “Many Victorians felt in all honesty that progress and science, reform and learning were on the side of prohibition. The new and
fashionable science of eugenics, developed by Sir Francis Galton, seemed to point towards the elimination of alcohol in order to
improve the race. The progressive movement sided with the prohibitionists in trying to get rid of the corrupt city machines and
the vice areas based on saloons. Most medical research seemed to be in favor of the banning of liquor for the sake of health and
hygiene. The social work carried out by the settlements in the slums found drink as much an enemy as poverty and often pointed
to the connection between the two evils. The rising tide of women’s rights seemed to make prohibition certain; a woman’s vote
was presumed to be a vote against the saloon.” 4
•
“The foundation of the Woman’s Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League before the close of the nineteenth century
gave the prohibitionists a disciplined army, ready to exploit politics and the American people in the interests of their chosen
reform. The refusal of the liquor trade to regulate the saloons of its own accord and the national psychology created by the First
World War were sufficient to give victory to the prohibitionists.” 4
•
“The farms were, however, too isolated to be of great help to the prohibitionists. Although the rich commercial farmers might
support prohibition to get more work out of their hired hands, the political strength of the drys lay in the villages and small
country towns, particularly among wealthier people…This dominant village middle class provided religious fodder for pulpit
politics and prohibition and gave the Ku Klux Klan the majority of its four million members during its revival after the Great
War.” 18
• “The Eighteenth Amendment could not have been passed without the support of the psychologically tolerant, made temporarily
intolerant by the stress of war. But when the moderates deserted the drys in time of peace, the hard core of the movement was
revealed. The main areas of prohibition sentiment were the areas where the Methodist and Baptist churches had their greatest
64
strength. These were the areas that father the bigot crusade of the Ku Klux Klan, which supported prohibition, among other
moral reforms. Although many sincere drys were not bigots at the beginning of the campaign for the Eighteenth Amendment,
they became bigots or left the cause by the time of repeal. Prohibition, an extreme measure, forced its extremes on its supporters
and its enemies. Its study becomes as study of social excess.” 23-24
• “It was in this wish to extend their own repressions to all society that the drys felt themselves most free from their constant
inward struggle. Indeed, they defended their attacks on the personal liberty of other men by stating that they were brining these
men personal liberty…Of course, in reality the drys were trying to bring personal liberty to themselves, by externalizing their
anguished struggles against their own weaknesses in their battle to reform the weaknesses of others.” 27
• “Frued saw that the moderate use of liquor was necessary for driven men, who could not find other interests or gratifications
against the miseries of the world. The prohibitionists, however, presumed that a man who was denied the bottle would turn to
the alter. They were wrong. They closed the saloons, but the churches did not fill. Luckily, drugs, radios, motion pictures,
automobiles, proliferating societies, professional sports, paid holidays, and the relaxed sexual ethics of the flaming twenties
provided new outlets for the libidos of deprived drinkers.” 27
• “The extremes of dry psychology were well suited to white Southerners. They had a special use for prohibition. It offered them
a moral refuge from their guilty fear of the Negro, as well as a method of controlling on of his means of self-assertion. Liquor
sometimes gave the Negro the strength to repudiate his inferior status. It also encouraged him to loose his libido on white
women, incited, so it was said, by the nudes on the labels of whiskey bottles. Thus the Negro should be prevented from drinking
alcohol. To a lesser degree, the same rule should be applied to white men, although this reform was not so urgent.” 29
• “In 1840…The Washingtonians, a society of reformed drunkards, found out that hundreds of thousands could be made to sing
the pledge after hearing the confessions of saved alcoholics. The techniques of persuasion of the Washingtonians appealed to
the heart rather than to the head.” 37
• “The original drives behind the temperance movement in America are clear. There was a sentiment of nationalism, a feeling that
self-control was necessary to the working of American democracy. There was an urge towards social reform, a campaign
against drunkenness and prostitution and crime. There was the need to protect the home, the wife, and the children of the
drunkard against disease and want.” 38
• “The struggle between the Protestant evangelical churches and the saloons was based on different views of the role of God and
man in society. It was bound up with nativist fears of the Roman Catholic Church and of the corruption which the liquor trade
had brought to politics and life in the large cities.” 81
Sources: pamphlets, sermons, congressional minutes
Connections: Rodgers, Atlantic, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Wiebe, Search, Hays, Response, Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg,
Uncertain
Eric Rauchway, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900-1920 (2001)
Argument: “Parents legitimately enjoy authority over children only so long as they cultivate in their children an ability to live
independently. Thus the family is a form of hierarchal social order that can justify its existence only when it undoes itself. If we
understand how this conception of the family underlay Progressives’ sense of their social obligations, we will be able to see that
Progressives did not desire either order or individualism per se. Rather, they sought to impose on society a moral system whose end was a
progressively wider diffusion of rights and goods among the populace. As a model engine for this diffusion, the liberal family promoted
this spread of liberties by a repeatable devolution of power from those who had it to those who could. The partnered marriages such as
those in this study provide the beginnings of such families and the core of reformist institutions that fulfilled similar roles with respect to
their dependents.” 16
• “This book contains a history of three families, each of them a self-conscious creation of a married couple determined to make
their lives together the basis for a career of political and social reform. It includes analyses of how these reformers used their
ideas about family and social obligation to create the New Republic, Ruskin College Oxford, the Bank Street Schools, and the
New School for Social Research, among other efforts that all embodied (and to some greater or lesser extent continue to
embody) this familial ethos. It also contains a variety of children: natural, adopted, and metaphorical. With all these elements
its essays an explanation of what was progressive about Progressivism: the use of the family (in fact and in metaphor) as an
engine to diffuse wisdom outward and pass it on to the next generation.” 2-3
• “Instead, Progressives married with the explicit intention of making their new families into engines of reform.” 25
• “The familial idea has further specific implications. First, it suggests that Progressivism has deep roots in the structure of the
bourgeois family…Second…the idea of the liberal family encapsulated for Progressives the appropriate relations between
powerful and powerless people in society, a relation akin to the process of civilization described by their contemporaries. For
Progressives, civilization referred to the notion of social progress tending toward the equitable treatment of all citizens…Third, it
suggests that we should reenvision separate female institutions as part of a continuum of new ways of living, a complement and
not a counterpart to the restructured Progressive family…Fourth, it suggests why the war should have been a disheartening effect
on Progressive idealism: it reinforced conceptions of family and of gender inconsistent with Progressive ambitions.” 26-27
• “For historians—and for all of us interested in the nature of the society we inhabit—families are (as one scholar says) “the
missing link for understanding the relationship between individuals and social change.” Social forces and political concerns tug
at this link, but individuals have often pulled back quite as hard, and the purpose of the connection—a yoke, a leash, reins, a
lifeline—changes as one side or the other gains an upper hand.” 2
65
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“During the Progressive period at the start of the twentieth century, a generation of reformers began self-consciously to adapt
traditional institutions to a modern and rapidly changing world, and in the process they took an especially keen interest in the
meaning and purpose of families…Progressives used their idea of family to describe the appropriate relation between private
lives and public action and between social elites and dependent classes, and also to give political meaning to the power of
education—the principal Progressive method of child rearing—as a means of reform.” 2
“When historians of the United States talk about Progressivism, we refer to a politics of social responsibility that emerged in the
United States at the turn of the twentieth century, analogous to but distinct from similar tendencies in other industrialized
countries.” 3
“Progressives sought an organizing principle for society that would accommodate liberties, encourage individual self-fulfillment,
and, most important, erode invidious social distinctions. They turned—and returned—to the family because it was a unique form
of social order that fulfilled itself in its dissolution—in the release of grown children, now self-governing adults, into the society.
For them the family was not a shelter from a harsh society, but a starting point in transforming such a society.” 4
“Progressivism in America also involved women much more thoroughly than the concurrent social politics of other countries
did. The most important instance of women’s role in Progressivism was the settlement-house movement, which saw middleclass, university-educated women living together in large houses in urban, immigrant neighborhoods for the purpose of
educating and enlightening the newly arrived Americans.” 5
“These women invented careers of their own, serving evident social needs. But mothering whole communities precluded (so the
argument went) mothering one’s own children. A settlement house worker could have one or the other, but not both—certainly
not easily. The women of the settlement houses tended to describe their careers as substitutes for family relations.” 6
“The marriage, which had been chiefly an economic and social institution, came now to symbolize, and provide, a primarily
emotional satisfaction—and if it could not do that, then Americans felt licensed to dissolve the relationship.” 7
“Men were supposed to be interested in economics and politics, in rationalizing the workings of the economy through financial
reforms, regulating industry, and providing benefits for male laborers…Women by contrast were supposed to be interested in
abolishing child labor and making working conditions for women more humane—reforms that, though they impinged on public
matters, grew directly out of women’s traditional, private concerns with home and family.” 7-8
“Thus women fulfilling the social claim were not only transferring their moral energy from the private to the public sphere but
transferring their mothering role along with that energy.” 8
“Women did not enter the political lists unopposed, and the maternalist state did not suit all politicians or even all reformers.
The women’s movement did not therefore fall from prominence after suffrage: it was pushed off by masculinists, advocates of a
paternalist state and a politics antithetical to maternalism.” 9
“Thus it became possible to see male reformers as opponents of a female agenda: the two Progressive eras that historians
identify were not only contemporaneous, but at odds. Either male reformers drove female reformers out of the public sphere or,
acting as the agents of a hegemonic political culture, they absorbed maternalist initiatives into their own agendas and deprived
them of their distinctive and subversive character: “Male politicians used maternalist rhetoric…merely as a cloak for
paternalism.” 9
“If the Progressive idea of the social good differed from men to women, we should find women and men defining themselves
within their gender, and reasoning out from that notion of gendered virtue to a corresponding notion of public good.” 10
“Given this series of objections to a strictly gendered interpretation, the existence and eminence of married Progressive couples
requires a closer look. In each of these couples, a man and a woman reformer worked each alongside the other.” 12
“[T] Roosevelt approved of an open approach to families that responded to social needs. For him, family also expanded outward
into society: “the meaning of free government” included his notion that what he called “ the parent class” had to foster
independence not only in their own children but in “the people as a whole.”” 15
“But both of them promoted an expansive vision of the family, extending beyond domestic walls into the larger society and
forging kinship ties across class lines, and both of them referred to this idea of family when they discussed the potential of
reform projects. Further, the socialized morals of the liberal family, advocated by both Addams and Roosevelt (in time of
peace), helped during the Progressive period to foster the use of marriage and family as ideal models for a liberal society, and
even the self-conscious remodeling of actual marriages and families in keeping with these political ideals.” 16
“In short, the liberal family tells us what was progressive about Progressivism. As we look closely at Progressive couples with
attention to their ideas about themselves and their lives as reformers, we see these families forming, growing, and attempting to
extend their influence out into society and onward into the future.” 17
“Progressives drew their ideas about families from their experience, as indeed they did all their ideas about reform, and they
found their experience at odd with social norms…the second problem: we often tend to blame the unhappy results of policy
regimes on the ideas that inspired them, rather than on the incidents and the systems that see those ideas translated into policies.”
“Reformers who sought to make their families into engines for transforming society saw instead the state—in its rude health
after a world war—exert increasing control over social relations.” 19
“If Progressives were principally interested in the development of a welfare state, they would have been morally derelict in
leaning on families and familial relations when they should instead have been arguing for a stronger state.” 19
“But the war did more than cause them to question their faith in the common man. More important, it forced them to confront
the intransigence of gender norms as cultural myths that limited the behavior of people of their own class. In time of war, the
state can draw on such myths to mobilize the population, in effect socializing human resources by an appeal to gender: men
66
become warriors; women become self-sacrificing keepers of home front. Wartime propaganda and special wartime education
programs—those to ready boys for war work—threatened Progressives’ special province and put the state in a position to “clip
children” to fit its mold…The mobilization of sate and society for war forced a reconsideration of the means and probable end of
education as a social reform, especially the utility of the family metaphor as a way of transforming social processes.” 22
• “The liberal vision of the family inspired Progressive politics at a time when middle-class Americans had every reason to believe
that the blessings they had enjoyed all their lives would apply not only to their children, but to the children of their less-fortunate
neighbors as well.” 22
• “First, the men and women involved had to reckon with prevailing social prescriptions for their behavior. As men or as women,
they were supposed to fulfill certain roles both in society and in their families. They had to decide for themselves how they
would ignore or modify these descriptions so they could pursue careers as reformers…Second, they had to decide how they
would allow their newly chosen roles to shape their lives. If they would not set aside marriage in favor of a reformist carer, hen
how would they incorporate the two?…“Third, having created for themselves marriages that answered their own political and
social needs, they set about pushing the boundaries of these marriages outward by making them the model for the center of
institutions that propagated reform-by-education. Each of them saw their own families as the bases for a progressively
improving society…Fourth, and most revelatory about what they expected and why they did not get what they wanted, they
withdrew from active politics, reconsidered their agendas, and even retreated form their optimistic positions when the war
came.” 23
Sources: Straight, Beard, and Mitchell papers
Connections: Rodgers, Atlantic, Sinclair, Prohibition, Willrich, City, Rauchway, Murdering and Blessed, Wiebe, Search, Hays,
Response, Hoftstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2003)
• Argument: McKinley’s assassination gave birth to Progressivism. “The anarchist murder of William McKinley in September
1901 forced American opinion makers to confront a terrible problem. As society became more urban and more complex, and
individuals had less control over their own fates, people grew surer than the only way to keep a populace sane and healthy was to
keep the social environment sane and healthy—the have good schools, clean streets, green parks. Social movements to create
and sustain all of these benefits grew to fruition during the Roosevelt presidency in the years following the assassination, given
shape ot the liberal political ideology Americans came to call Progressivism.” xi
• “Among the presidential assassinations, William McKinley’s had the most dangerously political motive. Abraham Lincoln’s
murderer was waging the Civil War by other means; James Garfield’s assassin claimed divine inspiration. Whatever motive
may have spurred John F. Kennedy’s killer remain murky. Ix
• “By contrast, McKinley’s assassin said plainly that he shot the President of the United States because he hated the politics of
state-supported capitalism that the President and his party represented, and in so doing he echoed hosts of critics in the United
States and around the world.” X
• “Because the United States was the richest and most powerful industrial country, the center of civilization and the capital of
capital—he wanted to strike at the American leader to prove the nation vulnerable, and toe shatter its illusions of safety. He
knew what he was doing, and he knew he would die if he succeeded. His reasoning was cruel, even inhuman; but however
bereft of sympathy and decency his motive was, it did not lack logic. Nor was he mistaken as to its consequences.” X
• “Killing the President did terrify the leaders of the country. They began treating the immigrant working classes differently.
They tried the assassin, executed him, dropped him in a grave, and poured sulfuric acid over his body, but they could not forget
the brutal lesson he had taught. Neither could they admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start
they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate.” X
• “In a sense, therefore, William McKinley had two killers: the man who shot him and destroyed his body, and the man who
succeeded him and erased his legacy. This book tells the story of how both earned their historical roles—anarchist assassin,
progressive President—through an act people preferred to regard as mad.” Xii
• “Theodore Roosevelt plays a central part in the story of his predecessor’s assassination. OF al the early interpreters, he did the
most to make the murder meaningful to Americans. When he argued strenuously that the assassin was a sane anarchist who
threatened the social order, the progressive President played on his constituents’ legitimate fears so they would support him in
his efforts to stamp out radical dissent. When he argued with equal energy that the assassin was a man made mad by society,
Roosevelt played on his constituents’ legitimate hopes so that they would support him in his efforts to render American
industrialism more humane. That he made both arguments points to what I regard as the essential fact of his personality:
Theodore Roosevelt acutely understood that stories were a means to political ends.” Xii-xiii
• “The elements that gave the United States its peculiar industrial politics were all present in the episode that made Roosevelt
President: the murder of William McKinley pressed Americans to give voice and clarity to their opinions on a working class that
was largely immigrant in its composition, to the place of race in a developing democracy, to the position of the government with
respect to social ills. Most important, the question of whether McKinley’s assassin was a sane radical or a deranged victim of
society hinged on key assumptions about human nature in the age of industry. The notion that he was sane and responsible
appealed to those keen to discipline the unruly elements of society and keep the tools of mischief—including, not least,
citizenship and the ballot—away from them. The idea that the cruelties of modern machinery made a madman of someone
67
ground by the teeth of modern machinery appealed to those hoping to improve living conditions and nurture society’s wounded
health.” Xiii
•
“For it was under McKinley that, in 1898, the United States stopped being a mere continental republic and became an
international colonial empire. After a short war with Spain, sparked by conflict in Cuba, the U.S. Army and Navy occupied the
former Spanish possessions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the distant Philippine Islands, across the Pacific, off the coast of China.” 6
• “Just three days after the shooting, and well before McKinley’s assassination became his assassin, Roosevelt first expressed what
would become the popular explanation of the tragedy. A madman had shot the President—a weak-minded madman, preyed
upon by delusions he found in the press, delusions given shape by the liberal writes of the day. It went without saying there was
no justification for this act, but even beyond that, there was no conceivable rational explanation for it, not even one that deserved
refutation. Imagining comprehensible motives behind such an act meant giving it more legitimacy than it deserved—and, as
Roosevelt knew, it also meant suggesting one’s own complicity.” 13-14
• “To most Americas at the turn of the century, anarchism meant the politics of terrorism and violence.” 17
• “The prosecution argument—held that Czolgosz bore legal responsibility for his actions because he had put himself in the way
of the corrupting influences of anarchism. He had allowed himself to be seduced by this decadent philosophy. Even if he was
somehow mentally deficient…he made a fatal and responsible choice, whose importance and outcome he knew, and knew to be
wrong.” 24
• “The defense argument…held that Czolgosz could not possibly bear responsibility for his actions because the powerlessness and
hopelessness of industrial life had driven him mad. Paid a poor wage, put routinely out of work by the tycoons to whom
McKinley had close ties, despised for his ethnic origins and his Catholic heritage, he had gone insane and focused his delusions
on the President. He could not possibly have chosen a better environment, flung about as he was by these mighty forces that
were reshaping the whole world. Besides, the defense reasoned, it was far better to conclude that only a madman would shoot
the President than to suppose that a perfectly sane and responsible person could come to the conclusion that it was now
necessary to wage war on the symbols and leaders of American government.” 24
• “Born a citizen in Michigan, Czolgosz was an American. Under the Constitution, he was eligible to be elected president,
whereas, for example, an immigrant like Buffalo D.A. Thomas Penney was not. What made him seem un-American was the
indelible taint of race in the sound of his name. And his alienation from American society, as well as his consequential action,
helped cement a change in public language about national origin and race. Afterward, and throughout the earlier decades of the
twentieth century, the violent, politically active African-American as the foremost racial threat to American society.” 61
• “Under Roosevelt, the Republicans would begin to awaken to this change. Sometimes they would act as if they believed
immigrants suffered from nurture, but they were constantly and increasingly concerned with the place of immigrant workers in
the expanding American order, and correspondingly eager to ignore the fate of African-Americans.” 61
Sources: papers, trial transcripts, research notes, newspapers
Connections: Rauchway, Refuge, Willrich, City, Sinclair, Prohibition, Rodgers, Atlantic, Rauchway, Blessed, McMath, American,
Wiebe, Search, Hays, Response, Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (2006)
Argument: “The United States became the country we know today at the end of World War I, when it took over the role of “top nation”
from Britain. The story of its rise to this position began at the end of the Civil War. After the demise of slavery, America spread west
over the plains, swiftly settling the continent and bringing twelve new states into the union. With the winning of the West came the
transformation of the United States into the world’ largest economy.” Immigration and foreign investment also made America possible. 7
• “Capital and labor from overseas pushed American political development in noticeably unusual directions during a particularly
important growth spurt…the effects of globalization helped the country become a powerful nation without developing (in
comparative terms) a powerful central government.” 4
• “The world’s people must have felt much this sense of puzzlement and anxiety in 1918, when at war’s end the Americans
suddenly emerged as the planet’s great power…Most of the world’s people knew little more about the United States in 1918 than
theatergoers know about Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet, and in significant ways we know little more now than they did then,
because we have been telling this history as if we’ve been restaging Hamlet, without any attention to the important offstage back
story.” 6
• “It remains now as it was in 1917, both immune to the trends of national development that elsewhere prevail and also apparently
unable to persuade other peoples to follow its [the US’s] lead.” 9
• “In the 1920s, at the close of the first modern era of globalization, American leadership preserved neither peace nor prosperity in
the world. And in the early twenty-first century, after another decades-long bout of globalization, the United States still stands at
the forefront of nations, still mighty, still apparently called to lead a world of people who do not—perhaps because they
cannot—follow its example.” 9
• “If today, Americans wish to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the 1920s we must understand why the United States became an
unfollowed leader, and why other nations are still unlikely to imitate it….The answer is simple, if paradoxical: the United States’
extensive connections to the rest of the world have created and maintained the nation’s peculiar habits of government. No other
nation enjoyed America’s unique place within the network of worldwide forces that commentators today summarize under the
term globalization, nor have these forces affected the development of other countries as they have America. To frame the idea
as a hypothesis: globalization has reinforced American character.” 9
68
“Americans have long expressed a devotion to liberty, both political and economic, and a proportionate distaste for government
power. This devotion explains much about American desires. But history does not always permit the expression of desires and
ideals in law and customs.” 11
• “The United States is today the world’s largest economy and the world’s greatest producer and consumer of energy resources,
yet it depends on the investment of capital and labor from the rest of the world to carry on its routine affairs; and its government
spends a smaller proportion of its people’s wealth than other rich countries’ governments do.” 12
• “Specifically, during the half century following the Civil War, stretching up to the start of World War I in Europe in 1914, the
United States became the America we recognize. During this time its economy quintupled in size, with its growth accounting
for a quarter of the world’s economic growth.” 12
• “when globalization was pushing more nations to become like one another, the United States was becoming less like other
countries. Even if all nations were in some way unique, no nations differed so much form its fellows in so many important ways
as did the United States.” 13
• “The late nineteenth century saw modernizing nations lay the basic foundations of what would become modern welfare states.
Governments responded to the long-term and cyclical unemployment characteristic of industrialization by transferring private
wealth to needy people for the public benefit.” 14
• “During the years that saw the other major powers sinking deeper and deeper into the imperial entanglements that ultimately
would stick them in the mud of the western front, the Americans were, with the help of investors from all over the world, sinking
hteir resources into the fields of their western frontier.” 18
• “[The United States] was most open to travelers, settlers, money, and ideas from the rest of the world. This openness was not by
itself the factor that made the United States diverge from the pack. So open had the nineteenth-century world become to traffic
in money and people among nations that some historians now call this period “the first great globalization boom.” 19
• “The United States received not only more, and more different kinds, of immigrants than any other developing nation…but also
most of the ocean-crossing migrants who went anywhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The United States
also received more money from the international capital markets than any other developing nation, and more so than was the
case elsewhere in the New World, this money came into the country through private banks instead of through investment in
government…As a result of this involvement of international capital and labor in this critical phase of American development,
the United States ended up with an empire and a government unlike any other country’s.” 19
• “The newly settled West served the same purpose for America as overseas colonies served for the European powers, providing a
wealth of natural resources that industrial metropoles could turn into finished goods.” 20
• “The United States did not just have a smaller or cheaper government than other nations. It had a government developed form
different causes and devoted to different purposes from those other nations.” 21
• “For Americans, the most important colonial relationship was that between the colonial government and the white settlers, who
chafed at the prospect of control from back East…Washington had a greater presence in the American West than in the eastern
United States.” 22
• “Whereas in 1880 the government literally occupied the American West with soldiers, by 1900 those troops had mainly
gone…During the decades around 1900, the American West contributed to the growth of government not because it needed
conquering, but because its voters, wishing to regulate private enterprise, supported the increase of government power.” 23
• “Although it is broadly true that a critique of capitalism fueled the growth of state power in America just as it did in other
countries, it is more precisely true that, because the U.S. government offered a disproportionate representation to its formerly
colonized West, the government grew according to the dictates of different critique of capitalism than prevailed elsewhere. The
colonial settlers of the American West resented having to borrow money at what they saw as unfavorable rates of interests,
resented conditions placed on loans, resented seeing the profits from moneylending leave the West to fund the further growth of
the already rich East. They resented having to pay shipping rates to monopolist railroads to get their goods to market. And they
focused their resentment on the owners of the banks and railroads, whom they saw—with some reason—as not only distant but
foreign. Just as the influence of foreign capital contributed to the quick building and settlement of the West, it determined the
essential nonsocialist character of the American response to industrial capitalism, which focused its ire on the outside ownership
and control of American assets.” 24
• “The arrival of millions of international workers in the United States pushed down the wages paid to American laborers and gave
the United States a multicultural working class.” 25
• “Under such circumstances, it was easier for the ordinary taxpayer to identify with the rich than with the poor, and the taxpaying
American was that much less likely to sympathize with the worker…and thus less likely to support policies that would use
public money to pay for social insurance.” 26
• “This cultural difference between classes, added to the material difference, reduced the likelihood that Americans would support
social policies like those of other nations, and ensured that whenever Americans thought about the problems of an industrial
working class, they thought about the problems of immigration.” 27
• “What made the United States different was its profoundly polyglot immigrant population. The country not only received far
and away more immigrants than any other country, it received more kinds of immigrants form a wider variety of countries.
Workers who spoke different languages and worshipped at different alters were more sensitive to the cultural divisions among
them and less attuned to their shared economic interests.” 27
Sources: statistics, economic information
•
69
Connections: Rauchway, Refuge, Rauchway, Murdering, Willrich, City, Rodgers, Atlantic, Sinclair, Prohibition, McMath, American,
Wiebe, Search, Hays, Response, Hosfstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967)
Argument: “Preurban, industrial social organization, so Wiebe’s argument goes, rested on community, in which the focal point was a set
of face-to-face primary group relationships through which life was understood, values generated, and economic and political institutions
developed. But urban, industrial society created a new set of relationships, above and beyond community, linking people over far broader
geographical areas. The scope of human thought expanded, understanding of reality came through impersonal media rather than personal
contact, and organized group action joined specialists over wide areas rather than only those within a limited geographical community.”
1248, Hays
• “Social change in modern America, Wiebe argues, involved the decline of community and the rise of society. The protest
movements of the late nineteenth century, for example, were rooted in the defense of community, and the reform movements of
the early twentieth century involved attempts to work out the new forms of more cosmopolitan social organization.” 1248, Hays
• “Convincingly he argues that this sources was not the “old middle class,” the independent proprietor of the past, but the new
group of professionals and organizational representatives who were constructing new systems, ordering life with large, rather
than parochial, perspectives, and seeking to manipulate factors beyond community. In this context, reform was not the irrational
expression of an attempt to regain a lost status, but a conscious and reasoned effort to shape institutions according to the values
of the new social order.” 1249, Hays
• Wiebe “has taken advantage of his opportunity to argue that the decentralized small-community society of 1877 was replaced
within a short but action-filled span of time by a new order. This order, Wiebe says, was largely the product of a new urban
middle class. In the 1870s “cries for reform sounded much like the counsel of reaction” (4). But by the turn of the century the
new reformers had a far different view: “The heart of progressivism was the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its
destiny through bureaucratic means” (166).” 392-393, Burke
• “By the 1870s, the United States as a distended society. The eruption of modern social and economic forces brutally
undermined the autonomy of small-town America. International markets, a national credit system, the railroads, the mass
movement of peoples from all over the globe to urban areas—these were some of the forces trampling what Wiebe called “island
communities,” those small self-contained towns and neighborhoods that had organized the life experience of most Americans
until the years after the Civil War.” 353, Cmiel
• “The story of the book is how the United States eventually shed its nostalgia for the island community and begun constructing
the bureaucratic nexus needed to order a modern society. Central to the change, according to Wiebe, was “the new middle
class,” those professionals and modernizing businessmen intent on curbing the unruly disorder but at the same time not fogged
by any romantic ennui for the older ways of life.” 353, Cmiel
• “Wiebe argued that the pragmatic, rational attitudes toward social problems so important to modernization meant that
bureaucracies would have to perpetually respond to new issues.” 353, Cmiel
• “For instance, although World War I had brought the outlines of a new order to America, that order remained “indefinable.” But
if people did not yet understand the new system, Wiebe claimed that in “a general sense, the nation had found its direction”
(nothing unusual there), but that Wiebe can in the same breath claim that “the nation” (at this point apparently disconnected from
any real people) has “found” its way.” 356, Cmiel
• “As late as 1920 the new order was still “undefinable,” the new middle class still laboring in “confusion” (301-302). Woodrow
Wilson, his advisers, and Congress did a remarkable job managing the nation during World War I, Wiebe thought, but no one
“could pretend…they followed a master plan” (221)356, Cmiel
• “It was not that democracy was being refigured to new ways of the world; it was that democracy was in decline. At times Wiebe
made the contrast directly, setting the two systems against each other. As he put it in one such passage, socialists elected to
union offices acted just like their non-socialist opponents, shelving “plans for democratic unionism in favor of a centralized
command” (174). 360, Cmiel
• “It is Professor Robert H. Wiebe’s thesis that these years witnessed a fundamental shift in American values, from those of the
small town in the 1880’s to those of a new, bureaucratic-minded middle class by 1920. Arguing that the United States at the
end of the Reconstruction period was “a society without a core,” afflicted by “a general splintering process,” Mr. Wiebe shows
how the nation was incapable of facing the challenges of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.” Vii-viii
• “Ultimately it was none of these but a “new middle class”—largely urban professional men and women—who developed new
values of “continuity and regularity, functionality and rationality, administration and management” in order to cope with
twentieth-century problems. Inevitably this new value system, consciously in conflict with that of nineteenth-century America,
led the new middle class to see “the need for a government of continuous involvement” and to emphasize executive
administration. The Progressive movement was the triumph of this new middle class with its bureaucratic mentality.” Viii
• “My purpose is to describe the breakdown of this society and the emergence of a new system. The health of the nineteenthcentury community depended upon two closely related conditions: its ability to manage the lives of its members, and the belief
among its members that the community had such powers. Already by the 1870’s the autonomy of the community was badly
eroded. The illusion of authority, however, endured. Innumerable townsmen continued to assume that they could harness the
forces of the world to the destiny of their community. That confidence, the system’s final foundation, largely disappeared during
the eighties and nineties in the course of a dramatic struggle to defend the independence of the community.” Xiii
70
“Although no replacement stood at hand, the outlines of an alternative system rather quickly took shape early in the twentieth
century. By contrast to the personal, informal ways of the community, the new scheme was derived from the regulative
hierarchical needs of urban-industrial life. Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a
world of endless change. It assigned far greater power to government—in particular to a variety of flexible administrative
devices—and it encouraged the centralization of authority. Men were now separated more by skill and occupation than by
community; industrial society than by their reputations in a town or a city neighborhood. The new system, moreover, had
applications as important in foreign as in domestic affairs. This, in sum, was America’s initial experiment in bureaucratic order,
an experiment that was still in process as the nation passed through the First World War.” Xiv
• “While overbuilding the railroads that had brought depression, it had created a commercial reservoir which for years afterward
sustained much of the economy, including the railroad themselves.” 1
• “In fact, what Thorstein Veblen made famous as “conspicuous consumption” carried a far more exact meaning in the town
where everyone looked on and cared than in the cities where only squandered millions would attract attention.” 3
• “Even in the cities, life often retained much of the town’s flavor. Within the city limits yet detached from its core,
neighborhoods provided fairly cloistered way stations between urban and rural living. In these years garden plots and a
smattering of livestock came as standard accouterment to the city scene.” 3
•
“Americans were judging the world as they would their neighborhood. Their truths derived from what they knew: the
economics of a family budget, the returns that came to the industrious and the lazy, the obnoxious behavior of a drunken
braggart, the advantages of a wife who stayed home and kept a good house.” 4
Sources: secondary synthesis sources
Connections: Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, McMath, American, Rodgers, Atlantic, Sinclair, Prohibition, Willrich, City,
Faragher, Sugar, Hays, Response, Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
•
Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (1957)
Argument: “The variety of ways in which the people of the United States responded to these drastic innovations is the subject of this
book. We shall examine how the circumstances of life were modified for different groups of people; how, in response, they altered or
failed to alter their activities; how they joined with each other to cope with a new, impersonal economic environment; and how they
struggled almost frantically, to preserve ways of life they felt were threatened. This period, the Populist-Progressive Era, is one of the
richest in American History, for here one can observe changes in the experience and behavior of people under the impact of the most
profound influence in the modern world. Industrialism opened vistas of vast human achievement; yet it produced a restless and strife-torn
society and gave rise to nostalgia for a calmer, less perplexed, pre-industrial life. This is a story of human adjustment, of the ways in
which Americans worked out their lives in a swiftly moving industrial age.” 3
• “The emphasis in this book is on the intricate and impersonal nature of the changes wrought by industrialism and the resulting
difficulties experienced by various groups in adjusting to them…Hays skillfully traces the reactions of farmers, businessmen,
workmen, politicians, and others to the shocks of an industrial age as its impact was felt across the country. The transition from
the rural to urban life, the increased emphasis on material gain and its effect upon politics, as well as the mounting concern about
individual values and its reflection in reform movements, receive their share of attention. In addition, the rise of the United
States to a world power, though somewhat less satisfactorily tied to the response to industrialism, is included.” 153, Johnson
• “While Professor Hays attacks the “anti-corporation theory of history” as an oversimplification, he leaves the impression that
there is a very substantial basis for it. Rejecting the attempts of the Populist-Progressive era to personalize corporate behavior,
he substitutes impersonal economic forces which “engulfed” the individual enterpriser.” 153, Johnson
• “It is a book about movements: the Granger, Populist and Progressive movements; trade unions; co-operatives; the muckrakers;
the ‘social justice movement’; the conservation movement; the Country Life Movement. Examining similar problems, the book
draws heavily on Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform.” 199, Potter
• “Destroying local and separate activities, the new forms of transportation and communication linked more tightly every group
and section into one interdependent nation. Eager to use their capital, their skills, and their cunning for economic gain, millions
of people from Europe and rural America poured into metropolitan nerve centers of the new economic order. The American
people subordinated religion, education, and politics to the process of creating wealth. Increasing production, employment, and
income became the measures of community success, and personal riches the mark of individual achievement.” 2
• “By the time of World War I, few activities of the American people remained uninfluenced by industrialism. Whether on had
sought to enhance his social prestige, or to gain material success, he had been forced to contend with the vast changes swirling
about him. Industrialism provided for every American an opportunity to participate in great economic achievements and to
enjoy a higher standard of living; but it also demanded drastic changes in their lives. It forced upon every one a new
atmosphere, a new setting, to which he had to adjust to his thought, play, worship, and work. Although the citizen of 1914 might
be most concerned with spiritual affairs and inward personal growth, as many were, he could not afford to ignore either the
decline of interest in religion or those consequences of industrialism which hampered creative expression.” 2-3
• “Even more significant, however, were the less obvious and the less concrete changes: the expansion of economic relationships
from personal contacts within a village community to impersonal forces in the nation and the entire world; the standardization of
life accompanying the standardization of goods and of methods of production; increasing specialization in occupations with the
resulting dependence of people upon each other to satisfy their wants; a feeling of insecurity as men faced vast rapidly changing
economic forces that they could not control; the decline of interest in non-material affairs and the rise of the acquisition of
material wealth as the major goal in life.” 4
71
“The unifying theme of American history between 1885 and 1914, so many historians have argued, was a popular attack against
corporate wealth. Through their state and federal governments, according to this interpretation, the discontented sought to curb
corporations and thereby to promote greater economic opportunity for all. This analysis accepts, uncritically, the popular ideas
of the Populist-Progressive Era. It is a far too simple explanation.” 188
• “They comprised a reaction not against the corporation along but also against industrialism and the many ways in which it
affected the lives of Americans. The people of that era sought to do much more than simply to control corporations; they
attempted to cope with industrial change in all its ramifications. True, they centered their fire on the business leader, but he was
a symbol of change which they could conveniently attack, rather than the essence of change itself.” 188
• “Urban immigrants, for example, resenting the attack on the city political machine, opposed urban civic reforms. In the political
upheaval of the 1890s, the industrial workingman refused to join the downtrodden farmer in capturing the Democratic party, and,
in one of the greatest political transformations of modern American history, flocked to the Republican party, which was
supposedly under corporate domination.” 189
• “Finally, those in the South and West lived under the shadow of a far more highly developed area, which, they felt, deliberately
imposed restraints upon the economic growth of their regions.” 190
• “Industrialism increased the desire for material gain among all Americans; but economic motivation does not wholly explain the
behavior of the American people during these years. Industrialism was less important in changing the motives of Americans
than in profoundly altering the environment, the setting within which mean and women strove for many different goals.” 190
• “Farmers fought back against the cities, often blindly and bitterly, temporarily imposing their patterns of life on the urban areas,
but in the long runt to no avail. And the South and West appealed to the federal government for aid in economic growth and for
laws to restrict the policies of northeastern corporations and thereby to foster a freer climate in which industry in their section
could grow.” 191
• “Industrialism also thrust Americans irrevocably onto the world scene.” 191
Sources: Secondary synthesis
Connections: McMath, American, Wiebe, Search, Hofstadter, Age, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Sinclair, Prohibition,
Rodgers, Atlantic, Willrich, City, Faragher, Sugar, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
•
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955)
Argument: “The center of attention in these pages is…the ideas of the participants—their conception of what was wrong, the changes
they sought, and the techniques they thought desirable. My them, then, is the conception the participants had of their own work and the
place it would occupy in the larger stream of our history.” 6
• “Though agricultural depression with failing prices admittedly sharpened the Populist movement, the middle-class, largely urban
Progressive movement occurred at a time of high prosperity. In one of the most enlightening sections in his book, Hostadter
interprets this second reform movement as the result of a status revolution. Relating the Progressives to the Mugwumps, he
finds that the native American, well educated and earning a living through a profession, was thrust aside by new groups and new
forces into a position where he felt his influence was, compared to the old days, negligible.” 667, Kirkland
• “The surge of reform, though largely turned back in the 1890’s and temporarily reversed in the 1920’s, has set the tone of
American politics for the greater part of the twentieth century. The reform movements of the past sixty-five years fall readily
into three main episodes, the first two of which are almost continuous with each other; the agrarian uprising that found its most
intense expression in the Populism of the 1890’s and the Bryan campaign of 1896; the Progressive movement, which extended
from about 1900 to 1914; and the New Deal, whose dynamic phase was concentrated in a few years of the 1930’s.” 3
• “The Populist-Progressive age came to an end only with the first World War, and by the time we began to get serious histories of
that age, we had been plunged into a new phase of reform brought about by the Great Depression.” 4
• “By “Populism” I do not mean only the People’s (or Populist) Party of the 1890’s; for I consider the Populist Party to be merely
a heightened expression, at a particular moment of time, of a kind of popular impulse that is endemic in American political
culture. Long before the rebellion of the 1890’s one can observe a larger trend of thought, stemming from the time of Andrew
Jackson, and crystallizing after the Civil War in the Greenback, Granger, and anti-monopoly movements, that expressed the
discontents of a great many farmers and business men with the economic changes of the late nineteenth century.” 4-5
• “Similarly, by “Progressivism” I mean something more than the Progressive (or Bull Moose) Party formed by the Republican
insurgents who supported Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1912. I mean rather that broader impulse toward criticism
and change that was everywhere so conspicuous after 1900, when the already forceful stream of agrarian discontent was
enlarged and redirected by the growing enthusiasm of middle-class people for social and economic reform.” 5
• “Its general theme was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed
to have existed earlier in American and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine; and
with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civil purity that was also believed to have been lost.” 5-6
• “The American tradition of democracy was formed on the farm and in small villages, and its central ideas were founded in rural
sentiments and on rural metaphors (we still speak of “grass-roots democracy”). For reasons I will try to explore, the American
was taught throughout the nineteenth and even in the twentieth century that rural life and farming as a vocation were something
sacred.” 7
• “Another circumstance attending the rise of Populism and Progressivism in America was unique in the modern world. Here the
industrialization and urbanization of the country were coupled with a breakdown in the relative homogeneity of the population.
72
American democracy down to about 1880, had been not only rural but Yankee and Protestant in its basic notions, and such
enclaves of immigrants as had thus far developed were too small and scattered to have a major nationwide impact upon the
scheme of its civic life. The rise of industry, however, brought with it what contemporaries thought of as an “immigrant
invasion,” a massive forty-year migration of Europeans, chiefly peasants, whose religions, traditions, languages, and sheer
numbers made easy assimilation possible. Populism and Progressivism were in considerable part colored by the reaction to this
immigrant stream among the native elements of the population.” 8-9
• “Out of the clash between the needs of the immigrants and the sentiments of the native there emerged two thoroughly different
systems of political ethics, the nature and interactions of which I have tried briefly to define. One, founded upon the indigenous
Yankee-Protestant political traditions, and upon middle-class life, assumed and demanded the constant, disinterested activity of
the citizen in public affairs, argued that political life ought to be run, to a greater degree than it was, in accordance with general
principles and abstract laws apart from the superior to personal needs, and expressed a common feeling that government should
be in good part an effort to moralize the lives of individuals while economic life should be intimately related to the stimulation
and development of individual character. The other system, founded upon the European backgrounds of the immigrants, upon
their familiarity with hierarchy and authority, and upon the urgent needs that so often grew out of their migration, took for
granted the political life of the individual would arise out of family needs, interpreted political and civic relations chiefly in
terms of personal obligations, and placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to abstract codes of law or morals. It was
chiefly upon this system of values that the political life of the immigrant, the boss, and the urban machine was based.” 9
• “The most prominent and pervasive failing is a certain proneness to fits of moral crusading that would be fatal if they were not
sooner or later tempered with a measure of apathy and of common sense.” 15
• “My criticism of the Progressivism of that period [1890 to 1917] is the opposite of Smith’s—not that the Progressives most
typically undermined or smashed standards, but that they set impossible standards, that they were victimized, in brief, by a form
of moral absolutism. It is possibly that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been
blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result—ruthlessness in political life.” 16
• “I believe it will be clear that what I am trying to establish is not that the Populist and Progressive movements were foolish and
destructive but only that they had, like so many things in life, an ambiguous character.”18
• “Actually, as I suggest in my final chapter, the spirit of the Progressive era was quite different from that of the New Deal [the
new deal was economic, the Progressive era was more social]. While there are genuine points of similarity and continuity,
which I do not wish to deny or minimize, my own interest has been drawn to that side of Populism and Progressivism—
particularly that of Populism—which seems very strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the cranky psuedo-conservativism of
our own time.” 20
Sources: Secondary Synthesis
Connections: MacMath, American, Woodward, Origins, Ayers, Promise, Sinclair, Prohibition, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed,
Willrich, City, Wiebe, Search, Hays, Response, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920
(1986) Argument: “The premise of the thesis is that certain doctrines, like Marxism, utopian socialism and, of course, laissez-fair,
inhibited social reform. Though differing radically from one another, all of these social philosophies were, in some sense, anti-political:
they assumed that mere political reform could have little or no positive impact on social problems. Scientific challenges to the
determinism of these philosophies, as well as growing disenchantment with assertions of ethical certainty, animated intellectual
radicalism in Germany, Britain, France and the U.S. between 1870 and 1920. The way to political reform was thus in the recognition
that, absent a clear and compelling solution to society’s problems, work would have to be conducted in a more pragmatic vein.” 147,
Robertson
• “Daniel Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings shows how American reformers improved home and work life by drawing lessons from
similar Atlantic nations between the late nineteenth century and the second World War. Rodgers’s book complements two earlier
works on shared policy ideas: James T. Kloppenberg virtuoso portrait of the parallel struggles to elucidate a philosophy of social
reform in several nations.” 145, Robertson
• “The converging market and industrial revolutions were forcing all these nations to confront similar social problems. Their best
minds puzzled through new public solutions to the social maladies there revolutions brought about. For many reform-minded
Americas, visits to European cities and studies at German universities opened “the transatlantic ‘moment’” in American social
reform in the late nineteenth century. The international flow of ideas began to create a prevalent perception of similar problems,
shared experiences, and common aspirations for a new social politics that transcended distinctive national experiences.” 146
• “What ideas made it possible to leave laissex faire behind and to embrace social reform? In addressing this question, James T.
Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory, provides an intellectual prologue to Atlantic Crossings.” 147, Robertson
•
“Kloppenberg identifies and analyzes six “philosophers of the via media [the middle way]” (Wilhelm Dilthey, T.H. Green,
Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Fouillee, William James and John Dewey) who, in different nations, crossed similar philosophical
bridges away from the certainty and determinism that were so widely accepted. Across that bridge each found existential
uncertainty and an energizing social consciousness that made positive government action both positive and desirable. The way
that each author elaborated on the practical consequences of moral and political uncertainty created the “epistemological and
ethical pivot on which political theory turned from socialism and liberalism to social democracy and progressivism” in their
respective nations (28). These thinkers insisted that knowledge was hermeneutic, that it proceeded from immediate social
73
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
experience. History was no longer seen as a predetermined Hegelian or Marxist script; because humans remember and
anticipate, history was view as contingent.” 147, Robertson
Though these authors wrote primarily on philosophy and epistemology, their ideas clearly implied that the state should expand
its reach to ensure effective, positive freedom in the context of growing social interdependence.” 147-148, Robertson\
“The social democrats Eduard Bernstein, Richard Ely, Walter Rauschenbusch, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Jean Jaures each
tried to reclaim socialism from utopianism and orthodox Marxism. These social democrats acknowledged the openness and
historical contingency of social evolution. They denied class struggle as the motor of history, emphasizing instead the ideals of
positive freedom and equality and the imperative need for political and economic reforms. Progressives Leon Bourgeois, L.T.
Hobhouse, Max Weber, Herber Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewy rejected the determinism of laissez-faire and the
formality of negative freedom. Instead, they advocated the extension of democracy into the cultural, social, and economic
realms, the establishment of progressive taxation and education, and the regulation of markets.” 148, Robertson
“Kloppenberg’s synthesis complements Rodgers’s book by showing that the intellectual struggle against determinism played out
similarly as a necessary prologue to reform in Britain, Germany, France, and the U.S. The notion of uncertainty as a central
organizing concept brings a good deal of coherence to the meaning of the diverse experiments that Rodgers describes.” 148
“Uncertain Victories suggests that policy makers in the U.S. would have lacked interest in other nations’ policies if philosophers
had not first subverted the self assurance of nineteenth-century ideologies. Uncertain Victories also shows that intellectuals in
different countries faced converging social circumstances, and in response articulated similar critiques of conventional wisdom.”
“Uncertain Victory seeks to change direction and shift the grounds on which we approach the philosophy of Progressivism. Not
only, he concludes, did American Progressives have a fully developed and articulated political philosophy, but they and their
fellow Social Democrats in Europe were also the heirs to a remarkable and forceful international philosophical reorientation,
which he names the via media, a philosophy occupying the large and fertile delta between two tributaries of European thought,
classical liberalism and Marxism.” 1000, Gilbert
“Kloppenberg’s achievement is to demonstrate the integrity and the interlocking ties of this joint European/American effort,
encompassing thinkers in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. He suggests not only that there were philosophers
who agreed on an extensive set of first premises and methods, but also that following them, a second group of activist thinkers
tried to put their premises and methods into practice and thereby set in motion movements that helped to transform modern
political thinking.” 1000-1001, Gilbert
“While the philosophers and political thinkers of the via media “may have been able to live without faith in the redemptive
power of theology or ideology, their societies have proved unable to do so.”” 1001, Gilbert
“In this study I focus on those two successive processes of convergence in ideas about how we know and what we are to do,
explore the connections between them, and suggest that the best of these ideas continue to be both philosophically and politically
vital.” 3
“They denied both mind-body and subject-object dualism inherited from Descartes, and they considered both passive sensation
and active decision essential and inseparable aspects of experience. Knowledge from their perspective, can neither be abstracted
from nor entirely reduced to the historical circumstances of individual lives. Truth must be cut free from notions of eternity and
necessity and grounded instead in human experience, never definite and subject always to revision. These mavericks insisted
that ideas emerge from, and must be validated in, neither language nor logic but life…meaning is woven into the fiber of
experience, that becoming rather than being is the mode of human life, and that people make rather than find their values. I will
call this cluster of ideas the radical theory of knowledge, radical because it cut to the core of attempts to find an Archimedean
point for epistemology and substituted an acceptance of contingency for the standard quest for certainty.” 4
“The theory of social democracy emerged in the 1890s when new ideas about knowledge and responsibility combined with new
political circumstance to transform socialist doctrine.” 5
“Like the philosophers of the via media, [social democrats] they located the foundation of knowledge in experience and
maintained that history provides a source of judgment more reliable, despite its uncertainties, than metaphysical or ideological
doctrine. Second, they shared a commitment to extend the democratic principle of equality from the civil and political sphere to
the entire society and the economy. Third, they championed gradual, constitutional reform instead of revolution. Finally,
although they embraced the means necessary for its realization, and for that reason they concentrated more on proximate reforms
than on ultimate ends.” 6
“I do not hope to recover the ideas that animated the discourse of social democracy as it rose to prominence with the
transformation of European and American politics from 1890 to 1920.” 6
“Lacking certainty about what we know and what we are to do, these wayward socialists claimed that such limited knowledge
makes politics less a science than a perpetual search for ideals of justice constituted historically rather than intuited a priori, a
goal to be approached neither by individuals seeking private visions of the good, nor by classes fulfilling their revolutionary
potential, but by communities struggling to order themselves dramatically.” 6
“Accustomed to seeing one another from a distance, the heirs to socialist and liberal orthodoxy recognized only slowly that they
were standing on common ground.” 7
“Without minimizing the very real and revealing difference separating social democrats from progressives, I will examine the
convergence between those who sought to extend the democratic principle of equality and those who renounced possessive
individualism and embraced an ideal of solidarity to supplement the customary liberal commitment to personal freedom.” 7
74
“Those who translated liberal theory into an idiom appropriate for twentieth century often called themselves progressives, in
Europe as well as in the United States, and that is the term I will adopt in this study.” 7
• “Those who searched for new ways of thinking about philosophy and politics from 1870 to 1920 were less an organized
expedition than a number of independent-minded explorers who ended up neighbors in a territory of new ideas.” 7
Sources: papers, correspondence, pamphlets, books
Connections: Rodgers, Atlantic, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Hofstadter, Age, Wiebe, Search, Willrich, City, Hays,
Response, Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism”, Buder, Pullman
•
Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progessivism,” The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982) p 113-132
Argument: “What made progressive social thought distinct and volatile, if this reading is correct, was not its intellectual coherence but
the presence of all three of these languages at once. If we imagine the progressives, like most of the rest of us, largely as users rather than
shapers of ideas, this was the constellation of live, accessible ways of looking at society within which they worked, from which they drew
their energies and their sense of social ills, and within which they found their solutions. It did not give those who called themselves
progressives an intellectual system, but it gave them a set of tools which worked well enough to have a powerful impact on their times.
To think of progressive social thought in this way is to emphasize the active, dynamic aspect of ideas. It is also to admit, finally, that
progressivism as an ideology is nowhere to be found.” 127
• “For decades the notion that the political and intellectual ferment of the Roosevelt and Wilson years cohered into an entity called
progressivism was one of the central organizing principles of American history.” 113
• “Of these developments, one of the most significant has been the emergence of a pluralistic reading of progressive politics, in
which the fundamental fact of the era is not reform in any traditional sense of the term, but the explosion of scores of aggressive,
politically active pressure groups into the space left by the recession of traditional political loyalties.” 114
• “Both historians [Filene and Buenker] began by insisting that the progressive movement was not, in the strict sense of the term, a
“movement” at all. Those whom historians had labeled progressives shared no common party or organization. They were rent
by deep disagreements over anti-trust policy, women’s suffrage, direct democracy, and any number of other specific issues.” 114
• “Only by discarding the mistaken assumption of a coherent reform movement could one see the progressives’ world for what it
really was: an era of shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of American society.”
• “That progressive politics was coalition politics, prone to internal fissures, was a commonplace. For a good many historians, in
fact, the progressives had made most sense when divided in two. By the end of the 1970s one could take one’s pick of nearly a
dozen dichotomies: “social” reformers vs. “structural” reformers, western democratic Byranites vs. eastern elitist Rooseveltians,
“social justice” progressives vs. “social order” progressives, consumer conscious “insurgents” vs. job conscious “modernizers, or
in Buenker’s case, heedless of his own theoretical advice, new-stock, urban liberals vs. old-stock patrician reformers.” 115
• “Robert Wiebe’s immensely influential The Search for Order (1967), in which Wiebe had laid particular stress on the
connections between “progressivism” and the surrounding organizational (or, as he called it, bureaucratic) revolution. In a
nation rushing pell-mell out of its crisis-ridden villages toward new bureaucratic organizations and social values, none ran faster
or worked harder than the progressives to rationalize and organize what they saw as their chaotic surroundings. Scratch the
moralistic veneer off progressivism, Wiebe argued, particularly after 1910, and what you found was a movement of organization
men caught up in dreams of social efficiency, systematization, and scientifically adjusted harmony. Progressivism was not “the
complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization,” as Hofstadter had had it. It was, in Wiebe’s telling,
precisely the reverse.” 117-118
• “But professional goals and bureaucratic social visions, historians also found, were by no means identical. If the “professions”
had nay trait in common, it seemed not to be a political ethos ut a common desire for job control. Professionally conscious
lawyers, for example, if Jerold Auerbach is right, worked far harder to drive the “disrespectable,” night school educated elements
out of their ranks than to straighten out legislation. Doctors, only a fraction of whom entered the field of public medicine, found
the progressive state most useful as a guarantor of their private monopoly. Professionalization and the search for a rationalized
social order it now seems clear, was no tightly organized expedition.” 118
• “As Hays described it, the context of progressive politics began with a massive growth in “technical systems” (large-scale
organizations dependant on mastery of large inputs of data: payrolls, oil reserves, truancy records, whatever); in occupational
specialization, and in communications networks and “functional organizations” binding those specialists together; and in the
scientific and bureaucratic values suited to the new organizational systems. Together these processes hastened the growth of
“cosmopolitan” forces as opposed to “local” ones. And that, in turn, generated the essential dynamic of progressive politics, the
flow of decision making upward, from ward bosses to city managers, townships to counties, school teachers to superintendents.”
• “If progressivism qualifies as an an “ism” at all, surely it is a system of shared ideas; yet nowhere in the 1970s was the
historiographical discord greater than when it came to describing progressive social thought.” 122
• “To put rough but serviceable labels on those three languages of discontent, the first was the rhetoric of antimonopolism, the
second was an emphasis on social bonds and the social nature of human beings, and the third was the language of social
efficiency.” 123
• “These three did not add up to a coherent ideology we can call “progressivism.” All three tended to focus on discontent on
arbitrary, unregulated individual power—enough so to make the trust, the political bass, and the sweatshop terms of enormous
bearing. But on a deeper level the three languages—full of mutual contradictions—did not add up at all. They had distinctly
different historical roots, and they rose into currency and fell into disuse at distinctly different times. We can best imagine those
who called themselves progressives as drawing from each of them—some more from one, some more from another—without
75
undue concern for philosophical consistency. Together they formed not an ideology but the surroundings of available rhetoric
and ideas—akin to the surrounding structures of politics and power—within which progressives launched their crusades,
recruited their partisans, and did their work.” 123
• “Of these languages, anti-monopolism was the oldest, the most peculiarly American, and, through the first decade of the century,
the strongest of the three…but this understanding of economic and politics in terms of graft, monopoly, privilege, and invisible
government had almost always before been the property of outsiders: workers, farmers, Democrats, Populists. What was new in
the Progressive years was that the language of antimonopolism suddenly gained the acceptance of insiders: the readers of slick
magazines and respectable journals, middle class family men, and reasonably proper Republicans.” 123
• “The second cluster of ideas from which the progressives drew—the language of social bonds—was more specific to the
Progressive years, and at the same time must less peculiarly American…still the most common explanations most Americans
gave to political, economic, and social questions at the end of the century were couched in terms of largely autonomous
individuals: poverty and success were said to hinge on character; the economy was essentially a straight sum of individual
calculations; governance was a matter of good men and official honesty. Part of what occurred in the Progressive era was a
concerted assault on all these assumptions, and, in some measure, an assault on the idea of individualism itself. That was what
the era’s “revolt against formalism” was all about: not a revolt against formal categories of thought, for progressive intellectuals
were full of them, but against a particular set of formal fictions traceable to Smith, Locke, and Mill—the autonomous economic
man, the autonomous possessor of property rights, the autonomous man of character. In its place many of the progressives
seized on a rhetoric of social cohesion.” 124
• “Like the language of antimonopolism, the language of social bonds focused its users’ anger on the irresponsible, antisocial act;
but it directed its users’ longing no to honest but to a consciously contrived harmony.” 125
• “Perhaps the most significant clue to its origin is that, of the three social languages on which the progressives drew, this was the
one most tightly attached to the churches and the university lecture halls. Its roots stretched toward Germany and, still more
importantly, toward the social gospel. When progressives talked of society and solidarity the rhetoric they drew upon was,
above all, the rhetoric of a socialized Protestantism, though how that transatlantic reconstruction of Protestantism took place
remains at the moment a very large and very open question.” 126
• “The last of the three clusters of ideas to arrive…was the one we associate with efficiency, rationalization, and social
engineering. Some of the progressives never stomached the new bureaucratic language of budgets, human costs, and system, nor
felt comfortable translating social sins into the new-fangled language of social waste. For others, however, the language of
social efficiency offered a way of putting the progressives’ common sense of social disorder into words and remedies free of the
embarrassing pieties and philosophical conundrums that hovered around the competing language of social bonds.” 126
Connections: Rodgers, Atlantic, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed, Hofstadter, Age, Wiebe, Search, Willrich, City, Hays,
Response, Kloppenberg, Uncertain
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1978)
Argument: “Even when the reformers were concentrating their fire on specific evils, their underlying purpose—or so I would contend—
was to win adherence to a general standard of right conduct upon which an enduring urban moral order could be build.” ix
• “Between the moral reformers of the Jacksonian era, with their quaint fustian about wickedness in the city, and the Progressive
environmentalists, with their soaring rhetoric of civic idealism and their confidence in the transforming power of parks,
playgrounds, and city plans, the gap seems almost unbridgeable.” Viii
• “Yet beneath the differences run powerful currents of ideological continuity. Common to almost all the reformers considered in
this book was the conviction—explicit or implicit—that the city, although obviously different from the village in its external,
physical aspects, should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village. City dwellers, they believed, must somehow be
brought to perceive themselves as members of cohesive communities knit together by shared moral and social values.” Viii
•
“It was in the 1820s that American began to awake to a fundamental transformation that was going on around them: a society
that had been overwhelmingly rural since its foundation in the seventeenth century was entering a period of explosive urban
growth.” 1
• “The first organized response to the urban moral challenge was that of American evangelicalism—one of the more dynamic and
expansive social forces of the early-nineteenth-century era. Though the evangelical churches and revivalists were frustrated in
their efforts to influence urban America directly, the great evangelical voluntary organizations that flourished in these years—
especially the Bible societies, and the Sunday schools—moved into the cities in a major way.” 1
• 5”The most basic of these assumptions was that the key to dealing with the urban challenge lay in re-creating in the cities the
moral order of the village.” 2
• “The surge of urban growth after 1790 unleashed social forces that would ultimately shatter this cohesive pattern forever. As
newcomers crowded in, long-settled families pulled up stakes, merchants moved away from their shops, and shipmasters fled the
congestion of the wharves for more distant residences, leaving what had been stable, socially diverse neighborhoods to begin the
long decline into slums. The protracted period of business depression and unemployment that has been labeled the “Panic of
1819” hastened this process of urban decay and also contributed to a high rate of population turnover: that ceaseless flow of
people into and out of the cities which has from the beginning been a central feature of the American urban experience.” 4
• “But the strangeness of the city was not simply a matter of size, physical expansion, or even of a shifting demographic profile.
The very rhythm and pace of life differed in ways that were as unsettling as they were difficult to define. From the early 1800s
76
on, observers commented on the impersonality and bustle of urban existed, the lack of human warmth, the heedless jostlings of
the free-floating human atoms that endlessly surged through the streets.” 4
• Municipalities did not take the lead in reforming the moral order of the cities. 7
• “What was needed, many became convinced, were sustained undertakings that would be firmly grounded institutionally, adapted
to urban realities, not too forbidding economically, and independent of passing gusts of reformist excitement. For many urban
reformers of evangelical leanings, the humble religious tract seemed to fit these specifications precisely.” 22
• “Not only would Sunday school literature find its way to “ignorant and depraved families,” declared the ASSU, but as the
scholars themselves were gradually transformed, they would become living models of respectable, orderly behavior…Sunday
school periodicals were full of accounts of children who tearfully reproved their parents and other adults for intemperance,
profanity, rowdiness, and other behavior alien to the sober world of the Sunday school.” 52
• Cities and their problems were developing along with the lakes, canals and railroad lines.
• “Three organizations unknown in 1830: the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the Children’s Aid Society,
and the Yong Men’s Christian Association…Though very different from each other, these three movements possessed certain
common characteristics distinguishing them from earlier efforts.
The evangelical ethos remained an important shaping
influence, but these three groups were distinctly more secular in their leadership and aims…Furthermore, all three focused their
efforts exclusively on America’s cities…Finally, these organizations tried with considerable ingenuity to adapt their techniques
and goals to urban realities…They worked to develop alternatives to the vanished order more attuned to the dynamic of urban
existence and the structure of urban society.” 85-86
• During the Gilded Age Charity organizations formed to move outside the workings of the Protestant Church. 143
• “A charity organization society, declared a Boston leader, “orderly and effective relations,” among the city’s varied elements.
When each of the “individual units” of the urban mass had been “located, guided, helped, and controlled,” declared another
speaker rather grandly in 1891, “we shall have a model state of society.” 150
• “Of all the late-nineteenth-century challenges to the assumptions of the charity organization movement, none was more pointed
that that which cam from the settlement houses.” 155
• “But despite its eventual decline, the charity organization movement for a crucial twenty-year period in the Gilded Age provided
a powerful rationale and institutional outlet for the urban social-control impulses of the American middle class. In these decades
cities and their complex problems—fleeing to the suburbs, retreating into tight neighborhood enclaves, dismissing municipal
politics with ridicule, and allowing the industrial capitalism that was shaping the city to proceed unchecked and uncontrolled—
charity organization had provided the illusion that in the moral realm, at least, it was still firmly at the helm.” 161
• “Whereas the earlier voluntarist movements had concentrated on influencing individuals or families, those of the Progressive era
were based on the conviction that the moral destiny of the city would be most decisively influenced through broad programs
utilizing a full panoply of governmental power and aimed at a fundamental restructuring of the urban environment.” 190
• “Negative environmentalists,” we might call them—pursued a coercive and moralistic approach, concentrating two institutions
that for them had come to epitomize urban moral and social breakdown: the brothel and the saloon. The other category of
reformers—the “positive environmentalists”—took their cue from the more hopeful and visionary side of the late-nineteenthcentury urban reformism. Their goal was to create in the city the kind of physical environment that would gently but irresistibly
mold a population of cultivated, moral, and socially responsible city dwellers.” 190
• Boyer sees the process of urban reform as a gradual shift from volunteered preoccupation with individual morality to
professionalized concern with environmental factors. He divides this process into four chronological phases. [1] In the
Jacksonian era, evangelical leaders, backed by business and professional groups, tried through Bible societies, tract societies and
Sunday schools to recreate rural ideals and communities in the bewildering new urban world. [2] In the mid-century decades,
the Children’s Aid Society, the YMCA, and other new institutions were directed exclusively at the city and based tentatively on
the hope that city life engendered resources, as well as obstacles, for its own reform. [3] In the Gilded Age, new groups like
those behind the Charity Organization Society and the early settlement-house ventures were confused and divided on the crucial
issues of individual moral responsibility versus environmental influences and “coercive” versus “assimilative”
reform. [4] Finally, in the Progressive era, reformers, whatever their differences, concentrated on the urban environment,
launching crusades to purify municipal governments, abolish the saloon and organized vice, establish local parks and children’s
playgrounds, create the “City Beautiful,” and instigate ideals of civic loyalty and virtue. Boyer closes his account with a look at
the 1920s. He persuasively argues that the method of social uplift died in this decade the city was viewed not so much as a
threat to social order, but rather as itself the social order, its diversity prized as “cultural pluralism” and its resources for pleasure
and self-reform acknowledged.” 678, Douglas
Sources: Synthesis
Connections: Stewart, Holy, Walters, American, Rauchway, Blessed, Murdering, Refuge, Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain,
Hays, Response, Willrich, City, Rodgers, Atlantic, “In the Search for Progressivism,” Wiebe, Search, Ryan, Cradle, Johnson,
Shopkeepers’, Thomas, “Romance of Reform,” Johnson and Wilentz, Kingdom, Cross, Burned, Hatch, Democratization, Mohl, New,
Kasson, Amusing, Monkkonen, America, Smith, Urban Disorder, Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park, Schuyler, The New, Buder,
Pullman
Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904)
Argument: “And there is my justification for separating from the bound volumes of the magazine and republishing, practically without
re-editing my accounts as a reporter of the same of American cities. They were written with a purpose, they were published serially with
77
a purpose, and they are reprinted now together to further that same purpose, which was an is—to sound the civic pride of an apparently
shameless citizenship.” 1
• “He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect
politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is
busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so
far that he can be stirred into action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back
to the shop.” 3
• “There is hardly an office from United States Senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man
has not been elected; yet politics remained corrupt, government pretty bad, and the selfish citizen has to hold himself in
readiness like the old volunteer fireman to rush forth at any hour, in any weather, to prevent the fire; and he goes out sometimes
and he puts out the fire…The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why? Because politics is business.
That’s what’s the matter with it. That’s what’s the matter with everything—art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine,-they’re all business, and all—as you see them.” 3-4
• “There are two great hindrances to their achievement of reform: one is that they are different from, but no better than, the
politicians; the other is that politics is not “their line.”” 4
• “The politician is a business man with a specialty. When a business man of some other line learns the business of politics, he is
a politician, and there is not much reform left in him.” 4
• “If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply and demand we may create. All we have to
do is to establish a steady demand for good government. The bosses have us split up into parties. To him parties are nothing but
means to his corrupt ends.” 5
• “We are pathetically proud of our democratic institutions and our republican form of government, of our grand Constitution and
our just laws. We are a free and sovereign people, we govern ourselves and the government is ours. But that is the point. We
are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some “party”;
we let them boss the party and turn our municipal democracies into autocracies and our republican nation into a plutocracy. We
cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them wheedle and bribe our sovereignty from us.” 7-8
• “The people are not innocent. That is the only “news” in all the journalism of these articles, and no doubt that was not new to
many observers…I meant to show simply how the people were deceived and betrayed. But in the very first study—St. Louis—
the startling truth lay bare that corruption was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramifications of
boodle were so complex, various and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them, and not even Joseph W. Folk, the
tireless prosecutor, could follow them all.” 9
• “I know a man who is making a history of the corrupt construction of the Philadelphia City Hall, in three volumes, and he
grieves because he lacks space. You can’t put all the known incidents of the corruption of an American city into a book.” 12
• “The corruption of St. Louis came from the top. The best citizens—the merchants and big financiers—used to rule the town, and
they ruled it well. They set out to outstrip Chicago.” 20
• “The riffraff, catching the smell of corruption rushed into the Municipal Assembly, drove out the remaining respectable men,
and sold the city—its streets, its wharves, its markets, and all that it had—to the now greedy business men and bribers. In other
words, when the leading men began to devour their own city, the herd rushed into the trough and fed also.” 21
• “But nothing was passed free of charge. Many of the legislators were saloon-keepers—it was in St. Louis that a practical joker
nearly emptied the House of Delegates by tipping a boy to rush into a session and call out, “Mister, your saloon is on fire,”—but
even the saloon-keepers of a neighborhood had to pay to keep in their inconvenient locality a market which public interest would
have moved.” 23
• “From the Assembly, bribery spread into other departments. Men empowered to issues peddlers’ licenses and permits to citizens
who wished to erect awnings or use a portion of the sidewalk for storage purposes charged an amount in excess of prices
stipulated by law, and pocketed the difference. The city’s money was loaned at interest, and the interest was converted into
private bank accounts.” 23
• “There was little difference between the two parties in the city; but the rascals that were in had been getting the greater share of
the spols, and the “outs” wanted more than was given to them.” 25
•
“Political bosses rushed to the rescue. Mr. Folk was reminded of his duty to his party, and told that he was expected to construe
the law in such a manner that repeaters and other election criminals who had hoisted Democracy’s flag and helped elect him
might be either discharged or receive the minimum punishment.” 26-27
• “The point is, that what went on in St. Louis is going on in most of our cities, towns, and villages. The problem of municipal
government in America has not been solved. The people may be tired of it, but they cannot give it up—not yet.” 41
Connections: Boyer, Urban Masses, Willrich, City, Hofstadter, Age, Mohl, New, Monkkonen, America, Smith, Urban Disorder
Raymond A. Mohl, The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920 (1985)
Argument: “This book traces the broad outlines of the urban transformation of the industrial era. It begins with a discussion of the
dynamics of urban change—the impact of dramatic population shifts, the influence of new technology in transportation and building, the
significant role of the factory, and the power of individual urban booster, builders, and planners to shape the new city. The book’s second
section analyzes the changing patterns of urban government in the industrial era. It focuses particularly on the mid-19th century crisis in
municipal government, the emergence of the political machine, and the rise of urban reformers who challenged the bosses. The final
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segment of the book addresses the important question of social order in the industrial city—how modernizing change undermined
traditional society and how urban people responded to change and social disorder. The book ends with a short survey of 20th-century city
development in the United States.” 4
• “The process by which a group of small colonial settlements grew into a highly industrialized and urbanized nation is a chief
theme in American history.” 1
• “The rise of the industrial city, perhaps more than any other feature of the national scene, characterized the social and economic
development of the period…Pittsburgh had other problems as well. The city government was corrupt, Trevelyan wrote [in
1898]. The streets were filthy and unpaved, the polluted air almost unbreathable, the downtown area incredibly congested, the
streetcars not only packed but dangerous, the noise levels intolerable. Labor conflict wracked the city, as workers and capitalists
struggled to protect their separate interests. The Pennsylvania steel city, Trevelyan concluded, represented “industrial greatness
with all the worst industrial abuses on the grandest scale.” 3
• “The great growth of the American urban population in the industrial era was affected by changing rates of fertility and
mortality. Demographers have noted that both birth rates and death rates declined during the industrial period…However, rural
birth rates always exceeded urban birth rates. The great explosion in the urban population did not result from a rising birth rate
among urban dwellers…Most important, improved water supplies drastically reduced death rates from typhoid, cholera, and
other epidemic diseases. As with birth rate, however, death rates were always lower in rural areas than urban.” 17-18
• “The city rather than the rural frontier supplied the safety valve for the nation’s surplus and economically discontented
population.” 19
• “Rural southern blacks began moving to northern industrial cities soon after the end of the Civil War. The movement gradually
intensified in the late 19th century. Between 1900 and 1920, some 750,000 blacks made the northward trek. Actually, the great
black migration from the South was larger following 1920…The movement was especially strong during and after World War I,
when the labor needs of American industry and simultaneous cotton crop failures and agricultural unemployment stimulated
black migration. Discrimination, lynching, and white terrorism helped drive blacks out of the South, but it seems clear that the
promise of economic opportunity in northern factories provided the essential pull attracting black sharecroppers and tenant
farmers.” 21-22
• “The new technology of the industrial era initiated changes in the internal structure of American cities. In particular, innovations
in urban transportation and building construction altered the spatial arrangement of people and economic activities.” 27
• Walking City ends in 1850s with horse drawn omnibus and commuter railways. This spreads the city limits out and encourages
suburbanization. Ominbus gives way to horse drawn street cars which gives way to the cable cars, which gives way to
electrified street trolleys, elevated rails and subways. People move out and the Central Business district forms and immigrants
and the poor move into lapsed neighborhoods. Cities become less compact and close.
• Skyscrapers allow building upwards, apartments could be luxurious draws for middle and upper classes while tenement houses
allowed 4 apartments per floor and no modern amenities, i.e. running water, bathrooms, windows, fresh air.
• Industry moved into city centers and along wharves. When property got too expensive, they moved out to outlying areas of the
city or out of city lines and then created favorable governments that kept business taxes low.
•
As municipal governments were slow to take care of urban needs, political machines and bosses took over. Ward controlled
Tammany and many other cities. Patronage, the graft, and social welfare built up loyalty from immigrants especially, to the
machine. Bosses even sponsored sporting events and built parks for baseball games to get support. Government was corrupt,
always skimming off the top or buying businesses to do city business, but they took care of city problems.
• Mugwamps were elite, club oriented men, like Teddy Roosevelt, who believed that government needed to reform cities and
business practices. They also believed that elite men were the best men for government and that the vote should be restricted to
avoid corruption. They wanted a greater degree of home rule in the cities and to institute strong-mayor oriented governments.
Mugwamps paved the way for structural reformers of the Progressive era. Structural reformers wanted administrative
bureaucracies to aid strong mayors.
• Social Reformers tried to reform society and Moral reformers tried to improve urban morality—like through prohibition.
Sources: Synthesis
Connections: Boyer, Urban, Hofstadter, Age, Kloppenberg, Uncertain, Steffens, Shame, Rauchway, Refuge, Murdering, Blessed,
Willrich, City, Cronon, Nature’s, Kasson, Amusing, Leach, Land, Monkkonen, America, Smith, Urban Disorder, Rosenzweig and
Blackmar, The Park, Schuyler, The New, Buder, Pullman
John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978)
Argument: “Amusement parks emerged as laboratories of the new mass culture, providing settings and attractions that immediately
affected behavior. Their creators and managers pioneered a new cultural institution that challenged prevailing notions of public conduct
and social order, of wholesome amusement, of democratic art—of all the institutions and values of the genteel culture. Amusement
complexes such as Coney Island thus shed light on the cultural transition and the struggle for moral, social, and aesthetic authority that
occurred in the United States at the turn of the century.” 8
• “Kasson sets up his argument by presenting two nineteenth-century versions of the well-ordered cityscape: Frederick Law
Olmstead’s plan for Central Park and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, each offering an alternative model to the chaotic reality of
urban life. But at the World’s Fair the crowds preferred a third alternative, the boisterous and exotic Midway. The Midway’s
great success inspired the creation of traveling carnivals and amusement parks in the following years, of which Coney Island
became the greatest.” 391, McArthur
79
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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“The appeal of these parks, says Kasson, derived from their ability to offer an alternative experience to the usual constraints of
genteel culture. Where Victorian propriety demanded dignified bearing, correct dress, and formalized public interactions with
others, the amusement parks suspended these rules, allowing a disregard of fashion, encouraging a freer deportment, and, in
particular, tolerating public expression of affection between the sexes. It became an American carnival, overturning traditional
social conventions. “Coney Island in effect declared a moral holiday for all who entered its gates. Against the values of thrift,
sobriety, industry, and ambition, it encouraged extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry. Coney Island signaled the rise of a new
mass culture no longer deferential to genteel tastes and values.” (50)” 391, McArthur
“New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Despite important differences in philosophy and form,
the two projects represented a broad common effort: to provide a model of social order, cohesion, and tranquility for a fractious
people; to elevate public taste and reform public conduct. Both enterprises were designed not simply to amuse but to instruct
their users in lessons of aesthetic taste and social responsibility and to inspire them with a respect for cultural standards.” 11
“Town commons and greens had existed in America since the seventeenth century, of course, but the public park, specifically
designed for recreation, remained an innovation of the nineteenth, a direct response to the new industrial city.” 12
“The planners steadfastly resisted any installations or practices that threatened to compromise the scenic integrity of the park as a
whole. In this way, Olmsted hoped, the park would offer both physical and imaginative exercise and create a setting where
people of all classes might promenade in large groups or picnic in small ones.” 13
“In fact, however, there were limitations to the park’s refining influence, as Olmstead himself was soon forced to acknowledge.
Although Central Park proved enormously popular, attracting an average of 30,000 visitors a day for a total of ten million in the
year 1871, the park lay so far uptown from New York’s center of population that the great majority of citizens could afford the
time and money for excursion only on special occasions. On ordinary days the park ministered to the more prosperous classes.”
“The Columbian Exposition, then, like Central Park, provided an alternative environment that expressed a strong critique of
urban conditions and culture. But the remedies the two offered were radically different. While Central Park sought to distance
the city by enveloping visitors in a picturesque rural retreat, the Exposition aimed to elevate the city by its example of
monumental grandeur.” 18
“The Midway in effect formed a colossal sideshow, with restaurants, shops, exhibits, and theaters extending down a huge
corridor, six hundred feet wide and a mile long, from the Exposition grounds westward to Washington Park.” 23
“The Midway, in short, offered a far different conception of cultural cosmopolitanism than the Court of Honor, one oriented both
to the ordered and refined past but to the heterogeneous and boisterous present.” 26
“In the postwar decades investors seized upon the possibilities of Coney Island as a resort and poured money into it. The
antiquated steamer was superseded by an increasing number of steamboat and railroad lines, and a colorful array of fancifully
palatial hotels rose along the beach. In an effort to overcome Coney’s tarnished reputation, promoters coined new names for the
Island’s various sections. The infamous Norton’s Point, rechristened the West End, faded in prominence as rivals sprang up to
the east, assuming new identities as West Brighton, Brighton Beach, and Manhattan Beach.” 30
“Although the subway did not extend all the way to Coney Island until 1920, turn-of-the-century visitors made their way by a
variety of routes and often a combination of conveyances. These included excursion boats, ferryboars, railroads, elevated trains,
electric trolleys, subway trains, horsecars, hackney carriages, automobiles, and bicycles. The cheapest fare to the resort in the
early 1890s had been forty cents, fifty for a steamer; but improvements in rapid transit beginning with the nickel trolley ride to
Coney in 1895 forced these prices down and brought the excursion within the means of the great multitude.” 37
“Coney Island drew upon all social classes and especially upon the rising middle class and the more prosperous working-class
visitors, salesmen, clerks, tradesmen, secretaries, shop attendants, laborers, and the like. Coney Island accommodated purses of
varying sizes. Most individual attractions at Coney Island charged ten cents apiece. Sometimes, however, there were bargains;
in 1905 Steeplechase Park began offering a combination ticket of twenty-five rides for twenty-five cents.” 38
“In addition to families, young men and women came by themselves to Coney, saving whatever spending money they could,
sometimes skipping lunches and walking to work in order to have enough for a trip to the resort. Coney offered pleasures
infinitely more thrilling than the dominant youthful pastimes of sitting on the front steps or hanging around on the street. Young
working-class women in particular could plan to spend no more than the cost of their transportation, since they quickly attracted
escorts eager to “treat.”” 39
“The liberating social setting was by no means limited to the beach. Indeed, as Coney Island’s attractions proliferated and
crowds increased, journalists observed ironically that one could spend a day at the resort and never see the water. As visitors
entered amusement area, they encountered an environmental phantasmagoria, combining characteristics of the beer garden,
couty fair, Chicago Midway, vaudeville, and circus.” 49
“All combined to create the holiday atmosphere of Coney Island, an invitation to collective gaiety and release. Coney Island
plunged visitors into a powerful kinesthetic experience that, like the surf itself, overturned conventional restraints, washed away
everyday concerns, buoyed and buffeted participants as they submitted to its sway.” 49
“The amusement complex presented scenes which were stunningly technological, urban, populous, egalitarian, erotic, hedonistic,
dynamic, and culturally diverse. For painters in revolt against decorous traditional standards, Coney Island offered in profusion
the ingredients of a powerful new aesthetic.” 88
“The problem Coney Island entrepreneurs faced by the 1920s was that the rest of the culture was catching up. The authority of
the older genteel order that the amusement capital had challenged was now crumbling rapidly, and opportunities for mass
entertainment were more abundant than ever. A long-time Coney Island resident would later observe, “Once upon a time Coney
80
Island was the greatest amusement resort in the world. The radio and the movies killed it. The movies killed illusions.” More
accurately, radio and movies made amusements ubiquitous, and the movies in particular presented elaborate, convincing
illusions at a price Coney Island could not match.” 112
• “It was not that attendance at Coney declined in the 1920s—on the contrary, it increased—but the experience was less
extraordinary and hence less meaningful. The extension of the subway from New York to Coney Island in 1920 also reduced the
element of contrast, the distinctive sense of entering a special realm operating under its own laws.” 112
Sources: journals, newspapers, photos
Connections: Boyer, Urban, Rosenzweig, Eight, Mohl, New, Leach, Land, Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park, Schuyler, The New
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)
Argument: “This book examines how this older culture [agrarian, rural, and 1870s] was challenged and was gradually superseded by the
newer culture. It deals with the new national corporations and the investment banks as they moved almost overnight into the everyday
lives of Americans. It focuses on mail order houses, on chain stores and dry goods houses, on hotels and restaurants, and especially on
department stores, and it does so in part because most historians have for too long looked down on them—indeed, on the entire field of
marketing, distribution, and merchandising—as subjects of only secondary importance compared to the fields of agricultural and
industrial production and, therefore, as subjects unworthy of detailed study. But this approach is mistaken; these institutions were—and
are—indispensable to the capitalist economy. They brought the reality of capitalism—the dream life of capitalism, that is—directly,
concretely home to generations of men and women.” 8
• “In its sheer quest to produce and sell goods cheaply in constantly growing volume and at higher profit levels, American
business, after 1890, acquired such power and, despite a few wrenching crises along the way, has kept it ever since. From the
1890s on, American corporate business, in league with key institutions, began the transformation of American society into a
society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending, and acquisition, with more
goods this year than last, more next year than this. American consumer capitalism produced a culture almost violently hostile to
the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods. It was culture that first
appeared as an alternative culture—or as one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions of republicanism and Christian
virtue—and then unfolded to become the reigning culture of the United States. It was the culture that many people the world
over soon came to see as the heart of American life.” Xiii
• “This book deals with the crucial formative years of this culture, 1880 to 1930. It seeks to illuminate its power and appeal as
well as the tremendous ethical change it brought to America. Today, as mass consumer capitalism seems to be spreading across
all frontiers, it is urgent for us to understand how it first came into being and what was gained or lost or repressed in that
process.” Xiii-xiv
• “This book attempts a fuller assessment of the culture of consumer capitalism. It discusses the economic reality that ushered it
into being—the national corporations, the mass market retailers, and the banks. The book deals with the advertisers and
promoters, the display artists and fashionists, and the huge number of brokers and confidence men and women who devised the
riveting enticements to serve business. But the book goes well beyond an economic analysis to see the culture as a whole, as a
complex set of relations and alliances among different kinds of people and groups—cultural and noneconomic, religious and
political—that worked together to create what merchant John Wanamaker called the “land of desire.”” Xiv
• “Behavior is not the key subject of the book, although plenty of behavior is described in its pages, plenty of people affirming the
new culture, opposing or hating it, celebrating it. Still, my subject is not consent but the creation of this culture. Consent, to be
sure, played some kind of role, but it was not decisive.” Xiv
• “Yet, I do not believe that consent was key to the creation and perpetuation of this new phenomenon. Indeed, the culture of
consumer capitalism may have been among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever created, and it was nonconsensual for
two reasons. First, it was not produced by “the people” but by commercial groups in cooperation with other elites comfortable
with and committed to making profits and to accumulating capital on an every-ascending scale. Second, it was nonconsensual
because, in its mere day-to-day conduct (but not in any conspiratorial way), it raised to the fore only one vision of the good life
and pushed out all others. In this way, it diminished American public life, denying the American people access to insight into
other ways of organizing and conceiving life, insight that might have endowed their consent to the dominant culture (if such
consent were to be given at all) with real democracy.” Xv
• “In the decades following the Civil War, American capitalism began to produce a distinctive culture, unconnected to traditional
family or community values, to religion in any conventional sense, or to political democracy. It was a secular business and
market-oriented culture, with the exchange and was a secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and was a
secular business and market-oriented culture, with the exchange and circulation of money and goods at the foundation of its
aesthetic life and of its moral sensibility. This book is about the growth of that culture, about its character, and about the people
and groups that brought it into being.” 3
• “By World War I, Americans were being enticed into consumer pleasure and indulgence rather than into work as the road to
happiness.” 3-4
• “A cult of the “new” belonged to this new culture…“The world and the books are so accustomed to use the word ‘new’ in
connection with our country,” wrote Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, “that we early get and permanently retain the
impression that there is nothing old about it.” It was hard under these circumstances to defend any tradition, any inherited
custom or belief, when the past itself was hostage to the new.” 4
81
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“By the end of the century, however, commercial capitalism had latched on to the cult of the new, fully identified with it, and
taken it over. Innovation became tied to the production of more and more commodities. Fashion and style were at the center,
appropriating folk design and image, reducing custom to mere surface and appearance. The cult of the new was, perhaps, the
most radical aspect of this culture, because it readily subverted whatever custom, value, or folk idea came within its reach.” 5
“But after 1885, in the wake of the rapid industrializing of the country, the idea of democracy, like the idea of the new and the
idea of paradise, began to change radically. Gradually, wealth lay less in the land and more in capital or in the money required
to produce new goods. This pecuniary wealth was owned by a small minority; but at the same time, growing numbers of
Americans were losing control over their work, becoming dependent on others—on the owners of the capital—for their wages
and well-being. In this context a new conception of democracy developed, fostered by growing incomes and a rising standard of
living and espoused alike by capitalists and many progressive reformers, a democracy at once more inclusive and more confining
than before.” 6
“This highly individualistic conception of democracy emphasized self-pleasure and self-fulfillment over community or civic
well-being…The concept had two sides. First, it stressed the diffusion of comfort and prosperity not merely as part of the
American experience as heretofore, but instead as its centerpiece. Thus, progressive Herbert Croly, inspirer of President
Theodore Roosevelt, wrote that the “promise of American life” consisted foremost in a “promise of comfort and prosperity for
an ever-increasing majority of good Americans…Second, the new conception included the democratizing of desire, or, more
precisely equal rights to desire the same goods and to enter the same world of comfort and luxury. American culture, therefore,
became more democratic after 1880 in the sense that everybody—children as well as adults, men, and women, black and
white—would have the same right as individuals to desire, long for, and wish for whatever they pleased. The Land of Comfort
was becoming the Land of Desire.” 6
“As late as 1870 the average number of workers in any given factor was still fewer than ten. Most markets were local or
regional, and the majority of businesses were individually owned and managed. The culture was largely agrarian, republican,
and religious; and more people—white people—controlled their own property or land.” 8
“Land of Desire deals with three other matters central to an understanding of why and how the culture of consumer capitalism
emerged in the way it did: the development of a new commercial aesthetic, the collaboration among economic and noneconomic
institutions, and the growth of a new class of brokers. After 1880, American business began to creat a new set of commercial
enticements—a commercial aesthetic—to move and sell goods in volume. This was the core aesthetic of American capitalist
culture, offering a vision of the good life and of paradise.” 9
“From the 1880s onward, a commercial aesthetic of desire and longing took shape to meet the needs of business. And since that
need was constantly growing and seeking expression in wider and wider markets, the aesthetic of longing and desire was
everywhere and took many forms. After 180 this aesthetic appeared in show windows, electrical signs, fashion shows,
advertisements, and billboards; as free services and sumptuous consumer environments; and as the artifacts or commodities
themselves.” 9
“At the heart of the evolution of this commercial aesthetic were the visual materials of desire—color, glass, and light. Used for
centuries by royal courts and by the military to excite devotion, loyalty, and fear, and by religions to depict otherworldly
paradises, these materials were now mobilized in the United States and other industrialized countries to suggest a this-worldly
paradise that was stress-free and “happy.”” 9
“By 1910, American merchants, in their efforts to create the new commercial aesthetic, took command over color, glass, and
light, fashioning a link so strong between them and consumption that, today, the link seems natural. By the 1920s so many
commercial institutions and people had exploited “color” that, according to The New York Times, the word itself had been “worn
to a frazzle.”” 9
“National corporations, department stores, investment banks, hotel chains, and the entertainment industry joined this circuit, but
so did the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, the Harvard Business School and the Wharton School,
Cornell University, New York University, Pratt Institute, and the New York School of Design. Even the nation’s most radical
labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World, participated inadvertently in the building of this new culture.” 10
“And, I hope this book demonstrates, many groups and individuals raised their voices against the new cultural changes taking
place and rebelled against them. These included farmers and workers who fought the large corporations; the small, independent
merchants of the era who took part in the “retail wars” against the big department stores; religious believers and leaders as well
as Congressional democrats and municipal socialists; insurgent economists and literary intellectuals; and numerous “ordinary”
citizens. Many of these people were principally loyal to the older democratic producing tradition, a powerful tradition that
claimed people themselves should determine the fate of their culture, the shape of their politics, and the conditions of their
labor.” 12
“Journalists James Roty took a trip across America in the midthirties and encountered little to show that the Depression had
dampened the power of what he called the “dream culture.” If anything, he wrote, both economic misery and the profit motive
had “augmented the demand for dreams.”” 382
“There seems to be much truth in this concept, as such great writers as Emerson, Whitman, and William James long ago
explained. It appears that many human beings not only seek but also need new goods, new adventures and experiences, and new
insights to feel alive and fulfilled. There may be no inherent limit to what people can or might desire or to what they can or
might be invited and tempted to do—economically, sexually, politically, morally. Human beings are infinitely flexible and
endowed with considerable imaginative powers.” 385
82
“At the same time, the conception of the desiring self, as expressed in capitalist terms and exploited by capitalism, offers a onesided and flawed notion of what it means to be human. It rejects what is also “human” about human beings: their ability to
commit themselves, to establish binding relationships, to sink permanent roots, to maintain continuity with previous generations,
to remember, to make ethical judgments, to seek pleasure in work, to remain steadfast on behalf of principle and loyal to
community or country (to the degree that community or country strives to be just and fair), to seek spiritual transcendence
beyond the self, and to fight a cause through to the end.” 386
Sources: Wanamaker’s archives, advertising, newspapers, journals, catalogues
Connections: Cronon’s Nature’s, Kasson, Amusing, Mohl, New
•
Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1780-1980 (1988)
Argument: “The history of our cities is, then, the history of how they came to their corporate status, what they have done with this status,
and how they have shaped themselves. Our cities are what we have made them. They will be what we make them. Not everyone shares
evenly in the power to shape and make them, and this is a part of the story.” Xiv
• “This book captures a different American city, a city epitomized by suburbs and freeways as well as high-rise downtowns. This
city, the unglamorous place where most Americans through history have lived, is not the ideal city and does not even represent
necessarily the kind of place where people should live.” Xi
• “The United States has two major kinds of government: territorial and corporate. Territorial governments include counties and
states. Cities, on the other hand, have corporate governments, and their territorial bounds are not rigidly set. As corporate legal
creatures, American cities are more akin to the business corporation than to other governmental entities.” Xi
• “Yet, until the changes wrought by the New Deal and World War II, local governments handled almost all of the welfare,
education, infrastructural building (bridges, sewers, wharves, streets) and regulation in the United States. Physically diffuse, the
power of the U.S. cities pervades the lives of their residents.” Xii
• “As a consequence, the United States is urban but not urbane. I wish to amend this partial, rural self-understanding through a
study that implicitly addresses the history of U.S. cities from a world historical context. This history is about U.S. cities, thus it
compares indirectly. It is designed to account for the American side of the differences between cities of Western Europe and the
United States which are so apparent in the late twentieth century but which had their roots in much earlier events. In so doing it
deliberately bridges several different research traditions, incorporating and building on “old” and “new,” political and social,
urban histories.” 1-2
• “A central historical precondition underlies the larger course of American urban history: timing. Richard Hofstadter emphasized
this aspect of American development, reminding us that the United States was “the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the
world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalist
enterprise.” This aspect of historical timing meant that by the nineteenth century, when the United States city formation began in
earnest, cities began building under the protective aegis of the nation state, which in its grasp for political power assumed the
cost and management of the military. Cities were freed to be more than fortified, mercantile warehouses, to design themselves
as service oriented, debt financed, growth (and therefore capital) promoting, economic (not social) centers.” 3-4
• “The city’s acceptance of responsibility for problems within its purview constituted a historically significant act worth yof our
careful attention. Cities could have chosen to ignore sewage, crime, unschooled children, and slow transportation simply by
tolerating higher disease rates, offense rates, illiteracy rates, and traffic tangles. That there is indeed wide variation in tolerance
between cities today illustrates that no “natural” level generating a response to problems exists. Instead, beginning in the midnineteenth century, cities chose to intervene aggressively in the local economic setting, intentionally creating what they hoped
would be ideal environments for economic growth. By these actions individual villages, towns, and cities attempted to amplify
their existing locational or economic advantages. Success, defined as population growth, increased wealth of all real property
owners.” 4
• “The basic chronology of U.S. cities has three parts: First, the premodern era, which came to a close in the period 1790-1830,
retained a deep similarity to and continuity with European cities. Containing about 5 percent or less of any region’s population,
cities functioned as commercial and political centers…Second, the century-long period of local economic and population growth
from 1830 to 1930 saw a dynamic and historically unprecedented expansion of cities—in absolute size, in proportion of the total
population, and in number. Prior to this century, cities had been much more responsive agents. But during this phase, cities
began to work out their new mode of providing services, acting positively in local affairs, and doing so as competitive
entrepreneurs. Local governments financed two transportation revolutions, in railroads and hard surfaced roads…the Great
Depression, which abruptly terminated the era…Finally, post-Depression cities made the innovations of the previous century
permanent and somewhat invisible, by creating bureaucracies to accomplish the new services. New federal government actions
during the Depression helped dissipate intense local concerns about cities.” 6
• More of a book on how to write urban history
Sources: maps, census, records, government records, secondary sources
Connections: Cronon’s Nature’s, Mohl, New, Boyer, Urban, Steffens, Shame, Smith, Urban Disorder, Schuyler, The New, Rosenzweig
and Blackmar, The Park, Buder, Pullman
Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (1992)
Argument: “The Battle for Homestead convincingly argues that the 1892 strike, as well as a dozen or so others that occurred in the
Pittsburgh industrial area, was not an isolated event; they were all the result of a prolonged struggle for control of the rapidly changing
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production process in the iron and steel industry. Whoever controlled the shop floor controlled the key to immense wealth and power. In
the minds of the industrialists, it was technology, not workers’ skill, that controlled the pace and capacity and ultimately, the costs of
production. The union, whether the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers or the Knights of Labor, was viewed as the only
significant barrier to the ultimate Darwinian victory.” 702-703, Weber
• “Specifically, it explore the politics, culture, and morality of steelmaking in late nineteenth-century America by tracing the
circuitous path that led businessmen, engineers, political leaders, and metalworkers to Homestead, Pennsylvania—sit of the
world’s largest and most “progressive” steel mill and of America’s most infamous debate over the politics, culture and morality
of steelmaking.” Xiv
• “For many people, the story of the Homestead Lockout is as famous for the violent events that punctuated it as for the way it
ended—with a resounding defeat for unionism in the steel industry.” 3
• “On 1 July, the workers seized the mill and sealed off the town to prevent scabs from resuming operations. In the infamous
battle of 6 July, 300 Pinkerton “detectives,” dispatched to the mill by darkened river barge under an arrangement with the county
sheriff, fought virtually the entire town; 3 Pinkertons and 7 workers were killed. Four days later, 8,500 national guardsmen were
called out at the request of Frick to retake the town and the mill. On 23 July, Alexander Berman, a Russian Jewish anarchist,
attempted to assassinate Frick but missed his mark. Soon after, guardsman W.L. Iams was hung by his thumbs for having
jumped to his feat and shouted, “Three cheers for the man who shot Frick!” 3
• “The AAISW held out until November; with its final defeat in Homestead, unionism in the national steel industry came to a
virtual halt for four decades.” 4
• “The story of Homestead dramatizes the broadest issues and problems of nineteenth-century industrial America. It is about the
endless conflict between the pursuit of private interest and the defense of the common good. It is about the right of individuals
to accumulate unlimited wealth and privilege versus the right of individuals to enjoy security in their jobs and dignity in their
homes. It is about the aspirations and the frustrations of Americans who wanted their country to be republic in fact and not
merely in name. In short, as the nineteenth century was with us still: Can—or how can—the new land of industry and
technological innovation continue to be “the land of the free”? That is, how does one reconcile the undeniable attractions of
material progress, implying as they invariably do a host of social and economic inequities, with the American commitment to
democracy for all?” 6
• “The technological innovations that transformed American industry in the 1860s and 1870s—in particular the Bessemer process
of steelmaking—elicited a wide variety of responses.” 7
• “Hesitations about the impact of the new technologies invading the workplace were compounded by the broader uncertainties
bequeathed to workers, and all Americans, by the Civil War. Among the most troubling of these was the place of labor, white
and black, within the new social order. In the view of many Americans, the “free” enterprise system—the very system that
promoted technological innovation and industrial efficiency—rather than ensuring their freedom, had effectively locked them
into an insidious form of wage slavery. Thousands of working Americans responded to these circumstances by demanding a
new kind of abolitionism.” 7
• “To end wage slavery and half the drift toward permanent “dependence,” labor leaders in greater Pittsburgh knew that the
workers’ movement had to cope with two specific challenges. Not surprisingly, the first was that posed by technological
innovation in the struggle for control of the workplace.” 7
• “The second challenge, which labor leaders saw as inextricably bound to the first, lay outside the shop floor, in the political
arena. Here the question was how to mobilize the workers of Pittsburgh to wrest the reins of government from the supporters of
“organized capital.”” 8
• “The principles labor sought to establish, according to the Tribune, were grounded in notions of right and justice markedly
different from the belief that self-interest is the universal, beneficent arbiter of human relations.” 9
• “A shared desire to ensure such happiness by securing what American workers since the Revolutionary Era had called a
“competence”—a sufficiency of means for living comfortably—provided the raw material out of which skilled industrial
craftsmen and their less skilled colleagues tried to forge the requisite solidarity to attack the “unnatural” wage system.” 9
• “Here, then, was the undergirding of a politics that did indeed indict nineteenth-century industrial civilization: a notion of right
that ensured a competence.” 10
• “The idea of a competence did not merely challenge the putative right to unlimited appropriation, however: it also asserted an
important moral and political distinction between property for use and property for accumulation. Locke seemed to have
removed the distinction. Labor reformers understood that it existed. However, in the end, they lacked a coherent strategy that
would: (1) provide all citizens with sufficient property for a competence; (2) check unlimited property accumulation; and (3)
ensure the individual pursuit of happiness that stood at the center of their cherished republicanism.” 10
• “The late nineteenth-century conflicts between organized capital and organizing labor thus embodied, to no insignificant degree,
a contest over the meaning of republicanism in modern America. The defenders of capitalism privileged the rights of property
and translated the republican emphasis on the development of moral personality into a quantitative process measured by the
calculus of the market. The adversaries of capitalism saw a discrepancy between republican ideals and daily experience and
sought to stave off the “corrupt” encroachments of a new tyranny of capital. At stake in this contest over the meaning of
republicanism and the control of instruments of power and production was the very definition of public culture and the public
interpretation of reality.” 10
• “it is the assault on the Pinkertons, along with the other bloody events of the day, that has haunted the memory of Homestead. 14
84
“It was precisely at this point that, in swarming across the mill yard and onto the wharf, Homesteaders crossed an important legal
boundary, for until now, they had followed the Advisory Committee’s stricture against trespassing on company land to avoid any
suggestion of an assault on property rights.” 17
• “The loss of Morris, Wain, Striegel, Fares, and Sotak and the wounding of their colleagues touched all of the principal ethnic and
occupational groups in Homestead and underscored their unity…Whereas the misfortunes the befell these Homesteaders seemed
to fortify and further consolidate the workers’ determination to resist the Pinkertons, morale plummeted inside the Iron
Mountain and the Monongahela over the course of the morning of 6 July.’ 23
• “But Burgoyne and other observers also recognized the Frick and Lovejoy had been counting on the ultimate authority of the
state from the outset; they knew that the more chaotic Homestead became, the more likely it was that Governor Robert E.
Pattison would order out the militia, thereby clearing the way for nonunion laborers to enter the steelworks.” 25
• “This much, however, is certain: Frick went to great lengths to ensure that if such a mobilization proved necessary, it would be
presented to the public at large as the logical, legal response to a brazen revolt of insubordinate workers. For this reason, Frick
and Philander C. Knox, chief lawyer for Carnegie Steel, had sought to deputize the Pinkertons prior to their arrival in
Homestead.” 27
• “At union headquaters the men were cheered by scores of encouraging telegrams sent by workers from across the country. The
workers in Homestead sensed “that they were fighting not only their own battle,…but the battle of organized labor as a whole,
and that the eyes of workingmen all over the content were upon them.” 23
• “On the other hand, the proposal that came forth from the crowd envisioned their prosecution for murder. To Burgoyne men and
women who had charged the riverbank on 6 July in defense of their jobs and homes, and who had watched their co-workers die,
it was the essence of American justice—a justice that required the Pinkerton “invaders” to be treated as criminals.” 34
• “Thousands of men, women, and children had gathered to witness the surrender, and they greeted the Pinkertons with vengeful
hoots and calls.” 34
• “The Pinkertons, Arthur Burgoyne wrote, “had to run the gauntlet, and if the experience before them was not destined to be
almost as trying as the attributed to the victims of the gauntlet torture in tales of Indian life, it was not because the mob did not
show all the signs of thirsting for a fierce carnival of revenge.” 35
Sources: newspaper, journals, telegrams, letters,
Connections: Smith, Urban Disorder, Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, Buder, Pullman
•
Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of
Pullman (1995)
Argument: Smith “argues that public discussion of late-nineteenth-century Chicago tells us much about the changing anxieties associated
with modernity in American culture.” 442, Fahs
• “This book examines the imaginative dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and the
celebrated model town of Pullman, Illinois, from its founding in 1880 to the famous strike of 1894. By imaginative dimensions,
I mean the context of through and expression that suffuses individual and social life.” 1
•
“The city’s resurrection from the flames, its ability to overcome and apparently even benefit from adversity, demonstrated to
many the vitality of a Chicago occupied a critical position. The pious rhetoric in which the reconstruction process was described
meanwhile revealed how important it was to American in 1871 to see the determination to rebuild the stricken city as reaffirming
the sacred purposes on which they believed that the country and their lives were founded, and to which they believed that the
country and their lives were founded, and to which they had so recently rededicated themselves through the struggle and
sacrifice of the Civil War.” 2
• “The bomb hit a cultural nerve. Immediately perceived as a critically representative event at this time of social conflict, it
became the focus of a continuing debate over several pressing issues going back to the fire, central among them the instability of
a concentrated and mixed urban population. The backdrop of this debate included the emergence of certain modes of thinking
and speaking about city life and social disorder that dictated how the eight men charged with the crime were prosecuted,
convicted, and punished . Their trial was the place where the state, speaking for and to the people of Chicago, America, and the
world, tried to force these defendants to take the blame for the bomb and other civil unrest in a way that reinforced the value and
legitimacy of the current order and discouraged opposition to it. The defendants resisted the role in which they were cast, using
their day in court to indict their accusers for creating the sources of the distress for which thy were being blamed.” 2-3
• “During the tumultuous 1880s, the town of Pullman, located just outside Chicago, seemed to demonstrate that it was possible to
have a healthy, humane, prosperous, and productive urban order free of the kinds of conflicts and dangers that the fire and
Haymarket revealed, and that this order could be sustained without police or troops, guns or gallows.” 3
• “George Pullman staked his fortune, his energy, and his reputation on building an industrial town so carefully planned and
managed that it would unite labor and capital in social harmony. In order to do this, however, he was convinced that one had to
entrust the responsibility for urban order to a single owner (in this case his Pullman Palace Car Company) in possession of all the
property and in charge of all the rules.” 3
• “If the model town could provide a way out of the apparently inescapable syndrome of urban disorder, then its lead was worth
following, even if to do so required, among the other ideas about social reform that it advanced, a major modification in the
concept of American citizenship.” 4
85
“Like the fire and the Haymarket riot before it, the Pullman strike became the event through which many Americans tried to
make sense of the larger patterns of change and conflict that seemed to dominate cultural life as the country headed into the
twentieth century.” 4
• “In this era of urban expansion, no other city grew so quickly and so much as Chicago.”5
• “Between 1870 and 1890 it moved from fifth to second largest city in the country. The 1880s were the years of Chicago’s
mightiest expansion, from half a million to over a million, with an increase of over 125,000 between 1885 and 1886.” 5
• “At the same time, partly because of the fire and this population increase, but also because of the immense changes in
transportation, communications, structure of the workplace (both factory and office), and building technology, Chicago’s
identity was constantly transforming, so that the city that was rocked by the Haymarket bomb was physically as well as
demographically different from the one that had burned down fifteen years before. This combination of sudden titanic growth
out of a virtually nonexistent past and continuing constant alteration combined to make Chicago seem a place hostile to
traditional ideals of order and stability.” 5
• “In common definition, disorder, however large or small, is a specific event or resulting condition that is opposed to order—the
way things normally are.” 6
• “As I shall show, the contemporary understanding of the fire, the bomb, the strike, and of Chicago itself as disastrous,
cataclysmic, calamitous, or catastrophic derived from existing ideas which were already in place and which affected how people
integrated these events and this city into their lives.” 6
• “None of these urban disorders that struck Chicago were imagined or, in some abstract sense, socially constructed, as anyone
burned or blasted or beaten in the course of each of them could readily attest. But we should be aware that the occurrences that
people consider most disruptive are those which seem to offer the greatest challenge to their ideas of order.” 6
• “Thus, the Haymarket bomb, which killed or wounded a few dozen people and caused virtually no property damage, was a
cataclysm of a deeper and broader kind than the fire because of its more extraordinary and enduring imaginative reverberations.
While the fire forced the physical re-creation of Chicago, the bomb remade the mental map of the metropolis.” 7
• “Through the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Americans increasingly agreed that the modern American city, and
Chicago in particular, was the disorderly embodiment of instability, growth, and change. They also agreed that it was the center
of political, economic, and social power in America, and, as such, was contested ground—another reason why it seemed so
unstable.” 7
• “The struggle was over the future of America, with which the rise of the city was so closely linked, and the matters at issue were
the rules and principles that formed the basis of this setting, from those relating to wages and working conditions to ones of
fairness, truth, and of course, order.” 7
• “Many of the individuals examined here were speaking to a much broader group of Americans who eagerly wanted the city
interpreted for them so that they could know what to believe about the world and how to act within it. They were willing to
accept that the urban world was often disorderly, but not that their beliefs were incoherent or lacking a sound basis. This mean
that they wanted an interpretation of urban experience that seemed neutral, apolitical, and stable, all the more so since the urban
setting struck them as so contested, politicized, and unstable.” 7
Sources: city histories, newspaper and magazine articles, government and corporation reports, memoirs, speeches, and pamphlets
Connections: Mohl, New, Krause, Battle, Cronon, Nature’s, Boyer, Urban, Steffens, Shame, Monkkonen, America, Rosenzweig and
Blackmar, The Park, Schuyler, The New, Buder, Pullman
•
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992)
Argument: “Yet they do remind us that America’s most important naturally landscaped park is an urban space, best understood in
relation to its city. That reminder in particularly important since most nonfiction about Central Park (as distinguished from imaginative
representations) has tended to view it as isolated from city life and conflicts, as a landscape of vistas, birds, bridges, buildings, rocks, and
tress. Few have written about the people who made, maintained, and above all, enjoyed the park that was their own.” 3
•
“Historians have shared the tendency to study this public space apart form the city’s people.” 3
• “To be sure, it is impossible to comprehend Central Park fully without understanding its appeal as a designed natural
landscape…our goal in this book is to offer a different perspective on the park’s history—one that puts people at the center and
relates the park to the city. We tell the story of the park’s people—the merchants and uptown landowners who launched to
project; the immigrant and black residents who lived on the land seized for the park; the politicians, gentlemen, and artists who
disputed its design and operation; the German gardeners, Irish laborers, and Yankee engineers who actually built it; and the
generations of New Yorkers for whom Central Park was their only backyard.” 3
• “We begin this history of Central Park as a social institution and space, an aspect of the city rather than just a natural or designed
landscape, by asking a seemingly easy question: What was a “public park”?” 3
• “Just as there are two traditions in the definition of Central Park as a park, its meaning as a public institution also has two
dimensions: its political character as property and its cultural character as open space. Public, in one sense, signifies property
rights, government ownership, and control of land removed form the real estate market. Public property, owned by the
government, thus contrasts to private property, owned by individuals or corporations who can exclude others from their land.
But public property also differs from common property, that is, land or resources to which all members of a community have
unrestricted access. The right to control public property is vested in government officials who determine who has access to it
and under what conditions.” 5
86
“Because Central Park is public property, the management of its grounds has also continually been negotiated through the city’s
tension-ridden political system. Who has the authority to control the park and define “proper” behavior with in it? What sorts of
restrictions on use should be set? According to what standards should the park be maintained? Should new facilities be added?
What kind? Who is permitted to participate in the public decision-making process?” 6
• “The public of a public park has a cultural and spatial as well as a political and property-based dimension. We think of public
spaces as territories open to all visitors. As open, nonexclusive spaces, parks assume their character not through political powers
of ownership or control but through patterns of use. The people who claim access to this public space constitute the cultural
public. This cultural dimension of a park as a public space overlaps with its political and property-based definition in sometimes
confusing ways. Some “public” space can be privately owned, as, for example, a theater or salon, and proprietors can regulate
access by price, if no longer by racial or gender categories. Public spaces defined as territories open to all people suggest the
ideal type of the village commons, but historically such common property has served closely knit, homogenous communities.” 6
• “Property-based definitions of public and private tend to be absolute (rooted in legal rights of ownership and control), but the
idea of public space as nonexclusive territory is a relative concept. In the modern American city, few, if any, spaces can be said
to be entirely open or entirely restricted. Degrees of exclusivity and access are shaped by economics, politics, and culture. A
variety of structural constraints determine whether people possess the means to make use of the public space. In the 1860s, for
example, long work hours, low wages, the cost of public transportation, and distance from downtown neighborhoods restricted
working-class New Yorkers’ use of Central Park. Further, formal prescriptive rules can control access. Rules that forbade
commercial wagons on its drives, for example, originally prevented the city’s bakers and butchers from taking their families
there for Sunday outings. Also, informal rules or codes of social conduct can determine whether particular groups want to use
different public spaces and whether they will feel welcome. In the early twentieth century black children who went to the park
faced the taunts of white youths. Although Central Park has always been a nonexclusive “public” space, it has not always been
equally accessible to all New Yorkers.” 7
• “Organized political pressure, for example, overturned the strict “keep-off-the-grass” rules and the restrictions on Sunday use
imposed by the original board. But the most important pressure for change came from patterns of everyday use as the park
became increasingly accessible and appealing to immigrant and working-class New Yorkers. They transformed the elite park of
the 1860s into a more eclectic and popular space by the 1880s and 1890s, and by the end of the century Central Park was
beginning to fulfill some of the democratic promises implicit in its creations as a public space. This democratization also
affected the three cultural institutions situated within the park. The zoo, the American Museum of Natural History, and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art drew new crowds to the park, but the museum’s trustees sought to control popular uses of “their”
institutions by fashioning a novel arrangement that gave private boards control over the management of institutions subsidized
by public money.” 9
Sources: memoirs, government records, maintenance reports, newspapers, secondary material
Connections: Mohl, New, Smith, Urban Disorder, Kasson, Amusing, Rosenzweig, Eight, Boyer, Urban, Schuyler, The New,
Monkkonen, America, Buder, Pullman
•
David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (1986)
Argument: “Despite the very real limitation, in its attempt to reconcile the increasing economic dominance of cities with traditional
values of home, family, and nature, the new urban landscape was one of the most creative and enduring contributions to civilization
undertaken in nineteenth-century America.” 8
• “Promoters of these projects attempted to redirect and control American urban development at what was arguably its most
crucial period—the years between 1840 and 1900—when cities were growing and changing at the most rapid rates in the
nation’s history, when they were becoming increasingly complex as physical and social spaces, and when they were taking the
shape of modern metropolitan areas.” 1
• “They had studied the historical lessons of other countries and had concluded that the propertyless residents of cities were
“sores” on the body politic. Distinguished spokesmen representing this group—Jefferson, Madison, and John Taylor of
Caroline—celebrated the virtues of an agrarian way of life and institutionalized their distrust of urban areas by locating the
national capital not in an existing city but in a new federal territory far from a metropolis.” 1
• “This shift from country to city, from farm to factory, was perhaps the most fundamentally dislocating experience in all of
American history. It demanded innovative solutions that would protect public health, provide areas for recreation to ease the
psychological adjustment to a new urban environment, and redirect the spatial growth of cities.” 2
• “Beginning roughly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, some leaders of a new generation, born primarily in New
England and New York after the Revolutionary War, perceived these challenges and sought to redefine urban form and culture.
Like its predecessor, this generation also cherished nature as the best environment, but what it meant by nature was quite
different: instead of the plantation or the farm, these rising cultural spokesmen more and more celebrated a specific set of scenic
qualities and social values they identified with a pastoral or domesticated environment, one in which man and nature had
achieved the state of balance Leo Marx has termed the “middle landscape.” The individuals who became promoters of the new
urban landscape had witnessed the transformation of New England and the beginnings of a dramatic expansion of the nation’s
cities in the antebellum years, and they especially regretted what by then had become the prototypical urban form, the gridiron.”
• “The conception of the city as a new urban landscape that evolved in nineteenth-century America differed from its precursors in
three principal ways. First, to a greater degree than in western Europe, with its long tradition of metropolitan centralization, the
idea of creating a more openly built urban environment began as a repudiation of the commercial city.” 3
87
“Second, this new conception of the city and its possibilities was middle-class in orientation. With the rise in urban property
values during the nineteenth century, the density of building and stress of apartment and tenement life seemed to undermine
traditional values associated with family and community…to counter this instability promoters of public parks created
communal spaces for family outings, places where the naturalistic landscape offered relief from cramped, dark, poorly ventilated
dwellings, and where rural scenery might sooth the “nerves and mind” of visitors.” 3
• “Third, advocates of the new urban landscape broke with older patterns of city form by attempting to achieve the differentiation
of space and land use within the metropolis. Because workers needed to live near their places of employment, in the colonial
and early national years cities usually mixed commercial and residential functions on the same block. Too often this resulted in
the congestion, filth, crime, and disease that contemporaries feared. But beginning in the 1830s, urban transportation systems
made possible the separation of workplace and domicile, thereby creating the potential for eliminating what reformers
considered the worst environmental failings of the older commercial city.” 4
• “The conception and creation of the new urban landscape began in the antebellum years, when more and more Americans
recognized that existing recreational spaces within cities were hopelessly inadequate.” 4
• “However pleasant, such cemeteries did not address fundamental problems of urban form: they were didactic landscapes full of
monuments of contemplation. Moreover, these cemeteries were at best only semipublic institutions and were located so far from
the city as to make it all but impossible for working people to escape to them from their neighborhoods.” 4
• “Thus, during the 1840s and 1850s proponents of the new urban landscape applied the lessons of cemetery design and crusaded
to create large public spaces within the city. They began with the notion that the country was somehow inherently superior to
the city, that what the urban environment most needed was a large recreational ground—a park.” 4
• “New York’s Central Park was the first major attempt to achieve these goals. Almost immediately after its construction,
however, Olmsted recognized that even so large a public landscape was not equal to the task of refining and civilizing a city.
Because of the high cost of urban land, Central Park was located far to the north of the built area of Manhattan ans was virtually
inaccessible to the people who most needed it. Consequently, Olmsted and his contemporaries urged the creation of parkways
and park systems that would extend the benefits of parks to all neighborhoods of the city.” 5
• “In place of the old urban structure he envisioned a modern city that included the morality of nature as well as the economic
functions of urban life. Such a city would combine “more compact and higher building in business quarters” with “broader,
lower and more open building in residential quarters.”…They struggled to create a new city with a compact commercial center,
spacious parks for recreation, openly built residential subdivisions, and suburban communities—each an integral and
interdependent part of the modern metropolis.” 5
• “A concern for maintaining social order pervades much of the writing of Olmstead and his colleagues, in large part because these
promoters of parks and suburbs thought of themselves as reformers” 6
• “Andrew Jackson Downing, Olmstead, Calvert Vaux, Charles Eliot, and other planners whose works this book analyzes
attempted to create landscapes that they hoped would promote the highest potential of civilization in America.” 6
• “He confessed that public school education was not enough, and to raise Americans to a higher level of civilization Downing
advocated a program of “popular refinement,” which involved the creation of a whole series of institutions—publicly supported
libraries and museums as well as parks and gardens. If implemented, he predicted, these institutions would “banish the plague
spots of democracy.” 6
• “Unable to alter the shape of older neighborhoods as well as the commercial center, advocates of a new urban landscape created
recreational and domestic spaces on the periphery of cities. They could not remedy inequalities in the existing social structure,
or provide housing and play facilities for the poor, which compromised their vision of the new city.” 6-7
• “[Schuyler] begins by examining the two most notable examples of American city planning at the beginning of the century,
Pierre L’Enfant’s plan for the nation’s capital and the Commissioners Plan of 1811 that imposed a rigid gridiron on Manhattan.
Schuyler views both as “flawed visions” with unfortunate consequences for Washington and New York City. L’Enfant’s
grandiose baroque plan with broad radical boulevards and monumental squares and circles was ill-suited to the small capital city
of the nineteenth century and contributed to the dismal emptiness that so many visitors observed in early Washington. The
commissioners’ gridiron created a city more suitable for real estate speculation than for decent living and made inadequate
provision for parks or open spaces. According to Schuyler, in the field of city planning nineteenth-century Americans were off
to a bad start.” 657, Teaford
• “By the mid-nineteenth century, however, American city dwellers would find inspiration for a better life in the unlikely confines
of the rural cemetery. Beginning in the 1830s with the opening of the famous Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, a series of rural burial grounds offered a welcome resort for families seeking a weekend escape from the city.
With curving lanes and romantic landscaping, the new cemeteries presented a sharp contrast to the repetitious grid of city streets
and the grim brick and stone tenements and townhouses.” 657, Teaford
• “But they also instructed city fathers in the desirability of developing parks for the growing number of urban dwellers. The
thousands of urban residents who converged on the cemeteries each weekend were ample testimony to the need and demand for
sylvan breathing spaces in the city.” 657, Teaford
• “Olmsted and Vaux’s naturalistic park was intended to be a rural island amid an urban environment. A thick border of trees
would shut out the surrounding city and prevent unwanted urban intrusions into the oasis of rural meadows, glens, ponds, and
groves that Olmstead and Vaux desired to create [for Central Park].” 657-658, Teaford
Sources: memoirs, papers, journals, newspapers
•
88
Connections: Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park, Kasson, Amusing, Mohl, New, Rosenzweig, Eight, Smith, Urban Disorder, Boyer,
Urban, Monkkonen, America, Buder, Pullman
Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning: 1880-1930 (1967)
Argument: “Long dismissed as mere paternalism, Pullman’s town was actually his effort at employing a business system for public as
well as personal ends. He hoped to show that industrialization need not lead to social disintegration and that the chaotic concentration of
men and machinery in unmanageable urban neighborhoods could be reversed by the planned order of an industrial community. The
model town was an experiment in reform, but one placed in a business context and intended to illustrate that social reform and good
business practices were complementary.” Xi
The Strike: “The panic of 1893 had caused the Pullman Palace Car Company to cut wages by about 25 percent. At Pullman, its company
town near Chicago, no corresponding reduction was made in rents and other charges, which led to a local strike initiated May 11, 1894,
by members of the American Railway Union. After the company president, George M. Pullman, had refused arbitration of the dispute, the
union's national council, led by its president, Eugene V. Debs, called for a nationwide boycott of Pullman cars. Sympathy strikes by union
locals occurred in 27 states and territories from Ohio to California, and violence of disputed origin and intensity broke out, centring in
Chicago. Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, sympathetic toward the strikers, refused to call out the militia. On July 2, in part acceding
to railroad management requests, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney procured an injunction from federal judges to halt acts impeding
mail service and interstate commerce; on July 4, President Grover Cleveland, acting on Olney's advice, ordered 2,500 federal troops to
Chicago. The strike ended within the week, and the troops were recalled July 20. When Debs was convicted of contempt of court and
conspiring against interstate commerce, leaders of both industry and organized labour recognized that the Sherman Antitrust Act could be
enforced against unions and, even more ominous from the viewpoint of labour, federal injunctions could be employed to defeat action by
the unions.” Britanica.com
• “This system was given dramatic setting in a model town built in 1880 to prove its validity for community as well as factory.
Pullman wished to demonstrate that American industry could plan and construct a town which would solve the social problems
of the time by providing adequate housing for workers and thus encourage their development of proper middle-class standards.xi
• “[George Pullman’s] model town was built to reinforce virtues of self-help and personal discipline such as industry, frugality,
and cleanliness, which he perceived as threatened by the impact of industrialization and immigration on the cities. A
harmonious community of contended workingmen living in comfortable housing amidst rural surroundings and enjoying
superior facilities would be created not through philanthropy or utopian ideas but by practical recognition of interlocking selfinterest rationally organized along a business philosophy of order and efficiency.” 228
• “The community was expected to encourage workers to remain in one place while fostering advancement and improvement
within the company. This desired stability was not achieved…By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans knew full well
that attachment to community must be subordinated to the advantages of mobility.” 228-229
• “Rules intended to insure control from above and provide equity at the bottom wound worker, resident, and company officer in
red tape. Decisions made at all levels of authority often resulted in injustices which only strengthened the impression of a
ubiquitous company and made inhabitants and employees rankle at its arbitrariness. No clearly defined manner of expressing
and resolving industrial or community grievances existed, so that they tended to overlap and fester. As an early experiment in
what the twentieth century would call social engineering, the model town of Pullman was a disappointment.” 229
• “When events underscored Pullman’s shortcomings, they were assumed to be the consequences of paternalism rather than
planning…all of its flaws were attributed to George Pullman’s imposition of his tastes and self-interest on the town.” 230
• “To urban reformers, the experiment seemed to indicate that planning would work only when combined with self-government.
Jane Addams, Richard Ely, and Graham Taylor feared the concentration of community power in a company, but believed
government could enlist the voluntary support of all groups to meet social problems effectively through democratically
originated planning.” 230
• “Though his experiment failed, it was the forerunner of the later garden city movement and other efforts to resettle men and
industry in planned communities away from the cities.” 231
• “Pullman, Illinois, was also many things. It was the most elaborate attempt ever made by an American businessman to
centralize, motivate, and control his workforce. It was George M. Pullman’s response to social disintegration and moral decay,
yet it was an $8,000,000 investment that he expected to pay a 6 per cent per annum return. It was also a notable, if not lasting,
experiment in urban planning.” 1250-1251, Baughman
• “Buder’s best writing and analysis are devoted to the value system that Pullman sought to express in his town and to engender in
his workers; to the planning process and physical appearance of the town; to the social characteristics of workers and residents;
and to Pullman’s gradual loss of “community identity.” The watershed in the life of Pullman and in the image of his town, of
course, was the strike. The author summarizes quite well the proximate causes: an organization grown too large for personal
supervision by top management and a lack of managerial sureness at lower levels; a complex system of piecework and inplant
transfer or pricing that often discriminated among workers by factors other than skill or performance; layoffs and wage
reductions in response to declining orders, with a refusal to reduce rents or costs of living in the town; and Pullman’s conviction
that management, not unions, had his employees’ best interest at heart.” 1251, Baughman
• “Following the strike, public criticism and internal dissent eroded the town’s original concept and destroyed the credibility of
George Pullman’s previously humanitarian image; neither was ever the same again. The suburban expansion of Chicago
interdicted and then subsumed the town.” 1251, Baughman
Sources: newspapers, memoirs, journals, maps, union records
89
Connections: Krause, Battle, Rauchway, Refuge, Blessed, Murdering, Hofstadter, Age, Rosenzweig, Eight, Rosenzweig and Blackmar,
The Park, Schuyler, The New, Boyer, Urban, Smith, Urban Disorder, Mohl, New, Willrich, City, Hays, Response, Kloppenberg,
Uncertain, Weibe, Search
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989)
Argument: “Grossman argues that the migration was not simply an unorganized and unthinking rush of people northward. On the
contrary, there was a structure to the process. Before leaving the South, wary blacks read up on the opportunities in Chicago, relying in
part on letters from kin and friends who had already moved north. They were also avid consumers of the boosterish propaganda printed
in Chicago’s leading black newspaper, the Defender, and they corresponded with both the Defender and the Chicago Urban League to
obtain information on jobs and housing. Having decided to depart, black migrants often banded together in migration clubs to take
advantage of the cheaper group fares offered by the railroads.” 221, Teaford
• “Once they arrived in Chicago, black newcomers reveled in the newfound freedom but also became aware of the limitations on
their new home. They enjoyed being able to sit anywhere they wished on the streetcar and felt empowered by the experiences of
castings a ballot. On the other hand, racial discrimination in employment and housing prevented blacks from winning
promotions and establishing their residence wherever they wished. Because of their inadequate schooling in the South, the
children of newcomers were relegated to special classes reserved for “retarded” youths, and when they graduated, racial barriers
often prevented young blacks form obtaining jobs commensurate with their education. Moreover, the leadership elite of
Chicago’s black community had mixed feelings toward the immigrants, claiming that the vulgar, unrefined behavior of the
newcomers could give the entire race a bad name. Though the migrants were overwhelmingly working class, they also received
a mixed reception from the labor unions, and consequently black workers generally proved to be lukewarm in their support for
unionization. The Defender adopted an ambiguous position on unions, and such black institutions as the Wabash Avenue
YMCA actively served the interest of employers and undermined the labor movement.” 221, Teaford
• “Wright soon learned that Chicago had its own racial etiquette, its own unwritten laws and patterns of discrimination.
Regardless, of how honest and hardworking a black Chicagoan might be, he noted in 1901, only the most menial and lowpaying
jobs were available.” 2
• “Most migrants viewed the North as a land of opportunity. During World War I, northern cities were just that, especially
compared with the South and within the context of the migrants’ short-term expectations and early experiences. Despite race
riots and a severe depression during the winter of 1920-21, most black migrants retained their faith in the promise of the northern
city; few returned South, except for an occasional visit.” 3
• “With northern employers unwilling to hire blacks as long as white immigrants from Europe remained available, northward
migration had played little role in southern black life until World War I shut off immigration. Catalyzed in early 1916 by
recruiters from northern railroads suffering from the wartime labor shortage, the Great Migration soon generated its own
momentum. “Northern fever” permeated the black South, as letters, rumors, gossip, and black newspapers carried word of
higher wages and better treatment in the North. Approximately one-half million black southerners chose to “say fair wel to this
old world” and start life anew in northern cities during 1916-19, and nearly one million more followed in the 1920s.” 3-4
• “Among the many cities offering new employment opportunities, Chicago represented a logical destination for black men and
women preparing to leave homes in southern communities. “The packing houses in Chicago for a while seemed to be
everything,” observed one man from Hattiesburg, Mississippi…The meat-packing firms were known even in the rural South,
where their storage facilities dotted the countryside. Many black southerners had heard of the “fairyland wonders” of Chicago’s
spectacular 1893 Columbian Exposition. Others knew of Chicago as the home of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing
Company, maker of High Brown Face Powder. Baseball fans might have seen or heard of Chicago’s black American Giants,
who barnstormed through the South every summer in a private railroad car. The Chicago Defender, the most widely read
newspaper in the black South, afforded thousands of prospective migrants glimpses of an exciting city with a vibrant and
assertive black community. Finally, the city was easily accessible via the Illinois Central Railroad, whose tracks stretched
southward from Chicago into rural Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, with easy access from adjoining states as well…From
1916 to 1919, between fifty and seventy thousand black southerners relocated in Chicago, and thousands more passed through
the city before moving on to other locations in the North.” 4
• “This book explore the meaning of the Great Migration from the perspective of its participants, with a particular focus on their
adjustment to a northern industrial city and on their perceptions of their place in that city.” 4
• “The key to a full understanding of the Great Migration and its meaning is to place the movement within the context of southern
history, class formation in the North, ghettoization, and radical ideology.” 5-6
• “This investigation, therefore, begins in the South, in particular the broad region from which Chicago drew its migrants—
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and parts of Georgia and Tennessee.” 6
• “Part One of this book establishes both a narrative and analytical foundation for understanding what black southerners did and
thought after they arrived in the North. The ways in which migrants approached urban schools, politics, workplaces, unions, and
other institutions grew out of their experiences as black southerners and participants in the Great Migration itself. Adjustments
clearly took place within certain constraints, most of which have been comprehensively analyzed by scholars interested in the
emergence and development of northern urban ghettos.” 6-7
• “The second half of the book will focus on the experiences of migrants in Chicago, which offers a variety of attractions as the
locus of a case study. The broad reach of the Defender meant that even to many who migrated elsewhere, Chicago symbolized
the promise of the North. More particularly, the city already had a black community sufficiently established to permit the
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emergence of a complex relationship between “Old Settlers” and newcomers. At the workplace the nature of the migrants’ nondomestic employment in Chicago—largely in steel mills and packinghouses—required a sharp transition form nonindustrial to
industrial work patterns. Unionization campaigns, especially in the meat-packing industry, forced the newcomers to define their
relationship to an industrial economy whose accessibility had been central to migration itself. Part Two examines the
environment black southerners found in Chicago and explores the ways in which the migrants’ backgrounds and experiences
shaped their perceptions of and responses to that environment.” 7
• “What they would eventually learn was that access defined as mere entry was not enough. Jobs did not mean promotions or
economic power; votes and patronage implied neither political power nor even legitimacy as civic actors; seats in classrooms did
not set their children on the road toward better jobs or places of respect in the city. Their initial optimism might seem naïve in
this retrospective light, and in many ways it was. But they had come from a society legally, socially, and seemingly
economically defined by racial categories, and it was not at all illogical for them to assume that, freed from racial proscriptions,
they would share American freedom and prosperity. Seventy years after the Great Migration it is clear that many of the migrants’
hopes foundered on the shoals of northern racism, the business cycle, and class relations.” 8
• “In Chicago, black men and women did not have to truckle to whites. They could vote, a right that symbolized their full
citizenship and the legitimacy of their participation in the affairs of the broader community. They could send their children to
schools whose quality seemed guaranteed not only by the apparent political influence of black aldermen, but by the more
tangible presence of white children sitting alongside black pupils. They could work in factories, where they earned high wages,
envisioned the possibility of promotion, and made meaningful choices on the crucial issue of unionization.” 259
• “While southern racial violence usually resulted from a symbolic transgression of racial etiquette, Chicago’s riot grew out of a
competitive situation that suggested the importance of blacks in the city’s political and economic life as well as in its housing
market. Moreover, the riot revealed a black militancy that would have provoked either repression or expulsion in the South:
when whites attacked, blacks fought back, and the Defender kept score on the front page.” 259
• “School integration, while attributable in part to whites’ disinclination to enact de jure segregation, persisted mainly because the
Board of Education had not yet been able to gerrymander districts efficiently. Integrated schools were doomed, their demise
awaiting only continued black migration into a city committed to ghettoizing its black inhabitants.” 260
• “Frustrations and conflicts at the workplace, racial violence, and various forms of exclusion and discrimination did indeed mark
visible boundaries of Chicago as a Promised Land during and immediately after the Great Migration, but the barriers seemed
neither as systematic nor as unbreachable as they had in the South.” 260
• “These distant employers, unlike landlords or merchants with a lien on the crop, neither pressured wives and children to work
nor related social order and the availability of a work force to what blacks did outside the workplace. Welfare capitalism
through black institutions like the YMCA and YWCA, and behavior modification campaigns originated from sources that were
essentially nonthreatening. White reformers could safely be ignored, and even the advice of the black middle class seemed
authoritative only when relations with the unfamiliar world of white institutions were at stake. No attempts to reshape behavior
outside the workplace carried coercive implications.” 261
• “Migrants, paid in cash, valued the freedom to spend or save according to their priorities and inclinations. Newcomers who had
come from a sharecropper economy based on credit had little experience with a regular cash income. Labor in turpentine and
lumber camps, where wages were paid monthly and often in scrip or some other form of credit at the company store, had been
only slightly more likely to generate cash.” 261
• “Embracing the emerging mass consumer culture more quickly and less ambivalently than European immigrants, they bought
radios, frequented movies, attended baseball games, crowded cabarets and vice resorts, and patronized chain store.” 262
• “Within the black community, the white world posed neither threat nor opportunity. There, differences among blacks, especially
along class lines, could not be ignored, partly because class in the black community depended so heavily on activity in the very
arenas in which blacks exercised the greatest autonomy: leisure and church…Inside the black metropolis, where whites exercised
little overt institutional influence, class tensions emerged clearly and constituted a significant aspect of the migrants’ sense of
their separateness from others in the community.” 264
• “What their early experiences in Chicago confirmed for many migrants was the potential of a variant of pluralism. Venturing
North to share in both the process and the rewards of democracy and industrialism, they did not necessarily expect or wish to
abandon their identity as black Americans. Indeed, they expected that what Chicago offered was an environment that would
permit them to choose to interact with white only in settings essential to economic and political citizenship. The political
process, the workplace, and the school were the most important of these settings; to many, the decisions surrounding
unionization turned on whether unions fell into a similar category.” 264-265
• “The dreams embodied in the Great Migration eventually collapsed under the weight of continued racial oppression and the
failure of industrial capitalism to distribute its prosperity as broadly as the migrants had expected.” 265
Sources: journals, newspapers, union literature, literature, speeches, government records
Connections: Smith, Urban, Woodward, Origins, Ayers, Promise, Mohl, New, Boyer, Urban, Litwack, Been, Foner, Reconstruction,
Lehman, Promised
Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979)
Argument: “But for the black men and women who lived to experience the Civil War, there would be the moment when they learned a
complex of new truths: they were no longer slaves, they were free to leave the families they had served, they could negotiate the terms of
their future labor, and they could aspire to the same rights and privileges enjoyed by their former owners. It is that moment—and the
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days, months, and years that immediately followed—which this book seeks to capture: the countless ways in which freedom was
perceived and experienced by the black men and women who had been born into slaveyr and how they acted on every level to help shape
their condition and future as freedmen and freedwomen.” xii
• “The various dimensions of slavery’s collapse—the political machinations, the government edicts, the military occupation—
should not be permitted to obscure the principal actors in this drama: the four million black men and women for whom
enslavement composed their entire memory. For many of them, the only world they knew ended at the boundaries of the
plantations and farms on which they toiled; most of them were several generations removed from the African immigrants who
had been torn from their homeland and shipped in chains to the New World. The distant voices of Africa still echoed in their
music, in their folk tales, in the ways they worshipped God, and in their kinship relationships. But in 1860 they were as
American as the whites who lorded over them.” Xi
•
“But the education acquired by each slave was remarkably uniform, consisting largely of lessons in survival and
accommodation—the uses of humility, the virtues of ignorance, the arts of evasion, the subtleties of verbal intonation, the
techniques by which feelings and emotions were masked, and the occasions that demanded the flattering of white egos and the
placating of white fears.” Xi
• “Whether they chose to recall bondage with terror, nostalgia, or mixed feelings, their thoughts, concerns, and priorities at the
moment they ceased to be slaves emerge with remarkable clarity and seldom conflict significantly with the contemporary
historical evidence.” Xiii
• “Never before had black people in the South found any reason to view the future with more hope or expectation than in the
1860s. The war and freedom injected into their lives the excitement of anticipation, encourage a new confidence in their own
capabilities, and afforded them a rare insight into the vulnerability and dependency of their “white folks.” For many, these were
triumphs in themselves. If their optimism seemed misplaced, the sights which greeted newly freed slaves suggested otherwise—
black armies of occupation, families reunited, teachers offering to instruct them, Federal official placing thousands of them on
abandoned and confiscated lands, former masters prepared to bargain for their labor, and black missionaries organizing them in
churches based upon a free and independent expression of their Christianity. To measure the significance of emancipation is not
to compare the material rewards of freedom and slavery, as many contemporaries were apt to do, but to appreciate the many and
varied ways in which the newly freed moved to reorder their lives and priorities and the new assumptions upon which they
acted.” Xiv
• “Unprecedented in the disruptions, stresses, and trauma it generated among both whites and blacks, the Civil War threatened to
undermine traditional relationships and dissolve long-held assumptions and illusions. Even if many slaves evinced a human
compassion for masters and mistresses caught in the terrible plight of war, invasion, and death how long before these same
slaves came to recognize that in the very suffering of their “white folks” lay their own freedom and salvation?” 4
• “Based upon the information they had peeved together from various sources, slaves not only kept themselves informed of the
progress of the war but, more critically, the began to appreciate its implications for their own lives and future. By 1863, at least,
the assumption prevailed among vast numbers of slaves (including even those who did not entirely welcome the prospect) that if
the Union Army prevailed on the battlefields, the Confederacy and slavery would expire together.” 27
• “Deprived of what they deemed essential protection, often frustrated in their attempts to anticipate black behavior, many
anguished whites forgot all that talk about contended and loyal slaves and described a situation fraught with the most terrifying
implications.” 30
• “Whether by guarding prisoners, marching through the South as an army of occupation, or engaging Confederate troops in
combat, the black soldier represented a sudden, dramatic, and far-reaching reversal of traditional roles—as spectacular as any in
the history of the country. What made this reversal even more manifest, however, was the conduct of the slaves on the
plantations and farms that lay in the path of the advancing Union Army.” 103
Sources: journals, newspapers, WPA narratives and oral histories
Connections: Grossman, Land, Foner, Reconstruction, Lehman, Promised, Ayers, Promise, Woodward, Origins
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (1991)
Argument: “What the mechanical cotton picker did was make obsolete the sharecropper system, which arose in the years after the Civil
War as the means by which cotton planters’ need for a great deal of cheap labor was satisfied. The issue of the labor supply in cotton
planting may not sound like one of the grand themes in American history, but it is, because it is really the issue of race. African slaves
were brought to this country mainly to pick cotton. For hundreds of years, the plurality of African-Americans were connected directly or
indirectly to the agriculture of cotton; at the time of the demonstration on the Hopson plantation, this was still true. Now, suddenly,
cotton planters no longer needed large numbers of black people to pick their cotton, and inevitably the nature of black society and of race
relations was going to have to change.” 5-6
• “The shift from an industrial to an information economy, argues Lemann, coupled with the instability of the rural southern
culture that many of these migrants brought north, was largely responsible for the family instability, high unemployment,
irresponsibility, and violence that became ever present in northern cities.” 1510, Broussard
• Howell Hopson wrote “In his memorandum, he wrote that “the introduction of the cotton harvester may have been comperatble
to the unveiling of Eli Whitney’s first hand operated cotton gin…” He was thinking mostly of the effect on cotton farming, but
of course the cotton gin’s impact on American society was much broader that that. It set off some of the essential confulsions of
the nineteenth century in this country. The cotton gin made it possible to grow medium- and short-staple cotton commercially,
which led to the spread of the cotton plantation from a small coastal area to most of the South. As cotton planting expanded, so
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did slavery, and slavery’s becoming the central institution of the Southern economy was the central precondition of the Civil
War.” 5
•
“This compelling book tells two interrelated stories: one, the story of the migration between the early 1940s and the late 1960s
of more than five million black Americans from the cotton plantations and small towns of the rural South to the ghettos of the
urban North; the other, the story of the evolution of the federal social policy in the 1960s and early 1970s in response to this
extraordinary demographic shift.” 635, Weiss
• “The political institution that paralleled sharecropping was segregation; blacks in the South were denied social equality from
Emancipation onward, and, beginning in the 1890s, they were denied the ordinary legal rights of American citizens as well.
Segregation strengthened the grip of the sharecropper system by ensuring that most blacks would have no arena of opportunity in
life except for the cotton fields. The advent of the cotton picker made the maintenance of segregation no longer a matter of
necessity for the economic establishment of the South, and thus it helped set the stage for the great drama of segregation’s end.”6
• “In 1940, 77 per cent of black American still lived in the South—49 per cent in the rural South. The invention of the cotton
picker was crucial to the great migration by blacks from the Southern countryside to the cities of the South, the West, and the
North. Between 1910 and 1970, six and a half million black Americans moved from the South to the North; five million of them
moved after 1940, during the time of the mechanization of cotton farming. In 1970, when the migration ended, black American
was only half Southern and less than a quarter rural; “urban” had become a euphemism for “black.”” 6
• “The black migration was one of the largest and most rapid mass internal movements of people in history—perhaps the greatest
not caused by the immediate threat of execution or starvation. In sheer numbers it outranks the migration of any other ethnic
group—Italians or Irish or Jews or Poles—to this country. For blacks, the migration meant leaving what had always been their
economic and social base in America and finding a new one.” 6
• “The great black migration made race a national issue in the second half of the century—an integral part of the politics, the
social thought, and the organization of ordinary life in the United States. Not coincidentally, by the time the migration was over,
the country had acquired a good measure of the tragic sense that had previously been confined to the South. Race relations stood
out nearly everywhere as the one thing that most plainly wrong in America, the flawed portion of the great tableau, the chief
generator of doubt about how essentially noble the whole national enterprise really was.” 7
• “The United States as a whole was in a kind of moral slumber about segregation in the South; white liberals were officially
against it, but they held out little hope that it could be eliminated. The South was still an essential part of the Democratic Party’s
coalition in presidential politics—John F. Kennedy carried the old Confederacy in 1960. Southern Democrats held the highest
leadership positions and controlled the most important committees in Congress. The white champions of civil rights were
mostly people like Eleanor Roosevelt, religious leaders, and figures from the Congress of Industrial Organizations side of the
labor movement, like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers—in other words, not members of the tough, pragmatic
tendency within the Democratic Party, Kennedy, as a senator preparing to run for president, voted with his Southern colleagues
to put an amendment in to the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that guaranteed jury trials (that is, certain acquittal) to people accused of
violating blacks’ voting rights.” 111
• “As the years pass, it has become clear that Johnson, in whose own soul was lodged a measure of the fundamental white
American ambivalence about blacks, was the only president in this century who was willing to put the American dilemma firmly
at the center of his domestic agenda.” 221
• Gangs, ghettos, better, but still low paying jobs, racisim, riots, and segregated neighborhoods with poor urban housing project
screening plagued Chicago.
Sources: memoirs, interviews, newspapers, government records
Connections: Grossman, Land, Foner, Reconstruction, Litwack, Been, Ayers, Promise, Woodward, Origins