by Jill Lepore
Rare was the American orator who could devise, out of a debate mired in invective, an argument about citizenship that rested on human rights. But Frederick Douglass, at the height of his rhetorical powers, made just this argument in a speech in Boston in 1869. Who deserves citizenship and political equality? Not people of one descent or another, or of one sex or another, but all people, Douglass insisted. “The Chinese will come,” he said. “Do you ask, if I favor such immigration, I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would.” Douglass spoke about what he called a “composite nation,” a strikingly original and generative idea, about a citizenry made better, and stronger, not in spite of its many elements, but because of them: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”36
Douglass’s expansiveness, his deep belief in equality, did not prevail. In its final language, the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”37 It neither settled nor addressed the question of whether Chinese immigrants could become citizens. And, in practice, it hardly settled what it proposed to settle—the voting rights of black men—for whom voting became only more difficult, and more dangerous, in the face of a rising tide of terrorism. Even though a Republican-controlled Congress passed the Force Act of 1870 and the Klan Act of 1871, making it illegal to restrict or interfere with suffrage, the Klan only increased its efforts to take back the South, rampaging across the land.
Nor did the Fifteenth Amendment settle the question of whether women could vote. On the one hand, it didn’t guarantee women that right, since it didn’t bar discrimination by sex (only discrimination by “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”); on the other hand, it didn’t suggest that women couldn’t vote. What it did do was to divide the equal rights movement, splitting the American Equal Rights Association, a civil rights organization, into two, Stanton and Anthony founding the National Woman Suffrage Association, which did not support the amendment, and the veteran reformer Lucy Stone and the poet Julia Ward Howe founding the rival American Woman Suffrage Association, which did. (The rift would be mended when the two organizations merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.)
In 1870, five black women were arrested for voting in South Carolina. But by now, women had decided to test the limits of female citizenship not only by voting but also by running for office. Victoria Woodhull, a charismatic fortune-teller from Ohio who’d attended a suffrage convention in 1869, moved to New York, and reinvented herself as a stockbroker, became the first woman to run for president. She ran as a “self-nominated” candidate of the party she helped create, the Equal Rights Party. In 1871 she announced, “We are plotting revolution.” Woodhull said she ran “mainly for the purpose of drawing attention to the claims of woman to political equality with man.” Ingeniously, she argued that women had already had the right the vote, under the privileges and immunities clause of the Constitution, an argument she brought before a House Judiciary committee, making her the first woman to address a congressional committee. “As I have been the first to comprehend these Constitutional and legal facts, so am I the first to proclaim, as I now do proclaim to the women of the United States of America that they are enfranchised.” Woodhull’s candidacy ended in ignominy. She spent Election Day in prison on charges of obscenity, and in the end, the Supreme Court ruled against her interpretation of the Constitution, deciding, in Minor v. Happersett, that the Constitution “did not automatically confer the right to vote on those who were citizens.”38
Woodhull’s adventurous, glamorous, and shocking campaign helped ensure that the question commanded attention, even if that attention was, at best, polite. “The honest demand of any class of citizens for additional rights should be treated with respectful consideration,” Republicans announced at their 1872 convention, a position that Stanton called not a plank but a splinter. At the party’s 1876 convention, marking the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, Sarah Spencer, of the National Woman Suffrage Association, said, “In this bright new century, let me ask you to win to your side the women of the United States.” She was hissed. At that same convention, Frederick Douglass, his raven hair now streaked with gray, became the first black person to speak before any nominating convention. Spencer had pleaded. Douglass pressed. “The question now is,” he said, eyeing the crowd of rowdy delegates, silenced by his booming voice, “Do you mean to make good to us the promises in your constitution?”39
Their answer, apparently, was no. That fateful year, a century after the nation was founded, Reconstruction failed, felled by the seedy compromises, underhanded dealings, personal viciousness, and outright fraud of small-minded and self-gratifying men. Grant, dissuaded from running for a third term, stepped down in 1876. Roscoe Conkling, a big, bearded boxer and New York senator, was so sure he’d get the party’s nomination that he picked his vice president and a motto—“Conkling and Hayes / Is the ticket that pays”—only to be defeated by his erstwhile running mate, the lackluster former governor of Ohio, Rutherford B. Hayes. When the Democrats met in St. Louis—the first time a convention was held west of the Mississippi—a delegation opposed to the nomination of the New York governor and dogged reformer Samuel Tilden hung a giant banner from the balcony of the Lindell Hotel. It read, “The City of New York, the Largest Democratic City in the Union, Uncompromisingly Opposed to the Nomination of Samuel J. Tilden for the Presidency Because He Cannot Carry the State of New York.”40 Tilden won the nomination anyway and, in the general election, he won the popular vote against Hayes. Unwilling to accept the result of the election, Republicans disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Eventually, the decision was thrown to an electoral commission that brokered a nefarious compromise: Democrats agreed to throw their support behind the man ever after known as Rutherfraud B. Hayes, so that he could become president, in exchange for a promise from Republicans to end the military occupation of the South. For a minor and petty political win over the Democratic Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.
Political equality had been possible, in the South, only at the barrel of a gun. As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end. The Klan terrorized the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people. (Between 1882 and 1930, murderers lynched more than three thousand black men and women.) Black politicians elected to office were thrown out. And all-white legislatures began passing a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place, down to the last street corner. Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars. Georgia became the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891. Courthouses provided separate Bibles. Bars provided separate stools. Post offices mandated separate windows. Playgrounds had separate swings. In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime.41 Slavery had ended; segregation had only begun.
II.
MARY E. LEASE crossed the plains like a tornado. “Raise less corn and more hell,” she said. She could talk for hours, her audience rapt. She stood almost six feet tall. “Tall and raw-boned and ugly as a mud hen,” one reporter called her; “the people’s party Amazon,” said another. A writer who watched her said she had “a golden voice,” an extraordinary contralto; to listen to her was to be hypn
otized. A founder and principal orator of the populist movement, Lease believed that after the Civil War the federal government had conspired with corporations and bankers to wrest political power from ordinary people, like farmers and factory workers. “There is something radically wrong in the affairs of this Nation,” Lease told a mesmerized crowd in 1891. “We have reached a crisis in the affairs of this Nation which is of more importance, more fraught with mighty consequence for the weal or woe of the American people, than was even that crisis that engaged the attention of the people of this Nation in the dark and bleeding years of civil strife.”42
A family unable to pay the mortgage on a farm in western Kansas headed back east to Illinois, having chronicled the journey on the canvas of their wagon: “left Nov. 20, 1894; arrived Dec. 26, 1894.” Lease had known that civil strife in her heart and by her hearth. Born in 1850, the daughter of Irish immigrants, she’d lost her father, two brothers, and an uncle in the Civil War; her uncle died at Gettysburg and her father starved to death as a prisoner of war. She never forgave the South, or the Democratic Party (which she called, all her life, “the intolerant, vindictive, slavemaking Democratic Party”).43 Married in 1873, she raised four children and lost two more to early death while farming in Kansas and Texas, and taking in washing, and also writing, and studying law. What was this new crisis endangering the nation that she talked about in hundreds of speeches, to applause as loud as a torrent of rain hitting the roof of a barn? “Capital buys and sells to-day the very heart-beats of humanity,” she said. Democracy itself had been corrupted by it: “the speculators, the land-robbers, the pirates and gamblers of this Nation have knocked unceasingly at the doors of Congress, and Congress has in every case acceded to their demands.”44 The capitalists, she said, had subverted the will of the people.
The populist movement, marble in the flesh of American politics into the twenty-first century, started in the South and in the West. Lease and people like her drew on the agrarian republicanism of Thomas Jefferson and the common-man rhetoric of Andrew Jackson, but they also influenced the political commitments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, serving as a bridge between populism and progressivism, the two great political reform movements that straddled the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
Lease fought for the farmers and wage laborers whose political voices, she believed, were being shouted down by capitalists. But she also fought for women’s suffrage and for temperance and helped to diffuse a distinctive female political style—the moral crusade—throughout American politics. Prevented from entering the electorate, women who wanted to influence public affairs relied on forms of popular politics that, among men, were on the decline: the march, the rally, the parade. In the late nineteenth century, a curious reversal took place. Electoral politics, the politics men engaged in, became domesticated, the office work of education and advertising—even voting moved indoors. Meanwhile, women’s political expression moved to the streets. And there, at marches, rallies, and parades, women deployed the tools of the nineteenth-century religious revival: the sermon, the appeal, the conversion.45
The female political style left its traces in every part of American politics, nowhere more deeply than in the populist tradition. Beginning in the twentieth century, it would drive the modern conservative movement.
What Lease described as a conspiracy between the federal government and capitalists, especially railroad company owners and bankers, had its roots in the Civil War itself, and in the federal government’s shifting policy toward the West. Before the war, the controversy over slavery had limited federal involvement in the West, but when the South seceded, Democratic opposition in Congress disappeared, giving Republicans a free hand. Without Democrats fighting for slavery’s expansion, Republicans had made haste to bring the West into the Union, and to exert authority over its economic development. A Republican Congress had approved the organization of new territories: the Dakotas (1861), Nevada (1861), Arizona (1863), Idaho (1863), and Montana (1864). In 1862 alone, in addition to the Homestead Act, the Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California) and the National Bank Act (to issue paper money to pay for it all). After the war, political power moved from the states to the federal government and as the political influence of the South waned, the importance of the West rose. Congress not only sent to the states amendments to the Constitution that defined citizenship and guaranteed voting rights but also passed landmark legislation involving the management of western land, the control of native populations, the growth and development of large corporations, and the construction of a national transportation infrastructure.
The independent farmer—the lingering ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman—remained the watchword of the West, but in truth, the family farming for subsistence, free of government interference, was far less common than a federally subsidized, capitalist model of farming and cattle raising for a national or even an international market. The small family farm—Jefferson’s republican dream—was in many parts of the arid West an environmental impossibility. Much of the property distributed under the terms of the Homestead Act, primarily in the Great Basin, was semi-arid, the kind of land on which few farmers could manage a productive farm with only 160 acres. Instead, Congress typically granted the best land to railroads, and allowed other, bigger interests to step in, buying up large swaths for agricultural business or stock raising and fencing it in, especially after the patenting of barbed wire in 1874.46
With the overwhelming force of the U.S. Army, the federal government opened land for settlement by suppressing Indian insurrections, including a rebellion of more than six thousand Dakota Sioux. In measures that began as exigencies of war, the federal government forced native peoples off their land while providing corporations with incentives to build railroads. In a single ten-year span, Congress granted more than one hundred million acres of public lands to railroad companies. In 1870, only two million non-Indians lived west of the Missouri River; by 1890, that number had risen to more than ten million.47
As railroads owned by large corporations extended their tentacles like so many octopuses across vast lands owned by giant companies, the big business of beef-cattle raising grew. Railroads made it possible to carry massive herds to market in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, and Kansas City. Buffalo that had long thrived on those lands were slaughtered nearly to extinction and replaced by Texas longhorns, five million of which were driven to railroad terminals in 1865 by cowboys of all backgrounds—white, black, Mexican, and Indian. By 1880, two million cattle were slaughtered in Chicago alone. In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.”48
The transformation of the West fueled the American economy, but it also produced instability, especially given rampant land speculation and the popularity of railroad stocks and bonds, novel financial instruments issued and managed by the federal government. That instability contributed to a broader set of political concerns that became Mary Lease’s obsession, concerns known as “the money question,” and traceable all the way back to Hamilton’s economic plan: Should the federal government control banking and industry?
Federal land and railroad projects required vast amounts of spending at a time when Americans were uncertain how to pay their debts. Like the Continental currency printed during the Revolutionary War, greenbacks, issued during the Civil War and not backed up by gold, soon became all but valueless. After the war, gold-bugs argued for the collection and retirement of the greenbacks and the establishment of a gold standard; “silverites” supported a standard of specie-backed curr
ency but not specifically gold. In 1869, Congress passed the Public Credit Act, promising to pay back its own debt in specie or specie-backed notes. But with all its borrowing and intricate financial instruments, the federal government, especially the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, became notorious for corruption and bribery.
Matters reached a crisis point in 1873, for Mary Lease and for the country, too. That spring, Lease and her husband and children moved to Kingman, Kansas, onto land they’d acquired through the Homestead Act. The Leases got their Kansas land for free, but Mary’s husband, Charles, had to borrow hefty sums of money from a local bank to buy tools and pay land office fees. They lived in a sod house, where Mary pinned newspaper pages to the walls so that she could read while kneading dough. For a few months they scraped by, but within a year they were unable to repay their debts, and the bank repossessed their land.49 Life on a Kansas farm was like trying to raise corn on a beach of sand. Better to raise hell.
In suffering financial ruin the dire year of 1873, the Leases were not alone. Eighteen-seventy-three saw the worst financial disaster since the Panic of 1837. Blame for the collapse rests on the desk of a white-whiskered Philadelphia banker named Jay Cooke, the latest in a long line of scoundrels that went all the way back to William Duer, whose swindling brought on the Panic of 1792. Cooke had made a great deal of money during the Civil War, investing in federal war bonds and in the Northern Pacific Railway, chartered by Congress in 1864. His brother Henry had been placed in charge of the Freedman’s Savings Bank, chartered in 1865. Henry Cooke illegally invested the bank’s money—the savings of freedmen—in his brother’s railroad ventures. The proposed Northern Pacific was supposed to go through lands owned and occupied by the Sioux, who, in 1872, began fighting against the U.S. Army. Investors pulled out of Jay Cooke’s scheme, and Henry Cooke’s savings bank collapsed. Jay Cooke & Company closed and declared bankruptcy, a bankruptcy that led to a nationwide depression.50 More than one hundred banks and nearly twenty thousand businesses failed. Even after the worst of the depression was over, the price of grain kept on falling. A farmer’s profit on a bushel of corn had been forty-five cents in 1870; by 1889, the profit on that same bushel had fallen to ten cents.51
