A People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn

the people and mouthed the sacred shibboleths of democracy, this did not mean that the common man ruled America. The professional politicians corning to the fore in the twenties and thirties, though sometimes self-made, were seldom ordinary. Both major parties were controlled largely by men of wealth and ambition. Lawyers, newspaper editors, merchants, industrialists, large landowners, and speculators dominated the Democrats as well as the Whigs.

  Jackson was the first President to master the liberal rhetoric—to speak for the common man. This was a necessity for political victory when the vote was being demanded—as in Rhode Island—by more and more people, and state legislatures were loosening voting restrictions. As another Jacksonian scholar, Robert Remini (The Age of Jackson), says, after studying electoral figures for 1828 and 1832:

  Jackson himself enjoyed widespread support that ranged across all classes and sections of die country. He attracted fanners, mechanics, laborers, professionals and even businessmen. And all this without Jackson being clearly pro- or antilabor, pro- or antibusiness, pro- or antilower, middle or upper class. It has been demonstrated thai he was a strikebreaker [Jackson sent troops to control rebellious workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal], yet at different times ... he and the Democrats received the backing of organized labor.

  It was the new politics of ambiguity—speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own in this time. TO give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the situation. Remini compares the Jacksonian Democrat Martin Van Buren, who succeeded Jackson as President, with the Austrian conservative statesman Metternich: "Like Metterm'ch, who was seeking to thwart revolutionary discontent in Europe, Van Buren and similar politicians were attempting to banish political disorder from the United States by a balance of power achieved through two well-organized and active parties."

  The Jacksonian idea was to achieve stability and control by winning to the Democratic party "the middling interest, and especially ... the substantial yeomanry of the country" by "prudent, judicious, well-considered

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  reform." That is, reform that would not yield too much. These were the words of Robert Rantoul, a reformer, corporation lawyer, and Jacksonian Democrat. It was a forecast of the successful appeal of the Democratic party—and at times the Republican party—in the twentieth century.

  Such new forms of political control were needed in the turbulence of growth, the possibility of rebellion. Now there were canals, railroads, the telegraph. In 1790, fewer than a million Americans lived in cities; in 1840 the figure was 11 million. New York had 130,000 people in 1820, a million by 1860. And while the traveler Alexis de Tocqueville had expressed astonishment at "the general equality of condition among the people," he was not very good at numbers, his friend Beaumont said. And his observation was not in accord with the facts, according to Edward Pessen, a historian of Jacksonian society (Jacksonian America).

  In Philadelphia, working-class families lived fifty-five to a tenement, usually one room per family, with no garbage removal, no toilets, no fresh air or water. There was fresh water newly pumped from the Schuylkill River, but it was going to the homes of the rich.

  In New York you could see the poor lying in the streets with the garbage. There were no sewers in the slums, and filthy water drained into yards and alleys, into the cellars where the poorest of the poor lived, bringing with it a typhoid epidemic in 1837, typhus in 1842. In the cholera epidemic of 1832, the rich fled the city; the poor stayed and died.

  These poor could not be counted on as political allies of the government. But they were there—like slaves, or Indians—invisible ordinarily, a menace if they rose. There were more solid citizens, however, who might give steady support to the system—better-paid workers, landowning farmers. Also, there was the new urban white-collar worker, born in the rising commerce of the time, described by Thomas Cochran and William Miller (The Age of Enterprise):

  Dressed in drab alpaca, hunched over a high desk, this new worker credited and debited, indexed and filed, wrote and stamped invoices, acceptances, bills of lading, receipts. Adequately paid, he had some extra money and leisure time. He patronized sporting events and theaters, savings banks and insurance companies. lie read Day's New York Sun or Bennctt's Herald—the "penny press" supported by advertising, filled with police reports, crime stories, etiquette advice for the rising bourgeoisie... .

  This was the advance guard of a growing class of white-collar workers and professionals in America who would be wooed enough and paid

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  enough to consider themselves members of the bourgeois class, and to give support to that class in times of crisis.

  The opening of the West was being helped by mechanization of the farm. Iron plows cut plowing time in half; by the 1850s John Deere Company was turning out ten thousand plows a year. Cyrus McCormick was making a thousand mechanical reapers a year in his factory in Chicago. A man with a sickle could cut half an acre of wheat in a day; with a reaper he could cut 10 acres.

  Turnpikes, canals, and railroads were bringing more people west, mote products east, and it became important to keep that new West, tumultuous and unpredictable, under control. When colleges were established out West, eastern businessmen, as Cochran and Miller say, were "determined from the start to control western education." Edward Rverett, the Massachusetts politician and orator, spoke in 1833 on behalf of giving financial aid to western colleges:

  Let no Boston capitalist, then, let no man, who has a large stake in New England .. . think that he is called upon to exercise his liberality at a distance, toward those in whom he has no concern. ... They ask you to give security to your own property, by diffusing the means of light and truth throughout the region, where so much of the power to preserve or to shake it tesidcs. . . .

  The capitalists of the East wore conscious of the need for this "security to your own property." As technology developed, more capital was needed, more risks had to be taken, and a big investment needed stability. In an economic system not rationally planned for human need, but developing fitfully, chaotically out of the profit motive, there seemed to he no way to avoid recurrent booms and slumps. There was a slump in 1837, another in 1853. One way to achieve stability was to decrease competition, organize the businesses, move toward monopoly. In the mid-1850s, priee agreements and mergers became frequent: the New York Central Railroad was a merger of many railroads. The American Brass Association was formed "to meet ruinous competition," it said. The Hampton County Cotton Spinners Association was organized to control prices, and so was the American Iron Association.

  Another way to minimize risks was to make sure the government played its traditional role, going back to Alexander Hamilton and the first Congress, of helping the business interests. State legislatures gave charters to corporations giving them legal rights to conduct business, raise money—at first special charters, then general charters, so that any

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  business meeting certain requirements could incorporate. Between 1790 and 1860, 2,300 corporations were chartered.

  Railroad men traveled to Washington and to state capitals armed with money, shares of stock, free railroad passes. Between 1850 and 1857 they got 25 million acres of public land, free of charge, and millions of dollars in bonds—loans—from the state legislatures. In Wisconsin in 1856, the LaCrosse and Milwaukee Railroad got a million acres free by distributing about $900,000 in stocks and bonds to fifty-nine assemblymen, thirteen senators, the, governor. Two years later the railroad was bankrupt and the bonds were worthless.

  In the East, mill owners had become powerful, and org
anized. By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the "Associates" controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.

  In the schoolbooks, those years are filled with the controversy over slavery, but on the eve of the Civil War it was money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country. As Cochran and Miller put it:

  Webster was die hero of die North—not Emerson, Parker, Garrison, or Phillips; Webster the tariff man, the land speculator, die corporation lawyer, politician for the Boston Associates, inheritor of Hamilton's coronet. "The great object of government" said he "is the protection of property at home, and respect and renown abroad." For these he preached union; for these he surrendered die fugitive slave.

  They describe the Boston rich:

  Living sumptuously on Beacon Hill, admired hy their neighbors for their philanthropy and their patronage of art and culture, these men traded in State Street while overseers ran their factories, managers directed their railroads, agents sold their water power and real estate. They were absentee landlords in the most complete sense. Uncontaminated by the diseases of the factory town, tliey were also protected from hearing the complaints of their workers or suffering mental depression from dismal and squalid surroundings. In the metropolis, art, literature, education, science, flowered in the Golden Day; in the industrial towns children went to work with their fathers and mothers, schools and doctors were only promises, a bed of one's own was a rare luxury.

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  Ralph Waldo Emerson described Boston in those years: "There is a certain poor-smell in all the streets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon, as well as in the lawyers' offices, and the wharves, and the same meanness and sterility, and leave-all-hope-behind, as one finds in a boot manufacturer's premises." The preacher Theodore Parker told his congregation: "Money is this day the strongest power of the nation."

  The attempts at political stability, at economic control, did not quite work. The new industrialism, the crowded cities, the long hours in the factories, the sudden economic crises leading to high prices and lost jobs, the lack of food and water, the freezing winters, the hot tenements in the summer, the epidemics of disease, the deaths of children—these ]ed to sporadic reactions from the poor. Sometimes there were spontaneous, unorganized uprisings against the rich. Sometimes the anger was deflected into racial hatred for blacks, religious warfare against Catholics, nativist fury against immigrants. Sometimes it was organized into demonstrations and strikes.

  "Jacksonian Democracy" had tried to create a consensus of support for the system to make it secure. Blacks, Indians, women, and foreigners were clearly outside the consensus. But also, white working people, in large numbers, declared themselves outside.

  The full extent of the working-class consciousness of those years—as of any years—is lost in history, but fragments remain and make us wonder how much of this always existed underneath the very practical silence of working people. In 1827 an "Address ... before the Mechanics and Working Classes ... of Philadelphia" was recorded, written by an "Unlettered Mechanic," probably a young shoemaker, who said:

  We find ourselves oppressed on every hand—we labor hard in producing all the comforts of life for the enjoyment of others, while we ourselves obtain but a scanty portion, and even that in the present state of society depends on die will of employers.

  Frances Wright of Scotland, an early feminist and Utopian socialist, was invited by Philadelphia workingmen to speak on the Fourth of July 1829 to one of the first city-wide associations of labor unions in the United States. She asked if the Revolution had been fought "to crush down the sons and daughters of your country's industry under ... neglect, poverty, vice, starvation, and disease...." She wondered if the new technology was not lowering the value of human labor, making people appendages to machines, crippling the minds and bodies of child laborers.

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  Later that year, George Henry Evans, a printer, editor of the Workingman's Advocate, wrote "The Working Men's Declaration of Independence." Among its list of "facts" submitted to "candid and impartial" fellow citizens:

  l.The laws for levying taxes are . . . operating most oppressively on one class of society....

  3.The laws for private incorporation are all partial . .. favoring one class of society to the expense of the other. . ..

  6.The laws .. . have deprived nine tenths of the members of the body politics, who are not wealthy, of the equal means to enjoy "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." ... The lien law in favor of the landlords against tenants ... is one illustration among innumerable others.

  Evans believed that "all on arriving at adult age are entitled to equal property."

  A city-wide "Trades' Union" in Boston in 1834, including mechanics from Charlestown and women shoe binders from Eynn, referred to the Declaration of Independence:

  We hold . .. that laws which have a tendency to raise any peculiar class above their fellow citizens, by granting special privileges, are contrary to and in defiance of those primary principles....

  Our public system of Education, which so liberally endows those seminaries of learning, which ... are only accessible to the wealthy, while our common schools ... are so illy provided for ... Thus even in childhood the poor are apt to think themselves inferior.. . .

  In his book Most Uncommon Jacksomans, Edward Pessen says: "The leaders of the Jacksonian labor movement were radicals.. . . How else describe men who believed American society to be torn with social conflict, disfigured by the misery of the masses, and dominated by a greedy elite whose power over every aspect of American life was based on private property?"

  Episodes of insurrection of that time have gone unrecorded in traditional histories. Such was the riot in Baltimore in the summer of 1835, when the Bank of Maryland collapsed and its depositors lost their savings. Convinced that a great fraud had taken place, a crowd gathered and began breaking the windows of officials associated with the bank. When the rioters destroyed a house, the militia attacked, killing some

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  twenty people, wounding a hundred. The next evening, other houses were attacked. The events were reported in Niles' Weekly Register, an important newspaper of that time:

  Last night (Sunday) at dark, the attack was renewed upon Revcrdy Johnson's house. There was now no opposition. It was supposed diat several diousand people were spectators of the scene. The house was soon entered, and its furniture, a very extensive law library, and all its contents, were cast forth, a bonfire made of them in front of the house. The whole interior of the house was torn out and cast upon the burning pile. The marble portico in front, and a great portion of the front wall were torn down by about 11 o'clock.. .. They proceeded to that of the mayor of the city, Jesse Hunt, esq. broke it open, took out the furniture, and burnt it before the door. . ..

  During those years, trade unions were forming. (Philip Foner's History of the Labor Movement in the U.S. tells the story in rich detail.) The courts called them conspiracies to restrain trade and therefore illegal, as when in New York twenty-five members of the Union Society of Journeymen Tailors were found guilty of "conspiracy to injure trade, riot, assault, battery." The judge, levying fines, said: "In this favored land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all.... Every American knows that or ought to know that he has no better friend than the laws and that he needs no artificial combination for his protection. They are of foreign origin and I am led to believe mainly upheld by foreigners."

  A handbill was then circulated throughout the city:

  The Rich Against the Poor!

  Judge Edwards, the tool of die aristocracy, against the people! Mechanics and working men! A deadly blow has been struck at your liberty!... They have established the precedent that workingmen have no right to regulate the price of labor, or, in other words
, the rich are the only judges of the wants of the poor man.

  At City Hall Park, 27,000 people gathered to denounce the court decision, and elected a Committee of Correspondence which organized, three months later, a convention of Mechanics, Farmers, and Working Men, elected by farmers and working people in various towns in New York State. The convention met in Utica, drew up a Declaration of Independence from existing political parties, and established an Equal Rights party.

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  Although they ran their own candidates for office, there was no great confidence in the ballot as a way of achieving change. One of the great orators of the movement, Seth Luther, told a Fourth of July rally: "We will try the hallot box first. If that will not effect our righteous purpose, the nest and last resort is the cartridge box." And one sympathetic local newspaper, the Albany Microscope, warned:

  Remember the regretted fate of the working-men—they were soon destroyed by hitching teams and rolling with parties. They admitted into dieir ranks, broken down lawyers and politicians.... They became perverted, and were unconsciously drawn into a vortex, from which diey never escaped.

  The crisis of 1837 led to rallies and meetings in many cities. The banks had suspended specie payments—refusing to pay hard money for the hank notes they had issued. Prices rose, and working people, already hard-pressed to buy food, found that flour that had sold at $5.62 a barrel was now $12 a barrel. Pork went up. Coal went up. In Philadelphia, twenty thousand people assembled, and someone wrote to President Van Buren describing it:

  This afternoon, the largest public meeting I ever saw assembled in Independence Square. It was called by placards posted through the city yesterday and last night. It was projected and carried on entirely by the working classes; widiout consultation or cooperation with any of those who usually take die lead in such matters. The officers and speakers were of those classes.... Tt was directed against the banks.