The Grangers had already moved into a political activism that peaked with the election of 1880, and they soon faded, replaced by the Farmers’ Alliances. This movement emphasized similar cooperative efforts but also stressed mainstream political participation and organization. Led by a host of colorful characters, including Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Kansas schoolteacher and lawyer famous for her recommendation that farmers should “raise less corn, and more hell,” the Alliance sought to appeal to blacks to widen its base.57 White Southerners, however, never supported the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and it disappeared within a few years. Meanwhile, every move to expand the appeal of the agrarians to one group, such as the freedmen, alienated other races or ethnic groups.
Despite the flamboyance of characters like Lease and Sockless Jerry Simpson, it was Charles W. Macune, the Alliance president, who formulated a genuine political plan of action.58 Macune advocated government loans monetized by the issue of new greenbacks or other types of government legal-tender notes, thus inflating the currency. The idea of inflation, either by the monetization of silver or through creation of new fiat money issued by the government, took on a life of its own as the end all of agrarian unrest. Farmers, sharecroppers, and any of the southern or western poor, for that matter, had become indoctrinated by pamphlets and incessant speeches that the solution to their problems was merely more money, with little instruction about the ramifications of money creation at the government level. William “Coin” Harvey, for example, in his popular book Coin’s Financial School (1894), offered a conspiratorial worldview of a money system controlled by sinister (often Jewish) bankers who, like the octopus (a favorite conspiracy symbol) had their tentacles throughout the international banking system.59 Other conspiracy-oriented books included Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People, by Sarah E. V. Emery (1887), and Mary Lease’s The Problem of Civilization Solved (1895), which raised the specter of both international banking cartels and racial pollution as the cause of American farmers’ plight.60 In these scenarios, the Rothschilds and other Jews of Europe, operating through a nebulous network in London (sometimes with the aid of the Bank of England and Wall Street), conspired to contract the money supply to benefit the lending classes.61
The developments surrounding the silver and money issue in the late nineteenth century originated with an international deflation that set in during the 1870s, but were in no way the work of the Rothschilds or other allegedly nefarious groups. These international forces were largely hidden from domestic critics and inflationists, who thought that increasing wage levels allowed them to pay back fixed debts with increasingly cheap dollars. (They ignored the fact that all other prices rise, and that although mortgages may stay constant, the price of seed, tools, farm implements, clothing, and fuel increases, eating up whatever savings are “gained” through the temporary artificial advantage in the mortgage payments.) Nevertheless, at the time, the postbellum policies of the U.S. government appeared to cause agrarian and labor distress.
It began with Congress’s 1873 decision not to monetize silver but to resume redemption of the Civil War–era greenbacks in 1879, putting the country on a de facto gold standard. This followed a decade’s worth of increased silver production, originating with the Comstock Lode in 1859, that had changed the ratio of exchange between silver and gold. Gold became more expensive, but the cheaper, more abundant silver was more widely available. This seemed to offer an opportunity for government action: if the government could be forced to purchase silver at fixed prices (higher than the market price) and coin it, silver miners would receive artificial price increases, and new silver coins would flood the West and South, providing a solution (it was thought) to the money question. When Congress rejected this scenario, silverites labeled the action the crime of ’73.
Meanwhile, the Treasury, under John Sherman, had carefully accumulated enough gold that the resumption occurred smoothly. Prior to the resumption, pressures from westerners and southerners to counteract the slow deflation that had gripped the economy led to calls for new issues of greenbacks. Alliance-related greenbackers even succeeded in electing forty-four congressmen sympathetic to the movement and four pro-Alliance governors in the years preceding 1892. The farmers increasingly found their calls for regulation and control of business drowned out by a larger new coalition of westerners and southerners who wanted the monetization of silver as the cure to all agrarian ills.
Since the early 1870s, worldwide deflationary pressures had forced prices down. Farm prices fell more than others, or so it seemed. Actually, it depended entirely on the crop as to whether prices genuinely dropped or stayed relatively even with other products. Despite the roundly criticized “crime,” the U.S. government had little impact on the price level, except when it came to bank notes. Since the Civil War, national banks had been the sole sources of note issue in the United States. That meant that notes tended to be more plentiful where there were many national banks, and less so where there were fewer. Both the South and the West were at a disadvantage in that case, the South because the comptroller of the currency was unlikely to give a bank charter to either former Confederates or freedmen, and the West because of the sparse population. Each region clamored for more money.
When the western silver mines proved richer than even the original prospectors had dreamed, both regions saw silver as a means to address the shortfall. In 1878, Richard “Silver Dick” Bland of Missouri and William Allison of Iowa introduced a measure for “free and unlimited coinage of silver” at a ratio of sixteen silver ounces for one gold ounce. Fearing a veto from President Hayes, Allison introduced amendments that limited the total silver purchased to $4 million per month at market prices. Allison’s amendments essentially took the teeth from the bill by robbing it of its artificial advantages for the holders of silver. Nevertheless, it reflected the new West/South coalition around “free silver,” meaning the purchase of all the western silver that could be mined, and its coinage at the inflated rate of sixteen ounces of silver to every ounce of gold. This was stated in the parlance of the day as sixteen to one, when the real relationship between silver and gold was seventeen to one. Put another way, silverites would be subsidized at taxpayers’ expense.
By Cleveland’s time, the federal mints had coined 215 million silver dollars, with more than three quarters of them in government vaults and only $50 million in actual circulation. Meanwhile, as miners hauled more silver in to exchange for gold, the government saw its gold supply dwindle steadily. Had the government circulated all the silver coins, it would not have produced prosperity, but inflation. Prices on existing goods would have gone up, but there would have been no new incentive to produce new goods. Instead, a different problem arose: the government had to pay gold to its creditors (mostly foreign) but had to accept the less valuable silver from its debtors. Congress formed into two camps, one around free silver, intending to increase the silver purchases and push for full bimetallism, and another around the gold standard. Cleveland was in the latter group. With a hostile president, and enough goldbugs in the House and Senate to prevent veto overrides, the silver issue stalled throughout the remainder of Cleveland’s term, but it would resurface with a vengeance under Harrison.
Shame of the Cities
While farmers agitated over silver, another large group of people—immigrants—flooded into the seaport cities in search of a new life. Occasionally, they were fleeced or organized by local politicians when they arrived. Often they melted into the American pot by starting businesses, shaping the culture, and transforming urban areas. In the process the cities lost their antebellum identities, becoming true centers of commerce, arts, and the economy, as well as hotbeds of crime, corruption and degeneracy—“a serious menace to our civilization,” warned the Reverend Josiah Strong in 1885.62 The cities, he intoned, were “where the forces of evil are massed,” and they were under attack by “the demoralizing and pauperizing power of the saloons and their debauching influence in pol
itics,” not to mention the population, whose character was “so largely foreign, [and where] Romanism finds its chief strength.”63 The clergyman probably underestimated the decay: in 1873, within three miles of New York’s city hall, one survey counted more than four hundred brothels housing ten times that number of prostitutes.64 Such illicit behavior coincided with the highest alcohol consumption levels since the turn of the century, or a quart of whiskey a week for every adult American.
Some level of social and political pathology was inevitable in any population, but it was exacerbated by the gigantic size of the cities. By the 1850s, the more partisan of the cities, especially New York and Boston, achieved growth in spite of the graft of the machines and the hooliganism. New York (the largest American city after 1820), Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston emerged as commercial hubs, with a second tier of cities, including New Orleans, Cincinnati, Providence, Atlanta, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland developing strong urban areas of their own. But New York, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans, especially, also benefited from being regional money centers, further accelerating their influence by bringing to the cities herds of accountants, bankers, lawyers, and related professionals.
By the mid-1800s, multistory buildings were commonplace, predating the pure skyscraper conceived by Louis Sullivan in 1890. Even before then, by mid-century two-story developments and multiuse buildings done in the London style had proliferated. These warehouses and factories soon yielded to larger structures made of brick (such as the Montauk buildings of Chicago in 1882) or combinations of masonry hung on a metal structure. Then, after Andrew Carnegie managed to produce good cheap steel, buildings were constructed out of that metal. More than a few stories, however, required another invention, the electric safety-brake-equipped elevator conceived by Elisha Otis. After Otis demonstrated his safety brake in 1887, tall buildings with convenient access proliferated, including the Burnham & Root, Adler & Sullivan, and Holabird & Roche buildings in Chicago, all of which featured steel frames. Large buildings not only housed businesses, but also entertainments: the Chicago Auditorium (1890) was ten stories high and included a hotel. After 1893 the Chicago city government prohibited buildings of more than ten stories, a prohibition that lasted for several decades.
If the cities of the late 1800s fulfilled Jefferson’s worst nightmares, they might have been worse had the crime and graft not been constrained by a new religious awakening.
Intellectuals, Reform, and the Foundations of Progressivism
The “age of reform,” as historian Richard Hofstadter put it, bloomed at the turn of the century, but it owed its heritage to the intellectuals of the 1880s reform movements. These reformers embodied a worldview that saw man as inherently perfectible. Only his environment, especially the roles cast on him by society, prevented him (or her) from obtaining that perfect state.65 Whereas many of the intellectuals of the late nineteenth century came from mainstream Christian religions, few—if any—traced their roots to the more fundamentalist doctrines of the Baptists or traditional Methodists. Instead, they were the intellectual heirs of Emerson and Unitarianism, but with a decidedly secular bent. Reformer Jane Addams, for example, had a Quaker background, but absorbed little Christianity. “Christ don’t help me in the least…,” she claimed.66 After her father died and she fell into a horrendous depression, Addams gained no support from Christianity: “When I am needing something more, I find myself approaching a crisis, & look rather wistfully to my friends for help.”67 Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose series of Atlantic Monthly articles in 1881 made him the original muckraker, was born to a Dutch Reformed minister-turned-bookseller. Lloyd himself was religious, though well educated (at Columbia). Like most of the early reformers, he had received a first-class education.
Indeed, the reformers almost always came from families of wealthy means, and were people who seldom experienced hardship firsthand. Mabel Dodge Luhan, the daughter of a Buffalo banker, attended all the best schools before coming to the conclusion that she could not trust her thoughts, only her senses. Lincoln Steffens’s father was an affluent merchant who could afford to send his son to universities in Europe, where he “acquired a taste for expensive clothes” and “dabbled in philosophy and aesthetics.”68 Upton Sinclair and Jack London proved exceptions to this rule. Sinclair’s family came from wealth on his mother’s side, but Sinclair’s father, a ruined former Southern aristocrat, had descended into alcoholism and supported the family by selling liquor, then hats. Unlike most of the other reformer intellectuals, Sinclair actually worked, selling dime novels to put himself through Columbia University before turning out the muckraker’s call to arms, The Jungle. London, a socialist, adventurer, sailor, gold seeker, and famous novelist whose Call of the Wild became a classic, had grown up poor, and had as a youth worked a wide range of jobs. More typical than either of these writers was Ida Tarbell, considered the original muckraker, whose father, Franklin, had a thriving oil tank-building business, providing her with a first-class education at the Sorbonne.
Another aspect of the social gospelers is worth mentioning here: with some two to three million fathers absent from the home during the Civil War and hundreds of thousands of fathers dead, literally millions of young boys were raised in households of women. Rather than learning masculine behaviors, they had “been raised by mothers who taught nurturing and caring,” in the process turning “to the ways of their mothers and took Christianity out of the home to save the world.”69 It is not a stretch to suggest that the casualty lists of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville produced a feminized, Progressive worldview among the emerging generation of reformers.
Best known for his association with the phrase “social Darwinism,” Sumner’s views were slightly more complicated. Writing in the Independent in 1887, Sumner identified the central threat to the nation as “plutocracy,” which was controlled by the wealthy who had the bourgeois tastes of the middle class. Embracing Malthusian views of overpopulation, Sumner expressed concern for the negative impact of charity and government policy, arguing in his “Forgotten Man” character introduced in his 1884 book, What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other. The danger, was as follows:
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.70
Benevolence, he argued, stole resources from those who would actually use funds to improve the lot of all in society. “Every bit of capital,” he argued, “which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer.”71 What the social classes “owed to each other” was to not create new impediments to the natural laws and laissez-faire capitalism that already functioned well.
Critics latched on to Sumner’s phrases, such as the “competition for life” and “struggle” to apply the natural science ideas of natural selection advanced by Charles Darwin. Yet Sumner had specifically warned against plutocracy and acquisition for its own sake. To Sumner, social classes best helped each other by performing their tasks with efficiency, honed by competition. That did not stop Sinclair from claiming that Sumner took “ghoulish delight” in “glorifying commercialism,” or prevent historian Richard Hofstadter from calling Sumner a “Social Darwinist” in his 1944 book, Social Darwinism in American Thought.72 Like other intellectuals and academics, Sumner ultimately relied on a scientific view of human behavior to explain (and defend) policy. And, like other intellectuals and academics, who at one time had as their central purpose the search for truth, Sumner had (at least in part) taken on the new vocation of social moralist.73 The emergence of this cla
ss was a phenomenon made possible only by the fantastic productive capabilities of capitalism, which provided the time and goods to allow people, essentially, to think for a living.
Grover Cleveland, Presidential Giant
Perhaps because his terms were separated by the administration of the opposing party under Benjamin Harrison, or perhaps because he simply refrained from the massive types of executive intervention that so attract modern big-government-oriented scholars, Grover Cleveland has been pushed well down the list of greatness in American presidents as measured by most modern surveys (although in older polls of historians he routinely ranked in the top ten). Republicans have ignored him because he was a Democrat; Democrats downplayed his administration because he governed like a modern Republican. Uncle Jumbo, as his nephews called him, had served as mayor of Buffalo, New York, in 1881, and the following year won election as governor of the state. Cleveland’s rise to prominence was nothing short of meteoric: he claimed the mayorship of Buffalo, the governorship of New York, and the presidency within a four-year period.
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