The Free And The Unfree
by
Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble


The Free
and the Unfree

******************

A PROGRESSIVE HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES

Peter N. Carroll

and

David W. Noble

Third Revised Edition

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Penguin Books 1977

Second edition published 1988
This third edition published 2001

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble, 1977, 1988, 2001

All rights reserved

Page 504 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

CIP data available
ISBN 014 10.01585

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Times Roman

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold
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published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For
Jeannette Ferrary
and
Lois Noble

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

PART ONE American Societies: From Settlement to Nation

chapter 1 Native Americans Meet Native Europeans

Native American cultures and their lands The first contact:
Columbus and European exploration The European
background: Protestant Reformation, political nationalism,
economic change, Renaissance curiosity Race for
empire: early exploration, conquest, and colonization

chapter 2 The Transplantation

The instruments of European expansion Tudor England
on the eve of colonization Anglican and Puritan conflict-Jamestown:
first permanent English settlement*
Puritans in New England Proprietary colonies Organizing
space and time The colonial family Colonial
religion: the Great Awakening and religious toleration

chapter 3 Colonial Economy and Social Structure

New England commerce and southern tobacco economy
Commerce and conflict in the Middle Atlantic colonies
Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts Westward expansion
vs. Native American interests Slavery and black
society The provincial elite Social mobility and social
stratification on the eve of revolution

chapter 4 Politics and the American Revolution

Political values and the emergence of modern politics
Colonial political structure The imperial wars and the
Treaty of Paris England's great war for empire and
colonial protest against taxation and other Intolerable
Acts The War for Independence: origins, military engagements,
peace settlement Establishing state governments
The Articles of Confederation: the first national
government and the call for reform

chapter 5 The Constitution and American Identity

Cultural nationalism after 1776 Constitution making:
the Philadelphia convention, Federalists vs. Antifederal
ists, ratification, and political consensus The emergence
of national identity Thomas Jefferson's legacy to America

PART TWO National Expansion: From Constitution to Civil
War

chapter 6 Social Patterns North and South

Marriage and the family Morality and religion The
organization of time in American life: the clock industry
Growth of factories, transportation, and industrial markets
Population growth and European immigration Industrial
values and the urban working class Social structure
in northern industrial society Southern slavery and
black culture: plantation economy and King Cotton,
black challenges to slavery Attitudes toward women and
children Women's rights and Seneca Falls

chapter 7 The Organization of Space

Western expansion and Manifest Destiny Geographical
exclusion: wars with Native Americans and removal to
reservations Texas and the Mexican War The colonization
movement vs. abolitionism Persecution of Mormons-Urban
planning and the growth of cities: grid
plans Anti-Catholicism: nativism and the Know-Nothing
party Consequences of racial separation: urban violence

	Nineteenth-century reforms: prisons, asylums, and the
environment

chapter 8 Politics and Power

Founding the Republic: the paradox of political parties
and local politics Alexander Hamilton's financial program
and the beginnings of national political parties:
Republicans vs. Federalists Foreign-policy formulations
under Washington, Jefferson, and Madison -War of 1812

	Era of Good Feelings: nationalism vs. sectionalism, the
Missouri Compromise, and political reform Andrew
Jackson, President of the people: Democrats vs. Whigs,

the Bank War, nullification controversy, and the Tariff of
Abominations Presidential election, 1856: Dred Scott
Decision, Lincoln in office, sectional crisis, secession and
the coming of civil war

chapter 9 The Civil War and American Identity

The war and its aftermath: strategies, battles, death immersion,
Emancipation Proclamation The weakness of
the Confederacy and the triumph of the nationalist attitude-The
Lincoln Presidency and republican destiny:
biracial society, Native Americans, social values, and
family relations Lincoln, symbol of unity and death

PART THREE An International Frontier Opens as the Western
Frontier Closes

chapter 10 The Collapse of Nineteenth-Century Culture

Debacle in the West for Native Americans: reservations
and the Dawes Act, disaster at Wounded Knee Spiritual
crisis and other threats to white Protestant values and
religious manifest destiny: divorce, fear of sex and death,
changing role of women Social activism: the Purity Crusade
The Teddy Roosevelt ideal Socializing adolescents
and dependent children for class roles Blacks: citizens
only in the eyes of the law

chapter 11 The New Industrial Economy

Railroads transform regional trade to a national economy
The modern corporation Growth of organized labor
Expansion and mechanization of agriculture Growth of
the metropolis and the urban labor force The black
ghetto: treadmill of poverty and underemployment

chapter 12 Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century

Reconstruction Democratic party and the "new South"
New industrial elite and the politics of corruption Populism:
the People's party allies with Democrats Harnessing
racial resentment against blacks: disenfranchisement,
legalized segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan Women in
politics and women's suffrage Regulation of power in
Washington

chapter 13 The End of Isolation, 1898-1920

President Theodore Roosevelt's two terms President
Woodrow Wilson: the man in office Exploiting foreign
markets America's Open Door Policy War in Europe,
1914, and American neutrality -The United States enters
World War I

PART FOUR The Closing of Frontiers at Home and Abroad,
1920-86

chapter 14 Prosperity and Depression, 1920-40

Postwar disillusionment: failure of the Purity Crusade,
the jazz era, and the "lost generation" Explosion of black
culture and black pride Postwar corporate boom Herbert
Hoover: at the helm of a consumer economy Stock
market disaster: facing the depression Roosevelt's emergency
measures

chapter 15 War, Economic Prosperity, and Consensus,
1936-60

Re-election of FDR Japan and Germany threaten American
neutrality War is declared War economy means
economic prosperity FDR on social issues Truman
completes FDR's fourth term Cold war with the Soviet
Union: Marshall Plan and NATO The collapse of Nationalist
China Korean conflict Eisenhower, the Red
scare, and the arms race The end of American innocence

chapter 16 New Visions, New Ethics, 1950-70

Voices of the beatnik poets Ecology: a "counterculture"
science Children in the counterculture Changing sex
and social roles: women's liberation Lifting taboos on
aging and death TV: mirror of modern times

chapter 17 Patterns of Economic Change, 1960-76

The Kennedy-Rostow economy Economic change and
the black community The growth of space technology
Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty International corporate
growth Inflation and recession Nixon faces the
economic crunch Oil crisis Curbing environmental exploitation
Limits to growth

chapter 18 American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics,
1960-76

John F. Kennedy and Cuba Escalating involvement in
Vietnam Johnson's Vietnam war Civil-rights activism
and change Native Americans and "Red Power" Political
women Nixon reunites Republican party. 1968Abuses
of the Presidency: Watergate

chapter 19 Politics and Society, 1976-86

Gerald Ford and the legacy of Watergate The rise and fall of
Jimmy Carter Resurgence on the right Reaganomics and the
economic crisis Iran-Contragate Social Issues: the family, the
elderly, and the poor

chapter 20 The Crisis of National Identity, 1987-2000

The legacy of Ronald Reagan The brief presidency of
George Bush Cultural pluralism and the rise of Bill Clinton
Prosperity, polarization, and political gridlock Washington
scandais and impeachment Multiculturalism and the election
of 2000

EPILOGUE

SELECTED REFERENCES

INDEX

Acknowledgments

This book had its inception in 1973 in a conversation at one of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's watering grounds, The Commodore Hotel in St.
Paul, Minnesota. Since then, we have depended upon more immediate
inspiration from numerous friends. From the beginning, the late
Alex Fraser encouraged us to undertake this project. Michael Batin-
ski, Robert Divine, Bruce Irvine, and Jennifer Williams read various
drafts of the manuscript and offered many suggestions for its improvement.
John Y. Simon generously shared his thoughts about
Lincoln, and Louis Carroll, "The Old Timer," contributed his
knowledge of early American clocks and watches. Susan Zucker-
man, our editor at Penguin, vastly improved the original manuscript
and turned our separate efforts into one book.

Jeannette Ferrary and Lois Noble supported us in so many ways
that even dedicating this book to them can be only a token acknowledgment;
presumably, they already know this.

PETER N. CARROLL
DAVID W. NOBLE

As we write this preface for the third edition, we recognize that The
Free and the Unfree is itself part of history. Writing now at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, we well remember that the idea for
our book had its origins during the cultural ferment of the 1960s. It
was then that we became colleagues and friends in the history department
of the University of Minnesota. One of us was middle-aged, and
one was at the beginning of his career. But we were drawn together
because both of us felt that we were participating in a national and
scholarly revolution that was changing the nature of U.S. history. We
wanted our teaching and writing to add momentum to what we understood
to be a challenge to an existing tradition of historical scholarship
that had diminished the importance of cultural outsiders, such as racial
minorities and women. In place of that old historical paradigm, we
wanted to help construct a new tradition of an inclusive democratic
history.

We were prepared for the insights of the 1960s by our own dissonant
experiences. David Noble had served in the racially segregated
U.S. Army during World War II. High fences separated camps into
white and black sections, and these two groups of American soldiers
were forbidden to fraternize. But German prisoners of war lived in
the white sections of the army camps, and white American soldiers
were encouraged to fraternize with these white enemies. Peter Carroll,
born the year that Noble entered military service, had been raised in
ethnically and racially mixed neighborhoods in New York City and
had begun teaching in Chicago in 1968 amid a backdrop of racial tension
and urban violence. In responding to his students' questions about
African-American history, he quickly discovered just how limited his
education as a historian had been. Later. Native-American students in
Minnesota asked similar questions, for which he felt utterly unprepared.
Indeed, it was through their common students that the authors
first realized their intellectual affinity.

The difficulty of approaching nonwhite history reflected the traditional
political values that dominated the historical profession. The
most important professional historians in the United States before
World War II were white Protestant men. Reflecting their personal cultural
experiences, they defined people who inhabited U.S. history as a

monolithic group not much different from themselves. As they focused
their attention on white male Protestants, their textbooks
excluded consideration of women, Native Americans, African Americans,
Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Catholics and Jews.
These textbooks told a story of liberty as Protestants from northern
Europe crossed the Atlantic to escape the power of established traditions
and institutions. This story of European power and American
liberty depended, however, on keeping other groups of Americans invisible
in textbooks. Otherwise one would notice that white Protestant
American men assumed patriarchal power over white women and all
nonwhites. One would also notice the power used by EuroAmericans
to conquer the Native Americans and Mexican Americans and to enslave
African Americans. This political, economic, and social pattern of a
powerful American culture dominating less powerful American cultures
expressed the everyday experience of the leading American historians.
Individually and collectively, they participated in informal
gentlemen's agreements that excluded most nonwhites as well as Jews
and Catholics from teaching U.S. history in major colleges and universities.
,

The experiences of World War II altered that intellectual consensus.
By the end of the 1940s, explicit racism and religious bigotry were no
longer respectable within the premier institutions of the academic
community. Moreover, in key areas of national life, the public acknowledged
the importance of certain nonwhites and the presumed
equality of white Catholics and Jews who had fought against fascism
in World War II. The Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 (the
"G.I. Bill of Rights"), for example, gave all war veterans opportunities
for education, home ownership, and health benefits, regardless of race,
color, or national origin. Meanwhile, the president of the United States
ordered the desegregation of the armed services, and the United States
Supreme Court outlawed legal segregation in housing and education.
Just as white ethnic Americans gained rights of full citizenship after
World War II, African Americans began a major civil rights movement
in the 1950s to end segregation and to exercjse their rights gained
with the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Other
groups, white and nonwhite alike, joined in the demand that the distinction
between the privileged citizenship of white Protestant males
and the second-class citizenship of all other Americans come to an
end.

This democratization of the larger society touched the core of the
academic world. Within the historical profession, more women, Jews,

Catholics, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans
began to teach U.S. history at major colleges and universities.
The content of the typical history curriculum also began to change as
historians paid more attention to the groups excluded from the old historical
consensus. But at the end of the 1960s, history textbooks still
told a story about a homogenous American people rather than about
their cultural and historical diversity. Even when books did address the
historical experiences of nonwhites and women, they treated such subjects
as footnotes to the larger white male experience.

And so amid the cultural ferment of our own times, we began to discuss
the possibility of writing a multicultural history of the United
States. We saw ourselves as part of the first group of historians who illuminated
the historical presence of those who not only had been oppressed
by the dominant culture, but also had been rendered invisible
in the retelling of the nation's past. We were certain that this domination
had never been as complete as the conventional textbook narratives
that gave voice only to white Protestant males. We believed
that there always had been a dialogue between the more powerful and
the less powerful. We expected that when we studied the cultures
of the Americans excluded from the textbooks of the 1960s, we would
find that the less powerful had always had significant influence on the
more powerful. Happily, the last thirty years of historical scholarship
has confirmed that expectation. When we wrote the first edition of The
Free and the Unfree in the 1970s, we did not want to discuss a variety
of American cultures in isolation from each other. Rather, we wanted
to illustrate how American history had always been a conversation
with many voices and perspectives. We understood that some were
more powerful and influential, but they had never been omnipotent. It
was only in textbooks that historians had created the illusion of a single
American people who spoke in unison. We hoped that The Free
and the Unfree would offer an alternative to this illusion. We hoped
that we would encourage our readers to engage in further exploration
of the rich variety of American voices. That continues to be our hope
as we enter the new century. We continue to see The Free and the Unfree
as an expression of an unfinished revolution. Much remains to be
done in the ensuing century both to democratize the United States and
the telling of its story.

Peter N. Carroll
David W. Noble
October 2000

History is about time--changes, passages, processes--and so it hinges
on sequence and chronology. But history is also about place--setting,
environment, context. Where events happen may be more important
than when.

Consider these examples:

On March 31, 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat alone at his home at
Monticello in Virginia and wrote in his pocket account book: "My
mother died about eight o'clock this morning in the 57th year of her
age." The blow immobilized him. Instead of returning to Philadelphia,
where the second Continental Congress had begun debating whether
to declare independence from Great Britain, Jefferson collapsed with
a massive, excruciating headache that lasted for six weeks. Outwardly,
he was unable to work. Only when his nerves had calmed would he
return to the political stage. And then, in six weeks of terrific productivity,
Jefferson wrote his two greatest works: the constitution of
the state of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence.

On the same day that Mrs. Jefferson died, a housewife in the town
of Braintree in the colony of Massachusetts, Abigail Adams, wrote a
long letter to her husband, John, who was attending the Philadelphia
congress. "I long to hear that you have declared an independancy,"
she said, "and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose
it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the
Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.
Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.
Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. ..." John Adams
laughed at the protest. He had heard already that talk of independence
"has loosened the bonds of government everywhere"--that children
and apprentices "were disobedient; that schools and colleges were
grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes
grew insolent to their masters." But, he quipped, "your letter was the
first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than
all the rest, were grown discontented." Still, Abigail Adams's plea
entered no public record. She remained at the sidelines of power.

On that same day, March 31, 1776, Father Pedro Font, a priest who
was accompanying an expedition of Spanish explorers through the hills
that stretch south from San Francisco in California, noted in his diary

a remarkable encounter: "We came upon a poor Indian who was coming
very carelessly alone, carrying a bunch of grass such as they eat.
But as soon as he saw us, he manifested the greatest possible fright
that it is possible to describe. He could do nothing but throw himself
full length on the ground, hiding himself in the grass in order that we
might not see him, raising his head only enough to peep at us with one
eye." So frightened was this Ohlone-speaking Indian that he could not
grasp in his hand the glass beads that the Spanish offered to him.
"Completely terrified, and almost without speaking, he offered . . .
his bunch of grass, as if with the present he hoped to save his life,
which he feared was lost." Taking pity on "the poor unfortunate fellow,"
Father Font left him alone. "He must never have seen Spaniards
before," he concluded, "and that is why we caused him such surprise
and fear." The Ohlones had good reason to fear. Within a century,
they were virtually extinct.

Each of these historical episodes--the lonely creativity of Thomas
Jefferson; the frustrations of Abigail Adams; the terror of that California
Indian--forms part of the larger history of the American people.
Where these events happened, however, has determined their significance
for historians. In the conventional narrative of American history,
attention focuses on events in the public arena--the debates of the
Continental Congress, the drafting of the Declaration of Independence
--in other words, on places that were controlled largely by white,
male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). By contrast, the domain of
women and racial and ethnic minorities--the household, the slave
quarters, the tule-grass teepee--have, until recently, received far less
attention. The vantage point of historians--where they look for appropriate
historical subjects--has shaped the content of their history.

Since the first publication of The Free and the Unfree, scholars have
begun to explore these terra incognita. Today, it is possible for undergraduates
to learn far more about women's history or black history
or working-class history than most senior scholars knew just a generation
ago. Consequently, the bibliographies that appear at the end of
this book have been revised and updated to incorporate the most
contemporary historical research. And yet, if we may sound immodest,
almost all the new scholarship about these neglected aspects of American
history fits within the framework of this book. While we now know
a great deal more about the affairs of politically limited peoples in the
United States--what we here call "outgroups"--their history can be

ercised power, that ruled the country. Indeed, the rise of the new
scholarship itself reinforces the book's overall thesis that the leadership
of the WASP elite is steadily eroding in the face of alternative visions
of the American past--and its future.

In acknowledging the expansion of outgroup history, however, it is
still premature to celebrate the demise of the old historical paradigms.
For the familiar focus on political parties, presidential elections, and
wars--what are, in short, the affairs of male WASPs--continues to
dominate the teaching of American history, particularly in the introductory
survey courses. The current popularity of "back to basics" in
the United States encourages this conservative trend. Moreover, even
historians of the outgroups often hesitate to challenge the traditional
interpretations of the leadership groups. Having chosen to study powerless
peoples, they shun the larger questions of power relations. Thus,
the rise of social history in the 1970s and 1980s coincides, paradoxically,
with a hardening of the conventional historical structure.

In bringing this history up to date, we have emphasized the continuous
themes in American culture. From what William James called
"the blooming, buzzing confusion" of current affairs, we have endeavored
to create a sense of order and coherence. Thus the Presidencies
of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, which form chapter
19, are woven into the historical tapestry of political values and
institutions. So, too, the events of popular culture during the past
decade express the historical dreams and concerns of ordinary Americans.
Both stories need to be told. For we believe that history, at
bottom, must embrace the experiences of all people.

In the mid-1970s, we described this perspective as "counterculture"
history. Since then, that term has itself become part of history--ossified,
conjuring up images of dreamy denial rather than vigorous dissent.
What we intended (the nomenclature notwithstanding) was a
holistic vision--one that saw American history as a convergence of
time, place, and power, with diverse peoples coexisting, albeit unevenly,
and the sum adding up to more than its parts. The history of
the United States, precisely because it was experienced so differently
by its constituents, produced a national identity that could transcend
mere ethnic, class, or political interests. This history endeavors to
embrace all Americans--not only the government, but the people, the
rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, in short, the free
and the unfree.

In preparing this revision, we would like to acknowledge the advice
and assistance of Michael C. Batinski, Matthew Carroll, Natasha CarrollFerrary,
Jeannette Ferrary, and Patricia Noble-Olson. And a special
thanks to Gerald Howard of Viking Penguin for supporting our efforts.

Peter N. Carroll
David W. Noble

Preface.

"In the beginning," wrote the philosopher John Locke in 1689, "all the
World was America, and more so than that is now." To seventeenth-century
Europeans, America symbolized some mythical state of nature, virtually
uncorrupted by civilization and practically devoid of government and
laws, arts and sciences. Locke's statement also implied that this
unblemished condition already had been altered by the introduction into
the wilderness of European civilization; colonization had introduced
social institutions into what previously had been a natural world of
God's Creation.

To Locke's contemporaries, these changes seemed entirely advantageous
and demonstrated the obvious blessings of European expansion. Since
Europe epitomized human civilization, then Europe must transform the
remainder of the earth into its own image. This grandiose vision
provided a powerful impetus for overseas expansion that enabled the
relatively small nations of Western Europe to conquer the entire world
and, to a large extent, to impose their values and institutions upon the
other inhabitants of the globe.

It is from the perspective of European expansion that this history is
written. About five hundred years ago, a small but aggressive European
culture burst its traditional geographic bounds and began extending its
influence around the world. Africans and Asians felt the effects of
Western expansion first, succumbing to the blandishments of European
traders and the force of European arms. But the European conquest
achieved its greatest successes in another part of the globe, the
apparently simple state of nature called America. The Europeanization of
the New World had profound effects upon the American continent, upon the
native inhabitants, and ultimately upon Europe itself.

The expansion of European culture represented more than political
domination. Renaissance Europeans themselves were not many centuries
away from a premodern peasant mentality that passively accepted the
natural state of the world and believed in preserving traditional values
and institutions. Yet the driving force of European expansion depended
upon a modern technological vision which insisted that rational secular
improvements should be imposed upon the irrationality of nature and
traditional societies. These assumptions enabled Europeans to define
themselves as a

superior people and to believe earnestly that the process of
Europeanization was good for everyone.

During the past century, however, some of the victims of Europeanization
have begun to challenge their ethnocentric oppressors. In international
terms, liberation movements in the so-called Third World have attacked
the political and economic power of the Western empires and have
resisted new modes of exploitation. No less important has been the
movement for liberation within the modern Europeanized societies. In the
United States, such movements as Black Power, Red Power, Women's
Liberation, and the youthful counterculture represent fundamental
resistance to the culture of the dominant elite. From this perspective,
the history of the American people may be seen as the attempt by
transplanted Europeans to impose Western values on nature and society in
the face of spreading opposition from within--from Native Americans,
blacks, ethnics, women, and, most recently, young people.

Historians tend to group themselves according to their interpretive
biases. Early in the twentieth century, "progressive" historians viewed
the history of the United States as a story of evolutionary progress in
which democratic principles struggled against the forces of reaction. In
the 1950s, a school of "consensus" historians placed the American past
in the context of the cold war and emphasized the uniqueness and
superiority of American ideals. By the 1960s, this optimism gave way to
historical revisionists who again described an American history based on
ethnic, racial, and class conflict.

In these terms, The Free and the Unfree may be described as a
"counterculture" interpretation of American history. Though it
recognizes the political preeminence of a ruling elite--which for the
most part consisted of male white Anglo-Saxon Protestants--it also
examines the historical experiences of some of the outgroups-- Native
Americans, Afro-Americans, ethnic Americans, and female Americans. This
discussion avoids both the simplifications of "consensus" historians as
well as the polarities of "conflict" historians. Instead, it emphasizes
a dynamic relationship between established groups and outgroups. To
explore this dynamic, The Free and the Unfree describes not only the
American political system but also the cultural milieu upon which it was
based.

In structure, The Free and the Unfree is divided into four historical
eras: (1) pre-Columbian settlement to the adoption of the United States
Constitution; (2) the founding of the republic

through the Civil War; (3) Reconstruction through World War I; (4) 1920
to the present. Each historical era is treated in a series of
interrelated, overlapping chapters that examine social, economic, and
political events.

This structure replaces the familiar political chronology that tends to
emphasize the history of established groups. The thematic arrangement of
chapters also illuminates aspects of American culture usually ignored in
standard works. The analyses of "American space" and "American time" for
example, uncover broad cultural trends that affected all people, not
merely those who happened to control political power.

The last chapter of each historical section recapitulates the
relationship between the free and the unfree at a specific point in
time. These discussions focus on the changing American identity as
expressed in the lives of four national leaders: Jefferson, Lincoln,
Wilson, and Nixon. Jefferson represented the values of the ruling elite
in the Revolutionary era, just as Lincoln, Wilson, and Nixon did in
their own epochs. The changing stature of these Presidents and their
changing relationships to the outgroups reveals a fundamental alteration
in the national identity during the past three centuries. If these
trends continue, perhaps the outgroups in the United States may yet
transform the home of the brave into the land of the free.

It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish
it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds.

—Black Elk

Part One.

*****************

AMERICAN SOCIETIES: FROM SETTLEMENT TO NATION

"The course of humanity was orderly"

******************

Chapter 1.

Native Americans Meet Native Europeans

Native American cultures and their lands The first contact: Columbus and
European exploration

The European background: Protestant Reformation, political nationalism,
economic change, Renaissance curiosity

Race for empire: early exploration, conquest, and colonization

Five hundred years ago, on the warm, windswept islands known today as
the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas, there existed a people called the
Arawak. They had emigrated from the South American mainland about five
hundred years earlier in rough dugout boats. Though peaceful and
friendly, the Arawak had displaced the indigenous peoples, who were
smaller in number and lived without agriculture or pottery, to the more
northern regions of present- day Haiti and Cuba. Now, however, the
Arawak themselves were being pressed by their bellicose neighbors, the
Caribs, and lived in fear of invasion.

Neither the Arawak nor the Caribs nor the other smaller groups of the
region possessed written alphabets or calendars. They relied for
continuity, like other preliterate peoples, upon oral traditions that,
along with the people themselves, have become extinct. We must
reconstruct their lives from fragments of pottery, burial remains, and
other artifacts that have endured the passage of centuries. It is an
imprecise operation, to be sure, but it provides sufficient information
to glimpse these peoples on their own terms. And there is also the
testimony of their literate conquerors, the Spanish, who began invading
the area nearly five centuries ago.

As in other premodern societies, the peoples of the Caribbean lived in
harmony with nature, adjusting their existence to the natural rhythms of
life. For food, they cultivated a variety of crops, particularly maize,
beans, and yams, and made cassava bread from yuccas. Skilled as
fishermen, they supplemented this diet with shellfish, rich in proteins.
They wore scant clothing, preferring to go naked in the tropical sun,
and probably did no weaving. But they twisted various wild fibers,
including cotton, into nets, bags, and hammocks. Their salubrious
environment enabled them to flourish, and it is now estimated that the
population of the region, at the time of the first European contacts,
numbered about eight million.

The density of population--far greater than previously believed
--reflected not simply the abundance of food, but also the ecological
balance of the area. For these people, nature and humanity did not exist
in opposition but interacted both in material and in spiritual ways.
Their rituals and taboos brought them closer to the

natural flow of the sun and the tides, to the heavens as well as the
earth.

The Arawak believed in a world of spirits, some human in shape, some
animals or totems, which protected each person and, together, the group.
These spirits formed a hierarchy that paralleled the social organization
of the people, thus linking the human world with the supernatural. The
leaders' personal spirits, in other words, constituted the gods of the
entire group. Today, there is no one left to practice their worship, but
we know that at ceremonial times they displayed their idols on large
ball courts and propitiated the spirits of their gods with elaborate
rituals. Apparently, such spiritual forces could not protect them from
invaders. For within one century of the Spanish arrival, the peaceful
Arawak and most of their neighbors became extinct, victims of European
disease, maltreatment, and cultural upheaval.

While the Arawak fished and planted around their sun-blanched islands,
other complex cultures flourished in other parts of the Americas. These
peoples varied enormously, ranging from poor nomadic food gatherers of
the interior plains of North America to opulent fishing societies of the
Pacific Northwest, from the woodland hunting tribes of what is now the
northern United States to the wealthy and powerful peoples of Central
America. Together, depending upon population estimates reconstructed in
our own times, they constituted somewhere between fifty and one hundred
million people, of which about ten million lived in North America. Many
areas in the western hemisphere contained denser populations than
regions of Western Europe in the age of Christopher Columbus. America
was not a vacant wasteland awaiting the arrival of "civilized"
Europeans.

Consider, for example, the chiefdoms of the Pacific Northwest, which
included, among others, such groups as the Tlingits of southern Alaska,
the Nootka on Vancouver Island, and the Yurok of northern California.
Like the Arawak of the Caribbean, these peoples were blessed with an
incredibly rich,environment based on the vast stock of fish, especially
salmon, and abundant edible plants. The large succulent fish annually
make their way upstream to spawn and then return to the sea, and the
indigenous peoples learned to make nets and weirs to harvest this crop.
The natives of the region also developed techniques to preserve their
fish, thus assuring sufficient food in seasons of scarcity. The natural
abun-

dance encouraged the formation of a sedentary society even though
agriculture remained generally undeveloped.

The ecological patterns of the Pacific Northwest influenced the social
organization of the local peoples. Since the acquisition of food was no
problem, wealth and status within society became more serious concerns.
One way of demonstrating wealth was to acquire more slaves than anyone
else, a social consideration that encouraged sporadic warfare among the
tribes as a way of obtaining slaves. Such servants possessed the lowest
position in these status conscious groups.

The desire for prestige also produced a periodic mass feast known as a
"potlatch" (a corruption of the Nootka word meaning "to give"), in which
a host demonstrated his affluence by giving away property. Such
generosity might result in the emancipation or murder of slaves and the
destruction or distribution of blankets and copper, as well as the
lavish provisioning of guests. Such conspicuous consumption, to use a
modern phrase, reinforced the elaborate distinctions within the social
hierarchy.

The concern for visible symbols of wealth also led to the acceptance of
sumptuary laws, which defined appropriate dress and ornamentation for
certain social groups. The chief enjoyed the most opulent accouterments,
including the most expensive costume and the largest house. Such
patterns, similar to the policies established by the monarchies of
Europe, reflect a people living well above the minimal needs of
subsistence. The introduction of Western technology, however, soon
undermined this social order by bringing mass produced goods and
epidemic diseases.

Halfway across the continent, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic
seaboard, lived groups of interrelated cultures. Speaking such languages
as Siouan, Algonquian, and Iroquoisan, they formed complicated societies
that often differed markedly from one another. Relying upon agriculture,
as well as on fishing, hunting, and trapping, the peoples of the Eastern
Woodlands built stable villages, some of them with as many as five
thousand inhabitants. Living either in birch-covered wigwams or in
rectangular longhouses, they usually palisaded their villages with log
stockades. They also possessed, in their light birchbark canoes, a
reliable means of commerce and communication with other tribes.

As the ecological patterns of this large geographic area varied
enormously, each native group adjusted its lifestyle to benefit from

the available resources. Such patterns reflected not so much economic
prudence as a spiritual relationship with nature. Regardless of regional
variations, the native peoples viewed the world as a balanced system in
which all creation, animate and inanimate, existed harmoniously. Thus
the biological world of edible plants or fish or game remained
intimately attached to a spirit world. Humanity was but one part of that
system. The acquisition of food, clothing, or shelter therefore depended
upon maintaining spiritual relations with the rest of creation. From
this perspective, the idea of owning parcels of land, bits of creation,
was unthinkable.

The native cultures recognized the importance of preserving the
ecological balance and protecting the wildlife and the land. This
attitude partly reflected the seasonal shifts in available resources.
Equally important was the need to palliate the spirit world for the
appropriation of material goods. Thus hunting followed explicit
spiritual rules or taboos, lest the destruction of certain living
creatures undermine the cosmic unity. Among the Micmac, an Algonquian
tribe of eastern Canada, the moose and beaver, both indispensable for
life, received careful treatment after being killed. Their bones were
never burned, nor thrown into the rivers, nor given to the dogs. Such
taboos reflected a fear that the animal spirits would inform the living
animals of their fates and thus prevent their further capture by the
native hunters. These spiritual concerns structured the natives'
relationship to the entire natural world. Only after the appearance of
Europeans did the system begin to disintegrate, and with it, the
ecological balance of the continent.

Perhaps the most famous of the Eastern Woodlands peoples were the
Iroquois, a powerful tribal group that lived between the Adirondack
Mountains and the Great Lakes in what is now central New York. Scattered
through the forest, the Iroquois formed communal societies in which all
property was shared. In this culture the men were responsible for
hunting and fishing, both spiritually endowed enterprises, while the
women cultivated the sacred soil of the Mother Earth. Since the fruits
of these labors were shared, the division of tasks along sexual lines
worked to strengthen communal bonds.

The Iroquois peoples, called by the Europeans the League of the
Iroquois, embraced five maior tribes: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Sene cas,
Cayugas, and Onondagas; later, a sixth tribe, the Tuscaroras, entered
the union. According to oral tradition, the League originated

plorers began to penetrate the coastal areas of North America. Perhaps
there was a causal relationship between the two events, for the Iroquois
League, by successfully terminating the internecine wars between the
tribes, enabled the natives to present a fairly united front to the
Europeans.

The Iroquois peoples had previously been badly divided by persistent
blood feuds and wars of revenge. Amid this general unrest, the arrival
of Europeans, or perhaps simply the growth of the native population,
heightened the desirability of tribal unity. These unarticulated needs
achieved spiritual importance when a Huron prophet named Deganawidah,
perhaps a supernatural apparition, inspired a vision of a Great Peace.
Appearing before Hiawatha, a Mohawk sachem, Deganawidah proposed a union
among the Iroquois tribes, based primarily upon the cessation of warfare
and the creation of an intertribal council of chiefs. The Iroquois must
bind their hands together so firmly and form a circle so strong,
declared Deganawidah, "that if a tree should fall upon it, it could not
shake or break it, so that our people and grandchildren shall remain in
the circle of security, peace, and happiness."

Captivated by this dream, Hiawatha traveled from village to village,
appealing for tribal unification. His personal commitment, together with
the practicality of his message, won numerous converts and facilitated a
formal confederation. Binding the tribes together was a council of fifty
chiefs, or sachems, chosen proportionately by the five nations. These
hereditary leaders negotiated differences between tribes but lacked the
power to interfere directly in internal tribal matters. Nor could this
council coerce individual tribes to abide by its decisions. But the
system brought peace to the Iroquois and enabled them to expand their
influence among other native groups. As an independent force the
Iroquois played a crucial role in the balance of power once the European
nations began to colonize North America.

The political structure of the Iroquois League reflected the social
organization of the tribes. At the core of Iroquois society was a
rnatrilineal family system. Mothers and daughters perpetuated the
kinship unit, while the sons departed at marriage to live within their
wives' families. Children belonged to the mother's lineage and followed
the matrilineal branch in cases of divorce. The inheritance of
possessions at death passed in a similar manner from mother to daughter.

The basic political unit of the Iroquois was the "fireside," which

consisted of the mother and all her children. Groups of firesides joined
by blood along matrilineal lines--sisters, for example-- formed groups
called ohwachiras. At the heads of the ohwachiras

were the oldest women, the village matriarchs. These leaders chose male
delegates to represent the group at the clan and tribal councils as well
as in the grand council of the League of the Iroquois. The male sachems
served for life and possessed considerable power. Yet the matriarchs
wielded ultimate power and could depose the male delegates if they
disagreed about policy. The political process among the Iroquois thus
depended upon consent rather than authority. In the final analysis, it
was the community that shaped political decisions.

The unity of the Iroquois made them especially strong enemies, and the
neighboring Algonquian peoples greatly feared their warriors. Believing
that the confederation was destined to expand over the continent, the
Iroquois often engaged in wars of conversion. Yet, although they
occasionally adopted some of their captives into the group, more
frequently they tortured their prisoners to test their bravery. "One
must be there to see a living picture of Hell," reported one Jesuit
witness.

South of the Iroquois confederacy, in what is now the southeastern
United States, there existed a large number of different peoples,
including the Creeks, Yamasees, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Cherokees.
Based upon mixed economies of hunting and agriculture, these tribes
possessed large populations, lived in settled villages, and maintained
extensive trade networks with other native groups. All of them had been
influenced by an earlier civilization, the Mississip pian, which was
characterized by gigantic earthworks, or mounds. These structures, some
of them larger than the great Egyptian pyramids, were used for burial
and ceremonial purposes.

The most striking of these cultures was the Natchez, a group of people
numbering about four thousand that occupied at least nine villages along
the Mississippi River. The Natchez were a rigidly hierarchical and
authoritarian society headed by an absolute chief called the Great Sun.
Believed to be a descendant of a sun god, the Great Sun enjoyed
spiritual as well as secular power. The French explorers and
missionaries who encountered the Natchez about three hundred years ago
were deeply impressed by the power of the chief, perhaps because their
own society--the France of Louis XIV--was authoritarian also.

Nevertheless, the French colonizers quickly destroyed the

Natchez, first by bringing epidemic diseases, then by killing the
natives in war. In 1699 the Natchez rose for the last time, but French
retaliation was brutal and thorough. All the survivors, including the
Great Sun, were sold into slavery, and the eternal fire that had burned
from the sacred Natchez temple was quenched forever. Only the silent
artifacts, dug up periodically by archaeologists, testify to what was
once a magnificent civilization.

A similar fate befell an even more powerful society, the Aztec of
Mexico. No brief discussion could adequately describe the grandeur of
this culture. But consider the words of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a
soldier who accompanied the Spanish conquistador Cortes on his
triumphant march into Mexico. "Some of the soldiers among us," he
reported, "had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and
all over Italy, and in Rome." But "so large a market place and so full
of people, and so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld
before." And some of these soldiers "even asked whether the things we
saw were not a dream."

Surprisingly, the Aztecs had arrived in Central America only five
hundred years before the Spanish soldiers. Benefiting from the
sophisticated agricultural tradition in the area, they built their
capital city, Tenochtitlan (at the present site of Mexico City), by
draining the local swamps and creating a complex system of irrigation.
With an abundant food supply, their population grew quickly, and the
Aztecs began expanding their influence by military conquest. The Aztecs
made exacting demands upon their defeated neighbors: control of trade
and markets and the payment of tribute and human bodies to be sacrificed
in bloody religious ceremonies before the Aztec gods. At the time of the
Spanish invasion, Tenochtitlan numbered at least sixty thousand people
and the Aztec empire dominated about five million more.

Despite the severity of their rule, or perhaps because of it, the Aztecs
had created a poorly integrated empire. Many conquered groups had
managed to maintain some independence, and many more remained restive
under Aztec administration. Such problems ultimately facilitated the
Spanish conquest. But until that time, the Aztecs exploited their
subjects unrelentingly, and as a result they had created a rich culture
that staggered the minds of the Europeans. It was this very splendor
that attracted the Spanish and doomed the Aztec empire. Aided by
smallpox epidemics, imperial disintegration, and, ultimately, Aztec
credulity, Cortes vanquished the native peoples within three years.

The new conquerors proved as ruthless as the Aztecs themselves, killing
and enslaving thousands of people, destroying the fabulous city with its
massive pyramids and temples. "The streets, squares, houses, and courts
were filled with bodies," reported one spectator, "so that it was almost
impossible to pass. Even Cortes was sick from the stench in his
nostrils."

This mortality revealed not so much the superiority of European weapons
as the vulnerability of the natives to European diseases. There are, of
course, no exact statistics of mortality among the indigenous
populations. But it is clear that the introduction of European
microorganisms devastated the natives at an incredible rate, killing
leaders as well as followers, and thoroughly disrupting and destroying
the native cultures. These hidden allies followed the Europeans
everywhere in the Western hemisphere, passing from body to body, until
vast numbers had perished. In New England, for example, the epidemics
had come with the fishermen who dried their catches on the coastal
beaches. When the first European colonists arrived a decade later, they
found piles of unburied skeletons as mute testimony of the catastrophe.

Lacking previous exposure to European viral strains, the Native
Americans never developed natural immunities to the European infections.
The Europeans were similarly vulnerable to American diseases. Soon after
the contact between Americans and Spanish, the Europeans began falling
victim to a mysterious and often fatal malady that modern medicine would
call syphilis. It was a curious exchange, then, that took place in the
Caribbean five hundred years ago.

The unique development of the Native American populations can be traced
back about thirty thousand years. During the last Ice Age, when large
portions of North America were covered with thick ice, the levels of the
seas dropped considerably, perhaps as much as three hundred feet,
because the ice incorporated large amounts of water. The enormous
glaciers did not cover the earth uniformly, and the lowering of the sea
level exposed land areas that previously had been submerged. Portions of
Siberia, Alaska, and western Canada were, at various times, virtually
free of ice and yet connected by a "land bridge" caused by the lowered
sea level. Depending upon the estimates of the level of the seas, it is
now believed that this land bridge extended in width for at least
several hundred

miles, perhaps much more. About ten thousand years ago, when the
glaciers began to melt, the land bridge became inundated again and is
now called the Bering Sea.

It was over this land bridge that the first human beings crossed to the
American continents. Probably they were pursuing large mammals that had
preceded them into an area filled with vegetation. These early humans
survived by hunting, perfecting their weapons and strategies. One
technique involved stampeding huge herds of bison over high cliffs to
obtain food from just a few beasts. As they followed these mammals,
human beings dispersed over the American continents, reaching the tip of
South America at least ten thousand years ago.

At about that time, radical changes began occurring in the climate of
the Western hemisphere. Temperatures rose, drying out portions of the
land and with it, the thick vegetation; simultaneously, to the north,
the glaciers thawed, pouring off water that formed into lakes and
rivers. The most dramatic effect of these ecological changes was the
rapid extinction of the large mammals that had lived off the abundant
vegetation. Woolly mammoths, giant mastodons, camels, horses--to name
only the most famous American mammals--quickly disappeared. Human beings
who had hunted these huge animals for food and other necessities, faced
similar extinction, and no doubt many nomadic groups succumbed. Others,
however, seeking alternative means of subsistence, shifted to small-game
hunting, fishing, gathering, and, most significantly, agriculture. The
invention of agricultural techniques brought immense changes to human
life and human culture. The cultivation of land meant that groups could
abandon nomadic patterns and settle in one place. The existence of a
controlled food supply--usually a combination of hunting, gathering, and
agriculture--also accelerated the growth of population. These changes,
in turn, encouraged the diversification of society. Political, social,
religious, and economic distinctions between individuals became more
necessary and more evident.

These early agricultural societies did not develop at the same rate or
in the same manner. Rather, human beings created cultures that seemed to
them to be best integrated into the natural environment. Salmon runs in
the Pacific Northwest, for example, influenced the cultural patterns of
the local peoples, just as the rainfall affected the Aztec cultivators
of maize. Yet this adaptation was not determined

simply by geography and climate. Not all people surrounded by fish
learned, like the Yurok, the mysteries of smoking and drying. Nor did
the Iroquois of the woodlands develop the irrigation techniques of the
Aztecs. Instead, a continuous interrelationship between human culture
and the natural world took place, an interaction that varied enormously
in time and in place. From the Arawak to the Yurok, from the Iroquois to
the Aztec, millions of people survived and flourished on the changing
surface of the continent.

Then, on an otherwise ordinary autumn day shortly after sunrise, the
Arawak inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands noticed strange ships
sailing on the horizon, much larger than their dugout canoes. As these
ships moved closer and closer, they saw strange-looking people with
light skins aboard, making odd gestures. The Arawak youths stood at the
banks hesitantly, and then some of the braver men began swimming toward
the mysterious boats.

These strangers offered the Arawak red-colored caps, glass beads, and
other curious trifles. In exchange, the Arawak brought parrots, cotton
skeins, darts, and other items. Then the strangers drew out swords,
which the Arawak, in ignorance, grasped by the blades, cutting
themselves. It was a symbolic act, this inadvertent drawing of blood.
For the Arawak and the strangers looked at the world from opposite
angles, and both were fascinated by what the other was not.

That first contact between Native Americans and Europeans was ' repeated
with increasing frequency as other enterprising Europeans followed those
first ships across the Atlantic Ocean. Whether the voyagers were
Spanish, English, French, or Portuguese in origin, whether the Native
Americans were Arawak, Yurok, Iroquois, Natchez, or Aztec, the initial
confrontation was usually the same-- two cultures looking at each other
from opposite ends of the sword, each awed by the mystery of the other.

To the Native Americans, these seagoing peoples presented obvious
differences in language, in dress, in color--so much so that the natives
doubted that they were human beings. "They believe very firmly," wrote
Christoper Columbus after his first voyage to His paniola, "that I, with
these ships and people, came from the sky, and in this belief they
everywhere received us, after they had overcome their fear. And this
does not result from their being ignorant (for they are of a very keen
intelligence and men who navigate all those seas, so that it is wondrous
the good account they give of

everything), but because they have never seen people clothed or ships
like ours."

As Columbus and his crew sailed along the coast, native messengers raced
ahead shouting from house to house, "Come! Come! See the people from the
sky!" Other native peoples reacted in similar fashion, often to their
subsequent confusion. The Aztecs of Mexico, including their emperor
Moctezuma, believed that the invading Europeans were white gods
destined, according to the Aztecs' religious tradition, to return and
reclaim their people. For this reason, they initially welcomed Cortes
into their capital; when they discovered their mistake, it was too late
to repel him. The Florentine explorer Verrazzano, who sailed along the
coast of North America during the sixteenth century, reported similar
receptions by natives amazed at the whiteness of Europeans and their
unusual technology.

In each of these cases, the Native Americans initially greeted the
European visitors with warmth and friendship. "Of anything they have,"
Columbus declared, "if you ask them for it, they never say no." And his
Journal abounds with examples of the natives' hospitality, of their
bringing food and drink and gifts. Amerigo Vespucci, for whom America is
named, also described what he considered the ultimate in generosity:
"The greatest token of friendship which they show you is that they give
you their wives and daughters; and when a father or a mother brings you
the daughter, although she be a virgin, and you sleep with her, they
esteem themselves highly honored; and in this way they practice the full
extreme of hospitality." To the Native Americans, the Europeans
constituted a strange form of creation, yet one that they endeavored to
incorporate into their existing world-view. Though the Europeans were
decidedly different from themselves, the natives were open and, from
their point of view, understanding.

The Europeans were not free of misconceptions either. For if the natives
mistakenly believed that the white-skinned sailors were gods, the
Europeans mistakenly believed that the natives were "Indians." This
misconception originated in Columbus' basic error (which he himself
never realized) in thinking that in sailing westward from Europe he had
reached the Indies, which were the true object of his voyage. To
Columbus, it was literally inconceivable that he had found previously
unknown lands. Like other Europeans of his time, he believed firmly in
the completeness of human knowledge. What he saw, therefore, he
incorporated into his existing world-view, and

the Native Americans thereby became, to the satisfaction of most
Europeans, simply Indians.

The Europeans' early attempts to describe the Native Americans provide
valuable insights into the nature of European culture. Columbus' first
observation mentioned that the natives possessed no visible religion,
and he expressed hope that they might be "converted to our Holy Faith by
love." Later, he described their physical appearance. "They all go quite
naked as their mothers bore them," he observed, adding that they had
coarse hair, "almost like the hair of a horse's tail," and that their
skin color was neither black nor white. "They ought to be good servants
and of good skill," the admiral concluded.

In another entry, Columbus described these "very handsome people":
"Their hair is not kinky, but straight. . . . They themselves are not at
all black, but of the color of the Canary Islanders." Again, the admiral
used the previously known African as a reference point to depict the
uniqueness of the Americans. Vespucci, who made four voyages to South
America, observed that the natives "have no modesty. They do not
practice marriage amongst themselves. . . . They can be termed neither
Moors nor Jews; and they are worse than heathen; because we did not see
that they offered any sacrifice, nor yet did they have a house of
prayer." Of their economy, he noted, "They engage in no barter; they
neither buy nor sell." Jean de Lery, an explorer of Brazil, maintained
that "their gestures and countenances are so different from ours, that I
confess to my difficulty in representing them in words, or even in
pictures."

What is interesting about all these descriptions is the negative form
the comments take; the Americans are described in terms of what they are
not or do not have. Most other European descriptions of the American
peoples are similar. John Winthrop, a leading colonist of Puritan New
England, justified his claim to the wilderness lands by exclaiming that
the natives "enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitations,
nor any tame cattle." In short, to the explorers and colonists who
followed in the wake of Christopher Columbus, the Native Americans
symbolized what the Europeans were not.

The notion of a negative identity--of not being something else-- forced
both the Americans and the Europeans to consider exactly what they
thought they themselves were. Each culture group, of course, dealt with
this problem differently. But in a fundamental

way, the contact between Americans and Europeans produced psychological
and cultural crises of major proportions.

For the Americans' side of the story, we are limited by the extreme
paucity of sources. As European diseases decimated the indigenous
populations, cultural traditions, like the people themselves,
disappeared. Those who survived the epidemics then confronted aggressive
European civilizations that sought to "uplift" the "heathen" by
destroying their cultures. Much was lost, but listen to the somber voice
of one survivor: "There was then no sickness; they had no aching bones;
they had then no high fever; they had then no burning chest; they had
then no abdominal pain; they had then no consumption; they had then no
headache"--all images of contrast, framing what existed in the present
with what once had been. "At that time," he concludes, referring to a
lost age, "the course of humanity was orderly."

Implicit in this sense of order is a notion of cosmic harmony, of a
balance between nature and culture in which people knew how to cure
ordinary disease, or at least knew how to cope spiritually with the
mysteries of the universe. There is a sense of psychological and
cultural equilibrium--lost forever to the Native Americans after 1492.

Europeans in the age of Columbus saw themselves as Christians, the most
spiritually pure people in creation. This ethnocentric idea found
reinforcement in the ideals of the Roman Catholic Church, which claimed
lo be a universal spiritual community. Yet this ideology clearly
excluded such religiously different people as Muslims, against whom
Christians had waged holy wars for centuries, and Jews, who remained
outsiders throughout European society. Believing in a single unitary
religion, members of the Catholic Church viewed infidels as suitable
either for conversion to the true faith or worthy only of death or
enslavement. Such religious attitudes shaped the Europeans' relations
with Africans as well as Native Americans.

By the age of Columbus, however, even the internal strength of the Roman
Catholic Church was deteriorating. Perhaps the Black Plague of the
previous century, with its staggering mortality, had undermined the
spiritual security of European society. Perhaps the increased
ceremonialism, with its repetition of formalized rituals, weakened the
religious vitality of the people. Whatever the exact causes (and they
were doubtless many and complicated), many Europeans commented on a
feeling of despair that seemed to pervade the culture. For a number of
reasons, some ecclesiastical, some liturgical, the Roman Catholic Church
was failing to satisfy the spiritual needs of many of its members.

This psychological context provides the background for the Protestant
Reformation, which began as a modest protest by the German monk Martin
Luther in 1517 and soon exploded throughout Europe. Luther's basic
disagreement with the Church of Rome was its emphasis upon intermediary
institutions that separated the individual from God. Luther argued that
individuals achieved salvation by faith alone and that certain
liturgical practices were unnecessary. These ideas spread quickly
throughout Europe and were adopted, often with some modifications, by
other spiritual reformers. These Protestants, as they were called, did
not always agree about all aspects of religion, and there were
significant differences between such groups as Lutherans, Calvinists,
and Anglicans. Despite this diversity, however, Protestants shared
certain theological assumptions that distinguished them from traditional
Catholics. The bitter opposition between these groups climaxed in the
next century in several wars of religion, an aggressive hostility that
also affected the course of history in America.

One reason for the rapid spread of Protestantism and the concomitant
intensity of religious rivalry was that the two processes were also
linked to the development of political nationalism in Europe. The late
fifteenth century witnessed the emergence of strong political dynasties
in such countries as Spain, France, and England. In each of these
countries, powerful monarchies began to consolidate their rule by
centralizing government. The adoption of a fervent religious ideology
often coincided with this process. Thus the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and
Isabella, who sponsored Columbus' voyages to the Indies, cast themselves
in the role of "Holy Monarchs," vigorous proponents of the expansion of
the Roman Catholic religion. A century later, England's Queen Elizabeth
I assumed a similar, but Protestant, position, which soon led to direct
competition with Spain in both Europe and America.

The process of political centralization, characteristic of Western
Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was also related to
broad economic trends, particularly the expansion of capitalism. By the
age of Columbus, European merchants were acquiring enormous profits
through commerce with the Levant for spices, silks, and other luxury
items. The lucrative trade, however, was monopolized by Italian
merchants. It was the desire to bypass these Italian

middlemen that led the monarchs of Portugal and Spain to seek an
alternate route to Asia. The accumulation of capital by European
merchants also led to the development of more sophisticated banking and
credit systems. In England, the independent wealth of the merchants,
rather than the treasures of the crown, supported the colonization of
North America. The prime motivation for the merchants, of course, was
profits. But in an age of keen national rivalry, the search for wealth
and power and the passions of ideology were inextricably linked.

Equally characteristic of the age was an enhanced concern among
intellectuals for knowledge about the natural world. As part of a more
general cultural movement, Renaissance scholars exhibited great
curiosity about such subjects as history, geography, and classical
learning. This spirit of inquiry, no less than the desire for wealth,
encouraged Europeans to fashion new navigational equipment, which, in
turn, facilitated voyages of exploration to what appeared to be new
lands. Information brought back by early adventurers whetted the
Europeans' appetite for still more exploration, a process that led to
the rapid expansion of European culture beyond its traditional
boundaries.

It is easy to underestimate the importance of these broad cultural
trends--the centralization of power, the accumulation of capital, the
expanding Renaissance mind. Consider, however, the situation without
these factors present.

About the year 1000, Norse adventurers, led by Leif Ericson, had landed
on the coast of North America at a place they called Vin land. According
to sketchy accounts, they attempted to establish a settlement there, but
were repelled by the native populations. However dramatic their
adventure, the Norse voyages had virtually no impact on European
society. By the late fifteenth century, few Europeans even knew about
these experiences. Yet news of Columbus' voyage of 1492 quickly flashed
through Europe, exciting the imaginations of intellectuals and
merchants, if not the common people; and thousands of explorers and
colonists soon set sail for America. The difference in the effect of the
Norse voyages and that of Columbus underscores the immense changes that
occurred in Europe during the intervening centuries.

The race for empire began first in Portugal when Prince Henry the
Navigator supported voyages of trade and exploration along the African
coast. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, Portuguese sailors
had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in southern

Africa and had established trading settlements as far east as India.
These voyages brought fantastic profits to the Portuguese adventurers
and demonstrated the value of overseas expansion. But Portugal lacked
the population to consolidate these advances and merely established
small trading posts. Soon other European nations began to challenge
Portuguese supremacy.

For a time, Christopher Columbus had sold his services to the Portuguese
crown, but he could not persuade his employers to support a western
voyage to the Indies. The Spanish, on the other hand, greeted the
proposal with greater enthusiasm. For them, Columbus' plan represented a
gigantic gamble, but also an opportunity to bypass Portugal's growing
control of trade. Remarkably, it worked-- though not in the way that
Columbus had anticipated.

Throughout his lifetime, Columbus believed that he had reached the
eastern coast of Asia, somewhere near Japan. Yet neither he nor the many
Spanish-speaking explorers who followed him managed to locate the fabled
spices, which promised incredible wealth. Only much later did Europeans
realize that Columbus had inadvertently located a previously unknown
continent. But if the search for spices failed, the Spanish did find
another source of wealth--the gold that belonged to the native peoples.

The Spanish reaction, as described by an Aztec witness, was perhaps
predictable. When given presents of gold by the Aztec emperor, "the
Spanish burst into smiles; their eyes shone with pleasure. . . . They
picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys; they seemed to be
transported by joy, as if their hearts were illumined and made new." The
lust for gold drove the Spanish onward. Wave upon wave of Spanish
adventurers arrived in America, crushing the native peoples, taking
their property for export to Europe. The Americans who survived the
European diseases --and statistically they were not many--were enslaved
and put to work in the mines until they too died. Then they were
replaced by new slaves brought in chains from Africa.

The presence of Catholic priests mitigated.the worst brutalities of the
Spanish conquest. But the missionaries themselves often conducted a more
subtle but no less deliberate form of European aggression. Anxious to
convert the heathen to Christianity, they herded the natives into
missions and forced them to surrender their traditional cultural styles.
Under such pressure many natives made accommodations to European ways.
But rebellion was not unknown. In 1680, for example, the Pueblos of the
Southwest, led by

the religious prophet Pope, rose against their conquerors. With a rare
display of unity, the Pueblos drove the Spanish from their territory,
but only for twelve years. Many other native peoples avoided direct
conflict with the Europeans and so managed to preserve their cultures.
More often, the natives made prudent compromises, integrating European
patterns with their own, which usually resulted in the eradication of
the traditional ways.

The early success of the Portuguese and Spanish empires reflected the
stability of the home countries. France, Holland, and England entered
the imperial contest later, because internal divisions diverted
government attention. Without domestic tranquillity, these nations could
support only sporadic voyages of exploration. In the early sixteenth
century, French navigators like Cartier explored the coasts of North
America, searching for the fabled "northwest passage" through the
continent. Not until the following century, under the influence of
Samuel de Champlain, did the French begin serious colonization of what
is now eastern Canada. Similarly, Dutch interest in America awaited the
formation of the Dutch East India Company in 1602.

England's claim to North America dated from the voyage of John Cabot in
1497. As was the case in France, however, severe internal problems,
including the dynastic worries of Henry VII and his son, Henry VIII,
drained the royal coffers and prevented serious involvement in
colonization. Only late in the sixteenth century, under the reign of
Elizabeth I, did England enter the race for empire. By that time, an
important motivating force was England's rivalry with Spain.

English and Spanish competition arose not only from political
considerations, but from ideological differences as well. When Henry
VIII severed England's ties with the Church of Rome because Pope Clement
VII refused to sanction Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he
inadvertently opened the door to basic religious reforms. Though Henry
himself remained unfriendly to Protestantism, the creation of a national
Church of England soon led to the confiscation of monastic lands and the
introduction of a vernacular Bible--both Protestant ideas in practice,
if not in principle. After Henry's death, the Anglican Church became
even more visibly Protestant. Though the short reign of Mary Tudor,
infamously known to Protestants as "Bloody Mary," resulted in a
temporary reversal, the ascension of Elizabeth in 1558 seemed to place
England solidly in the Protestant camp.

Under Elizabeth, relations with Spain deteriorated completely. England
provided clandestine support to the Dutch Protestants who had rebelled
from Spanish rule, and Elizabeth countenanced English raids on Spanish
shipping by such sea dogs as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, who pirated
Spanish gold and carried their loot to England. Provoked by such
aggression, Spain launched its grand Armada in 1588 to bring England to
its knees. Instead, English forces defeated the Spanish fleet, opening
the way for English expansion in America.

By that time, England already had planted a small colony on Roanoke
Island, near the coast of what is now Virginia (so named in honor of the
Virgin Queen). Inspired by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, one of Elizabeth's
courtiers, and implemented by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Roanoke adventure
proved a dismal failure, largely because the English alienated the
native peoples by their cruelty. In retaliation for the loss of a silver
cup, about which the natives claimed to be ignorant, the colonists
destroyed a small village and ruined the growing crops. Such severe
actions offended the otherwise friendly tribes and proved disastrous for
the poorly supplied settlers. When the invasion of the Spanish Armada
prevented the sailing of supply ships in 1588, the colonists were forced
back on their own resources, and lacking both experience and the good
will of the natives, they vanished without a trace.

The failure of the Roanoke colony demonstrated to the English the need
for a self-sustaining settlement, free from dependence upon the native
populations. Such an enterprise required extensive capital resources,
far more than could be gathered by a single individual. In the future,
joint-stock companies or corporations---early capitalistic
institutions--would finance the expense of colonization.

More significant than these lessons, however, was the deliberate
alienation of the native peoples by the first Roanoke colonists. In
later years, the local tribes would still provide vital assistance to
the European settlers. But after the Roanoke experience, relations
between the two peoples were always temperejd by mutual suspicions, if
not outright hostility.

Roanoke, then, was a sobering experience for both cultures. It meant
that the English would abandon colonial expansion until after the death
of Elizabeth in 1603. For the natives, that would bring temporary
respite. Meanwhile, the Spanish to the south and the French to the north
continued their slow but steady invasion of the continent.

"Though it be not the Lord's day"

******************

Chapter 2.

The Transplantation

The instruments of European expansion Tudor England on the eve of
colonization

Anglican and Puritan conflict

Jamestown: first permanent English settlement

Puritans in New England

Proprietary colonies

Organizing space and time

The colonial family

Colonial religion: the Great Awakening and

religious toleration

Despite the excitement of the early voyages of exploration, it took
Europeans several generations to comprehend the importance of the land
masses they called America. In the century after Columbus' voyage, even
the intellectuals remained curiously silent. Yet the discovery of flora
and fauna unknown in Europe raised inescapable philosophical questions.
Medieval Europeans had believed in the completeness of human knowledge
and had assumed a unity of the human species after the initial Creation.
The discovery of a new continent inhabited by new peoples challenged
these orthodox beliefs.

In confronting these profound dilemmas, Renaissance Europeans reacted
with typical ethnocentrism and concluded that God had designed America
for them. Though they debated about the origins of the Native Americans
and wondered aloud whether these people might not belong to one of the
Lost Tribes of Israel, they agreed that God undoubtedly intended for
them to be converted to Christianity. The Europeans also assumed that
America was simply a howling wilderness awaiting the introduction of
European civilization. Thus they determined to transform the New World
into a New Europe.

First, they would send missionaries to America to teach the benighted
natives the ways of European civilization and the religious truths of
Christianity. Every colonizing adventure--whether Spanish, French,
English, or Dutch--always cited the conversion of the natives as its
primary justification. But the missionary impulse usually was fruitless;
from the natives' viewpoint, the endeavors often created total
disruption.

The second instrument of European expansion was even more grandiose, but
as time would show, much more successful. Since America lacked the
advantages of European society, the institutions and values of Europe
could simply be transplanted into the wilderness. America would become
another Europe through colonization --a process that promised not only
to improve the New World but also to enrich the Old. This was a daring
vision indeed, but one that offered immense returns to all involved.

The process of transplantation took many forms depending upon the
national background of the European colonists. At a certain

point in historical development--about 1500 for the Spanish, 1600 for
the English--branches of European culture were severed from the main
stems and replanted in America. That hundred-year interval, a century of
immense change in England, explains why Hispanic America was so
different from Anglo America. In the Spanish colonies, for example, the
Roman Catholic Church wielded an enormous influence; while in British
America, settled after the Protestant Reformation, the new religion
shaped most social relations. Other differences in colonial America
reflected the different social structures and economic values of the
European nations. In this chapter, the emphasis is on the English
colonies, the small remote outposts of what would later become the
British Empire and, later still, the United States.

On the eve of colonization, the population of England was about four
million. Despite important differences in status and wealth, the English
people proudly shared a national identity and viewed themselves as a
superior nation blessed with the Protestant religion and the Tudor
monarchy. Such advantages had not come easily. During the sixteenth
century, England had experienced fundamental changes that altered the
traditional patterns of economic, social, and political life.
Elizabethan England, the daring nation that launched the marauding
activities of Francis Drake and the colonizing experiments of Walter
Raleigh, was significantly different from the medieval society that had
recognized Henry VII as its first Tudor sovereign in 1485.

Henry VII and his son Henry VIII, like the monarchs of the European
continent, had consolidated royal power by destroying the influence of
the feudal aristocracy. Reviving the institutions of local government,
particularly the offices of sheriff, justice of the peace, and lord
lieutenant, the Tudors undermined their dynastic rivals and linked the
royal authority directly to the local counties. The success of the
monarchy, however, depended upon the perpetuation of the royal line. It
was Henry VIII's desire for a male heir that motivated his divorce from
Catherine of Aragon, which, in turn, led to the creation of a national
church.

The centralization process also affected economic affairs. Since the
Tudors wished to make England self-sufficient, they encouraged the
merchants to shift from the export of raw wool to the manufacture of
finished woolen products for foreign trade. Such policies,

chants, who accumulated additional capital for further investment. This
wealth provided the economic support for colonization in the seventeenth
century.

The premium placed upon the production of woolens stimulated a major
transformation of English society. As it became more profitable to raise
sheep, English landowners began to enclose the common lands, thus
disrupting traditional agricultural practices. The confiscation of
monastic lands after Henry VIH's break from Rome accelerated this trend.
Landlords and merchants benefited by the enclosure movement, but the
poorer folk who customarily worked on other people's lands--renters, day
laborers, artisans-- found their lives profoundly changed. Forced from
their lands and traditional occupations, these people traveled the
countryside seeking adequate livings, and many found themselves
attracted to London. The city's population tripled in this period,
despite the unhealthiness of urban life. These dislocations convinced
many observers that England was overpopulated. Writers like Richard
Hakluyt proposed that colonies be used to absorb the surplus population
and rid the nation of its "sturdy beggars."

This image reappeared frequently in English writing. "Wandering beggars
and rogues that pass from place to place ... are plagues and banes,"
exclaimed one frustrated minister. Such statements reveal a typical
unsympathetic reaction to the social unheaval of the age. But they were
motivated not by callousness so much as by a world-view that could
comprehend social disorder only in moral terms. Despite generations of
unsettledness, Elizabethans continued to subscribe to a value system
based on the essential orderliness of the world. Thus social problems,
however widespread, indicated personal weakness rather than the
disintegration of the social fabric. From William Shakespeare to the
meanest journeyman who watched his plays in the Globe, English people
believed in the natural order of the universe. Humanity, in this
pre-Copernican age, lived at the very center of creation, drawn
simultaneously upward by the celestial spirits of heaven and downward by
the demons of hell. Each aspect of creation, even inanimate objects,
held a specifically assigned place in the cosmic unity and formed a
hierarchy reaching ultimately to the Throne of God. These ideas were not
usually articulated because it was seldom necessary to do so. Rather,
they represented the cosmic assumptions shared by most people,
unquestioned beliefs about the nature of the universe. These notions
remained functional even when they were not empirically

accurate. Seventeenth-century Europeans, for example, continued to view
the earth as the center of the universe, despite the astronomical
calculations of modern science.

The same tenacity applied to social assumptions as well, which is why
Elizabethan commentators regarded the dislocated workers as "common
rogues." The social values of the English, like their image of the
universe, assumed that there was a natural harmony to social relations.
Human groupings, like the human body, constituted a living organism,
what they called a "body politic." Society was an organic community in
which each part of the body performed some function necessary to the
welfare of the whole. The king was the "head" of society, the workers
the limbs. Another metaphor reflected familial values: the king was
"father" to his subjects, ruling paternally over his children. In such
terms, it was literally inconceivable for one segment of society to gain
from the injury of another; any defect weakened the entire organism.

The notion of hierarchy, if not of order, reflected the nature of the
Elizabethan social structure. At the apex of society stood the monarchy
and nobility, followed by the wealthy gentry. These groups provided the
social and political leadership of the nation. Beneath them came people
who lived by their own labor--yeomen, husbandmen, journeymen, servants,
and other landless groups. Wives and children assumed the social status
of their husbands and fathers. Within this hierarchy, status
distinctions were clearly understood, though not always respected.
Marital choices, education, styles of dress often were restricted by
societal expectations and occasionally by force of law. Yet England was
not a rigid society. Social mobility was not infrequent, though it
usually involved only a small rise or fall in status. Members of the
upper classes ruled, and those of lesser status expected them to rule
and deferred to their leadership. Such attitudes accepted inferiority as
well as superiority--a mental framework that influenced English
relations with peoples native to Africa and America.

These political and social values had their roots in the family
structure of Tudor England. As in the political world, the father ruled
the household, presumably in the interests of all, and the women and
children were expected to obey his authority. The conventional household
was nuclear in structure, consisting of parents and their children and
perhaps a servant who held the status of a child. It was in these units
that children learned their places in the social hierarchy. Even young
children were forced to accept the

parental will or face severe disciplinary measures. Such child- rearing
practices reinforced the authoritarian values of English society.
English children well understood (and, as adults, well remembered) the
lessons of authority and the acceptable limits of autonomy and
independence.

As in other agricultural societies, English life depended upon the
rhythm of the seasons, the amount of rainfall, the size of the harvests,
the appearance of pestilence and disease. Infant mortality rates were
high, life expectancy low, starvation and malnutrition a common concern.
English family patterns reflected these fragile circumstances. Children
did not marry until they could afford to support a family, a practice
that delayed marriage until children were in their middle or late
twenties. This custom, in turn, limited the years of marital fertility.
Such biological configurations, together with the probable practices of
birth control (through abstinence or withdrawal), resulted in fairly
small families, ranging on the average from five to seven children.
These demographic patterns varied according to the wealth of a family,
for more affluent people could afford to marry earlier and to feed more
children.

The insecurity of life--the proximity of famine, disease, and
death--reinforced the religiosity of these predominantly rural folk. In
the transitory world of human affairs, they found spiritual solace in
the eternal world hereafter. But under the Tudor monarchs, religious
traditions were no longer so secure. The creation of the Anglican Church
by Henry VIII, the Protestantism of his son, Edward VI, the reversion to
Catholicism by Mary, and Elizabeth's via media (the middle road between
Protestantism and Catholicism) --all undermined what previously had been
viewed as the immutable principles of religion. Such ideological changes
may not have altered the worship practices on the parish level, but they
nevertheless confused and troubled the average Christian believer.

Out of this turmoil, there emerged among English Protestants a growing
concern for rationality in religious affairs, an attempt to impose
orderliness and logic on spiritual matters. This process led in two
antithetical directions--one resulting in an articulate defense of the
Church of England and the religious principles of Anglicanism, the other
producing a radical reformist group that avowed beliefs known as
"Puritanism." Though disagreeing about many fundamentals of religion,
both movements recoiled from what they called the superstitions of the
medieval Catholic Church and both stressed the need to distinguish
affairs of this world from those of the next.

This tendency to split reality into material and spiritual spheres, a
characteristic of modern thought in general, constituted an important
difference between European culture and the premodern cosmologies of the
Native Americans and Africans.

Puritanism began as a protest by reformist ministers against the
vestiges of Catholicism that remained in the Church of England. Carrying
the logic of Protestantism to its extreme conclusion, the Puritans
argued that many traditional ceremonies--wearing the surplice, fpr
example, or bowing and kneeling during worship services --and certain
ecclesiastical offices--such as the episcopacy--that were not explicitly
sanctioned by the Bible undermined the purity of the church; they
therefore demanded the elimination of these "corruptions." The Anglicans
denied these criticisms, arguing that religious practices that were not
explicitly forbidden by the Bible were permissible. The main
disagreement between Anglicans and Puritans thus centered on how
properly to interpret the authority of the Scriptures.

Though Puritanism originated among ministers and intellectuals, it soon
spread among people in all status groups, particularly those whose lives
had been most disrupted by the social and economic changes of the
period. Puritan preachers stressed the importance of "godliness" in all
human affairs and condemned "worldliness," the search for material
wealth, which sidetracked a person from the more valuable treasures of
heaven. Such ideas made sense to people forced from their traditional
lands by capitalists who cared more for profits than for the welfare of
individuals. To people confronting the chaos of London, the Puritan
ideals of orderliness and Christian charity moderated the trauma of
upheaval. Puritanism, like other evangelical movements, promised the
security of heaven hereafter, if not in the present. Thus Puritanism
offered its adherents an explanation of worldly confusion at the same
time it provided emotional ballast to ease the worst frustrations of
that dislocation. Within two generations, Puritanism was sufficiently
powerful as a social force to stimulate the migration of thpusands to
America and to challenge the monarchy at home.

The men and women who established England's colonies in America had
specific ideas about time and space. Their beliefs, usually held
unconsciously, reflected a general trend in Western culture toward
greater precision and rational definition. The English colonists, like
other modern people, felt extremely uncomfortable

about ambiguity in these matters, which is one reason why they failed
utterly to appreciate the sophistication of the nonWestern peoples they
encountered, why they considered Africans and Native Americans mere
savages and barbarians. Ironically, their own societies still manifested
some of this vagueness, relics of an earlier cultural perspective. But
increasingly, seventeenth-century Europeans were attempting to eliminate
the mysteries of time and space and replace them with more rational
constructs. Thus they viewed America as a territorial map rather than a
geographic reality and saw its open space as a vast wilderness upon
which to implement their ideas.

The first permanent English colony began in May 1607 when three vessels
dropped anchor several miles up the James River in Virginia at a site
they named Jamestown. Financed by the Virginia Company of London, a
joint-stock corporation, and settled by ambitious young men employed by
the company, the colony was expected to produce lucrative profits by
locating gold mines and a water route through the continent to the
fabulous markets of Asia. The vision of duplicating Spanish success,
however, blinded the adventurers to the realities of colonization.
Investors in London, misled perhaps by exaggerated promotional reports,
underestimated the difficulties of settlement and provided poor
leadership for their employees in Virginia.

The colonists themselves demonstrated equal ignorance. They chose a
malarial swamp on which to erect their village, and then they allowed
their meager supplies to dwindle while they searched for gold. Afflicted
by disease and famine and divided by petty squabbles, they succumbed at
an alarming rate. "God (being angry with us)," reported Captain John
Smith, "plagued us with such famine and sickness that the living were
scarce able to bury the dead." Only the timely intervention of the
native chief Powhatan prevented the extinction of the colony. As it was,
only one-third of the original settlers survived the first "starving
times." New settlers and new supplies, sent periodically by the London
investors, failed to alleviate the situation. Matters were made still
worse by English provocation of the local tribes. Theft and violence
disrupted trade with the natives and led to counterattacks by Powhatan's
people. Several times the colonists were ready to abandon the settlement
only to halt at the unexpected arrival of supply ships. One relief group
found only sixty survivors, who "looked like anatomies, crying out, we
are starved, we are starved."

If Virginia was to survive, the Virginia Company had to attract two
major resources: capital and labor. Stock sales and public lotteries
kept the limping enterprise solvent while the colonists pursued easy
riches. Then John Rolfe, later famous for his marriage to Pocahontas,
discovered another source of potential profit: an American plant called
tobacco. The weed became immensely popular in Europe, and Virginians
soon began exporting thousands, then hundreds of thousands, of hogsheads
of tobacco a year to meet the demand. Increased exports brought greater
Capital investment, thus assuring the economic future of the colony.

The cultivation of tobacco still required an adequate labor force. The
original planters of the colony had been employees of the Virginia
Company, expecting to share enormous profits from colonization. The
agony of settlement promptly shattered their dreams. Some investors also
hoped to use native labor, much as the Spanish had enslaved the peoples
they had conquered. But the tribes of North America successfully
resisted such plans, partly because of the weakness of the English,
partly because they lived in more scattered villages. To solve the
persistent labor problem, the Virginia Company began to contract with
individual English laborers, known as "indentured servants," who agreed
to work on company lands for a specific period (usually seven years) in
exchange for passage to America and a promise of land. Though these
indentured servants constituted the backbone of the Virginia labor force
through most of the seventeenth century, their expectations of land and
self improvement were seldom fulfilled. For the Virginia Company also
offered fifty acres (known as a "headright") to investors who would pay
the transportation of workers to the colony. The policy enabled some
people of modest means to acquire land, but more often the beneficiaries
were wealthy merchants who could underwrite the cost of many servants.
These enterprising investors thus acquired large } landholdings. By
their wealth they also obtained control over most of the available
supplies, including food, which enabled them to exploit even the free
workers. Where labor was so valuable, servants were treated as
commodities to be leased, traded, or sold. Such attitudes were a logical
outgrowth of organic social theory, the commonly held idea that some
people were subservient to others. But in America these values also led,
just as logically, to the creation of a slave caste.

"About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that

sold us twenty Negars," reported John Rolfe nonchalantly about an event
in 1619. Thus began the grim tale of black-white relations in British
America. The development of slavery in America usually is explained as a
result of a need for labor, because that is the way white slaveowners
viewed the Africans. Given the shortage of workers and the difficulty of
controlling indentured servants, the shift to black slavery appeared
economically sensible.

But the profit motive alone does not explain the enslavement of one
people by another. Rather, the forced migration of Africans to America
and the institutionalization of slavery in all the English speaking
colonies required more than an eye for the marketplace. The vision of
Africans as potential slaves had deep roots in Western culture; there
were predispositions in the Western mind which, given the specific
historical conditions such as a need for labor, encouraged the
establishment of black slavery in the colonies.

There were, first, the visible differences--dark skin and kinky hair,
for example--which distinguished the African from the European. As in
dealing with the Native Americans, Renaissance Europeans attempted to
incorporate these strange beings into their preexisting cosmology. Black
complexions suggested images of the curse of Ham, the swarthy son of
Noah condemned for his sins. Such biblical metaphors reinforced cultural
prejudices against blackness itself--black as dirty, evil, sinful,
inferior. Then, as with the Native Americans, there was the question of
religion. From the Christian perspective, the Africans had no religion,
no spiritual relations with the true God. They were mere heathens who
worshiped devils disguised as Gods. Such notions justified slavery as a
missionary institution, a way of saving souls from the snares of Satan.

More subtle than these considerations was the Elizabethan preoccupation
with order and organization. To the European eye, African culture lacked
traditional institutions. People wore different clothing, enjoyed music
and dance with strange rhythms, ate exotic foods; in short, they
accepted a lifestyle that made no sense to white culture. Europeans
therefore concluded that Africans were savages. Yet most of the peoples
of Africa, particularly the sedentary agricultural societies of west
Africa, had stable lives structured by conventional cultures. That the
Europeans, trapped by their own value system, could not perceive these
patterns is perhaps understandable. It seems likely that their hostility
to African life also betrayed profound fears of disorder and the loss of
traditional restraints--in

other words, betrayed anxieties that they had about themselves. For
while Europeans attempted to organize space and time more rationally,
Africans, no less than Native Americans, lived within a cyclical order
that appeared to the Europeans to be no order at all. Thus the African
symbolized the evils of impulse and unrestraint, the antithesis of
European social ideals.

These cultural prejudices also dominated relations between Virginians
and the indigenous peoples, even when the colonists were totally
dependent upon the generosity of the natives. Thus, after eating the
food provided by Powhatan, John Smith remarked, with no trace of irony,
that the settlers would have "all perished" but for the mercy of "those
wild and cruel pagans"! Meanwhile, as tobacco cultivation spread through
the colony and occupied more and more acreage, the natives increasingly
realized the white threat to their lives. Under Powhatan's successor,
Opechancanough, the natives launched a vicious attack on the English
plantations in 1622, killing about one-third of the white population and
forcing Virginians to retreat from their extended outposts. The attack,
viewed by the English as a "massacre," brought prompt and bloody
retribution, unleashing a restive racism that justified a policy of
genocide. Eventually, negotiations ended the bloodletting, but sporadic
warfare between whites and natives continued through the century.

While Virginians slowly expanded their settlements along the river banks
that open on the Chesapeake, an even more grandiose enterprise commenced
some five hundred miles to the north. Led by Puritans who were
dissatisfied with conditions in England, thousands of colonists crossed
the Atlantic to settle in areas around Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Unlike the planters of Virginia, the
settlers of New England were motivated less by the search for profits
than by ideological considerations.

By the 1620s, after two generations of protest, the Puritans had
recognized the futility of reforming the Church of England according to
their perfectionist ideals. Frustrated by this failure and resentful of
the dislocations of their society, the Puritans condemned the sinfulness
of England and warned that the Lord soon would punish the nation with
His wrath. Such fears justified a search for a secure haven. "I am
verily persuaded," declared John Winthrop, the leader of the Puritan
exodus, that "God will bring some heavy affliction upon this land, and
that speedily." But, he added optimistically,

perhaps "he will provide a shelter and hiding place for us and ours."
Surrounded by "wild beasts and beast-like men," the Puritans would
establish a city of God in New England.

Midway across the Atlantic, Winthrop addressed his friends aboard the
Arbella. "We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of
Christ," he announced, and "we ought to account ourselves knit together
by this bond of love, and live in the exercise of it." Thus commenced
the great migration to America. These colonists sailed to New England,
not only to escape the evils of England, but also to build an ideal
community, what Winthrop called "A Model of Christian Charity," to
demonstrate to the world the efficacy of true Christian principles. "We
shall be as a city upon a hill," he proclaimed, a beacon of hope, a
divine blueprint that all the world would imitate irresistibly.

These were grand aspirations, befitting a proud people, and they placed
great responsibility upon each member of the Puritan community. For the
most part the first colonists shared this commitment and put aside the
petty squabbling that had impeded the early experiments in Virginia. In
other societies, ownership of land or the fortuitousness of birth
determined one's place in the community. But in New England the
spiritual bonds of Puritanism dominated social relations and brought
people together. This is not to say that there were no disagreements
among the colony's leaders or between the leaders and some of their
followers. But there was a determined self-conscious effort to mediate
disputes according to principles of equity rather than the strict rule
of law.

Though the Puritans expected the successful transplantation of the true
faith to herald a new era of human history, they sought historical
precedents and models for the Wilderness Zion. It was Winthrop's hope,
for example, that there would be one community in New England, much like
a medieval town. Soon after landing in Massachusetts, however, the
settlers were forced to disperse around the Bay, where they formed
several communities. Later still, the migration of additional
colonists--by 1640, the numbers had swelled to twenty
thousand--necessitated the formation of interior settlements to
accommodate the burgeoning population. This geographic expansion, though
unforeseen and unwelcome, did not defeat the Puritan mission. Instead,
the Puritan leaders endeavored to control the scattered settlements
through the institutions of town government. Thus the colony granted
land not to individuals, but to the towns, which then subdivided the
holdings among their resi-

dents. In forming towns, the inhabitants usually covenanted to uphold
the Christian principles upon which the colony had been founded. "We
whose names are here unto subscribed," declared the first settlers of
Dedham, Massachusetts, "do, in the fear and reverence of our Almighty
God, mutually and severally promise amongst ourselves and each other to
profess and practice one truth according to that most perfect rule, the
foundation whereof is everlasting love."

Town meetings resolved political questions, levied taxes, and appointed
local officials, who, acting on behalf of the community, supervised such
business as the distribution of alms, the employment of schoolmasters,
the use of common lands, and the repair of the meetinghouse. In these
small communities, residents worked together, prayed together, and
celebrated together, reinforcing the solemn promises of their town
covenants and their commitment to Puritan ideals. Eventually this peace
would be broken; people would bicker about landholdings; the spirit of
charity would be eroded by the frictions of neighborliness. But that was
in the future. For the first generation, the town system constituted a
communal approach to basic secular problems.

Despite charitable intentions, however, some problems were not easily
resolved. Thus, when John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, two of the most
eminent ministers in New England, disagreed about religious principles,
the quarrel resulted in Hooker's migration with most of his congregation
to Connecticut, where they founded a new community. The departure, like
numerous others in the seventeenth century, irritated the Puritan
leadership. But it was one way of maintaining the forms of social
harmony despite basic religious differences.

The geographic expansion of the Puritan settlers led them into areas
more densely populated by Native Americans, particularly the Pequots and
Narragansetts. From the English perspective, the appropriation of the
natives' lands was entirely justifiable, since the tribes did not
properly subjugate the wilderness, which is to say, they did not
organize the land according to European models. The Pequots had other
ideas about the land, however, and these differences in perspective led
to open warfare in 1637. Claiming that the Pequots had murdered some
English traders, the Puritans launched a punitive expedition against
these "minions of the devil." The result was a brutal slaughter of the
Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut. Male survivors of the main attack were
executed, while the women and

children were enslaved and shipped to the West Indies. Designed to
strengthen the Puritan communities, the military affair had one ironic
disintegrating effect: the armies located some fertile acreage around
New Haven, which soon encouraged further inland migration and an
additional splintering of the communal ethos.

The enslavement of the Pequot survivors had divine sanction under the
right of conquest. Such principles had justified slavery throughout the
Christian world and had been used to enslave Moorish prisoners during
the medieval period. It was harder to apply this logic to African
slavery, since no Africans had been captured in holy wars. But that did
not matter to the Puritan colonists who, like other Europeans, viewed
the blacks as an inferior and uncivilized, unchristian people. In 1638,
perhaps in exchange for the Pequot captives, the first black slaves
began arriving in New England from the West Indies. Black slavery never
became deeply entrenched in New England for a number of demographic
reasons, most notably the commitment of the Puritans to homogeneous
communities. But their treatment of non-Europeans demonstrated the
ethnocentric basis of their godly Utopia.

Both Massachusetts Bay and Virginia had been organized and financed by
joint-stock companies, early capitalistic institutions designed to
facilitate the sharing of capital investment and risk. Another type of
colonial endeavor also served as an institution of English expansion:
the proprietary colony. The principle here was solidly aristocratic.
Instead of chartering a corporation of merchants, the English crown
granted American territory to influential courtiers to develop as they
desired. Such gifts led to the colonization of Maryland by George
Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore; the Carolinas by a handful of
proprietors, including Lord Shaftesbury; and Pennsylvania by the Quaker
William Penn. The royal favor also granted New York and New Jersey to
the Duke of York, though both places already were settled by the Dutch.
It took a small fleet to resolve that dilemma in 1664.

By giving away wilderness lands, the English kings found an inexpensive
way to reward loyal subjects, particularly those willing to advance
credit to the crown. For the proprietors, these grants represented a
source of immense wealth--provided they could attract settlers to
purchase or lease the tracts. Fundamental to these transactions was the
assumption that the Native Americans held no valid claim to the
territory and that English definitions of land

ownership would prevail. Thus the proprietors of Maryland and the
Carolinas devised elaborate schemes to divide and subdivide landholdings
according to archaic feudal principles, a social blueprint thoroughly
unsuitable to conditions in America. Even William Penn, who strived to
implement his Quaker ideology by purchasing land from the natives by
treaty, assumed that paper boundaries could contain a burgeoning
population, that artificial conceptions of space could be imposed on a
vast land mass.

Such attitudes reflected a general European search for rationality and
order. The contrast between the Native American cultures and those of
Europeans is nowhere made clearer. To the indigenous peoples, the
universe itself was harmonious and orderly, thus precluding from
consciousness the idea of superimposing human constraints on natural
conditions. But the Europeans, products of another time and another
place, saw the world differently. They were correct, nevertheless, in
one regard: for better or worse, it was their image of the world that
ultimately prevailed.

If colonization meant the transplantation of European notions of space,
the institutional configurations in the colonies emphasized European
ideas about time and history. Where most Native Americans lived by
natural time, adjusting to seasonal rhythms, the sun, the moon, and the
stars, Europeans had begun, with increasing efficiency, to divide time
into convenient segments. During the medieval period, when most
Europeans lived close to the soil, timekeeping was extremely inaccurate;
even the most finely constructed clocks had only an hour hand to
approximate the time. Then in the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch
mathematician Christian Huygens invented a pendulum clock that allowed
much greater precision. English clockmakers, responding to the
organizational zeal of their culture, promptly imported Huygens'
techniques, added a few refinements, and began producing timepieces that
were accurate to within five seconds a day. By the late seventeenth
century, therefore, most English clocks possessed £ minute hand and a
sounding mechanism that struck at quarter-hours.

Such mechanical achievements demonstrated the Europeans' capacity to
reduce time to human proportions. Yet, paradoxically, that technical
ability was not always implemented in clock design. Human consciousness
could not always reckon with technology. Despite the introduction of the
pendulum, some English clocks,

particularly the popular lantern clocks used in the colonies, still had
only one hand.

A similar anomaly affected the measurement of calendar time. In
traditional societies, the beginning of the new year usually coincided
with the vernal equinox, the season of natural regeneration. Thus in the
Julian calendar, used throughout Western Europe until the sixteenth
century, March constituted the first month of the year. The Julian
calendar contained several astronomical inaccuracies, however, and in
1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar that, among other
changes, began the new year in January. But not until much later did the
Protestant countries adopt the revised Gregorian calendar; in British
America, the changes were not introduced until 1752. In the interim,
English colonials employed a modified system in which dates falling
between January 1 and March 25 were represented by dual numbers; March
1, 1631, in other words, would be written March 1, 1630/31. Such
confusing practices betrayed a transitional stage of development, a half
modern, half-premodern conception of time. Yet by the end of the
eighteenth century, the dating system had been standardized and resolved
in the interests of clarity. At almost the same date, the single-hand
clock also became extinct.

This blurring of cosmic time and secular time emerged in a more personal
setting as well: the birthday celebration. The systematic recording of
live births did not begin in England until the reign of Henry VIII. As
in other premodern societies, particularly in areas of widespread
illiteracy, people often did not know their exact birthdates, nor did
such data apparently matter. To celebrate the anniversary of a birth
involved the imposition of human chronology upon the sacred arrangement
of festivals and holidays (literally "holy days"). Thus birthday
anniversaries, even those of children, were seldom celebrated before the
nineteenth century. Yet in the colonial period there still could be
considerable ambivalence about secular time. "I am fifteen years old
today," wrote a young female diarist in 1675. "My mother hath bid me
this day [to] put on a fresh kirtle and wimple, though it be not the
Lord's day, and my Aunt Alice coming in did chide me and say that to pay
attention to a birthday was putting myself with the world's people
[rather than God's]." This family quarrel is extremely enlightening,
suggesting a fundamental clash of values and perceptions. Above all, it
reveals the intimate connection between time and progeny.

It was in the family that the English preoccupation with organizing
space and time merged most clearly. Families, in this premodern age,
constituted basic economic units, serving to perpetuate business
relationships and the ownership of land. Since real estate was the major
economic asset, a tangible symbol of wealth and status, family patterns
aimed at preserving existing holdings. The subdivision of land among
many children undermined the value of this basic resource. That is why
English men married so late and the number of children remained so
small. The desire to maintain ownership over the generations also
explains why English parents preferred male children--offspring who
would retain both the family name and the title to the land.

In America, however, where available land was more abundant, some of
these restrictive patterns began to disappear. First-generation
colonists appropriated enough land for their own use and reserved
considerable undeveloped land for their children. One result of this
policy in New England was the lowering of the age at marriage, since
children could now afford to support a family sooner. Since this
extended the years of marital fertility, the number of children born to
colonial parents increased slightly, averaging between six and eight per
family. In the southern colonies, however, the disproportionate number
of male colonists created an imbalanced sex ratio that kept the marriage
age high and the number of children low. In black families, where the
patterns of servitude probably created an even more imbalanced sex ratio
during the first decades of colonization, these trends would be more
pronounced. By the eighteenth century, however, black families seemed to
thrive despite the increasing restrictions caused by the slave system.

But if second- and third-generation whites enjoyed unprecedented
opportunities to acquire land, their own children, particularly those
born after 1700, confronted a rapidly tightening situation. As more real
estate went under the plow, available acreage decreased, a small but
growing trend that forced some children to migrate to undeveloped lands
in the interior or to seek nonagric.ultural employment. In an ironic
way, the initial generosity of American parents accelerated family
disintegration, for children could no longer expect an adequate legacy.
The psychological implications of this pattern were quite significant.
Where seventeenth-century parents could control the land supply and thus
retain at least a modicum of power over their adult children, their
grandchildren often lacked the resources to keep their own offspring
dependent. Perhaps this demographic

situation explains why fourth- and fifth-generation Americans, the
people who matured around 1776, so resented the idea of political
dependence and were so strident in asserting their autonomy.

The importance of family estates reflected more than economic
considerations, for the perpetuation of landownership also satisfied a
profound emotional need for symbolic immortality, for feelings of
continuity and survival. As the modern world demystified the universe,
separating human order from the cosmic, people sought immortality in
secular ways, particularly through the lives of their own children.
Parents became more solicitous about the young, concerned for their
nurture and education. They began to name their children after
themselves with greater frequency, a sure indication of the desire for
secular immortality. And when one child died, it was not uncommon to
call a sibling by the same name.

This shift in parental values coincided with an important biological
change: people lived longer in America because the environment was
healthier. Not only did infant mortality decline, but more grandparents
lived to enjoy their children's children. The ecological harmony of the
continent eventually collapsed during the eighteenth century as epidemic
diseases became more common in the colonies. But the presence of
grandparents provided colonial children with important psychological
defenses against their own parents, serving to moderate the traditional
dislike of children and the usual cruelty of child rearing. Perhaps
these grandparents, older and closer to death themselves, better
understood the significance of genetic continuity.

The biological patterns that perpetuated the species also reinforced the
sociological basis of sexual relations. Marriage served to
institutionalize sexuality--protecting the continuity of property and
genealogy. But despite our popular notions of puritanical sex, English
colonials were a lusty people who appreciated physical pleasure for what
it was. Their idea of legitimate sexuality, however, was quite limited.
There is considerable covert evidence of guilt about nocturnal emissions
and masturbation; sodomy and bestiality were capital crimes. In 1642, a
sixteen-year-old servant in New England was, in the words of Governor
William Bradford, "detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with
a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey." For man
and beasts alike, the punishment was death. Still, as evidenced by the
number of "seven-months" children born in the eighteenth century,
premarital intercourse was becoming more common, probably because

lessening economic opportunity encouraged the delay of marriage. In
describing the ideal family, conventional wisdom reiterated the values
of English society and stressed the hierarchical nature of human
relations. Husbands were superior to their wives, children subservient
to their parents. In practice, obviously, there was considerable
deviation in all respects. Among other things, divorce represented one
form of redress, though accurate figures about its frequency are not
available. As an instrument of social control, nevertheless, the
colonial family did inculcate the demands of the wider society. As
child-beating lost favor among the upper classes, for example, parents
employed the sanctions of shame, of losing face, as a means of
discipline. Colonial children learned to respect the demands of visible
appearance, of saving face, of avoiding foolish self-exposure. Moreover,
in eulogies for the dead and in manuals of etiquette, colonial
commentators emphasized the advantages of suppressing emotions, of
moderating passion, of maintaining a placid exterior. Such attributes
coincided with a view of society that emphasized harmony and
interdependence.

If the colonial family served to institutionalize secular time, there
was an even more intense commitment to organizing cosmic time. Here the
primary institution was the church. Where premodern cultures simply
accepted the inexplicable mystery of the universe, modern Europeans
attempted to rationalize the spiritual world and stressed the importance
of organized religion. That colonial Americans devoted so much energy to
analyzing the essential mysteries of life and death betrayed the
fundamental paradox of colonial culture, the sense of living midway
between the secular and the infinite.

Colonial religion generally derived from the tenets of the Protestant
Reformation modified by the fierce ideological struggles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though Anglicans and Puritans
shared many religious principles, it was the differences that often
mattered most to them. As conservatives, Anglicans accepted many of the
historical innovations of previous centuries. But Puritans, driven by a
powerful self-image of sainthood and spiritual purity, rejected
religious practices that seemed to be human inventions.

Outside New England, the Anglican Church predominated in the colonies.
Yet the patterns of settlement in America forced the Anglicans to modify
their religious institutions, leading them unwittingly in a Puritan
direction. Thus a shortage of Anglican ministers, together with the
dispersal of population, placed increased burdens

on individual believers, an implicitly Puritan doctrine. Sometimes these
demands overwhelmed the laity, creating a spiritual vacuum that then
lapsed into secularism and religious indifference. Even when Anglican
ministers did appear, they lacked the institutional support of an
American episcopacy and often became mere hirelings of the local
vestries that paid their salaries. These ecclesiastical configurations
nevertheless worked well in the southern colonies, where the Anglican
Church enjoyed numerical superiority. But where the Church of England
was weaker, especially in New England, the absence of an American
episcopate troubled colonial Anglicans immensely. Despite their fervent
pleas, however, English politics prevented the appointment of an
American bishop during the entire colonial period, a situation that
placed New England Anglicans at the mercy of an aggressive, often
intolerant Puritan leadership.

Religious institutions in colonial New England revealed the tenacity of
Puritan ideals, even after the original zeal of the first generation had
waned. Seeking religious perfection, the Puritans resolved to eliminate
the historical innovations that had corrupted Christianity in other
places. While any baptized Christian could join the Church of England,
the Puritans generally insisted that church membership be restricted to
true saints--to those who could testify to the spiritual presence of
Christ. Potential communicants would stand before the congregation and
describe their religious experience, baring their most intimate secrets
to their friends and neighbors. The ritual reinforced communal bonds,
bringing people more closely together. But some Christians could not
endure such self exposure. When one woman in Dedham fainted twice in the
course of her examination, the church altered its policy about female
members, permitting them to testify through their husbands or in
private. Many more dared not speak at all, preferring to live outside
the ordinances of God rather than jeopardize their immortal souls by
deception.

Revealing the inner strength of Puritanism, such practices satisfied
most people--but not all. The minister at Salem, for example, a
determined Christian named Roger Williams, questioned whether any mortal
could determine the spiritual purity of other people's souls. Concerned
that hypocrisy would sneak into God's churches, he advocated a rigid
separation of saints from sinners, of church and state--a logical idea,
given Puritan theories about perfectibility, but one totally impractical
in a society seeking religious uni-

formity. For his troubles, Williams was banished by the Massachusetts
authorities. He fled to Rhode Island in 1635 and established another
colony committed to the principles of religious toleration. Other
deviants, also frustrated by the Puritan establishment, soon followed
him there.

While Puritan theology denied that good works could bring salvation (the
very idea was Catholic), the New England orthodoxy could not allow moral
standards to lapse even in affairs of this world, Thus when Anne
Hutchinson, a member of the Boston congregation, challenged the
ministers' emphasis on moral behavior over spiritual purity, the
Massachusetts establishment moved to suppress her beliefs. As in
Williams' case, however, Hutchinson's position--known as
"Antinomianism"--was difficult to denounce because it simply represented
a logical extension of widely held Puritan ideas. Such theological
consistency did not protect this woman, however; after a lengthy trial,
she was expelled from the church and banished from the colony in 1638.

The Antinomian crisis--as the affair was called--reveals more than the
ideological rigidity of Puritanism, for Anne Hutchinson was not only a
deviant; she was a woman. As in other areas of society, Puritan women
were expected to keep their place in church. "The woman is more subject
to error than a man," announced John Cotton of Boston. "It is not
permitted to a woman to speak in the Church . . . but rather it is
required she should ask her husband at home." Intellectual activity, it
was believed, threatened to unbalance female minds, and John Winthrop
readily explained the insanity of one woman by pointing to her
propensity to write poetry. Similar reasoning seemed to justify the
persecution of Anne Hutchinson. Shortly after departing Massachusetts
she delivered a "monstrous" birth, a sure sign of the influence of the
devil. And when, in 1642, she and her children were murdered by natives
in New Netherland, the Puritans extolled the perfection of God's
vengeance --one satanic people butchering another.

Such zeal depended upon the personal commitment of individual Puritans,
an intensity difficult to sustain over time. Within one generation of
colonization, New England preachers detected a decline in religiosity
and bewailed the failure of the Puritan mission. "Look into families and
other societies," urged one Connecticut minister, "is there not too
visible and general a declension; are we not turned (and that quickly
too) out of the way wherein our fathers walked?" Though Puritan
observers exaggerated the prob-

lem, hoping to stimulate a religious revival, the thrust of their
comments was accurate. By the late seventeenth century, full
participation in church services had declined noticeably, particularly
among males, despite such compromises as the "Half-Way Covenant" which
altered the standards of admission.

In Puritan terms, the major symptoms of decline were a loss of charity,
a rise of "worldliness," a general drift toward secular, materialistic
relationships. These changes were dramatized by sporadic accusations of
witchcraft, culminating in the celebrated trials at Salem in 1692. To a
people believing in angels and devils, the discovery of witchcraft was a
frightening phenomenon, awakening genuine fear of eternal damnation. Yet
witchcraft was a common crime in Europe, explicable through traditional
cultural mechanisms. What is significant about New England witchcraft is
its relationship to the loss of communal feelings. Most accusations
involved neighbors with long histories of resentment and petty quarrels.
Beset by anger or guilt for the failure to fulfill traditional
obligations, people accused one another of collaborating with the devil
to destroy the social order. In time of social crisis--the late
seventeenth century, for example--such accusations could reach epidemic
proportions. At Salem, about two hundred persons were charged with
witchcraft, and twenty died for the crime. Once the inner hostility was
purged, however, once people became reconciled lo a more competitive
secular society, accusations of witchcraft abruptly ceased, and the
devils departed from New England forever.

The crisis in Puritanism reflected the messianic temperament of its
proponents, their aggressive search for truth and the profound
disillusionment at failure. Another group of radical Protestants, the
Society of Friends, or "Quakers," who founded the colony of
Pennsylvania, experienced a similar transformation. Believing that each
human being, as a divine creation, possessed an "inner light" of grace,
the Quakers launched a "Holy Experiment" to put their ideals into
practice. Unlike other English Protestants, the early Quakers sought to
uphold their principles in negotiating with the Delaware tribe,
carefully dcmarking land boundaries and property rights, seeking the
peaceful coexistence of two cultures.

By the rnid-eighteenth century, however, the pursuit of material
wealth--land speculation and the fur trade--had undermined the Quaker
commitment. Treaties were broken, friendly natives killed, land stolen.
The immigration of non-Quakers, especially Scotch Irish and Germans who
desired land claimed by the Delawares,

hastened this process. Quaker idealism regarding Africans also vanished
as Pennsylvania merchants reaped the profits of the slave trade. Yet
both these trends did not go unchallenged. As in New England, important
members of the Quaker community protested the loss of zeal and the
surrender of values. These idealists eventually formed the antislavery
vanguard in America and advocated the emancipation of human chattel. By
that time, William Penn's vision of a wilderness Utopia had long been
abandoned.

By the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, therefore, colonial
churches everywhere confronted a fundamental tension between their
professed values and the behavior of their members. People continued to
believe in the ideals of Christian love and social harmony even while
they pursued secular concerns that destroyed those values. Similar
paradoxes exist in most societies, partly because language and imagery
lag behind worldly experience, partly because people do not like to
acknowledge their innovating practices. Such intellectual resistance was
especially true in America, since most colonials still believed in the
moral superiority of the first generation of colonists, the
community-builders of the seventeeth century. To betray their ancestors
involved considerable guilt and anxiety. These psychological tensions
produced a generalized uneasiness in the colonies, a gnawing doubt about
the thrust of American culture, a dissatisfaction with the fruits of
materialism.

Such unarticulated concerns combined with several immediate events--a
war with France and Spain, a diphtheria epidemic, several slave
insurrections--to create a tinderbox of emotions. The tinderbox exploded
in 1740 with a massive religious revival known as the Great Awakening.
The igniting factor was the presence of an itinerant English preacher,
George Whitefield, who traveled from New England to Georgia proclaiming
the gospel of Jesus Christ and winning converts for the Lord. "He speaks
from a heart all aglow with love, and pours out a torrent of eloquence
which is almost irresistible," declared one admiring woman in New
England. People dropped their tools in their fields, mounted their
horses, and raced to hear the apostle preach in crowded churches and
open fields. Benjamin Franklin, with his typical concern for details,
once estimated that Whitefield's voice could reach twenty-five thousand
people in the open air.

Like the Puritans of the seventeenth century, proponents of the
Awakening stressed the majesty of God and His promise of redemption to
true believers. People could attain salvation, according to the

"New Light" preachers, only by undergoing a conversion experience by
which the Lord imputed His grace to otherwise helpless sinners.
Thereafter, however, once reborn, these saints joined the Elect of God,
destined for life everlasting in heaven. It was a powerful
transformation they described, filled with passion and spiritual
ecstasy.

Consider the sermon of Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God," preached at Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1741. "The God that
holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some
loathsome insect, over a fire, abhors you," Edwards intoned; "his wrath
towards you burns like fire, he looks upon you as worthy of nothing
else, but to be cast into the fire." Such hellfire preaching alarmed
godly Americans and aroused their latent guilt. They responded first
with terror--"some sighing, some groaning, some screeching," reported an
eyewitness. The brimstone, however, contrasted with the joyous visions
of heaven, images of peace and tranquillity and love. The message became
compelling. People reached the depths of despair, lay helpless before
the Lord, and then discovered the inner energy of conversion, rising to
"raptures, and transports, triumphing and singing psalms and
hallelujahs." The beauty of holiness replaced the mortal world of
humanity.

Evangelical preachers won considerable success throughout the colonies,
appealing to people in all regions and in all classes. But they were
particularly effective in reaching people in vulnerable places--areas
undergoing rapid social change, communities worried about disease or
impending warfare. One social group--adult white males--seemed
especially responsive to the revivalists. Perhaps young men were closer
to the visceral dangers of war or the spiritual crisis of materialism.
Perhaps, too, they found in the evangelical religion a sense of self,
what modern psychologists call "identity." During the colonial period,
young men usually became "adults" not at the end of puberty, but
somewhat later, when they married and formed autonomous families. This
delay created a period of ambiguity about their place in society. During
social crises, such people are susceptible to ideological movements that
promise to alleviate their psychological doubt. In receiving the
evangelical message, therefore, young men in America resolved their
inner crises and found coherence both on earth and hereafter. Not
everyone, of course, welcomed the revivalist religion. Many
conservatives, known derisively as "Old Lights," resented the disruption
of customary practices and saw chaos, rather than grace, conquering the
land. Their antipathy to the Awakening soon precipitated a major
intellectual war with the evangelicals. These debates between New Lights
and Old had several salutary effects. When both sides eventually
realized that they could not extirpate their opponents, it became
possible to imagine a pluralistic approach to matters of religion. Thus
the idea of religious toleration quietly slipped through the back door
of American culture. Toleration, of course, did not imply equality, and
several state governments maintained an established church well into the
nineteenth century. Nor did prejudice against religious minorities
simply vanish. But among Protestants, at least, the imperatives of
religious truth, the old Puritan idea that "rightly informed
consciences" would inevitably agree, gradually gave way to a more
liberal attitude that allowed most groups to flourish.

The willingness of eighteenth-century colonials to tolerate Protestant
dissenters reflected the growing secularization of American society, a
shift from mystical insight to rational inquiry. This transformation
received institutional validity after 1776 by the formal separation of
church and state. That split, long seen as the triumph of enlightened
ideas, represented the culmination of a fundamental and profound
cultural development. Where once life and death had been merged in a
cosmic harmony, now they were separated into discrete areas--the secular
and the sacred, one governed by the dictates of reason, the other by the
passions of faith. Thus the miracles of time and space were reduced to
problems of timekeeping and territorial boundaries. It was one way of
rationalizing the unknown.

"The sudden rise of their estates"

******************

Chapter 3.

Colonial Economy and Social Structure

New England commerce and the southern tobacco economy

Commerce and conflict in the Middle Atlantic colonies

Mercantilism and the Navigation Acts

Westward expansion vs. Native American interests

Slavery and black society

The provincial elite

Social mobility and social stratification on

the eve of revolution

The secularization of time and space in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries--the subdivision of hours into minutes and wilderness into
colonies--was largely an unconscious process. The early idea of New
England as the wilderness (instead of in the wilderness), for example,
and the perpetuation of old-style calendar time reflected the slow
development of the modern mind, the genuine blurring of mystery and
experience, of faith and reason. Such ambiguities usually remained
latent and unarticulated. Yet as fundamental assumptions about life,
these cosmic attitudes inevitably affected the ordinary world of human
relations. It was in the visible realm of social affairs that the
paradoxical vision of the universe became most manifest, most acute,
and, from the perspective of colonial Americans, most alarming. As
mystery drained from the cosmos and rationality replaced it, the
emotional network of social obligations also dissolved, leaving a hollow
inexplicable void at the core of society.

These changes came slowly and subtly. The first English colonists, like
their medieval ancestors, accepted the view of society as a living
organism in which social interaction occurred for the health and
survival of all. That biological metaphor was extremely important, for
it suggested an intimacy between the physical world and the social,
between nature and humanity. Such a system presumed a hierarchy of
social relations, headed by natural-born leaders-- royalty and
aristocracy--and supported by the faithful devotion of the ruled. Mutual
love and responsibility, what Puritans called "the welfare of the
commonwealth," were expected to preserve the social order. This did not
always occur, of course, but such failure was explained in terms of
human frailty rather than as a failure of the social structure itself.

The organic world-view represented the social assumptions of most
English colonists, whether they sailed to Virginia to find gold or fled
to New England to create a godly Utopia, and so pervasive was it that
people adhered to it even when it no longer could contain their
experiences. After the American Revolution, the tension between social
ideals and social realities became more apparent and led to the
formulation of a different, more individualistic vision of society.

* * *

The departure from cosmic time and sacred space encouraged a pattern of
economic arrangements that also moved from the communal values of the
medieval world toward the individualistic capitalism of modern times. In
traditional societies, the development of natural resources through
human activity constituted a sacred operation by which the "mysteries"
of a craft were applied to divine creation. Labor and land were
therefore simultaneously spiritual and secular. But the needs of life in
the colonies advanced ideas that separated the cosmic from the
artificial and destroyed that intimacy. Thereafter, the land and the
people who cultivated it lost their mystical functions. Instead they
became objects and commodities to be bought, sold, and manipulated for
purely secular interests.

Though this process occurred everywhere in colonial America, it emerged
most clearly in Puritan New England, a society unusually self-conscious
about its historical thrust. In his mid-ocean address to the first
colonists, John Winthrop had reiterated the Puritan commitment to social
hierarchy and Christian charity. Underlying that harmony was the Puritan
concept of "calling," the idea that God summoned each person to a
particular vocation to perform some secular task. Thus labor possessed
spiritual attributes designed to reinforce communal bonds. Each calling
had specific value, but no calling logically could benefit at the
expense of another, for that would topple the cosmic order. Some would
be wealthy, of course, and some "mean and in subjection." But private
interest remained subordinate to the common good.

During the first decade of settlement, the steady flow of migrants and
their property to New England assured the economic prosperity of the
colony. But following the outbreak of the English civil wars in 1640, as
Puritans in England became more optimistic about conditions at home, the
great migration slowed to a trickle, causing a severe depression in the
colonies. To bolster the economy. Puritan leaders encouraged the
expansion of trade, the marketing of foodstuffs, fish, and furs in the
West Indies, in England, and in Europe. Such activity, well befitting
the aggressive Puritan style, eased the depression, provided a valuable
outlet for secular energy, and. in time, became the bulwark of the New
England economy. Trade networks, usually with kindred spirits or family
members who could be trusted, soon placed New England in the mainstream
of Atlantic commerce, and offered vast profits to the coastal merchants
who

fitted the ships and, depending upon the harvest, modest returns to the
farmers who supplied them.

Economic prosperity eliminated many of the problems facing the
wilderness communities. But the lure of profits, in its own way,
threatened the spiritual basis of Puritan society. Workingmen in
Massachusetts Bay took advantage of the labor shortage and raised their
rates, provoking widespread criticism of their loss of charity. Such
practices contravened the Puritan commitment to the "just price," the
intrinsic value of a particular commodity. To redress such grievances,
the colony government enacted legislation to regulate wages and prices,
a policy that proved difficult to enforce despite wide public approval.
People resented, above all, the large, almost usurious, profits
accumulated by mercantile investors. In 1639, Robert Keayne, the
wealthiest man in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was fined £200 for
amassing "excessive" profits and forced to make a public confession in
church. Unlike some other thriving capitalists, Keayne was a faithful
Puritan. Although he apologized sincerely to his neighbors, he
maintained his innocence to the end, even drafting a fifty-page
"Apologia" in which he explained the dilemma of balancing the fruits of
his calling against the spiritual treasure of heaven. Keayne's paradox
persisted well into the eighteenth century, plaguing other Puritan
consciences by its insolubility: how to be an assiduous Christian in
this world without surrendering the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

While commerce thrived in New England, the settlers along Chesapeake Bay
concentrated on growing tobacco for export to England. So profitable was
this product that southern planters rejected all suggestions to
diversify their crops. Instead, they enlarged their plantations to
increase tobacco cultivation. Virginia planters with wealth or political
influence obtained the best land, along rivers navigable by oceangoing
ships to facilitate the export of tobacco and the importation of other
goods. These favored planters soon began acting as merchants for their
neighbors, exporting their tobacco and selling them imported
commodities, a role yielding them great profits. Tobacco production thus
stimulated commercial activity despite the absence of a major southern
port. The excessive cultivation of tobacco often worked against the
planters' best interests, for overproduction brought lower prices and
intermittent depressions. Some planters responded by

deliberately destroying growing crops. More typically, however, planters
compensated for declining profits by more intensive cultivation, which
served only to lower prices still more.

Eventually, the tobacco growers attained greater economic stability
through crop control and careful management. But throughout the colonial
period, they remained dependent upon English and Scottish merchants for
credit. In the mid-eighteenth century, fluctuations in tobacco prices,
together with excessive borrowing, created endemic indebtedness among
the Chesapeake planters. Moreover, British interests often used their
political influence to protect their investments. Thus when the Virginia
legislature attempted to prevent the overproduction of tobacco by
curtailing the slave trade, the English Privy Council, responding to the
pleas of British merchants, vetoed the law. This exemplifies one of the
ways in which the colonial economy was tied to the wealth and power of
the metropolis across the sea. The future tobacco industry hinged
ultimately upon the development of virgin lands. As planters moved
westward, fertile acreage increased in value. Investment in land thus
became profitable, despite the uncertainty of tobacco production. Land
no longer served merely as a geographic place on which to perform a
secular function; land was a commodity, easily bought and just as easily
sold. Though still an important symbol of status, land had lost its
mystical qualities.

Nor was this secular attitude limited to the Chesapeake colonies. In New
England, too, the growth of population, largely through natural
increase, undermined the collective society envisioned by the first
colonists. During the seventeenth century, New England authorities
carefully regulated frontier expansion by granting townships only to
settlers who promised to transplant families and "godly churches" in the
wilderness. But by the next century, these restraints had vanished. No
longer was land granted solely to members of a community. The colony
sold land to speculators, some of them nonresidents, who would reap
large profits when other settlers moved to the area. Land speculation
quickly, became widespread in New England, attracting even small
investors and inflating the price of land everywhere, often beyond the
means of poorer folk.

To orthodox Puritans, this search for worldly wealth symbolized the
spiritual apostasy of New England. "Land! Land! hath been the idol of
many in New England," complained Increase Mather, a staunch defender of
the old religion, "how many men since coveted after the earth, that many
hundreds, nay thousands of acres, have

been engrossed by one man, and they that profess themselves Christians,
have forsaken churches . . . and all for land and elbowroom enough in
the world." What Mather lamented was not simply a loss of religious
zeal, but a rejection of a spiritual ethos--the repudiation of a cosmic
vision that viewed the earth as Creation rather than as real estate to
be consumed.

The insatiable thirst for land soon led to direct conflict with Native
Americans. In Virginia, tobacco planters disregarded earlier treaties
and encroached on the natives' land, allowing their livestock to trample
the growing crops. After repeated affronts, the Doegs and Susquehannocks
retaliated with arms in 1675. The frontier settlers reacted by attacking
the natives, despite the official disapproval of royal authorities. The
episode revealed the racist attitudes of white soc'ety, what one
rebellious colonist admitted was "our open and manifest aversion of all,
not only the foreign, but the protected and darling Indians." One group
of settlers even proposed "that the Indians taken [prisoner] in the late
war be made slaves."

The conflict in Virginia paralleled the situation between the Wampanoags
of New England and Puritan expansionists. Though Puritan missionaries
labored to convert Native Americans to Christianity, they required the
"barbarous heathen" to reject their traditional cultures, live in
"praying villages," and adopt an English lifestyle. Their ethnocentrism
allowed no tolerance for Native Americans who did not accept Christian
gospel and who maintained their own spiritual beliefs. By 1675, the
Wampanoags had suffered considerably. Under the leadership of their
chief, Metacom (known to the English as King Philip), they set out to
attack Puritan settlements, hoping to drive their oppressors into the
sea. Fear spread through New England, and the Puritan militia
counterattacked. But it was the exhaustion of supplies among the
natives, rather than Puritan military strength, which finally brought
the Puritans victory in 1676. Even in the aftermath of their victory
they continued to kill Native American survivors of the conflict, or
enslaved them to pay for the war. The people who viewed the land as an
object to be owned could just as easily view its inhabitants as
commodities to be captured and sold.

Where the Puritans cloaked their racism with the rhetoric of
Christianity, the settlers of the Carolinas, many of whom previously had
been slaveowners in Barbados, proved more direct and more brutal in
dealing with Native Americans. The trade in deerskins was extremely
profitable, and control of it legally belonged to a group of

proprietors in London, who attempted to create a monopoly. But in order
to develop their holdings, the proprietors had invited settlers from
other colonies, especially from the West Indies. These colonists
resented the proprietary regulations and determined to eliminate them by
dealing directly with the natives. The Carolina traders decided to
exterminate the uncooperative tribes, particularly the Westos, who
continued to trade with the proprietors. Those natives who survived the
warfare were promptly sold into slavery, thus establishing a commerce
that became even more profitable than deerskins.

Relying upon the services of rival tribes, the Carolina merchants
supported slave-raiding attacks on numerous native peoples. First the
Westos, then the Apalachees, later the Tuscaroras, and later still the
Yamasees--all fell victim to the aggressive traders. In 1708, the South
Carolina slave census listed 1,400 Native Americans; more still had been
exported to other English colonies. The native slave trade, besides
enriching the Charleston merchants, also hastened the depopulation of
the local tribes, a demographic catastrophe that opened additional lands
for settlement. By the early eighteenth century, Carolina planters were
earning comfortable profits from the cultivation of rice and indigo,
both staple crops, on large plantations worked by slave labor. These
planters, like the slave traders they supported, well understood the
material advantages of treating human beings as items of commerce to be
demystified and exploited, like the land.

These economic patterns also emerged in the "middle colonies"-- New
York, the Jerseys, and Pennsylvania--where English capitalism reinforced
similar economic propensities in other ethnic groups. In New York, the
original Dutch authorities had granted enormous tracts of land to
private investors, a policy the English perpetuated after the conquest
of New Netherland in 1664. Like the Dutch, English landowners did not
always sell these holdings but often leased them, thus establishing a
dependent class of tenant farmers. As an area rich in natural resources,
New York exported furs, naval supplies, and food to other parts of the
British Empire.

The fur trade, particularly the fierce competition between Albany
merchants and the French in Canada, brought the English colony into
close contact with the Iroquois. The strong unity of these tribes
prevented the immediate destruction of their culture, and the Iroquois
proved to be astute negotiators. Both England and France recognized the
Iroquois' potential power and desired to placate these

potential allies. After the defeat of France in 1763, however, the
Iroquois lost this crucial advantage in the balance of European power
and increasingly became victims of aggressive English landowners.

Though the Dutch colonists maintained their ethnic integrity long after
the advent of English power, there was no essential conflict between the
two cultures, particularly in the realm of economic affairs. Such
harmony contrasted markedly with the pattern in Pennsylvania, the colony
that attracted the most non-English settlers. Founded by Quakers,
Pennsylvania became a cauldron of ethnic antagonism as Scotch-Irish and
Germans flocked to the colony. Driven to America by religious
persecution and economic oppression and attracted by promises of
religious toleration and free land, these groups clamored for fertile
acreage. They quickly settled the eastern counties of Pennsylvania and
pressed westward and then southward into the Shenandoah Valley and the
frontier portions of Virginia and the Carolinas.

The influx of these new settlers inflated the value of undeveloped land
and encouraged further land speculation. Even the Quaker merchants, once
known for their fair dealings with Native Americans, succumbed to the
lure of wealth. Breaking treaties with the Delaware tribe, Pennsylvania
officials grabbed vast tracts of western land, which quickly soared in
price. Meanwhile, the growing numbers of Europeans forced the local
tribes farther westward, depriving them of their traditional lands and
disrupting their agriculture. Burning resentment brought the Delawares
back, however--as allies of the French during the Seven Years' War. Then
they attacked the frontier settlements and spread terror throughout the
colony, forcing the pacifist Quakers of Philadelphia to take a more
militant stand.

The acquisition of western lands not only profited the speculators, but
also accelerated the expansion of commercial agriculture in
Pennsylvania. Surplus crops moved eastward to Philadelphia and then in
Quaker ships to the West Indies, a trade pattern that rewarded both the
farmers and the merchants who exchanged their goods. Such commercial
profits often were reinvested in western lands, which stimulated still
more agricultural production.

The accumulation of wealth by Quaker merchants did not necessarily
contradict their religious impulses; like the Puritans of New England,
the Quakers viewed material success as a sign of divine blessing. But
the pursuit of profits nevertheless undermined Quaker

idealism, encouraging an individualistic attitude toward contractual
relations. Nor did Quakers shun the profits of the slave trade. Even the
City of Brotherly Love possessed a large slave population, employed
mostly as artisans, laborers, and domestic servants. Like other
Europeans, therefore, the Quakers gradually acquired the emotional
detachment that characterized the modern mind.

The pattern of economic relations linking the colonial economies to the
mother country was defined by a loose policy known as mercantilism.
According to mercantilist principles, a nation's prosperity depended
upon the creation of a self-sufficient economy, free from foreign
competition. In theory, colonies were sources of raw materials and
markets for the finished goods produced in the home country. Ultimately,
it was the mother country that would benefit most by this arrangement,
but the mercantilist theory held that the colonists too would prosper
proportionately; since organic social theory assumed a natural harmony
of interests, such a conclusion seemed self-evident.

The idea of a regulated economy had deep roots in European societies,
and most Europeans expected government supervision of economic affairs.
In the English colonies, town and county officials attempted to regulate
wages and prices in the interests of the community. In imperial affairs,
these attitudes led to the formulation of a series of Navigation Acts
enacted by the English Parliament to regulate the flow of commerce.
First passed in the mid-seventeenth century, the Navigation Acts
protected English shippers from foreign competitors by requiring the use
of English vessels in all colonial trade. Additional legislation
enumerated specific commodities-- tobacco, sugar, cotton, and indigo,
for example--which could be sold only in England; eventually the list
included rice, furs, lumber, iron, and naval stores as well.

This monopoly of trade was intended to assure the mother country a cheap
and reliable flow of natural resources protected from foreign
competition. A similar protectionist attitude led to the passage of
several manufactory laws. The Hat Act of 1732, for example, protected
English producers from the competition of colonial hat manufacturers,
while the Iron Act permitted Americans to produce only pig and bar iron.
Despite attempts to compensate colonials for the loss of foreign
markets, such legislation demonstrated the primary importance of the
English economy. The Navigation Acts functioned not to raise revenue,
but to direct the flow of

trade. In theory, such direction protected all members of the British
Empire, regardless of their geographic habitation. The mercantile system
thus reflected the underlying assumptions of organic social theory.

The Navigation Acts were seldom as exploitive in the countinghouses as
they appeared on the statute books. Though the mercantile laws required
the colonies to trade certain goods exclusively with England, most
colonial commerce would have sailed in that direction anyway. Since
trade networks usually depended upon loyal agents and kin, colonial
Americans probably would have formed alliances with English merchants.
English manufactures, moreover, exceeded European goods in quality,
availability, and cheapness, a logical reason for the development of
trade with America. More specifically, the Navigation Acts encouraged a
thriving shipbuilding industry in New England, and by 1776, one-third of
England's commerce moved in American-made ships. The mother country also
subsidized certain staples, especially indigo, thus artificially
bolstering an otherwise marginal industry.

Colonial Americans recognized these advantages and ascribed them to the
peculiar blessings of all English people. Yet they knew, too, that the
system did not always function efficiently or wisely. The Molasses Act
of 1733, for example, which was passed through the influence of the West
India sugar lobby, established a prohibitive duty on imported sugar, a
rate so high as to threaten the manufacture of rum in New England.
Colonial merchants responded by ignoring the law and shipped their goods
with impunity for three decades. However, this disobedience was not
always possible in other areas of the economy, and the Navigation Acts
bore heavily on tobacco and rice planters, creating sporadic depression
in both industries. Such burdens seemed particularly acute at the end of
the seventeenth century when economic grievances, combined with other
more subtle pressures, created a major social crisis in English America.

The clumsiness of the Navigation Acts betrayed the uncertainties of
economic activity throughout the British Empire. Caught between a
world-view that stressed the harmony of economic interests and a
capitalistic perspective that demanded greater rationalization, colonial
planters and merchants searched for a modicum of worldly security
without sacrificing the personal nature of economic relations. As they
violated English laws, borrowed freely from their neighbors, or
scrambled for friendly legislation from their repre-

sentatives, colonial entrepreneurs demonstrated a remarkable, even
poignant, capacity to be humane and understanding. Consider, then, the
ambivalence of the Puritan merchant Robert Keayne: "I have not lived an
idle, lazy, or dronish life," he asserted with certainty, if not with
pride, but "more happy would it have been for me if I had [kept] as
careful ... an account of my sins and the debts I owe to God." Those
spiritual omissions, haunting in their silence, speak plainly about the
thrust of America.

The paradoxes of colonial economic development, the tension between
precapitalistic and capitalistic values, emerged in social relations as
well, influencing the colonial social structure and the articulation of
social values. These tensions partly reflected the larger transition
occurring in European culture, a subtle but continuous shift from an
organic community to one characterized by individualistic relationships.
Whereas medieval Europeans found their identity within specific status
groups or "estates," modern societies emphasized the importance of
personal uniqueness and individuality. Midway between these
perspectives, seventeenth-century Europeans felt early strains of that
process of historical change.

Yet it was not in London or in Paris that these trends first appeared
with clarity. Rather it was in the remotest outposts of European
culture, in the small, struggling settlements that perched along the
Atlantic coast, where powerful symptoms of change emerged. For the
transplantation of European society was a self conscious process, a
deliberate attempt to define coherently what most Europeans simply took
for granted. Thus it was in America that the clash between modern and
premodern grated most loudly and, considering the reverberations of that
collision, most prophetically.

Virginia, the first colony to be settled, was the first to experience
these changes. As Elizabethan Englishmen, the first Virginians expected
aristocrats to rule the colony, a situation that prevailed under the
control of the Virginia Company. But within one generation, many of the
colony's leaders had either died or returned to England, leaving a void
at the apex of the social structure. Into this vacuum slipped the
wealthiest residents in the colony, rich landowners who had exploited
the "headright" system by importing indentured servants and claiming
large tracts of real estate. These self-made leaders lacked the
traditional symbols of high social status that, in

I

Hngland, legitimized the control of power. Thus Virginians perceived a
significant difference between their social values (which linked status
to power) and the existing pattern of social arrangements. Disturbing as
this may have been, Virginians did not then reject their traditional
values, but sought to implement them more perfectly.

After the English civil wars began in 1640, many wealthy young men
migrated to Virginia to escape the crisis. In America, their social
status enabled them to obtain land and power, and they gradually became
important leaders of the colony. By about 1660, the transplanted elite
had formed valuable political alliances, some of them as colleagues of
the royal governor. Those aspiring planters who did not attain political
influence were frustrated and resentful of the rule of the
power-holders.

This anomalous situation, where power rested with new wealth, provided
the background for a major social crisis in 1676 known as Bacon's
Rebellion. The precipitating cause of the insurrection was the refusal
of the royal governor, William Berkeley, to send soldiers against the
Doegs and Susquehannocks who lived on the western fringes of the colony.
Anxious to remove the local tribes from the lands, frontier settlers,
under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon, seized the initiative, first
attacking the natives and then challenging the governor's authority.
After a dramatic confrontation between Berkeley and Bacon, in which the
rebel forced the governor to surrender his power, the sudden death of
Bacon abruptly ended the uprising. Berkeley then crushed his opponents,
executing twenty three men for treason, before being recalled himself by
the royal government in England. Though ostensibly a conflict of power
between the political elite in Jamestown and the county leaders on the
frontier, Bacon's Rebellion also revealed profound tensions within the
social order. "We appeal to the country itself," declared Bacon in a
"Manifesto" written during the crisis. "Let us trace these men in
authority and favor . . . let us observe the sudden rise of their
estates [compared] with the quality in which they first entered the
country or the reputation they have held here amongst wise and
discerning men, and let us see whether their extractions and education
have not been vile." What Bacon protested was the rise of a provincial
elite lacking the traditional accouterments of power--old wealth,
tobacco economy only emphasized the general frustration that prompted
the uprising.

Bacon's Rebellion constituted a desperate challenge to a social
structure based upon new wealth. His vision of social order, however,
looked to the past. Bacon was not a modern man calling for autonomy and
independence. Rather, he decried the loss of traditional order and
coherence and summoned Virginians backward to an older social form. The
defeat of Bacon and his allies by the provincial elite not only allowed
these wealthy planters to preserve their power against the rebels, but,
through intermarriage and business alliances, to become even more
solidly entrenched in subsequent decades. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century, they had consolidated their strength, once again
linking wealth, and power to status and had emerged, finally, with the
prestige of social leadership.

Thus colonial society saw European notions of status replaced by
provincial images of success. Colonial elites never consciously rejected
the traditional ideology of aristocratic leadership; if anything, they
tried, like provincials elsewhere, to imitate the lifestyle and
deportment of their metropolitan models. Such posturing was accepted for
the real thing in all colonies, enabling the colonial elite to wield
power with greater authority. A fluid social system, characterized by
considerable mobility, became more rigid, more stable, and ultimately
more stratified.

This changing social climate was reproduced in other English colonies.
In New England, the transformation coincided with the decline of
Puritanism and the emergence of a more secular society. Where
first-generation Puritans expected a correlation between godliness and
social leadership, their descendants, more pragmatic and more worldly,
thought more about power and wealth.

In 1637, for example, the townspeople of Ipswich, Massachusetts,
beseeched the younger John Winthrop to return to their community,
explaining that "his abode with us hath made our abode here much more
comfortable than otherwise it might have been." Such "able men" offered
emotional security to people living in remote places. For similar
reasons, the Puritans bestowed high social status on their ministers.
During the seventeenth century, however, as New England merchants
amassed enormous fortunes in the Atlantic trade, they discovered another
way of looking at the world. Merchants, men with international concerns,
were the first to recognize

New England's secondary place within the British Empire; Win- throp's
city on a hill constituted, in reality, a mere appendage of English
society. When Puritan conservatives threatened their commercial
interests and stood in the way of their search for status, these
merchants aligned with British politicians to break down the New England
Puritan social structure. "We are some of us English gentlemen,"
exaggerated one Puritan scion, "and we should labor to support such
families because truly we want them."

These social changes, particularly the redefinition of leadership roles,
reflected a new estimation of individual worth. In Europe, change
affecting all social classes occurred gradually and was characterized by
the destruction of feudal obligations, the separation of workers from
the land, and the rise of laissez-faire capitalism. In the colonies,
however, the transformation of social relations occurred more abruptly.
It did not occur without selecting a victim--not the European peasants
but the African slave.

During the first decade of settlement, the tobacco planters of Virginia
and Maryland relied primarily upon the labor of indentured servants, a
contractual relationship that, if not always equitable, at least
acknowledged the rights of both parties. White servants often received
extremely cruel treatment at the hands of their masters, which suggests
that African servants, about whom there is little reliable information,
suffered similar cruelty.

By 1640, colonial authorities were treating some blacks, though not all,
as slaves, a status that meant, in North America, lifetime hereditary
servitude. This policy reflected a major departure from traditional
English practice, which usually stressed the mutual obligations between
masters and servants. The notion of perpetual slavery also differed
radically from African traditions, in which slavery served to assimilate
conquered peoples and still protected the rights of individual slaves.
Such innovations strongly suggest that economic considerations alone do
not explain the evolution of black slavery in America. It does suggest
that there existed a deep antipathy to Africans, which encouraged their
enslavement. Slavery, in turn, reinforced racist attitudes, since it
placed nearly all blacks into the lowest caste. This process attained
legal recognition by the 1660s, both in the colonial legislatures and in
the judicial system. In one Virginia ruling, the courts held that
conversion to Christianity did not alter a slave's status, thus
undermining the "heathen" argument long called

upon as rationalization of the slave system. This can be seen as one
demonstration of the self-conscious creation of a slave society in
America. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, drafted ironically
by the English philosopher of liberty John Locke, also protected the
institution of slavery in spite of religious conversion. Other
legislation in the Chesapeake Bay colonies stripped the Africans of
basic defenses, including the right to testify in court, the right to
own property, and the right to legal marriage. Human beings were thereby
viewed outright as chattel.

The tightening of the slave system during the late seventeenth century
reflected other social developments. After 1690, the expansion of the
tobacco economy increased the demand for slave labor, leading to massive
importation of Africans. The increasing numbers of blacks and the
growing fear of slave revolt led colonials to restrict their activities,
a policy culminating in the Virginia slave code of 1705. This law
significantly coincided with the emergence of an indigenous provincial
elite. As the planter class consolidated its power in the aftermath of
Bacon's Rebellion, it also established a clearly defined slave caste at
the lowest level of society.

The institutionalization of slavery in the southern colonies mirrored
the demands of a plantation economy. In New England the presence of
fewer blacks made the problem appear less urgent. Slavery never became
deeply entrenched there, and the black population possessed certain
civil rights denied them in Virginia. Not until the last decades of the
seventeenth century did Puritan legislation specifically inhibit the
activity of blacks--establishing curfews, prohibiting the consumption of
alcohol, limiting emancipation, and prohibiting interracial marriage and
sexual relations between the races. The timing of these enactments is as
important as their content, for they coincided with a period of social
crisis. Confused about the drift of their society, Puritans, like the
tobacco planters, responded by imposing an artificial legal order upon
otherwise vaguely defined social relations.

As an institution, slavery varied according to the social conditions of
each region. The Dutch West India Company had encouraged the importation
of slaves to New Netherland during the seventeenth century, a policy
continued by the English, As a result, New York became the largest
slaveholding area north of the Chesapeake. In the urban centers of
Albany and in New York City slaves constituted approximately one-fifth
of the population; about one-third of the white population owned at
least one slave. In the northern

colonies Africans constituted a small minority of the population. They
lived in close proximity to whites, often isolated from other slaves,
and worked as farm hands, artisans, and domestic servants. In the
southern colonies the absence of urban centers and the economics of
commercial agriculture determined that most slaves worked on
plantations. The typical agricultural unit remained relatively small,
averaging less than thirteen slaves in Virginia and Maryland at the end
of the eighteenth century; and even on the southern plantations, blacks
interacted closely with whites. The greater density of a black
population in the South, however, provided slaves with certain defenses
against white culture. In the privacy of the slave quarters African
culture could flourish more readily. In the North, where slaves lived
more intimately with whites, closer supervision was more likely.

The slave population increased considerably during the eighteenth
century. This demographic trend was a reflection of an equal balance of
black males and females that encouraged marriage, and the general
healthiness of the North American climate. Black women born in America
seemed to be more fertile than native Africans living in America. The
lower fertility of first-generation slaves may well have been a
deliberate form of resistance to American slavery. However, the
expansion of the American-born black population lessened the importance
of the slave trade with Africa and the West Indies, resulting in a
steady decline of the percentage of foreign born slaves in North
America. In isolated areas, native Africans probably were unknown.

Such demographic patterns affected the blacks' response to slavery, for
their level of acculturation determined their relations with whites.
Africans with no understanding of the English language found themselves
consigned to menial work requiring strength rather than skill.
Better-assimilated slaves, capable of communicating with their masters,
could become triined craftsmen--carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, or
boatmen. These occupational opportunities increased their personal
freedom, for they were sometimes required to perform tasks away from
home. Travel offered unique opportunities for escape, and skilled
artisans, more experienced than other blacks in coping with white
culture, constituted the largest class of runaway slaves.

The success of the slave economy depended upon efficiently organizing
the labor of the Africans. Such discipline might require physical
brutality, but planters also relied upon pecuniary incentives

to increase production. Recognizing the interest of the planters in
efficiency, slaves frequently resisted the system by deliberately
performing inefficiently. "My spinners," observed one Virginia planter,
"imagining I was gone yesterday instead of their usual day's work spun
but 2 ounces a piece."

Opposition to the slave system occasionally took violent forms. In 1712
a group of slaves in New York City launched a bloody assault on some
white men, an uprising that was suppressed only by the presence of
English soldiers. White retribution proved incredibly cruel--torture and
execution of the insurrectionists--and the colonial Assembly promptly
passed a new slave code severely restricting the movements of the black
population. Even more desperate than this clash was an uprising of
slaves in Stono,'South Carolina, in 1739. There blacks captured a cache
of arms and began marching toward freedom in Spanish Florida.
Intercepted by the white militia, the blacks used their guns in a futile
effort at escape.

Though armed rebellions occurred rarely, blacks did not passively
succumb to American slavery and did not easily abandon their culture for
the values of white society. The isolation of American blacks from their
native roots, however, undermined the strength of African culture,
producing a cultural blend that was partly African, partly English. This
occurred subtly, as it involved the superimposi tion of European forms
onto a bedrock of African beliefs. Thus the religions of west Africa
emphasized the importance of a powerful conversion experience, similar
to that of evangelical Christianity. Perhaps that parallel explains why
American blacks proved so receptive to the preachers of the Great
Awakening and came forward in great numbers to be baptized. But black
perceptions of Christianity remained highly selective, drawing primarily
upon aspects of Western religion that coincided with previously held
feelings and ideas.

The emergence of a slave caste in colonial America was part of a

general trend toward a more stratified and polarized social order. I

This pattern varied from area to area, depending upon the nature of
economic activity, the environmental context, and the cultural
predisposition of the settlers. Yet certain generalizations still may be
made. All regions witnessed a remarkable expansion of population,
largely the result of natural increase. In 1700, about 250,000 people
inhabited British North America; by 1776, that figure had increased
tenfold, approaching 2,500,000, of which about one-fifth were black

slaves. The sheer growth of population accelerated the process of social
differentiation, accentuating the anomalies between articulated social
values and the actual working of the social system.

On the eve of the American Revolution, power, wealth, and status in all
colonies rested firmly in the hands of a provincial elite. Despite their
bourgeois origins in the previous century, these planters and merchants
wielded great political power and modeled their lives on their image of
aristocracy. They built spacious houses, employed numerous servants or
slaves, and imitated the latest English fashions. For pleasure and
instruction, they read English books and periodicals, founded
liberal-arts colleges that instituted traditional European curricula,
and followed with interest the scientific proceedings of the Royal
Society of London.

Despite their apparent gentility, however, they were hardly an idle
class of aristocrats. In an age of personal business relations, commerce
required long hours in the countinghouse, drafting instructions to ship
captains or letters of credit to other merchants. Similarly, the richest
plantation owners generally maintained personal control of their
operations, assigning work tasks, checking the crops, dealing with
slaves. No wonder, then, that Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's
Almanack, filled as it was with the aphorisms of business, became
enormously popular in the colonies. And when Franklin and John Bartram
founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1743, it
was "useful knowledge" they promised to study.

Wealth required work, but it brought important social advantages as
well. The European distinctions of status failed to survive the first
generation of colonization. Titles like "esquire" and "mister" lost
their clarity and consequently their importance. But colonials continued
to acknowledge the value of status and rank, generally related to
wealth. The assignment of seats in the churches, for example, reflected
the prominence of each family, a visible sign of worldly standing if not
of spiritual perfection. Harvard and Yale ranked students by the social
position of their families rather than by standards of intellectual
excellence. Indeed, higher education aimed not simply to improve the
minds of young men (women were excluded from these intellectual
citadels), but also to develop their characters, to inspire their
natural qualities of leadership.

In this age of personality, members of the provincial elite cultivated
their behavior to win the respect of others and so they were concerned
about their public images. Courtesy, temperance, and

equanimity constituted basic social virtues, evidence of superior
status. Few people, of course, attained such distinction. But most white
property owners--what colonials considered "the middling sort"--probably
aspired to improve their social position and therefore accepted the
stratified system. It was this hopeful attitude, rather than any
vestigial respect for aristocracy, that perpetuated the patterns of
deference in colonial America.

By European standards, the American social order was considerably more
fluid, allowing resourceful people to rise in wealth and status.
Certainly the career of Benjamin Franklin, the model of a self-made man,
attested to that possibility. But increasingly in the eighteenth
century, such opportunities became rare. As wealth consolidated in the
hands of the elite, the disparities between the upper and lower classes
became more pronounced and stratification lines became harder to breach.
Social mobility was not entirely impossible, but the fluidity associated
with frontier society no longer existed.

The coastal regions experienced the most overcrowding, the result of the
population explosion. As available land disappeared, rural poverty
became more evident; many young men chose nonagricultural occupations,
swelling the population of the nearby towns. Such decisions might hasten
economic advancement, for colonial artisans enjoyed moderately high
wages. But the urban centers also attracted ever larger numbers of
propertyless workers--day laborers, journeymen, sailors--who scratched
out a livelihood or joined the growing list of unemployables supported
by public charity. Only the black population, victimized by all white
groups, seemed lower in status. For all these working people, lacking
both property and the privileges it brought, the hardening of social
lines often fostered deep class antagonism.

Such antagonism often led to armed rebellion. In areas of New York,
tenant farmers demanded the end of long-term leases; in Pennsylvania,
frontier settlers demanded a more militant policy toward the native
tribes; in North Carolina, western farmers demanded a voice in
government. They resorted to violence to effect these social changes.
Though indications of profound dissatisfaction, these rebellions were
typically unsuccessful and failed to produce significant reforms. In the
cities, violence was more spontaneous and more common, usually involving
ethnic or racial rivalry. But at times of crisis, the urban poor
constituted an important social force. Bread riots in Boston, protests
against impressment

into the Royal Navy, electoral dissent in Philadelphia--all represented
the systematic use of raw power to influence the political process. Such
outbursts, significant as they now appear, nevertheless were exceptional
events in colonial America. Most people, captivated by illusory visions
of upward social mobility, remained loyal to the system and awaited
their turn.

By the outbreak of the American Revolution, therefore, provincial
society contained a hierarchy of relations extending from the wealthiest
planters and merchants to the destitute poor who crowded the almshouses.
To the European eye, such distinctions seemed natural, merely a visible
manifestation of inherent class differences. For Americans, however, the
organization of society concealed a fundamental change in social
assumptions, a shift from the spiritual organicism of the body politic
to the exploitative arrangements of modern individualism.

Though men of power, people like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, might
speak of "natural" leaders and a "natural" aristocracy, the provincial
elite, unlike its European counterpart, was a leadership of wealth
rather than of birth, a decidedly artificial, unnatural standard of
distinction. Thus status in America came to rest solely upon secular
values, the accumulation of material riches and the concomitant
acquisition of political power. Aristocratic postures, powdered wigs,
and a genteel eloquence could not alter that essential truth. It was
wealth, therefore, and the power it bought, not some mystical system of
estates, that structured relations between individuals and thus paved
the way, in the next century, for the expansion of American capitalism.

"On the side of power"

******************

Chapter 4.

Politics and the American Revolution

Political values and the emergence of modern politics

Colonial political structure The imperial wars and the Treaty of Paris

England's great war for empire and colonial protest

against taxation and other Intolerable Acts

The War for Independence: origins, military

engagements, peace settlement

Establishing state governments

The Articles of Confederation: the first national government and the
call for reform

Changes in economic and social relations in colonial America were
closely intertwined with emerging patterns of political activity. As
individuals became merely units of economic development, as wealth
purchased prestige and status, the political process also became more
secular. In a society where elite groups lacked the traditional
advantages of aristocratic birth, the manipulation of politics often
served as a necessary substitute. In addition, the pursuit of material
rewards more often depended upon the acquisition of political power--the
ability to influence executive policy or the passage of legislation.
Proximity to power, in turn, reinforced other secular trends by
encouraging a prudent defense of self-interest, even at the expense of
other members of society.

These attitudes contrasted markedly with the values and assumptions
transported to America by the first colonists. Those early settlers had
embraced a cosmic vision based upon the orderliness of all human
relations. As in economic and social matters, so too they believed that
the political world reflected a natural harmony of interests. Power,
they assumed, served the needs not of particular groups or individuals,
but of the entire community. Since a conflict of interests was literally
inconceivable short of treason, these assumptions justified the
institutions of monarchy and aristocracy. The leadership of a few, they
believed, protected the interests of the many.

By the sixteenth century, however, some of these institutional patterns
had begun to change. In England, the power of the Tudor dynasty often
hinged upon the cooperation of Parliament. When Henry VIII established a
national church, he relied upon parliamentary statutes to legitimate his
decision. Parliament still remained subservient to the throne, summoned
and dissolved at the monarch's will, restricted from encroachment on the
royal prerogative. Yet the Tudor monarchs realized--and this was their
special genius--that Parliament could not be ignored on substantive
issues. This blurring of power, so typical of the emerging modern mind,
often perplexed the Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century,
resulting in strident ideological battles between king and Parliament.
Yet even the English civil wars did not fully clarify the question of
sovereignty. Parliamentary legislation still risked the royal veto, a
power exer-

cised as late as the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14) and a real threat
even thereafter. Nor did the House of Commons of the eighteenth century
pretend to represent the interests of its constituents in any modern
sense of political representation. Thus to the end of the colonial era,
English political values manifested the paradoxical tendencies of the
larger society, a tenuous composite of premodern organicism and modern
individualism.

In America, the tensions between political values and political
practices emerged more clearly. As a people dominated by English
influences, colonial Americans attempted to reproduce English political
institutions. Though geographically isolated from the seat of British
government, they remained loyal to the English constitution, praised its
unique advantages, and repeated the rhetoric of English politicians. Yet
as outposts of empire, colonial interests often conflicted with those of
the mother country, thereby underscoring the tension between organic
unity and interest politics. What was deemed necessary and proper in
England was not always appropriate or desirable in America.

The three thousand miles separating colonials from London prevented the
satisfactory implementation of the English political system in America.
However much colonials might voice adherence to their English heritage,
they could never reduce that distance nor lessen the effects of that
oceanic barrier. Lacking a locus of power in America, colonials
gradually realized, much to their chagrin, that the rights of Englishmen
would not always protect them from the politics of the mother country.
It was that realization, the culmination of a painful but logical
process of political awakening, that led finally to the Declaration of
Independence and the creation of a republican form of government.

Though provincial politics and imperial relations ultimately dominated
the political process in the colonies, it was the local units of
government that directly affected the lives of most people. In New
England, town meetings served as the primary unit of government,
resolving disputes between neighbors,' supervising economic activities,
parceling land, and electing delegates to the colony legislature. In
other areas, county governments, modeled on local government
institutions in England, provided the basic political services. Among
many other responsibilities, these institutions registered land deeds,
probated wills, levied taxes, supervised roads, meted out justice, and
served as the basic units of political representation. Such

fundamental power, especially its proximity to daily lives and daily
concerns, emphasized the local orientation of these rural people.

Implicit in this arrangement was a belief in paternalistic government.
Colonials assumed that local officials best understood their needs and
interests, much as the medieval lord of the manor was thought to
regulate affairs for the common welfare. In England, such attitudes
justified the perpetuation of political representation by "estates" of
the realm. Thus landlords, even nonresidents, continued to sit in
Parliament on behalf of their "constituencies"-- whether or not they
shared the interests of the other residents. But in the colonies, local
government followed the dispersal of population, thus linking geographic
units to particular constituencies. Representation in America was more
specific than in England from the beginning of colonization, and as a
result it became more secular earlier.

However, the expectation of paternal government influenced the selection
of political leaders. In the New England towns, all male residents voted
for town officials and usually chose men of standing to act as
"selectmen" to oversee public affairs. The openness of the town
meetings, unusual in an age of aristocratic rule, reflected the
Puritans' desire to wield power by consensus rather than by majorities.
The popular nature of town government contrasted with the workings of
the county system. As in England, the county officials --justices of the
peace, sheriffs, coroners, and clerks--were appointed by the central
authority--usually in America by the royal governor. But in practice,
the governor appointed men from a list of nominees submitted by other
local officials. Thus a group of local leaders could form a
self-perpetuating oligarchy that screened political candidates and
assured the protection of their interests. The system was hardly
democratic, but neither were the assumptions of most people living in
America.

Nowhere was this paternalism clearer than in the electoral process
itself. Since the units of local government provided the basis of
representation in the colony legislature, elections were supervised by
the county sheriffs, men firmly entrenched in the local oligarchy. At
the instruction of the governor, the sheriffs in each county established
a date and place for polling and publicized the election to candidates
and eligible voters. In a society which recognized the preeminent
importance of property, suffrage was restricted by property
requirements, usually the ownership of land. The requirement for
officeholding was even higher. In England, such standards severely

limited the number of voters, but in America, where landownership was
more common, this was not the case. Approximately 75 percent of the
adult males in New England qualified to vote, and in the southern
colonies the figure was somewhat lower, approaching 50 percent.
Nevertheless, large groups of people were excluded from voting for other
reasons. People who were considered "dependents" --women, children,
servants, and slaves--did not have a sufficient stake in society and
consequently were denied the vote. The system also excluded certain
minority groups--Catholics, Jews, free blacks, Native Americans,
non-English-speaking Europeans. These limitations partially reflected an
organic world-view that presumed the establishment of homogeneous
communities. Yet they also revealed an aggressive ethnocentric aspect of
English culture, a sense of superiority that ultimately became
established in what has been identified as the dominant WASP system.

Though political participation remained the privilege of white male
Protestant property holders, even eligible voters, then as now, often
neglected their duty. One reason for this apathy was that most
candidates represented similar interests and articulated a similar
ideology; the voters faced no significant choices. Moreover, distance
from the polling place--usually the county courthouse--frequently
deterred voter participation. Occasionally, a corrupt sheriff might
deliberately summon the voters to a particularly remote site, hoping to
influence the outcome. Finally, the very conception of politics as a
paternal responsibility reinforced voter apathy.

On election day, the voters found the sheriff seated behind a long
table, flanked by the justices of the county and, at the extreme ends,
the rival candidates. Already the hopeful officeholders had demonstrated
their gentility by providing the citizens with abundant food and drink,
usually hard cider and rum punch. "Some of them drank drams in the
morning," reported one observer, "and went merry to the court house." To
vote, presumably. The sheriff opened the proceedings by reading the
governor's writ calling for the election. Then he invited the voters to
come forward. One by one, each citizen stood before the sheriff,
announced his choice, and watched the clerk tally the count. The favored
candidate usually rose from his seat and, with the grace befitting a
gentleman, thanked the voter for his trust. Afterward, the candidates,
losers as well as winners, treated the voters to more drinks and
celebration, a raucus rural festival that occasionally degenerated into
brawls and hell-raising. George Washington, whose consummate skill won
him the abiding

affection of his neighbors, understood the importance of such fare: "I
hope no exception were taken to any who voted against me but that all
were alike treated and all had enough," he explained to a colleague; "it
is what I much desired." Then, with food in their bellies and liquor on
their breaths, the voters rode homeward, confident that they had
exercised their civic duties.

The electoral process underscored the personal nature of colonial
politics. People voted neither for slates nor for parties, but for
particular individuals. To persuade the populace of their
qualifications, therefore, candidates had to demonstrate their claim to
leadership. Public generosity was one such sign; the refusal to solicit
votes was another. Yet candidates could not be too aloof from the
people, lest they offend the voters by their pretense. There was a fine
line to be drawn. Thus one unsuccessful candidate complained that

he had lost the election despite the fact that he had "kissed the

of the people"! The importance of personality became even clearer in the
context of open balloting procedures. Where people cast their votes in
public, it was indeed risky to challenge the existing power structure.
In any case, few people ever tried. Rather, they accepted the
traditional standards of political excellence--wealth, status,
gentility.

The rule of the oligarchs provided a modicum of stability in local
politics, despite the factional strife on the provincial level of
government. In a culture that stressed the advantages of political
harmony, the endemic discord that characterized provincial politics
seemed inexplicably perverse. "The greatest care [should be] taken not
to go into parties and separate interests," warned one conservative, but
he admitted that " 'tis fondness for a party . . . that possesses,
biases, and determines us on all occasions." This conflict between
values and practices partly reflected a larger transformation within
Western culture, the gradual loss of an older communal ethos. But in a
more immediate way, the tension also revealed the peculiar nature of
colonial politics. Though Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic
claimed to share a common interest, American politics ultimately
depended upon the political activities of English politicians. The very
idea of being colonial thus undermined the political stability of the
colonies.

The dependent status of colonial politics was dramatized periodically by
the arrival of a royal governor appointed by the crown. with solemn
toasts--the newcomer would attempt to ascertain the balance of power in
the colony. Already the governor possessed a long list of instructions,
drawn by the English Privy Council, which he had sworn to follow to the
letter. He knew that some of these orders would imperil the interests of
certain colonials and arouse their opposition. But he hoped that these
provincial Englishmen would respect the royal prerogative and honor the
wishes of the British government.

From the colonial perspective, the arrival of a new governor created an
aura of uncertainty. Since most governors obtained their positions
through the patronage obligations of English politics, they were usually
Englishmen by birth, complete strangers to colonial affairs. Yet they
possessed considerable power in matters that affected the lives of each
inhabitant. As the personal representative of the crown, the governor
was responsible for enforcing parliamentary and colonial legislation,
including the Navigation Acts, which regulated American commerce. As
commander-in-chief of the colony militia, the governor supervised
military defense and contracted with local merchants to supply the
troops. With the approval of the colonial council, the most stable
branch of colonial government, the governor bestowed grants of land, an
enormously important power in an agricultural society bolstered by heavy
land investment. Besides these executive responsibilities, the governor
possessed important legislative functions. He could summon or dissolve
the colonial legislature, order new elections, and recommend
appointments to the colonial council, which served as the upper house of
the legislature, somewhat like the English House of Lords. He also
controlled appropriations and expenditures and could veto legislation.
Finally, the governor and his council constituted the highest judicial
court in the colony. To many colonials, these extensive powers seemed
greater than those exercised by the king in England. That is why
American politicians shuddered at the arrival of a new royal governor.
It was not arbitrary power that they feared, but simply that the person
who held it was an unknown quantity?

The governor's council was a body usually consisting of twelve men,
appointed by the crown at the recommendation of the governor. As an ally
of the governor, the council often served a conservative role in the
legislative process, forcing the lower house to moderate its proposals.
By manipulating the council, many a governor averted the politically
unpleasant task of vetoing provincial

legislation. The compliance of the council reflected not only its	I

dependence upon the authority of the executive, but also its social
composition. As the wealthiest men in the provinces, councilors
cherished their influence with the royal authorities. By aligning with
English interests, they themselves drew closer to the seat of English
culture, to what provincials generally regarded as a more sophisticated
society. These psychological advantages reinforced the more obvious
material gains that came from supporting the royal authority. Since
members of the council received no salaries, they often supplemented
their incomes by accepting other government positions, which increased
their political dependence on the governors.

Members of the colonial elite who lacked the favor of the governors but
who also aspired to greater influence in provincial affairs	: entered
the power structure through the "assemblies" (the lower	: house of the
legislatures). With strong ties to the county oligarchs who nominated
them, the members of the assemblies were elected to office through the
provincial electoral process. As men of wealth and status, they too
commanded the respect of their constituents. But they often remained
outside the mainstream of provincial power, forced to acknowledge the
political pre-eminence of the governor's inner circle. Their
estrangement from royal power undermined their commitment to the
imperial system and made them more willing to challenge the governor's
authority.

In Massachusetts, members of the House of Representatives quarreled with
the royal governor about the appropriation of salaries, using this
platform as a wedge to wrest additional power at the expense of the
prerogative. In Pennsylvania, a strong antiproprietary faction waged
perennial warfare against the Quaker establishment, in search of a more
aggressive policy against the Dela wares. These pressures reinforced
basic ethnic antagonisms in that colony, resulting, at the end of the
colonial period, in an abortive attempt to have William Penn's colony
placed under direct royal supervision. In New York, the political issues
involved not only

Anglo-Dutch rivalry, but also a conflict between the mercantile	I

interests centered in New York City and the landed wealth of the Hudson
Valley. In Connecticut, disputes between New Light Protestants and Old
Lights spilled into the political arena, creating bitter rivalry for
control of power. Questions of taxation and political representation
emerged to undermine the political peace in all colonies.

This pervasive contention had important implications for the
distribution of power. Where provincial politicians lacked the security
of an entrenched elite, they could ill afford to cooperate with a
governor whose presence threatened their leadership. Thus the leaders of
the assemblies gradually began to erode the power of the prerogative by
challenging some of the governors' basic privileges. Consider the
problem of spending public monies. Most royal officials conceded that
the assemblies, like the English House of Commons, had the right to
approve all tax legislation, for that was considered the essence of
representative government. Once such a measure was passed, however,
royal officials tried to curtail the power of the assemblies;
disbursement of funds, audits of accounts, awards of contracts, and the
establishment of salaries remained a matter of the royal prerogative.
But gradually the assemblies began to claim those other powers. At times
of crisis, for example, when a war with France galvanized colonial
energy, the assemblies might assume the right of awarding government
contracts along with the appropriation of funds for defense. The royal
governors, of course, denied the validity of such actions. In times of
calm, they might even dissolve an assembly that made such extravagant
demands. But there were times when that was not possible, and there were
governors who lacked the courage to try.

In acquiescing to legislative inroads, the colonial executives seriously
weakened their future positions. It was not simply that they lost the
principles of power; they also surrendered its substance. The
appointment of a government contractor, for example, could be an
important source of patronage, a means of rewarding loyal allies or
punishing recalcitrant opponents. Without such powers, the governors
lost the ability to harness votes in the legislatures. Besides weakening
their own hands and those of their successors, they also encouraged the
proliferation of political factions whose pursuit of power often
obviated cooperation with government officials.

These political configurations reflected ngt simply the jealousies of an
emerging provincial elite, but also the persistent problem of dealing
with imperial authority. Just as the arrival of a new royal governor
might jeopardize a decade of rapprochement, so too did other branches of
the English government intrude in colonial affairs, creating a highly
uncertain political environment. English interference was not only
frequent, but complicated. Simply listing the various offices
responsible for colonial administration illumi-

nates the bewildering maze of political relations: the Board of Trade
and Plantations, a branch of the Privy Council, reviewed colonial
legislation, proposed bills to Parliament, and adjudicated colonial
disputes; the Secretary of State for the Southern Department issued
instructions to royal officials in the colonies; the Treasury Board
supervised the collection of customs duties; the Admiralty Courts
regulated the enforcement of the Navigation Acts; Parliament enacted
legislation affecting all members of the British Empire. Other, less
official bodies were equally influential in imperial affairs--merchants,
lobbyists, and political pamphleteers. For colonials, three thousand
miles from England, the quagmire of offices often proved an
insurmountable obstacle to political effectiveness.

This institutional structure, despite its bulk, remained very active in
American affairs. Though historians have spoken often of "salutary
neglect," English officials affected colonial politics in profound ways.
By retaining the right to veto provincial laws, the Privy Council could
supervise the American legislatures whether or not it exercised its
powers. Nor were these merely theoretical constraints. The veto of
legislation or, more commonly, the delays caused by the bureaucracy
undermined the colonists' search for political order. Even matters of
immediate concern were often suspended until the royal assent crossed
the Atlantic. Moreover, in this age of personal politics, English policy
often contradicted itself. What satisfied some royal authorities might
offend others, a confusing pattern that was aggravated by the
overlapping jurisdictions within the administrative machinery.

In economic affairs too the British supervision kept American interests
subservient and insecure. A major problem within the colonial economy
was the scarcity of gold and silver to serve as a medium of exchange. To
alleviate this shortage, several colonial governments issued paper money
as legal tender. English merchants were alarmed by this and fearing that
the currency would depreciate in value they convinced Parliament to
prohibit the circulation of such money. Although this decision was
enforced unevenly it nevertheless posed a serious economic problem.
Georgia and Maryland simply ignored the restriction, while Massachusetts
searched in vain for a satisfactory alternative. The controversy
revealed, not so much English tyranny, as the basic powerlessness in
American society.

This sporadic intervention in colonial affairs, serious as it now
appears, was dwarfed ultimately by the international repercussions

of British imperialism. As loyal Englishmen, most provincials viewed the
British Empire as the bastion of liberty and rallied to its defense in
time of need. But such times occurred with unsettling frequency during
the colonial era. Between 1689 and 1763, England engaged in four major
wars with her European enemies, especially France, and each of these
conflicts produced a parallel conflagration in America. The wars gave
colonials an opportunity to demonstrate their martial valor, bringing
such celebrated victories as the capture of the French fortress at
Louisbourg in 1745. But the conflicts also reinforced a sense of
powerlessness when, for reasons of diplomacy, the British ignored
colonial sacrifices and negotiated away captured territory.

Colonial participation, however it was regarded in London, proved
immensely valuable to Great Britain during the Great War for Empire that
erupted against France in 1754. Considering its vast implications,
nothing less than the control of the American continent, the war had
obscure origins on the western frontier. French fur traders had moved
into the Ohio River Valley and established a network of trading posts
and forts, hoping to contain British expansion. Meanwhile, colonial land
speculators from Virginia and fur traders from Pennsylvania also had
entered the area. Gunshots were exchanged, provisions stolen. Soon the
entire frontier was ablaze.

England's early military strategy proved dismally ineffective. In 1755,
General Edward Braddock led the pride of the English army into an ambush
set by French soldiers and their allies from Canada. Braddock's
defeat--soon enshrined in American folklore to epitomize British
arrogance--shocked colonials everywhere. Subsequent French victories in
New York and Pennsylvania aggravated the tension, convincing some pious
provincials that God was punishing the people for their sins. Perhaps it
was Providence that turned the tide. At least many colonials fervently
believed that William Pitt's ascension to power signified a divine
blessing. Pitt determined to eliminate France from North America and
began rushing men and supplies to the colonies. British troops responded
with alacrity, winning victory after victory until the heroic encounter
between Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham resulted in the
conquest of Quebec in 1759. That triumph effectively sealed French
resistance in Canada, though the war did not end officially until the
signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

News of British success bolstered colonial enthusiasm, and the coming of
peace brought spontaneous jubilation from New England

to Georgia. Benjamin Franklin, then living in London as a colonial
agent, viewed the events optimistically and predicted unprecedented
growth and prosperity in America. Such expansion, he suggested, would
enrich the whole empire, because "the growth of the children tends to
increase the growth of the mother." Franklin's filial metaphors, dutiful
as they were in 1760, nevertheless concealed a basic problem within the
imperial family. The children were growing older and more restive; the
parent, stiffer and less flexible. Earlier, Franklin had warned of such
dangers. "To weaken the children," he had advised, "is to weaken the
whole family." By 1763, as the British patriarchs carved up the spoils
of war, it was becoming evident that the colonial children were chafing
under the parental restraints.

Despite the chronic instability of provincial politics--the endemic
disputes between the governors and the legislatures, the interference of
English politicians, the vulnerability of the colonies during
wartime--colonial Americans generally believed in a political system
based on natural harmony and moral order. That is why political writers
such as Franklin relied so heavily upon family metaphors, and that is
why most colonials, even as late as 1776, remained loyal to the English
crown. Throughout the revolutionary crisis, the most commonly cited
justification for political obedience was the Fifth Commandment--Thou
shall honor thy father and mother--which, in context, meant one's
political parents.

As interest in politics became more visible, however, and destroyed even
the illusion of political harmony, a new ideology also emerged to
explain the intensity of political conflict. By the mid-eighteenth
century, most politically conscious colonials recognized that the
expansion of power in England constituted an important threat to the
American political order. Yet as loyal Englishmen, they continued to
venerate the institutions of British politics. The only satisfactory
explanation of conflict, therefore, was that the particular individuals
who wielded power in England--not the system itself-- might be corrupt.
This linking of power and morals revealed the paradoxical vision of the
eighteenth-century mind, the blurring of organic politics and modern
individualism. These ideas emerged first in England. They were
articulated by a group of political writers, known as Independent Whigs,
who had been excluded from the informal arrangements of power then
dominating English politics. Seeing themselves as victims of the system,

Independent Whigs bitterly resented the political machinations--the use
of patronage, for example--which preserved the position of those in
power. Their writings became extremely popular in America and were
reprinted in numerous colonial newspapers and periodicals. For
provincials, too, remained outside the political citadel and thus
appreciated this denunciation of the establishment.

According to the political ideology of the Independent Whigs as well as
of provincial politicians, power and liberty stood at opposite poles of
the political system. In an ideal world, that polarity balanced
naturally; the rich and wellborn enjoyed privileges and responsibilities
denied to ordinary folk. But the growth of secular politics had weakened
that natural balance, creating a more brittle tension between power and
liberty. Most Englishmen still believed that the British
Constitution--the peculiar blend of monarchy, House of Lords, and House
of Commons--served to institutionalize those political forces and thus
prevented the collapse of either pole. Within the English system,
liberty and power could coexist in a tenuous balance that allowed
maximum liberty to the citizens without degenerating into license and
anarchy. That remained a very delicate balance, however, and it easily
could be subverted by corrupt politicians.

The Independent Whigs and their American sympathizers emphasized the
potential dangers of such a system. Corrupt leaders, they warned, would
overthrow the Constitution, subvert the balance of power, and establish
a tyranny--unless, that is, the people guarded their rights. This
thesis, imbued as it was with conspiracy and distrust, won remarkable
popularity among provincial Americans; the instability of provincial
politics had prepared them for it. To a people already suspicious of
royal governors and the power of the Privy Council, such ideas possessed
a special clarity.

The conspiracy theory of politics also offered a solution to the
dilemma. Where corrupt politicians exceeded the "natural" limits of
power and threatened the constitutional order that protected liberty,
the people had the right to rebel. It was the unnatural exercise of
power that would provoke that awesome decision. "The people know for
what end they set up and maintain their governors," declared the New
England minister Jonathan Mayhew in 1750--in a sermon preached
appropriately on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I!--and the
people "are the proper judges [of whether] they execute their trust as
they ought to do it;--when their prince exercises an equitable and
paternal authority over them;

when from a prince and common father he exalts himself into a tyrant;
when from subjects and children he degrades them into a class of slaves,
plunders them, makes them his prey and unnaturally sports himself with
their lives and fortunes." Good parents, natural parents, did not do
such things.

Mayhew's position represented an extreme in colonial thinking, one that
few Americans would accept without serious qualification. Yet it was
based upon many widely shared assumptions. First, there was the fear of
corruption. Though most people believed that the monarch, as God's
anointed authority, was innocent of deliberate evil, there were
suspicions that the sovereign's ministers--the members of his Privy
Council--lusted after power. "The king can do no wrong" was the popular
truism, but the king's advisers quite obviously could. Opposition to the
royal power therefore focused not on the monarch, but on the ministers
who formulated policy in his name. Thus the colonial children would
remain loyal to their royal parent, even as they condemned the power of
his servants.

Closely related to this idea was the provincial attitude toward English
society. For most eighteenth-century Americans, England remained the
center of sophisticated culture, the source of enlightenment, learning,
and cultural achievement. American visitors stood awed at the
magnificence of that country, literally astounded by the architecture,
the gardens, the curious inventions, the historical monuments. Yet, like
provincials everywhere, they also distrusted the luxury and opulence of
the metropolis, believing that the facade of sophistication concealed a
pervasive evil and degeneracy. These images helped explain the pattern
of English politics. The king's advisers, surrounded by the corruption
of the metropolis, had become tainted themselves. By contrast, American
society seemed simpler, more innocent, more virtuous.

These cultural values remained amorphously denned, seldom spoken with
the clarity of Mayhew's discourse. Large segments of the provincial
population simply ignored, or were excluded from, political
considerations. Slaves on Patrick Henry's plantation undoubtedly could
not understand what the Virginia orator meant when he demanded liberty
or death. Nor is it likely that white propertyless workers who labored
from "sun to sun" six days a week shared with politically aware
colonials the antipathy to English interference. These disenfranchised
classes did not shape colonial politics; rather, they responded to
decisions already taken by their political leaders. When summoned by
these leaders many ral-

lied to the banner of colonial liberty, hoping to acquire some of its
benefits for themselves. But many others, already distrustful of the
provincial leadership, lagged behind; they did not require an elaborate
ideology to understand their best interests.

Thus several dissatisfactions influenced the colonial response to
British policy in the years after 1763. The Great War for Empire,
instead of resolving the difficulties of imperial administration,
accentuated the problems facing Great Britain. The war itself had been
very costly, precipitating a rise in taxes. The acquisition of Canada
added to that financial burden, and the decision to garrison British
troops in America increased still further the cost of colonialism. When
English officials contemplated this unhappy situation, they noted that
the American provinces had benefited greatly by the war and concluded
that the colonists should share in the added taxes. Bolstering this
economic consideration was a more important political concern. During
the war, the colonists had violated British interests by trading with
the enemy. They also had refused to provide adequate supplies and
manpower for the English forces. Such resistance reflected the general
inefficiency of the colonial administrative system. With the arrival of
peace in 1763, British officials determined that it was time to reform.
The result was a series of executive orders and legislative enactments
designed to reorganize the British Empire.

The first royal order aimed at coordinating British relations with
Native Americans. In the Proclamation of 1763, George III prohibited
English settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains and ordered British
troops to the frontier to prevent violations and to oversee the fur
trade. Decisions made in England, however, were not always enforceable
in the wilderness.

Alarmed by European invasions of the Ohio Valley, the interior tribes
had fought on the French side in hopes of maintaining a balance of
power. After the French defeat, the tribes lost this critical advantage.
The new English policy further restricted their trading opportunities,
forcing them to carry furs to British forts, eliminating the annual
gifts of European goods, and prohibiting the trade of alcohol. In these
straitened circumstances, the natives became increasingly restive.
"Wherefore do you suffer the whites to dwell upon your lands?" asked the
Delaware prophet Neolin. "Drive them away; wage war against them."

The message was clear and compelling. In 1763, the Ottawa

chief, Pontiac, led his people against the British and terrorized the
white settlements. British reinforcements managed to quell the immediate
threat, but it was mainly the absence of the French with their supplies
and munitions that doomed the Ottawas' efforts. For colonials, however,
the uprising demonstrated the inadequacy of British defense, despite the
new policy of standing British troops in America.

English attempts to curtail western expansion proved equally
unenforceable. Land speculators and colonial officials blithely ignored
the territorial restrictions imposed in London and continued to occupy
the Ohio Valley. The natives, bereft of outside support, resisted
sporadically; more often, they sold their lands, acquiescing to the
colonial invasion.

The failure of England's policy on American western lands revealed the
vast distance, political no less than geographical, that separated
colonial interests from those of the mother country. Even with the best
intentions, the British perspective conflicted with that of provincial
Americans on such issues as representation, taxation, and military
necessity. These problems were compounded by a system of communications
that was not only slow but also unreliable, and by a political climate
in England that prevented the formulation of a consistent political
course.

Consider the matter of revenue. Burdened by an enormous war debt, the
English ministry determined to apportion some of the needed taxes on
Englishmen who resided in America. This policy was consistent with the
mercantilist view of community, especially because the colonies had
benefited by the recent war. In 1764, Parliament passed the Sugar Act,
which sought to prohibit illicit trade with other nations and which,
unlike the earlier Navigation Acts, sought to raise revenue by enforcing
the duties on sugar. The following year, Parliament enacted the Stamp
Act. This law required the use of taxed stamps on certain legal
documents, newspapers, and other printed matter. Significantly, both
measures bypassed the provincial legislatures in levying taxes.
Sandwiched between these laws was the Currency Act of 1764, which
prohibited the circulation of paper money as legal tender, an enactment
designed to protect British interests from having to accept depreciated
money in payment for debts. Ironically, it reduced the available
currency at the very time Parliament was increasing the tax burden.

From the British perspective, such legislation was eminently fair; but
Americans saw things differently. Following the departure of

the French from Canada, a diplomatic act that freed the colonists from
their traditional dependence upon the British military, Americans found
themselves in a severe postwar depression caused by the overstocking of
goods and the abrupt loss of sales to war contractors. The decline of
trade affected not only the merchants, but also the dock workers,
sailors, and day laborers they employed. Meanwhile, southern tobacco
planters, who had begun to consume English commodities at an
inflationary rate after 1750, found their resources curtailed by British
creditors. Heavily indebted, they faced a bleak economic future. It was
at this difficult juncture that colonial Americans learned of the new
imperial measures.

The reaction to the legislation in the colonies unleashed a century of
political frustration and revealed an abiding fear of powerlessness. One
New York merchant warned that the Currency Act. would destroy "the
intercourse between the mother and her offspring." "Why should they
punish the colonies indiscriminately?" he asked in confusion. "Parents
seldom do, good ones at least, with their children." Such unnatural
behavior clearly violated normal family relations and indicated a moral
deficiency within the British government.

Convinced that the king's ministers had hatched a sordid conspiracy to
destroy American liberty, colonials organized an elaborate protest
against the laws. Petitions flooded to Parliament demanding a repeal of
the obnoxious legislation. Merchants boycotted English goods, hoping to
use economic pressure to force a redress of grievances. Urban workers,
distressed by the disruption of business and long resentful of such
royal policies as impressment, organized secret groups known as the Sons
of Liberty--a significant filial designation--to harass uncooperative
officials and prevent the enforcement of the new legislation.
Occasionally, their activities provoked mob violence, as when an irate
crowd stormed the house of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson,
leaving it a shambles. Such protests, destructive though they appeared,
possessed an important inner logic. They were not random mobs of drunken
workers, as alleged by royal officials. Rather, they were politically
alert groups who selected their victims with care and, in their eyes,
with justice. Nor were extralegal activities confined to the lower
classes. In 1765, nine colonial legislatures sent delegates to a Stamp
Act Congress in New York City where the leading lawyers of the colonies
drafted a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances" that denied the
legitimacy of the Parliamentary legislation.

These protests, though often motivated by suspicion, fear, and interest,
also possessed an important philosophical basis that was widely
articulated and loudly defended. The question focused upon the nature of
the British Constitution and locus of sovereignty. Parliamentary
leaders, long accustomed to conflict over the royal prerogative,
insisted that sovereignty belonged solely to the English legislature, an
opinion which justified imperial legislation that affected the colonies.
That opinion was not shared by American colonists, who traditionally
paid taxes levied by the provincial legislatures, bodies in which they
enjoyed direct representation. Even the Navigation Acts, which taxed
certain types of trade, served primarily to regulate commerce, not to
raise revenue. Thus the passage of the new imperial legislation evoked
bitter cries of taxation without representation.

British politicians argued that the colonists indeed enjoyed the full
rights of Englishmen, including the right to legislative representation.
They observed that Parliament, as the representative body of all the
estates of the realm, already represented American interests. This
notion of "virtual representation," truly a legacy of the medieval
world-view, made no sense to American protestors. "The people of these
colonies are not, and from their local circumstances cannot be,
represented in the House of Commons in Great Britain," responded the
Stamp Act Congress. This constitutional impasse, which was essentially a
clash between the old organic vision of politics and a modern sense of
interest, dominated all subsequent debate.

How the issue ultimately would be resolved was perceived with remarkable
clarity by a lawyer from Annapolis, Maryland, named Daniel Dulany: "If
the claims of the mother country and the colonies should seem on such
occasion to interfere, and the point of right to be doubtful," he wrote
in 1765, "it is easy to guess that the determination will be on the side
of power, and the inferior will be constrained to submit." William Pitt,
England's savior during the Seven Years' War, disagreed. Speaking in
Parliament for the repeal of the Stamp Act, he admitted that "the force
of this country can crush America to atoms. . . . But on this ground, on
the Stamp Act, when so many here will think [it] a crying injustice . .
. your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like
a strong man." Such arguments, together with the economic coercion of
the boycott and the persuasion of colonial agents, eventually prevailed.
In

1766 Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, conceding the immediate issue,
but at the same time announced in the Declaratory Act that it retained
the constitutional principle of legislating for the empire. Americans
generally ignored this latter enactment and celebrated "the joyful
tidings." Yet their satisfaction contained a perverse irony. For the
ideology of conspiracy had convinced them that corrupt politicians had
plotted the destruction of American liberty. The repeal of the Stamp Act
merely confirmed that fear, for Parliament certainly would not have
rescinded a good law. "We always have had enemies, and we may always
expect them," warned a Thanksgiving Day preacher. "We may depend upon it
that they will lay new schemes, and disappointment may but whet their
rage."

Americans, therefore, possessed a full ideological defense against
subsequent imperial policy. In 1767 Parliament enacted the Town shend
Acts, which, among other things, established new customs duties, created
a new board to enforce the Navigation Acts in Vice Admiralty Courts
(which did not require jury trials), allowed the customs revenue to pay
the salaries of colonial officials and thus freed them from legislative
appropriations, and suspended the New York Assembly for refusing to
comply with an earlier Quartering Act. In each of these provisions,
Parliament reasserted its claim to sovereignty and ignored colonial
protests over the right of representation.

Once again, Americans saw the work of conspiring politicians and
responded with alacrity. In response to the Townshend Acts, John
Dickinson published an influential tract, Letters from a Farmer in
Pennsylvania, which argued against Parliament's right to tax the
colonists even in matters of trade. Colonial merchants, hoping to
pressure their English creditors, again instituted nonimportation
agreements. And the Massachusetts House of Representatives, under the
leadership of the resourceful Sam Adams, issued a "Circular Letter"
urging all colonials to join the protest. These were firm, even strident
decisions. But the statements were also carefully guarded in language
and respectful in tone. "This House cannot conclude, without expressing
their firm confidence in the King our common head and father," declared
the Massachusetts legislature.

While English officials contemplated their next step, colonial resisters
took matters into their own hands. American merchants continued to
violate the Navigation Acts despite the aggressive tactics of the new
customs commissioners. Then in 1768, one of John Hancock's
ships--appropriately named the Liberty--was confis-

cated for smuggling. News of the event aroused the Boston populace and
that night a mob attacked the commissioners and destroyed public
property. Outraged by the violence, British officials dispatched several
regiments to Massachusetts. These redcoats not only symbolized the
potential of English tyranny, but also annoyed members of the working
classes who competed for odd jobs with the otherwise idle soldiers.
Tension remained taut for months, exploding periodically in minor
brawls. But on the evening of March 5, 1770, the insults were
particularly vicious, and the crowd especially angry. Unnerved, British
troops fired on the agitated crowd, killing five civilians. The
atrocity, known ever after in America as the Boston Massacre, confirmed
the colonists' worst fears about English authority and the danger to
American liberty.

The outburst ironically coincided with a British decision, which had not
yet reached the colonies, to repeal the offensive legislation. England,
of course, never relinquished the principle of Parliament's sovereignty,
and to make that point clear, retained a small tax on tea. But
Americans, convinced of their moral superiority over the corrupt
Europeans, concentrated more on the good news, heralded by repeal of the
Townshend Acts, and celebrated the return of prosperity. But it was a
tenuous peace at best, interrupted by political squabbles within the
legislatures and by overt conflicts between colonial smugglers and royal
customs officials.

This calm, fragile though it was, might have persisted indefinitely had
politicians on both sides of the Atlantic focused on immediate problems
rather than on the ideological principles they espoused. But amid the
general atmosphere of suspicion, the issues came to a head again when,
in 1773, the English government approved the Tea Act, a measure designed
to protect the East India Company from imminent bankruptcy. In economic
terms, the legislation benefited the colonies by lowering the price of
tea. But the political consequences were more dangerous. Besides
assuming England's right to tax the colonists, the law also created a
trade monopoly that American merchants feared might eventually be
extended to other commodities. These were theoretical matters, to be
sure; but in an age of strenuous political activity, theory was the
essence of the question. While intellectuals criticized the laws, crowds
in every port tried to prevent the unloading of the tea. In Boston, a
group of colonists, thinly disguised as Mohawks, dropped the chests into
the harbor.

News of this event outraged English opinion. Not only had the

colonists defied legal authority, they also had destroyed private
property. Parliamentary retribution was prompt. In a series of Coercive
Acts (known in America as the Intolerable Acts) passed in 1774,
Parliament closed the port of Boston pending payment for the tea;
altered the government of Massachusetts by, among other things,
restricting town meetings; authorized the transfer of legal cases to
other colonies; and reinstituted a Quartering Act to support British
troops in the colonies. To Americans, this legislation constituted a
fundamental violation of the British Constitution. If Parliament could,
by a mere majority, alter the structure of government, American liberty
was indeed imperiled. Nor could any colony be more secure than
Massachusetts. Those who believed in conspiracy politics had no trouble
identifying the threat and condemned the corrupt politicians. But it was
a conservative who best articulated colonial fears when he asked, with a
trace of nostalgia, "if old England is not superannuated and become a
child again."

Amid such despair, colonial leaders summoned a conference to discuss
mutual problems, and in September 1774, delegates from every colony
except Georgia convened in Philadelphia. The sessions of this First
Continental Congress reflected the tensions within the wider society.
Moderate leaders, alarmed by the recent crisis yet fearful of a
separation from the mother country, desired to protect American
interests without destroying the British Constitution and rallied to a
compromise Plan of Union proposed by Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania.
The plan, based on a sharing of sovereignty between Parliament and an
intercolonial council elected by the provincial legislatures,
represented an important departure from earlier colonial thinking. Yet
even this proposal, innovative as it was, failed to satisfy the more
radical delegates, who defeated the measure by a single vote. Instead
the Congress took a more militant position, declaring the Coercive Acts
null and void, and addressed a "Declaration of Righ'.s and Grievances"
to the king. In this missive, they promised loyalty to the crown, but
rejected Parliament's legislative supremacy. Then, in an attempt to
strengthen their demands, Congress adopted the "Continental
Association," which prohibited the importation and consumption of
British goods. Unlike the earlier economic boycotts, compliance with the
association would not be voluntary, for the Congress also recommended
that "committees of safety" in each province enforce the program.

These extralegal activities hastened the polarization of political over
to produce mob violence. Such tactics, though economically effective,
alarmed conservative members of the community. In England, parliamentary
leaders looked askance at the colonists' intransigence. William Pitt and
Edmund Burke, both friends of the American cause, tried to placate their
colleagues, but amid rising passion and ideological commitment, it was
too late. Parliament responded to the Continental Congress by ordering
additional troops to Boston and restricting New England's trade.
Meanwhile, the people of Massachusetts prepared for war. When British
regulars marched toward Concord in April 1775 to seize a stockpile of
weapons and ammunition, they were met by colonial minutemen. A brief
skirmish at Lexington Green climaxed months of uncertainty and began to
force political decisions that most people had preferred to avoid.

In May 1775, while other colonies were still absorbing the shocking news
from Massachusetts, a Second Continental Congress opened session in
Philadelphia. More radical in composition than its predecessor, the
Congress nevertheless hoped to reconcile differences with the mother
country. In an "Olive Branch Petition" addressed to George III, the
delegates reaffirmed their loyalty to the crown and prayed for a
cessation of hostilities. Yet they realized too the urgency of the
situation. "We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an
unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers," they
explained solemnly, "or resistance by force." And they prudently
appointed the Virginian George Washington to head the Continental Army
in the besieged city of Boston. In June 1775, colonial soldiers and
British regulars had clashed again, this time in bloody battles at
Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill.

These encounters, full with human sacrifice, further polarized political
passions. Once begun, the process became self-generating, almost
inexorable. And then the winter of 1776 brought harsher news.
Parliament, still hoping to assert its power, ordered all colonial ports
closed, an act that imperiled the interests of all American inhabitants,
regardless of their political persuasions. As word of this reached the
colonies, Americans also learned that George III, disgusted by the
apparent anarchy, had hired Hessian mercenaries to suppress the
rebellion. The specter of foreign soldiers hunting English subjects
terrorized the colonists, and many again thought they saw the hand of
conspiracy threatening American liberty. But it was a recent English
immigrant, the son of a Quaker corset-maker, who

colonists defied legal authority, they also had destroyed private
property. Parliamentary retribution was prompt. In a series of Coercive
Acts (known in America as the Intolerable Acts) passed in 1774,
Parliament closed the port of Boston pending payment for the tea;
altered the government of Massachusetts by, among other things,
restricting town meetings; authorized the transfer of legal cases to
other colonies; and reinstituted a Quartering Act to support British
troops in the colonies. To Americans, this legislation constituted a
fundamental violation of the British Constitution. If Parliament could,
by a mere majority, alter the structure of government, American liberty
was indeed imperiled. Nor could any colony be more secure than
Massachusetts. Those who believed in conspiracy politics had no trouble
identifying the threat and condemned the corrupt politicians. But it was
a conservative who best articulated colonial fears when he asked, with a
trace of nostalgia, "if old England is not superannuated and become a
child again."

Amid such despair, colonial leaders summoned a conference to discuss
mutual problems, and in September 1774, delegates from every colony
except Georgia convened in Philadelphia. The sessions of this First
Continental Congress reflected the tensions within the wider society.
Moderate leaders, alarmed by the recent crisis yet fearful of a
separation from the mother country, desired to protect American
interests without destroying the British Constitution and rallied to a
compromise Plan of Union proposed by Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania.
The plan, based on a sharing of sovereignty between Parliament and an
intercolonial council elected by the provincial legislatures,
represented an important departure from earlier colonial thinking. Yet
even this proposal, innovative as it was, failed to satisfy the more
radical delegates, who defeated the measure by a single vote. Instead
the Congress took a more militant position, declaring the Coercive Acts
null and void, and addressed a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances" to
the king. In this missive, they promised loyalty to the crown, but
rejected Parliament's legislative supremacy. Then, in an attempt to
strengthen their demands, Congress adopted the "Continental
Association," which prohibited the importation and consumption of
British goods. Unlike the earlier economic boycotts, compliance with the
association would not be voluntary, for the Congress also recommended
that "committees of safety" in each province enforce the program.

These extralegal activities hastened the polarization of political over
to produce mob violence. Such tactics, though economically effective,
alarmed conservative members of the community. In England, parliamentary
leaders looked askance at the colonists' intransigence. William Pitt and
Edmund Burke, both friends of the American cause, tried to placate their
colleagues, but amid rising passion and ideological commitment, it was
too late. Parliament responded to the Continental Congress by ordering
additional troops to Boston and restricting New England's trade.
Meanwhile, the people of Massachusetts prepared for war. When British
regulars marched toward Concord in April 1775 to seize a stockpile of
weapons and ammunition, they were met by colonial minutemen. A brief
skirmish at Lexington Green climaxed months of uncertainty and began to
force political decisions that most people had preferred to avoid.

In May 1775, while other colonies were still absorbing the shocking news
from Massachusetts, a Second Continental Congress opened session in
Philadelphia. More radical in composition than its predecessor, the
Congress nevertheless hoped to reconcile differences with the mother
country. In an "Olive Branch Petition" addressed to George III, the
delegates reaffirmed their loyalty to the crown and prayed for a
cessation of hostilities. Yet they realized too the urgency of the
situation. "We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an
unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers," they
explained solemnly, "or resistance by force." And they prudently
appointed the Virginian George Washington to head the Continental Army
in the besieged city of Boston. In June 1775, colonial soldiers and
British regulars had clashed again, this time in bloody battles at
Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill.

These encounters, full with human sacrifice, further polarized political
passions. Once begun, the process became self-generating, almost
inexorable. And then the winter of 1776 brought harsher news.
Parliament, still hoping to assert its power, ordered all colonial ports
closed, an act that imperiled the interests of all American inhabitants,
regardless of their political persuasions. As word of this reached the
colonies, Americans also learned that George III, disgusted by the
apparent anarchy, had hired Hessian mercenaries to suppress the
rebellion. The specter of foreign soldiers hunting English subjects
terrorized the colonists, and many again thought they saw the hand of
conspiracy threatening American liberty. But it was a recent English
immigrant, the son of a Quaker corset-maker, who

dramatically perceived the crisis at hand. In a brief pamphlet entitled

Common Sense, Thomas Paine launched a devastating critique, not simply
of Parliament and king, but of the institution of monarchy itself. It
was not a coterie of wicked ministers who sought to destroy America, he
declared with stunning logic, but the "Royal Brute" himself, George III.
In six months, colonial readers had consumed 150,000 copies of the
tract, a striking testament to the steady radicalization of American
politics.

With the hardening of political positions, the earlier equivocations no
longer sufficed. Some conservative citizens, even those who had
criticized imperial policy, now repudiated the revolution and became
outspoken supporters of the British Empire. Some, for personal and
psychological reasons, discovered that they could not choose at all.
William Samuel Johnson, once a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress,
identified the source of the dilemma when he admitted the difficulty of
separating from, "the parent state." The radicals, however, suffered no
such qualms. In the spring of 1776, the Congress recommended that each
colony overthrow the royal authority and create new state governments
based on republican principles. And in June, as the crisis passed all
previous bounds, Richard Henry Lee, a delegate from Virginia, introduced
a resolution declaring America independent from the British Empire.
Hoping to generate large-scale support for the proposal, the Congress
appointed a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson to draft a coherent
explanation of that momentous decision. On July 4, 1776, two days after
approving Lee's resolution, Congress adopted the Declaration of
Independence.

When other colonials affirmed their allegiance to the mother country and
their political fathers, Jefferson offered a stinging rebuke to the
king's parental authority. His was an indictment not of Parliament and
the wicked advisers, but of the king himself. "The history of the
present King of Great Britain," exclaimed the Declaration, "is a history
of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."

But the Declaration of Independence did not simply rehash traditional
politics. In justifying separation from England, Jefferson appealed to
"self-evident" truths and the "unalienable rights" of "all men." These
were revolutionary premises. The principles of revolution, Jefferson
explained, did not lurk in the intricate mysteries of constitutional
law; they were not obscure or scholarly. Rather, they

were intuitive, within the capacity of most people, and they legitimated
bold acts in defense of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Such "rights," of course, did not exist in American society in 1776.
Abigail Adams, the wife of one of the signers of the Declaration, stated
this other truth most eloquently in a letter to her husband. "I cannot
say, that I think you are very generous to the ladies," she complained
with startling perception, "for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and
goodwill to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an
absolute power over your wives." Less articulate Americans, denied the
educational advantages of Abigail Adams, might have had much more to
add.

Jefferson's statement never claimed to be descriptive of social
conditions in America. Rather, he asserted the fundamental principles
that justified political revolution. Governments, he declared, derive
their power "from the consent of the governed." And when government
threatens the basic rights of the people, "it is the right of the people
to alter or to abolish it." In 1776, those rights validated the
destruction of monarchy and the institution of republican forms of
government. But in Jefferson's words they possessed a universality that
"in the course of human events" justified other revolutions throughout
the world. That potential power, alarming though it may have been to the
signers of the Declaration, was the colonists' legacy to the world.

And so on July 4, 1776, it was done. The "Thirteen United States of
America" declared their independence from Great Britain. Now they had to
demonstrate the viability of their premises and the power of their
convictions. It would not be a simple matter. "And for the support of
this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine
Providence," Jefferson concluded, "we mutually pledge to each other our
Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

Ten years later, while serving as the ambassador to France, Jefferson
looked back to the Spirit of '76. "If our country, when pressed with
wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads
instead of its hearts," he asked, "where should we have been now?
hanging on a gallows as high as Raman's. You began to calculate and to
compare wealth and numbers: we threw up a few pulsations of our warmest
blood: we supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers: we put our
existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved
our country." Dramatic as

it sounded, Jefferson's reminiscence was only slightly exaggerated.

In 1776, the colonial position indeed seemed precarious. Militarily
overpowered, economically underfunded, politically divided,
diplomatically isolated, the colonies fought the mightiest nation in
Europe. Royal officials remained thoroughly optimistic about an easy
victory. Yet the British confronted numerous obstacles to success.
Fighting three thousand miles from the home islands, Great Britain had
to transport troops, supplies, and, most important, directives and
reports. In contrast, co'onial soldiers could be easily activated and
conveniently dispersed. In addition to these tactical advantages,
colonials benefited by their ideological resolution, what * Jefferson
called the "pulsations of our warmest blood." Certain of their
objectives, American revolutionaries knew what they risked, while
English officials vacillated between war and peace negotiations.

If the radicals acted with revolutionary zeal, many of the colonists,
perhaps even a majority, remained politically neutral or friendly to the
king. Like rural folk in other ages, American farmers did not always
share the political passions of their leaders and preferred to live in
peace. Thus many citizens simply sat out the war. Yet inactivity was not
always possible, given the presence of British armies and colonial
militia, and the maltreatment of the civilian population by British
troops often served to politicize otherwise unaligned people.

Despite such pressure, many colonials--approximately 20 percent of the
total population--openly sided with the crown. Revolutionary leaders
called them "Tories" to emphasize their aristocratic origins and make
the war for independence seem more like a popular uprising. But Loyalism
generally involved not so much class interests as broader social
configurations. Thus people belonging to minorities often remained loyal
to Great Britain. In New England, they were Anglicans, victims of
Congregationalist discrimination; in New York and Pennsylvania, they
were ethnic minorities threatened by the encroachments of English
Protestant culture. Political affiliation also reflected larger tensions
within the political structure. In New York, tenant farmers opposed the
Revolution because their landlords supported it. Similarly, in North
Carolina, western farmers who had been alienated by the provincial
establishment moved into a Loyalist position to protest the power of the
entrenched elite. And in the anomalous situation where slaveowners

fought for "liberty," many black slaves, when given the opportunity,
supported the British.

These patterns may explain why American supporters of the Revolution
proved so hostile to their political foes and treated them so harshly.
Loyalists were tarred and feathered, ridden on rails, flogged, even
executed. The term "lynch law" probably originated from the proceedings
of one Charles Lynch, a justice of the peace in Virginia, who achieved a
certain notoriety for his treatment of Tories.

In addition to the brutal treatment they received, Tories had their
property snatched from them by the newly formed revolutionary
governments. Many Tories were forced to seek shelter behind British
lines. These actions reflected not only a tradition of social antagonism
but also a strong desire among revolutionaries to achieve a united
front. By the war's end, nearly one hundred thousand colonial
inhabitants had gone into exile in Canada and England. Their banishment
brought profound psychological alienation --"a dismal gloom," reported
one unhappy exile from London.

One month after the adoption of the Declaration, General William Howe
landed with twenty thousand soldiers on Long Island. Washington waited
with the Continental Army at Brooklyn Heights, hoping to stall the
British advance. But when the redcoats opened fire, the colonial militia
broke ranks and began a frantic retreat. Washington managed to ferry his
troops to Manhattan, but Howe pursued him into the city, forcing the
Americans to retreat to New Jersey. Several times, Howe narrowly missed
capturing the American army, but as winter set in, he returned to New
York City, where he established his headquarters. Meanwhile, on
Christmas Day, the Americans surprised a Hessian force at Trenton by
crossing the Delaware River at night. The effort, celebrated by
revolutionaries everywhere, was the only good news of the war.
Throughout this first campaign, the Continental Army had displayed an
alarming lack of unity and skill. But Washington inadvertently
discovered the key to military success. He could trade territory falling
back from position to position, almost indefinitely--as long as he had
an army to move.

The British still believed that the colonial rebellion centered in New
England and that the isolation of those colonies would bring peace
everywhere else. In the spring of 1777, therefore, they

launched a three-pronged attack in New York. General Burgoyne would
march from Canada to Albany, while Howe would move northward from New
York City and General St. Leger would lead a force from Lake Ontario
toward the same vicinity. The three armies were supposed to converge,
rally the Loyalists, and deliver a final blow to American hopes. On
paper, a brilliant plan; but in the wilderness, surrounded by a hostile
population, it proved a colossal error. Burgoyne began marching
southward and captured Fort Ti- conderoga. But St. Leger encountered a
force led by Nicholas Herkimer and retreated to Lake Ontario. Meanwhile,
Howe, for some mysterious reason, ignored the master plan and moved
southward from New York City, defeated Washington at Brandywine, and
invaded Philadelphia just after the members of the Congress had fled the
city. Henry Clinton commanded a residual force in New York City and
moved toward Albany; but after a brief trek, he too returned to his
base. This decision left Burgoyne floundering in upstate New York,
unable to find the expected Loyalists and severely harassed by local
militia. Desperate for an escape, Burgoyne attacked at Saratoga, but was
beaten back. He tried again, unsuccessfully. At last, on October 17,
1777, Burgoyne surrendered to Horatio Gates. "The fortune of war," he
declared, "has made me your prisoner." To which Gates replied, "I shall
always be ready to testify that it has not been through any fault of
your excellency."

Such niceties aside, the American victory at Saratoga had immense
political importance. In France, news of the battle transformed a
secretly friendly nation into an open ally. Louis XVI, still angry at
France's loss of Canada, promptly recognized the new republic, while his
foreign minister Vergennes met with the American ambassador, Benjamin
Franklin, to negotiate an alliance. Word of those conversations soon
reached England, producing fears of active French intervention. But
Parliament remained as dilatory as ever, taking several months to
establish a peace commission. Eventually the British agreed to all
American demands--except independence. But by then it was too late. In
1778, France had signed a formal treaty of alliance with the new nation,
a pact in which both parties agreed to fight until England recognized
American independence.

After 1778, the main theater of war shifted to the southern colonies,
where the British still anticipated a strong Loyalist following. In
1780, the redcoats invaded Charleston, South Carolina, and captured five
thousand American soldiers, and Lord Cornwallis won

a smashing victory at Camden. But Americans, too, had their victories.
An important battle was won at King's Mountain and another at Cowpens.
Even the British victory at Guilford Court House in 1781 brought them
heavy casualties, forcing Cornwallis to retreat to safety in Wilmington,
North Carolina. Washington, meanwhile, chafed in New York, keeping a
cautious eye on Clinton's movements. In midsummer of 1781, the American
general learned that Cornwallis had established a position at Yorktown
on a narrow peninsula that extended into the Chesapeake Bay. Washington
feinted an attack on New York to keep Clinton bottled up and then raced
his army to Virginia. Meanwhile, the French Admiral De Grasse had sailed
from the Caribbean into the Chesapeake, sealing Cornwallis from outside
assistance. Surrounded and outnumbered, Cornwallis surrendered on
October 19, 1781, and seven thousand redcoats relinquished their guns to
the popular tune "The World Turned Upside Down." So ended the military
conflict.

It took another two years to consummate the peace negotiations, but on
September 3, 1783, England accepted the Treaty of Paris, formally ending
the war. The most important provision of the document was George Ill's
recognition of American independence. Other clauses established
territorial boundaries, protected American fishing rights in Canadian
waters, guaranteed navigation of the Mississippi River, promised the
restoration of all prewar debts, and provided that the Congress would
recommend the restoration of Loyalist property confiscated during the
war. The firmness of the American diplomats--Benjamin Franklin, John
Jay, and John Adams--thus won Americans an almost total victory. On
November 25, 1783, the last British troops sailed from New York City,
and the date--called by New Yorkers "Evacuation Day"--became an annual
holiday celebrated with patriotic festivity for the next half century.

If the Treaty of Paris fulfilled the demands of the Declaration of
Independence, the practical political results had emerged much earlier
and with less formality. In May 1776, the Congress had urged the
separate states to replace the British political system with governments
based on republican principles. The disruption of the British Empire
made that request academic, and each state confronted the question of
political forms within the context of its own political tradition. In
Pennsylvania, where radicals had seized power quickly, the new
government possessed a unicameral legislature and

eliminated the office of governor entirely. The Massachusetts
constitution was more conservative, creating a bicameral system and an
executive office with limited authority; yet even there, the draft
constitution was submitted to the people for approval.

Such variations, significant as they were in each state, should not
obscure an essential unity that dominated American political thinking.
Until 1776, revolutionary Americans had defended the British
Constitution as the bulwark of liberty. It was the king's ministers,
they said, and later the king himself, who had perverted that delicate
system. Fundamental to American thought, therefore, was the idea of
separating power within the government, reducing executive authority,
and making power directly responsible to the people. These ideas
influenced the formation of the state governments in the period after
1776. The new state constitutions provided for legislative powers vested
in bicameral legislatures (except in Pennsylvania) in which the lower
houses theoretically represented the interests of the "people" and the
upper houses, or senates, protected the interests of property. Such an
arrangement endeavored to balance the power of all classes. But there
was one paradoxical outcome. By reducing the power of the executive
branch, the state constitutions increased the power of the legislatures,
allowing them executive and judicial functions previously held by the
colonial governors. To protect the people from legislative tyranny,
therefore, most states also adopted a bill of rights or inserted
appropriate clauses directly into their state constitutions to guarantee
civil liberty.

The importance of the legislatures made questions of political
representation more pressing than ever before. In organizing republican
governments, American politicians assumed that the legislatures
represented specific constituencies and spoke for that amorphous group
they called "the people." They agreed, nevertheless, that the power of
the people could easily degenerate into anarchy and destroy the
governmental balance. To reduce the likelihood of mob rule, the state
constitutions restricted political participation to male property owners
and often established still higher property qualifications for
officeholding. Despite occasional demands for wider democracy, the older
habits of elitist politics prevailed. Consequently political
representation remained with the more affluent citizens even though
there is some evidence that members of state senates were slightly less
wealthy than the councilors of the colonial period.

The conservative nature of these changes tells much about the American
Revolution. Despite the revolutionary implications of the Declaration of
Independence--the demands for government by consent of the governed and
the assumptions about political equality-- power generally remained in
the hands of moderate leaders who were concerned as much with the
interests of property as with the cause of liberty. Thus the American
Revolution did not lead to a drastic redistribution of property. When
the state governments confiscated the Loyalists' estates, they sold the
property to investors to help finance the war. Similarly, another form
of property--the ownership of slaves--remained inviolate despite the
rhetoric of Jefferson's Declaration. Indeed, one of the allegations
raised against George III was that he "excited domestic insurrections
amongst us"--an oblique reference to the offer made by the royal
governor of Virginia to grant freedom to any slave who deserted his
master.

This institutional conservativism contrasted markedly with the
intellectual revolution that underlay the Spirit of '76. The defense of
political liberty soon led many Americans to question the validity of
the "peculiar institution." Several northern states made provisions for
the gradual emancipation of slaves, and abolitionist societies, usually
inspired by Quaker idealists, emerged throughout the North. Such
programs were conservatively implemented, allowing black slavery to
persist well into the nineteenth century. And the pervasive racial
hostility and discrimination largely went unchallenged. Yet the doctrine
of natural rights provided the ideological underpinnings for further
protest and additional reforms. Some slaveowners, distraught at their
own paradoxical stances, simply liberated their slaves voluntarily.

In placing their faith in the state constitutions, Americans testified
to their abiding distrust of centralized authority. Having successfully
challenged the claims of the British Empire, they were not about to
accept some other distant power. With visions of Parliament and George
III.prominent in their minds, they turned to the question of
intercolonial union. The result was the Articles of Confederation, first
adopted by the Congress in 1777, but not ratified by the states until
1781. Usually seen as a dismal failure, the Articles of Confederation
revealed the political prejudices and political interests of the
American people in 1776. Since the state governments remained
pre-eminent, the Articles limited the power of the national government.
The Congress could declare war, negotiate treaties,

establish a post office, and standardize weights and measures; but it
could not tax the citizens, nor could it regulate commerce--both
important powers retained by the states. Within the Congress, each state
possessed one vote, and nine states had to agree to all legislation;
amendments required unanimous votes. Such legislative caution also
reflected the fear of usurpation, for the Articles made no provision for
an executive or judicial branch. It was the Congress, burdened by the
bureaucratization of the Revolution, which eventually established
executive committees to handle administrative matters.

The major questions facing the new government were financing the War for
Independence and negotiating a treaty of peace with Great Britain. To
solve the first problem, the Congress proposed an "impost" tariff, but
the legislature of Rhode Island, concerned with protecting local
interests, rejected the measure; a second bill stalled in the New York
assembly. The new nation therefore relied primarily upon requisitions
from the states (which, in this age of state supremacy, were not always
forthcoming) and from foreign loans. Negotiations with Great Britain
tediously continued, and in an ironic way, ultimately solved the
financial problem. By acquiring the Northwest Territory in 1783, the new
nation obtained a gold mine of potential resources: the vast tracts of
land, still occupied by the native tribes, could be sold to American
investors.

Already, western settlers and eastern land speculators had moved into
the territory. Congress had approved the Land Ordinance of 1785, which
divided the lands into townships and square-mile sections to be sold at
public auction. Though orderly and open, the system still created
parcels of land too large to be purchased by ordinary citizens, thus
assuring that this profitable property would fall into the hands of
affluent investors. Other congressional policies proved more liberal.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1784, drafted by Thomas Jefferson,
established the principle that any states formed in the western
territories would enter the union on an equal basis with the original
thirteen. Three years later, a second ordinance elaborated a systematic
program for the admission of the states carved out of the Territory.
True to the principles of republicanism, the plan incorporated popular
representation and a bill of rights guaranteeing civil liberties. In an
unprecedented step, the law of 1787 prohibited slavery from the region.
Thus the revolutionary generation reaffirmed its commitment to the
Declaration of Independence, in theory if not in practice.

If

Foreign interest in America did not end with the Treaty of Paris.
Congress was mindful of the diplomatic developments that took place as
it dealt with new western territory. Great Britain refused to relinquish
its trading posts near the Great Lakes and ignored ambassador John
Adams' offers to negotiate. More serious was Spain's decision to close
the Mississippi River to American commerce, an act that not only
jeopardized western farmers, but also undermined the economic plans of
southern expansionists. When John Jay negotiated a treaty with Spain in
1786 that traded American commercial rights in the West Indies in
exchange for the loss of navigation on the Mississippi, Congress split
violently along sectional lines. Southern congressmen, enraged by Jay's
willingness to disregard their interests, questioned the viability of
the existing confederation. It was these congressmen, anxious about
their vision of western expansion, who urgently summoned a
constitutional convention to revise the Articles of Confederation.

Other political nationalists, most notably Robert Morris and Alexander
Hamilton, also had advocated the creation of a strong national
government. As allies of the southern coalition, people like Hamilton
proved extremely influential in rallying popular support. Their success
reflected the changing political climate of the 1780s.

Throughout the revolutionary period, problems of power and politics
usually crystallized in the states. Since few people--mostly merchants
and army officers--had any interstate interests, Americans generally
looked to the state governments to enact necessary laws. But in many
states, people began to question the wisdom and efficacy of the
legislatures. In Massachusetts, western farmers led by Daniel Shays had
closed the judicial courts to prevent the collection of debts. The state
militia acted to suppress the uprising, but the event traumatized
conservatives everywhere, evoking specters of anarchy and disorder. In
other states, people complained about the inadequacy of public finance,
the proliferation of inflation, and the burden of taxation.

These local concerns troubled people across all social and economic
classes, heightening a sense of political impotence and feelings of
political instability. As citizens grew disillusioned with the state
legislatures, they began to consider reform of the national
confederation as a step toward alleviating their grievances. It was from
this local perspective that people rallied to the outspoken nationalists
when they proposed a conference in Philadelphia in 1787 "to render the
constitution of the federal government adequate

to the exigencies of the Union." That convention, full of consequences
unimagined by its sponsors, climaxed a century and a half of political
experience and was the culmination of a generation of revolutionary
protest.

"From the infancy of creation"

******************

Chapter 5.

The Constitution and American Identity

Cultural nationalism after 1776

Constitution making: the Philadelphia convention, Federalists vs.

Antifederalists, ratification, and political consensus

The emergence of national identity Thomas Jefferson's legacy to America

The Declaration of Independence provided the ideological basis of the
new American republic. But neither separation from the British Empire
nor the subsequent War for Independence could easily transform the
cultural identity of the people. Thirteen colonies with thirteen
different histories and, in 1776, thirteen different futures found
themselves inextricably woven in a war of liberation. Yet it was not a
war of national liberation, as Benjamin Franklin well understood when he
warned, with more than a trace of anguish, that "we must hang together,
or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Lacking a unified culture, American patriots worked to create one in the
years after 1776. "Every engine should be employed to render the people
of this country national," proclaimed the lexicographer Noah Webster;
"and to inspire them with the pride of national character." That was a
formidable task. For though "they may boast of Independence, and the
freedom of their government," he observed, "yet their opinions are not
sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and
literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its
manners, are still prevalent among the Americans." Webster therefore
proposed a new orthography--a "national language," an "american
tongue"--to strengthen the "band of national union." Such schemes,
self-conscious as they were futile, revealed basic tensions at the core
of the American identity.

Prior to independence, the colonies had shared one unifying theme--the
culture of provincialism. Merchants in Boston, tobacco planters on the
Chesapeake, and farmers in Georgia had acknowledged the intellectual
pre-eminence of the English metropolis and had advocated "a blind
imitation of its manners." The provincial outlook also contained an
internal dialectic that proclaimed the positive advantages of
nonmetropolitan, nonurban, unsophisticated culture. This perspective
emphasized the blessings of simplicity, frugality, and authenticity. The
virtues of plainness thus distinguished Americans from the inhabitants
of Europe.

These cultural images were politically important. For if, as Jefferson
announced, government derived its just powers from the consent of the
governed, then the character of the citizens would

determine the quality of their political institutions. The revolutionary
generation's optimism about the American people thus explains their
dedication to a republican form of government. "I think our governments
will remain virtuous for many centuries," declared Jefferson in 1787,
"as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as
there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled
upon one another in large cities, as in Europe," he warned, "they will
become corrupt as in Europe."

This optimistic spirit was no less important than the frustrations of
Confederate politics in influencing the delegates who journeyed to
Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 "to form a more perfect Union."
Jefferson, surveying the scene from his ambassadorship in France,
considered them the most talented politicians in the nation--"an
assembly of demigods," he exclaimed--and most Americans, even their
opponents, would have agreed. From Virginia came George Washington and
James Madison, from New York Alexander Hamilton, from Pennsylvania
Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris; in sum, fifty-five men averaging
about forty-two years of age, most of them well born and well connected,
all of them the "first characters" of the American states.

They carried with them a sophisticated political ideology and a keen
understanding of American society. They determined to create a
republican form of government, a political system capable of protecting
the interests of property without endangering the "liberty" of the
citizens. Political leaders believed, however, that republican
governments were extremely fragile entities, vulnerable both to the
machinations of enterprising tyrants and to the anarchic demands of the
common people. It was necessary, therefore, to create a system that
would balance the power of all groups. Such a government would still be
susceptible to the vagaries of popular politics and public opinion, what
conservatives considered the rule of the mob. But those fears were eased
somewhat by the optimistic attitude toward American society. A virtuous
people, it was commonly believed, could be trusted to select wise and
good leaders. Only then could a republican government actually survive.

This ideological consensus, basic as it was to the framing of the
Constitution, could not conceal certain fundamental cleavages among the
delegates about the distribution of power. As representatives of their
states, the members of the Constitutional Convention attempted to
protect their constituencies on such crucial matters as

If

representation and taxation, liberty and property. The delegates from
the larger states preferred a system of representation based on
population and advocated a strong legislature directly responsible to
the citizens. Representatives from the smaller states desired a
legislative system based on the equality of states regardless of
population or wealth. Their position hinged on the assumption that local
sovereignty should not be subsumed by a national government with direct
power over the people. Despite strenuous arguments, neither side could
fully convince the other, and out of this deadlock came the Great
Compromise. Accordingly, legislative power was divided into two houses,
one--the House of Representatives--based on population, the other--the
Senate--representing the states.

Closely related to the debate about legislative representation--indeed,
for some delegates the essence of the issue--was the status of slaves
within the political system. Did black slaves, as human beings, deserve
political representation, or did they exist merely as property? Under
the Articles of Confederation, when the Congress discussed the
possibility of levying a head tax, the delegates from the northern
states insisted that slaves should be counted as full human beings. But
the southern representatives, loyal to their investments, insisted that
slaves were merely chattel; they proposed that five slaves be counted as
three whites for purposes of taxation. In 1787, however, when the issue
focused on representation, these positions reversed. Now the southern
delegates demanded equal representation for slaves, and northern
spokesmen asked ingenuously whether they might have representation for
their livestock. The question involved political power rather than
ideology, and pragmatically, it was resolved by compromise. In the
Three-Fifths Compromise, therefore, five slaves equaled three free
persons for purposes of legislative representation and taxation.

Other provisions of the Constitution prevented congressional
interference in the slave trade before 1808--a convenient future date
that perpetuated the foreign slave trade. The delegates also provided
for the return of fugitive slaves in language sufficiently vague to
create serious problems for free blacks kidnapped by unscrupulous
profiteers. As for Native Americans, they were simply excluded from the
body politic and placed in the category of "foreign nations." Meanwhile,
the electoral process remained under the scrutiny of the state
legislatures, which preserved the existing suffrage limitations. In
short, the Constitution institutionalized the political power of the
white male establishment.

Their work completed, the delegates in approval signed the document
(those in opposition had prudently departed from Philadelphia earlier)
and transmitted it to the states for ratification. It was Benjamin
Franklin, then in his eighties, who captured the sanguine temper of the
final proceedings. Glancing at the president's chair, on which a rising
sun had been painted, he remarked that "painters had found it difficult
to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun." Throughout the
convention, he continued, "I have . . . looked at that behind the
president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting."
Now, in September, with the heat of the summer passed and the fires of
debate quenched, he was more certain. "I have the happiness to know," he
declared with a wink, "that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

Still, the new Constitution required the approval of the American
public, a people suspicious of government at a distance and distrustful
of politicians and power. Many citizens were satisfied with the Articles
of Confederation and believed in the value of state sovereignty. Fearful
that political representatives might ignore the interests of their
constituents, they wished to keep government close to home. This
principle appealed to people with local concerns--small farmers, state
politicians, and those who believed that republican governments could
survive only in small geographic regions where political representatives
truly shared the interests of the inhabitants. This Antifederalist
position represented a logical extension of the colonial tradition, the
demand for local self-government.

Supporters of the new Constitution--people who styled themselves
Federalists--argued that state governments were too susceptible to
popular control, that the masses did not respect the interests of
property, that liberty threatened the stability of the republics. The
Federalists appealed to people with interstate interests--merchants,
commercial farmers, public creditors, and urban workers whose
livelihoods depended upon the prosperity of their employers. They also
attracted politicians who lacked power within the existing state
governments, men who hoped to supplant the entrenched political groups.
As defenders of property, the Federalists saw a strong national
government as a bulwark against the caprice of popular politics.
Moreover, they argued against the Antifederalist allegation that
republican governments could exist only in small territories. They took
the position that no single group could control power in a large
pluralistic nation. Thus the very size of the

United States would guarantee the twin blessings of liberty and
property.

Despite the absence of majority support, the Federalists rallied their
followers carefully, argued feverishly, made adroit concessions, and in
the end prevailed---though by a slim margin. That they succeeded is an
indication of the general apathy the American public felt to questions
of national politics. More important, the entire debate underscored a
basic consensus among American politicians about the nature of
government and the future of American society. Nowhere was this more
evident than in the rapid dissipation of opposition once the
Constitution had passed the hurdles of the ratifying conventions. Though
modern Americans see the Constitution as the basis for strong
government, in 1789 federal powers were more potential than actual. Thus
all powers not specifically granted to the national government remained
in the states. Citizens continued to pay most of their taxes to the
local governments and consequently remained more interested in statewide
politics. Voter participation, for example, was often higher in
gubernatorial elections than in presidential contests. The Constitution,
in other words, had enormous implications for the future of the United
States, but most Americans still regarded the national government as a
remote power in their lives.

The intensive debate over the Constitution uncovered many political
assumptions that would also influence subsequent American history.
Foremost seemed to be a general distrust of politicians. Antifederalists
feared the expansion of aristocratic influence. Federalists, on the
other hand, worried about the masses, who lacked a real stake in the
social order. James Madison stated the problem succinctly in the
Federalist Papers, a series of essays written with John Jay and
Alexander Hamilton, which urged the ratification of the Constitution.
"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men,"
Madison declared, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first
enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place
oblige it to control itself."

American politicians were slowly admitting that the ideal of community
no longer determined their political associations. "The political creed
of an individual may almost be ascertained with certainty from his
connections, or speculative prospects," complained "A Citizen" in 1786.
To modern Americans, the notion of interest

politics seems utterly self-evident. But for the Founding Fathers, the
idea was, if not exactly new, at least profoundly discomforting. In an
age that professed an essential harmony of human relations, the
existence of parties and factions--of fundamental political cleavages
--revealed an abiding human perversity rather than a normal pattern of
political exchange.

Yet the Founding Fathers recognized too the inevitability of political
discord and sought merely to institutionalize its effects. Madison
admitted that "a factious spirit has tainted" the body politic, but he
argued that the new government would curtail the spread of that
infection. A large nation composed of numerous factions would prevent
any single group from accumulating power. Politics would reduce to the
art of the possible, the balance of interests, and the compromise of
power. Though hostile to the specific remedy, Antifederalist writers
shared Madison's analysis. "On the preservation of parties, public
liberty depends," observed "A Farmer." "Wherever men are unanimous on
great public questions, wherever there is but one party, freedom ceases
and despotism commences."

The Constitution therefore became, for friend and foe alike, an
institutional expression of interest politics. With a bicameral
legislature and an independent executive, the framers of the
Constitution separated power and, in theory at least, balanced it
between the branches of government. Citizens-at-large elected the
members of the House of Representatives, but senators, chosen by the
state legislatures, belonged to a different constituency; and the
President was selected by electors appointed in the states. More
specifically the Constitution appealed to the citizens of the southern
states by perpetuating the slave trade, promising defense "against
domestic violence," and prohibiting export duties. Other provisions
benefited northern interests. These included the easing of interstate
commerce and the implicit promise to settle outstanding debts. For the
"people," that amorphous body in whose name all had been transacted, the
Constitution offered few defenses of their cherished liberty. Lacking a
bill of rights, the document established an independent judiciary free
from political control and permitted impeachment of civil officers for
"treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." These
institutional constraints did not impede the exercise of power; they
sought only to channel its direction. By establishing the principles of
national citizenship, the Constitution formed a direct link between
individuals and government, based upon law. The Constitution could
prevent the arbitrary use of

If

power, but it could not--nor did the founders wish it to--create a
national community of mutual obligations and responsibilities among all
citizens.

Consider, for example, the clause that declared: "No title of nobility
shall be granted by the United States." That phrase plainly
institutionalized the egalitarian principles of Jefferson's Declaration
and, in theory, assured equal rights to all citizens. But the commitment
to an egalitarian ideology also altered the definition of appropriate
economic and social activity. The elimination of a hereditary
aristocracy simultaneously undermined the social obligations that
traditionally had accompanied wealth and status.

Political theory aside, American society did not exist apart from the
real people who inhabited the country, and what was observable in the
states was the perpetuation of social and economic inequality. During
the revolutionary era, the disparities of wealth had increased, and
there had been a tightening of class lines. The post Revolution
egalitarian credo thus left the most vulnerable citizens at the mercy of
their more affluent and more powerful compatriots. The idealization of
the individual encouraged the emergence of a laissez-faire society, and
the commerce clauses of the Constitution greatly facilitated its
implementation. Patrick Henry, a fervent opponent of the Constitution,
seized upon its implications in alarm. "What right had they to say, We,
the People?" he asked bitterly. "Who authorized them to speak the
language of We, the people, instead of We, the states?" But Henry, the
patriarchal slaveowner, was swimming against the racing currents of
individual liberty.

The political consensus that emerged after 1789 stimulated a self-
conscious attempt to create a national culture. Thus the Founding
Fathers soon themselves became heroes, and the Constitution itself
became an object of patriotic veneration. The search for national unity
also encouraged a new interpretation of American history that stressed
the people's common heritage. "Providence has been pleased to give this
one connected country to one united people," asserted John Jay in The
Federalist No. 2, "a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking
the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same
principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."
Such homogeneity partially reflected the aggressiveness of English
culture, its ability to submerge minority groups, its tenacity of
language, institutions, and values. The matter was stated somewhat
differently by the French

immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in Letters from an American
Farmer (1782) when he answered his famous question, "What, then, is the
American, this new man? He is either a European or a descendant of a
European; hence, that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in
no other country. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into
a new race of men." Thus emerged the image of the melting pot, the
blurring of national and ethnic differences.

But what happened to the Germans in Pennsylvania and the Dutch in New
York? Where were the Catholics and the Jews? What became of the people
who were neither Europeans nor descendants of them? And in this "new
race of men," where were the mothers and the daughters? To catalogue
such omissions is not to correct the facts, for John Jay and St. Jean de
Crevecoeur certainly would have acknowledged the existence of other
people. They did not necessarily intend to exclude Africans, Native
Americans, unassimilated Europeans, and women from American history. But
they did so just the same. Crevecoeur's and Jay's ideas about "this new
man" illuminated the implicit assumptions held by the American
establishment. For the Founding Fathers, the American was a white
AngloSaxon Protestant male. In the face of these biases, minority
cultures actually did exist, and their presence could not be denied.
Consequently the question "What then is the American, this new man?"
brought forth a powerful corollary: what, then, is he not? Here was the
basis of a profound tension within American society.

No one struggled more with that dilemma than the sage of Monticello,
Thomas Jefferson. "It is impossible not to look forward to distant
times," he declared from the White House, "when our rapid multiplication
will expand itself . . . and cover the whole northern, if not the
southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed
in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with
satisfaction," he added obliquely, "either blot or mixture on that
surface." This was a curious addendum indeed, one which attempted to
conceal a fundamental fissure within the national identity.

Thomas Jefferson had been a most unlikely revolutionary. He was born to
wealth in Virginia in 1743, educated at the College of William and Mary,
admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-four, a member of the House of
Burgesses at twenty-six. Blessed with a lucrative inheritance--some of
it self-made by his immigrant father,

some of it inherited by his mother--Jefferson owned considerable land
and numerous slaves all his life. Like other members of the Virginia
gentry, he enjoyed the perquisites of elite status, dabbling in the
classics, studying the violin, supervising the routines of plantation
life at Monticello. After his marriage in 1772, Jefferson came to view
Monticello as a citadel of peace, a private island amid the storms of
politics. Even when most fully occupied in his public career, Jefferson
yearned for the solitude of his home.

Yet it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia planter, who declared that
"all men are created equal." It was Thomas Jefferson, the American
ambassador to France, who proclaimed that "the tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" and
who suggested, with great seriousness, that "a little rebellion now and
then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms
in the physical." And it was Thomas Jefferson, the elder statesman, who
observed that "nothing ... is unchangeable but the inherent and
unalienable rights of man." Those grandiose thoughts befitted a person
of Jefferson's stature and, in no small measure, they reflected the
enormous confidence that a member of the WASP elite enjoyed. It is only
against the bedrock of personal security that the paradoxes at the
center of Jefferson's thought become clear--his simultaneous commitment
to personal liberty and his ownership of slaves; his disgust by the
institution of slavery and his own racial prejudice; his insistence that
the earth belonged to the living and his unyielding attempt to transform
the land into pockets of Jeffersonian civilization. Thomas Jefferson of
Monticello--and few other Americans--could afford the luxury of those
contradictions.

Jefferson's ambivalence about American society reflected not only the
peculiarities of his social environment, but also his grand cosmic
vision, which embraced all creation. Like the other rationalists of the
eighteenth century, Jefferson philosophically divided life into tidy
compartments of existence. His was an environmentalist interpretation of
human activity. "Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the
savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our seacoast," he
proposed. "These he would observe in the earliest stage of association
living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering
themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find
those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals
to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous
citizens, the pioneers of the

advance of civilization, and so on ... until he would reach his, as yet,
most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent,
in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the
present day."

When Thomas Jefferson voiced his egalitarian ideology, therefore, he
applied it to those members of the human community he considered
civilized. Yet he believed he was applying it to the world --provided,
that is, that the more benighted peoples accepted what he described as
the "march of civilization . . . passing over us like a cloud of light."
If the red people of the western coasts discarded their animal skins, if
the black people returned from slavery to Africa, if the
"semi-barbarous" frontiersmen embraced the "progress of man," then the
American spirit would conquer the continent without "blot or mixture."

The Jeffersonian transformation involved the imposition of rational
order upon the natural wildness of the earth. Jefferson, like so many of
his contemporaries, was discomforted by irregularity, by uncertainty, by
inefficiency. His image of the world extolled the straight line, the
rectangular order, the repetition of geometrical { forms. In his
architecture, for example, he celebrated the straight lines of classical
antiquity, planning the capitol of Virginia in the image of the Maison
Carree, which he considered one of "the most perfect examples of cubic
architecture." So influential was Thomas Jefferson, or, more accurately,
so much did he understand the temper of his culture, that the geometry
of classical architecture became a prototype for what later generations
would call republican simplicity. Jefferson simply did not appreciate
the sacred circles of premodern peoples.

The passion for order dominated Jefferson's vision of America's destiny,
especially his understanding of western expansion. As his "philosophical
observer" plainly saw, the settlement of virgin lands transformed the
harmony of Native American society into linear expressions of
Anglo-American culture. In 1784, while serving in the Congress,
Jefferson drafted the first Northwest Ordinance, a blueprint for the
creation of new states north of the Ohio River. In this document,
Jefferson reasserted his commitment to republican politics by assuring
equality to all states in the union--a liberal statement even today. He
divided this territory into fourteen rectangular districts and gave
them, as befitted his admiration of the classics, such names as
Metropotamia, Pelisipia, and Cherronesus. Within these states, he
advocated the subdivision of lands into

rectangular sections and subsections. His ideas about city planning, as
evidenced by his interest in the national capital, reflected a similar
commitment to linear development, to intersecting grids--in other words,
to artificial order.

These conceptual prejudices perhaps explain why Jefferson became a major
exponent of American agrarianism and why he celebrated the virtue of the
yeoman farmer. As governor of Virginia during the war for independence,
he supported the abolition of entail and primogeniture, two relics of
feudal landholding, both archaic reminders of the once-sacred earth.
Instead of the land, Jefferson idealized the people who demystified the
soil and sold their produce in the marketplace. "Those who labor in the
earth," he announced, "are the chosen people of God." For this reason,
President Jefferson overcame his constitutional scruples about the
purchase of Louisiana. By doubling the size of the union, he obtained
sufficient space for the expanding American farmer. Yet he also
expressed hope that the Native Americans in Louisiana would abandon
their traditional hunting ways, adopt a sedentary existence, and cede
the remainder of their lands to the United States. There was no room in
his individualistic vision for native communities and the seasonal
cycles of tribal life. "The backward [tribes] will yield," he wrote in
1812, "and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the
forest into the Stony [Rocky] mountains."

Jefferson's commitment to geometrical order was a natural outgrowth of
his preoccupation with orderliness and his compulsion for self-control.
He was a man who deeply distrusted his emotions; he seemed to reduce
life to long lists of statistics and compilations of household expenses.
The difficulty he experienced in establishing meaningful human
relationships may explain Jefferson's thirst for solitude as well as his
apotheosis of the independent farmer. "Dependence," Jefferson advised,
"begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and
prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." American farmers,
unlike the peasants of the Old World or the Native Americans of the New,
lived on the land isolated from communities. For Jefferson, they
personified American virtue, and he hoped that the United States would
become a nation of self-reliant yeomen.

Jefferson's strident defense of independence suggested his deep seated
ambivalence about all human attachments. It was more than coincidental
that the death of his mother in 1776 preceded by only a few weeks his
drafting the formal separation of the colonies from

IT

the mother country. Jefferson, like other members of his culture, held
idealized images of women. "Nothing is so disgusting to our sex as a
want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours," he advised his daughter. "I
hope therefore the moment you rise from bed, your first work will be to
dress yourself in such a style as that you may be seen by any gentleman
without his being able to discover a pin amiss, or by any other
circumstance of neatness wanting." Women, he also believed, should be
sheltered from the turmoil of an active life. "Our good ladies . . .
have been too wise to wrinkle their *f foreheads with politics," he
boasted. "They are contented to soothe * and calm the minds of their
husbands returning ruffled from political debate."

Jefferson's desire to exclude women from the vicissitudes of life
betrayed his own fear of emotional relations and his transparent desire
to conceal his feelings. All his known sexual encounters, with the
exception of his (significantly) previously married wife, involved
"forbidden" women---wives of other men and slaves. These patterns reveal
a personality in a culture that consigned emotional involvement to the
dusky recesses of consciousness. Genuine passion proved too threatening
to the rationalistic controls of his modern mind.

Jefferson did not admit his love for his slave, Sally Hemings, nor did
he ever publicly acknowledge their progeny. Only in his will did he
provide for their freedom. Yet their very lives demonstrated his lack of
self-restraint, for which he suffered massive guilt. Once unleashed, the
fruits of passion might escape all bounds. "If something is not done,
and soon done," he warned at the time of the Santo Domingo slave revolt,
"we shall be the murderers of our own children."

That turn of phrase, besides its literal truth, spoke volumes about WASP
attitudes toward nonwhite peoples. Though Jefferson genuinely despised
slavery and lamented its unhappy effects on white society as well as
black, he personally made few gestures toward emancipating his "people."
He spoke once of-freeing his slaves after he had paid his debts; but
evidently it never occurred to him to reorder his economic priorities.
Jefferson also grappled with the problem of racial inferiority and
concluded ambiguously that it was difficult to determine if blacks were
innately inferior to whites or if slavery made them so. His
environmental explanation of human nature suggested the obvious evils of
the "peculiar institution," but he shrank from the consequences of his
logic. "As far as I can judge

from the experiments which have been made," he replied to one
questioner, "to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose
habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children."

Jefferson remained more optimistic about Native Americans, whom he
viewed as a higher form of humanity and potentially the equal of whites.
He believed that Africans could never be integrated into American
society but anticipated a time when red and white cultures would "meet
and blend together, to intermix, and become one people." That
amalgamation, of course, implied that the Native Americans would embrace
the higher forms of civilization pouring out of the eastern states, and
revealed the same patriarchal attitude applied to blacks. "Our Indians
stand pretty much in the relation to the Government as do our children
to us," declared a Jeffersonian official. "They are equally dependent;
and need, not unfrequently, the exercise of parental authority."
Jefferson himself would not have said it differently.

Through this regard of nonwhite people as children, the Jeffersonians
not only justified their political hegemony, but also expressed a view
central to American culture. For what is a child? "Completely selfish,"
stated a Jeffersonian evangelical in 1814. "His object is to gratify
himself." In a culture that placed reason over feeling, logic over
passion, childishness would represent the utter depravity of the human
condition and would require immediate remedies. "If your children
possess dispositions that lead them into sin," the missionary advised,
"it surely cannot be cruel to check those dispositions, or give them a
new and better direction." And so the Africans and Native Americans,
ethnic minorities and women entered the Jeffersonian family, or, more
precisely, waited at the doorstep. Meanwhile, "a new race of men" spread
its influence, blot and mixture notwithstanding, across the continent.

Part Two.

NATIONAL EXPANSION: FROM CONSTITUTION TO CIVIL WAR

"The mad career of self-indulgence"

******************

Chapter 6.

Social Patterns North and South

Marriage and the family

Morality and religion

The organization of time in American life: the clock industry

Growth of factories, transportation, and industrial markets

Population growth and European immigration

Industrial values and the urban working class

Social structure in northern industrial society

Southern slavery and black culture: plantation economy and

King Cotton, black challenges to slavery

Attitudes toward women and children Women's rights and Seneca Falls

The paradoxes, the ambivalences, the ambiguities--these were Thomas
Jefferson's legacy to his country. Yet, like most of the Revolutionary
generation, Jefferson remained optimistic about America, looking to the
children of the Republic to assume the mantle of leadership. "If we do
not think exactly alike," he assured his aged colleague John Adams, "it
matters little to our country ... we have delivered [the Republic] to
our successors in life, who will be able to take care of it, and of
themselves." Where the children of Europe were mired in a traditional
world of adult corruption, the American child enjoyed unprecedented
opportunities in the cradle of liberty. This salubrious environment
assured the moral virtue of the nation's youth. "Before the
establishment of the American states, nothing was known to History but
the man of the old world," Jefferson remarked. Now, however, the child
of America, full with the strength of the continent, promised a new
history for all mankind.

Colonial parents had viewed their offspring as children of Adam, tainted
from birth by Original Sin; republican parents, less inclined to
theological determinism, saw the newborn babe as naturally innocent.
American children, instead of requiring a "second birth" to attain
salvation, represented a "new race of men" capable of perfection on
earth as well as in heaven. This new attitude was part of a larger
secularization within Western culture, the shift from a theological
cosmos dominated by God to a more worldly order controlled by human
achievement. The American child, still innocent in both spheres,
symbolized the unlimited possibilities of the future.

During the colonial period, the number of live births had increased
steadily until, by 1800, the average American family comprised about
seven children. This reproductive explosion, unprecedented in Western
history, expressed both the favorable economic circumstances in America
and the relative healthfulness of the natural environment, which had
reduced the rate of infant mortality. Whatever the exact causes,
children were a larger part of society than ever before.

This biological pattern also illuminated a more subtle revolution in
American values. In the seventeenth century, material conditions enabled
couples to marry earlier and so it was possible for young

IT

146	National Expansion: From Constitution to Civil War

people to obtain sexual fulfillment without defying social convention.
Such intimacy created a new atmosphere for sexual relations. Young
people now believed that love was the most important consideration in
marital arrangements. Emotional involvement and personal attachment--not
the settlement of property or the protection of family interests--became
the accepted impulse for marriage.

This psychological transformation produced significant side effects. As
marriage became a union of autonomous individuals, sexual relations
became less risky, abstinence less vital. Even when economic conditions
no longer encouraged early marriages--and in the eighteenth century this
became the case--sexual passion was not denied. The result was a rise in
the number of premarital conceptions, as measured by "seven- and
eight-month" children. Thus human passion, once legitimized, surmounted
the secular limitations of the American economy. Yet these premarital
unions did not jeopardize the stability of the family. Rather than
deliver "illegitimate" babies, couples chose either to abort the
pregnancy--about which there is little evidence--or, more commonly, to
marry. Premarital pregnancy, instead of being "unwanted," may well have
hastened the formal union of loving couples.

The emphasis on worldly love, of which the procreation of children was
so central a part, coincided in the nineteenth century with the
withdrawal of emotional energy from other aspects of creation. Thus
religion, once the touchstone of human experience, became primarily a
question of denominational affiliation--an ecclesiastical matter to be
determined as much by the resonance of the preacher's voice as by the
spiritual satisfaction wrought by the liturgy. For less pious
Christians, the dampening of religious zeal seemed a decided
improvement, leading to an appreciable drop in church membership
throughout the nation. Equally significant, the quest for immortality
took more worldly forms. Instead of seeking everlasting life in heaven,
people turned to their progeny to perpetuate a visible lineage on earth.
The children of America thus provided historical ballast--a secular
immortality--for a society bent on improving the human condition through
material advancement.

But the fires of religion were not so easily extinguished, and the moral
precepts of traditional Christianity continued to dominate American
thought if not action. Those standards had been adapted, however, to
suit the needs of a burgeoning, individualistic society. Thus the notion
of self-determination, originally stated as a political

imperative, extended in the nineteenth century to religious choices as
well, providing moral sanction for the principle of religious
voluntarism, the right of individuals to worship as they wished. That
liberal perspective, so different from the authoritarian assumptions of
the colonial era, still limited religious freedom to orthodox
Protestants. Religious minorities continued to suffer overt persecution
as well as more subtle forms of discrimination.

Those restrictions notwithstanding, the liberalizing tendencies
encouraged religious heterogeneity within the American mainstream.
Equally important, the substance of American religion also moved in a
liberal direction, resulting in the articulation of more gentle versions
of Protestantism. The "rationalistic" elements within American
Christianity, for example, rejected the awesome God of Calvin and
emphasized God's love for humanity. As expressed by the Unitarian
minister William Ellery Channing, God exercised His sovereignty in a
rational manner, offering salvation to all people. The doctrine
dovetailed with the egalitarian political values of the period. "We
reason about the Bible," Channing remarked in a revealing metaphor,
"precisely as civilians do about the Constitution." The heavenly city,
once the private domain of the Puritan saints, now widened its gates for
all who would enter.

These egalitarian assumptions, logical and calm in the Unitarian
pulpits, burst like kindling through the thickets of evangelical
Protestantism. In the thinly populated regions of the West,
circuit-riding preachers, their saddlebags packed with Bibles, worked
assiduously to extend the territorial domain of the Christian religion.
Their exhortations won wide approval among the gospel-starved frontiers
people. In 1800, a particularly powerful meeting produced a tidal wave
of evangelical fervor, known to contemporaries as the Second Great
Awakening. By midcentury, the evangelical impulse had captured most of
the Mississippi Valley, establishing a spiritual stronghold of
Methodists and Baptists throughout the West. The holy spirit then moved
eastward, slipping into the coastal cities where urban working
people--the vanguard of American industrialism --answered the clarion
call. According to Charles Grandison Finney, the leading evangelist of
the times, God had opened His heart to all human beings, freely
promising salvation to all people who would open their hearts to Him.
Unlike the evangelists of the colonial period. Finney saw conversion as
an act of human will, a voluntary decision that all people could muster
by transforming their individual selfishness into communal benevolence.

This egalitarian doctrine, as with the Unitarians, suited the
individualistic ethos of the period. It also provided a spiritual
alternative to the materialism of the age. As industrial values spread
across the nation, the evangelical religion spoke an older language of
Christian charity, of community and love. In social terms, these tenets
obligated Christians to work actively to perfect American institutions,
to rid them of sin and corruption. Such imperatives offered moral
direction to people who worried about irreligion and who suffered what
Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the torment of "unbelief, the
uncertainty as to what we ought to do."

Emerson's confusion, a profound bewilderment he shared with many of his
contemporaries, was a symptom of this age of individualism. The
destruction of the communal values of the colonial period had left
Americans afloat on a sea of Self--of self-determination, of
self-interest, and, to their utmost despair, of selfishness. Carrying
the individualistic credo to its fullest conclusion, Americans had
created a boundless society that promised immense material advantages
for some people, but left others exposed to an awesome sense of
spiritual emptiness. "As long as our civilization is essentially one of
property, of fences, of exclusiveness," lamented Emerson, "our riches
will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter, and our
wine will burn in our mouth."

Such jeremiads, laden as much with fear as frustration, pointed directly
to the capitalistic economy of the nineteenth century. Everywhere
Americans seemed enmeshed in an obsessive pursuit of wealth. "The
Americans arrived but as yesterday," observed the French visitor Alexis
de Tocqueville, "and they have already changed the whole order of nature
for their own advantage." That speedy transformation toppled traditional
images of social order and alarmed more conservative citizens. "Do not
be in a hurry to get rich," advised one cautious journalist. "Gradual
gains are the only natural gains."

Nowhere was this cultural transformation more apparent than in American
attitudes toward time. Rural folk traditionally guided their lives by
seasonal time, enjoying periods of spontaneous leisure during most of
the year (sowing and harvest times were the major exceptions). But the
new economic ethic forced people to measure time more precisely. By the
last decade of the eighteenth century, nearly every American-made clock
possessed a third hand to measure seconds--more an indication of
intellectual interests than a

necessary appendage. At the same time, there appeared the first
American-made watches, assuring the portable presence of this secular
mentality.

The major revolution, however, came in the production of clocks. In
1800, only about one family in ten owned a clock--a statistic that
reflected both the rural orientation of most Americans and the high cost
of accurate timepieces. The expansion of industrial values soon altered
those factors. Responding to the growing interest in good but
inexpensive timepieces, a young Connecticut clockmaker named Eli Terry
switched from brass gears to wooden works, developed a system of mass
production based on interchangeable parts, and, by 1808, was producing
thousands of clocks a year. Those innovations, similar to other advances
in American manufacturing, created a boom in New England clockmaking.
The Panic of 1837, a severe economic crisis, eventually wrought disaster
in the wooden works industry, but by then certain technological
improvements in brass manufacturing as well as a greater sensitivity to
consumer needs enabled American clockmakers to recover rapidly. By the
Civil War, nearly every American home possessed an accurate timepiece
made in the United States.

The development of the clock industry, besides demonstrating the growing
preoccupation with temporal precision and regularity, tells much about
the process of manufacturing throughout the nation during the early
nineteenth century. As in other industries, clock makers traditionally
had built their clocks at home, relying upon self-employed skilled
artisans to fashion the intricate parts. A clock maker would then
assemble the components--a hand-painted dial, individually wrought
wheels and gears, a skillfully carved case. He would then deliver the
finished product to a local purchaser, take his modest profits, and
begin the process again. More successful clockmakers might employ
several apprentices, develop a network of related artisans who also
worked at home, and locate customers in other parts of the state; but
the essential process, though larger in scope, did not differ greatly.
An identical system existed for other types of manufacturing--whether
the production of shoes or the publication of books.

The emergence of factories introduced important qualitative changes.
First, the capital for Terry's enterprise came from two local merchants
who contracted to sell the finished products. These investors, like many
others in New England, realized that manufacturing promised much larger
returns than commerce, an insight

that would affect American investment throughout the economy. It

is also significant that Terry's factory did not eliminate his less
adventurous competitors. Artisan clockmakers continued to produce
handmade clocks, but sold their wares to a different, perhaps more
affluent, market. Nor were other skilled workers absorbed into the
expanding factories; rather, the manufacturers preferred to employ the
less expensive labor of unskilled workers. Quantity, not quality,
provided the margin of profit.

Central to the expansion of American manufacturing was the existence of
adequate markets to consume industrial production. In 1790, the American
population numbered four million; by 1830 it approached thirteen
million; by 1860 it surpassed thirty-one million --despite steadily
declining birthrates! Simultaneously, the size of the nation's urban
areas grew dramatically. In 1790, New York City contained thirty
thousand people; thirty years later that figure had quadrupled, and by
the Civil War it exceeded one million. Other cities expanded
proportionately. This trend toward urbanization, though still embryonic
by modern standards, created the population density necessary to consume
the growing output of American manufacturing.

The immense surge of population could be traced to increasing
immigration from Europe. Before 1840, the largest waves of European
immigrants came from Germany, Ireland, and England. The immigrants were
either artisans who had competed unsuccessfully with the new factories
or farmers who had suffered the economic consequences of overproduction.
Both groups, already possessing some material advantages, enjoyed even
larger opportunities in the United States, despite the difficulties of
migration and the problems of cultural alienation. Those without
property settled in the port towns, while immigrants with capital
traveled inland to purchase farms in the Midwest or to open shops in
such new urban centers as Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh.

After 1840, however, the composition of, the immigrant groups changed
greatly, because of the terrible famines in Ireland and, to a lesser
extent, the crop failures in Germany. Now the immigrants were poorer and
lacked the capital necessary to move to the interior states. They
settled, instead, where they arrived, swelling the population of the
port cities. There they formed an urban proletariat that labored in the
factories and on the docks. With low incomes and

scant opportunity, these industrial workers could afford to buy only the
inexpensive products of American manufacturing.

The expansion of industrial markets depended not only upon the
population growth, but also on the ability of manufacturers to reach
their consumers. When, for example, Eli Terry wished to sell his
earliest clocks, he arranged for local merchants to carry his wares to
potential buyers. Thus emerged the Yankee peddler--half entrepreneur,
half caricature--who traveled the countryside selling pots, pans, book
subscriptions, farm implements, and a host of other products that
included, more often than not, wooden-works clocks from Connecticut. He
transported, too, a series of Yankee industrial values that the bucolic,
pastoral images painted on the clockfaces could not conceal. Though
traditional American farmers may have resented the Yankee credo, they
bought the clocks anyway and often scraped the paint from the glass so
they too could admire the new technology. Possibly they found
vindication when the clocks went awry--as the wooden works often did in
the steamier climates --but eventually the Yankee tinkered away those
flaws.

The spread of industrial values, like the products they endorsed,
followed various routes around the nation. During the early nineteenth
century, most traffic moved along crude roads first cleared in colonial
days or floated on flatboats down navigable rivers and streams. High
freight costs encouraged the improvement of transportation facilities,
and led to the construction of new roads and turnpikes financed by
private investors and the state governments. The successful
implementation of the steamboat in the regions east of the Mississippi
River increased the volume of trade and reduced transportation costs.
Both factors had an enormous impact on the expansion of industry in the
East. These improvements soon were dwarfed by the proliferation of
artificial canals, most notably the Erie Canal in New York. Such
waterways further reduced the cost of inland transportation, boosting
the prosperity of eastern producers. By linking the Midwest with the
Atlantic ports, the canals also stimulated trade with Europe.
Sleek-bodied clipper ships now carried western farm goods to the Old
World not only with speed but with regularity, bringing greater profits
to American merchants and the farmers from whom they obtained their
goods.

By accelerating inland travel, the improvements in transportation
hastened the settlement of the interior by enterprising farmers. These
agrarians, surely the children of the Jeffersonian dream,

quickly realized the advantages of mechanized agriculture and purchased,
in ever larger numbers, such contrivances as McCormick's reaper, the
thresher, and the steel plow. These inventions, together with the drop
in freight charges, spurred American agriculture to unprecedented levels
of production at the same time that the demand for food was increasing
in Europe. The result was widespread prosperity for American farmers,
which enabled them to consume still more manufactured goods shipped from
the eastern states.

These reciprocal advantages--typical of the national economy by the eve
of the Civil War--became more apparent with the introduction of the
railroad in the middle decades of the century. Rail construction, though
potentially very profitable, required large outlays of capital, most of
which was supplied by European bankers. But the railroad companies also
sold considerable stock to merchants and farmers living along the
projected right-of-way. These investments, often the result of mortgaged
farm property, enabled many western farmers to protect their economic
connections with eastern markets. In urban areas businessmen recognized
the advantages of having a nearby railroad terminus and became powerful
proponents of additional building. In this manner a small town on the
shores of Lake Michigan mushroomed into the thriving metropolis of
Chicago.

The construction of transportation facilities--whether railroads,
canals, or turnpikes--often required more capital than private business
could arrange. The state governments therefore stepped into the breach,
to provide loans, subsidies, and tax exemptions for public improvements.
These supports culminated with the enormous grants of public land--more
than a billion acres--to the western railroads. Such subsidies betrayed
the nation's prime concern--the expansion of the marketplace. By the
Civil War, thirty thousand miles of track had been laid and four trunk
lines linked the eastern seaboard with the Midwest. It was no longer
necessary for the Yankee peddler to hitch up his team in order to reach
customers in that part of the nation.

The expansion of the railroads represented only one aspect of the new
industrial ethic. As people like Eli Terry demonstrated the
profitability of factories, investors turned increasingly to mass
production. By introducing new machinery, cutting labor costs, and
streamlining production, manufacturers reaped ever greater profits. Such
expansion quickly developed a self-generating force. Improvements in one
area of production often stimulated changes in others. The railroad, for
example, created an industrial demand for lumber, iron, and coal, which
in turn encouraged the mining, smelting, and timber industries. Business
itself became a major consumer of the fruits of technology.

The transformation of the American economy not only raised the levels of
production and consumption, but also strengthened the new industrial
value system. The success of the clock industry in spreading
technological time throughout the nation spoke impressively of that
metamorphosis. Time had been harnessed, and its treatment had moral
value. "Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of
clear dishonesty," maintained the distinguished pedagogue Horace Mann.
"You may as well borrow a person's money as his time." That lesson,
self-evident as it may be in our own times, did not come easily to
nineteenth-century children, nor to their parents who labored in the
factories.

The success of American industry required efficiency and regularity in
production and the discipline of the working classes. "Who has not been
delighted," asked Kentucky's Henry Clay, "with the clockwork movements
of a large cotton factory?" Manufacturers established work schedules,
set production goals, purchased time clocks, and expected their workers
to perform. Less scrupulous employers allowed their clocks to run down,
which was one way of jamming more minutes into the work hour. But even
an honest industrial system forced employees to abandon traditional
habits of work.

Farm labor might be difficult, unrewarding, and lonely, but it was not
unceasing. Though farm workers occasionally labored more hours than
industrial employees, agriculture also had long hours of slack, periods
of undisciplined rest, freedom from externally imposed order. Even when
Captain John Smith used martial law to compel the first colonists of
Virginia to work more diligently, he demanded only six hours of daily
labor and allowed the rest of the day to be spent "in pastime and merry
exercises." The major problem of the new industrial society, therefore,
was to impose some system of organization upon the workers, a task
accomplished only with great difficulty. Thus factory owners established
rigid labor rules, enforced by punitive fines. Workers were punished for
lateness, prohibited from eating in work areas, fined for drunkenness.
Such policies had to be taught to each generation of industrial
laborers--first to the Yankees who left their unprofitable farms,

later to the immigrants from across the seas. Indeed, Horace Mann's
pedagogy, with its apotheosis of punctuality, aimed at the workers'
children, hoping to inculcate industrial values into the youngest and
newest Americans.

For rural people, the industrializing process created profound
psychological traumas. Some simply could not, or would not, adjust to
the routines of the factory. Many lost their jobs and joined an
evergrowing number of unemployed workers who crowded the welfare rolls.
Others drifted from job to job, discovering few opportunities for real
improvement. Still more found solace in alcohol, a phenomenon that
alarmed conservative members of society. Some workers, of course,
thrived on industrial discipline, worked hard, and managed to attain
significantly better living conditions. Statistically, however, they
constituted a small minority within the industrial labor force. The
impact of industrialization upon the emotional life of American workers
is more difficult to measure and to document. But the loss of the
spontaneous leisure that had characterized pre-industrial society
probably explains the rise of organized athletics in the nineteenth
century. Baseball, which became popular just before the Civil War,
required a modicum of organization and a system of rules within which
individual athletes could measure their prowess. The
institutionalization of physical activity also revealed a more general
evisceration of the human body in industrial society. Living in secular
time, people had to discipline all bodily activities--to use the
Freudian trilogy, oral, anal, and genital. The need for such discipline
surely had existed before the Industrial Revolution, but the factory
system, with its emphasis on order and efficiency, greatly intensified
it.

These psychological patterns, which accentuated the distance between
individuals, had profound effects on social relations. "By our modes of
life--our houses--our dress--our equipage; in short by what is strictly
external to us," declared a contemporary philanthropist, "men detach
themselves from their, neighbors--withdraw themselves from the human
family." Such psychic separation encouraged the celebration of the
individual and the pursuit of self interest. In the process, an older
sense of community as "the human family" quietly vanished.

Tangible effects of this process appeared within the social structure.
Industrial expansion offered broad opportunities to adventurous
Americans--but only those who already held some capital

could seize the initiative. Although industrial capitalists might
supplant the older commercial elite, the new rich usually bore the same
family names and possessed the same genealogical connections.
Occasionally a John Jacob Astor--truly a self-made man--emerged to
flaunt the unlimited opportunities of the new social order. But Astor,
like Benjamin Franklin a century before, proved the exception to the
rule of social immobility. Moreover, the nouveaux riches, few as they
were, shared the social values of the old wealth, a tendency reinforced
by frequent intermarriage between these groups.

This elite was overwhelmingly Protestant--largely members of the
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational denominations. Genteel by
birth and breeding, they enjoyed their wealth in huge mansions,
patronized fashionable restaurants, joined exclusive social clubs,
attended balls, concerts, and the theater. But when the local assessors
came to evaluate their property, they were not above petty
peculation--concealing their fortunes, underestimating their holdings.
Such behavior contrasted with their public pretensions of noblesse
oblige, but in this, too, they personified the laissez-faire values of
industrial America. Of such stuff emerged the Robber Barons half a
century later.

If few Americans worked their way up the social ladder into the
enchanted circle, so too did few rich families decline significantly in
wealth or status. Had they done so, they would have found themselves
amid a fairly prosperous middle class composed of skilled artisans and
independent farmers. Despite the proliferation of mechanized factories,
skilled craftsmen seldom competed directly with mass-produced goods and
thus enjoyed considerable security. In times of prosperity, these
artisans formed trade unions that sought such middle-class goals as free
public education, the abolition of child labor, and the shortening of
the workday to ten hours. Believing fervently in the American dream,
they neither challenged the industrial elite nor embraced the lower
classes who suffered most, by industrialization.

"Ours is a country," assured one Whig journalist, "where men start from
an humble origin, and from small beginnings rise gradually in the world,
as the reward of merit and industry, and where they can attain to the
most elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according
to the pursuits they elect for themselves." That was the rhetoric of the
self-made man, a self-congratulatory optimism contrived to mitigate the
frustrations caused by the

new social order. For the working classes, however, this optimism was
largely illusory. The urban masses lived amid industrial poverty,
sporadic unemployment, and limited opportunity. Often as immigrants or
free blacks they suffered the additional indignities caused by WASP
ethnocentrism--they were publicly attacked for their ideas and their
values, and their children were compelled to learn the assimilationist
lessons of the dominant culture.

Status differences, though hardly novel in American history, became
further defined during the early nineteenth century. Stated simply, the
rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer. The social order not only
became more polarized, but also more stratified, and mobility between
status groups became ever more difficult. Even in the newly settled
areas of the West, early arrivals seized the best lands and the main
chance, and thus became an entrenched elite. Late arrivals confronted a
social hierarchy not dissimilar from that of the eastern states. But in
the West, where geographical mobility was more feasible, it was common
for settlers to tear down their balloon frame houses, load them in
wagons, and resurrect them at some other site. Still, the notion of
social mobility served more as a lesson in values than as a description
of reality.

However sad the situation of industrial workers, few suffered quite so
much as the black slaves who labored in the southern states. In the
South the capitalist ethos, stimulated by great profits from cotton
production, had led to a tightening of the slave system. Although
Revolutionary leaders like Thomas Jefferson anticipated the gradual
extinction of black slavery, the generations of Andrew Jackson and
Abraham Lincoln confronted a flourishing labor system based on lifetime
hereditary servitude. Southern apologists often claimed that plantation
slaves lived better than northern industrial workers. This claim was a
materialist argument, which, even if accurate, was largely irrelevant
and not to the moral point.

The development and growth of textile factories in England and in the
northeastern United States during the last decades of the eighteenth
century created an increased demand for raw cotton. Not until 1793,
however, when the Yankee Eli Whitney perfected the cotton gin, did
southern planters obtain an effective means of transforming their cotton
crops into rich profits. The innovation promptly revolutionized the
southern economy, leading to the mass production of cotton for sale
abroad. As cotton exports to Europe increased, capital flowed into the
United States, largely through the

hands of northern merchants who reinvested in other areas of the
economy. So crucial was this exchange that shifts in cotton production
affected financial commitments throughout the world, an economic
phenomenon responsible for such banking crises as the Panic of 1837. It
was southern cotton, therefore, that provided the resources for the
economic surge of the nineteenth century.

Despite these factors, industrialization made meager inroads in the
South. Many reformers urged southern capitalists to support local banks,
railroads, and textile factories. But instead of becoming economically
independent, the South relied upon northern business for most of its
manufactured goods. In explaining that pattern, southerners often argued
that plantation society was economically unprofitable but at least
preserved the pre-industrial values of Jeffersonian America. Such
rhetoric, full of imagery of magnolia trees and mint juleps, belied the
economic basis of southern society. However garnished by the gentility
of southern aristocrats, plantation agriculture remained as capitalistic
and as profitable as the textile factories of New England. Southern
investors avoided bank stock and heavy machinery, not because they were
peculiarly anti materialistic, but because they had found other, more
profitable forms of investment--land and slaves.

On the burgeoning western frontiers of the South--in Alabama, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas--sugar cane and King Cotton brought
great wealth to capitalistic planters. In the Old South, where soil
erosion had weakened the land, commercial farmers turned to wheat and
corn and harvested lucrative returns. Even the less affluent farmers
managed to transform the loamy black belt into modest gains. Compared to
the profits of industrial investment, southern planters enjoyed greater
returns than their northern counterparts. And despite the complaints of
southern apologists, the plantation economy still flourished on the eve
of the Civil War. It was not soil depletion that drove southern farmers
westward, but the economic incentive to cultivate more cotton. Those
imperatives also led southern politicians to advocate the territorial
expansion of the United States into Mexico, Cuba, and Central America,
where, it was hoped, the plantation system would continue to thrive. No
Yankee imperialist held more lofty ambitions!

The success of the plantation economy, like the northern factories, also
depended upon efficient management of the labor force. Thus the
expansion of cotton production thwarted the emancipationist impulses of
people like Jefferson and led instead to a reinvigoration of the slave
trade; over one hundred thousand blacks were brought into the United
States before Congress implemented the constitutional prohibitions in
1808. Meanwhile, planters heading westward brought their slaves along,
anticipating large profits from their labor, if not their market price.

These economic motives accelerated the deterioration of liberal
humanitarianism that had followed the American Revolution. Though Thomas
Jefferson grieved at the injustices of slavery, most of his neighbors
lost interest in the egalitarian ideology, especially after they learned
of the slave revolt in Santo Domingo in 1793. Seven years later, the
danger came closer to home when anxious whites unearthed a slave
conspiracy at Richmond, Virginia, under the leadership of a prophet
named Gabriel Prosser. The slaveowners executed the conspirators, and to
prevent future disturbances the southern legislatures enacted new laws
further restricting the mobility of all blacks, slave and free. Those
decisions revealed not only the power of the master class but also the
fear running through its members.

As an economic system slavery continued to flourish, despite occasional
tremors of unrest. On small farms, slaves lived and worked near their
masters, close to the caprice of human emotion-- sometimes for the
better, sometimes not. But most blacks inhabited larger plantations,
living within black communities in the slave quarters. From sunup to
sundown, under the scrutiny of white overseers or black slave drivers,
they operated with the efficiency of factory workers. But even the most
efficient slaveowners had to accommodate the human needs of their
workers or risk a disruption of labor. Escape--if only for a few
days--broke the established patterns of work. So too did feigned
illness, self-inflicted injury, "accidental" fires, broken tools, and
deliberate ignorance. Such behavior, common as it was, reveals a
pervasive discontent among black slaves, an ever-percolating rage
against the plantation system, and an unceasing effort to assert human
values.

Some blacks attained some independence within the slave system, learning
skilled trades that enabled them to"sell or lease their services in
nearby towns and neighboring plantations. Such opportunities, besides
bringing pecuniary gain, provided psychic release from the organized
discipline of plantation labor.

It was through religion, though, that slaves most successfully evaded
the routines of white culture. Meeting secretly in the woods at night,
blacks exorcised the anguish of slavery through spiritual

arousal. Black music, heavy with the rhythms of Africa, reinforced black
identity, and the circular patterns of dance transcended the linear
modes of Western expression. Out of their past, this religious
experience strengthened communal bonds in the hostile present of white
America. No wonder, then, that it was a peculiar darkening of the
sun--the ultimate mystery of cosmic time--that launched Nat Turner's
vision of a slave revolt in 1831.

These acts of rebellion forcefully challenged the southern image of
slavery. The first American slaveowners had viewed slavery as a
necessary expedient. The slaves' labor was essential, and they
themselves would benefit from enforced assimilation into Christian
society. By the age of Jefferson, however, most southerners saw slavery
as a necessary evil--one that should be gradually abolished. Such
attitudes had produced several schemes of gradual emancipation, some of
which were implemented in the northern states.

The eruption of black rebelliousness undermined the Jeffersonian thesis
that slavery was necessary. Moreover, evangelical Protestantism, with
its emphasis on human perfectibility, aroused the messianic passion of
radical abolitionists who demanded that slavery be ended at once.
Assaulted from within by hostile slaves and threatened from without by
the evangelical abolitionists, southern slaveowners altered their
defense of the "peculiar institution." Arguing that blacks were
naturally and permanently inferior to whites, and hence natural slaves,
they described slavery, not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good.
This position achieved further legitimacy from the theory of
polygenesis--the plural origins of mankind--- which proposed the
permanence of racial characteristics. Given scientific supports by such
prestigious scholars as Louis Agassiz, this theory justified the
enslavement of blacks in perpetuity. Such racist doctrines, cultivated
far from the environmentalism of Thomas Jefferson, clashed violently
with the perfectionist philosophy of the evangelicals. In portraying
blacks as natural slaves, southern apologist inadvertently touched an
extremely sensitive nerve at the root of American culture. According to
the proslavery polemicists, black slaves were happy, shiftless, lazy,
irresponsible, good-natured, docile, and ignorant --all qualities that
were later stereotyped as "Sambo." In effect, apologists of slavery
transformed the barbaric savage from the African jungles into an
innocent, carefree child. By equating slaves with children, however,
advocates of slavery actually helped to dramatize the inherent evils of
slavery. American Protestants believed that

children were naturally innocent and vulnerable to adult corruptions.
The description of the childlike slave aroused bitter outrage at
slavery's corruption of innocent victims and so helped to stimulate the
strident abolitionism of such evangelicals as William Lloyd Garrison.

To many social reformers, the plight of the slave seemed to parallel the
precarious position of all American children. As a materialistic spirit
spread across the land, steadily destroying the older communal morality,
anxious observers turned to the family as the anchor of social order.
Yet by the second decade of the nineteenth century, it appeared that the
family was failing in that vital task. In demographic terms, the
nation's birthrate began to drop until, by the Civil War, the average
family comprised fewer than five children. Despite encouragement from
conservatives to procreate, family size continued to shrink during
subsequent decades. The American family, viewed by the Jeffersonians as
the bulwark of the Republic, seemed, by the age of Lincoln, to be in a
perilous decline.

This troubled vision prompted the publication of numerous manuals for
improved child rearing. Written usually by Protestant ministers, these
pamphlets urged American parents to stem the floodtide of corruption by
instilling traditional values in the young. Parson Weems' Life of
Washington, surely the bestseller of the age, described the first
President as a paragon of virtue--the cherry tree notwithstanding--and a
model for all children to imitate. The sheer volume of these
publications indicated that there was widespread feeling that American
children were fleeing the hearth prematurely, rushing, in the words of
one anxious writer, "in the mad career of self-indulgence."

These writers viewed the family as a refuge from adult institutions. "In
America," remarked Emerson, "out-of-doors all seems a market, in-doors
an air-tight stove of conventionalism. Everybody who comes into the
house savors of these precious habits: the men, of the market; the women
of the custom.".There was more than humor, then, in the popular saying
that "a ship is like a lady's watch, always out of repair." While
American men were busy rationalizing the marketplace, their women
remained at home working by a different sense of time. "Instead of being
the intelligent regulators of their own time," Catherine Beecher
explained, "they are the mere sport of circumstances."

But if American children were to be spared from the shoals of

materialism, who else could inculcate the customary wisdom? "The world's
redeeming influence," answered a Protestant minister, "must come from a
mother's lips." It was the American woman, sheltered like her children,
who assumed responsibility for the nation's youth. "O that mothers could
feel this responsibility as they might!" declared a New England
Congregationalist. "Then would the world assume a different aspect."

Such obligations compelled American women to preserve their own chastity
lest they inadvertently corrupt their innocent charges. That task was
made somewhat easier by the general denial of female sexuality.
According to conventional wisdom, women lacked sexual feelings--save
those associated with childbearing. Even the medical profession viewed
female sexuality as a disease, best treated by radical surgery. These
attitudes were reinforced by the sexual exploitation of nonwhite women,
a form of cultural oppression that consigned physical passion to
inferior peoples and raised the white woman to a lofty pedestal of
sexual anesthesia. By denying the organic flows of the human body, the
desexualization of American women epitomized the white male's efforts to
master the natural world.

The suppression of female sexuality undermined the woman's general sense
of adulthood. "True feminine genius," declared a popular woman writer,
"is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual
childhood." This glorified image of the passive female assured the
subordination of women in all aspects of life. Lacking the traditional
protections associated with arranged marriages, American wives
surrendered their independence, even losing the right to own property.
The male establishment also denied women full political citizenship,
prevented their entry into the nation's colleges (Oberlin became the
first coeducational institution in 1837), and barred them from the
professions. As perpetual children, women would remain untarnished by
the corruptions of the adult world.

The infantilization of women closely paralleled the subordination of
blacks by the male establishment. "The prejudice against color,"
complained the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "is no stronger than
that against sex. . . . The Negro's skin and the woman's sex are both
prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the
white Saxon man." Stanton also objected to the surrender of her maiden
name in marriage. "Ask our colored brethren if there is nothing in a
name," she suggested. "Why are the slaves

nameless unless they take that of their master? Simply because they have
no independent existence. . . . Even so with women. The custom of
calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That, and colored men Sambo
and Zip Coon, is founded on the principle that white men are the lords
of all."

These discriminatory patterns unleashed a strenuous movement for women's
rights, climaxing in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Adopting the
language of Jefferson's Declaration, the feminists criticized male
supremacists for denying their rights. "He has endeavored, in every way
that he could," declared one particularly poignant paragraph, "to
destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and
to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life." The women's
rights movement brought limited reforms from the state legislatures, but
obviously failed in the quest for full equality.

Nineteenth-century America remained a man's world in which women played
subordinate roles as wives and mothers. "When our land is filled with
pious and patriotic mothers," asserted a Protestant minister, "then will
it be filled with virtuous and patriotic men. . . . A new race of men
would enter upon the busy scene of life, and cruelty and crime would
pass away. O mothers! ... In a most peculiar sense God has constituted
you the guardians and the controllers of the human family." That
rhetoric, ironic as it was myopic, remained largely unchallenged amid
the piety and patriotism of that busy male world, the great market
"out-of-doors."

"This whole vast country from sea to sea"

******************

Chapter 7.

The Organization of Space

Western expansion and Manifest Destiny

Geographical exclusion: wars with Native Americans and

removal to reservations

Texas and the Mexican War The colonization movement vs. abolitionism

Persecution of Mormons

Urban planning and the growth of cities: grid plans Anti-Catholicism:
nativism and the Know-Nothing party

Consequences of racial separation: urban violence Nineteenth-century
reforms: prisons, asylums, and the environment

The reduction of time to secular proportions--the emphasis on precision,
discipline, and regularity--paralleled a similar cultural attitude
toward American space. Where Thomas Jefferson spoke of "distant times"
when the nation would expand across the continent, his ideological
descendants, less inclined to philosophical meditation, proceeded to
implement the dream. During the early nineteenth century, they poured
into the Mississippi Valley and beyond, passing into the territories
claimed by Great Britain and Mexico and colonizing the Pacific Coast by
midcentury.

The effect was typically Jeffersonian. "Every western traveller is
familiar with the monotonous character of the towns resulting from the
endless repetition ... of rectangles," complained a nineteenth century
landscape architect named Horace Cleveland, "yet the custom is so
universal and offers such advantages in simplifying and facilitating
descriptions and transfers of real estate that any attempt at the
introduction of a different system encounters at once a strong feeling
of popular prejudice." The capitalistic marketplace indeed had conquered
the "out-of-doors."

This peculiar transformation of the wilderness into linear acreage
partly reflected the demographic composition of frontier society. Though
people of all regions, classes, and ethnic groups settled in the western
states, the predominant characteristic of these hardy migrants was their
youth. Young Americans--the maturing children who no longer could expect
an adequate inheritance of fertile land--packed their goods and headed
west. This sense of declining opportunity, far more than any mystical
lure of the frontier, was responsible for the exodus into virgin lands.
Equally noticeable was the statistical majority of men who carried with
them the individualistic credo of their mentors.

Northern farmers, escaping the worn and crowded lands of the seaboard,
moved first into Vermont and the western areas of New York, then across
the upper tier of the Northwest Territory, before advancing to the brink
of the Great Plains. Meanwhile, southern planters left the tobacco-tired
coastal areas for the rich soil of Kentucky and Tennessee, shouting
ecstatic praises to this new land of milk and honey. But then they
watched another generation, equally restive, march northward into the
ward into the black belt of the Gulf Plains where cotton and slavery
thrived. By the Civil War, most of the Midwest and Deep South had been
settled, and outposts of American culture stretched as far as the golden
hills of California and the trading villages of the Willamette Valley in
Oregon.

Often viewed as a tidal wave of expansion, this grand migration actually
proceeded by fits and starts, by short jumps into adjacent territories.
Consider the case of Thomas Lincoln, prototypical frontiersman and
father of the sixteenth President. Born in Virginia in 1778, Tom Lincoln
moved to Kentucky with his family at the age of six. He remained there
long enough to marry Nancy Hanks, also a native of Virginia, and begin
his own family. In 1816, seven years after the birth of his famous son,
Lincoln led his family into Spencer County, Indiana. There he buried his
wife, formed a second marriage with a Kentucky widow, and prospered
moderately untl 1830, when he decided to relocate in southern Illinois.
After one year near Decatur, Illinois, Tom Lincoln moved once more,
about one hundred miles southeast to Coles County. There, in 1851, he
died.

That biography, romanticized though it has been by American folklore,
tells much about the western experience. First, Lincoln followed a
familiar route westward, settling near kin who had preceded him. When he
picked his homesites, he chose land where the soil was similar to what
he had left behind; as an experienced farmer, he did not suddenly
abandon his well-tried agricultural habits. Also significant is the
willingness with which he assumed his reputation as "a rolling stone."
Like so many of his contemporaries, Lincoln easily surrendered his
holdings to the best buyer, staked out new claims at the next homestead,
developed his interests, and sold the titles again. For Lincoln, the
land had lost its mystical qualities and existed merely as an
interchangeable part, as regularized, orderly, and fragmented as the
mass-produced gears that turned Eli Terry's clocks.

In approaching the land as a commodity, people like Tom Lincoln revealed
not only their materialistic values, but also the practical economics of
land acquisition. Though Congress always professed to sell the national
domain cheaply to the nation's farmers, the division of public lands
through auctions usually benefited speculators and brokers who could
afford to purchase large chunks of real estate for resale to the actual
settlers. Such practices did not prevent the proliferation of
independent farms through the

I

Mississippi Valley. But it did make it easier for the first settlers to
grab the best lands, consolidate their holdings, and then sell out at
premium prices. Indeed, investment in real estate remained so common
and, in some periods, so intense as to retard the expansion of the
American economy by diverting capital from other forms of commercial and
industrial enterprise. This phenomenon, though evident in all sections,
appeared most clearly in the southern states, much to the chagrin of
economic reformers who urged southern businessmen to diversify their
investments.

Despite this pervasive materialism, the popular image of the American
West continued to emphasize its antimaterialistic purpose. For Thomas
Jefferson and his proselytes, the unsettled wilderness symbolized the
boundless possibilities of national regeneration. Free from corrupting
institutions, open to all settlers, the vast spaces represented the land
of innocence, a veritable garden of Eden. There, in a timeless place of
purity, the American nation would fulfill its destiny.

This apocalyptic vision, by linking geography with nationalism, placed
special responsibilities on the American people. In the words of John L.
O'Sullivan, archexpansionist editor of the Democratic Review, the United
States had a "Manifest Destiny" to stretch its influence until "the
whole boundless continent is ours." Central to the concept of Manifest
Destiny was the belief in American superiority. Like the Founding
Fathers, nineteenth-century expansionists lauded the uniqueness of
republican governments and extolled the blessings of political liberty.
By carrying these institutions across the continent, American expansion
would broaden the foundations of liberty, extend the area of freedom,
and elevate the benighted peoples who still lived under inferior forms
of government. This missionary impulse reinforced a strenuous commitment
to the Protestant religion. By transporting the Protestant gospel into
the unmapped regions of the West, American evangelicals would protect
the virgin lands from the machinations of heathen devils and the
serpentine wiles of Spanish Jesuits. Republican government and the
Protestant religion thereby promised to preserve the purity of the
continent.

These ideological imperatives thrived on the spirit of technology. "Let
us bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and
canals," declared John C. Calhoun in 1816. "Let us conquer space."
American expansionists promised to carry the blessings of

industry to the less favored peoples of the interior. "Our government .
. . should encourage the arts and sciences," advised a Pennsylvania
promoter in 1847, "and introduce . . . those mighty improvements by
which time and space are annihilated in our own land." The sense of
technological progress permeated the expansionist vocabulary. "The steam
is up," shouted the Boston Times

from the very doorstep of industry, and "the young overpowering spirit
of the country will press onward." Such optimism--energetic, boastful,
and haughty--pointed to an "omnipotent spirit" they called "Young
America."

Manifest Destiny, besides symbolizing the energy of the Republic, also
illuminated a larger cultural theme: a gnawing fear of disorder and an
abiding hostility toward the irrational. In spatial terms, these
patterns encouraged the subjugation of the wilderness--the leveling of
forests, the organization of lands, the erection of towns and villages.
The dramatic alteration of the landscape--heralded and applauded by all
contemporaries--thus represented a grandiose attempt at imposing secular
limitations over the natural boundlessness of the continent.

The pace of progress encouraged gross insensitivity. "Rapacity and
spoliation cannot be features of this magnificent enterprise," argued a
New York expansionist. "We take from no man; the reverse rather--we give
to man. . . . With the valley of the Rocky Mountains converted into
pastures and sheep-folds," he maintained, "we may with propriety turn to
the world and ask, whom have we injured?"

The answer came, with propriety, from Washakie, a Shoshone forced from
his lands by the white invasion. "The white man," he complained, "kills
our game, captures our furs, and sometimes feeds his herds upon our
meadows." "Every foot of what you proudly call America," he protested,
"not very long ago belonged to the red man. The Great Spirit gave it to
us. ... But the white man had, in ways we know not of, learned some
things we had not learned; among them, how to make superior tools and
terrible weapons . . . and there seemed no end to the hordes of men that
followed . . . from other lands beyond the sea." That forceful lament
revealed another, more spiritual vision of the land--the sacred Mother
Earth--which contradicted the impulses of white America.

The mystical values of the Native Americans threatened the orderly
imagination of the whites. Other unorthodox groups seemed

equally dangerous. Roman Catholicism, for example, represented an
alternative to WASP rationalism that aroused widespread fears among the
Protestant majority. Sectarian religious movements, most notably the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also alarmed more
traditional Protestants. In each case, the WASPs responded by
establishing geographical barriers around the nonconforming groups.
Hoping to avoid cultural contamination, WASP society imposed ever more
rigid order upon American space--drawing territorial boundaries,
creating ethnic enclaves, stipulating lines of demarcation. Though
symptoms of fear, such strategies proved remarkably successful in
isolating non-WASPs from the American mainstream and in insulating the
dominant culture from these unwanted peoples.

The first victims of geographical exclusion were the native peoples
living just west of the coastal tribes. Following the War for
Independence, white encroachment on the natives' lands created endemic
tension between the races. In the Northwest Territory, the presence of
British agents, illegal occupants of the fur-trading posts, further
complicated the situation. When American settlers began occupying the
region, the local tribes attacked them and defeated a series of military
expeditions sent to pacify them. Within the Washington administration,
Secretary of War Henry Knox recognized the legitimacy of the natives'
claims and urged the President to maintain "principles of justice." But
when the natives refused to respect an earlier treaty, denying the
legitimacy of the tribal delegates, the American government authorized
the use of force. In 1794, General "Mad Anthony" Wayne destroyed a
native coalition in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the following year
dictated the Treaty of Greenville, which extinguished some of the
natives' land claims and established a boundary line separating the two
peoples.

The attempt to isolate the races failed, however, because Americans
refused to respect the treaty obligations. White settlers seized tribal
lands with impunity, penetrated traditional hunting grounds, and
debauched the natives with alcohol. William Henry Harrison, appointed as
territorial governor in 1800, aggravated these conflicts. Manipulating
the rival chiefs, Harrison acquired additional lands and encouraged
further white aggression. Meanwhile, the native peoples suffered
immensely. "I can tell at once," Harrison reported with unusual candor,
"upon looking at an Indian whom I may chance to meet, whether he belongs
to a neighboring or to a more distant tribe. The latter is generally
well-clothed, healthy and vigorous; the former half-naked, filthy, and
enfeebled by intoxication." Despite these observations he did not change
his policies.

Fearing total destruction, Native Americans grasped one last hope. Under
the leadership of the brilliant Shawnee chief, Tecum seh, and his
brother, the Prophet, the tribes of the Northwest formed an alliance
promising to sell no more land to the whites. The presence of American
traders, beckoning with gifts and alcohol, often undermined this
agreement. But Tecumseh remained hopeful that a confederation could be
established embracing all the tribes of North America. On the eve of the
War of 1812, which once again embroiled the United States in a war with
England, he journeyed from tribe to tribe, even as far as the Creeks and
Cherokees living along the southern frontier, to advocate a military
confederation backed by British arms. Though greeted by sympathy by some
native leaders, Tecumseh's message challenged long-standing traditions
of tribal conflict. While local chiefs and tribal elders debated his
proposal, a skirmish between Harrison's soldiers and the Shawnees at
Tippecanoe in 1811 demonstrated the weakness of the Northwest
confederation. Then the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain
and the United States intensified tribal divisions. With only limited
support from the British, Tecumseh began a desperate war against the
American forces. But his death in the Battle of the Thames in 1813
effectively terminated Shawnee resistance. Abandoned by the defeated
British at the war's end, the northwestern tribes relinquished their
remaining lands and moved reluctantly to reservations west of the
Mississippi.

Some, like the Kickapoo chief Kanakuk, protested bitterly against being
forced from their traditional lands. "My father, you call all the
redskins your children," he chided the American warriors. "When we have
children, we treat them well. . . . Take pity on us," he begged, "and
let us remain where we are." Such pleas fell on deaf ears. And when, in
1832, Black Hawk led some Sauk and Fox back across the Mississippi into
Illinois, the American militia captured the red chief. One of the
Illinois volunteers, a young man named Abraham Lincoln, had just been
discharged from service. Otherwise, he would have heard Black Hawk sadly
bid farewell to his people. "Black Hawk is a true Indian," he said, but
"he can do no more. He is near his end. His sun is setting, and he will
rise no more. Farewell to Black Hawk." Thus silenced, the northern
tribes accepted a restive exile--until new outrages would bring them
back to the warpath.

For the southern tribes, the War of 1812 proved equally disastrous. The
unwillingness of the Creeks and Cherokees to align with Tecumseh
heightened intertribal turmoil. During the war, the Cherokees supported
the American army commanded by Andrew Jackson and helped defeat the
Creeks in a bloody slaughter at Horse Shoe Bend. This American victory
enabled Jackson to dictate a treaty of peace in which the Creeks
surrendered most of their lands. "They have disappeared from the face of
the earth," boasted Jackson to his superiors. The way was now clear for
further American expansion into the Gulf Plains.

Those Creeks who survived the carnage found sanctuary among the
Seminoles living in Spanish Florida. The Seminoles readily accepted
these refugees, just as they welcomed fugitive slaves fleeing the
plantations of Georgia. More affluent Seminoles even owned black slaves.
When American slavehunters crossed the border in search of runaway
blacks, Native Americans joined with the slaves to resist the white
invaders. The result was a series of pitched battles, with numerous
casualties on both sides. To end this violence and to capture the
runaway slaves, the Monroe administration ordered Andrew Jackson, now
the hero of New Orleans, to lead a punitive expedition against the red
and black guerrillas. Jackson responded with typical efficiency,
indiscriminately burning Seminole villages. Many native resisters were
killed, and many blacks were seized. Even the Spanish flag provided no
protection. In one famous episode, Jackson executed two British
subjects, allegedly for instigating the border crisis. Though the United
States government officially chastised Jackson for his actions, it used
the affair to prove the incompetence of Spanish rule in Florida. Shrewd
negotiations by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams soon enabled the
United States to acquire Florida in 1819 in exchange for assuming
Spanish "debts" to American citizens for loss of property. This same
treaty, sometimes known as the Transcontinental Treaty, acknowledged
American claims to the Pacific Northwest and thereby established an
important precedent for expansion in subsequent decades.

The conquest of the Creeks and Seminoles foreshadowed the fate of
another powerful native society, the Cherokee of Georgia. In the early
decades of the century, the Jeffersonian establishment hoped to
assimilate these people by propagating the Christian religion and the
lessons of republican government. In the words of one government agent,
these twin blessings would hasten "the conversion of the savage into the
civilized man." However misguided, such lofty

goals required white Americans to practice a modicum of restraint. But
the citizens of Georgia were more interested in land than in justice.
They sold debilitating alcohol to the natives, bribed their leaders,
disrupted traditional customs, and appropriated their lands.

These genocidal impulses alarmed the Cherokee leaders, many of them
half-breeds, who hoped to thwart American aggression by hastening the
process of assimilation. A brilliant man named Sequoia developed a
written alphabet, proving that his people were "civilized." The
Cherokees also adopted American agricultural techniques, imitated white
styles of dress, and struggled to maintain their lands. Despite existing
treaties with the United States, however, the government of Georgia
denied the validity of Cherokee land titles and demanded their removal
from the state. The Cherokees responded by drafting a formal political
constitution to demonstrate their autonomy and declared themselves an
independent nation, protected by the laws of treaty. Protesting this
action, the governor of Georgia remarked that "treaties were expedients
by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without
bloodshed to yield up what civilized people had a right to possess."

President Andrew Jackson, long a foe of the southern tribes, proved
equally unsympathetic. "If they now refuse to accept the liberal terms
offered they can only be liable for whatever evils and difficulties may
arise," he replied. "I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red
children." In the Supreme Court of John Marshall, however, the Cherokees
discovered a friendlier paternalism. Ruling in favor of their claims,
the Chief Justice acknowledged the Cherokees as a "domestic dependent"
nation. "Their relation to the United States," he held in 1832,
"resembles that of a ward to his guardian."

But Marshall's juridical acuity, however presumptuous, proved no match
for Georgia's intransigence or Jackson's executive authority. Fully
supporting Georgia's claims, the President insisted on enforcing the
Indian Removal Act of 1830r "Doubtless it will be painful to leave the
graves of their fathers," Jackson told the members of Congress in 1833.
"But what do they [do] more than our ancestors did or than our children
are now doing? ... Is it supposed that the wandering savage has a
stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian?
Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it
is to our brothers and children?" By removing the Cherokees from their
homes. Jackson

concluded, the United States was "not only liberal, but generous."
Meanwhile, Georgia officials simply sold Cherokee land in a state
lottery.

As white settlers arrived to claim their holdings, the Cherokees found
themselves thrust from their homes. Many took shelter in the mountains
of Tennessee. Even the more resolute lost hope when Congress refused
their desperate appeals. Finally, in 1838, President Martin Van Buren
ordered General Winfield Scott to evict the Cherokees from their lands.
Thus began the infamous "Trail of Tears." American soldiers, wielding
bayonets and swords, herded the Cherokees into stockades and then led
them on a forced march to reservations west of the Mississippi. The
Cherokees suffered enormously along the route, succumbing in great
numbers to starvation, exposure, and disease. Probably four thousand
people died during this period of internment. For the survivors, there
were only the uncertain promises of future security. "Brothers!" one
Cherokee had warned prior to the great upheaval, "Will not our great
father come there also"?

The policy of racial separation, so brutally enforced against the
Cherokees, revealed a striking paradox in American attitudes toward
space. It was only by imposing rigid territorial order on non WASP
peoples that white Americans could preserve a sense of geographical
mobility for themselves. "The white man," remarked a Shoshone, "who
possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at
pleasure, and lives where he likes cannot know the cramp we feel in this
little spot." For Native Americans took literally the Jeffersonian
injunction that the earth belonged to the living. By white America's
standards, consequently, their behavior often appeared unpredictable. By
placing the native peoples on those "little spots of the earth," the
American government assured itself of the orderly development of the
western states.

This paradox--the institutionalization of space and the advocacy of
geographic mobility--stimulated the territorial expansion of the United
States during the nineteenth century. Although the acquisition of
Louisiana in 1803 seemed to provide ample room for American farmers,
within two decades, Americans were crossing into the Mexican province of
Texas. At the same time as these settlers claimed loyalty to the Mexican
government, they also preserved their American forms of culture,
including, in many cases, the institution of black slavery. As the
number of these unassimi-

lated people increased, the Mexican regime attempted to curtail further
immigration from the United States. Such policies were intended to
strengthen the central authority, but instead provoked a violent
rebellion, which led to the proclamation of an independent Republic of
Texas in 1836.

As Americans, the leaders of the Texas government appealed to the United
States for annexation. But the threat of war with Mexico, together with
the possibility of British military intervention, precluded such a
course. Meanwhile, the Texas issue entered American politics.
Enthusiastic expansionists, many of them southerners with an eye on
Texas cotton fields, urged the immediate acquisition of the territory.
Their pleas won the endorsement of President John Tyler, a true son of
Virginia, who presented a Treaty of Annexation in 1844. But when his
secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, boasted that the scheme would
guarantee the perpetuation of slavery, many northern congressmen refused
to support it, and the treaty failed to pass in the Senate.

The Texas question intruded in the presidential campaign of 1844. The
Whig candidate, Henry Clay, attempted to appease both sides by blurring
his position on annexation, and thus he satisfied no one. His strategy
especially antagonized some of his northern supporters, who switched to
a third-party candidate, the abolitionist James G. Birney running on the
Liberty party ticket. This defection, largely a symbol of northern
political trends, ironically facilitated the election of the Democratic
expansionist, James K. Polk. Tyler, the lame-duck President, treated
Folk's victory as a popular mandate and submitted a joint resolution
(which required a bare majority) for the annexation of Texas. Amid much
protest and invective, Texas entered the union in 1845. "Who shall say
there is not room at the family altar for another sister like Texas,"
exulted the New York Sun, "and in the fullness of time for many
daughters from the shores of the Pacific."

Despite such joy, these political machinations aggravated the
controversy with Mexico. President Polk offered token concessions, but
the Mexicans, insulted and outraged, rejected his ambassador. The
collapse of diplomatic relations, followed by a border clash between
American and Mexican soldiers at the disputed Rio Grande boundary,
intensified passions. In 1846 Polk requested Congress to declare war,
claiming that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil."
Though an obscure member of the House of Representatives named Abraham
Lincoln asked piously if the Presi-

dent could identify the precise spot of American soil upon which
American blood had been shed--an indelicate question applauded by many
other northern Whigs and abolitionists--the war measure passed with
ease.

As a military affair the war with Mexico proved the superiority of
American arms and strategy. Under the leadership of Zachary Taylor, one
army defeated the forces of General Santa Anna and occupied Buena Vista.
A second contingent led by Winfield Scott-- once the nemesis of the
Cherokee--marched into Mexico City. Within one year, American troops had
destroyed virtually all opposition in Mexico. American soldiers under
Stephen Kearney captured New Mexico, and American settlers in California
rebelled against the Mexican government and established the "Bear Flag"
Republic. These victories defined the terms of the peace settlement. In
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States obtained California,
New Mexico, and the disputed Rio Grande area for $15,000,000 and some
monetary claims against Mexico.

The dramatic conquest of Mexico also concealed some subtler aspects of
America's Manifest Destiny. During the course of the war, when the
United States army occupied Mexico City, many expansionists began to
advocate the annexation of all Mexico. Logical as the idea seemed in the
light of American continentalism, it soon foundered on another, less
obvious problem. John Calhoun, surely the least subtle of politicians,
explained his objections: "To incorporate Mexico," he proclaimed in the
Senate, "would be the very first instance ... of incorporating an Indian
race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is
composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as
that! Ours, sir, is the government of a white race." Other politicians
were less blunt. But when the final boundaries were drawn, it was the
Rio Grande--not some distant isthmus--that became the nation's border.

Nor was this sense of exclusiveness merely a southern concern. Early in
the war, as it became apparent that the United States would defeat
Mexico, a congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot introduced a
measure to prohibit slavery in any lands obtained from Mexico. Defeated
twice in the Senate, the Wilmot Proviso nevertheless unleashed a bitter
debate about the status of slavery in the territories. Efforts to limit
the extension of slavery partially indicated the impact of abolitionism
on American politics, but many expansionists simply opposed the presence
of nonwhite people

IT

176	National Expansion: From Constitution to Civil War

in the pure garden of America. Several northern states, for example,
prohibited the entry of free blacks in the 1850s. Such legislation
reflected a fear of economic competition from cheap black labor. More
fundamental, however, was the deep-seated prejudice against black
people. "It is certainly the wish of every patriot," asserted a leading
Republican politician named Francis P. Blair, that "our union should be
homogeneous in race and of our own blood." By excluding African people
from the West, therefore, white America could fulfill its special
destiny to cover the continent with free institutions.

One way of controlling the black population was to transport them back
to Africa. The colonization movement had dated from * the early decades
of the century. Seen as a way of ending black slavery, the scheme also
promised to resolve--or, more precisely, accepted the impossibility of
resolving--America's race problem. Emancipated slaves, instead of
remaining in proximity to their former masters, would be removed to some
distant location. In 1817, the exclusionists formed the American
Colonization Society, a philanthropic organization that advocated
compensation for former slaveowners and the prompt exportation of blacks
to Africa. The movement appealed particularly--and ironically--to
evangelical Protestants who thought that American blacks might be
suitable instruments for converting the African heathen to Christianity.
After the founding of the Republic of Liberia in 1822, however, only
about twelve thousand blacks returned to Africa.

The dwindling interest in colonization after 1830 was partly the effect
of the growing influence of radical abolitionists who insisted that the
American people could indeed resolve the problems of racism. Equally
important was the bitter opposition of the free black community. "The
colonizationists want us to go to Liberia if we will," complained one
black; "if we won't go there we may go to hell." Such antipathy,
repeated by many black leaders, effectively undermined the colonization
program.

As political abolitionism became more powerful in the 1850s, however,
white politicians again saw colonization as the only satisfactory
alternative to race warfare. The prevalence of racial hatred also
convinced some blacks that colonization would benefit their people. "We
must have a nationality," argued one supporter of emigration. "I am for
going anywhere, so we can be an independent people." Even during the
Civil War, the idea of colonization and forced emigration seemed to be a
viable alternative to the dilemmas

of a biracial society. But black participation in the war effort,
together with a resurgence of moral perfectionism, again suggested the
possibility of racial harmony. Moreover, there remained an illusive hope
among whites that the blacks might depart voluntarily to their natural
abodes in the torrid zones. And the West, that magical territory settled
from both the North and the South, would maintain its racial
homogeneity, and its purity.

The fear of contamination by undesirables also motivated the persecution
and exclusion of white cultural deviants, most notably the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons). Founded by the prophet
Joseph Smith and based upon the divinely inspired Book of Mormon, the
Mormon Church originated in upstate New York, a region known for its
religious enthusiasm. But the unique religious practices of the Mormons,
including plural marriages, offended orthodox Protestants, and Smith was
forced to migrate, first to Ohio and then to Jackson County, Missouri.
"Our people fare very well," wrote one of their leaders in 1833, "and,
when they are discreet, little or no persecution is felt." Discretion or
no, the Mormon presence aroused the hostility of their "Gentile"
neighbors, provoking mob violence and virtual civil war. Facing
imprisonment, Smith chose emigration again and led his people to
Illinois in 1839. At Nauvoo, they built a flourishing town, populated in
1845 by fifteen thousand people. But their material success aroused
envy, and their religious deviation created storms of protest. The
murder of Joseph Smith in prison indicated the depth of outrage, and at
this crucial juncture his survivors again sought solace in the
wilderness. One group, under the leadership of Brigham Young, made the
grand exodus to Utah in 1846 and founded the state of Deseret. Beyond
the territorial limits of the United States and isolated from hostile
neighbors, the Mormons transformed the barren desert into a prosperous
community.

The exclusion of the Mormons--like the isolation of the Cherokees,
Mexicans, and blacks--depended upon the availability of open lands. As
the American population spread across the continent, however, these
possibilities diminished considerably. The Mormons soon discovered that
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought them back into American
jurisdiction, forcing them to confront anew the intolerance of the
dominant culture. In 1857, President James Buchanan even sent federal
troops to enforce the Constitution. Sheer distance protected the Mormons
from additional interference. But before Utah would be admitted as a
state later in the century, the Mormons had to eliminate such deviant
policies as polygamy. In the end, the WASP majority had asserted its
will.

Despite the prolonged controversy, the Mormons shared certain
fundamental values with their antagonists. Nowhere was this more
apparent than in their attitudes toward space. When the Mormons designed
their first citadel in Missouri, they followed a geometric plan
organized around twelve temples and square city blocks. In their other
settlements at Nauvoo and in Utah, they also built cities noted for
geometric order and regularity. Even today, Salt Lake City remains a
monument to rectangular geometry; its numbered streets radiate in linear
rows from Temple Square at its center.

These linear blueprints typified urban planning throughout the United
States. Though Pierre L'Enfant's plan for the national capital at
Washington, D.C., lacked a geographical center (as befitted a government
based on the separation of powers), the architects of the city created
rectangular blocks and right-angle intersections. The streets of New
York followed a similar plan. In 1811, the city's planners instituted
the grid pattern for the upper portion of Manhattan Island, created a
system of numbered streets, and divided building lots into regular
parcels of real estate. Four decades later, the planners of San
Francisco repeated the rectangular patterns despite the steep hills and
the natural contours of the land.

Such organizing principles contrasted markedly with the confusion of
older, traditional cities. "The map is a perfect chaos," acknowledged a
Boston editor in 1830, "and all directions are set at defiance by the
abrupt terminations of our high-ways, and their sinuous and uncertain
windings." Newer portions of the city, however, boasted a grid
arrangement, which one resident characterized "as the true lines of
civic beauty and convenience." These improvements provided clarity,
regularity, and efficiency. But as the Boston commentator observed, in
the older "hap-hazard streets ... the fault of intricacy was more than
repaid by_the advantages of constant novelty."

The spatial relations of the nineteenth-century cities also revealed a
deliberate attempt to isolate WASP America from nonrational, corrupting
influences. Just as white American Protestants shrank from incorporating
the premodern peoples of Africa and America, so too did they shun
non-Protestant immigrants who symbolized medieval superstition. Only by
establishing rigid defenses against

F

what they conceived as irrationality could white Protestant Americans
feel safe from the forces of cultural disintegration.

As children of the Reformation, American colonials had articulated a
fervent hostility to the Roman Catholic Church, and their own children
readily perpetuated that antipathy. Richard Henry Dana expressed the
typical prejudice when he remarked sarcastically that "there's no danger
of Catholicism spreading in New England; Yankees can't afford the time
to be Catholics." Besides representing the irrationalism of the Middle
Ages, Catholics also acknowledged the moral supremacy of an
extranaticaal authority-- the pope at Rome. That divided loyalty
convinced American Protestants of the unassimilability of Catholics.
These popular prejudices, common though they were in Protestant Europe,
lay dormant in America largely because the Roman Catholic population
remained fairly small. As late as 1830, only about three hundred
thousand people (about 3 percent of the population) subscribed to the
Catholic faith. But even those small figures impelled some
conservatives, particularly in New England, to advocate immigration
restrictions.

Following the famines in Ireland and Germany, Catholic immigration to
America soared dramatically. By 1860, about 10 percent of the
population--some three million people--were Roman Catholics. Lacking
specific skills, the Irish often constituted the poorest class in
industrial society. In New England, their willingness to accept lower
wages enabled them to replace farm girls in the textile mills; in the
South, they often performed tasks considered too dangerous for the more
valuable slaves. Such poverty encouraged crime and alcoholism--two
symptoms that merely reinforced prevailing prejudices.

As the working-class immigrants crowded into the cities, living in
squalor, which contemporaries called "slums," the upper classes began to
move into less congested areas. The emergence of fashionable and
economically exclusive neighborhoods in Jacksonian America--a phenomenon
associated with the growing stratification and polarization of the
social structure--paralleled the cultural ex clusionism of the westward
movement. Living in wealthy enclaves, the urban upper class thus
minimized social contact with lower-class workers and immigrants. By
erecting large mansions in undeveloped parts of the cities, the upper
classes could preserve a sense of spaciousness even as they divided and
subdivided the open tracts of land.

Such residential escapes required more wealth than most people

possessed. Thus the arrival of working-class immigrants glutted the
labor market, and threatened the economic position of other urban
workers. As jobs became scarce and wages shrank, many lower- class WASPs
vented their anger at the new immigrants, fomenting ethnic antagonism
and mob violence. In the minds of working-class Protestants, economic
oppression and anti-Catholicism easily blurred. In one celebrated case
in 1834, a mob of Protestant workers displaced their hatred for the
Irish workers onto an Ursu- line convent in Boston, burned it to the
ground, and spent the next three days rioting in the streets.

That violent reaction--characteristic of urban ethnic clashes in the
nineteenth century--represented only one type of WASP protest. An
avalanche of popular literature depicted the moral iniquities of the
Catholic Church. Viewing Catholicism as a threat to traditional values,
many Protestants attempted to use the public schools to assimilate the
immigrants. But when the Catholics protested the introduction of
Protestant Bibles in the schools during the 1840s, the issue spilled
into the political arena. The tendency of immigrants to support
Democratic candidates--probably because their antagonists voted
Whig--merely aggravated the situation. Throughout the country, political
groups supporting nativism emerged to advocate restricted immigration
and tightened standards for naturalization.

The nativist movement, like the struggle over slavery in the
territories, climaxed during the 1850s with the growth of the American,
or "Know-Nothing," party. As the nation passed through sectional crisis
and headed toward Civil War, many anxious conservatives looked hopefully
for a resurgence of common ideals. The elimination of foreign influences
seemed like a panacea for the nation's ills. Thus the American party,
based on the principle "Americans must rule America," won great
popularity in all regions. In the presidential election of 1856,
ex-President Millard Fillmore gathered nearly one million votes and the
Know-Nothings obtained considerable power in Congress. But as a
patchwork alliance, the American party could not transcend the deepening
divisiveness caused by the slavery issue. By 1860, political nativism
had lost much of its appeal. It was not surprising, however, that many
exclusionists then joined the Republican party and embraced a political
platform based on free soil.

As anti-Catholicism resulted in urban violence, so did WASP attitudes
toward free blacks. In northern no less than southern

towns, black Americans were systematically excluded from white
institutions, denied access to public facilities, and segregated in
housing, churches, and schools. At times of economic crisis, black
workers usually lost their jobs first. Even so, they frequently were
attacked by white mobs for accepting lower wages.

Patterns of racial segregation in some ways may well have satisfied some
cultural needs of black people. In segregated churches, black Americans
could maintain their cultural identity and African heritage. Spatial
segregation thus encouraged black autonomy in fact, if not in law. And
in living apart from white society blacks avoided the constant scrutiny
of white officials.

Hostility to racial integration in the North also provoked mob violence
against outspoken abolitionists. A Boston mob once attacked William
Lloyd Garrison in broad daylight, while an otherwise law-abiding crowd
assaulted the abolitionist editor Elijah Love joy on several occasions,
at last killing him in Illinois in 1837. Prominent in these mobs were
northern colonizationists who wanted to resettle blacks in Africa and
feared that the demise of slavery would herald racial amalgamation.
Significantly, a high proportion of these rioters inhabited
neighborhoods with large numbers of black residents. Such proximity,
instead of easing racial tension, apparently intensified the commitment
to exclusion.

The sharpest irony of racial separation, however, was the establishment
of segregated burial grounds. Even the Quakers of Benjamin Franklin's
Pennsylvania--Christian humanitarians who welcomed blacks in their
worship services--maintained segregated burial places. This
contradiction probably reflected not only a fear of racial
contamination, but also a dread about death and decomposing bodies. New
Englanders and urban dwellers traditionally established burial grounds
around their churches. But in the absence of nearby churchyards, rural
Americans had buried the dead on family farms. In both cases, the dead
remained near the living; death constituted a fulfillment of life.

During the nineteenth century, as churchyards became crowded and
individuals departed family lands, these burial traditions often proved
inconvenient and apparently undesirable. Reflecting a modern secularism,
urban Americans established public cemeteries in areas outside the
existing city limits. The dead, as vivid reminders of human mortality,
thus were removed from the body politic. Such policies symbolized a
denial of physical decay, a denial of fundamental life processes. In a
striking way, the rejection of the dead

mirrored other taboos about the human body. Black people, as symbols of
bodily activity--in work, dance, and sex--aroused such phobias and thus
were excluded from white cemeteries. In yet another way did white
Protestant society attempt to impose human order on the infinite. Even
the dead threatened that rationalized order.

The institutionalization of space, of which the cemetery movement was a
part, also provided an answer for the placement of other people who
could not be integrated into the social order. The insane, paupers,
orphans--all lacked a settled place in society. In the colonial period,
these troubled individuals lived with sympathetic kin or legally
appointed guardians, so that they could mix with ordinary members of the
community. The usual punishments for crime were corporal punishment,
banishment, or death; in noncapital cases, criminals, once punished,
could re-enter society. Thus, social deviants did not lose their status
as human beings. Underlying these patterns was the assumption that
ultimate justice, for better or ill, would come hereafter.

During the early nineteenth century, American reformers suggested that
socially deviant individuals be isolated from the remainder of society
and placed in asylums where they would receive treatment leading to
rehabilitation. Such reforms involved the reclassification of those
offenses considered capital crimes and the imposition of rational
justice. For the mentally ill, the poor, and the orphaned, houses of
refuge, staffed by professionals, would provide rational guidelines for
moral improvement. In short, nineteenth century reforms attempted to
exclude all deviants from interaction with ordinary people and,
presumably, corrupting influences.

Life within the penitentiaries and asylums followed rigidly controlled
rules and routines. "Everything moves by machinery," observed a visitor
to one orphan asylum, "as it always must with masses of children never
subdivided into families." An institutional regimen, authoritarian to
the core, thus established order for these otherwise disorderly inmates.
By controlling the pressures of ordinary life, the institutions promised
to speed the process of rehabilitation. And if isolation freed deviants
from the burdens of life, so did it liberate normal people from
interaction with unwanted, irrational individuals. By segregating
madness--like exiling Native Americans--the WASP majority hoped to
perpetuate a society based solely upon reason and order. Though cloaked
in the Ian gauge of social reform, Americans maintained these separating

institutions long after they had failed to achieve their stated purpose.

The reforming impulses, grandiose as they now appear, were part of an
overwhelming optimism about the Americans' ability to control and
reorganize the natural environment. They "treated nature as a conquered
subject, not as a mother who gave them birth," observed a European
visitor in 1837. "They were the children of another world, who came to
burn, ransack, and destroy, and not to preserve what they had found.
They burned the forest, dug up the bowels of the earth, diverted rivers
from their course, or united them at their pleasure; and annihilated the
distances which separated the North from the South, and the East from
the West."

By midcentury, however, as the conquering children poised at the western
ridges of the continent, some Americans--only a handful, to be
sure--began to question the meaning of that geographical carnage. Amid
the strident materialism of Jacksonian America, two New Yorkers, Thomas
Cole, the painter, and James Fenimore Cooper, the novelist, contemplated
gravely the destruction of American nature, and with it, the forces of
national regeneration. In a series of magnificent paintings, Cole--known
today as an exponent of the Hudson River School--grappled with the
sublime power of uncorrupted nature: the lonely rider fording a mountain
stream; minuscule characters dwarfed by forests--not a barnyard in
sight, nor an ax, nor a hoe. Meanwhile, Cooper produced the archetypal
child of nature, the uncorrupted Leatherstocking, protesting the killing
of pigeons, the death of innocence. Both Cole and Cooper, romantics in
an age of technology, feared the consequences of American violence to
nature. If the destruction of nature was a technological problem, there
were other troubled Americans prepared to offer technological solutions.
George Perkins Marsh, a professional lawyer and diplomat, paused in 1864
to write a book called Man and Nature in which he pointed to "the
dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations
which . . . interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic
and inorganic world." Urging "the restoration of disturbed harmonies,"
Marsh criticized his countrymen for ignoring the moral dimensions of
human activity. "It is time," he warned, "for some abatement in the
restless love of change which characterizes us." Amid the havoc of Civil
War, Marsh's voice indeed cried in the wilderness.

More influential than Marsh was the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, a
pioneer landscape architect. As the designer of New York's Central Park
in 1857, Olmsted stressed the importance of respecting the natural
environment, of organizing space in accord with the contours of the
land. His philosophy, like his art, revealed a fundamental contradiction
in American attitudes toward space. The very idea of designing parks
reflected the permanent loss of open space. In planning the landscape,
therefore, Olmsted could only be imposing human rationalism upon an
essentially undefinable subject. That his countrymen--as well as
subsequent generations --have praised his vision merely underscores the
culture's alienation from the natural world.

The notion of taming nature within the confines of urban parks
epitomized the white American Protestant attempt to transform wildness
into civilization. From this perspective, American expansion constituted
a "mighty improvement" of a "savage wilderness." But in linking the
national identity to the subjugation of space, the expansionists assumed
that there always would be additional territory to seize and subdue. It
required less than one century, however, before commentators like
Frederick Jackson Turner undermined the confidence of that prophecy, and
with it, the sense of national purpose.

"The principles of our happy government"

******************

Chapter 8.

Politics and Power

Founding the Republic: the paradox of political

parties and local politics

Alexander Hamilton's financial program and the beginnings of

national political parties: Republicans vs. Federalists

Foreign-policy formulations under Washington,

Jefferson, and Madison

War of 1812

Era of Good Feelings: nationalism vs. sectionalism,

the Missouri Compromise, and political reform

Andrew Jackson, president of the people: Democrats

vs. Whigs, the Bank War, nullification controversy,

and the Tariff of Abominations

Presidential election, 1856: Dred Scott Decision,

Lincoln in office, sectional crisis, secession

and the coming of civil war

'They who own the real estate of a country," observed a Civil War
Republican, "control its vote." That simple aphorism underscored a
dramatic transformation of American politics since the age of Thomas
Jefferson. As economic and social relations became more secular, so too
did political affairs. In the decades after the American Revolution, a
spirit of democracy spread through the land, destroying forever the
genteel traditions of the Founding Fathers; and political values
simultaneously shifted from the politics of deference to a secular
politics based on interest.

Such a transformation would have alarmed the Founding Fathers. Like
their colonial ancestors, the founders of the Republic had assumed that
an underlying harmony of political interests, an organic unity, would
bind all citizens to "the general welfare." Those assumptions had
justified the creation of a republican form of government. But the
country's founders also understood that republics were especially
vulnerable to the machinations of selfish politicians, and they advised
against the formation of political factions, which served the interests
of only one segment of society. Such factions, they feared, would
undermine the tenuous balance of republican government and destroy the
grand experiment in politics. "The spirit of party," warned President
Washington in his Farewell Address, "agitates the community with
ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one
part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection." Such
advice, a lingering inheritance from the world of deference politics,
allowed little room for serious disagreement about policy and power.

It was against this bedrock of belief that American politicians
confronted the massive social changes unleashed by the new secular
spirit. The expansion of American commerce, the migrations into western
lands, and the early development of industry all challenged traditional
expectations of social order. The reaction of politicians to these
trends depended upon their previous vision of the good society.

Political conservatives condemned the disruptive effects of geographic
and social mobility. Fearful of institutional disintegration, they
opposed the westward migration and the acquisition of new territories,
supported property qualifications for voting and office187

holding, and advocated a restriction of immigration and naturalization.
Though professing loyalty to the principles of republicanism,
conservatives questioned the wisdom of majority rule, claiming that the
masses could not be trusted to exercise power unselfishly. The true test
of republican government, they insisted, was not its defense of liberty,
but rather its ability to protect the rights of property. Despite this
unconcealed elitism, the conservatives appealed not only to the upper
classes, but also to ordinary Americans who respected the traditions of
deference and expected their betters to rule.

The clash between conservatism and change, muted through most of the
eighteenth century, emerged sonorously during the early decades of
self-government. In this age of local politics, however, the central
questions of power were resolved on the county and state levels of
government. Though the Constitution of 1789 provided the foundation for
a strong national government, politicians of the period understood the
importance of controlling the county courts and the state legislatures.
Even the national capital, when it was finally completed in 1800, did
not offer the excitement of local politics. Many elected
representatives, fleeing what they considered political exile, resigned
their national offices to return to the true seats of power.

These local and regional attachments accentuated the personal nature of
politics in the states. Political factions, some of them dating from
colonial days, were often able to dwarf the significance of specific
issues. In New York, for example, perhaps the most Balkan of states,
Governor George Clinton commanded the allegiance of the small-scale
farmers despite the shifting ground of his own politics. Political
affiliations, moreover, often followed from private connections,
marriage alliances, and kinship--all highly personal forms of
interdependence. Finally, local issues played an inordinately important
role in shaping political lines. The migration of New England Yankees
into western New York and the proliferation of urban poverty in the
state's metropolis explain much about the rise and fall of political
dynasties in the Empire State. In other areas, the story, though
substantially different, repeated similar patterns.

The very complexity of early national politics tells much about American
political attitudes. That people identified more readily with local and
state candidates indicates not only an abiding provincialism, but also
the absence of serious national questions. Only in

the area of foreign policy did political interests cross state lines,
and only then did political passions precipitate the formation of
national parties. Even then, the party system percolated downward, not
into a morass of haphazard interests, but upon a firm foundation of
long- existing factional groups. Indeed, the sophistication of local
politics, not the absence of formal party structures, demonstrates that
American citizens keenly understood the workings of power and their best
political interests.

The first national parties emerged in the only institutions of national
power--the executive offices and the halls of Congress. Despite
President Washington's attempt to transcend political divisions, his
endorsement of specific domestic and foreign policies provoked serious
controversy. Such disagreements resulted from differing visions of the
nation's destiny and focused on the meaning of republicanism. All the
national leaders acknowledged the importance of balancing liberty and
authority. But they disagreed about where one ended and the other began.
Washington's secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, fearful of
the disruptive tendencies of popular politics, advocated a strong
defense of the rights of property. On the other side, Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson and his friend James Madison, Speaker of the House of
Representatives, stressed the importance of defending liberty from the
encroachment of government. Such contending philosophies soon ruptured
the harmony of Washington's administration.

The first skirmish opened when Hamilton presented a series of financial
reports designed to strengthen the national government. Hamilton, a
political conservative, believed that the Republic's future depended
upon the support of the economic elite, specifically the creditors and
speculators who had invested in the bonds of the Confederation and in
the securities issued by the separate states. By rewarding the business
interests, Hamilton argued, the United States would win the loyalty of
its wealthiest citizens (many of whom had purchased the bonds at
something less than face value) and forge an alliance based on mutual
interest. The restoration of American credit also would attract foreign
investment without jeopardizing the independence of the new government.
Hamilton proposed, therefore, that the national government fund the
existing debt at face value and assume the outstanding debts of the
separate states.

Both proposals encountered resistance from the southern states, which
would have benefited least. For Madison, however, the issue

involved more than economic interest. By expanding the size of the
national debt, Hamilton's program would increase the power of
government, creating a need for additional taxation and a larger
bureaucracy. No less dangerous was Hamilton's undisguised manipulation
of the principal of self-interest as a basis of political loyalties.
Liberal republicans, on the other hand, believed the allegiance of the
people should depend, not upon interest and coercion, but upon
patriotism and love. Despite their sincere criticism, however,
Hamilton's opponents agreed to compromise, and the measures passed
through the Congress.

Hamilton then introduced a third proposal, the chartering of a national
bank partly supported by government funds, which reopened the debate.
Hamilton assumed that careful management by a central bank would provide
capital for the expansion of American business and thus assure the
economic stability of the new nation. Admitting that the bank would
offer special advantages to the business community, Hamilton also
claimed that other citizens would benefit indirectly by prosperity and
improved government services. Hamilton's conservatism emerged not only
in the specific proposal, but also in his willingness to expand the
power of government. Critics of the bank, most notably Jefferson, argued
that the measure was illegal because the Constitution made no reference
to banks. Fearing the power of a strong government, Jefferson insisted
that Congress could exercise only those powers specifically designated
in the Constitution; all others remained in the states. To persuade
Washington to sign the bank into law, however, Hamilton elaborated a
broader interpretation of the Constitution, one that emphasized the
"implied" powers of Congress to enact any measures for "the general
welfare." True to his elitist predilections, the President endorsed the
Bank of the United States.

The quarrel over Hamilton's financial program, besides illuminating
basic ideological cleavages, also stimulated the beginnings of national
political parties. To increase support, Hamilton worked with sympathetic
members of Congress, providing executive reports and political advice.
Hamilton's opponents also began to organize support in Congress and even
established a friendly newspaper, the National Gazette, as an
alternative to the more conservative organs. Despite this activity,
national politics still did not significantly affect political affairs
in the states. More concerned with local questions and local interests,
American politicians watched the congressional

battles from a distance, lending only occasional support to measures
that affected their immediate concerns.

In retrospect, the quarrel over the financial program seems predictable
and restrained. But contemporaries in both camps saw things much
differently. "Mr. Madison, cooperating with Mr. Jefferson," wrote
Hamilton with undisguised venom, "is at the head of a faction decidedly
hostile to me and my administration; and actuated by views . . .
subversive of the principles of good government and dangerous to the
union, peace, and happiness of the country." Jefferson replied that
Hamilton's proposal "flowed from principles adverse to liberty, and . .
. calculated to undermine and demolish the Republic." Such
disproportionate rhetoric reflected a peculiar republican myopia about
political dissent. Believing still in a community of interests,
politicians like Hamilton and Jefferson lacked an alternative
explanation of political opposition. Only some terrible corruption could
explain the refusal of reasonable men to agree about politics. At issue
was no mere economic policy. It was the very survival of republican
government. Aware of the fragility of republics and the experimental
nature of the United States, politicians raised the specter of
conspiracy at the first signal of trouble. For people who had challenged
king and Parliament less than two decades before, such vigilance seemed
a small price for political independence.

These questions of national survival soon provoked bitter disputes about
foreign policy. The French Revolution, by reiterating the principles of
the Declaration of Independence, had demonstrated the value of
preserving the United States as a symbol of liberty for other oppressed
peoples. But the Reign of Terror, which flaunted guillotine politics and
atheistic philosophy, promptly emphasized the inherent dangers of
popular government. These ideological matters came closer to home when
war erupted between France and Great Britain. President Washington hoped
to steer a middle course and issued a Proclamation of Neutrality
forbidding any assistance to either belligerent. But as the
administration attempted to rise above factions, a whirlwind of
controversy shattered the republican consensus. Since American economic
interests remained closely bound to British commerce and manufacturing,
conservative leaders, Hamilton among them, advocated a pro-English
foreign policy. Underlying this advice was a genuine admiration of
British constitutionalism. Less cautious Americans, however, inspired by

the leadership of Jefferson and Madison, saw in France a revitalization
of the Spirit of '76, an antimonarchical surge that promised to extend
the blessings of liberty to the Old World. These differing viewpoints
did not remain contained in the chambers of government, but exploded in
public debate throughout the states.

The issue crystallized when Washington endorsed the Jay Treaty, a
commercial agreement between the United States and Great Britain, which
attempted to resolve some of the grievances dating from the Revolution.
Believing that an Anglo-American alliance would preserve the Republic
from the storms of popular politics, Hamilton began to organize support
for the treaty in Congress and in the states. Such activity, by
appealing to broader questions of ideology and power, created a durable
political coalition, known to historians as the Federalist party.
Opponents of the Jay Treaty adopted a similar, though initially less
effective course, harnessing votes in Congress, mobilizing factional
support in the states, and, in the end, forging the basis of the
Democratic-Republican party.

This maneuvering confused no one more than the party builders
themselves. In an age that looked at political parties as subversive and
conspiratorial, the emergence of strong coalitions aroused profound
doubts. Each political group resolved that tension first by denying any
evil intention and then by publicly accusing the other party of plotting
to overthrow the Republic. Republicans accused Federalists of trying to
erect a constitutional monarchy on the model of Great Britain;
Federalists accused Republicans of trying to foment a rampant democracy.
Partisan rhetoric was not the only weapon used. When the Federalist
administration of Washington's successor, John Adams, encountered
resistance to its anti-French diplomacy, the government attempted to
eliminate the opposition party by enacting the Alien and Sedition laws
of 1798. Prohibiting public criticism of the legal government, the
measures justified the imprisonment of several Republican newspaper
editors. Such aggressive policies drove the Republicans to seek
constitutional refuge from the governments of the separate states. In a
series of resolutions passed by the legislatures of Virginia and
Kentucky, Jefferson and Madison argued that each state retained the
right to nullify an unconstitutional act of Congress. That doctrine,
though still only a statement of constitutional principles, revealed the
precarious condition of the national union.

Even the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, heralded as a popular
revolution in politics, failed to abate the fear of conspiracy.

"We are all Republicans," declared the new President hopefully, "we are
all Federalists." Such wishful thinking betrayed distrust of political
dissent and a realistic concern that Federalists and Republicans did
not, in fact, share common principles. After Jefferson's election, the
Federalists declined rapidly as a national party, largely because their
elitism alienated a majority of the voters. Jefferson himself
accelerated that demise by adopting some of the Federalists' programs
and values. The legitimacy of the Louisiana Purchase, for example,
hinged upon Jefferson's acceptance of a broad interpretation of the
implied powers of the Constitution. Moreover, the Republican
administration preserved Hamilton's financial structure, thus assuaging
conservative fears about democratic anarchy.

Although the Federalists were defeated in national politics, they
continued to play an important role at the state and local levels of
government. After 1800, the party apparatus passed into the hands of a
younger generation of politicians, more energetic than their
predecessors, but equally conservative. Their success in state
elections, particularly in New England, undermined Jefferson's search
for consensus, and their persistent criticism of the administration
raised new fears of conspiratorial subversion. A few Federalist
extremists actually flirted with secession, imagining a northern
confederacy composed of New York and New England. But most remained
loyal to the Constitution, though President Jefferson was unconvinced.
"Federalist monarchists," he remarked, "disapprove of the republican
principles and features of our constitution and would . . . welcome any
public calamity . . . which might lessen the confidence of our country
in those principles and forms."

Such suspicions, however irrational, played a major role in the
formulation of American foreign policy during the Jefferson and Madison
administrations. The renewed warfare between England and France in 1803
soon embroiled the United States and raised old questions about the
rights of neutrals, British violations of the Revolutionary settlement,
and the impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy. Though the
Republican Presidents attempted to avert war, both belligerents--more
concerned about their own national interests--challenged American rights
with impunity. At last, in June 1812, Madison asked Congress to declare
war on Great Britain--not because England was the sole aggressor, but
because British attacks seemed more threatening to American
independence. At stake in 1812 was not just the rights of neutral
commerce nor the protection of private property. It was nothing less
than the

preservation of the Republic. Despite a decade in power, the
Jeffersonians still feared a monarchical conspiracy to undermine the
government. "I have for a long time been convinced," declared a
Republican congressman with typical paranoia, "that there was a party in
our country, fully determined to do every thing in [its] power, to
subvert the principles of our happy government, and to establish a
monarchy on its ruins." According to such perceptions, British
aggression would embarrass the young Republic, undermine popular
confidence in government, and thus facilitate a constitutional
revolution. By 1812, therefore, Republicans saw only one alternative to
an "unconditional submission" to British imperiousness: a declaration of
war.

The war vote in Congress followed party lines and merely confirmed
Republican suspicions about Federalist loyalty. Nor did the war ever
become a national crusade. Northern investors boycotted American bonds.
Federalist governors in New England restricted the activities of their
state militias. Northern newspapers scoffed at "Mr. Madison's War" and
predicted a dire defeat. Such claims, partisan though they were, often
proved disarmingly accurate. Despite years of controversy, American
military forces were hopelessly unprepared for war. The navy won a few
celebrated victories, but the British fleet soon blockaded American
shipping, further injuring foreign trade. Three invasions of Canada--all
poorly planned and badly executed--dashed the spirits of even the most
sanguine expansionists. In 1814, a contingent of redcoats captured the
national capital, burned the White House, and headed toward Baltimore
before being stopped by a last-ditch defense. Meanwhile, Napoleon's
abdication meant that Britain could now turn its full attention to the
American theater of war.

Amid this despair, Federalists summoned a convention to Hartford,
Connecticut, to contemplate the desperate state of the union. Though
some hinted broadly about secession, Federalist leadership remained more
moderate and instead proposed a series of constitutional amendments
designed to protect the interests and values of the conservative
minority. Among their suggestions were a restriction of territorial
expansion, limitations on naturalized citizenship, and the protection of
minority rights. These proposals, much more than the stereotyped
gestures of political impotence, showed the passing of the old order,
the loss not only of power, but of meaning. The very idea of society, as
Federalists understood that term, was vanishing before their eyes and
being replaced by a spirit of indi-

vidualism. One month after adjournment, that message paraded boldly
across the headlines of their newspapers. General Andrew Jackson and a
motley group of backwoods frontiersmen--symbols all of the unwashed
democracy--had stopped the British cold in the Battle of New Orleans.
News of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, merely sealed the case.

In the aftermath of the war, the older ideological divisions seemed less
apparent. Republican politicians, no longer outraged by Hamiltonian
finance, resurrected a second Bank of the United States, initiated
protective tariffs, and appropriated federal funds for public
improvements. President James Monroe even ventured into the Federalist
citadel of Boston in 1817, winning a warm reception from his erstwhile
foes and inaugurating what the conservative press hailed as a new "era
of good feelings." Despite its inconclusive battles, the War of 1812 had
demonstrated the stability of the Republic. "What is our present
situation," asked the young Henry Clay in 1816. "Respectability and
character abroad--security and confidence at home." The phantom of
monarchical conspiracy had been killed forever.

The willingness of politicians to submerge their differences on the
national level, however, did not erase older commitments to regional and
local interests. Congressmen like Clay and John C. Cal houn supported
policies such as the tariff because they believed those measures would
benefit their particular constituencies. When the reverse occurred, when
the fruits of commerce and industry spread unevenly around the nation,
the political leaders retreated quickly to the support of states'
rights. One early harbinger of that reflex was the response to the Panic
of 1819, a severe economic depression. The crisis was largely the result
of declining food prices in Europe and the overextension of land
investment, but it soon revived sectional antipathy to the national bank
and to the protection of manufactures. The vote on the tariff of 1824,
for example, followed sectional rather than party lines--with southern
interests slipping ominously into a minority status.

Even more visceral was the sectional reaction to the problem of slavery.
In 1819, when Missouri applied for admission to the Union, a New York
representative named James Tallmadge introduced a resolution to
eliminate slavery from that territory. Though Tallmadge couched his
proposal in the language of morality, his colleagues in Congress
grappled instead with its political signifi-

cance. At stake was the political representation of the slave states
--two seats in the Senate and congressional apportionment based on
three-fifths of the slave population. As a question of pragmatic
politics, therefore, the problem could be resolved. In the Missouri
Compromise of 1820, Congress accepted Missouri as a slave state,
balanced by the admission of Maine as a free state, and agreed to
prohibit slavery in other parts of the Louisiana Territory north of
36°30'--a territorial boundary as precise as it was artificial.

But the politicians could not obscure the moral passion of the issue and
the fragility of the settlement. "You have kindled a fire," pronounced a
congressman from Georgia, "which all the waters of the ocean cannot put
out, which seas of blood can only extinguish." And Thomas Jefferson,
approaching the end of his days at Monti cello, heard "a fire bell in
the night," which he confessed, "awakened and filled me with terror."

While Thomas Jefferson worried about the future of the Union, a younger
generation of politicians, more attuned to the rules of interest
politics, had emerged as national leaders. John Quincy Adams, son of the
second President, was born in 1767, as was his major political rival,
Andrew Jackson. Henry Clay of Kentucky, chief architect of the Missouri
Compromise, began his life in 1777. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and
John Calhoun of South Carolina, both powerful representatives of
sectional loyalty, were born in 1782. These men were not the founders of
the Republic; they were its children, nurtured in its principles almost
from their first breath. Unlike their parents, products of a different,
colonial culture, they had less to unlearn, less to fear.

All their lives, these children of the Revolution had heard patriotic
orators proclaim the uniqueness of the United States. "Every child in
America," asserted Noah Webster in 1790, "as soon as he opens his lips .
. . should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes
and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor." George
Washington, now the political father, emerged as the symbol of national
independence. Parson Weems' enormously popular biography celebrated
Washington's patriotism, and even Thomas Jefferson paused, in the middle
of his first inaugural Address, to applaud "our first and greatest
revolutionary character, whose pre-eminent services had entitled him to
the first place in his country's love and destined for him the fairest
page in the volumes of faithful history." Such accolades, emblazoned on
national holi-

days and repeated by printers, preachers, and politicians on every
occasion, formed the sinews of the national identity.

If the American people were as virtuous as the orators announced, if the
American Republic constituted a superior form of government, if all men
possessed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness--in short, if all the patriotic polemics were to be believed,
how could the citizens justify the antidemocratic legacies of the
colonial heritage? When the Founding Fathers, respectful of the politics
of deference, had established republican governments, they had
instituted traditional limitations on suffrage, representation, and
taxation. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, as younger politicians
assumed the reins of leadership, these political anomalies were
challenged and largely overthrown.

The impetus for political reform came not only from the rhetorical
splendor of the pedagogues and patriots, but also from the activities of
interest groups in state politics. As the centers of population shifted
toward the west, as denominational rivalry destroyed established
orthodoxies, as urbanization and industrialization polarized the social
structure, the problems of representative government became more acute.
By 1815, large segments of the population-- religious minorities,
propertyless workers, frontier settlers--were demanding the rights of
republican government. Such pressures culminated in the summoning of
state constitutional conventions to propose reforms of the existing
political system.

As extensions of state politics, these conventions manifested the
prevailing conflicts over political democracy. "It is not to be
disguised that our governments are becoming downright democracies,"
complained the eloquent arch-conservative James Kent of New York. "The
principle of universal suffrage, which is now running a triumphant
career from Maine to Louisiana, is an awful power, which, like
gunpowder, or the steam engine, or the press itself, may be rendered
mighty in mischief as well as in blessings." Against such objections,
the reformers stressed the egalitarian principles of the American
Revolution. "Life was as dear to a poor man as to a rich one," observed
a Boston politician, and "so was liberty." Those ideas, self-evident,
but unimplemented by the Founding Fathers, encouraged political reform
by their sons, and ultimately led to a significant expansion of the
suffrage in most states.

These democratizing reforms, however, still perpetuated the existing
prejudices of a WASP establishment. In Massachusetts, for example, the
conservatives preserved the favored tax status of the

Congregational Church, despite the outraged pleas of the Baptist
minority. Even the concept of "universal suffrage," was given
limitations. "The qualification of age, and of sex, remains," remarked
one delegate. "Women are excluded--minors are excluded." No less obvious
was the exclusion of the political "children"--blacks and Native
Americans. "They are a peculiar people," said an opponent of black
suffrage, "incapable ... of exercising that privilege with any sort of
discretion, prudence, or independence. They have no just conceptions of
civil liberty." Nor did anyone defend the rights of "the aborigines,"
described by this speaker as the "only rightful proprietors of our
soil--a people altogether more acute and discerning ... [than] the
African race." The New York convention simply disqualified thirty
thousand free black residents. In other states, the forces of reform
often stumbled against the entrenched conservative opposition. Political
democracy, tremendous in its potential, remained yet the special
province of the white male elite.

The tenacity of the conservatives, besides reflecting a fear of
democracy, also revealed a lingering fear of political parties. "The
revival of party animosities in any shape, is mostly to be deprecated,"
warned Joseph Story of Massachusetts, a justice of the United States
Supreme Court. "If parties are to arise, new animosities will grow up,
and stimulate new resentments." Yet the new generation of political
leaders, more convinced of the stability of the Republic, remained
indifferent to such advice. In expanding the size of the electorate, the
political reformers were expressing their confidence in majority rule.
No longer suspicious of minority dissent, neither were they seeking
universal approval. The majority opinion, legally expressed through the
political process, would provide ample support for the democratic
politicians.

The expansion of the suffrage, by accepting the idea of interest
politics, encouraged the appearance of political parties. Once the
anathema of the Founding Fathers, the party apparatus became an
appropriate, perhaps even a necessary, instrument for organizing masses
of voters and articulating the will _of the people. Party loyalty, not
some ideological consensus, became the bulwark of republicanism. As
party competition increased, moreover, the people could perceive clearer
distinctions between rival candidates, producing a dramatic surge in
voter participation. The old politics of consensus soon followed the
Federalist ideology into oblivion, and a new egalitarian credo, charged
with the energy of bandwagon

campaigns and stump oratory, captured the spirit of young America.

This political activity became evident after the election of Andrew
Jackson in 1828. Though supported by a powerful coalition forged by the
"Little Magician," Martin Van Buren, Jackson posed as the President of
the people, the only national representative of all citizens. Where
earlier Presidents, from Washington to the younger Adams, had earned
their credentials in the executive branch of government, Jackson had
emerged from the vicissitudes of state politics, a self-made
frontiersman from Tennessee. As the hero of New Orleans, Jackson
symbolized the natural virtue of the American people, their sense of
national destiny, their commitment to the simple republic of the
Founding Fathers. On Inauguration Day, the new President boldly opened
the White House to the people, allowing the Washington crowd--"from the
highest and most polished," reported a disgusted Justice Story, "to the
most vulgar and gross in the nation"--to consume the ice cream and cake,
lemonade and punch, while smashing china, trampling furniture, and
causing a veritable riot, all of which merely confirmed the
conservatives' worst fears about, as Story put it, "the reign of King
Mob."

Jackson's image as President of the people--however exaggerated and
self-serving--pointed out the major ideological cleavage of the times.
Whether defending the infamous "spoils system" or supporting the state
of Georgia over the Cherokee nation, Jackson identified his programs
with the will of the majority and depicted his opponents as exponents of
aristocracy and privilege. Besides illuminating Jackson's peculiar
personality, his rhetorical style reinforced the appeal of the
Democratic party. In an age of rapid economic and social change, the
Jacksonian Democrats represented the older order, articulating an
agrarian philosophy of frugality, simplicity, and virtue. Above all. the
Jacksonians condemned the artificial contrivances of the new
capitalism--paper money, chartered corporations, and banks. These
economic institutions, the Jacksonians contended, had enabled a
privileged aristocracy of wealth to steal the birthright of the common
people. Old Hickory, as the symbol of national virtue, would restore the
government to the people.

If the Jacksonians appealed to citizens who were dissatisfied with the
changing social order, other Americans, more hopeful about the future of
industrial capitalism, found comfort in the party of the

Whigs. Like the Jacksonians, the Whigs had made peace with the
democratic credo and shared a commitment to economic individualism.
Theirs was a philosophy of the self-made man, which promised the fruits
of industry to all diligent citizens. In supporting such measures as
protective tariffs, internal improvements, and national banking, the
Whigs denied any special favoritism and instead predicted a
democratization of wealth. "As commerce expands," maintained the
sanguine Daniel Webster, "the effect . . . [is] to diffuse wealth and
not to aid in its accumulation in a few hands." National legislation,
agreed Henry Clay, would only accelerate that process. To the
adventurous American, therefore, the Whigs symbolized the future
prosperity of the nation.

Though the Whigs and Democrats shared a common political culture, the
difference between the parties, like the opposite sides of a coin,
seemed utterly irreconcilable; and the political clashes, when they
came, assumed mammoth proportions. Consider the matter of the national
bank. Chartered in 1816, the second Bank of the United States had
provided sensible direction of the national economy by controlling the
flow of credit, supervising the activities of the state banks, and
offering a stable currency of banknotes for the public. Yet the Bank, as
a direct agent in the economy, had offended numerous interests. State
bankers often resented its cautious oversight; working people criticized
the use of paper currency, which circulated at less than face value;
orthodox Jeffersonians condemned the special interests implicit in a
nationally chartered corporation. All this antipathy--and much
more--converged in the violent psyche of Andrew Jackson.

The charter of the Bank was to expire in 1836. Nicholas Biddle,
president of the Bank, remained optimistic about its approval by
Congress and, at the advice of several Whig politicians, moved for a
rechartering four years earlier, just before the presidential election
of 1832. After considerable debate, Congress passed the Bank bill and
transmitted it to the White House for endorsement. If Jackson signed the
measure, he would have deserted basic political principles; if not, he
risked his chances of re-election. Jackson did not hesitate. "The Bank,"
he exclaimed to Van Buren, "is trying to kill me, but I will kill it."
Jackson's veto message, written with fury as well as power, denounced
the Bank as a privileged institution, a threat to "the liberties of the
people." and a violation of the Constitution. "Many of our rich men have
not been content with equal protection and equal benefits," the
President declared, "but have

IT

besought us to make them richer by act of Congress." Then, raising the
theme of restoration, Jackson urged a return to "that devoted patriotism
and spirit of compromise which distinguished the sages of the Revolution
and the fathers of our Union."

With the election approaching, the veto placed the Bank issue before
that amorphous body Jackson called "the people." Now, as before, they
sustained him. After his re-election, Jackson proceeded to dismantle the
Bank, despite the outraged protests of the Whigs. Though blamed for
provoking an inflation in 1833 and a subsequent depression in 1837,
Jackson's policies were less significant than distant changes in
international finance. But for friend and foe alike, the Bank War
dramatized the problem of balancing power and interest in the expanding
Republic.

Even more significant was Jackson's confrontation with the state of
South Carolina over the question of sovereignty. During the 1820s,
Congress had enacted higher tariffs to protect American manufacturing,
despite the growing opposition of southern politicians. After the
enactment of the Tariff of 1828--known popularly as the Tariff of
Abominations--John Calhoun, then Jackson's vice presidential running
mate, drafted an Exposition and Protest suggesting that a state
government could nullify a law passed by Congress. Still loyal to the
Union, however, Calhoun left his paper unpublished and awaited a change
in policy. It was not until the passage of yet another uncompromising
tariff in 1832 that the doctrine of nullification again emerged. The new
tariff prompted the state legislature of South Carolina to call a
special convention to consider an appropriate response. Judging the
tariff to be unconstitutional (on the grounds that it taxed the states
unequally), the convention adopted an ordinance of nullification that
declared the tariff to be "null, void, and no law, nor binding upon this
State, its officers or citizens." The convention warned that any attempt
to enforce the law would be "inconsistent with the longer continuance of
South Carolina in the Union." Such threats failed to persuade the
President. Jackson immediately requested Congress to lower the tariff.
But he also issued a proclamation denying the constitutionality of
nullification and summoning the citizens of South Carolina to repudiate
their leaders. "Their object is disunion," he intoned. "Disunion by
armed force is treason." Though prepared to authorize force against the
nullifiers, Congress agreed to a Compromise Tariff in 1833, which
defused the crisis. Repudiated by the other southern states, criticized
by a large

unionist minority, the legislature of South Carolina could only retreat.
With its last breath, however, the convention issued a final protest: it
nullified the now defunct Force Act, which had allowed executive action
against the state.

The bitterness of the nullification controversy--far beyond its
immediate significance--revealed a massive, spreading cleavage within
the structure of the Union. The real issue was not a tariff on European
imports, but a sense of isolation and powerlessness among one segment of
American society. As evangelical Protestantism lent sanction to a small
crusade of northern abolitionists, southern slaveowners found themselves
increasingly vilified as agents of moral evil. No less threatening was
the enemy within--the discovery of the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in
Charleston in 1822 and the Nat Turner revolt in nearby Virginia in 1831.
The tariff debate merely emphasized the impotence of the once powerful
state of South Carolina. This feeling of loss--not unlike the sentiments
of the New England Federalists of an earlier generation--enabled the
nullifiers to win widespread support in their stand against the national
government.

The ultimate failure of the nullification movement, while disarming the
radicals, merely hardened the ideological lines. During the 1830s,
partly in response to the militant abolitionists, many southerners began
to defend slavery as a positive good. Fearful of even discussing the
matter, others in the slaveowning establishment relied upon extralegal
force to suppress dissent. When abolitionist pamphlets were discovered
in the mails, the southern state governments confiscated the
"incendiary" materials and persuaded Jackson's postmaster general to
uphold their position. Even on the floor of Congress, the southerners
fought abolitionist petitions, and forced the House of Representatives
to accept a "gag rule" in 1836, which automatically tabled all
antislavery petitions without discussion. The only alternatives, Calhoun
declared, were "to witness the .assaults on our character and
institutions, or to engage, in an endless . . . defense. Such a contest
is beyond mortal endurance. We must in the end be humbled, degraded,
broken down and worn out."

If the slaveowning establishment saw an abolitionist lurking within
every Yankee peddler and schoolteacher, the strident defense of slavery
also convinced the abolitionists that there was an equally
conspiratorial "slave power" bent on subverting republican principles.
This mutual suspicion--partly an accurate perception of

I

radical politics, partly the result of people projecting their own worst
intentions onto their enemies--played an important role in the debate
over territorial expansion. To northerners, the annexation of Texas, the
war with Mexico, and the expansionist designs on Cuba all confirmed an
"aggressive slaveocracy" seeking to extend the peculiar institution into
previously uncorrupted lands. To southerners, however, the attempt to
limit the expansion of slavery indicated a sectional plot--to deny the
constitutional rights of property and to reduce the southern states to
colonial status. Such clashing perceptions, each convincing in its own
internal logic, made any compromises tenuous and unsatisfying.

Underlying the dispute was a common commitment to evangelical
Protestantism and political democracy. Southerners and northerners alike
accepted the moral perfectionism of the evangelical churches and strove
to rise above sin. It was partly for this reason that southern churches
redefined their attitude toward slavery in the 1830s--shifting from
support of a necessary compromise with evil to a self-righteous
vindication of a moral good. Northern Protestants, by condemning this
position, created great tensions within American Christianity, leading
to sectarian splits in the Methodist and Baptist churches. No. less
important was the southerners' insistence on the full rights of
citizenship. By denouncing the legal right to own slaves in the
territories, northern critics were consigning southern Americans to an
inferior political status. "The prohibition," remarked Martin Van Buren,
"carries with it a reproach to the slaveholding states, and . . .
submission to it would degrade them." In a culture that asserted the
uniqueness of its political institutions and proclaimed the special
virtue of its citizens, the notions of peculiarity and sin caused deep
and unhealing wounds.

If politicians focused upon pragmatic questions of power and ignored the
moral issues, compromise was still possible. When, for example, David
Wilmot moved to prohibit slavery from the former Mexican provinces,
congressional leaders split angrily along sectional lines, creating a
constitutional deadlock that threatened the Union. At issue was not
simply the question of slavery, but also the problem of power, for the
Senate was then divided equally into free and slave constituencies. The
admission of California, certain to be a free state, would destroy that
balance, forcing the South into a permanent minority status.

While radical spokesmen like William H. Seward condemned the

immorality of slavery, and slaveowners like Jefferson Davis attacked the
abolitionists, more moderate politicians, most notably Henry Clay and
Stephen Douglas, introduced a series of resolutions known as the
Compromise of 1850. California would enter the Union as a free state,
the status of New Mexico would remain temporarily unresolved, the slave
trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in the national capital, and
a fugitive slave law would protect the rights of southern property.
Reduced to a trading of interests, the clash of sectional power could be
avoided. But the Compromise assumed that the voices of principle would
agree to be silent, that slavery and abolition were merely matters of
policy.

That the Whig party could not survive the crisis only emphasized the
frailness of the peace. Unwilling to submerge their differences about
the status of slavery, northern and southern Whigs failed even to adopt
a national platform in 1852, and watched the Democratic candidate,
Franklin Pierce--equally noncommital but less offensive to the
South--sweep to victory. As the last remaining national party, the
Democrats controlled the future of the Union, Pragmatic to the core, the
Pierce administration attempted to preserve a facade of neutrality,
while appeasing southern expansionists with the Gads den Purchase (to
facilitate the construction of a southern-Pacific railroad) and by
hinting at the acquisition of Cuba. Meanwhile, the northern legislatures
fanned the fires of sectional discord by enacting personal-liberty laws
designed to impede the fugitive slave provisions of the Compromise. The
publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852
further emphasized the emotional distance between the sections. Morality
was again creeping into politics. The issue climaxed in 1854 when
Senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill to organize the territories of
Kansas and Nebraska according to the doctrine of "popular
sovereignty"--the idea that the settlers of each territory, not the
Missouri Compromise nor the current federal Congress, should determine
the future status of slavery. To pragmatists like Douglas, the
.principle seemed eminently reasonable and thoroughly democratic. But it
ignored the moral imperatives of the issue and so aroused passionate
protests throughout the North. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
declared Abraham Lincoln, in a typical northern reaction, was doubly
wrong--"wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and
Nebraska--and wrong in its prospective principles, allowing it to spread
to every other part of the world, where men can be

found inclined to take it." Even northern Democrats dissented loudly,
and many of them deserted their party to form an alliance with former
Whigs. It was here that the Republican party, the first major sectional
party, had its beginnings.

Lincoln's protest revealed the central thrust of the new party--
opposition to the expansion of slavery. Convinced that slaveowning
interests were attempting to pervert free institutions and destroy the
national mission, the Republicans determined to thwart the sectional
conspiracy. To the South and to loyal Democrats, however, the
Republicans seemed equally subversive. Identifying with the agrarian
tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, the South saw its opponents as mad
abolitionists, and agents of Yankee materialism, urban corruption, and
capitalist exploitation. Moreover, once persuaded, once committed,
neither side could transcend the self-generating logic of conspiracy.

Nor did the issues easily vaporize. Competing for the future of Kansas,
free-soil and proslavery rivals moved into the territory and commenced
an undeclared war of intimidation. "Bleeding Kansas," as the struggle
was called, came closer to home when Senator Charles Sumner, a
Massachusetts Republican, condemned "the Crime against Kansas" in an
inflammatory speech. Preston Brooks, one of South Carolina's
congressional representatives, retaliated by attacking Sumner with his
cane, leaving the senator an invalid for years. To northerners, proof of
southern barbarism needed no further testament.

Amid such violence, the presidential election of 1856 seemed a tame
affair. Despite serious internal strains, the Democrats united behind
James Buchanan, a "doughface" northerner (with southern principles), and
reaffirmed the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The Republicans
nominated John C. Fremont and campaigned to the slogan "Free Soil, Free
Speech, and Fremont." The anti-immigration Know-Nothing party, rallying
behind former President Millard Fillmore, drained support from both
groups. When the vote was counted, Buchanan had obtained a narrow
electoral victory of sixty votes. More significant was the strong
Republican showing in the North. Fremont had carried the popular vote
there and won eleven of the sixteen free states. The possibility of a
sectional victory seemed closer than ever before.

What the Republicans could not manage at the ballot box in 1856, the
Supreme Court delivered in 1857. In the Dred Scott

Decision, announced just three days after Buchanan's inauguration, the
Court held that blacks were not citizens of the United States and that
Congress--and by implication the territorial legislatures-- lacked the
constitutional authority to exclude slavery from the territories. Not
only was popular sovereignty invalid, but so too had been the Missouri
Compromise. While northerners bristled and southerners exulted, Buchanan
attempted to end the crisis and admit Kansas into the Union. Despite his
commitment to popular sovereignty, however, Buchanan ignored a rigged
election that had produced the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. This
perversion of the principles of popular sovereignty appalled even
Stephen Douglas, who then broke with the administration. The next year,
while campaigning against Abraham Lincoln for the Senate, Douglas
repeated his opposition to the Dred Scott Decision. This assertion
--known to historians as the Freeport Doctrine--together with his
anti-Lecompton position doomed Douglas in the eyes of the South. He
appeared no better than the blackest Republican.

As the Democrats prepared for the nominating convention of 1860, the
southern wing announced that the party would have to endorse the Dred
Scott ruling and reject the principles of popular sovereignty. Any other
position would reinforce the fear of an abolitionist conspiracy. Already
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in October 1859 had sent chilling
fears across the South, raising terrible visions of northern plots and
domestic slave revolt. "Should the North fail to give some substantial
guarantees ... for southern institutions and constitutional rights,"
remarked one southern Democrat, "a revolution is inevitable."

Amid extreme tension and fear, the Democrats convened in Charleston,
South Carolina--the very hub of southern radicalism-- and discovered
that they could not agree. When northern Democrats clung tenaciously to
popular sovereignty, the southern delegates bolted the meeting, allowing
a rump group to reconvene in Baltimore to nominate Douglas and popular
sovereignty. The southern Democrats then proposed John Q. Breckinridge
of Kentucky and drafted a platform based on congressional protection of
slavery in the territories. A small fragment of southern Whigs, still
uneasy about a sectional alliance, supported the candidacy of John Bell
and urged a return to national unity. The Republicans, hoping to draw
support from the Midwest, nominated the little-known Abraham Lincoln
from Illinois.

In the final poll, Lincoln captured the Presidency on a strictly

sectional vote. Douglas carried only Missouri and part of the New Jersey
ballot; Bell won three border states; Breckinridge swept the remainder
of the South. Lincoln's election as a sectional President symbolized the
South's alienation from the national government and its impotence before
the will of the northern majority. "If we could have a Lord North in the
Presidency," asserted a South Carolina politician in an unwitting play
on words, "some rash insulting act might be perpetrated that would alarm
and unite the South." The election of the Republican candidate, in
itself, did just that. In southern eyes, Lincoln appeared as menacing to
the South as that other Lord North, the minister of George III, had
seemed to colonial revolutionaries less than a century before.

Shortly after Lincoln's election, the legislature of South Carolina
summoned a special session to consider secession. On December 20, 1860,
after brief debate, the convention formally repealed the state's
ratification of the Constitution. Within six weeks, Mississippi,
Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas--all from the cotton
South--had followed South Carolina out of the Union. In justifying these
acts, the southern states denied any revolutionary intentions and
instead emphasized the constitutionality of their positions. The federal
union of 1789 had been based on a compact of separate states, they
argued, and each state retained "reserved powers." Among these legal
powers was the right to withdraw from the original compact. The
Republican victory had placed the national government in the hands of
avowed enemies--a party determined to scourge the South of its cherished
institutions. Even the national President, supposedly after Jackson the
representative of all citizens, threatened the southern way of life.

Besides arguing the constitutionality of secession, the southern states
attempted to create a new confederation based on what they considered
the original principles of the Founding Fathers. Though some extremists
like William Yancey of Alabama and Robert Barn well Rhett of South
Carolina asserted the uniqueness of southern culture and urged their
colleagues to repudiate the old republic, the leadership of secession
remained with the legally elected governors, usually moderate
politicians who sought to restore the original institutions and values
of government. When the seven seceding states met in Montgomery,
Alabama, in February 1861 to form the Confederate States of America, the
delegates represented moderate interests and carefully chose two
moderate politicians, Jefferson

Davis of Mississippi and Alexander Stephens of Georgia, as executive
officers. The fire-eaters significantly were frozen out of the
government.

The Constitution of the southern Confederacy revealed the conservative
principles of its founders. Modeled after the Constitution of 1789, the
document established similar branches of government, guaranteed the
perpetuation of republican institutions, and protected the civil rights
of its citizens. Noticeably different, however, was its defense of
states' rights--the "sovereign and independent character" of each state.
In a few particulars, the Constitution also attempted to alleviate
specific long-standing grievances. Thus the Confederate Congress was
prohibited from levying tariffs "to promote or foster any branch of
industry." Similarly, in acknowledging the possibility of future
territorial expansion, the Constitution guaranteed the preservation of
slavery. Yet the delegates to the Montgomery convention, perhaps with an
eye to British support, indicated their commitment to traditional values
by denying the legality of the international slave trade. Such
moderation placed the southern Confederacy safely within the mainstream
of American history.

While the Deep South created the Confederate government, the national
politicians sought to avert civil war. President Buchanan, the lame-duck
incumbent, declared that secession was unconstitutional, but made no
proposals to resolve the crisis. Representatives from the border states,
most notably John J. Crittenden, sponsored compromise resolutions that
would have restored the old Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific
Ocean, guaranteed slavery where it already existed, and compensated
slaveowners for fugitive slaves. In his inaugural address of March 4,
1861, President Lincoln reaffirmed his willingness to protect the
institution of slavery in the South. He proposed, moreover, to enforce
the fugitive slave law with the same dedication that he would suppress
the foreign slave trade. But Lincoln remained adamant in opposing the
extension of slavery, and on that single issue, symbolic as it was, the
Union would founder. By the time Lincoln presented his inaugural speech,
most of the property belonging to the national government had been
seized by the Confederate states. Despite his assurances that "there
will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people
anywhere," however, the President specifically announced his intention
"to hold, occupy, and possess" federal property. One of these enclaves
was Fort Sumter, guarding the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Told
that the garrison needed supplies and reinforcements, Lincoln hesitated
to act lest he alienate pro-Union support in the South. But to surrender
the fort would be equally damaging to the authority of government. The
President chose a middle alternative --he would send only supplies to
the besieged soldiers and he would announce his decision in public.

The burden now shifted to Jefferson Davis. Outmaneuvered by the
President, he chose to attack this vestige of federal authority. On
April 12, 1861, the shore batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter, sounding
the first shot of the war. Three days later, Lincoln called for
seventy-five thousand volunteers to end the rebellion in South Carolina.
Two days thereafter, the state of Virginia, watching nervously, voted
for secession and renounced the Union. So too did Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina. The Civil War had begun.

"The home of one national family"

******************

Chapter 9.

The Civil War and American Identity

The war and its aftermath: strategies, battles,

death immersion, Emancipation Proclamation

The weakness of the Confederacy and the triumph of the

nationalist attitude

The Lincoln Presidency and republican destiny: biracial society, Native
Americans, social values, and family relations

Lincoln, symbol of unity and death

Whatever the constitutional principles in question at its inception,
whatever the ideological passion or the political realism of its
instigators, the Civil War soon symbolized but one thing to all its
participants; it was, in the words of Charles Francis Adams, Jr., "the
Carnival of Death." President Lincoln had expected a short war and had
called for three-month volunteers. "Lincoln may bring his 75,000 troops
against us," responded Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the
Confederacy. "We fight for our homes, our fathers and mothers, our
wives, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters! . . . We can call out a
million of peoples if need be, and when they are cut down we can call
another, and still another, until the last man of the South finds a
bloody grave."

In July 1861, with high optimism, the Union army marched toward Bull
Run, a twisting shallow creek just south of Washington, D.C. There, on
the banks of the stream, the bluecoats met stiff resistance from the
southern defenses. The raw Union troops hastily withdrew, broke ranks,
and raced back to the safety of Washington. The First Battle of Bull Run
had caused 3,000 casualties, North and South. Thus began what Walt
Whitman called "the red business." In 1862 the carnage increased. In
April, 23,000 soldiers fell near Shilo Church in Mississippi. Two months
later, in the Seven Days' Battles, 16,000 Yankees and 20,000 Rebels
joined the casualty lists. The next month, a second meeting at Bull Run
produced 25,000 victims. At Antietam, the following month, 21,000 more
were killed or wounded. In December, the Battle of Fredericksburg left
15,000 additional casualties. The next year, small country crossroads
like Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Chancellorsville and Brandy Station,
carved their names indelibly on the national landscape. By the time
Grant grabbed Lee's hand at the Court House of Appomattox in April 1865,
618,000 American men had died, and hundreds of thousands more had been
scarred and maimed.

The survivors, civilian no less than military, bore invisible scars
forever. "War is horrid beyond the conception of man," wrote Colonel
Robert Ingersoll in 1862. "It is enough to break the heart to go through
the hospitals. Old gray-haired veterans with lips whitening under the
kiss of death--hundreds of mere boys with

thoughts of home--of sister and brother meeting the dark angel alone,
nothing but pain, misery, neglect, and death around you, everywhere
nothing but death--to think of the ones far away expecting the dead to
return--hoping for one more embrace--listening for footsteps that never
will be heard on earth--for voices that have grown still and forever."
Those mothers and fathers, widows and sweethearts, siblings and
children--each carried what Abraham Lincoln once called "a living
history" of war and death.

The trauma of the war struck to the core of national consciousness. For
Whitman, the human slaughter opened yawning chasms of pain and shock,
powerful images of tragedy. "These thousands, and tens and twenties of
thousands of American young men," wrote the Wound Dresser from a Union
hospital, "badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with
diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c open a new world
. . . giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than
any yet, showing our humanity, . . . tried by terrible fearfulest tests,
probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the
petty bonds of art." Most casualties never lived to reach those haunted
hospitals, seeping their lives on the stone walls that failed to shelter
them, in the fresh air of the countryside, in civilian barns and sitting
rooms, sometimes on passenger trains behind the lines. These were public
deaths, witnessed by ordinary farmers and workers, etched in thousands
of memories.

"The cannon will not suffer any other sound to be heard for miles and
for years around it," noted Ralph Waldo Emerson in the season of
Spotsylvania (25,000 casualties). "Our chronology has lost all [the] old
distinctions in one date--before the War, and since." Ever after, the
American people returned to those battles and fields, memorizing
tortured strategies and mad charges, erecting marble monuments, studying
Mathew Brady's photographs of twisted limbs and rotting flesh, and
gawking at the empty panorama. "We are met on a great battlefield of
that war," they have learned to repeat. "We have come to dedicate a
portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave
their lives. . . . But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot
consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground." The stark pathos of those
words, repeated interminably because they could not be assuaged, thus
entered the national vocabulary, where patriotic sentimentality finally
could dull the reality and create a mythological sense of peace and
rest.

* * *

The staggering mortality of the Civil War, far greater than any American
war before or since, reflected a perverse inability of the military
leaders to comprehend the implications of technological warfare.
Experienced, if at all, in the Mexican War, a conflict characterized by
dashing strategic sweeps and technological obsolescence, the Civil War
generals and their political leaders remained committed to grand
climactic battles that would destroy the enemy at once. In traditional
warfare, such victories had come from bold frontal assaults, wave upon
wave of charging soldiers overwhelming an embattled adversary. In an age
of slow-loading inaccurate weapons, such bravery produced celebrated
heroes and casualties remained relatively low.

The introduction of new rifled weapons, however, and the invention of
expanding minie bullets revolutionized warfare. Where the old
smooth-bored muskets encouraged bold rushes and close fighting, guns
like the Springfield rifle could annihilate an advancing infantry from
across the fields. Though only a few frontal assaults succeeded during
the entire Civil War, the military planners continued to order hordes of
soldiers against the defensive emplacements. "Move in quick time until
within a hundred yards of the fort," sounded one typical order, "then,
double-quick and charge!" Meanwhile, at the top of the hill waited the
enemy's artillery, pouring fire onto the upcharging troops. That
casualty figures soared, therefore, is not surprising. "An assault,"
declared one Union soldier, "means--a slaughter-pen, a charnel-house,
and an army of weeping mothers and sisters at home. It is inevitable."
Agreed a Confederate officer, "It was not war--it was murder."

No less deadly than the minie bullets were the ravages of camp disease.
The conglomeration of rural troops, previously untouched by childhood
contagions, encouraged epidemics of the mumps and measles, which often
debilitated whole regiments. Survivors of these infections faced
intermittent warfare with such killers as typhoid, dysentery, malaria,
and diarrhea. Though hardly as glorious as a cavalry charge, the
diseases vanquished many a battalion, killing, by the war's end, twice
as many soldiers as died in combat. Moreover, in the prisoner-of-war
camps, in the notorious Libby and the putrid Andersonville, ravaging
disease, compounded by starvation and scurvy, worked its toll, claiming
some 8,500 lives in one four-month period during the blazing summer of
1864. This incredible human

waste, inadvertent though it was, intensified feelings of national
sacrifice and nourished a collective sense of guilt, which in its turn
demanded retribution.

It was this terrible unremitting loss that transformed the war to save
the Union into, in Lincoln's words, "a people's contest" that embraced
the entire society. In his first war message to Congress, delivered
three months after the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had reiterated his
limited commitment to preserve the Union as it existed in 1861. The
issue, he declared on July 4, was "whether a constitutional republic, or
a democracy--a government of the people, by the same people--can, or
cannot maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic
foes." As an experiment in government, he remarked in the metaphors of
Jefferson, the United States had "to demonstrate to the world, that
those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a
rebellion--that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successor of
bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally,
decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets. . . .
Such," he proclaimed, "will be a great lesson of peace."

As the casualty figures mounted and the Union army seemed incapable of
achieving a decisive victory, dissatisfaction with the war spread
through the North. In the election of 1862, Democratic candidates, many
of them outspoken critics of the administration, gained considerable
strength, capturing the legislatures of Illinois and Indiana. Only the
intervention of the Union army--which arrested some Democratic
candidates--enabled the Republicans to remain in power in the border
states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. Secret peace
societies--known pejoratively as Copperheads --sprang up throughout the
North, and in one celebrated case, Lincoln approved the arrest and
subsequent banishment to the South of a leading Ohio Democrat named
Clement L. Vallandig- ham. Such violations of civil rights illuminated
the changing direction of the war.

While the Democrats condemned Lincoln for waging an unconstitutional war
against political self-determination, more radical Republicans chafed at
the President's restraint. When General John C. Fremont, once the
Republican candidate for the Presidency, ordered the emancipation of all
slaves owned by Missouri rebels, Lincoln, fearing that the border states
might be provoked to desert the Union, countermanded the order. A
similar proclamation by

General David Hunter produced an identical presidential response. Those
decisions reflected Lincoln's pre-eminent interest in preserving the
Union. By 1862, however, the inadequacy of the military effort, together
with Republican threats to form a more radical third party, impelled
Lincoln to move in a bold direction.

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union," Lincoln
announced in 1862. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave
I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would
do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I
would also do that." By the autumn of 1862, the time to act had come.
Following the Union victory at Antietam, Lincoln issued a preliminary
proclamation announcing his intention to free all the slaves in the
areas of rebellion on January 1, 1863. This policy, he argued, by
attacking the core of southern society, would expedite a military
victory. "Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed," he
maintained; "without slavery it could not continue." Still defined in
constitutional terms, the preliminary proclamation invited the southern
states to restore the Union, offering something less than forced
emancipation in return for peace. Lincoln also reaffirmed his
willingness to compensate former slaveowners for the loss of their
chattel.

The final Emancipation Proclamation, true to the preliminary proposal,
affected slavery only in the Confederate territories. It did not touch
slavery in the loyal border states. Nor did it apply even in federally
controlled areas of the South, such as New Orleans. As Secretary of
State William Seward remarked, "We show our sympathy with slavery by
emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in
bondage where we can set them free." In his first Inaugural Address,
Lincoln had indicated his willingness to accept a Thirteenth Amendment
that would have guaranteed slavery in the southern states. Now, to
sanction his wartime Proclamation, he urged a different Thirteenth
Amendment: to eliminate slavery in the Confederate states. A Republican
Congress, more radical than the President, went beyond this request and
endorsed an amendment prohibiting slavery throughout the United States.
Ratified in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln's death, it
represented a fundamental alteration of the Constitution of 1789.

Presented as an emergency measure, the Emancipation Proclamation served
as the basis for an important change in military policy. From the
outbreak of hostilities, radical Republicans and confirms the wisdom of
calling upon black men ... to take up arms in behalf of their country,"
asserted the ex-slave Frederick Douglass. "We are ready and would go,
counting ourselves happy in being permitted to serve and suffer for the
cause of freedom and free institutions." But arming black troops (in a
cultural system that viewed blacks as inferior and unreliable) and
sanctioning their use of violence against whites alarmed northern
conservatives. When a small group of black volunteers began drilling
privately in New York City, for example, the chief of police ordered
them to disband. Even in the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln warned
the freed slaves "to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary
self- defense."

That same document nevertheless welcomed the induction of black men "to
garrison forts, positions, stations, and ... to man vessels of all
sorts." The decision to use black soldiers, like emancipation itself,
constituted an unalterable transformation of the war effort. Though
military commanders remained suspicious about black troops, doubting
their ability to endure combat conditions, black regiments promised to
shorten the war and thus save white lives. Despite their enthusiasm and
proven valor in the field, however, black troops remained distrusted and
unwelcome allies who received the worst details and the riskiest
assignments. In the navy, the black volunteer could attain no higher
rating than "boy," and his pay, through most of the war, remained lower
than a white serviceman's. Still, the enlistment of black soldiers and,
more important, their prowess with arms provided a powerful argument to
accept black citizenship in the years after emancipation.

The departure of a black regiment from New York City in March 1864
epitomized the transformation. During the summer of the previous year, a
predominantly Irish mob had protested federal conscription laws by
attacking the black population. For four days, the mob had control of
the streets, looting, burning, and lynching indiscriminately. Only the
arrival of seasoned Union troops, pulled from the reserves at
Gettysburg, had restored order to the city. Less than a year later, the
New York Times reported the farewell parade of black soldiers
"everywhere saluted with waving handkerchiefs, with descending flowers,
and with the acclamations ... of countless beholders." "It is only by
such occasions," the Times declared, "that we can at all realize the
prodigious revolution which the

public mind everywhere is experiencing. Such developments are infallible
tokens of a new epoch."

If the use of black soldiers sealed the North's commitment to total war,
so too did it galvanize southern opposition. During the secession
crisis, southern radicals had warned that the election of Lincoln would
jeopardize the institution of slavery and threaten the southern way of
life. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed those dreadful
predictions, leading Jefferson Davis to denounce the policy as the "most
execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man." By touching on
the most profound southern anxieties about racial control, the arming of
black men removed the possibility of early compromise. Whatever their
political disagreements about secession, white southerners recoiled
instantly from the specter of Yankee abolitionism and rallied gallantly
to the banner of white supremacy.

However optimistic southerners were in 1861 or desperate by 1865, they
simply could not match the industrial superiority of the more populous
North. Equally debilitating for the Confederacy was the lack of a
national commitment. Most southerners had supported secession as a
constitutional right of the separate states. They also shared a desire
to perpetuate southern slavery. Yet southern citizens generally lacked
any symbolic loyalty to the Confederate government. Such prominent
politicians as Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia objected to the
centralization of power in the Confederacy and refused to cooperate with
such policies as conscription and the use of local militia beyond state
lines. Nor did Jefferson Davis, as the creature of a states' rights
tradition, possess informal party connections with the
citizens-at-large. Where Lincoln could expect the support of loyal
Republicans, Davis had to operate within the narrow, often provincial,
contours of state politics. In the absence of a national culture,
defenders of states' rights like Governor Brown and General Robert E.
Lee commanded far deeper allegiance --and, in the aftermath of the war,
far greater respect--than the Confederate officials of Richmond.

The doctrine of national loyalty, so vigorously denied within the
southern Confederacy, emerged in the North as a central tenet of Union
ideology. In rejecting the constitutionality of secession, the North
also repudiated the argument that the southern states were merely
exercising the right of political self-determination. Pointing

out the contradiction between a slave society and one committed to free
institutions, northern polemicists denied the contemporary relevance of
the Jeffersonian doctrine. By challenging the free elections of 1860, by
disregarding the southern Unionists, by perpetuating slavery, the
Confederacy violated the basic principles of majority rule and so proved
the falseness of southern constitutionalism. In the North, loyalty to
the established government assumed a new importance and, because of the
massive spilling of blood, attained intense emotional validity.

One result of this shift was a dramatic rewriting of Revolutionary War
history. "Little allowance has hitherto been made for those who steadily
adhered to the cause of the Crown during the War of the Revolution,"
remarked a northern historian in 1865. "The Loyalists . . . have been
rudely assailed by American historians. 1 . . . The time has come for a
more dispassionate consideration of their actions. The events of the
last four years . . . must teach us to entertain a higher respect for
the men who did not at once join in the cause of independence, violate
their oath of allegiance, and disown submission to the long-established
government." The Spirit of '76, once considered the beacon for popular
revolution, was being examined in an entirely different light. Indeed,
when the Paris Communards returned to the barricades in 1870, they
earned few plaudits from the once-kindred revolutionaries in America.

Tied to this emphasis upon political loyalty was a new commitment to the
concept of nationalism. While a young politician in Illinois, Lincoln
had advocated a "political religion of the nation." As the Revolutionary
generation had supported the Declaration of Independence, he declared,
"so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American
pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor." This attachment to
the Constitution, common as it was throughout the nation, dominated the
secession crisis, each section arguing the constitutionality and,
consequently, the legitimacy of its position. So venerable had this
tradition become that the last amendment to that fundamental law had
been ratified in 1804. As the Civil War became a total war, however, the
need for constitutional change became clear. Three amendments passed
between 1865 and 1870 bestowed the rights of citizenship upon the former
slave population. Not until 1913, when different political pressures
again demanded reform, would another series of amendments be approved.

The willingness to tinker with the Constitution after 1865 reflected a
new attitude toward the national government. Until the Civil War,
American politicians agreed that certain "domestic" institutions-- like
slavery and suffrage--fell within the domain of the state governments.
The secession of the southern states, considered illegal by the North,
forced the national government to intervene in those previously
exclusive spheres. The national government now claimed the right--and
the victory of the North confirmed the right--to directly coerce
individual citizens. Moreover, the notion of "reconstruction," despite
its plethora of meanings, always assumed that the national
government--Congress or the President--would determine the political
structure of the southern states. The conquering North, committed to
national unity, would direct the future thrust of American history.

It was Abraham Lincoln, more than any other American, who grappled with
the new problems of national identity. "The only thing like passion or
infatuation in the man," Walt Whitman remarked about the sixteenth
President, "was the passion for the Union of these states." As the chief
executive of the United States, its wartime commander-in-chief, Lincoln
assumed, reluctantly at first, and then with greater intensity and
purpose, the burdens of reforging the nation. "That portion of the
earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United
States," he declared in a message to Congress in 1862, "is well adapted
to be the home of one national family; and it is not well adapted for
two, or more. Its vast extent, and its variety of climate and
productions, are of advantage ... for one people, whatever they might
have been in former ages. Steam, telegraphs, and intelligence, have
brought these, to be an advantageous combination, for one united
people."

At the core of his passion for the Union was Lincoln's sense of
historical destiny, his belief in a national mission. Even as a boy, he
confessed in 1861, he had seen "something more than common" in the
Spirit of '76. "I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they
struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that
something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world
to all time to come . . . shall be perpetuated," and he hoped that he
personally might be "an humble instrument" for the "almost chosen
people" of God "for perpetuating the object

of that great struggle." "We cannot escape history," he repeated in
another address. "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best,
hope of earth."

The vision of providential destiny, not unlike the grand optimism of the
Revolutionary War patriots, seemed to explain, even justify, the
terrible calamity of Civil War. "Our fathers brought forth on this
continent," he intoned at Gettsyburg, "a new nation, conceived in
liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal." Now, however, the Civil War was "testing" the viability, the
validity, the future of that experiment. Lincoln returned to the theme
of cosmic destiny in his second Inaugural Address. Both the North and
the South, he explained, "read the same Bible, and pray to the same God;
and each invokes His aid against the other." Perhaps, then, the "Living
God" had brought "this mighty scourge of war" to purge the nation for
its sins. As the armies of Ulysses Grant hammered viciously at the
soldiers around Lee, Lincoln asked seriously whether "every drop of
blood drawn with the lash should be repaid by another drawn with the
sword."

Though phrased in the same providential language, Lincoln's sense of
American destiny had changed radically during the course of the war.
When, in 1862, he had spoken of "one national family" composed of "one
united people," he was expressing his commitment to a white society.
Just as Thomas Jefferson envisioned American expansion without "blot or
mixture," so too did Lincoln expect the black population to leave the
United States. Lincoln's hopes for emancipation were linked to
colonization--the departure of all blacks--free as well as slave--to
some other, presumably more congenial, environment.

In articulating his devotion to a white America, Lincoln never qualified
his hostility to the institution of slavery. Unlike Jefferson, who
viewed slavery as a necessary evil, Lincoln considered black servitude
"the greatest wrong inflicted on any people." Though he had been willing
to accept southern slavery to preserve the Union in 1861, he clearly
viewed that proposition as socially unnecessary but politically
expedient. "One section of our country believes slavery is right," he
asserted in his first inaugural speech, "while the other believes it is
wrong." Lincoln's decision to press for emancipation, however hesitant,
required no major ideological conversion, no psychological
metamorphosis. The changing war merely pushed him in that direction.

Although Lincoln reversed his position on southern slavery, he

remained ambivalent about the problem of race. "I am not, nor ever have
been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political
equality of the white and black races," he had asserted in his debates
with Stephen Douglas in 1858. "There must be the position of superior
and inferior," he assured a cheering audience, "and I ... am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the white race." As President,
Lincoln repeated these sentiments to a delegation of free blacks, hoping
to convince them to support colonization. "On this broad continent," he
assured the committee, "not a single man of your race is made the equal
of a single man of ours. ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact,
about which we all think and feel alike, I and you." In this spirit, "it
is better for us both," he concluded, "to be separated."

Despite strong opposition within the black community, some black
separatists, led by Henry Highland Garnett, welcomed the opportunity to
escape American racism and emigrated to Haiti. Others, with financial
support from the federal government, settled in Panama and in the
Caribbean islands. Both experiments proved unmitigated failures, which
forced Lincoln to re-evaluate his ideas. Meanwhile, black soldiers had
demonstrated their value to the Union cause, thus proving their
readiness for political citizenship. By 1864, Lincoln himself was
redefining his image of the "national family." In a private letter to
the governor of the reconstructed state of Louisiana, Lincoln suggested
that certain blacks--"the very intelligent, and especially those who
have fought gallantly in our ranks"--be granted the vote. "They would
probably help," he remarked, "in some trying time to come, to keep the
jewel of liberty within the family of freedom." Lincoln's attitudes
toward Native Americans reflected similar racial assumptions. As a young
man in Illinois, he had volunteered for service in the Black Hawk War,
but his only distinction was in protecting a friendly native from a
lynching. The written language, he asserted in 1859, "distinguished us
from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science,
all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with
it." During the Civil War, Lincoln declined the services of Native
American soldiers just as he had declined those of blacks; eventually,
to a limited extent, he reversed that policy. Lincoln's view of the
native tribes emerged more clearly in 1862 when the Sioux of Minnesota,
angry at the invasion of white settlers, rose in arms. "Attend to the
Indians," Lincoln telegraphed the territorial governor. Yet when
Minnesota

settlers ordered the execution of 303 Sioux, Lincoln intervened,
commuting the sentences of "those guilty only of participation in
battles." Lincoln's cautious policy indicated his desire to minimize
racial violence but also assured the dominance of white society.

If Lincoln's racial attitudes reflected his frontier heritage, those
same experiences also conditioned his image of white society. "I am a
living witness," he told an Ohio regiment at the White House, "that any
one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has."
Though not the first President to boast about his humble origins,
Lincoln fervently believed in the promise of American capitalism. "On
the side of the Union," he declared in his first war message to
Congress, "it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form ...
of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of
men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders--to clear the paths
of laudable pursuit for all--to afford all, an unfettered start, and a
fair chance, in the race of life." Here was a commitment to free labor
as the basis of a free society.

As a Whig politician and later as a Republican, Lincoln reiterated the
values of American capitalism. "That some should be rich," he told a
working-class group in New York, "shows that others may become rich, and
hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who
is houseless pull down the house of another but let him labor diligently
and build one for himself." This doctrine of the self-made man,
personified in his own life, underlay Lincoln's opposition to the
economics of slavery. In the same sense, however, it implied that a
capitalist economy would bring material rewards to all segments of
society. Certainly that was the thrust of his own administration in
supporting transcontinental railroads, tariffs, centralized banking, and
the Homestead Act. But as a child of the frontier, Lincoln did not
perceive the social implications of such policies--the growing
disparities of wealth, the emergence of massive corporations, the
reckless appropriation of natural resources and the national domain.

Lincoln showed himself considerably more sensitive to the plight of
European immigrants who flocked to America in the decades before the
Civil War. Though his rhetoric betrayed occasional slurs at Irish
workers Lincoln explicitly repudiated the anti-Catholic violence of the
1840s. Moreover, while supporting some" restrictions on naturalization,
he criticized the exclusionism of the Know-Nothing party. "As a nation,
we began by declaring that 'all men are created

equal,' " he wrote privately in 1858. "We now practically read it 'all
men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get
control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes,

and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this," he concluded, "I
should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of
loving liberty." For this child of AngloSaxon parents, the land of
self-made opportunity remained open to all white settlers.

It was in the bosom of his family that all Lincoln's dreams and emotions
converged. As a boy, the death of his mother, Nancy Sparrow Hanks, had
created a profound sense of loss, and ever after he remained suspicious
about human dependence. His relations with his father were equally
ambivalent, perhaps because he blamed his father for his mother's death.
Though Tom Lincoln summoned his only child to his deathbed in 1851,
Lincoln avoided the visit and sent benign homilies instead. "Tell him to
remember to call upon . . . our great, and good, and merciful Maker,"
the absent son advised; "who will not turn away from him in any
extremity." Then, inadvertently punning on one of his mother's maiden
names, Lincoln reminded his father that God "notes the fall of a sparrow
. . . and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him."
"If we could meet now," added the son in a revealing statement of his
alienation, "it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than
pleasant."

Lincoln's ambivalence about the family of his birth influenced his
attitudes toward other personal alliances. In marriage, he
chose--reluctantly --a more polished, more sophisticated woman named
Mary Todd, whom he frequently referred to as "Mother." Seemingly
satisfied by the union, Lincoln's public statements about marriage
focused on the anomalies of such bonds. In explaining his antipathy to
miscegenation, for example, he asked why "because I do not want a negro
woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife," a remark
which brought yelling cheers and laughter from his Illinois audience. "I
am now in my fiftieth year," he continued, "and I certainly never had
had a black woman for either a slave or a wife." Such disclaimers,
typical of the fine art of stump oratory, pointed to Lincoln's--and his
culture's--sensitivity to the blurring of racial and sexual roles.

Lincoln's description of the secession controversy revealed a parallel
ambivalence about the larger question of Separation and

Union. Speaking about "the lovers of the Union" who criticized the use
of force against the South, Lincoln remarked that "in their view, the
Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular
marriage at all; but only as a sort of free-love arrangement,--
[laughter]--to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate
attraction. [Continued laughter.]" "A husband and wife may be divorced,"
he stated at another time; "but different parts of our country cannot do
this." Lincoln's passion for the Union, therefore, satisfied not only
political needs, but emotional ones as well. It was this commitment to
the Union that shaped his entire wartime policy --from the resistance to
secession to the arming of black troops and to his generous offers of
reunification after the peace. Ideology and emotions, in Lincoln's life,
came easily together.

Most dramatically, Lincoln personified the death immersion of the
country. As the war leader, he carried the awful burden of sending young
soldiers to their deaths, a responsibility that weighed heavily on his
conscience and evoked the genuine compassion for which he became justly
famous. In his celebrated letter to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, whose sons had
died for the Republic, the President revealed his own powerful grief for
"the loved and lost." And he mourned profoundly the loss of his own son,
Willie, to malaria. The sense of judgment hovered in his mind as he
composed his second Inaugural Address, still quoted today for its
rejection of malice, its espousal of charity, its fervant plea "to bind
up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow, and his orphan." Five weeks later, on April 9, 1865,
the war was over. "We must be more cheerful," Lincoln remarked to his
wife on the evening of the fourteenth. "Between the war and the loss of
our darling Willie --we have both been very miserable." And then as the
President sat watching Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in
Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a single shot from a small derringer
pistol. Lincoln died in a boardinghouse the next morning.

Millions mourned his death and lined the streets to watch his coffin on
its solemn journey across the country to his final resting place in
Springfield, Illinois. In the outpouring of grief, the nation purged
four years of collective guilt, four years of death. And Lincoln's
words, like the war itself, became part of the national mythology,
metaphors to be repeated ritualistically, not for their meaning alone,
but for their magical powers of cure, the last catharsis of death.

Part Three.

******************

AN INTERNATIONAL FRONTIER OPENS AS THE WESTERN FRONTIER CLOSES

"The nation's hoop is broken"

******************

Chapter 10.

The Collapse of Nineteenth-Century Culture

Debacle in the West for Native Americans: reservations and the Dawes
Act, disaster at Wounded Knee

Spiritual crisis and other threats to white Protestant

values and religious manifest destiny: divorce, fear of

sex and death, changing role of women

Social activism: the Purity Crusade

The Teddy Roosevelt ideal

Socializing adolescents and dependent children for class roles Blacks:
citizens only in the eyes of the law

As Civil War broke out in 1861, almost three hundred thousand Native
Americans were living west of the Mississippi. The most powerful tribes
were the Sioux (Dakota) in Minnesota and the Dakotas; Cheyenne,
Arapahos, and Comanches lived on the plains of Kansas, Nebraska,
Colorado; in the Southwest was the home of the Apache and Navaho; the
Utes and the Nez Perces inhabited the Rocky Mountain areas of Utah and
Idaho. The one hundred thousand Native Americans in California were
divided into many small and peaceful tribes until white Americans began
to move westward and settle on the Pacific Coast in the 1840s and 1850s.

Early in the war, Union troops, under General James Carleton, marched
east from California into Arizona and New Mexico to block Confederate
forces. Afterward General Carleton prepared to clear the Southwest of
its Native American population to make way for white settlement. "There
is to be no council held with the Indians," he ordered, "nor any talks.
The men are to be slain whenever and wherever they can be found." Many
of the Apache retreated into Mexico. But the Navaho were not so easily
moved; they had an agricultural settlement based on orchards and
herding. As a result they suffered starvation as their trees and animals
were destroyed by the white army. Even then, some of the surviving
Navaho fled into the mountains rather than move to a distant
reservation. As one of the rebel chiefs, Manuelito, declared, "My God
and my mother live in the West, and I will not leave them. It is a
tradition of my people that we must never cross the three rivers-- the
Grande, the San Juan, the Colorado. Nor could I leave the Chuska
Mountains. I was born there. I shall remain." Finally, in 1868, the
United States government permitted the Navaho to return to the most
desolate and barren part of their former territory. Only the Navaho,
alone among the tribes of the 1860s, could preserve their sense of
place, of being in harmony with the sacred center of their universe. "We
came back and the Americans gave us a little stock and we thanked them
for that. When we saw the top of the mountain, we wondered if it was our
mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so, and
some of the old men and women cried with joy when they reached their
homes."

The sudden and dramatic disruption of the Southwest and Pacific

Coast tribes in the middle of the nineteenth century was comparable to
the experience of the East Coast tribes when they suffered the initial
shock of the invasion of English settlers in the early seventeenth
century. In Minnesota, however, at the northern end of the white man's
frontier, another kind of tragedy awaited the Native Americans in the
1860s. The Santee, a Sioux tribe living in the eastern part of the
state, knew that Native Americans in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and
Wisconsin had made treaties with the white man and surrendered much of
their territory in exchange for a guarantee that they would have
perpetual title to a small portion of their land. Then as the white man
continued his westward advance, the treaties had been broken, all the
land had been taken, and tribal survivors had been moved westward.

A chief of the Santee, Little Crow, had participated in the signing of
treaties that ceded much of Minnesota to the whites. His tribe was
supposed to retain a strip of land along the Minnesota River and to
receive annual payments from the national government. In 1862, he was
sixty years old. He had been to Washington and had seen the vast numbers
and the strength of the white men. He knew that his tribe could not
outfight them and so he tried to make the transition to the white man's
way of life. He joined a church, established a farm, built a square
house.

But soon young warriors came to his house to ask him to lead them in
battle against the whites. The annuity from the government had not come,
and their people were starving. When they had asked the white traders
for supplies, they had been told to eat grass or their own dung. Now
they wanted to fight and take the supplies for their hungry women and
children.

When Little Crow told them they could not win such a war the young
warriors declared that he was old and a coward. Afterward, Little Crow's
son remembered that his father replied, "You are full of the white man's
devil water. You are like dogs in the Hot Moon when they run mad and
snap at their own shadows. We are only little herds of buffalo left
scattered; the-great herds that once covered the prairies are no more.
See!--the white men are like locusts, when they fly the whole sky is a
snowstorm. You may kill one-two-ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the
forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. But then, he
continued, "Ta-oyateduta [Little Crow] is not a coward; he will die with
you."

All along the Minnesota River, the Sioux attacked forts and settlements.
But in six weeks, American troops had defeated the

Santee. The entire tribe was gathered as prisoners. Little Crow was shot
and killed when he tried to escape. Three hundred and three tribesmen
were sentenced to death. Lincoln ordered that only thirty- nine were to
be killed. On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight were hanged in the largest
legal execution in American history. Those who survived were informed
that their treaty was no longer valid; they no longer had land in
Minnesota and would be sent into permanent exile on a reservation in the
Dakota Territory.

A young Teton Sioux, Tatanka Yotanka, Sitting Bull, who visited these
cousins, came to the conclusion that there could be no repetition of the
tragedy of Little Crow. Native Americans could not compromise with the
whites. To negotiate was to accept a slow, ignominious death. If death
came in war, it would be quick and dignified.

In the summer of 1865, General Patrick E. Connor marched into the Great
Plains to deal with the Sioux and Cheyenne. For the next two years,
Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux, under the leadership of Red Cloud,
defeated the soldiers. Finally, in 1868, the United States government
abandoned the forts it had built in this territory and signed a peace
treaty with Red Cloud, recognizing the tribes' right to this land.

In Washington, however, some were determined that this would be the last
treaty to be made with the Plains tribes. "The idea that a handful of
wild, half-naked, thieving, plundering, murdering savages," declared a
government official, "should be dignified with the sovereign attributes
of nations, enter into solemn treaties, and claim a country five hundred
miles wide by one thousand miles long as theirs in fee simple, because
they hunted buffalo and antelope over it, might do for beautiful reading
in Cooper's novels or Longfellow's Hiawatha, but is unsuited to the
intelligence and justice of this age, or the natural rights of mankind."

Abandoning the idea of further direct military conflict with the tribes,
the government strategiests conceived of a plan to destroy the buffalo
upon which the Native Americans depended for their existence. "Let them
kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated," General Philip
Sheridan stated, "as it is the only way to bring about lasting peace and
allow civilization to advance." In 1870, fifteen million buffalo
remained on the plains. Within a decade, systematic slaughter by white
troops and hunters had purged them from the landscape.

By 1874, the government felt strong enough to send Colonel

George Armstrong Custer on a military expedition to explore the Black
Hills, the sacred center of the area guaranteed to the Sioux in the
Treaty of 1868 for "as long as the grass should grow and the rivers
flow." But gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, and the national
government wanted possession of the territory and the removal of the
tribes. The chiefs were ordered to sell the land and move into
restricted reservations to the east, where they would be forced to adopt
white customs. For Sitting Bull, the answer was clear: "If the Great
Spirit had desired me to be a white man, he would have made me so in the
first place. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows. Now we are poor
but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die, we
die defending our rights." And the young war chief, Crazy Horse, agreed:
"A man does not sell the land on which the people walk."

When the bluecoats marched into the territory, one column under Custer's
leadership was annihilated in the summer of 1876 at the battle of the
Little Big Horn by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors. But now the soldiers
came like the snowstorm of locusts that Little Crow had feared. When
Crazy Horse fled to the mountains, there was little game to sustain his
people. During the winter and spring of 1877 most of his people
surrendered. Crazy Horse wandered along until September when he was
captured. Brought to Fort Robinson he was met by a bluecoat who thrust a
bayonet into the chief's abdomen. Sitting Bull fled with another band
into Canada, and when General Alfred Terry crossed the border to
persuade him to return to the reservation, Sitting Bull insulted the
general by having a woman, The-One-Who-Speaks-Once, speak at the
council. "I wanted to raise my children over there," she declared, "you
did not give me any time. I came over to this country to raise my
children and have a little peace. That is all I have to say to you. I
want you to go back where you came from."

But the Canadian government put pressure on Sitting Bull to return.
Canadians, too, made it clear that there was no room on their plains for
native hunters, and that the buffalo must give way to farms and wheat
and fences and cattle. When Sitting Bull returned to the United States
in 1881, he was taken prisoner. Later when he was allowed to return to
his people on the Standing Rock Reservation, he opposed the government's
attempt to reduce the size of the reservation. When the other tribal
leaders told him that he must not anger the white man, Sitting Bull at
last declared, "I am here to

I

apologize for my bad conduct, and to take back what I said. I will take
it back because I consider I have made your hearts bad."

He listened silently to Senator John Logan, member of a Senate
commission, who instructed him in his new identity as a dependent child:
"You have no following, no power, no control, and no right to any
control. You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of
the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the
government, and all you have and are today is because of the government.
I merely say these things to you to notify you that you cannot insult
the people of the United States of America or its committees. The
government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires
to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as
white men."

In confining the natives to the reservations, white Americans were
merely extending their definition of social deviance. They believed that
the Plains tribes had to be segregated because they could not accept the
dominant values and laws of white society. The army restricted them to
the reservation, and the Indian agents fed and clothed them just as
prison officials provided for criminal convicts. The reservation
differed from the prison in that Native Americans were able to remain
together as families. Government officials warned of the dangers of such
intimacy. "As long as Indians live in villages," advised one agent,
"they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent
feasts, heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting--these will
continue. I trust that before another year is ended, they will generally
be located upon individual land or farms. From that date will begin
their real and permanent progress." Not until 1887, however, did
Congress pass the Dawes Act. It allotted 160 acres of land to the head
of each Indian family. The common reservation land of the tribe would be
distributed into pieces of private property. The surplus reservation
land was to be sold by the government to white settlers.

Helpless to resist this assault on their cultural values, many Native
Americans, among them the Sioux tribe, were ready at the end of the
1880s to make a pilgrimage to hear the good news from a messiah, Wovoka,
who had appeared in the Paiute tribe. Here, they believed, was a
returned Christ. The white men had killed Christ and rejected his
message, but now he had returned as a red man. "I have sent for you and
am glad to see you," declared the red Christ. "My children, I want you
to listen to all I have to say to

you. I will teach you how to dance a dance, and I want you to dance it."
He prophesied that the next year would see the coming of a new soil that
would spread over the entire earth, burying all the white men and their
evil. The Indians dancing the Ghost Dance would be lifted into the air
while the new soil spread. When they came down to the new surface, it
would be covered with deep grass and endless herds of buffalo, antelope,
and wild horses.

Kicking Bear and Short Bull, two Sioux who had traveled on the white
man's iron horse into the Shining Mountains to learn the Ghost Dance,
returned to teach their people this dance of salvation. Indian agents,
however, did not believe that this strange religious enthusiasm, which
reached so many and such different tribal groups across thousands of
miles, was based on the red Christ's words, "You must not hurt anybody
or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always." In 1890,
officials in Washington ordered the arrest of potential war leaders, and
Sioux who served the white men as an Indian police force came to arrest
Sitting Bull in his cabin, where Sergeant Red Tomahawk shot him through
the head.

Sitting Bull's frightened Hunkpapa Sioux fled their reservation to the
camp of Minnecanjou Sioux under the leadership of Big Foot. Fearing
further violence, Big Foot led them out on the plains, where they were
captured on December 28 by four troops of cavalry and forced to camp at
Wounded Knee Creek. The next day, Colonel Forsyth of Custer's Seventh
Regiment ordered a search for weapons. A shot was fired when the
soldiers handled a deaf warrior, Black Coyote, roughly. Cannon placed on
a ridge were fired into the tepees. The Indians ran, pursued by
soldiers. For some, the race with death lasted two miles. In the end,
300 of the original band of 350 had fallen in their tracks and then
frozen into grotesque shapes along the grisly gauntlet.

A young survivor named Black Elk caught the drama of 1890 when he
reminisced a half-century later as an old man. "I did not know then how
much was ended," he confessed. "When I look back now from this high hill
of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying
heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw
them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there
in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died
there. It was a beautiful dream. The nation's hoop is broken and
scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."

Black Elk's historical vision seemed correct. In 1889, the United

States government broke the agreements it had made to the Five Civilized
Tribes of the Southeast when it had forced them to move to the Oklahoma
Territory, promised as a refuge for the Indians forever. Here these
tribes had transplanted their sophisticated patterns of agriculture,
government, and education, only to meet white men poised at the boundary
of Oklahoma waiting to rush into what they considered to be vacant land.
Once more the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws
would experience the tragedy of displacement, as would the Cheyenne,
Arapahos, and Kickapoo. Their communal land would be fragmented into
private allotments so that they, like their new white neighbors, would
live by the system of private property.

But the irony of Black Elk's perception of the events at Wounded Knee in
1890 was that perhaps more of the Anglo-American dream died there than
that of the Native Americans. After 1890, it would truly be said of the
white Americans, "There is no center any longer." The mythology that had
sustained the Englishmen who had come to America was a reversal of the
one that had sustained their medieval ancestors. For medieval Europeans,
as for Native Americans, place was sacred and individuals were fulfilled
spiritually by being buried with their ancestors. Modern secularized
society, however, promised fulfillment to those who left the traditional
places and moved into new spaces. As a symbol, America offered sanctuary
from the disharmony and the evils of the Old World,

At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate four
centuries of white progress on the continent, those gathered there
listened in dismay to the young historian Frederick Jackson Turner
proclaim the impending demise of national values in a paper titled "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History." The signs of
declension. Turner declared, were to be found in the census statistics
of 1890, which indicated the end of the American frontier. "This brief
statement," he explained, "marks the closing of a great historic
movement. Up to our own day, American history has been in a large degree
the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an
area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American
settlement westward, explain American development.

For Turner, the uniqueness of America came from breaking the links with
the Old World conception of place. "American democracy was born of no
theorist's dream. It came stark and strong and

full of life out of the American forest and it gained new strength each
time it touched a new frontier." American nature was a space in which
Europeans were allowed to reject the cultural identity of the Old World
and could be reborn as free individuals. "Into this vast, shaggy
continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement.
European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American
wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught
them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained
them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World. And ever as
society on her eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its
social forms, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideal of democracy,
she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her most
distant domains."

For Native Americans, the mythological sources of rejuvenation came from
the natural cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. As Turner expressed the
national mythology, however, cultural renewal depended upon movement
through space. As long as Americans moved west, they would remain young.
The tragedy of 1890 for Turner was that "the free lands are gone. The
material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing
away." It was inevitable that America would cease to be a New World and
would regress into Old World conditions. When people ceased to be mobile
in space, as in the East, then they began to live in the corrupt
cultural conditions of Europe. Once the western lands, the last space,
had been filled, there would be no new frontiers to revitalize American
democracy. "Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men.
It was unique." He concluded, therefore, that "the familiar facts of the
massing of population in the cities and the contemporaneous increase of
urban power, of the massing of capital and production in fewer and
vastly greater industrial units, especially attest the revolution." The
United States was destined to establish industrial conglomerates based
on an urban concentration of people.

White Americans in 1890 wanted the Native American to become a
Jeffersonian yeoman so that he could enjoy AngloSaxon liberty and
democracy. But in 1890, there was no space for this yeoman, red or
white, no future for the Jeffersonian dream. Looking to the East from
Wounded Knee one saw the population of cities almost double every
decade. Even the number of cities multiplied, moving steadily westward:
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati,

Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis.

Such urban growth increasingly depended upon immigration from Europe,
including millions of Catholics and Jews. In 1862, as Yankees in
Minnesota cleared the Sioux from the land, the center of St. Paul,
ironically, was filling with Irish Catholics.

In 1865, the white American majority identified the nation with
Protestant, especially evangelical Protestant, values. It had been easy
to relate this kind of religious emphasis to the autonomous spiritual
life of the individual and to the assumed economic autonomy of the
homestead. It was easy to fear the loss of this autonomy in the city.
For these Protestants, the index of the health of their Christian nation
was the observance of the Sabbaih. The nation was healthy if its people
observed the day in sober worship with no concessions to work or play.
By this standard, Protestant leaders already had found signs of great
decadence by 1877. As one churchman wrote, "Owing to the demoralization
consequent on the late Civil War, and the laxity of all moral restraint
growing inevitably from such social disturbances; owing to the
introduction and acceptance of trans-Atlantic theories and practices;
owing to the mixed character of our great population, representing too
many divergent types of thought, Sabbath desecration has assumed
alarming proportions and summons the Churches of Christ to a new and
vigorous campaign for its repression."

The virtues of evangelical Protestantism and its relationship to
American nationalism were expressed in popular public-school textbooks.
Warren's Common School Geography, for example, stated that "Christian
nations are made powerful, and much more advanced in knowledge than any
others. Their power also is continually increasing. There is little
doubt that, in the course of a few generations, the Christian religion
will be spread over the greater part of the earth." For Christian, of
course, read Protestant, and by the 1880s, this sense of religious
manifest destiny was ironically threatened in the very heart of the
American citadel by the waves of Catholic immigrants who challenged
Protestant domination of the public schools. A Methodist bishop charged
that "the combined and persistent efforts made by the bishops and
priests of the Romish Church [threaten] to destroy our system of common
schools. It becomes us cordially to unite with all intelligent
Christians and all true patriots to cherish the free institutions
bequeathed to us by our Protestant forbearers."

Josiah Strong, one of the great evangelical theologians, wrote Our
Country in 1884 to warn that "the city" represented the "seven perils"
facing the nation. The first six were Romanism, Mormonism, intemperance,
socialism, wealth, and immigration, and they all blended into the
seventh peril, the city. The city was the base for the alien army that
had invaded America, "an army twice as vast as the estimated numbers of
Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe and overwhelmed Rome."

Everywhere one looked in late-nineteenth-century America, one sensed the
failure of space, of the geographical frontier, to provide an
environment for individual liberty and equality. One indication was the
formation in 1884 of the Zion's Watch Tower Society by Charles Tazl
Russell. This group, which was to grow to major proportions in the
twentieth century as the Jehovah's Witnesses, expressed the first doubts
by lower-middle-class Protestants about the necessary relationship
between the American political state and Christian values. Russell
rejected the orthodox Protestantism of his youth after concluding that
an established elite was in control and manipulating American society.
He believed that their satanic conspiracy worked through "the religious,
commercial, and political combine." As corrupt as any European nation,
he predicted that this American establishment would be destroyed in 1914
by the armies of God. Only those who refused to be loyal citizens of the
evil nation, only those who became Russell's followers, would be safe
from this Armageddon and would inherit the purged and purified earth.

Another major spokesman of disenchantment was Mark Twain. As early as
his 1868 book, The Gilded Age, written with Charles Warner, Twain
expressed his horror at the political corruption that followed the Civil
War. In Life on the Mississippi, he tried to reaffirm his faith that the
fantastic economic growth, which seemed related to political corruption,
was really a progressive force, lifting the American South out of
European decadence. "The signs are that the next twenty years will bring
some noteworthy changes in the valley in the direction of increased
population and wealth and in the intellectual advancement and the
liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these." One finds, he
concluded, "all the enlivening signs of the presence of active,
energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century people
which don't dream; they work."

But by the end of the book, Twain emphasized that this dedication to
work did not bring independence to the individual; rather, it trapped
him in the social system. Twain stated that he loved the profession of
river pilot "far better than any I have followed since and 1 took a
measureless pride in it. The reason is plain; a pilot in those days, was
the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived on
the earth. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and
worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the
Mississippi pilot had none." At the time Twain wrote, however, the pilot
was no longer free; he was forced to work from the charts that outlined
the artificial channels imposed on the river by the Corps of Engineers.

In books his readers interpreted as humorous tales for children, Twain
came to question whether American nature had ever expressed a redemptive
purity that contrasted with the corruption of European society. Tom
Sawyer found terror and death in the cave, which on the surface seemed
to promise a sanctuary for children from the corruption of adult
society. He also found gold there, an element that initiated him
directly into that adult society.

Twain's bitterness toward nature became more intense in Huckleberry
Finn. It was not enough that the yeomen along the shore of the
Mississippi, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, were homicidal
maniacs ready to slaughter children as well as women and men. But the
river itself, which promised peace for Huck, as the cave had for Tom,
was also the messenger of terror and death. Promising to carry him and
the runaway slave Jim to freedom, the river instead carried them into
the darkness and hopelessness of the Louisiana swamps.

When Twain turned his sights to the man-made technological world in The
Connecticut Yankee, his vision remained as bleak as that of his
contemporary, Henry Adams. The direct descendant of two presidents,
Henry Adams was sensitive to the political corruption of the 1860s and
1870s. Like Twain, he felt trapped by the forces of urban industrial
society. Both men shared the idea that this new energy would destroy
rather than liberate the individual and that by 1890 they were
approaching the end. "I am living," Twain wrote, "in the noonday glory
of the Great Civilization, a witness of its gracious and beautiful
youth, witness of its middle-time of giant power, sordid splendor and
men ambitious, and witness also of its declining vigor and the first
stages of its hopeless retreat before the resistless forces which itself
had created and which were to destroy

it." His final vision of the future was a holocaust created by an
engineer-dictator who destroys America with an ultimate weapon.

American nature for L. Frank Baum, creator of the Oz stories, had failed
to provide independence for the yeomen or a refuge for the fantasies of
children. Baum intended to write fairy tales for children that would
have happy endings, unlike the European stories filled with sex and
death. His Oz stories ultimately became the fairy tales for
twentieth-century American culture. Baum placed his orphan-hero Dorothy
on a farm in Kansas. But she would never grow up to become a self-made
success, able to compete in a world of constant conflict. Instead, she
would fly away to Oz, where she would join the ruler of that magical
space, Ozma. Dorothy and Ozma never age. They remain presexual
adolescents forever, and they protect every inhabitant of Oz, young or
old, male or female, from any threat.

Nineteenth-century Americans had repressed the experience of sex and
death in order to sustain their belief in continual linear expansion. Oz
had neither sex nor death, neither secular time nor cyclical time. It
came to symbolize the nineteenth-century home, a point in space without
time.

The separation of innocent children from corrupt elders depended upon
the separation of the home from public life. Family life in the modern
world was a private affair, and the wife and mother shielded her
innocent children from the corruption of outsiders. Raised in the
innocence of the home and taught to fear the public life of their
fathers, children would not be attracted to the ways of those male
elders when they reached the point where they must leave home. If the
East and Europe represented the place of fathers, then young adults
could move on, if only imaginatively, to the American West, where the
purity of geographic space could be substituted for the purity of the
space of the home. But the disappearance of the frontier would have its
effects on the idea of the innocence of the home and the corruption of
life outside it. Almost at the same time that the 1890 census indicated
the end of a frontier for white men, another government bureau reported
that divorce had become a national problem. The growing divorce rate was
only one indication that middle-class women were beginning to break the
social convention that confined them to the privacy of the home.
Increasing numbers of young women attended colleges, choosing to become
teachers, librarians, and social workers. In many cases, the members of
this working minority

remained unmarried and lived a celibate life, and enjoyed the friendship
of other women. Well-to-do married women and women who worked joined
clubs by the thousands. Their numbers grew to the hundreds of thousands
in the decade before World War I.

The confinement of the middle-class woman to the privacy of the home had
served not only to produce children who would want to reject the
tradition of their fathers but also to segregate sexuality. In a time
when regularity and predictability were prized, the unpredictability of
sexual desire (and by implication all biological and cyclical time), was
very threatening. The symbolic asexual American woman served to
neutralize sexual desire and these "irrational" biological rhythms in
the interest of protecting the rational male world of political,
economic, and intellectual life.

This fear of female sexuality is documented in the writings of many
doctors in the last decades of the nineteenth century. According to
medical advice, young men needed energy to compete successfully in the
marketplace, and they needed to be taught by their mothers not to waste
that energy through masturbation. Each adolescent possessed a limited
amount of energy to use in his struggle for success in adulthood. In his
penis, however, each boy had a potential "worm hole" from which that
energy might escape. The advice to the young man was not to masturbate,
not to frequent prostitutes, and to marry as quickly as possible a woman
like his mother. He would choose his wife for her qualities of thrift
and prudence. An article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
concluded that this kind of wife would not tempt him to "spend" his
energies too frequently in his marriage bed because "sturdy manhood
loses its energy and bends under the too frequent expenditure of this
important secretion."

Faced with the possibility of greater sexual unpredictability as women
began to reject their identity as sexless mothers, medical practitioners
moved to reduce the threat of sexuality through the strategies of
rational science. One device was measurement. "I do not know that anyone
has thought of measuring the quality of semen, ejected in the act of
copulation," wrote Dr. J. Marian Sims. "I was induced on several
occasions to remove semen with a syringe and to measure it subsequently,
and I found that ordinarily there was about a drachm and ten minims."

For the medical profession, "woman was what she is in health, in
character, in her charms, alike of body, mind, of soul because of her
womb alone." Dr. Augustus Gardner warned that there was

among this "other sex a widespread uneasiness, a discontentment with
woman's lot, impatient of its burdens, rebellious against its
sufferings, with an undefined hope of emancipation, propagating
theories, weak, foolish, and criminal." When a physician wrote that the
"well-being of society demands that means shall be adopted to separate
its good elements from the bad," he had in mind, among other things,
clitoridectomy. The medical profession also began the practice of
removing women's ovaries. After the operation, one doctor claimed, women
became "treatable, orderly, industrious, and cleanly." Dr. Sims
described his invention of the speculum for the observation of the womb
in the same terms that English and American explorers were using to
describe their conquest of the mysteries of Africa, the dark continent.
He was able to see, he wrote, "everything as no man had ever seen
before. I felt like an explorer in medicine who first views a new and
important territory." Controlling the beginning of the life cycle,
American doctors by World War I had largely persuaded middle-class women
that they could give birth to their children only in hospitals. Midwives
were deplored as vestiges of the dark ages. Women needed the guidance
and control of male physicians when they gave birth.

The cultural mythology of an unlimited American geographic frontier,
expressed by the historian Turner, was that the nation would remain
young and vital as long as it was in motion. When the frontier was gone,
Turner had stated, the New World would become like the Old World. The
nation would age. Death followed aging.

If the country had a new fear of death, its reaction, as with sex, was
to control it. The medical profession gained more prestige as people
increasingly viewed doctors as salvation figures who could conquer
death. While waiting for the conquest, however, Americans created a new
profession, that of the mortician. At the end of the nineteenth century,
the middle class would be buried in caskets, not coffins. Caskets are
made of metal, and unlike coffins, give no suggestion of the outline of
the human body. Human bodies were embalmed, and cosmetics were employed
to restore to them the appearance of health and vitality. The cemeteries
of the well-to-do became more elaborately landscaped; they were spacious
and park like. The gravestones became more monumental, often modeled
after the Egyptian obelisk, a symbol of eternity. All these developments
suggested that the departed had passed away, not died. The embalmed
body, encased in metal, could not become part of the earth's cycles.
Instead, the parklike cemetery suggested that Ameri-

can space was not part of that nature which operates according to the
cycles of the seasons. Moreover, according to the books of etiquette of
1890, death was a family embarrassment. "When a death occurs in the
house, all matters should be at once placed in charge of a relative or a
friend of the family. The family itself should be kept away from
everyone as much as possible, and none of the sad details left to them.
They should not be seen until the day of the funeral. Front windows
should be shut, blinds and shades pulled down. It is not customary for
any except the nearest relatives to go to the cemetery. Ladies of the
family do not accompany the remains to the cemetery. As to periods of
mourning, Ward McAllister advocates short mourning even for the nearest
relatives."

The middle-class women who were coming out of the privacy and
cleanliness of their own homes into public life were no longer shielded
from the activities that were part of the male-dominated world. From the
Civil War to World War I, many feminist leaders advocated the
elimination of the male double standard, which allowed men to have
sexual relationships with prostitutes, and elimination of prostitution.

In 1865, many cities with large numbers of prostitutes had a Gentlemen's
Guide to Houses of Prostitution. A movement to legalize prostitution
gained in popularity by 1870, which prompted Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, leaders of the women's suffrage movement, to
oppose it. They were joined by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the leader of
the small group of women in the medical profession, and her sister,
Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman ordained as a Protestant
minister. The Reverend Ms. Blackwell expressed her horror at the dirty
cities, and she rejoiced at the Boston fire of 1871 because "the crooked
city will now be compelled to straighten her paths. Will it be New
York's turn next to be purified so by fire?" And Frances Willard led the
effort of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) to remove the
corrupting power of alcohol from the city.

Operating with the slogan "No sex in politics and no sex in industry,"
women created numerous organizations to make the city safe for the
feminine principle in public life. The American Committee for the
Prevention of Legalizing Prostitution in the 1870s was followed by the
Social Purity Alliance of the 1880s. In the next decade, the National
League of Working Women's Clubs and the National Consumer League both
helped working women to resist

the temptation of the city. By the first decade of the twentieth
century, they were fighting immorality through the League for the
Protection of the Family and a National Vigilance Society. These
Protestant-dominated groups began to forge some links with the Catholic
hierarchy in establishing their purity crusade. Archbishop Ireland gave
support to Prohibition, and Cardinal Gibbons served with President
Charles W. Eliot of Harvard on a National Vigilance Committee. This
pressure climaxed when the United States Congress passed the Mann Act in
1910, making interstate traffic in white female slaves a federal crime.

The combination of Protestant and Catholic pressure succeeded in these
decades in persuading the states to pass legislation prohibiting
abortion. Until after the Civil War, the states continued to accept the
common-law tradition that permitted abortion during the first months of
pregnancy.

Another area in which the middle class attempted to legislate morality
related to drugs. Experts today believe that addiction was eight to ten
times more common in 1870 than it was in 1970. Addiction was
concentrated among the middle-aged and middle class, especially women.
Drugstores dispensed morphine and heroin without prescription to anyone
with the money to buy them. States began to prohibit drug sales as they
did sales of liquor before there was national legislation. Then Congress
passed the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, which forbade the sale of
drugs except through prescriptions for legitimate reasons. As arrests
jumped from 888 in 1918 to 3,477 in 1920, many cities created clinics to
aid addicts during withdrawal. But as the numbers of those arrested
shifted from the middle class and middle-aged to the young and the poor,
especially blacks, the clinics were abandoned.

Undercurrents of anti-Semitism ran through much of the purity crusade.
The great New England historians George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, John
Motley, and William Prescott had written at the time of the Civil War
that world progress would take place through the mechanism of
competition and,that the white AngloSaxon Protestants would emerge as
the survivors on the field of racial battle. This meant, in their
vision, that not only would the Native Americans and Afro-Americans
disappear by the end of the nineteenth century, but also that the weaker
and less energetic Mediterranean and Eastern Europeans, Catholics, and
Jews, who had lacked the forcefulness to pioneer in colonial America,
also eventually would die out. As David Levin has pointed out in his

book History as Romantic Art, these historians ascribed feminine
characteristics to Catholics and Jews. Like women, they depended on
stealth, craft, and conspiracy to defeat their enemies. But ultimately
these wily ways by which the French, Spaniards, and Portuguese had won
initial power in the New World were overcome by the honest,
straightforward battle tactics of the AngloSaxons (WASPs).

A considerable number of German Jews, however, had immigrated at
midcentury and subsequently had prospered. Their way of life in Germany
had imbued them with modern secular attitudes of progress. Many
German-American Jews had reached the highest levels of education and
wealth by the 1880s. Many were converting to Unitarianism and
Congregationalism. In a generation, these German Jews had closed much of
the social distance between themselves and the two-centuries-older
eastern aristocracy.

Appalled by the vitality of the German Jews, many young white
Protestants in eastern colleges fantasized that one of their ancestors
had been Jewish. A Boston blueblood, Barrett Wendell, wrote, "The racial
agony in which we are being strangled by invading aliens, who shall
inherit the spirit of us, grows heavier with me, as the end of me--and
of ours--comes nearer." Henry Adams also identified his sense of
decadence with Jewish vitality: "I don't want to go home. Washington is
repulsive. If I were growing rich, it might be a consideration, but as
far as I know, I am relatively a good deal poorer than I was five years
ago. The Jews have fixed the cards all round."

It is little wonder that so many of the fears and fantasies of white
slavery, the seduction of pure country girls into a life of prostitution
in the city, centered around the "absolute fact that corrupt Jews are
now the backbone of the loathsome traffic." George Kibbe Turner declared
in the United States Immigration Report of 1911 that "there are large
numbers of Jews scattered throughout the United States who seduce and
keep girls."

A major response to Jewish competition was segregation. Tuxedo Park,
established in New York in 1886, was the first suburb deliberately
restricted to WASPs. New boarding schools like Groton were founded, and
enrollments at the older ones, Exeter, St. Paul's, and Andover,
increased as children of the elite were being withdrawn from (he public
schools. The most socially prestigious Ivy League colleges were also
rigidly restricted, because as one alumnus said, "If the Jews once get
in, they would ruin Princeton as they have

Columbia and Penn." The white Protestant businessmen did not socialize
with Jewish businessmen in their city clubs; in the suburbs, they
established restricted country clubs. As the great banker J. P. Morgan
said, "You can do business with anyone, but only sail with a gentleman."

The wives of the threatened elite founded the Daughters of the American
Revolution. The DAR, by carefully keeping family genealogies, could
determine whether a wealthy, well-educated Congregationalist had
ancestors who had come over on the Mayflower or who merely had fled from
Europe in the nineteenth century.

For these women the final model for pure Americans was that of
citizenship. Loyalty to the nation would overcome vice and moral
confusion. The Mothers' Congress, which became the national
Parent-Teachers Association, began a successful lobbying effort to have
an American flag placed in every classroom. Young truants were redeemed
by having them march and sing songs like "Down with the pauper; down
with the scamp; up with the Freeman; up with the wise; up with the
thrifty; one to the prize; we love our land and we should die; to keep
Old Glory in the sky."

For the most part the Protestant elite did not sink into apathy like
Henry Adams, but decided to act vigorously. It adopted as its model
Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt's vision was of a renewed masculine
society of soldiers and engineers, men of action, not civilization. "Woe
to our nation," he wrote, "if we let matters drift."

Roosevelt tied the nation's spiritual and moral crisis directly to the
end of the Indian Wars. "The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a
war with savages," he declared, "the fierce settler who drives the
savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him." As
Roosevelt recounted American history, the nation had been vital and
disciplined from 1600 to the 1880s because of the constant warfare
against the Indians. "The qualities needed to make a good soldier," he
remarked, "are the qualities needed to make a good citizen." When
Americans were no longer at war they had lost that martial elan.
Roosevelt discovered pacifism among young men, and even worse, the
rejection of motherhood by young women. Roosevelt snorted, "A race is
worthless and contemptible if its men cease to be willing to fight hard
and if its women cease to breed freely. Voluntary sterility among
married men and women, even more than physical cowardice, is the capital
sin of civilization."

Roosevelt self-consciously withdrew from the "effete" East into

the western wilderness to prepare himself to become a national savior.
An American hero had the strength of nature and the strength of military
discipline. When Roosevelt led his Rough Riders into battle in Cuba in
1898, it was clear that he shared his interpretation of the hero with
much of his culture. Many journalists described him in exactly the terms
Roosevelt applied to himself.

"Here in the West for years," one newspaper reported, "he lived a life
of vigor and activity, developing those lungs that had suffered somewhat
in living in cities, and wakened as well the resourcefulness in danger,
that self-reliance and the power which his future career was to
require." "Young Roosevelt," a journalist declared, "was born with an
iron indomitable will. His career is another illustration of the truth
that that which a man wills to become, that he is sure to become."

Roosevelt and many like him believed that the revitalization of the
nation would come from the youth who expressed a natural wildness and
fighting spirit and could be encouraged to channel this energy in
efficient, military forms. This new category of youth was adolescence,
the years between fourteen and eighteen. The American psychologist G.
Stanley Hall, who first described this new stage of life in Adolescence,
published in 1904, proudly declared that "semi-criminality is normal for
healthy boys."

It was in the private boarding schools of the upper middle class that
the social patterns of adolescence emerged. Earlier in the century,
young people of these years were often identified with radicalism. Freed
from parental control, they might experiment with political ideology,
with art, with sexuality, or with the world of work. But in the later
nineteenth century these children were more apt to be confined within
the institutional control of the school, acting in loco parentis. Like
the armed forces, the school was a total institution. Young men of
similar backgrounds lived and studied together, separated from the
larger society. They experienced a regimented day, waking, eating,
studying, playing, and sleeping at sharply defined times under the rigid
discipline of their schoolmasters. Their play was organized, uniformed,
competitive team sports. They were taught that to be a man, one must
develop physical prowess and the will for power. They were taught to
avoid the ways of women, which were those of weakness, emotion, and
unreliability. They were taught that they would become men and marry
good worrrn. To deserve the love of this virtuous wife, they were to be
law-abiding churchgoers. But from their peers they learned the

double standard. They were taught to anticipate adult life when they
could drink, gamble, and have brief, violent, sexual relationships with
prostitutes. Most who tried to live as adults while they were still
adolescents were punished by school authorities. But they knew that they
had the secret admiration of their superiors, who accepted the double
standard that young men will be young men.

Upon initiation into this society of militant boys, first as freshmen in
boarding school and then again as freshmen in college, the newcomer had
to accept hazing from the upper classmen. This rite of passage
supposedly tested the courage and discipline of the young man to be a
soldier. Another traditional ritual, though of a higher status, was
physical combat with one's peers. At the end of their first year, the
freshmen at Princeton University, for instance, had won the right to
fight with the sophomores in a ritual battle in which the classes
attacked each other with bamboo canes. They also had won the right to
throw away the hats that symbolized their position as initiates. The
following fall, they would join in the hazing of new freshmen and compel
them to wear the identifying hats. These customs spread to most
colleges, even those that enrolled only high-school graduates.

The private schools where this military code first emerged had a strong
relationship to the Protestant Episcopal Church. Much of the
nineteenth-century aristocracy was Episcopalian. American churchmen
borrowed enthusiastically from English spokesmen for a muscular
Christianity, often quoting with approval Charles Kings ley's comment
that "God made man in His image, not in an imaginatory Virgin Mary's
image."

Sports reflected the militant spirit. One of the pre-Civil War games of
the upper class had been popularized as baseball and was played and
watched by the lower middle class. A later development, football, was a
game that would prove the manhood of its adolescents. Unlike baseball,
football was characterized by intense group discipline. The team had to
move as a perfectly synchronized unit in complete obedience to the
leadership of the quarterback. The territory to be conquered was clearly
marked off in ten-yard segments. If the team, given a set number of
plays, successfully took that segment, it was rewarded with the
opportunity to try to take the next segment. The offensive team could
march to the whole length of the field, winning all the territory from
the defensive team.

Modern space, clearly defined and measured, had become the

context for a sport. And football also included the modern sense of
time. Unlike baseball, football, was played under the discipline of the
clock. One no longer had an indefinite period in which to win or lose.
As the clock ran down, stress increased as the opportunity to win
decreased minute by minute.

Playing without helmets at first and without adequate padding, Ivy
League players suffered many deaths as well as serious injuries,
including the loss of eyes. Theodore Roosevelt, as President, defended
the game against those who wanted to prohibit it because of its
excessive violence. As a visiting French military officer put it, "Le
football is a veritable little war, with its necessary discipline and
its way of getting participants used to danger and to blows."

The violence of football could not spread to baseball, but its emphasis
on statistics did. Increasingly baseball players were evaluated by their
batting and fielding averages; the pitchers, not only by the numbers of
their victories and losses, but by their earned-run averages. Baseball
managers were evaluated by their ability to impose discipline. The
umpires became more important as the figures responsible for imposing
absolute adherence to the rules of play.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear that culture
leaders were using sports as social models. At the end of World War I,
the Black Sox scandal echoed the massive corruption in politics that had
come to light. There was decisive action to restore the purity of
baseball through the establishment of a commissioner who was given
"czarlike" powers of regulation and punishment of management and
players. Sportswriters, who had become important newsstaffers with
regular columns, cooperated by limiting their coverage to the players'
activities on the field. No discussion of the private lives of the
players was allowed to destroy the public image of these "created"
national heroes.

If the private schools were mobilizing the adolescents of the elite to
provide aggressive leadership for the conquest of new frontiers for the
nation, it was assumed by Theodore Roosevelt and his generation that the
public schools would mobilize working-class adolescents to become the
soldiers who would follow the commissioned officers of the elite.
Between 1890 and 1914, the high school was added to the public school
system. Compulsory attendance laws were passed, forcing the young people
to remain dependent children through high school.

It was hoped that the high school would "Americanize" the children of
the new immigrants. In citizenship classes, they would learn to revere
the national leadership. For similar reasons, organizations such as the
Boy Scouts were created to mobilize the energy of working-class
children. Marching and singing in uniform, revitalized by contact with
nature, taught loyalty to God and the nation, a Scout expressed his
experience when he said, "The Scout movement teaches you to be good
citizens, and not to know anything about politics."

Theodore Roosevelt's friend Owen Wister provided a cowboy hero for these
militant adolescent boys in his novel The Virginian. Living alone in
nature, the cowboy hero, although over twenty-one, served as a model for
boys because he did not engage in adult activities, especially sex. When
confronted with a villain, the adolescent had been taught that the
naturalness of youth could always defeat a man corrupted by convention.
In this confrontation, the cowboy, the hero of adolescence, always
enjoyed total victory.

As this Purity Crusade against prostitution, drug addiction, and alcohol
consumption was defining new groups of criminals, the invention of
"adolescence" created another criminal class--delinquents. Many
lower-class young people refused to accept the status of dependent
adolescents and give up their independence as responsible persons who
could choose their own patterns of work and sexuality. A whole group of
middle-class male and female "child- savers" appeared between 1890 and
1914 who would operate as "disinterested" altruists to segregate "sick"
young people from their "infected" environment. As the great progressive
sociologist Charles H. Cooley wrote, "When an individual actually enters
upon a criminal career, let us try to catch him at a tender age, and
subject him to rational social discipline."

Since the delinquents were defined as dependent children, they had no
civil rights of due process when they were arrested. Sent to
reformatories, without trial, they had no definite sentences because
they were being redeemed, not punished. They could earn their way back
to a normal adolescent life by showing that they had learned the values
of "sobriety, thrift, industry, prudence." They also were encouraged to
acquire "realistic" ambitions befitting their social station. For these
lower-class young people, as for the children of the Native Americans,
wrote Cooley, "the organized and ordered discipline of reform schools
can make respectable citizens out of a

class of children who are quite unmanageable and even antisocial in
their own homes."

The purity crusaders had reached the conclusion that the children of
Catholics, Jews, and Native Americans could be Americanized through the
institutions of the school and the reformatory. The children of the
white Protestant elite could provide energetic leadership for these
groups of docile followers. But as distinctions between good and clean
citizens and evil and dirty criminals were more dramatically drawn,
Afro-Americans were considered permanently a part of the deviant group.
The consensus of cultural leaders in 1890 was in agreement with the
anthropological position of Joseph Le Conte that "modern ethnologists
have thoroughly established the fact that in all essential qualities the
Negro race seems to be totally incapable of development."

This "child race" had received total guidance from whites during the
period of slavery. The Civil War and Reconstruction, however, had
transformed black men into citizens with the right of geographic
mobility. Most blacks had remained in the South as sharecroppers, but
they were not under the direct economic control of white leadership. The
explosive growth of black churches after 1865 also gave the
Afro-Americans a vast new experience of independent social life. Even an
incomplete public-school system represented a revolutionary change from
the systematic denial of education under slavery. The emergence after
the Civil War in the South, where 90 percent of the blacks still lived,
of a small number of black political leaders, businessmen, teachers,
lawyers, and doctors threatened white attitudes toward the Negro. "There
is absolutely no place in this land for the arrogant, aggressive,
school-spoilt Afro American who wants to live without manual labor," Tom
Watson, the white Populist leader in Georgia, affirmed. "Yes Sir! We
know Sambo, and we like him first rate, in his place. And he must stay
there, too." But it seemed impossible to restore blacks to their
pre-Civil War dependence.

The cultural conventions of white society defined every independent
black man as a potential rapist. For Mississippi political leader James
K. Vardaman no black man had "congress with the opposite sex, having in
mind the making of a child," but "copulate[s] solely for the
gratification of the passion--for the erotic pleasure it affords him."
Southern politicians like Ben Tillman of South Carolina and writers like
Thomas Dixon of North Carolina created in the 1890s the foundation of an
anti-Negro crusade, comparable in some ways

to Adolf Hitler's war against the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. Whites
from different classes were asked to forget their economic differences
and unite to preserve their racial purity.

In his novel The Leopard's Spots, Dixon endeavored to convert white
readers from their perception of the black as "Sambo." He dramatized the
end of plantation servility and predicted the reversion of free blacks
into animal aggressiveness. His novels reiterated the warnings of the
political speeches of Tillman and Watson that the independent black men
had regressed "back, back into barbarism, voodooism, human sacrifice."

What was needed, according to Dixon and many southern political leaders,
was a militant uprising of white society to destroy black independence
as their fathers had crushed the threat of black autonomy during
Reconstruction. This crusading prejudice produced rigid forms of social
segregation between 1890 and 1910. Blacks had often been banned from
public areas in the South during the 1870s and 1880s, but on occasion
they had been accepted. Soon state laws were passed officially
separating whites from blacks in every conceivable area of public
life--trains and streetcars, stations, theaters, and restaurants.
Southern cities passed laws limiting blacks to specific residential
blocks. Whites were forbidden the use of black houses of prostitution;
laws were even passed forbidding the races to play checkers together,
and textbooks to be used in white and black schools could not be stored
in the same warehouse.

White southerners who had permitted male "Sambos" to serve their food
and female "Sambos" to suckle their young were suddenly obsessed by the
idea that blacks were carriers of dirt and disease. Under slavery, Tom
Watson insisted, the Negro had "practiced continence and was but
slightly contaminated by venereal disease." Now, however, blacks were
"rotten with it and the constant deterioration is glaringly evident."

More than any other region, the white South committed itself to
Prohibition between 1890 and 1920. For southern leaders like the
Reverend Edward Gardner Murphy, Prohibition was "the deliberate
determination of the stronger race to forego its own personal liberty
for the protection of the weaker race." When President Theodore
Roosevelt created a national Country Life Commission in 1908 to study
ways to preserve the health of rural America, he received a major
recommendation that "the saloon must be banished from all country
districts. The evil is especially damning in the South because it
seriously complicates the race problem." Alcohol could easily turn
"Sambo" into the "devil."

But if Dixon was right, even Prohibition could not keep blacks from
becoming devils. More drastic measures were necessary. While some
antiblack spokesmen advocated the deportation of blacks, other northern
leaders listened to more extreme proposals, such as "to emasculate the
entire Negro race and thus prevent any further danger from them, and the
horrors of their crossing continually with the Anglo-Saxon stock." And
Congressman James Griggs of Georgia had entered into the Congressional
Record on April 17, 1908, a vision of the ultimate solution: "The utter
extermination of a race of people is inexpressibly sad, yet if its
existence endangers the welfare of mankind, it is fitting that it should
be swept away."

When Woodrow Wilson, a son of the South, became President in 1912, his
administration, dominated by southerners in Congress and in his Cabinet,
moved to apply the standards of social segregation won by the anti-Negro
crusade to the federal civil service. Investigating committees, under
the direction of the postmaster general and the secretary of the
treasury, found evidence of the threat of black sexuality and black
disease to white government workers. White women, Secretary William
McAdoo found, were "forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored
women." Affidavits were collected from white women "that the same toilet
is used by both whites and blacks, and some of said blacks have been
diseased, evidence thereof being very apparent; that one Negro woman had
been for years afflicted with a private disease, and for dread of using
the toilet after her, some of the white girls are compelled to suffer
physically and mentally."

President Wilson agreed with his Cabinet members that segregation in
toilet and eating facilities should be instituted and black men limited
to such menial jobs that they would not be in contact with white women.
When he was confronted by black leaders who protested the establishment
of Jim Crow segregation in the federal civil service, Wilson replied,
"Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so
regarded by you gentlemen."

Afro-American leaders well understood white willingness to use violence
as a means to gain their end. R. R. Wright, Jr., a leading black social
worker and social philosopher who was editor of the Christian Recorder,
reacted to the fact that, from 1890 to 1917, a black man or woman had
been lynched on the average of one every

two days. "We are lynched," he cried out, "we are hanged, riddled with
bullets, and burned. Excursions are run to have the daughters and sons
of 'respectable leading citizens' witness the barbecuing of a nigger."

Who were these white men and women? For Wright, they called themselves
Christians but were the antichrist. Like so many black ministers who had
emerged as the leaders of the freedmen during Reconstruction, Wright
used Christian theology to understand and criticize white society. For
him, "the Anglo Saxon and the Teuton had failed." Forsaking Christian
humility, "the Anglo-Saxon race is the greatest fighting race that has
yet appeared on the stage of history." Forsaking Christian charity and
spirituality, the AngloSaxons had become the most selfish and
materialistic of peoples. Only blacks, therefore, could make America a
Christian nation and redeem whites. Wright's friend Reverdy C. Ransam,
editor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, argued that the
innate poetry and spirituality of blacks made them natural Christians.
"The Negroes are a kind-hearted people." Because of their influence,
"the heart of America has been softened with more kindness, a sweeter
spirit has filled its life and a stronger wave of emotion has swept the
whole range of its philanthropy and religion."

In 1917, most Afro-American leaders had more hope than the Native
Americans had had in 1890. Christ was black, but he could find a place
for whites who would be redeemed from their sinfulness by black
spirituality. All whites would not have to perish as Wovoka had
prophesied.

"The day of combination is here to stay"

******************

Chapter 11.

The New Industrial Economy

Railroads transform regional trade to a national economy

The modern corporation

Growth of organized labor

Expansion and mechanization of agriculture

Growth of the metropolis and the urban labor force

The black ghetto: treadmill of poverty and underemployment

On May 10, 1876, the tolling of the bell in Independence Hall sounded
the beginning of the nation's centennial celebration. All the church
bells in Philadelphia shared in the joyful expression of gratitude for
the century of progress that had carried the American people so far and
so fast from the simple republic of the Founding Fathers. The city of
Philadelphia, whose growth had not been so rapid as that of New York,
hoped to recover its momentum by holding the Centennial Fair in its
magnificent Fairmount Park-- three thousand beautiful acres at the fork
of the Schuylkill and Wissahicken rivers. The theme of progress was so
strong that the state used no colonial models for the buildings that
were erected. Nor was there any hint of the eighteenth century within
the huge main buildings. In the central exhibition hall, the gigantic
Corliss machine, thirty feet high and weighing seven hundred tons,
released fourteen-hundred-horsepower units of energy to provide power
for all the fair's exhibits. This engine symbolized the spirit of the
Centennial, a celebration that did not look backward to the past, but
focused instead upon a future of unlimited power and energy.

Thousands of citizens came each day to stand in awe of the Corliss
engine and its ability to regulate its speed automatically, to respond
instantly to moments of low and high demand for its energy. It
represented a steady and uninterrupted flow of power. New automatic and
self-regulating turnstiles allowed a constant flow of people into the
grounds. Special streetcar and railroad lines, the first capable of
moving twelve thousand passengers an hour, the second, twenty-four
thousand an hour, transported the spectators from the central city to
the fair. Within the centennial grounds, people traveled on a
narrow-gauge railroad, which circled the fair. The United States of
America in 1876 was presented as a river of progress, flowing downhill,
away from its small and distant origins, growing constantly in size and
gathering speed and momentum as it moved inexorably and majestically
into an unknown but assuredly splendid future.

It was the explosion of railroad building during and immediately after
the Civil War which had provided the foundation for the mood of progress
at the Centennial. Thirty thousand miles of track had been flung down
just in the years from 1866 to 1873. Suddenly,

railroads stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Rivers of steel
flowing from east to west, from north to south, had created a national
economy by 1876.

In the 1860s, the major industries had been regional, servicing an
agricultural society. They processed the farmers' crops and provided the
farmers with tools, clothing, and other supplies. The raw materials were
furnished locally, and the finished goods were sold within their
separate regions. But the fantastic growth of the railroads provided a
huge market for industrial producers. Iron, steel, coal, and lumber were
in direct demand for the railroads. These industries in turn made it
possible for regional specialization to be linked to the national
economy. The forests of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, of
Washington, Oregon, and California, could provide lumber for the whole
nation. Minerals from the mines of the Rocky Mountains could easily be
brought east. So could cattle from Texas and the northern plains and
wheat from Minnesota and hogs from Illinois. Factories in Boston, New
York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago could supply markets
in the far reaches of the South and West.

To hold together a railroad network spread across the country required a
new form of organization--the corporation. Railroad companies became the
first major private bureaucracies. It took a hierarchical structure
comparable to an army to mobilize and utilize efficiently the energies
of the tens of thousands of men employed by the railroads. The
corporation thus patterned itself on the Union army, the first major
public bureaucracy. The company was composed of several major divisions.
Under the leadership of a general staff, the heads of the corporate
divisions, like the military generals, possessed considerable autonomy.
These private divisions were broken down into smaller units comparable
to regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons. Each had its own
leadership linked in a chain of command up to the president of the
company and his staff, the chief company officers and the board of
directors.

This first modern private company made- a fetish of Time. The railroads
ran by timetables. All railroad employees had their railroad watches
synchronized to keep the company schedules. The railroad's large-scale,
professionalized, bureaucratized management established the model for
other burgeoning industries. The captains of industry who were creating
companies to produce for the national market--men like Gustavus Swift in
meats, Charles Pills bury in grain, Henry Havemeyer in sugar, Frederick
Weyerhauser

in lumber, John D. Rockefeller in oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, James
Duke in tobacco--all divided their business into autonomous departments
of marketing, processing, purchasing, and accounting, and they all
delegated great authority to the heads of these divisions.

The vision of the 1876 Centennial--the idea of a productive national,
economy, smoothly and efficiently integrating the physical power of the
machine with the social power of a machinelike institution, the
corporation--served to inspire men like John D. Rockefeller. By ] 870
Rockefeller had rejected the idea of a nation of free and equal
producers, of a marketplace of small and autonomous competitors. He
envisioned an America in which a few gigantic corporations dominated
production. He saw a marketplace of huge, integrated companies,
cooperating to avoid competition. The virtue of this new form of
production, for Rockefeller, was its efficiency. The movement to
consolidate small companies into large companies, he wrote, "was the
origin of the whole system of modern economic administration. It has
revolutionized the way of doing business all over the world. The time
was ripe for it. It had to come, though all we saw at the moment was the
need to save ourselves from wasteful conditions. The day of combination
is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return."

To achieve consolidation in oil, Rockefeller went to war against his
competitors. He built pipelines to force railroads to give him rebates
if they were to carry his products. With rebates, he could undersell his
rivals. Then he set out to eliminate competition: they could sell out to
him at his price; they could become his agents; or they could be
destroyed. The Panic of 1873 facilitated his effort to buy out or ruin
rival companies. Ohio was the scene of his first takeovers, where
Rockefeller had begun his refining business. Refiners in New York and
Pennsylvania were his next target. By 1880, the superior size and
organization of his militant company made it possible for him to control
90 percent of oil refining in the nation. The victory, he said, came
because "we had taken steps of progress that our rivals could not take.
They had not the means to build pipe lines, bulk ships, tank wagons;
they couldn't have their agents all over the country; couldn't
manufacture their own acid, bungs, wicks, lamps, do their own
cooperage--so many other things; it ramified indefinitely. They couldn't
have their own purchasing agents as we did, taking advantage of large
buying."

Small businessmen approached the state and national governments for help
in fighting the new corporate giants. But William

II

262	An International Frontier Opens as the Western Frontier Closes

Vanderbilt, testifying before a congressional committee in 1879, warned
politicians that they could not control them. "Yes, they are very shrewd
men," he insisted. "I don't believe that by any legislative enactment or
anything else, through any of the states or all of the states, you can
keep such men down. You can't do it! They will be on top all the time."

Many of the small businessmen threatened by the Robber Barons saw the
problem in a limited way. They did not see the larger, more profound
revolution that would place the corporations in control of the economy
by 1900. Hence they did not organize political opposition to stop the
trend of monopolization in the key areas of industrial production.

The first economic groups to grasp the full implications of the
corporate revolution were the workers in the craft unions. Organized
labor had expanded dramatically immediately before and during the Civil
War. Union leaders usually regarded owners of small factories with ten
to twenty workers as fellow producers and considered small industry no
threat to the open economy. But by 1869, the organizers of the National
Labor Union were aware of the danger to their independence if they
became industrial soldiers dominated by a rigid hierarchy of managers.
William Sylvis, the president of this new group, saw monopoly,
inequality, and plutocracy as the major trends of the day. "So long as
we continue to work for wages," he declared, "so long will we be
subjected to small pay, poverty, and all of the evils of which we
complain." His answer then was cooperation. The workers must form
producers' and consumers' cooperatives. They could preserve political
and social democracy only if they engaged in economic democracy.

The National Labor Union grew rapidly until 1873, when a depression and
widespread unemployment made it easy for employers to ruin them. There
was a constant influx of unskilled labor from Europe and from rural
America, and advancing technology enabled employers to use unskilled
workers to replace the skilled workers who were most likely to belong to
unions. Workers despaired at the destruction of their unions and
sometimes formed underground organizations, one of which was the "Molly
Maguires" in the coal mines. Irish miners used guerrilla tactics against
their employers, but their organization was infiltrated by company
spies. A young Irish immigrant, James McParlan, a Pinkerton detective,
became an official of the Molly Maguires and informed on his fellows. On
his testimony, ten were hanged.

Railroad workers throughout the country rebelled against pay cuts in
1877. They rioted in Baltimore, Altoona, Reading, Scranton, Buffalo,
Toledo, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Everywhere
the authorities summoned government troops to end the riots. In Reading,
for example, eleven were killed in the streets; in Pittsburgh, twenty
more were shot down.

When prosperity returned in the 1880s and full employment gave the
workers more bargaining power, there was a dramatic resurgence of union
efforts. Two or three hundred thousand workers had joined the National
Labor Union. Now almost a million joined the Knights of Labor. The new
organization's president, Terence V. Powderly, announced that its aim
was "to make each man his own employer." All productive Americans were
invited to join the Knights; only parasites, professional gamblers,
stockbrokers, prostitutes, lawyers, bankers, and liquor dealers were
barred.

By 1890, however, the position of the worker had not much improved.
Factories were growing larger. The majority of industrial workers seemed
to be passive wage-earners. Twenty years of labor agitation had failed
to create a viable cooperative alternative to the corporation. Though
some workers considered violent revolution as the only way to overthrow
the corporation, the establishment proved equally effective in the use
of force. In 1886, as thousands of workers in Chicago went on strike for
shorter hours, some of the union radicals began to act. On May 3, a bomb
exploded in Hay market Square during a confrontation between police and
strikers. The police arrested eight known anarchists, of whom seven were
condemned to death, although there was no evidence to link them with the
bomb.

In 1893, a major economic crisis again encouraged employers to slash
salaries and reduce the power of the unions. When the Pullman Company in
Chicago reduced wages, it did not lower the rents it charged in its
model town. A strike by the angry Pullman workers expanded rapidly into
a major walkout of railroad employees headed by Eugene V. Debs.
President Cleveland then sent federal troops into Chicago, and the army
killed more than thirty people in a confrontation.

Debs and other strike leaders had been sent to prison for "conspiracy"
against the government, and it was then that Debs converted to
socialism. He could no longer believe in the restoration of a pre-Civil
War America run by free and equal capitalist producers. But neither
could he accept those socialists who called for a violent

overthrow of the establishment. Instead Debs believed that the
increasing monopolization of the economy by a few large corporations was
acceptable because such centralization would facilitate a peaceful
revolution of the economy when socialism had been voted into power by
the American people. Debs helped to found the Socialist party, which was
based on the belief that political democracy could reform the social and
economic patterns.

Samuel Gompers agreed with Debs that there could be no violent overthrow
of the new corporate order and no restoration of an older and more
socially and economically democratic America. As a member of the
cigar-makers' union, Gompers would emerge to lead the American
Federation of Labor (ALL). Speaking in 1888, he urged workers to
acknowledge the corporate revolution and accept their place within that
structure. "The fact is being fast forced upon the consciousness of the
wage-workers of this continent that they are a distinct and practically
permanent class of modern society," he declared, "and, consequently,
they have distinct and permanent common interests." Like the socialist
Debs, Gompers believed that the growth of the large corporation was
inevitable. "We are convinced," Gompers continued, "that the State is
not capable of preventing the legitimate development or natural
concentration of industry."

The future, as Gompers and other leaders of the ALL predicted, was one
in which the business leaders would permanently control the means of
production. The sole interest of these corporate officers was to
increase the profits of their organizations. The interest of the
workers, the enlisted men, was simply to organize in unions and bargain
for a share of the profits. As Adolph Strasser, another ALL leader,
explained, "We have no ultimate end. We are going on from day to day. We
are fighting for immediate objectives." In launching the ALL, Gompers
and Strasser were seeking to free the craft unions from the
anticorporate ideology that had characterized organized labor under the
Knights of. Labor. Where the Knights appealed to all industrial and farm
laborers, the ALL comprised a loose federation of craft unions, the
unions of the skilled workers. In effect, these elite workers had
abandoned any hope for the unionization of the masses of unskilled
industrial workers. The failure to generate unity within the total labor
force was recognized by union leaders. They were also aware of the
union's inability to solve the problem of white racism. The refusal of
white workers to

IT

consider unity with black workers did not go unnoticed. "It is useless
to deny the fact that there is a great amount of race prejudice still
existing among white workers," Gompers declared, "and it is well to keep
this fact in mind. It is useless to be simply trying to ram our heads
through stone walls."

ALL leaders were similarly pessimistic about reducing friction between
white Protestant workers and the newer Catholic and Jewish immigrants.
Indeed, there was little unity among Catholics-- Irish, German, Slavic,
and Italian. In the cities, immigrant workers from the industrial cities
of northern Italy were easily unionized, but the immigrant workers from
rural areas in southern Italy and Sicily were bewildered and confused by
their first contact with industrialism in America.

Corporate leaders well understood and exploited the ethnic groups within
the labor force. They deliberately worked to deepen resentments between
them by using blacks as strikebreakers against whites or by using one
white ethnic group against another. Explaining why he was hiring Swedes,
an employment agent for a Chicago meat-packing plant stated, "Well you
see, it is only for this week. Last week we employed Slovaks. We change
about among the different nationalities and languages. It prevents them
from getting together. We have the thing systematized. We have a
luncheon each week of the employment managers of the large firms of the
Chicago districts. There we discuss our problems and exchange
information." Even more brutal was the assessment of the captain of
industry Jay Gould: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill
the other half."

Some business leaders, represented by the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM), wanted to eliminate the ALL, just as the Knights of
Labor and the National Labor Union had been destroyed earlier. Others,
however, argued that the ALL should be encouraged because of its
apolitical attitudes, its refusal to engage in fundamental social and
economic criticism. For millionaires like Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio and
August Belmont of New York, a safe labor movement was preferable to the
radicalism that seemed to be surrounding Debs' Socialist party. These
corporate leaders founded the National Civic Federation in 1900 with
Hanna as president and Gompers as vice-president to demonstrate the
common interests of management and labor within the capitalist system.
President Theodore Roosevelt shared this position and supported
conservative labor leader John Mitchell, the president of the United

Mine Workers, against the coal-mine owners. Roosevelt was particularly
angry at coal executive George Baer, because he would not make a
distinction between conservative and radical union activity. Writing to
Mark Hanna, Roosevelt declared, "From every consideration of public
policy and of good morals, they should make some slight concessions."
Ultimately, Roosevelt forced arbitration on Baer.

As the number of large corporations jumped from twelve in 1893 to 318 in
1904, controlling 5,288 manufacturing plants, the ALL increased its
membership from 265,000 to 1,700,000. Accepting cooption by the
corporation seemed to guarantee the survival of a limited union
movement.

Meanwhile the corporations were free to mobilize the unskilled and
nonunionized workers as they pleased. The International Harvester
Corporation taught its Polish workers enough English to carry out their
tasks. The major thrust of the lesson was to develop a sense of
discipline and time.

I hear the whistle, I must hurry.

I hear the five minute whistle,

It is time to go into the shop.

I take my check from the gate board

and hang it on the department board.

I change my clothes and get ready to work,

The starting whistle blows,

I eat my lunch.

It is forbidden to eat until then,

The whistle blows at five minutes of starting time.

I get ready to work.

I work until the whistle blows to quit.

I leave my place nice and clean.

I put all my clothes in the locker.

I must go home.

Hatred of this new discipline of the clock -was expressed in poems like
this written by an immigrant worker, Morris Rosenfeld:

The clock in the workshop--it rests not a moment; It points on, and
ticks on; eternity time; Someone told me the clock had a meaning; In
pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme. At times, when I listen, I
hear the clock plainly;

I

The reason of old--the old meaning--is gone;

The maddening pendulum urges me forward to labor and still

labor on.

The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger, The face of the clock
has the eyes of the foe; The clock--I shudder--Dost hear how it draws
me? It calls me "machine" and it cries to me "sew."

A much more elaborate popular literature was produced to educate the
large white Protestant population coming to the city from the farm in
the late nineteenth century. Manuals that taught young rustics how to
succeed in the city stressed the importance of time. "Holding
punctuality among the major virtues, the good worker is ever true to the
appointed hour and as he goes and comes, men set their watches by him,
as though he were a clock--face of the sun and moved by solar
machinery."

Spiritual and economic success were linked in this literature. "Those
who will their salvation and diligently cultivate industry, frugality,
sobriety, perseverance, punctuality, loyalty, obedience will find the
reward of success." Success for the young man from the farm was defined
as finding a secure place in the corporate army. Respect, even fear of
authority, was inculcated. "Your employer, like God, knows the ways of
the just and unjust. There are no secrets before God, or your employer.
He knows who shirks, who watches the clock, who clips a few minutes, who
is a little late and a little early to leave. He records your sins and
good works in the book of judgment and on the day of reckoning knows who
deserves poverty and who deserves wealth."

In the immensely popular dime novels of Horatio Alger, there is the same
moral lesson of loyalty and obedience. His young orphan heroes come to
the city from the country looking for a protective father figure. In his
series of Ragged Dick stories, Dick dreams that "some rich man would
adopt me, and give me plenty to eat, and drink and wear, without my
havin' to look so sharp after it." Dick also expresses his limited
ambition when he says, "I'd like to be an office boy, and learn
business, and grow up 'spectable.' " Alger's heroes succeed because they
are morally correct and they have the good luck to find someone who
rewards their virtue.

Between 1880 and 1900, a self-consciously Catholic literature developed
very rapidly which preached similar advice to young

Catholics. In those years, the Irish and the German Catholics were being
joined by new millions of Italian and Slavic Catholic immigrants. The
Catholic minority was growing large enough for ecclesiastical and lay
leaders to begin advocating a movement for Catholic power. Decisions
were made to build a national Catholic school system that would parallel
the public school system run by Protestants. Such separation, it was
hoped, would preserve the church identity of young Catholics. Yet
Catholics themselves continued to disagree about the nature of that
identity. The Irish prelates, who dominated the hierarchy of the
American church, persuaded the Church at Rome to crush the movement of
German Catholics who desired to preserve the variety of European
languages in the parochial schools. Under the influence of the Irish,
Catholic schools, like the Protestant-dominated public schools, would
teach in English. Catholic power would find expression only in the
English language.

Between 1880 and 1900, magazines like the Catholic Reading Circle Review
and Catholic World were founded "to get Catholics to read Catholic
literature." In addition to the pressures of the schools to remind young
Catholics to remain within prescribed cultural boundaries, the Young
Men's Catholic Association was founded as a symbolic alternative to the
Protestant Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), the Catholic summer
school as an alternative to the Protestant Chautauqua, and a guild of
Catholic authors as an alternative to the national literature dominated
by Protestants. Catholic self-consciousness as a separate community was
strong enough by the end of the nineteenth century to provide a market
for "A Game of Quotations from American Catholic Authors," "The
Pictorial Game of American Catholic Authors," and A Catholic Speller. By
1900, a hundred American Catholic authors were being identified by adult
magazines such as Ave Maria and The Messenger of the Sacred Heart and
children's magazines such as Our Boys' and Girls' Own. The central
message of these novelists, as expressed by the most popular, Maurice
Egan, in such novels as The Vocation of Edward Conway and The Success of
Patrick Desmond, was the necessity of pride in the Catholic heritage and
the right of Catholics to claim a full and equal share of the American
experience.

One great danger to Catholicism was a marriage to a non-Catholic. Many
plots elaborated by Catholic writers involved the temptation to form
such a marriage and a last-minute rejection of the

temptation, often through the help of a supportive priest. The other
great temptation examined by the novelists was that of worldly ambition.
The virtues of hard work, sobriety, cleanliness, and propriety as taught
by nuns in the parochial schools were emphasized. But ambition should
never allow personal greed to separate the Catholic from his membership
in the Catholic community. Other novels dealt with the Catholic tempted
by conversion to Protestantism in order to increase the likelihood of
achieving material wealth. Often, at the last moment, with the help of a
priest, the Catholic reaffirms his belief and rejects temptation.
Modest, not exceptional, success was the norm preached in the Catholic
literature and schools. And it was Catholics, the readers of these
novels, who later constituted the majority of the membership of the ALL
trade unions. These were the ethnic workers who heeded Gompers' advice
to accept the leadership of the mainstream elite who dominated the
corporations.

Many farmers did not share the industrial workers' fears of the
corporation. Although the large railroad companies symbolized the
mobilization of labor in rigid, hierarchical, bureaucratic patterns, for
the farmers it still symbolized the possibility of fulfilling the
agrarian dream of Thomas Jefferson. The rapid westward expansion of the
railroads ironically provided the economic conditions for the expansion
of the number of farms from about 2,000,000 in 1860 to almost 6,000,000
in 1900 and a comparable increase in the land under cultivation from
about 150,000,000 acres to almost 400,000,000. Without the extension of
the railroads, hundreds of thousands of white settlers could not have
taken advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which entitled them to a
160-acre farm. The railroads also had been given millions of acres by
the national, state, and county governments to encourage their push into
the West. The railroads subsequently sold these lands at prices ranging
from two dollars to ten dollars an acre. Recognizing the profitability
of settling the West, the railroads also joined with the midwestern and
western state governments in sending agents to the East and to Europe to
encourage immigration. As Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota
declared, "Give us the capital of more men and we will vivify and infuse
the breath of life into the dead capital of millions of acres now
growing only prairie flowers. Immigration will multiply capital, diffuse
wealth, sell our town lots and increase activity in every pursuit and
business."

This boom psychology and the almost religious idealism of

achieving yeoman independence inspired hundreds of thousands of settlers
to fling themselves into the space of the newly conquered Indian
territory. But the idealism that drove them west was not enjoyed in the
lives they led there. One wife described a typical day as "done my
housework, then made fried cakes, squash pies, baked wheat bread and
corn bread, cut out a night dress and partly made it," and then "am very
tired." On the edge of white settlement, without family or friends or
medical help, women bore many babies and then watched a high percentage
of them die. Again a wife recorded the experience of sitting up with a
sick child. "At half past five this A.M., he died after much suffering."
Then she added, "made his pants Aunty sent him and buried him about sun
down. All well with him."

This final farmers' frontier was characterized by a total commitment to
technological progress. "The Minneosta farmers do not go out there in
the old ways in which their fathers had," reported the New England
writer Mary Dodge, "for the very good reason they have neither ways nor
fathers. They make experiments. Indeed, their farming itself is an
experiment." And one could see the twentieth-century future of
corporation farming on the incredibly flat land of the Red River Valley
between Minnesota and North Dakota, where men like Oliver Dalrymple put
together farms of thirty thousand acres. There, commanding twenty-five
reapers moving through the wheat fields, "a superintendent on a superb
horse, like a brigadier directing his forces, rides along the line,
accompanied by his staff of two on horseback. They are fully armed and
equipped, not with swords but with wrenches, hammers, chisels. An army
of 'shockers' follow the reapers, setting up the bundles to ripen before
threshing."

The rapid mechanization of agriculture made it possible for fewer
farmers to feed more people. But the irony for this agricultural
community was that the farmers, because they depended on the natural
cycle of the growing season, could not equal the linear productive
output of the urban factories-. Although the farmers could use machines
to accelerate planting and harvesting and eliminate much of the manual
labor in these critical periods, the machinery sat idle after the
planting. The farmer, unlike the industrial producer, had to wait for
the cyclical maturing of his crops and remained dependent, to a large
degree, on the amount of sunshine and rain needed by those crops. Again,
after the harvest, the machinery was not used during the fall and winter
as the farmer

awaited the return of spring and the new planting season. The machines
in the factories, of course, could run every day of the week, every week
of the year, even day and night if necessary. But the farmers did not
pay less for the machines or the energy they used than did
industrialists.

By 1900, the value of industrial products surpassed those of agriculture
for the first time. It was possible for 5,000,000 factory workers to
produce goods worth $11,500,000, while 11,000,000 farm workers produced
goods worth $8,500,000,000. As fewer men and more machines produced
greater amounts of goods, prices fell. Farmers, however, were not
producing as efficiently as industrial workers, although the prices of
their agricultural products were set by industry. Even by 1890, many
farmers found that they simply could not compete; they could not pay off
mortgages because their costs were not diminishing as they did for
industry. In the following years, even into the 1930s, an ever
increasing number of farmers lost their farms and became tenants on the
land; others moved into the cities after the loss of their farms; still
others survived by acquiring more machinery and increasing the size of
the farm, and sent their daughters and sons into the cities. In 1860,
6,000,000 people lived in the cities; in 1910, it was 45,000,000, almost
half the national population. At least 11,000,000 of the city dwellers
in 1910 had come from rural America; almost another 20,000,000 were
immigrants, European peasants, driven from the land by the same
processes of industrial efficiency operating in the Old World.

The demographic explosion of urban America was directly related to the
new forms of technology. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the
size of American cities remained limited by the absence of mass
transportation. Most people walked to work or climbed aboard horse-drawn
vehicles capable of carrying only a few passengers. In these walking
cities, no more extended than the time it could take the poor to walk to
and from work, the rich and powerful lived in the urban center, where
their important commercial and banking activities were concentrated. But
with the development of trains and streetcars the rich were encouraged
to move to the outskirts of the city and commute to their downtown
business. The use of coal, and later electricity, for industrial power
made it possible to concentrate factories in the central cities.
Formerly, manufacturing had been dispersed in factory towns spread along

rivers that supplied water power to run the machines. New technology
provided water for these expanding cities, and new technology created
sewage systems to handle the wastes of several million people as well as
the wastes that came from the huge new factories. Nonelected specialists
came to control water, sewage, transportation, and the other
services--gas, electricity, and the telephone-- that made life in the
gigantic metropolis possible.

Spatial specialization, even fragmentation, came to characterize this
new streetcar metropolis. In the smaller, pre-Civil War cities, rich and
poor lived side by side. Stores, offices, small-scale industry,
residences, and schools existed in the same neighborhoods. In the early
twentieth-century cities, not only did the rich flee the downtown area
to live in suburbs, but even the rapidly growing middle class and white-
and blue-collar workers moved away from the urban center to establish
modest neighborhoods apart from the inner-city poor.

At the very center of the downtown areas proliferated skyscrapers,
serviced by elevators. Commercial and banking activities were
concentrated there. The executives came into this center every day from
the suburbs, and their white-collar workers arrived from the edges of
the city. Here also were concentrated the professional men, lawyers, and
doctors. The suburbs and the more modest lower middle-class
neighborhoods became specialized as places for family life dramatically
separated from the work place or the place of professional services.
Major department stores and theaters became part of the downtown
landscape. The wives of businessmen, doctors, and lawyers traveled along
their husbands' commuting route to the center of the city for their
shopping and entertainment. Grouped around this specialized downtown
area was a ring of housing for the poorest city dwellers. Unable
financially to construct their own dwellings, they subdivided housing
abandoned by the wealthy and the middle class.

Chicago, which expanded from 300,000 in 1870 to 3,000,000 in 1920, is a
classic example of the pattern of residential rings that characterized
metropolitan development during that half-century. Around the area of
residential poverty that surrounded downtown Chicago was a ring of
blue-collar and lower-middle-class residences. Here there were some
small single-family cottages, but most lived in flats and apartments. In
the middle-class suburbs were numerous single-family homes. Running
through these rings were corridors of commercial and industrial activity
that radiated from the downtown

center into the farmland, like the railroads that came into the central
city from every direction.

For the millions who surged into Chicago by World War I, the major
concern was economic and social survival. Protestants, Irish, German,
and Italian Catholics, a variety of Slavic groups, and blacks settled in
separate neighborhoods and maintained their ethnic identity. Most
aspects of life were experienced on the job and in the neighborhoods.
Work took place in factories or offices; there was no interest or
ability to see the economy of the city as a whole. There was no
connection between ethnic social identity and economic class interest.
Poor blacks, Catholics, and Jews in the innermost ring of poverty did
not associate with one another politically to put pressure on city
leaders to provide housing or jobs or medical care. Nor did blue-collar
lower-middle-class white Protestants and the various Catholic groups and
Jews see their common interests.

Only the mainstream Protestant elite, who dominated the city's economic
life from downtown offices, seemed to look out from their skyscrapers
and see the city as a whole. But even for them, the whole might be seen
as a series of autonomous parts. Working their way to the top of the
corporation, they had been specialists in one of the company's
departments. They were trained to see the functioning of only their
department. In a stable, corporate world where each department was
fulfilling its corporate responsibility, an overview might not be
necessary. Their political and economic control of the city did not
include social planning.

To all appearances community leaders believed that all economic and
social problems would be solved by continued expansion. If the city grew
new rings as it responded to economic growth, then the inner-city poor
could move outward--into the ring formerly filled with the blue-collar
lower middle class who would also move outward into the middle-class
sector. The same hopes apparently were held in regard to employment,
education, and social services. Expansion, not planning, was supposed to
solve the urban problems of 1914.

The social and economic evidence of 1914, however, did not support this
belief in the inevitable benefits of economic expansion. The black
ghettos of Chicago and every other American city in 1914 showed no signs
of moving their inhabitants onto the corporate escalator.

In 1890, there were fifteen thousand blacks in Chicago, where 80

percent of the population was foreign-born or had foreign-born parents.
By 1915, blacks numbered fifty thousand as more and more left a South
that seemed to offer few economic opportunities and much social and
political oppression. At the end of the Civil War, blacks had hoped that
the plantations would be broken up and the land distributed to the
former slaves. "The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have
land and till it by our own labor," declared a black leader, and he
insisted that "no such thing as a free democratic society can exist in
any country where all lands are owned by one class of men and cultivated
by another." But only a few radical Republican leaders, like Thaddeus
Stevens, agreed with the blacks that "the whole fabric of southern
society must be changed." Stevens asked, "How can republican
institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist
in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?" But most radical Republican
leaders shared so strongly the racial prejudice against blacks that they
would not confiscate the property of the southern white planters.

Most of the former black slaves saw no alternative but to continue to
work for the white man, on the white man's land for the white man's
profit. The new pattern of southern agriculture was sharecropping.
Because of a shortage of capital to pay wages and because blacks
preferred the autonomy they could have as sharecroppers, the planters
divided their land into a series of small farms worked by separate black
families. A share of their crop was returned to the planter to pay their
rent. In practice, however, the system of credit and indebtedness came
to be dominated by storekeepers located at country crossroads.

Northern bankers loaned money to southern bankers, who loaned it to
storekeepers, who used it to buy supplies of food, clothing, tools, and
seeds, which they sold to the sharecroppers on credit. Under the burden
of high interest rates, only a small percentage of black farmers could
save enough money to buy their farms from the white owners. For the
children of these sharecroppers, white as well as black, there was very
little future in farming. And many blacks and whites began the trek to
the city.

Most migrants headed for the opportunity of a northern city. Stripped of
its huge capital investment in slaves, the white South had little
capital to invest in industrialization. Some northern and European
capital entered the region to finance the expansion of railroads,
tobacco factories in North Carolina, cotton mills in South

I

Carolina, steel mills in Birmingham, Alabama, and lumbering in
Mississippi and Louisiana. But this investment was so small in
comparison to that in the North and the Midwest that industrialization
and urbanization in the South fell far below national growth patterns.

There were few employment opportunities for blacks in the southern
cities. Slaves and free blacks had been artisans and craftsmen in these
cities before 1865. But between Emancipation and 1900, they were driven
systematically from those jobs by hostile whites. This created an ironic
situation for black educational leaders like Booker T. Washington. Born
in slavery, Washington had received an education at Hampton Institute in
Virginia. Hampton was one of a number of schools begun by the American
Missionary Association. This group, dominated by New England
Congregationalists, like other northern white church groups was
concerned with giving blacks the opportunity of formal education that
had been denied them under slavery. Southern state governments, under
radical Republican leadership, had created public schools in that region
for the first time. This system included provisions for segregated black
schools. Since these institutions did not include high schools,
secondary or college education had to be provided by northern or
southern philanthropy.

Northern white philanthropists visualized black education producing more
efficient agricultural and industrial workers and consequently financed
colleges for the training of black teachers to staff the primary
schools. Booker T. Washington, who had left Hampton to help build
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, asked for funds from Carnegie and
Rockefeller and other northern philanthropists to teach young blacks the
virtues of thrift, punctuality, cleanliness, sobriety, and hard work.
Blacks, he insisted, would use any gifts responsibly because they were
"the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that
the world has seen." Education would not make them wish for social or
political equality, he continued, because "in all things that are purely
social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all
matters essential to mutual progress."

Washington had been persuaded by his white New England teachers that
everyone could become a self-made man in America. He was certain that if
black people worked hard in agriculture and industry and in small
business, they could climb the ladder of economic success. But blacks
were prevented from making progress

in those occupations by the prejudice of white southerners in 1900. And
when they moved into northern cities, they encountered the same
prejudice. Skilled black artisans, barbers, waiters, and caterers were
deprived of jobs that subsequently went to white immigrants.

White immigrants were often able to apply their European work experience
to their jobs in America. Skilled workers from England and Germany and
Russian urban Jews frequently found well-paying jobs in industry. Irish,
Italian, and Polish peasants, among others, with nothing but
agricultural experience, found jobs as unskilled labor. But on the
average, these unskilled, uneducated whites were given better jobs than
northern blacks, who had generations of urban experience, possessed more
occupational skills, and had acquired more formal education.

For the unskilled, uneducated, rural blacks who entered northern cities
in larger numbers in 1900, there was almost no hope of advancement on an
occupational ladder. In Boston, for example, a second generation of
Irish-Americans increased their number of white-collar workers to 24
percent, doubling the 12 percent of the first generation. In contrast,
black immigrants in Boston increased their number of white-collar
workers only from 7 percent to 9 percent as the descendants of the first
generation came of age.

Most ethnic neighborhoods in the early twentieth century were no more
than 60 percent occupied by a dominant immigrant group such as Irish or
Italian or Jewish. But blacks, who had been scattered throughout
northern cities in 1880, were soon pushed into ghettos that became 90
percent or more homogeneous after 1900. Although most black men were
confined to low-paying jobs as day laborers and most black women
confined to domestic service, these poor people paid higher rents than
their white neighbors because they were forced to find housing within
the restricted boundaries of the ghetto. In Chicago in 1910, an
apartment for working-class whites was "seven room, $25," but a "seven
room for colored people, $37.50."

Within these developing black ghettos ip every major northern city,
there was a revolution in leadership. In Chicago, for example, the black
community leaders of 1900 were doctors, dentists, and newspaper men who
were hopeful for integration. Within a decade, however, they had been
replaced by self-made businessmen like Oscar DePriest, who made a
fortune in real estate. Formerly from Alabama, DePriest and a few other
black businessmen acquired wealth from the people of the ghetto and thus
had an interest in

preserving it. "I believe that the interest of my people lies with the
wealth of the nation," declared a black leader in Chicago, "and with the
class of white people who control it."

But when Chicago's black population doubled during World War I, a result
of a decline in white immigration, and the great migration of five
hundred thousand blacks into northern cities that served to fill the
labor shortage caused by the war, the obsequious attitude of these black
leaders toward the white establishment did not protect them from savage
white criticism. As the black ghetto pushed into Irish and Polish
working-class neighborhoods on its western edge and into a middle-class
white Protestant neighborhood on the south, street conflicts occurred.
White "athletic clubs" physically attacked blacks on the streets and
white "neighborhood improvement" societies even bombed black homes.
Rigid racial segregation was established in city parks and beaches,
restaurants, hotels, theaters, and stores. By the spring of 1919,
bombings were taking place every day, and finally a major race riot
exploded in July. Comparable riots had taken place in other cities that
had experienced large black migrations.

From 1890 to 1917, Anglo-Americans had been reassuring themselves that
the industrial and urban frontiers could replace the vanished geographic
frontier. It was more than ironic, therefore, as white Americans
expressed their hope to control the vast colored populations of the
world through the industrialization and urbanization of every continent,
that they seemed unable to control the black population within their own
national boundary. "Black man, stay South," thundered the Chicago
Tribune in 1918. Blacks, wrote the newspaper, couldn't fit into the
northern way of life because they didn't have the white work ethic. "Mo'
rain, mo' rest, mo' niggers sleep in de nest"--this, said the Tribune,
was black philosophy; "today's the day, not tomorrow with them." And the
Chicago Tribune offered financial aid to any blacks who would agree to
return to the South.

"Nation is a word of unity and power"

******************

Chapter 12.

Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century

Reconstruction

Democratic party and the "new South"

The new industrial elite and the politics of corruption

Populism: the People's party allies with Democrats

Harnessing racial resentment against blacks:

disenfranchisement, legalized segregation, and

the Ku Klux Klan

Women in politics and women's suffrage Regulation of power in Washington

"Pride is abolished, America. The monster is dead," rejoiced the New
England Transcendentalist Cyrus Bartol in 1861. "The war is purging away
our idolatry. This is the first truly religious war ever waged." Most
northern intellectuals agreed that the Civil War was eradicating the
evil of slavery from the South and simultaneously eliminating the evil
of having tolerated slavery from the North. It was not enough,
therefore, for these northerners to view the war as a "conflict between
liberty and slavery, civilization and barbarism, between Christianity
and anti-Christ." They also had to seek divine punishment of their own
region. "Monstrous has been the nation's crime," declared William Ellery
Channing, "total let the repentence be, and costly the sacrifice of
atonement."

Northern writers were prepared, then, in April 1865 to interpret the
murder of Lincoln as the final expression of a Christlike sacrifice of
all the Union soldiers who had died to atone for the nation's sin in
accepting slavery. Now the sin was gone. For Ralph Waldo Emerson and his
friends, "Best of all, whatever else comes, emancipation has
come--whether the slaves are free or not--we ourselves are free."

When, however, Emerson wrote during the war that "the magnificent sweep
of purification grows more and more impressive to me," he was forgetting
the problems of the freedmen and the Confederate leaders. White
majorities in most northern states, during the war, where only 5 percent
of the blacks lived, continued to deny voting rights and other symbols
of citizenship to blacks. In their prejudiced eyes, and, of course, in
the eyes of most southern whites, Afro-Americans were so intellectually
inferior, so morally irresponsible, so spiritually unclean that they
could not share citizenship with the intellectually and spiritually
superior white race.

Nor did northerners think well of the white Confederate leadership. If
blacks were seen as an alien race, planter aristocrats of the South were
defined as an alien class. In the decades before the Civil War,
northerners had described this aristocracy as a living vestige of the
medieval past. It was said that these feudal lords defied the
rationality of capitalism by holding blacks in peasantry and defied
middle-class morality by sexually exploiting their female slaves.

Radical Republicans had disagreed with Lincoln throughout the war about
the strength and danger of the planter aristocracy. Economically,
radical Republicans represented the rapidly developing industrial
capitalists of the Northeast and Midwest. They were strongly committed
to creating a uniform and standardized national marketplace for their
products. They had been frustrated by southern opposition to their
legislative program in the 1850s and feared that southerners returning
to Congress would join with northern Democrats to dismantle the
favorable economic legislation, particularly the tariff, passed during
the war.

Persuaded by the myth of a feudal South, radical Republicans had
objected violently to Lincoln's plan for a lenient reconstruction which
would permit the continuity of Confederate leadership in the southern
states after the war. With Lincoln's death, congressional radicals were
in a position to seize control of reconstruction from the new President,
Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, who had been made Lincoln's
running mate in 1864 to symbolize the nonpartisan and national nature of
the war effort.

Radical Republicans not only could outmaneuver this stranger to their
party, but also could use Lincoln's death, ironically, to discredit the
continuation of Lincoln's policies. The assassination of the President,
declared the radicals, demonstrated that the planters were still in
conspiratorial rebellion. "Now is the critical time," asserted Wendell
Phillips, "the rebellion has not ceased, it has only changed its
weapons. Once it fought; now it intrigues." The New York Tribune argued
that "the hands of the rebel are again red with loyal blood." Although
only a few radical Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner
among them, advocated the revolutionary idea of citizenship for free
blacks, they were able to persuade other radicals and even some
conservative Republicans to endorse their position by arguing that black
citizenship was necessary if the planter aristocracy was to be
destroyed. Southern whites, organizing their state .government under the
Lincoln-Johnson Plan of Reconstruction, passed "Black Codes" which held
the freedmen on the plantations where they had worked as slaves. From
the perspective of the radical Republicans, the freedmen under such
restraints were still a peasantry. There could be no disestablishment of
the South's feudal aristocracy until blacks obtained the right to leave
the plantations. Not until blacks could travel freely could they be free
workers, able to respond to the

If

rational demands of the marketplace. This reasoning led many Republicans
to support the idea of black citizenship.

As the congressional elections of 1866 approached, northern Democrats
often endorsed southern political leaders who, in the words of South
Carolina's B. F. Perry, insisted that the states should have a "white
man's government intended for white men only." For many northern
Democrats, such as Representative James Brooks of New York, a leader of
congressional opponents of radical reconstruction, blacks were a
"repugnant race." And Francis Blair, Democratic vice-presidential
candidate in 1868, warned that "unless Negroes submit to the intelligent
guidance of the powerful white race, their fate will be that of the
Indians, they will be exterminated." President Johnson identified
himself with these Democrats when he warned the voters that "of all the
dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those
which must result from the success of the effort now [being made] to
Africanize the half of our country."

Despite the strength of the southern Democrats, the Republican majority
in Congress simply refused to seat any representatives from the southern
states. The radical Republicans also won smashing victories over the
northern Democrats by waving the "bloody shirt." Remember, said Robert
Ingersoll, "every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat. The man
that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Soldiers, every scar
you have got on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat."

The radical Republicans by early 1867 had a large enough majority to
override any veto by President Johnson. First, they passed a Freedmen's
Bureau Act and Civil Rights Act. Next, on March 2, 1867, they voted a
Reconstruction Act that dismantled the southern state governments and
divided the states into five military districts, each under the control
of an army general. The army assumed responsibility for registering
white and black voters. Confederate leaders were disfranchised and
constitutional conventions were called to draft new state constitutions.
The conventions were ordered by the army to accept the Fourteenth
Amendment, which created national citizenship for all males. Acceptance
was a necessary prerequisite for the states to avoid military occupation
and re-enter the Union.

Congressional Republicans moved to consolidate their control of the
national government by reducing the size of the Supreme Court and by
intimidating the remaining justices. They also impeached

President Johnson and came within one vote of convicting him in the
Senate. This assumption of power by the legislative branch,
unprecedented in American history, depended upon the support of the
northern constituency. Most northern labor leaders identified their
interests with those of the industrialists; they largely supported the
disintegration of the nonproductive economic and social systems of the
South. Similarly, the officer corps of the army chose to support
Congress rather than the President.

Through the use of the army, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Union
League, organized by the Republican party throughout the southern
states, seven hundred thousand blacks were registered to vote. Because
many white southerners chose to stand with their disfranchised
Confederate leaders and refused to register, only six hundred thousand
whites were eligible to vote. The northern Republican party had
effectively taken political control of the southern states.

In 1868, the Republicans elected the war hero General Ulysses Grant to
the Presidency. A majority of northern and southern white voters cast
their ballots for the Democratic candidate in 1868. It was only the
ability of the Republicans to deliver the electoral votes of the
southern states, based on black majorities, that elected Grant. Northern
Republicans moved to consolidate this new power base by enacting the
Fifteenth Amendment, which stated that the right to vote "shall not be
denied, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

It was whites, of course, who dominated the national Republican party,
and it was whites who dominated the state Republican parties in the
South. White army officers, white civilians from the North who went
South as carpetbaggers, and southern whites, scalawags, who collaborated
with these northerners, provided the top political leadership in every
southern state. No black was a governor during Reconstruction. Blacks
were never a majority in any state senate. Only in South Carolina, where
65 percent of the population was black, were blacks elected a majority
in the .lower house. Only two blacks, Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K.
Bruce, served in the United States Senate, and both were from
Mississippi, which was also more than 50 percent black.

Most of these black politicians were content, at first, to follow the
white leadership. They agreed with P. B. S. Pinchback, a black leader of
Louisiana, that "it is false, it is a wholesale falsehood to say that we
wish to force ourselves upon white people." They accepted the

social segregation imposed on them by the northern carpetbaggers and
southern scalawags. "There is an antagonism which we all have against
the Negro race," said B. H. True, a New York carpetbagger in Georgia,
"that I cannot get rid of; I do not believe any white man can." These
white Republicans initiated legislation that prohibited intermarriage
between the races and created a system of segregated public schools.

Both the carpetbaggers and the scalawags had more respect for the
disfranchised white leadership of the South than for their black
constituents, and they sympathized with the desire of these whites to
regain their individual status as first-class citizens and to have their
states return to a normal relationship with the Union. Pardons from the
President and Congress began to restore that individual citizenship.
Normal relationships with the Union would be established when outside
military and political control ended, and the southern states could
choose, as the northern states did, their own leadership.

The majority of white southerners, therefore, hoped to re-enter the
Union in 1869; they were not struggling to retain a regional way of
life. Their representatives and senators wept on the floor of Congress
when they were permitted once more to participate in the nation of their
southern fathers, of Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe and
Jackson and Polk. But in 1869, they perceived their inferior status
because other states were free of military rule and other states did not
have to share political power with blacks. There would be no black
congressmen from the North until the election of Oscar DePriest in 1928,
no black senator until the election of Edward Brooke in 1966, and few
local officials or mayors until the 1970s. For white southerners,
however, the black majorities in many counties throughout the region
posed a real threat; blacks could claim the right to share leadership.
And in states like South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where
black majorities existed, the trend was for blacks increasingly to claim
that right. Unlike the situation in the North after acceptance of the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, southern blacks, with the rights of
geographic mobility and the vote, were not going to quietly accept
second-class citizenship and docilely follow white leadership. They
would compete with whites for political, economic, or social leadership.
As the hysteria of the Civil War receded, however, northern Republicans
were willing to listen to reports from army officers and

carpetbaggers that indicated that they had wrongly perceived the
anticapitalist nature of southern leadership. They recalled that
southern Whigs once had supported a national banking system, internal
improvements, and even, in some cases, a high tariff which protected
manufacturers from competition with more efficient English industry.
They were informed that many southern Democrats believed that, with the
collapse of the plantation economy, their future lay with Yankee forms
of industrial and financial capitalism. Seventy-five percent of the
high-ranking Confederate officers had become executives in
northern-owned corporations, banks, and railroads, which had emerged in
the South.

In the election of 1876, therefore, the Republican party reversed its
strategy. It would appeal to the traditional elites of the South, many
of whom were former Whigs, asking them to join with their natural
allies, the social and economic elites who dominated the Republican
party in the northern states. To this end, President Rutherford B.
Hayes, on taking office in March 1877, appointed a Democrat, Senator
David Key from Tennessee, as his postmaster general. It was hoped that
Key would distribute patronage to attract former southern Whigs into the
Republican party.

By 1876, however, this strategy was no longer viable. In every southern
state, former Whigs had joined the Democratic party to end the military
occupation, to re-establish the political rights of the ex-Confederate
leaders, and to deprive blacks of first-class citizenship. The
Democratic party had become the respectable party in the South because
it served as the vehicle upon which white southerners hoped to escape
from what they considered second-class status in the nation. No regional
leadership developed in the South because each state was struggling to
regain a normal relationship with the Union. Radical Reconstruction
ended as early as 1869 in Virginia and Tennessee, and by 1871 in Georgia
and North Carolina. Only South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana still
contained Union troops in 1876.

Much of the control of the Democratic party in the South had slipped
into the hands of former Whigs, despite the fact that the majority of
white voters were small farmers who opposed the economic policies of the
national Republican party. Most white voters, unlike these leaders,
disapproved of Republican policies on banking, tariffs, and railroads.

Democratic party leaders in the South in 1876, whether former Whigs or
old-line Democrats, were committed to building a "new

South," an urban-industrial South. Thus they approved those Republican
policies that they believed would help the economic development of their
region. But since the Republican party was anathema to the average white
southern voter for both emotional and economic reasons, they saw no
opportunity of achieving those policies by joining the Republican party.
They had a better chance of obtaining their political goals at the helm
of Democratic leadership. If Democrats with Republican principles were
elected to Congress, then "Republican" legislation could be passed that
would be favorable to the industrial leaders of both regions.

It is not surprising, therefore, that these southern Democrats chose to
solve a constitutional crisis in 1876-77 by helping to elect a
Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, to the Presidency. Since neither Hayes
nor the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, had received a majority of
the popular or electoral vote in 1876, the election had to be decided in
Congress; this decision depended upon which electoral votes Congress
would accept from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the last
states occupied by Union soldiers. Southern Democrats in Congress had
the power, if they aligned with northern Democrats, to keep a President
from being named by March 4, 1877. But they voted with northern
Republicans for the Republican candidate, thrusting Hayes into the
Presidency.

At the centennial year of 1876, the Republicans retained the Presidency
they had held since 1860, but they failed to turn the majority of the
nation's white voters away from the Democratic party. Republicans had
not persuaded the people that a centralized society was better than the
Democrats' vision of the nation as a decentralized country of
semi-autonomous regions where the most important political activity
occurred at the state and local level. During the next twenty years, the
Republicans lost the Presidency twice, in 1884 and 1892, and at no time
during these decades were they ever in a position to control both houses
of Congress. Not until 1896 could they begin to fulfill the political
vision of Senator Charles Sumner. "Nation is a word of unity and power,"
he had declared in 1866, "it brings to mind intelligent masses enjoying
the advantage of organization."

Instead of growing in strength in the 1870s and 1880s as the party that
had hitched its wagon to the star of an urban-industrial future,
Republicans seemed on the verge of being destroyed as a viable political
organization by the new social and economic forces.

Defeated in its southern strategy, the Republican party appeared to be
undermined by the northern industrialists it was trying to befriend.
Impatient with the failure of the Republican party to provide leadership
at the national and local level, the new industrial leaders resorted to
massive bribery at all levels of government to buy the legislation they
believed was necessary to their new economic order. "If you have to pay
money to have the right thing done," the railroad magnate Collis P.
Huntington stated, "it is only just and fair to do it." And the Central
Pacific Railroad budgeted $500,000 annually for bribes in the decade
from 1875 to 1885.

Pre-Civil War businessmen and the intellectuals they supported were
appalled by the corruption of the new industrial elite. The mainstream
aristocracy had always associated corruption with the Democratic party,
the organization that had appealed to the immigrants in the northern
cities. They expected Boss Tweed of New York City to say that "this
population is too hopelessly split up into races and factions to govern
it under universal suffrage, except by the bribery of patronage or
corruption." But they still recoiled from the open cynicism of
Republican leaders like Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine.

These "mugwump" gentlemen, disgusted by political corruption, bolted the
Republican party in 1872 and again in 1884. But by the late 1880s, many
of the sons of this merchant aristocracy were ready to join the
Republican party to try to impose political, social, and economic order
on the cities, the states, and ultimately the nation. Theodore Roosevelt
was one such child of inherited wealth who became contemptuous of his
father's effete generation. "It is also unfortunately true," wrote
Roosevelt, "that the general tendency among people of culture has been
to neglect and even to look down upon the rougher and manlier virtues,
so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often
associated with a certain effeminacy of character." Roosevelt intended
to throw himself into the fight against the corruption of city politics,
state politics, and finally national politics, sure that he.and other
strong-willed reformers could bring order out of chaos.

It was in the cities that the reformers, known to contemporaries as
Progressives, began work in the 1880s and 1890s, and it was there that
the new corporations had their headquarters. It began to occur to the
reformers that the corporate model--so useful in creating economic
order--might be used to create political order.

In numerous industrial cities corrupt political bosses operating

through personal bureaucracies were in control of local governments.
Through patronage they surrounded themselves with local supporters in
the police, fire, and sanitation departments. They supplied contracts
for the construction of public buildings. In one celebrated case, an
estimate of $250,000 for a courthouse in New York City reached a cost
overrun of $14,000,000. These politicos also juggled tax assessments for
major companies as well as for residential property owners; they
influenced banks which held city deposits; they provided tips to
real-estate men about future public building or park construction; they
found government jobs for doctors and lawyers beginning their careers;
they protected gamblers and prostitutes from police and judges.

The political bosses could exist only as long as they were able to
deliver the vote at the precinct and ward levels of government. Many of
the inner-city poor, mostly new immigrants, identified themselves with
America by supporting the political machine. Scorned and rejected by the
mainstream elite, they received psychic warmth and political favors from
these politicians. But the staying power of the political boss depended
upon his ability to touch the lives of the poor with something tangible,
such as public jobs, coal and food in a family emergency, legal aid, or
an occasional outing to an amusement park. Many municipal bosses gained
popularity by supporting the Old World holidays and festivities, which
white Anglo-American Protestants hoped would be left behind in Europe.

All of these activities contradicted the business leaders' sense of
orderly space and predictable time. They wanted efficient transportation
and adequate fire and police protection for their property. They
perceived the bosses as inefficient, especially in the distribution of
jobs to poorly educated immigrants who had no professional
qualifications. To challenge the bosses, business leaders began to push
for the elimination of a large city council elected from the wards. A
small council elected from the city at large, they felt, would bring
talented, honest men to city hall. The reformers advocated a stronger
mayor, or a city manager, and a visible bureaucracy of civil servants
chosen rigorously for their professional qualifications. The city would
be run by a mayor, and like the president of a corporation he would be
surrounded by able department heads. A crucial urban reform for the new
industrial elite was to take control of the public schools away from the
ethnic neighborhoods. Just as the city should be considered a
corporation and run as one,

so should the schools. If the purpose of the schools was "the training
of recruits for our leading mechanical industries, high privates who can
adequately meet unexpected situations and an industrial rank and file
who shall rise to the possibilities of the less skilled type of work,"
then the schools must be made efficient. Education, said an
industrialist spokesman, is a "problem of economy: it seeks to determine
in what manner the working unit of the school plant may be made to
return the largest dividend upon the material investment of time,
energy, and money." Created out of the need to teach efficiency,
insisted upon by business leaders, was the "platoon" system, which
taught students to march in an orderly fashion from room to room at the
end of each class period.

One effort reformers made to gain control of the schools was to replace
the large school boards elected from the neighborhood wards with smaller
boards chosen in city-wide elections. The large school boards had been
dominated by lower-middle-class and middle-class members. The new
smaller boards were dominated by upper-class and upper-middle-class
members.

The presidential election of 1896 marked the climax of a successful
effort by the new industrial elite, in alliance with the old mercantile
aristocracy, to gain political power in the cities. For the first time,
a Republican presidential candidate, William McKinley, won almost every
large northern city. The Republicans had lost the Presidency to the
Democrats in 1884 and 1892, and had won it in 1888 in the electoral
college without a popular majority. But they had gained a strong
national majority in 1896, which they continued to hold until 1932.

The year 1896 was a pivotal political year because ideological lines had
been drawn so clearly between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Those who still believed in the agricultural frontier aligned with
Democrats and voted for William J. Bryan, the "boy orator of the
Platte." Those who had interests in the urban-industrial frontier stood
with the Republicans and McKinley. Since the colonial Americans had so
completely identified America with the frontier, the political rhetoric
of 1896 revolved around the question of who was American and who was
not. This debate had deep roots in the political economy of the nation.

When southern cotton farmers and wheat farmers of the Plains, hurt by
declining prices in the 1880s, became conscious of the explosive
development of the corporations, they began to seek government
assistance, first from state governments and then from the federal
government. They viewed the corporation as a threat to the freely
operating marketplace of equal producers. To restore equal competition,
they called for the creation of government commissions to regulate the
corporate economy. Finding the Democratic party unresponsive to their
concerns in 1890, many of these farmers formed a third party, the
People's party, or Populists. Its platform of 1892 warned that the
disruption of the Jeffersonian marketplace was causing the appearance of
"two great classes--tramps and millionaires," and the nation was
"rapidly degenerating into European conditions." Conservative in their
Jeffersonian outlook, the Populists declared, "we seek to restore the
government of the Republic to the hands of 'the plain people' with which
it originated. We assert our purpose to be identical with the purpose of
the National Constitution."

For the Populists, the only functional Americans were productive farmers
and workers. They denied that the corporations were legitimate producers
and insisted that the economy basically represented a conspiracy of
bankers. One of their proposed reforms, therefore, was to remove the
national currency from the hands of private bankers and place it under
the control of the federal government. For the Populists, this reform
would not only destroy the alien conspiracy, but also encourage a policy
of currency inflation. If the government added silver to gold as the
monetary basis for determining the amount of paper currency in
circulation, the resulting inflation would raise the prices of the
farmers' crops.

During the severe economic depression of 1893, however, the Democratic
President, Grover Cleveland, refused to compromise his laissez-faire
principles. Amid the massive suffering, Cleveland wrote to his bankers,
"You know rich investors like me have to keep an account of income in
these days. I find I am developing quite a strong desire to make money
and I think this is a good time to indulge in that propensity." Younger
Democrats, among them William Jennings Bryan, foresaw disaster for their
party in 1896 if Republicans identified it with the depression. To
defeat Republicans in that election Democrats would need to attract the
Populist vote. One basis for such a coalition was the issue of silver
coinage, an inflationary measure supported by Populists and rural
Democrats.

At the 1896 nominating convention, the young rebel Democrats captured
control from the Cleveland forces and named Bryan. In his famous "Cross
of Gold" acceptance speech, Bryan touched the

nerve center of rural America. Identifying with a Jeffersonian nation
that had patiently suffered a series of wrongs from the urban
financiers, Bryan evoked the scene of the innocent agrarian producers
standing to fight because they had been driven mercilessly against the
wall. "We have petitioned," Bryan cried, "and our petitions have been
scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we
have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no
longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!"

Bryan denounced the financiers for failing to see their dependence on
the farmers, for failing to see "that if you legislate to make the
masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every
class which rests upon them," for failing to see that "their cities rest
upon our broad and fertile prairies." Bryan warned, "Burn down your
cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if
by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets
of every city in the country."

The Republicans responded by stressing the need for an industrial
frontier to provide jobs. Only the Republicans, they claimed, could
provide the economic growth that would end the depression. Beyond the
practical economics, however, the Republicans pointed to the moral
issues. As they saw it America stood for the rationality of the free
marketplace. Since the Democrats had joined the Populists in calling for
government intervention, which would destroy the free marketplace, Bryan
and the Democrats must be un-American. "The Jacobins are in full control
at Chicago. No large political movement in America has ever before
spawned such hideous and repulsuve vipers," wrote the Philadelphia
Press. "This riotous platform rests upon the four cornerstones of
organized repudiation, deliberate confiscation, chartered communism, and
enthroned anarchy." The Democratic platform, added the New York Tribune,
"was the hysterical declaration of a reckless and lawless crusade of
sectional animosity and class antagonism. No wild-eyed and rattlebrained
horde of the red flag ever proclaimed a fiercer defiance of law,
precedent, order, and government."

With both parties claiming a conspiracy and both promising to purge the
nation of evil, black Americans once again became powerful symbols of
malevolence. In Virginia and North Carolina, during the 1880s and 1890s,
black voters had formed alliances with low-income whites and challenged
the power-holders in the state Democratic parties. In response the
politicians created a mythic

history of the Reconstruction era that effectively destroyed the
interracial alliances. They described Reconstruction as a record of
massive and hideous rape, murder, and arson by blacks against whites.
They suggested that white men join together in the Democratic party to
expel the blacks from politics, to restore order, to preserve white
racial purity. They warned whites not to place economic self-interest
over matters of racial unity. It was only because the white community
had splintered into a variety of economic groups, they observed, that
blacks returned to politics, where they now threatened a repetition of
the horror of Reconstruction.

After creating this atmosphere of racial hysteria, marked by a rapid
rise in the rate of lynching, white politicians called for state
constitutional conventions, first in Mississippi in 1890, to
disfranchise blacks despite the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment.
Black leaders had warned in 1870 that the amendment could not protect
their political rights without a system of national voter registration.
Twenty years later, southern state conventions proposed poll taxes and
literacy tests, which applied to both races. A higher proportion of
blacks, who had come out of slavery without property or literacy, were
disfranchised than whites. But local white southern registrars used the
literacy test to disqualify even literate blacks.

The Supreme Court did not respond to reports from the southern state
conventions of the disfranchisement of blacks. The Court also turned a
deaf ear to southern representatives and senators who boasted on the
floor of the Congress that "niggers" had been driven from politics in
their states. The Court quietly accepted the spread of "Jim Crow" laws
that legalized segregation in public areas, taking the position that
separate but equal facilities did not violate the rights of citizens
under the Fourteenth Amendment. Black leaders had argued in 1867 that
only federal control of education could guarantee equal facilities. The
Supreme Court, however, did nothing to prevent southern states from
spending disproportionate sums (at a ratio of ten to one) for white
schools.

Low-income southern whites had struggled until 1896 to maintain
coalitions with black voters. In Georgia, Tom Watson, a leader of the
Populists, attempted such an alliance. "You are kept apart that you may
be separately fleeced from your earnings. You are made to hate each
other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of
financial despotism which enslaves you both," he declared to white and
black farmers. "You are deceived

and blinded that you may not see how the race antagonism perpetuates a
monetary system which beggars both."

Against Watson's advice, most Populist leaders had thrown their support
to Bryan in 1896. He warned that the fusion of Populists with Democrats
in the southern states would allow the "new South" elites to consolidate
their political power. Bitterly disappointed, Watson withdrew from
politics for a time.

Partially absorbed by the Democratic party in 1896, Populism collapsed
as a viable political movement and a one-party system dominated by the
Democrats became the pattern in the southern states. Primaries,
established in these one-party states, became the only effective
elections, and blacks were barred on racial grounds from participating
in these primaries; thus they were doubly disfranchised. The Supreme
Court ruled that political parties, as private organizations, could
engage in overt racial discrimination.

In all the cotton states, from South Carolina to Texas, politicians
emerged to rally popular support and harness the racial resentments of
lower-class and lower-middle-class whites. Tom Watson, who turned
violently antiblack after his political defeat, and Theodore Bilbo of
Mississippi, and Ben Tillman of South Carolina were only a few of the
demagogues who kept the anti-Negro crusade alive after 1900. They also
attacked the Catholic immigrants in the northern cities. "The Roman
Catholic Hierarchy," warned Watson, in a publication called Watson's
Jeffersonian Magazine, "is the deadliest menace to our Liberties and our
Civilization," because of "the sinister portent of Negro priests." He
also engaged in violent anti-Semitism. He called for the lynching of Leo
Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent accused of murdering an employee;
Frank was guilty, Watson wrote, because of his physical appearance:
"those bulging satyr eyes, the protruding fearfully sensual lips; and
also the animal jaw." He was guilty because as a Jew he had a "ravenous
appetite for the forbidden fruit--a lustful eagerness enhanced by the
racial novelty of the girl of the uncircumcised." He must be lynched,
Watson wrote, because the courts were corrupted by the "gigantic
conspiracy of Big Money. Frank belonged to the Jewish aristocracy, and
it was determined by the rich Jews that no aristocrat of their race
should die for the death of a working-class Gentile." After Frank was
lynched by an unmasked and unpunished crowd, Watson called for the
re-creation of the Ku Klux Klan. During Reconstruction, scattered groups
of whites throughout the South had called themselves the Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan.

But these local klans had not been able to create a widespread
organization with centralized leadership. In Georgia in 1915, a cohesive
and interlocking Klan was established that would become a national
organization as strong in much of the Midwest as it was in the South. It
was dedicated to carrying the antiblack crusade to the North and to
placing the same kinds of restraints on Catholics and Jews.

Many white middle-class women first became involved in politics when
they participated in the abolitionist movement before the Civil War. As
they worked to free blacks from slavery and to raise the status of black
men to full citizenship, they thought that the revolution to increase
political participation would reach out to include women. They were
bitterly disappointed when white men ignored women during the passage of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Until the 1890s, however,
feminist leaders continued to argue that women enjoyed the same
universal natural rights as white and black men and had the right to
full citizenship, including the vote.

But the merger of the two most important women's organizations, the
National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage
Association, to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA) in 1890 marked a major change in the arguments used to gain the
vote. The new generation of leaders represented by Carrie Chapman Catt,
which replaced the generation represented by Susan B. Anthony, was
prepared to link suffrage for WASP women with the Purity Crusade. The
energy of middle-class women in NAWSA was blended with the energy of the
Women's Christian Temperence Union (WCTU).

Abandoning the philosophy of universal human rights, the major arguments
of NAWSA stressed that the vote for women would largely be used by the
middle class. These Anglo-Saxon women, crusading for purity, would help
their hubsands preserve the virtues of the Republic from the threat of
unqualified and biologically inferior blacks and Latin and Slavic
Europeans. By claitning to share the biological superiority of their
men, the middle-class women were trying to disprove one of the major
arguments used against them--that they were biologically incapable of
rational decisions.

Opponents of the suffrage movement argued that women, like certain male
minorities, were too intellectually and morally inferior

296	An International Frontier Opens as the Western Frontier Closes

to be responsible citizens. "There are millions of men in the world for
whom despotism is a necessity, and it is this class who immigrate to us
every day, who are undermining our institutions," declared a male
conservative in the periodical Remonstrance, and "if woman suffrage is
to be allowed we double not only the numerical force of the threatening
majority, but its moral--or immoral influence."

The suffragist leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, now agreed with the male
conservatives that "this government is menaced with great danger. That
danger lies in the slums of the cities, and the ignorant foreign vote."
But then she offered the woman's vote against the foreign and black
vote. "There is but one way to avert the danger," she warned; "cut off
the vote of the slums and give it to women." Middle-class men, she
continued, must recognize "the usefulness of woman suffrage as a
counterbalance to the foreign vote, and as a means of legally preserving
white supremacy in the South."

Western states had begun to grant the vote to women in the 1890s at the
same time that southern states were disenfranchising blacks. Gradually,
the former trend reached the eastern states. By 1914, a group of
younger, more militant women led by Alice Paul formed the Woman's party
to lobby in Washington for a constitutional amendment. The outcome of
this activity was the addition of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Amendments to the Constitution in 1920. The former amendment established
national Prohibition and the latter, woman's suffrage. Both were
acceptable to the new industrial elites in their effort to establish
order throughout the country.

The destruction of the saloon had been of great importance to the
corporate leaders in their efforts to control the city. As the urban
population exploded, so did the number of saloons. By 1900, in most
cities there was one saloon for every two hundred city dwellers. Beer
consumption had jumped from three gallons per capita per year in 1850 to
thirty gallons per capita in 1912. Brewers usually financed the saloons,
paying the rent and license fee and providing the fixtures and the beer.

The saloons were meeting places for the male working class and centers
of immigrant culture. The saloon provided a public toilet, a
check-cashing service, and a free or cheap lunch. In an emergency, a
customer could spend the night sleeping on the floor. Labor unions and
political ward clubs usually met in saloons. Employers often came to
saloons to find temporary or permanent labor. Most importantly, however,
the saloons were centers where immigrant

cultures were preserved and a sense of working-class solidarity was
strengthened. Here laborers came to find release from the hated routine
of the factory clock; here they came to engage in uninhibited
self-expression, free from the discipline of the job; here they could
forget about the future.

With Prohibition the saloon was supposed to disappear, and with it the
ethnic spirit that had flourished there. Many hoped it would dissipate
the working-class consciousness that the saloon-goers had shared. And
finally it was hoped Prohibition would undermine union organization and
the ward clubs of the urban bosses.

As the Republicans became the majority party in much of the North by
1896 and as Democrats, with Republican principles, consolidated their
control in the South, there was an increase in the ability of the
parties to achieve discipline in the Congress. The party caucus, through
the control of committee assignment, became more efficient in guiding
key legislation to final enactment.

This regularization of power made the interrelationships of economics
and politics less chaotic and more predictable than it had been in the
1870s and 1880s. Lobbyists established themselves as a central part of
the political life in Washington. They were able to deal with
congressional leaders whose influence lasted from session to session.
Reaching a new level of professionalization, lobbyists provided research
and speech-writing services for congressmen, as well as other forms of
economic support. The industry leaders were also moved to further
political action to curtail the erratic power of the urban bosses. They
were able to bring to an end the practice of printing and distributing
ballots through political parties, by introducing the secret ballot.
When William McKinley was re-elected in 1900, however, it would have
been difficult to predict that the interests of industry would so
completely have their hands on the throttle of political power in 1920.
Many southern and western farmers bitterly resented Republican
leadership as the new century began. Although significant numbers of
industrial workers had supported the McKinley administration, many
others were so hostile to the new corporate economy that they were ready
to join the Socialist party, which gained rapidly in strength between
1900 and 1912. There were deep divisions within the Republican party
itself. Many businessmen, especially those with small businesses, were
critical of the desire of the industrial leaders to limit competition in
the marketplace; nor did they sympathize with the thrust of the McKinley
administration to make the United States a major world power, involved
in a struggle to expand overseas markets.

Thus the United States entered the new century filled with deep social,
economic, and political divisions. On September 6, 1901, President
McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. The task of creating unity
out of disunity now fell on the shoulders of the vice president,
Theodore Roosevelt.

'I will not cry peace"

******************

Chapter 13.

The End of Isolation, 1898-1920

President Theodore Roosevelt's two terms

President Woodrow Wilson: the man in office

Exploiting foreign markets

America's Open Door policy

War in Europe, 1914, and American neutrality

The United States enters World War I

Newspapers made Theodore Roosevelt a hero during the brief
Spanish-American War of 1898. He served as a lieutenant colonel with a
volunteer cavalry regiment popularly known as the Rough Riders because
some of its members were cowboys. Reporters wildly exaggerated the
military significance of the charge at San Juan Hill. "Nothing in the
lucid pages of Thucydides, nor in the terse commentaries of Caesar,
nothing can surpass the story" of this battle, one wrote; "probably
never before in the history of a country has so remarkable a thing
happened." Republican leaders had chosen Roosevelt to be their
vice-presidential candidate in 1900 because of his wartime fame. In
1901, the assassination of McKinley brought him to the Presidency. At
forty-three, he was the youngest President in American history, and the
press immediately identified his youth and vigor with the few years he
had spent in the West.

Newspaper editors and their readers seemed to want a hero who could heal
the symbolic and sectional divisions of the country. These divisions
were pointed up in the presidential elections of 1896 and 1900, when
McKinley was seen as the representative of a United States of America
East and Bryan as the representative of an America West. Roosevelt was
both an easterner and a westerner. He was a city dweller who spoke
passionately of the values of rural life. "No nation has ever achieved
permanent greatness," he declared, "unless this greatness was based on
the well-being of the great farmer class, the men who live on the soil."
Many farmers believed that Roosevelt would take up Bryan's battle
against the encroachment of the large corporations, and they identified
him with Andrew Jackson as a defender of western farmers against
eastern, exploitation. "The devouring dragon of the Jacksonian age was
the Biddle Bank," wrote a western newspaper. "General Jackson destroyed
it as Mr. Roosevelt has destroyed the evil trusts."

City dwellers in the 1890s had begun to echo the farmers' demands for
governmental commissions to control the large corporations. Small
businessmen and large numbers of middle-class professionals, who were
seeing themselves as "consumers," hoped that government commissions
would protect them from exploitation by big business. Like the farmers,
they rallied around Roosevelt, hoping

that he would revive the political strength of their interest groups.

Roosevelt came to the Presidency angry at what he saw as the
irresponsibility of many big businessmen. "The folly of the very rich
men; their greed and arrogance," he warned, "have tended to produce a
very unhealthy condition of excitement and irritation in the popular
mind, which shows itself in the great increase in the socialistic
propaganda." He wanted businessmen to be socially responsible and to
take a paternalistic attitude toward labor, farmers, and consumers. "Our
aim is not to do away with corporations," he declared. "These big
aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism. We
draw the line against misconduct, not wealth." During his two
administrations, Roosevelt continued to stand as the unstable center of
conflicting interests.

Farmers, small businessmen, professionals, women, and consumers in
general saw themselves participating in a democratic upsurge that they
called "progressivism." They distrusted legislatures and courts, which
they believed were under the control of special and selfish interests.
Calling themselves "the people," they argued that only the executive
represented all the people and that executive leadership was therefore
the best instrument for the democratic expression of the will of the
people. This "progressive" movement lobbied for the direct expression of
democracy in the initiative, referendum, and the recall of judges. It
built up pressure for the adoption in 1913 of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Amendments to the Constitution, which established the income
tax and the election of United States senators by the voters rather than
by the state legislatures. It called for more government by
disinterested experts and less by professional politicians.

Leaders of the industrial elite, George Perkins of U.S. Steel among
others, had also come to see such changes as advantageous to the large
corporation. A strong executive, surrounded by a bureaucracy of
nonelected experts, could provide a climate of political stability that
the corporations needed for their long-range economic planning. It would
be more effective than dealing with legislators and judges who
represented a multiplicity of conflicting and short range local
interests. Big businessmen agreed with Roosevelt when he declared, "I am
afraid all modern legislative bodies tend to show their incapacity to
meet the new and complex needs of the times." Thus they supported the
development of regulatory commissions. The "progressives" believed they
had won a victory over the large

corporations when they persuaded Congress to pass a Meat Inspection Act
and a Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. But government inspection did not
lower prices and increase competition as the "progressives" expected;
instead it drove small entrepreneurs out of business because they could
not afford to meet the new standards and thus solidified the control of
the market by a few large meat packers and drug companies.

Nowhere was this pattern clearer than in the area of conservation.
Roosevelt added dramatically to the forest land under national control.
He placed his friend Gifford Pinchot in charge of the use of these
national resources. Trained in scientific forestry in Germany, Pinchot
declared that "the object of our forest policy is not to preserve the
forests because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the
wilderness." Efficiency, Pinchot said, is the primary purpose of
conservation, "a conscious and purposeful entering into control over
nature," and "the millennium will have been reached when humanity shall
have learned to eliminate all useless waste." Again it was the large
national economic interests that supported this policy of conservation
and it was local small lumbermen and ranchers who were opposed.

In spite of Roosevelt's great personal popularity, neither the
"progressives" nor the industrial leaders were satisfied with the
legislative accomplishments of his two terms. William Howard Tail,
experienced as an administrator, inherited this discontent when he won
the Presidency in 1908 as the Republican candidate. Tail had none of
Roosevelt's charisma, and he did not sympathize with the demands of
either the "progressives" or the industrial elite. Instead he aligned
himself with ths believers in the traditional competitive marketplace.
"Progressive" Republicans began to look to Senator Robert LaFollette of
Wisconsin to challenge Tail in 1912, while the political leaders
sympathetic to big business, such as George Perkins and the magazine
publisher Frank Munsey, persuaded Roosevelt to head a third party. They
argued that this Progressive party, under Roosevelt's leadership, could
complete the transition of the nation from the irrationality of a
competitive marketplace to the rationality of a marketplace controlled
by the large corporations acting through governmental agencies. The
Socialist party reached its greatest strength in this election of 1912.
Roosevelt as a Progressive won more votes than Tail. But with the
Republicans split, it was the Democratic candidate, Wood row Wilson, who
won the Presidency. And much to Roosevelt's

304	An International Frontier Opens as the Western Frontier Closes

chagrin, it was in Wilson's administrations that the legislative hopes
of both the "progressives" and the new industrial elite were to be
fulfilled.

Roosevelt considered Wilson an ineffectual academic, unable to provide
political leadership. And, indeed, Wilson's biography up to 1910 seemed
to justify such contempt. He had been born in Virginia just before the
Civil War. His father was a Presbyterian minister loyal to the
Confederate cause. During his youth Wilson seemed to be a very obedient
son. He seemed overawed by his father. "If I had my father's face and
figure," he declared as an adolescent, "it wouldn't make any difference
what I said." He was unable to learn to read until he was eleven,
perhaps because he feared he could not live up to his father's
expectations. He was disappointed that he felt no calling for the
ministry and trained to be a lawyer. But he was unable to compete
effectively enough to establish a legal practice in Atlanta, Georgia. He
retreated to Johns Hopkins University to take a Ph.D. in history and
political science and sought the security of college teaching.

But Wilson did not see this choice as a retreat from the real world.
This new university was one of the first to make the transition from a
nineteenth-century college to the twentieth-century university. The key
to this transition was a change from the status of amateur to that of
professional for both students and faculty. The seminar and the Ph.D.
degree had been imported from Germany to establish the professional
college teacher. The seminar provided the methodological skills so that
doctoral candidates could achieve scholarly objective and professional
neutrality. Perhaps Wilson, with a Ph.D. in political science, could
think of himself as a secular priest in control of a more powerful and
relevant set of universal truths than those possessed by his father.

College teaching and then politics seemed to offer Wilson the
opportunity to manipulate people without becoming close to them. "I have
a sense of power in dealing with people collectively which I do not feel
in dealing with them singly," he admitted. "Plenty of people offer me
their friendship; but, partly, because I am reserved and shy, and partly
because I am factitious and have a narrow uncatholic taste in my
friends, I reject the offer in almost every case."

Wilson's scholarly concern was with power. His successful book
Congressional Government expressed his envy of the parliamentary system.
The English Prime Minister, he argued, had much more

power than the American President because he was not frustrated by a
system of checks and balances. And Wilson saw his scholarly career as
temporary. "My feeling has been that such literary talents as I have are
secondary to my equipment for other things," he declared, and "that my
power to write was meant to be a handmaiden to my power to speak and to
organize action."

Wilson deplored the fact that his first teaching post was at Bryn Mawr,
a women's college. Teaching women politics, he declared was "about as
appropriate and profitable as would be lecturing to stone-masons on the
evolution of fashion in dress." Lacking intellectual capacity, women
made good wives, where "their life must supplement man's life." Wilson
needed the support of a traditional wife, and remarried quickly after
the death of his first wife.

He was glad to leave Bryn Mawr to teach at Wesleyan and then Princeton.
"I have for a long time been hungry for a class of men," he rejoiced.
Hungry also for power, Wilson soon accepted the presidency of Princeton
with the stipulation that he have total power to hire and fire the
faculty. It was his ambition to remake the college along the lines of
Johns Hopkins and produce national leaders who were scholarly experts.
The alumni, however, defeated his efforts to minimize social life while
maximizing scholarship. He was especially disappointed by their refusal
to make the graduate school a central part of the campus.

He was ready, therefore, to leave university life when he was asked by
Democratic party bosses in New Jersey to be their candidate for the
governorship in 1910. Wilson's speeches as a college president had
attracted the attention of wealthy and conservative eastern Democrats.
He had been critical of Bryan and agrarian reform, and he had been
critical of organized labor. In the histories of the United States which
he had written, Wilson called for the preservation of leadership by
those Americans who were descended from the "English race" against the
threat to "English character" posed by new immigrants, "men of the
lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of
Hungary and Poland."

Upon election as governor, Wilson immediately repudiated the party
bosses. He supported the passage of legislation to strengthen regulatory
commissions; he backed "progressive" demands for the initiative and
referendum and showed concern for the consumer. Hoping for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1912, Wilson saw himself in a
position to surpass Theodore Roosevelt as a national leader.

Identified himself with the East, Wilson courted Bryan, retracting his
earlier criticism, and won a symbolic relationship with the West. But
Wilson's great advantage over Roosevelt was his identification with the
South. His birthplace, the South, Wilson declared, was "the only place
in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be
explained to me." This first southerner elected to the Presidency since
before the Civil War praised the region of his « youth. There was, he
said, "nothing to apologize for in the past of the South--absolutely
nothing to apologize for." This, for Wilson, included slavery, which
"had done more for the Negro in two hundred and fifty years than African
freedom had done since the building of the pyramids."

Wilson was part of a whole generation of young southern intellectuals
who had come North to be educated and who hoped that the South could be
integrated into the patterns of northern urban and industrial life. When
Wilson and the Democrats captured the Presidency and Congress in 1912,
southerners became the leaders of Congress as well as important members
of Wilson's Cabinet.

Wilson's goal was to change the complexion of the Democratic party so
that it would more successfully synthesize "progressivism" and the
interests of the new industrial elite than Roosevelt had in remaking the
Republican party. He pleased southern and western farmers and northern
consumers by lowering the tariff. He supported a Federal Farm Loan Act
and a Warehouse Act that fulfilled a demand for government storage of
crops made by the Populists in 1890. He showed paternalistic concern for
labor by supporting the Adamson Act, which established an eight-hour day
for railroad workers. In his "New Freedom" speeches, like Roosevelt in
his "Square Deal" speeches, Wilson promised to protect the average
American against the giant corporations. "What this country needs above
everything else is a body of laws which will look after the men on the
make," Wilson had orated. "The only way to enrich America is to make it
possible for any man who has got the brains to get into the game."

But like Roosevelt, he agreed that the corporation was "indispensable to
modern business enterprise." "Nobody," he declared, "can fail to see
that modern business is going to be done by corporations. The old time
of individual competition is gone by." More than Roosevelt, he was able
to achieve the legislation which met the "progressive" demand for
government commissions to regulate the

corporations and the demand of the corporations for government
commissions to regulate the economy. He had moved vigorously to provide
personal leadership to mobilize the new Democratic majority in Congress.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Reserve Board were
the two great legislative accomplishments of his administrations. The
"progressives" who believed in the possibility of nonpolitical experts
running the FTC expected it to make the corporations responsible to
consumers. But those members of the industrial elite who staffed the
Commission considered the purpose of the FTC to be to overcome
irrational competition and encourage rational corporate planning. Edward
Hurley, the head of the FTC, hoped "we can recommend to Congress some
legislation that will allow them [coal companies] to come here and fix
prices."

This was also the case with the Federal Reserve System. The
"progressives" saw it as taking economic power out of the hands of
private bankers and putting it in the hands of experts representing the
people. But, in practice, the system encouraged the large national banks
and discouraged the small state banks and thus solidified the
pre-eminence of the great New York financial institutions.

"Our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their
jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world,"
Wilson told the Democratic Convention in 1912. "Our domestic markets no
longer suffice. We need foreign markets." A fellow student of Frederick
Jackson Turner at Johns Hopkins, Wilson agreed that the closing of the
agricultural frontier had caused a national crisis. He also agreed with
Turner in the 1890s that overseas expansion could provide a new
frontier. Again it was Wilson rather than Roosevelt who most strongly
expressed the industrial elite's desire to develop an overseas frontier.

This concern for a new frontier had become a dominant theme in Congress
by 1890. "A policy of isloation did well enough when we were an embryo
nation, but today things are different," declared Senator Orville H.
Platt in 1893. "We are the most advanced and powerful people on earth,
and regard to our future welfare demands an abandonment of the doctrine
of isolation." He concluded, "It is to the ocean that our children must
look, as they once looked to the boundless West."

A dramatic change took place, therefore, during the 1890s in the

conduct of foreign affairs. Presidents and their foreign-policy advisers
began to assume that America was a world power, that vital American
economic, political, and military interests existed overseas. They
stressed the need for a more systematic foreign policy, one that would
include a sense of continuity with the past. A new Republican or
Democratic administration should perpetuate the policies of its
predecessor. Those at the head of government assumed a sense of
interrelatedness in world affairs: the success of American policy in the
Far East would be linked to its success in Central America or any other
place on the globe. It was expected that the executive branch could and
should initiate policy and then generate public and congressional
support for it. Policy makers in the world, then, needed an appreciation
of the instruments of foreign affairs, and recognized the need for a
large and skillful diplomatic corps and a large and powerful navy.

The only question that faced the political elite in the 1890s was the
nature of the new empire. Some, like Captain A. T. Mahan, the great
theoretician of the new Naval War College, called for annexing overseas
colonies "as outlets for the home products and as a nursery of commerce
and shipping." Others, like Carl Schurz, agreed that "we cannot have too
many markets." But he asked whether overseas markets could be obtained
"only by annexing to the United States the countries in which they are
situated."

Although the United States did annex the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands
at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the proponents of
the "Open Door" empire won the larger debate. "Had we no interests in
China," stated a report of the United States Senate, "the possession of
the Philippines would be meaningless." Confident in the superiority of
the American economy, the most rapidly growing in the world,
foreign-policy leaders believed that American interests could penetrate
to every area of the globe without the use of military power. "Open
Door" notes were sent to Japan and all the European nations that had
economic interests in China stating that the United States wanted to
preserve the territorial integrity of China and opposed further
colonization by Europeans.

England supported the American "Open Door" policy in China at the same
time that the British government supported American domination in
Central America. Forced to concentrate its naval forces against the
rapidly developing German fleet, England withdrew from the Caribbean and
canceled plans for a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific.
President Roosevelt quickly walked into the power vacuum and encouraged
a revolution in the Colombian province of Panama.

Roosevelt also declared a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, that the
United States would oversee the internal affairs of all Caribbean and
Central American republics and intervene when necessary to keep those
affairs stable. The preservation of this internal stability would remove
any cause or excuse for European intervention in these areas. Having
served notice of American hegemony there, Roosevelt saw to the building
of the Panama Canal, which would be controlled militarily by the United
States.

Roosevelt delighted in foreign affairs, where he did not have to work
artfully with Congress and the public to get legislation enacted. "The
biggest matters, such as the Portsmouth Peace, the acquisition of
Panama, and sending the fleet around the world," he affirmed, "I managed
without consultation with anyone; for when a matter is of capital
importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only." Woodrow
Wilson agreed with Roosevelt. "The initiative in foreign affairs, which
the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually
the power to control them absolutely." The "progressive" commitment to a
strong executive was finding its greatest fulfillment in foreign policy.

Roosevelt, Tail, and Wilson periodically sent marines into Central
American and Caribbean republics to stabilize the local political
situations and protect American investments. Military governments in
Cuba and the Philippines after the SpanishAmerican War gave American
leaders confidence that they could bring rational order to the rest of
the world. General Leonard Wood proudly declared that "for the first
time, probably in its history, Havana has an honest and efficient
government, clean of bribery and speculation." An American reporter
praised "the establishment, in a little over three years, in a Latin
military colony, in one of the most unhealthy countries of the world, of
a republic modeled closely upon the lines of our own great Anglo-Saxon
republic."

Thus, for the new corporate and political elites, their success in
organizing rational space in American cities, in controlling the
millions of European peasants who had come to these cities, in educating
these masses in the efficient ways of industry, according to the
discipline of linear time, could be repeated throughout the entire

310	An International Frontier Opens as the Western Frontier Closes

world. "America's duty toward the people living in barbarism is to see
that they are freed from their chains and we can free them only by
destroying barbarism itself," declared Theodore Roosevelt. "Peace cannot
be had until the civilized nations have expanded in some shape over the
barbarous nations." It is not surprising then that Wilson was willing to
intervene in the affairs of even such a major nation as Mexico. "I am
going to teach the South American republics to elect good men," he
affirmed.

American intellectuals, after 1890, had been engaged in a dramatic
reversal of their attitudes toward Germany. From 1810 to 1890, Germany
had been perceived as the most modern European nation, and Americans had
gone there to be educated into the most progressive intellectual
currents. But the early-twentieth-century image of Germany, firmly
established by 1914, was of the most reactionary European nation,
stubbornly preserving the medieval and barbaric past. England had
replaced Germany as the most admired country. Wilson had shared in this
change of attitude. His writings were full of praise for things English,
while they described German culture as "essentially selfish and lacking
in spirituality."

When war came to Europe in August 1914, Wilson strongly emphasized the
necessity of American neutrality. He felt that this world war might
create a situation where America would have "the infinite privilege of
fulfilling her destiny and saving the world." England and France,
however, in their conflict with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires
were considered too compromised and corrupted by their own empires to be
completely worthy of having the United States fight on their side.
Wilson's vision of the world that would emerge from this conflict was
one in which all empires were dissolved and the major nations imitated
the pattern of the United States by pursuing a course of "Open Door"
economic expansion which flowed across national boundaries.

If the United States entered the war on the side of England and France
only to help them defend their empires, then the United States would
have lost its soul in this imperial civil war, and "the spirit of
ruthless brutality," Wilson warned, "will enter into the very fiber of
our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the
beat, the man on the street." If America did not Americanize Europe,
then Europe would Europeanize America, and the nation would be locked
into a cycle of European civil wars.

By November 1916, however, when he was re-elected on the slogan "He kept
us out of war," Wilson feared that he had become trapped in a web of
circumstances beyond his control. He and his advisers had refused to
take a strong stand against England when its navy violated international
law. But Wilson had issued ever stronger warnings to Germany to halt its
submarine warfare, also contrary to international law. Finally, in the
summer of 1916, an American ultimatum forced the curtailment of German
submarine activity. The nightmarish fear that descended upon Wilson was
that a German decision to recommence submarine warfare would challenge
American national honor and ultimately force the country to enter the
European civil war. Desperately, he tried to persuade England and France
and Germany to sit down and negotiate a peace settlement. But in January
1917, German leaders decided to take the calculated risk that the
restoration of unrestricted submarine activity would defeat the Allies
before America could mobilize its military forces.

The great power of the Presidency in foreign affairs had made it
possible for Wilson to place the United States on the verge of war
without the knowledge of the average voter. These voters had reelected
Wilson because they believed he would preserve peace. The strong peace
movement among women had rallied for Wilson. Many German-Americans and
Irish-Americans who hated English imperialism also backed Wilson. A
number of midwestern WASP "progressives," who feared the power of
eastern corporations to influence foreign policy, saw the Republican
party in 1916 as pro English and prowar and supported Wilson.

Wilson shared the view of WASP leaders who had made the foreign-policy
revolution in the 1890s that Germany was the chief threat to the
American policy of worldwide free trade dominated by the American
economy. Both the United States and Germany surpassed England in
industrial production and population in the 1890s. But German leaders
chose to try to expand overseas through an empire of colonies modeled
after that of England. From 1895 to 1917, American naval and military
leaders planned for possible war against Germany. And German leaders
expected war against the United States during these years.

In February 1917, all of Wilson's advisers urged him to ask for a
declaration of war. Bryan, his first secretary of state, had resigned
when Wilson's eastern friends had persuaded him to bend neutrality

and allow the New York bankers to make huge loans to England and France.
By March 1917, these loans totaled more than $2 billion, whereas only
$20 million had been loaned to Germany.

Wilson would not retreat from the right of Americans and American ships
to sail into the war zone. This was the revolutionary principle of free
trade to which the WASP elite was committed. Wilson asked Congress to
pass legislation to arm American merchant ships. When his request was
blocked by such midwestern progressive Republicans as Senator Robert
LaFollette of Wisconsin and George Norris of Nebraska, Wilson armed the
ships by executive order. They sailed to England and were fired on by
German submarines, and they fired back. By March 1917, Wilson had
involved the United States in a shooting war with Germany.

Germany made it easier for Wilson to overcome congressional opposition
to the war by urging Mexico to join in a war against the United States
and regain the territories it had lost in 1846. These Zimmermann Notes
fell into American hands, and Wilson used them to prove the
aggressiveness of the German feudal aristocracy. But when Wilson went to
Congress with a war message in April, deep doubts still haunted him. "My
message today was a message of death for our young men," he lamented to
a friend; "how strange it seemed to applaud that."

Once the decision was made, Wilson seemed to be trying to per saude
himself that it really was a crusade. "Valor withholds itself from all
small implications and entanglements and waits for the great opportunity
when the sword will flash as if it carried the light of heaven upon its
blade," he cried out. "When men take up arms to set other men free,
there is something sacred and holy in the warfare." "I will not cry
peace," Wilson affirmed, "as long as there is sin and wrong in the
world." Wilson still hoped, at the end of the war, that England and
France would divest themselves of their empires and accept the American
"Open Door" policy. Then with the end of the German and the
Austro-Hungarian empires, American entry into the war would have ushered
in a new era in- which the entire world would become a rational space
for free trade among all nations.

Wilson fiercely repressed all criticism of the war, especially by the
Socialists. "This is no time either for divided counsels, or for divided
leadership," he warned. "Unity of command is as necessary now in civil
action as it is upon the field of battle." But as American armies tipped
the balance and forced German surrender in November 1918, Wilson was
faced with an overwhelming Republican vietory in the congressional
elections. The many Americans who opposed the war could, at least,
express their unhappiness by voting for Republicans.

Just as he refused to acknowledge that England and France had not
divested themselves of their imperial ambitions, he refused to admit
that he was not supported by a unified national consensus on the meaning
of the war and the shape of the peace. He sailed to Europe, thinking
that he had it in his own power to lead the world into a new era. "I am
the only person of high authority amongst all the peoples of the world
who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back," he declared. "I am
speaking for the silent mass of mankind who have as yet had no place or
opportunity to speak."

In Paris, however, he was forced to compromise with the imperial
ambitions of England, France, Italy, and Japan. But when he came home to
ask for the ratification of the peace treaty and for American membership
in a League of Nations, which would guarantee the political patterns
established by the treaty, he refused to listen to criticism of the
treaty and the structure of the League.

Republicans demanded compromise and revision before they would support
the treaty. But Wilson ordered Democratic congressional leaders to
reject all compromises. In the hope of persuading the people that they
must accept his treaty as the guarantee that American participation in
the war had changed world history, he went on a speaking tour of the
nation. Addressing the veterans in the crowds, Wilson cried out, "Boys,
I told you before you went across the seas that this was a war against
war, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come
to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to
fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You fought for something you did
not get."

Wilson drove himself hard on this trip; he inflicted such physical
punishment on himself as he spoke several times a day, day after day,
that it seemed that he was seeking martyrdom. Suddenly, he collapsed,
incapacitated by a stroke. He spent the last year of his Presidency in
silence and semidarkness. Meanwhile, in 1920 the voters went to the
polls and elected Warren Harding, who promised a return to "normalcy."

America had refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles or join the League
of Nations. Wilson's dream of world order, of a world liberated from
traditional imperialism by the United States, lay silent and impotent
within him. Probably the most painful thing for this invalid, however,
must have been the knowledge that the selfdestruction of the European
civil war had made it possible for Bolshevism to capture control of
Russia. For in 1920, the Soviet I Union had pledged to shape a future
that would eradicate imperialism --an imperialism, according to Nikolai
Lenin, which dominated the policies of the United States as well as the
Western European nations.

Part Four.

******************

THE CLOSING OF FRONTIERS

AT HOME AND ABROAD,

1920-86

"We are entering a new era"

******************

Chapter 14.

Prosperity and Depression, 1920-40

Postwar disillusionment: failure of the Purity Crusade,

the jazz era, and the "lost generation"

Explosion of black culture and black pride

Postwar corporate boom

Herbert Hoover: at the helm of a consumer economy

Stock-market disaster: facing the depression

Roosevelt's emergency measures

"The stage is set, the destiny is disclosed. It has come about by no
plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into the war.
We cannot turn back. America shall in truth show the way." With these
words, Woodrow Wilson had exhorted his fellow Americans to bring the
Purity Crusade to a climax and finally to purge evil and darkness from
the entire world. Now, in 1919, he continued to urge Americans to
fulfill that mission which gave a "halo" to the "gun over the
mantelpiece" and "the sword" that had been used in the holy war. For
Wilson, this was a time when the world had embraced American soldiers
"as crusaders, and their transcendent achievement has made all the world
believe in America as it believes in no other nation organized in the
modern world." In what appeared to Protestant leaders as the moment of
their greatest triumph, their spokesman, Tyler Dennett, boasted that
Protestant "religious organizations took on a new importance in the eyes
of the government after the war began." The national government, its
armies, and the Protestant churches, Dennett declared, had become one as
"the churches offered direct and open channels for communicating with
the people, for stimulating patriotism, and for education in war aims."

During 1919 and 1920, the Protestant churches planned to fulfill
Wilson's exhortations through an Interchurch World Movement that would
fill every nation of the world with Protestant missionaries. "Our
business is to establish a civilization that is Christian in spirit and
in passion," Dennett proclaimed, "in Borneo as much as in Boston."

Barely two years later, these words sounded hollow. Students, who
earlier had rushed to volunteer for missionary duty, decided to stay
home. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Northern
Methodists, and Baptists appeared disillusioned and confused as they
entered the 1920s. Suddenly, they were faced with a world that refused
to be redeemed and a great financial drive to mobilize resources for the
missionary effort failed. Demoralized, they suffered another shattering
experience when their own respectable middle-class church people refused
to uphold the Eighteenth Amendment and keep America free from the
influence of alcohol.

In the larger cities nightclubs sold bootleg liquor and featured

jazz entertainment as the Purity Crusade, which had gained momentum in
the decades before 1920, seemed entirely forgotten. "It struck me funny
how the top and bottom crusts in society were always getting together
during the Prohibition era," wrote the jazz musician Milton Mezzrow. "In
this swanky club which was run by the notorious Purple Gang, Detroit's
bluebloods used to congregate --the Grosse Point mob on the slumming
kick, rubbing elbows with Louis the Wop's mob."

The Purity Crusade had been fighting against a loosening of morality not
only at the lowest socio-economic class, but also among the middle
class. The divorce rate of the middle class had increased steadily from
1890 to 1920; it would double in the 1920s. Other symptoms of decline
alarmed conservatives. The urban middle class had stopped chaperoning
its daughters after 1900, and there was a tremendous decline in the
pattern of premarital virginity by 1920. It was clear that by 1910 a new
code of permissiveness was being elaborated by the young. Soon
unchaperoned, sexual intimacy became acceptable within the context of an
affectionate relationship that might result in marriage.

This sexual revolution was accompanied by a significant decline in the
birthrate. In 1914, Margaret Sanger brought the growing interest in
contraception into the open with the publication of her magazine The
Woman Rebel. Dedicated, she wrote, to the liberation of "women enslaved
by the machine, by wage slavery, by bourgeois morality, by customs,
laws, and superstitions," The Woman Rebel advocated "the prevention of
conception" by imparting adequate knowledge to its middle-class readers.
Sanger violated the law by starting birth-control clinics for
lower-class women. "Mothers! Can you afford a large family? Do you want
more children? If not, why do you have them? Do not kill, do not take
life, but prevent," read the signs for her clinic. "Safe harmless
information can be obtained of trained nurses." By 1921, her efforts
were achieving respectability in the American Birth Control League,
supported financially by younger wealthy women.

Just as the conservative middle class could not stop its younger members
from participating in a sexual revolution, neither could it stop these
young people from listening and dancing to rather sensual music. African
rhythms, which had survived in the black community, began to influence
white popular music in the 1890s. Ragtime was an Afro-American music in
which the piano captured some of the patterns of the African drum. As
the audience for this

music grew, the lyrics of songs began to change; they became much more
explicitly sexual. Sheet music sold widely, and conservative defenders
of morality were horrified by the dance crazes that swept through cities
in the years immediately before World War I.

In the 1920s, blues and jazz, which had succeeded ragtime as the major
Afro-American influences on popular music, seemed even more sensual and
consequently more threatening. "Jazz is rhythm without soul," declared
Walter Damrosch, a leader of the musical establishment, and John Philip
Sousa agreed that jazz "employs primitive rhythms which excite the baser
human instincts." Dr. E. Elliot Rawlings, a spokesman for the medical
profession, added that "jazz music causes drunkenness. Reason and
reflection are lost and the actions of the persons are directed by the
stronger animal passions."

Not only did "those moaning saxophones and the rest of the instruments
with their broken, jerky rhythm make a purely sensual appeal," stated
Fenton Bott, head of the National Association of Masters of Dancing, but
the lyrics written in "the Negro brothels of the South" were "an offense
against womanly purity, the very fountainhead of our family and civil
life." Many newspapers and magazines agreed to try to halt the spreading
influence of jazz through a conspiracy of silence, only reporting that
it was a dying fad. When this proved ineffective, the General Federation
of Women's Clubs tried to have the music repressed. By 1929, many
cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Kansas
City, had regulations prohibiting jazz from public dance halls.

The attempt to prohibit jazz only increased its appeal to the young, who
were in self-conscious rebellion against their parents and were
searching for other ways of experiencing the rhythm of life.

As the American geographic frontier closed in the 1890s, the symphonic
music of Western Europe and the United States began to show signs of
stress. Charles Ives in America and Arnold Schoenberg in Europe
introduced dissonance and atonality into their symphonies. The music
critic Leonard Meyer has argued in his book Music, the Arts, and Ideas
that patterns of Western music that had prevailed since the Renaissance
had begun a process of disintegration that would continue until, by the
mid-twentieth century, it was clear that there was an entirely new
musical world. Another music critic, Henry Pleasants, in his book
Serious Music and All That Jazz., argued that Afro-American music had
replaced the sym-

phonic tradition in Western Europe as well as in the United States. I

The survival and increasing success of this premodern music from 1890 to
1920 was contrary to the expectations of the WASP intellectuals, who
were certain that the modern sense of space and time would conquer all
premodern expressions of space and time. Charles Beard had replaced
Frederick Jackson Turner as the most influential historian between 1900
and 1914 because Beard promised in his book of 1901, The Industrial
Revolution, that industrialism was a frontier force that destroyed all
irrational historical cultures and liberated the individual to live in
rational space and make progress along the line of linear time. There
was an explosion of such optimism among social scientists during the
"progressive" era. The economist Thorstein Veblen reinforced Beard by
declaring that "machine discipline acts to disintegrate the
institutional heritage of all degrees of antiquity" and that "the
mechanically trained classes, trained to matter-of-fact habits of
thought, show a notable lack of spontaneity in the construction of new
myths or conventions as well as in the reconstruction of the old." John
Dewey, the greatest educational philosopher of progressivism, saw the
school as speeding the process of industrial liberation. The purpose of
the school, Dewey declared, "is to see to it that each individual gets
an opportunity to escape from the limitation of the social group in
which he was born."

Veblen in his book Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution
(1915), and Dewey in his book German Philosophy and Politics (1916), had
presented the argument that the German people were living in the modern
industrial world but their rulers were still part of medieval culture.
American entry into the war would hasten the logic of industrialism by
purging this feudal aristocracy. Agreeing with Veblen and Dewey, Charles
Beard enthusiastically backed the American war effort, which was to
liberate all people to live within the rationality of industrial space
and time. "The years, 1917-1918," said Beard, "as surely as the age of
the American and French Revolutions, will mark the opening of a new
epoch."

Many northern Protestants had abandoned biblical fundamentalism in the
1880s and 1890s to accept the idea of evolution. These "liberal"
Protestants identified evolution with progress, and they took their
definition of progress from these social scientists. The great liberal
Protestant theologian Walter Rauschenbusch used this concept of the
industrial frontier to prophesy the final triumph of

Protestantism in freeing people from the ceremonies and traditions of
the Dark Ages. In his books Christianity and the Social Crisis

and Christianity and the Social Order, written just before World War I,
Rauschenbusch reaffirmed the optimism of the academic prophets: "We are
standing at the turning of the ways. We are actors in a great historical
drama. It rests upon us to decide if a new era is to dawn in the
transformation of the world into the kingdom of God, or if Western
Civilization is to descend into the graveyard of dead civilization."

For the poets and novelists of the 1920s, the "lost generation," born
between 1890 and 1900 and reared within the prophecy of the industrial
frontier, World War I was even more shattering than it was for their
teachers. Bitterly disillusioned, academics like Beard, Dewey, and
Veblen abandoned internationalism for isolation. They abandoned hope
that the entire world could be brought into industrial rationality, but
they continued to hope that this could be the future of the United
States.

But a young F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby,
rejected such a hope. His hero, James Gatz, leaves the closing
agricultural frontier of North Dakota. Reversing the mythic pattern by
which Europeans coming west across the Atlantic were washed clean of
their old culture and were reborn with a new identity, Gatz comes east
and gets a new identity crossing Lake Superior. Now a self-made man, Jay
Gatsby will work in the industrial frontier of New York City. In
contrast to the "green breast" of the geographic frontier first seen by
the Dutch sailors of Henrik Hudson, Fitzgerald presented Gatsby with a
"valley of ashes." In this frontier of ugliness and decadence,
Fitzgerald gives Gatsby the heroic task of overcoming biological time.
To fulfill his quest, he must restore Daisy, a girl whom he loved before
he went to the war, to her original virginity. He must persuade her of
the unreality of her marriage to another man while he was away and of
the unreality of her motherhood. But instead of a rational and
predictable world, Gatsby is caught up by circumstance; an automobile
accident sets a chain of events in motion in which a man kills Gatsby
because he mistakenly believes Gatsby was the driver of the car that
killed his wife.

Earlier, in the 1890s, Frank Norris in his novels Vandover and the Brute
and McTeague had expressed his fear of the sexuality of women. In Sister
Carrie, Theodore Dreiser had described the supe-

rior power of a woman to survive the new urban environment. And in his
autobiographical novel of 1912, The Genius, he had explicitly talked of
his fears of the strength of female biology.

For the young Ernest Hemingway, who had been physically wounded in Italy
during the war, the psychic wound was worse. In contrast to the
industrial frontier's promise of progressive linear time, the war had
forced him to confront death, the possibility of the cyclical nature of
time, the cycle of birth inevitably followed by death. And woman, for
Hemingway, was the symbol of this cycle.

The opening scene of his first collection of short stories, In Our Time,
was of refugee women giving birth, how the women "screamed every night
at midnight," but "the worst were the women with dead babies. You
couldn't get the women to give up their dead babies." Alternating with
stories of the war were stories of Hemingway's childhood in northern
Michigan. Here again the boy goes with his doctor father to witness the
birth of a baby in an Indian camp. During the painful Caesarean
delivery, the Indian father kills himself. In Hemingway's novel Farewell
to Arms, when the hero, Frederick Henry, deserts the insanity of the war
and takes refuge in Switzerland with Catherine, the nurse he has loved,
they live happily through the winter. But spring brings the birth and
death of the chi'd and Catherine.

For John Dos Passes, the insanity of the armies continued into the
insanity of the corporations of the 1920s. Young Americans had believed
that armies could operate rationally and bring liberation. They had
believed much the same about corporations. "Men seemed to have shrunk in
stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had
invented--men had become antlike," wrote Dos Passes in his novel Three
Soldiers. But it was Dos Passes' massive USA that best expressed the
"lost generation's" horror of organization. Divided into three books,
which themselves included twelve stories, Dos Passes added to the sense
of fragmentation by including short newsreels, historical biographies,
and statements by an introspective observer in the Camera Eye. His book
had the qualities of the immensely popular silent movies--it was flat
and two-dimensional; its movement did not flow but broke into jerky
episodes; it went faster and then slower; it became bright and then
faded; it had humor and terror.

Dos Passes in the 1920s was back with Mark Twain in the 1880s. Having
lost faith in the urban-industrial frontier of his Progressive fathers,
he, like Huck Finn, had no space to flee to escape these

fathers. In USA he wrote, "The transcontinental passenger thinks
contracts, profits, vacation trips, mighty continent between Atlantic
and Pacific, power, wires humming, dollars, cities jammed, hills empty,
the Indian trail leading into the wagon road, the macadam pike, the
concrete skyway, transcontinental planes, history, the billion dollar
speed up. And in the bumpy air over the desert ranges toward Las Vegas
sickens and vomits into the carton container the steak and mushrooms he
ate in New York."

The son of this corrupt father stands as a solitary vagabond on a
highway beneath the plane. Trying to hitch a ride, he is a dropout who
"went to school, books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your
own home, shine bigger than your neighbor, the radio crooner whispered,
girls, ghosts of platinum girls coaxed from the screen, millions in
winnings were chalked upon the board, in the offices, pay checks for
hands willing to work; the cleared desk of an executive with three
telephones on it--he waits with swimming head, needs knot his belly,
idle hands numb, beside the speeding traffic."

Young white musicians saw in jazz a symbolic alternative to the
bureaucratic prison of their fathers. Jazz had a structure that offered
an opportunity to improvise. Eddie Condon, who taught himself to play
jazz by ear, reported his father's reaction: "You are terrible and you
can't read music." Condon's reply to his father was, "What's that got to
do with being a musician?" For Hoagy Carmichael, jazz was a way out of
chaos into a new world of meaning. He smoked marijuana and listened to
jazz. He described what it felt like: "My body got light. Every note
Louis [Armstrong] hit was perfection. I ran to the piano. They swang
into 'Royal Garden Blues.' I had never heard the tune before but somehow
I knew every note. I couldn't miss. I was floating in a strong deep-blue
whirlpool of jazz. It wasn't the marijuana. It was the music. The music
took me and had me and it made me right."

For the first time in American history, whites seemed to express an
appreciation for black culture. Whites perceived in the body of black
music and culture vitality, honesty, and spontaneity. In a world where
traditional idealism had vanished, where traditional religion seemed
bankrupt, perhaps black primitivism, outside of white culture, offered a
new spiritual meaning, a new salvation. Like most premodern cultures,
black culture was present-minded, with little concern for the future.
The past and the future were contained

in the present. For the "lost generation," with its faith in progress
shattered, the present had become all-important, and whites sensed,
without being able to analyze it, the present-mindedness of black music.

Music had been a significant part of the black oral tradition. This
music with its sensual rhythms was a communal expression that was
spontaneous and improvisational. Leadership in the musical performance
could emerge spontaneously in a situation where there was no division
between artist and audience, no division between the caller and the
responder. In this sense, Afro-American musical influence grew stronger;
it had an effect on the composed and restrained patterns of ragtime; on
the immediacy of the blues, where the human voice spoke in song; and on
the improvisation of jazz, where the musician conversed with his
listeners through his instrument. To participate in the music was to
live more fully. For Charlie Parker, the great black jazz musician,
"Music is your own experience. If you don't live it, it won't come out
of your horn." Music that expressed an immediate experience of sorrow
and joy, of disharmony or harmony with the universe, was religious
music. Unlike most white religion, it presented worship as a pleasurable
activity and a release from tension. Even the white musician Paul
Whiteman, who presented an extremely restrained, prettified, and
commercialized jazz to white audiences, sensed some of this meaning.
"Jazz is at once a revolt and a release," he said, and added, "This
cheerfulness of despair is deep in America. That is the thing expressed
by that wail, that longing, that pain behind all the surface clamor and
rhythm and energy of jazz."

Black creativity exploded in the 1920s as talented blacks from across
the country came into New York to participate in the Harlem Renaissance.
Young poets, novelists, playwrights, composers flowered in an
environment of black pride established by an older generation of
intellectuals who were editing militant periodicals-- The Messenger, The
Crusader, Challenge Magazine, The Crisis. The two generations agreed on
the militancy expressed by the young poet Claude McKay: *

If we must die--let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an
inglorious spot, While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

* Claude McKay, "If We Must Die," Selected Poems of Claude McKay

(New York: Bookman Associated, 1953), p. 36.

doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

Making their mock at our accursed lot ...

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

But they disagreed on the form of the militancy. The young did not want
to continue to offer themselves to whites as Christlike salvation
figures; nor did they want to move in the direction of economic
radicalism as the sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois was
advocating. Indeed, their confusion about the issues of sexuality and
spirituality seemed to relate them more to the white intellectuals of
their generation than to the older generation of blacks who affirmed so
strongly their commitment to black Christianity and to Victorian sexual
morality.

The uncertainty of black poets and novelists further separated them from
their white patrons, who provided financial support for their art.
Whites wanted certainty from blacks, the certainty of an uncomplicated
biological primitivism. "Unfortunately, I did not feel the rhythms of
the primitive surging through me," complained the poet Langston Hughes,
"and so I could not live and write as though I did. I was Chicago and
Kansas City and Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to
be."

Established black leaders--DuBois, Benjamin Brawley, Kelly Miller,
Charles W. Chestnutt--did not understand the tortured soul searching of
Jean Toomer's novel Cane, or Nella Larsen's novel Quicksand. And Countee
Cullen lamented in his poem, "Yet I Do Marvel."*

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him
sing!

A few black poets, however, among them Langston Hughes and Sterling
Brown, rejected the image of the biological primitive and began to
define their sense of a black cultural tradition. The black
establishment had nothing but contempt for blues and jazz in the 1920s.
Accepting the white definition of art as something created by an
exceptional artist, they dismissed popular music as worthless. But
Hughes argued that black poets should look to the blues for inspiration.
"To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his
heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor

* Countee Cullen, in On These I Stand (New York: Harper & Row, 1947).

that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with
tears." And he added that the black writer must reject the implicit
motivation "I want to be white." Only the black masses, Hughes argued,
were free from that aspiration; only they kept alive a separate black
culture. Sterling Brown, a professor of English at the black school
Howard University, was prevented from bringing jazz on campus, but his
poems reminded the respectable black middle class of the reality of
existence for most black people in America:

O Ma Rainey,

Li'l an' low,

Sing us 'bout de hard luck

Roun' our do':

Sing us 'bout de lonesome road

We mus' go. . . .*

The newly arrived black masses in the northern cities also responded to
a call for black pride from Marcus Garvey, who founded the Universal
Negro Improvement Association in 1914. The UNIA spread from New York to
many other cities. Garvey's message was that black is beautiful; he told
lower-income blacks that they should rejoice in being blacker than the
colored aristocrats like DuBois. "Sometimes we hear he is a Frenchman
and another time he is Dutch and when it is convenient, he is a Negro.
Now I have no Dutch, I have no French, I have no Anglo Saxon to imitate:
I have but the ancient glories of Ethiopia to imitate." The black, he
insisted, must develop "a distinct racial type of civilization of his
own and work out his salvation in his motherland, Africa." For Garvey,
there was no hope for blacks in white America. Whites were devils who
could not be redeemed. Ultimately, blacks would have to return to Africa
to escape contamination from white evil. In the meantime, blacks should
support each other by dealing only with black businesses. The UNIA
organized groceries, laundries, restaurants, a printing plant, a hotel,
and the Black Star Steamship Line. The United States government
convicted Garvey of mail fraud and deported him in 1926 as an
undesirable alien (he was a native of the West Indies). Both the
black-pride movement and Garvey's efforts collapsed with the coming of
the Great Depression. Last hired, and first fired, blacks struggled for
physical survival through the economic catastrophe of the 1930s.

* Sterling Brown, "Ma Rainey," in B. A. Botkin, ed., Folk-Say: A
Regional Miscellany, 1930 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1930),
p. 277.

* * *

"We are entering a new era," declared Henry Ford in 1920. "Our new
thinking and new doing are bringing us a new world, and a new heaven,
and a new earth, for which prophets have been looking from time
immemorial." Business and political leaders, unlike artists,
intellectuals, and religious leaders of the 1920s, did not feel a sense
of postwar disillusionment. "Our country," declared Herbert Hoover, "has
entered upon an entirely new era." President Warren Harding agreed that
"at the moment, we are on the threshold of a new era."

Economic and political leaders at the outset of the new decade believed
that progressivism had finally realized a fully rational and scientific
economy and society. The evangelistic efforts of Frederick W. Taylor,
the efficiency expert, to spread the gospel of scientific management had
been institutionalized in a Taylor Society in 1911. And in 1914, Henry
Ford had successfully installed a moving assembly line in his Highland
Park plant outside Detroit which reduced the time needed to assemble a
car from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. Ford was as certain as
Taylor that the souls of workers were saved by forcing them to accept
the discipline of the assembly line. "The natural thing to do is work,"
Ford argued. "Human ills flow largely from attempting to escape the
natural course. The day's work is a great thing--a very great thing!
Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation." For Taylor and
Ford, people tried to escape from the naturalness of work through the
unnaturalness of their imaginations. But the application of Taylor's
time and motion studies to the workday allowed the worker no free time
for daydreaming. The well-organized factory kept the employee busy every
moment, and Ford rejoiced that "the net result is the reduction of the
necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his
movements to a minimum." The assembly line ran constantly by the logic
of linear time. "The most beautiful things in the world are those from
which all excess has been eliminated," Ford exhorted. "We must cut out
useless parts and simplify necessary ones."

By 1914, the fictional heroes of such popular magazines as the Saturday
Evening Post, which reached the new urban-industrial middle class,
operated in harmony with the visions of Taylor and Ford. In the 1890s,
at a time when this class was trying to bring order out of chaos,
fictional heroes had Napoleonic characteristics. But the need for a man
of will and militant action, the need for a

Theodore Roosevelt, evidently had passed by 1914. It appeared that order
already had been imposed on chaos, and sustaining that order demanded
administrative heroes. "You might readily think of him as a machine of a
man, with no waste words or motion, who was organizing a machine of
men." This was the ideal hero presented in the middle-class magazines of
1914. And World War I, unlike the Spanish-American War, had no military
hero like Theodore Roosevelt. Instead, it was an administrator of food
supplies, Herbert Hoover, who fulfilled the desire of the urban middle
class for a hero "who could take over existing organizations and run
them with a minimum of human friction and a maximum of practical
results." In an article in the Saturday Evening Post Hoover was said to
have given the country "clean, efficient action." He was "always there
with the goods." He always "could put things through." He established a
"methodical system" at "incredibly low cost."

A national Chamber of Commerce, organized in 1912, had responded to war
in Europe by asking for military preparedness. Between 1914 and 1917,
business leaders argued that such preparedness depended upon a mobilized
economy which "will make individual manufacturers and businessmen and
the government share equally in responsibility for the safety of the
nation." These leaders persuaded Woodrow Wilson to recognize their
Industrial Preparedness Committee. "Twentieth-century warfare," declared
the automobile executive Howard E. Coffin, "demands that the blood of
the soldier must be mingled with from three to five parts of the sweat
of the man in the factories, mills, mines, and fields of the nation in
arms." When the war came, this organization of business, political, and
military leaders first became the national Defense Advisory Commission
and then the War Industries Board (WIB).

Run by Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street investor, the WIB planned and
regulated much of the national economy. It avoided price competition as
it placed contracts with large corporations without competitive bidding.
The government also created a Food Administration, headed by Herbert
Hoover, a Fuel Administration, and a Railroad Administration. In
addition to a Shipping Board and a War Trade Board, the government
established a National War Labor Board which rewarded loyal union
leaders by encouraging the eight-hour day and higher wages. The
Committee on Public Information mobilized college professors in its
scholarship division to write propaganda for the war effort. Many of the
most eminent historians helped to shape an image of Germany as a
monstrous

n

nation as they encouraged their students to enlist. For one of them, Guy
Stanton Ford, "In the vicious guttural language of Kultur, the degree
A.B. means Bachelor of Atrocities."

The federal government had encouraged patriotic organizations to
scrutinize the teaching of American history in high schools and
colleges. It also urged individuals to spy on their neighbors. After the
Russian Revolution came under the control of Bolsheviks who concluded
peace negotiations with Germany, the government encouraged people to
identify Germany and Communist Russia as common enemies. It also
identified the American Socialist party with these enemy nations. Eugene
Debs, Rose Pastor Stokes, and many other Socialist leaders were
imprisoned for opposing American participation in the war.

This wartime crusade for conformity had carried over into 1919. In the
national capital, the Washington Post reported that "the crowd burst
into cheering and hand clapping" when an irate citizen shot a critic of
a patriotic pageant. In Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit a
citizen for killing a man who had said, "To hell with the United
States." In Connecticut, a salesman for a clothing store was sentenced
to prison for calling Lenin "one of the brainiest" men in the world. "If
I had my way with those ornery wild eyed socialists," declared Billy
Sunday, the nation's most powerful evangelist, "I would stand them up
before a firing squad." Senator McKellar of Tennessee advocated the
establishment of a penal colony on Guam for political prisoners. And
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer set in motion widespread raids,
breaking into private homes and union meeting halls without warrants to
arrest thousands of suspected radicals. The accused were held without
bail, denied lawyers, and often beaten after being chained and marched
through the streets. Most of those arrested were ultimately released.
But in Massachusetts two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Van
zetti, were convicted of murder, more for their radicalism than from the
evidence. Judge Thayer, who presided, declared that he wanted to get
"those anarchist bastards." Palmer helped to deport radicals, arguing
that "we must purify the sources of America's population and keep it
pure." He declared "I am myself an American and I love to preach my
doctrine before 100 percent Americans, because my platform is undiluted
Americanism." He established a special antiradical division, headed by
young J. Edgar Hoover, within the Department of Justice. The New York
State legislature expelled its five Socialist members despite the legal
status of the Socialist party.

When ALL unions, which had grown to a membership of five million in
1920, reacted to the dramatic inflation of 1918 and 1919 by engaging in
a wave of strikes, corporate leaders fought back by labeling ALL unions
as radical, "connected with Russian Bolshevism, aided by Hun money."
Skilled workers decided to make the first effort to unionize the steel
companies since the disastrous defeat of labor in 1890. Continuing to
reject the idea of an industrywide union, they organized in twenty-four
separate groups, each associated with the ALL. After the strikers had
lost $100,000,000 in wages and twenty lives to the troops guarding the
plants, their effort collapsed.

As the Socialist party disintegrated in the years after World War I and
gradually diminished as a political force, the ALL lost its appeal to
business as a safe alternative to socialism. The ALL then became the
sole rival of business, and corporate leadership moved to limit its
power. Between 1920 and 1930, membership in the ALL slipped from five
million to less than three. Thousands of spies were hired to infiltrate
labor groups and to identify leaders who not only were fired but also
were blacklisted across the country. The National Association of
Manufacturers, supported by the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs and most of the
newspapers and magazines, mobilized a movement for its "American Plan"
that would replace "union shops" with "open shops." Business groups
urged businessmen who had accepted unionization to break up the unions
in their plants. In this way, whole communities, among them San
Francisco, which had significant unionization, were transformed into
"open shop" cities. Many workers were forced to sign "yellow dog"
contracts in which they promised that they would not join a union,
contracts that were enforced in the courts. Both the federal and state
courts were overwhelmingly anti-union throughout the decade, issuing
injunctions that made strikes and picketing almost impossible.

Many of the larger corporations established company unions as part of an
effort to create a sense of team loyalty. Personnel managers listened to
the grievances of workers and helped them organize recreational groups.
The personnel manager was a product of the business schools of the
decade, which were dedicated to scientific management. Between 1919 and
1924, 117 colleges added courses in business administration, and the
pioneering schools, such as Harvard, were increasing their programs at
the graduate level and engaged in massive building programs.

Within the political context of this corporate growth and confidence,
the Republican party at its convention in 1920 could afford to choose an
obvious nonleader, Warren G. Harding, for its presidential candidate.
Harding and the other Republican Presidents of the 1920s--Calvin
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover--symbolized the confidence of the corporate
leaders that direct political power was no longer necessary to protect
the marketplace from its domestic or international enemies. With the
Republicans able to deliver 61 percent of the vote for Harding in 1920,
the only challenge to the political domination of the corporation came
from within the Republican party itself. Senators like LaFollette of
Wisconsin, Norris of Nebraska, Borah of Idaho, and Johnson of California
cooperated in the establishment of a "farm bloc" that was critical of
"monopoly" capitalism while calling for government support of farmers
caught in a deteriorating economic situation. This "farm bloc" convinced
Congress to pass the McNary-Haugen plan by which the government would
buy surplus farm crops to sell, if need be, at a loss on world markets.
But Coolidge successfully vetoed this legislation in 1927 and 1928.

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Secretary of Commerce
Herbert Hoover, who shaped foreign policy in the Harding administration,
were determined to carry on Wilson's plans for America's world
leadership. Hoover had disagreed with Wilson on the need for American
participation in the League of Nations because he feared that political
commitments made within the structure of the League might introduce
irrational and unpredictable elements into the world marketplace. But
Hughes and Hoover, like Wilson, wanted to contain radicalism and to
stabilize the world by expanding the American economy into foreign
markets. They believed this expansion would preserve the political order
of the rest of the world and at the same time benefit the American
economy because "the vast increase in the surpluses of manufactured
goods must find a market outside the United States."

These Republican leaders moved vigorously to use American influence to
stabilize Europe and Asia. To restore the economic health of the Western
European nations and contain Communism, they advocated the restoration
of the German economy. They encouraged American bankers to make large
loans to Germany and pressured England and France to reduce the
reparations they were demanding from Germany. In addition to the Dawes
Plan of 1924 and the Young Plan of 1929 designed to accomplish these
economic goals, American foreign-policy makers urged the Western
European

nations to guarantee their mutual borders in the Locarno Pact of 1925.
The treaty significantly left the borders of Eastern Europe without
guarantees in the hope that the Soviet Union might be reduced in size.

Hughes and Hoover called for a meeting of the major Asian powers in
Washington, D.C. At the Washington Conference of 1921, the United
States, Japan, England, and France agreed to guarantee the political
status quo in East Asia, to allow China to be developed under the
philosophy of the Open Door, and to stop an arms race by limiting the
size of each nation's navy. But the hope of the corporate leaders for a
new era in foreign policy was as shortlived as their hope would be for a
new era in the domestic economy.

The significant new magazine of the 1920s was System, dedicated to
helping business accept rational leadership. "New conditions have called
a new type of man to lead the new kind of business organization,"
declared Walter Gifford, the president of AT&T. "These men must take a
long view ahead because the company is going to be in business long
after they are dead." The new statesman of industry was to be the kind
of leader "who has greater reverence for scientific method than for the
traditions of his class." Herbert Hoover was seen as that kind of
statesman of industry. Elected President in 1928, it was believed that
he would bring the rationality of the business world to the irrational
world of politics.

Hoover, the son of an Iowa blacksmith, had become a multimillionaire by
1914, developing his talents first as a mining engineer in Africa, Asia,
and Europe and then as a shrewd investor and administrator of his
international business interests. As secretary of commerce under Harding
and Coolidge, Hoover worked energetically to persuade the large
corporations to cooperate in trade associations. The three or four
companies that dominated each of the areas of major production such as
autos, steel, and rubber could plan their futures methodically if they
would agree to share the market, fix wages, and set prices. This
rational planning fit the concept of linear time. With such
coordination, Hoover was certain that the nation had forever left
business cycles behind. Within the framework of the corporation, the
assembly line would streamline production and distribute an unceasing
flow of goods for American consumers.

In 1928, as Hoover prepared to succeed Coolidge as President, both were
ecstatic about the dramatic increase of productivity during the first
eight years of the decade. Cars, refrigerators, telephones, and radios
had become a part of the lives of most Americans. All limits on human
experience seemed to have been broken by the productive capacity of the
assembly line. "The man who builds a factory builds a temple, and the
man who works there worships there," exulted Coolidge. "We have seen the
people of America create a new heaven and a new earth." And for Hoover,
"The almost unbelievable magic of industry during the truly incredible
decade just past has been so continuously amazing as to lead the mere
inexpert bystander to be ready for almost anything in the field of
material achievement."

When Hoover took the oath as President in March 1929, he was proud and
confident. "We are a happy people--the statistics prove it. We have more
cars, more bathtubs, oil furnaces, silk stockings, bank accounts than
any other people on earth." Then in October 1929 the stodc market
crashed. Unemployment was two million in 1928, three million in 1929,
four million in 1930, seven million in 1931, twelve million in 1932, and
fifteen million in 1933. Industrial production dropped by 50 percent,
and national income fell from $82 billion to $40 billion during these
four terrible years.

Hoover saw no major weaknesses in the American economy. He knew that
corporate profits had increased at least 60 percent in the 1920s as
industrial production increased 40 percent. He knew that the national
government had been able to reduce its debt from $24 billion to $16
billion between 1920 and 1930. With surpluses flowing into the national
treasury, he had supported legislation in 1926 that reduced income,
estate, and gift taxes for the rich. He had been concerned that farm
income had dropped from $22 billion in 1919 to $8 billion in 1928 and
would drop to $3 billion by 1933. Hoover hoped to solve the problem by
having farmers join associations that would enable them to control
prices and production in the way that large corporations did through
their trade associations. What proved easy for corporate producers of
cars and steel proved impossible for the hundreds of thousands of
farmers who produced cotton or wheat or corn. They kept competing with
one another, trying to produce more, and continued to drive the price of
their crops down. Six million rural Americans were forced off the land
in the 1920s by this economic downslide and by a new breakthrough in
farm mechanization caused by the introduction of the gasoline-powered
tractor. These unskilled workers migrated into cities, where there was
little demand for their labor.

Even though most immigration was cut off by legislation in 1921

and 1924 and the birthrate continued to decline, unemployment persisted
throughout the 1920s. With only a 10 percent increase in average wages
for the decade, most city dwellers could not afford new housing, and
there was significant unemployment in the construction industry.
Meanwhile, the dynamic rate of growth in radios, refrigerators, and cars
had leveled off by 1928.

Increasingly, the new consumer economy had depended upon advertising to
create demand for the products of the assembly line and for credit to
make it possible for low income people to indulge these cultivated
desires. In 1914, $250 million was spent on advertising in magazines.
This figure doubled by 1919 and reached $3 billion by 1929. The mass
magazines--Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Ladies' Home Journal,
Woman's Home Companion--no longer considered their readers, as had the
nineteenth-century magazines, to be patrons of literature or citizens to
be enlightened. Rather they approached their readers as a great market
of consumers. By 1929, these consumers had incurred $5 billion of time
payment debt. But it was the upper classes, profiting the most from the
prosperity of the 1920s, that went furthest into debt. They gambled on
the unlimited nature of the stock market. The average of industrial
stocks in 1924 was 106; by 1927, it rose to 245. Banks and insurance
companies increased their loans to people investing in the market from
$1 billion in 1924 to $9 billion in 1929. By the summer of 1929, the
market had reached 449, driven up by the frenzy of investment. Then in
October, the crash came, and the market continued to plummet until it
reached a low of 28 in 1932.

Hoover believed that the weakness of the European economy had pulled
down the economy of the United States in 1929. He revealed a basic
contradiction in his outlook by stressing the soundness of an
independent American economy but also emphasizing the need for American
business to expand overseas if it was to remain healthy. The United
States had been a debtor nation in 1914, having borrowed money from
Europe to develop its -industrial potential. By 1920. however, this
position was reversed, and European nations owed the United States $10
billion. Until the stock-market crash in 1929, American bankers
continued to lend money in Europe, especially Germany, keeping the
European economy, which had been badly weakened by World War I, from
collapsing. American bankers also moved to replace European investment
in Latin America and Asia, and the world owed American investors more

than $20 billion by 1929. This web of economic interdependence was badly
shaken by the crash that began in America in 1929.

Hoover refused to break the tradition that relief was a local and state
responsibility. American business leaders were aware in 1914 that
England and Germany, the major European industrial nations, had
implemented certain social services: unemployment compensation, medical
insurance, and pensions for the retired. As an alternative to these
social-welfare policies, businessmen had decided to hold yearly
Community Chest drives in their towns and cities to provide private
charity for the poor, the ill, and the elderly. But with unemployment
approaching 40 percent in most of the major cities, private charities
proved utterly inadequate. So, too, did the efforts of the city and
state governments.

As people literally starved, they resorted to city garbage. Scenes like
this one reported in a Chicago newspaper became commonplace: "Around the
truck which was unloading garbage and other refuse, were about
thirty-five men, women, and children. As soon as the truck pulled away
from the pile, all of them started digging with sticks, some with their
hands, grabbing bits of food and vegetables." A survey in New York City
in 1932 reported that 20 percent of the children were suffering from
malnutrition. When Russia asked Americans to apply for six thousand
skilled jobs in 1931, it received a hundred thousand applications.

Hoover feared that federal relief would corrupt the American character.
People would no longer feel the spiritual pressure to become self-made
successes; they would lose their ambition. In America, Hoover declared,
"It is as if we set a race. We, through free and universal education,
provide the training of the runners; we give to them an equal start; we
provide in the government the umpire of fairness in the race. The winner
is he who shows the greatest ability, and the greatest character." But
by 1931, Hoover was asking Congress to create the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation. The purpose of the RFC was to loan money to private
corporations to keep them from collapsing. Otherwise, the corporate
failures might ruin the banks and the mortgage and life-insurance
companies that had loaned them money and undermine the entire capitalist
system. The fear that forced Hoover to request the RFC was immense. To
bring politics into the marketplace was to profane the sacred. And yet
Hoover felt that he must be the first American President to use the
artificial power of the federal government to try to control a business
cycle.

Soon after he took office in 1929, Hoover faced another major threat to
his ideal of a rational marketplace. Imperial Japan, heedless of
American plans, moved troops into the northern Chinese province of
Manchuria. But in 1931 Hoover refused to use military power to check
this Japanese expansion. An important reason for his refusal to
compromise his principles in the foreign-policy crisis was the fear of
the Soviet Union. Hoover, like other American business leaders, had been
terrified by the success of the Bolshevik revolution. The United States
had managed to contain the revolution within Russian borders, keeping it
from spreading in Germany and destroying it where it had gained a
foothold in countries like Hungary. Hoover had decided during the 1920s
that World War I had been a civil war in which the European capitalist
nations had destroyed one another. This anarchy and self-destruction by
the supposedly reasonable middle classes had allowed Russia to fall into
Communist hands. What would happen if another such civil war, comparable
to World War I, broke out among the capitalist nations? Would such
conflict provide an environment for another rapid spread of Communist
influence? Hoover feared such an outcome.

Hoover, the Republican, feared and distrusted the Democrat Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who replaced him in March 1933. The difference between Hoover
and Roosevelt was as deep and emotional as the difference between
fundamentalist and liberal Protestants. Hoover was the fundamentalist
capitalist and Roosevelt, the liberal. Roosevelt was willing to use
political power in the marketplace without the sense of reluctance or
agonized conscience that Hoover had felt. "The country needs and demands
bold, persistent experimentation," Roosevelt had declared. "It is common
sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly, and
try another. But above all, try something." "I experimented with gold
and that was a flop," Roosevelt laughed. "Why shouldn't I experiment a
little with silver?"

Born to an old, established family, Franklin Roosevelt had not rebelled
against its model of the relaxed gentleman as had Theodore Roosevelt.
Satisfied with mediocre academic achievement at Harvard, he had
participated fully in the social life of the college. When he became
active in politics during the "progressive" years, his reform philosophy
was close to the paternalism of English conservatives. He was so sure of
his place in the social and economic order, and in the strength of that
order, that he could contemplate

the government of his class providing organized charity for the poor and
dependent masses.

Roosevelt and his advisers had revealed no dramatic or radical plans to
deal with the Great Depression during the 1932 campaign. Instead, his
speeches criticized Hoover's experiments as irresponsible. Hoover had
raised the national debt from $16 billion to $19 billion, and Roosevelt
said, "Let us have the courage to stop borrowing to meet continuing
deficits." Hoover had asked farmers to reduce their crops and livestock,
and Roosevelt said that it is a "cruel joke" to advise "farmers to allow
20 percent of their wheat lands to lie idle, to plow up every third row
of cotton, and shoot every tenth dairy cow."

When Roosevelt took office, he had received advice from the conservative
farm organizations, representing the larger farmers, to go beyond
Hoover's call for voluntary restrictions and have the federal government
set limits on production. He responded by supporting the Agricultural
Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933, which ordered the slaughter of six million
pigs and the plowing under of ten million acres of cotton. Corporate
leaders also came to Roosevelt to plead for direct government backing of
the trade associations. He responded with the National Industrial
Recovery Act of 1933. Based on the precedent of the War Industries Board
of World War I, NIRA legalized the trade-association agreements on
production and prices. Section 7(a) of the law recognized the right of
labor to bargain collectively. But most union growth in 1933 and 1934
came in the form of company unions.

Even before the quick passage of these acts by a Congress that did not
examine or debate them, Roosevelt had used his executive power to close
the national banks temporarily during his first day in office. He moved
dramatically to use the power of the national government to sustain the
property structure of the nation. From an average failure of 100 banks a
year in the 1920s, the rate of collapse had reached the catastrophic
figure of 4,004 in 1933. By his quick actions from March to June 1933,
Roosevelt had stopped the disintegration of the property structure of
the nation and the economic status quo in banking, industry, and
agriculture had successfully been sustained.

Roosevelt also checked social and economic disintegration by releasing
federal funds to the states for relief of the unemployed and the
starving. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), therefore,
was a radical means to maintain stability and

lessen the rebellious discontent of the unemployed. So too was the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which took many jobless young men out
of the cities, gave them uniforms and military discipline, and put them
into work camps. An important experiment in regional planning was
established with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which developed
the rural area along the Tennessee River and its tributaries by building
dams, fertilizer factories, and electrical generating plants.

Further stabilization of the economy came from the Home Owners' Loan
Corporation. The HOLE loaned billions to homeowners to enable them to
pay their mortgages, and the Roosevelt administration was much more
willing to use Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Under the
New Deal, the RFC loaned $10 billion to the railroads, as well as to
many large and small businesses.

All these activities, for Roosevelt, were emergency measures, with the
exception of the NIRA. Once economic disintegration had been halted, he
expected to stop deficit spending. But he believed that the political
and legal marriage of the national government and corporations was a
permanent necessity that reflected the end of American economic
expansion. "Our last frontier has long since been reached," Roosevelt
declared. "The day of the great promoter or the financial titan, to whom
we granted anything if only they would build or develop, is over."

By 1934, Roosevelt was under heavy attack from Huey Long, a senator from
Louisiana, for his lack of concern for the poor of America. Long
demanded justice for those people, not relief. His twenty-seven thousand
Share-Our-Wealth clubs spread across the entire country, reaching seven
million people. Long demanded a minimum wage for all workers and
pensions for retired people to be financed by a heavy tax on the rich.

The average age of the population had begun to increase dramatically as
the birthrate declined and the immigration of young people from Europe
ended. Americans therefore .became aware of the elderly for the first
time during the depression. Francis Townsend, a sixty-seven-year-old
doctor from California, organized a national movement of older people.
Townsend called for a pension of two hundred dollars a month for every
person over sixty. The money was to be raised by a national sales tax.

It was a series of spontaneous strikes across the country in 1934,
however, that forced Roosevelt and his advisers to consider the need

for legislation to provide some permanent security for workers and the
elderly. In 1932, Congress, no longer in awe of the demoralized
corporate leaders, passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which largely
protected labor's use of boycotts, strikes, and picketing from court
injunctions. It also outlawed the "yellow dog" contracts. Workers had
hoped that the replacement of the antilabor Republicans (in control from
1920 to 1932) by the Democrats meant a supportive administration.
Finally they decided to take matters in their own hands when Roosevelt
seemed interested only in stabilizing the status quo.

For the first time since the Civil War, workers demonstrated enough
solidarity in city after city to enable them to match the violence used
against them by the establishment. In Minneapolis, truck drivers,
struggling to unionize, mobilized support from twenty thousand workers
to defend themselves successfully against the police and management
vigilantes who attempted to break their strike.

These militant strikers were condemned by the ALL leadership. The older
labor leaders did not recognize that with the end of massive European
immigration in 1914, something like an American labor force was being
created as the result of a common industrial experience shared by a
generation of workers. Rebellious ALL leaders such as John L. Lewis of
the United Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing
Workers, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers,
however, visualized the possibility of industrial unions and created the
Committee for Industrial Organization to encourage such unionization
within the ALL. Met with hostility by top ALL leadership, they withdrew
to begin a new labor movement, the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO). The CIO rapidly gained two million members as the newfound sense
of worker solidarity exploded in massive illegal sit down strikes where
the workers occupied automobile and steel plants. "It was like we was
soldiers, holding the fort," one striker remembered. "It was like war.
The guys with me became my buddies." No longer able to count on federal
troops or even the police as they had before 1929, corporations like
General Motors and Ford spent a million dollars a year for spies and a
private police force to fight the strikers. But worker discipline
gradually defeated the automobile and steel companies and established
CIO unions throughout these industries.

In his message to Congress in 1935, Roosevelt declared that "we

have not weeded out the overprivileged and we have not effectively
lifted up the underprivileged." He was thus willing to accept the Wagner
Labor Relations Act, which established a National Labor Relations Board.
The NLRB conducted elections to determine whether workers wanted to
unionize. Later Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act, which
established a forty-hour workweek and a minimum wage of fifty cents an
hour. A Wealth Tax Act in 1935 increased the income tax for upper-income
groups and also established higher inheritance and gift taxes. A Social
Security Act was also passed in 1935. Old-age pensions were to be
provided in the future when workers reached sixty-five. They were to be
payments into a government fund from their wages matched by payments
from their employers. Large numbers of workers, however, were not
included within social security in 1935. The law also provided funds to
the states to pay unemployment compensation. Finally, federal funds went
to the states to support the children of dependent mothers. Roosevelt
also increased the use of federal funds to provide jobs for the
unemployed in the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

"I am fighting Communism, Huey Longism, Coughlinism, Townsendism,"
Roosevelt declared. "I want to save our system, the Capitalist system."
Unlike Hoover, however, he was flexible in the means he used to sustain
the existing property patterns in the country. To head off radicalism,
he was willing, in an emergency, to engage in deficit spending to keep
unemployment under control. But when the economy began to make a modest
recovery in 1936, he cut back on WPA expenditures. This cut in
government expenditures produced a sharp recession in 1937, and
unemployment again doubled, from five to ten million. So Roosevelt, the
pragmatist, again increased WPA expenditures. Not until his 1940 budget
message to Congress did Roosevelt speak of the possibility of permanent
governmental manipulation of the economy to sustain prosperity.

"The end of American history"

******************

Chapter 15.

War, Economic Prosperity, and Consensus, 1936-60

Re-election of FDR Japan and Germany threaten American neutrality

War is declared War economy means economic prosperity

FDR on social issues

Truman completes FDR's fourth term

Cold war with the Soviet Union: Marshall Plan and NATO

The collapse of Nationalist China

Korean conflict

Eisenhower, the Red scare, and the arms race The end of American
innocence

"Foreign markets must be regained if America's producers are to rebuild
a full and enduring domestic prosperity for our people," Roosevelt
declared in 1935. "There is no other way if we would avoid painful
economic dislocations, social readjustments, and unemployment."

Roosevelt had been confused about the place of the United States in
world affairs between 1933 and 1935. He had rejected Hoover's thesis
that the depression was caused by international circumstances. He
refused to cooperate with the London Economic Conference, which had
tried to stabilize world currencies in 1933. By 1935, however, Roosevelt
and his advisers were sure that foreign trade was essential to American
prosperity, and he was ready to use political and military power to
protect that trade from the increasing threats of Japan and Germany to
expand their commercial interests in Asia and Europe.

Roosevelt's intentions were frustrated, however, by a rising tide of
neutralist sentiment within the United States. The diminished prestige
of the corporations caused by the depression made it possible for the
"farm bloc" senators to strengthen their critique of a foreign policy
based upon corporate expansion. Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota
began an investigation into the profits of munitions makers in World War
I. The public outrage that followed the revelations of his committee
resulted in the passage of Neutrality Acts in 1935, 1936, and 1937,
which were designed to keep the American economy from being integrated
into that of warring nations, as had happened between 1914 and 1917.

The "farm bloc" senators had the support of many of the Protestant
ministers and university professors who had been enthusiastic about
American participation in World War I. During the 1920s and 1930s most
historians, led by Charles Beard, became "revisionists" in their
interpretation of the causes of World War I. We had assumed. Beard
wrote, that the war was a battle between democracy and feudalism. But an
analysis of the newly opened official archives of Russia, Germany, and
Austria revealed, Beard continued, that the war had been caused by
capitalist ambitions in each country. American bankers and munitions
makers, through their clever use

of propaganda, were the most responsible for the entry of the United
States into this capitalist civil war. Now in the 1920s and 1930s, the
same forces were again at work. "If the last World War grew mainly out
of commercial rivalry," Beard declared, "and if we now see signs of a
more intense rivalry than ever, supported by all the powerful agencies
of government, what then shall we say of the future?" His answer and
that of many other intellectuals, among them John Dewey, was isolation.

After he had won re-election, Roosevelt began a campaign to reverse this
trend to neutrality. He made a major speech at Chicago in 1937 warning
of the dangers of Japanese "aggression" as well as that of Germany and
Italy. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933. Part of his
plan to end economic and social chaos was to defy the Treaty of
Versailles and the League of Nations and rearm Germany. He also planned
to bolster the economy by using national political power to expand
German export markets. Italy, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini,
also was attempting to overcome economic problems through overseas
expansion.

With Japan challenging the Open Door policy of the United States in
China and Germany making similar challenges to the American policy in
Europe, the Roosevelt administration felt even more threatened by the
attempts of these nations to establish markets in Latin America, an area
that American economic leaders had considered a special preserve of the
United States since 1900. "We're just going to wake up and find that
Italy, Germany, and Japan have taken over Mexico," warned Henry
Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury.

Roosevelt failed to rally public opinion to his position in 1937, but he
did persuade Congress to enlarge the navy in 1938. Not until 1939, as
Europe approached the outbreak of World War II, could Roosevelt persuade
Congress to modify the Neutrality Acts and end the embargo on the sale
of arms. In the spring of 1940, his campaign for greater political and
military involvement against Japan, Germany, and Italy led to the
passage of a huge $18 billion appropriation for military preparedness,
and in September 1940, Congress passed the first peacetime conscription
act. Roosevelt, who had been transferring government armaments to
private interests so they could be sold to England, acted directly by
issuing an executive agreement in which he made a gift of fifty
destroyers to England in return for the right to establish American
military bases on several British possessions.

As the election of 1940 approached, however, public-opinion polls
continued to indicate that the overwhelming majority of Americans wanted
to keep out of the war in Europe. Roosevelt, who had arranged to have
the Democratic Convention draft him to run for an unprecedented third
term, promised in his campaign speeches that "I have said this before,
but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to
be sent into any foreign wars."

Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, approved Roosevelt's foreign
policy. His nomination represented a victory for those Republicans who
agreed with Roosevelt that political and military power must be used to
defend the international marketplace. Within the Republican party, there
was a tendency for corporate leaders from the East to support Willkie's
philosophy of "One World," while business interests from the Midwest
tended to align with the America First Committee, which was opposed to
military intervention. These "isolationists," headed by Senator Robert
Tail of Ohio, supported Hoover's contention that "it is fairly certain
that capitalism cannot survive American participation in this war."

After his victory in 1940, Roosevelt moved rapidly to integrate the
United States with the war effort of England, now standing alone against
Nazi Germany. He persuaded Congress to pass a Lend Lease Act in early
1941, making it possible for the government to give England all the arms
and supplies it needed. Roosevelt and his military advisers entered into
secret conferences with English leaders on the overall strategy of the
war effort against Germany and Japan. These talks were based on the
assumption that the United States soon would enter the war. The
agreement was to defeat Germany first and then turn to Japan. Through
the summer and fall of 1941, Roosevelt ordered the navy to attack German
submarines that interfered with supply ships bound for England as far as
Iceland, where bases had been taken over by the United States. In
October 1941, Roosevelt announced to the American people on radio that
"America has been attacked by German rattlesnakes of the sea" and "the
shooting has started."

The undeclared war in the North Atlantic became a declared war when the
Japanese armed forces attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Throughout the previous year, Roosevelt and
Secretary of State Cordell Hull had refused to sell crucial resources,
especially oil and steel, to the Japanese. This embargo had created a
political crisis in Japan between those who desired further Japanese
expansion short of war with the

United States and those who insisted that war was inevitable. Now the
war party demanded an immediate war to gain the economic supplies denied
to Japan by America. They argued that a delay would weaken the Japanese
resource base and so began to prepare for an attack on the United
States. Meanwhile, the peace party was given a last chance to negotiate
the reopening of trade with the United States. American intelligence had
cracked the Japanese secret codes and knew of these plans. Roosevelt and
Hull understood the consequences that would follow from their refusal to
negotiate, but somehow the commanders at Pearl Harbor were not
adequately prepared. On December 8, Roosevelt asked Congress to
recognize that a state of war existed with Japan. In the Senate, the
vote was 82 to 0; in the House, 388 to 1. Germany and Italy, bound to
Japan by treaties, now declared war against the United States. The
formal declaration of war had come, even though public-opinion polls in
1945 indicated that 80 percent of Americans still believed that
President Roosevelt had violated his campaign pledge of 1940 to keep
America out of war.

The outbreak of World War II, however, enabled Roosevelt to forge a new
alliance with corporate leaders. In 1939, anticipating war and calling
on his experience with the "industrial-military complex" of 1917,
Roosevelt appointed a War Resources Board headed by Edward Stettinius of
U.S. Steel. And after American entry into World War II, Roosevelt was
able to fulfill his dream of a planned economy dominated by large
private corporations operating without price competition. He was able
once again to duplicate the experience of World War I with a War
Production Board, a Food Administration, an Office of Economic
Stabilization, a War Manpower Commission, and an Office of Price
Administration. This planning went further, however, than that of World
War I and included rationing. As in World War I, the planned economy was
run by corporate leaders--William Knudsen and Charles Wilson of General
Motors, Ralph Budd of the Great Northern Railroad, William Jeffer of the
Union Pacific, and Donald Nelson of Sears, Roebuck as well as Stettinius
from U.S. Steel.

The government promised that there was to be no antitrust activity to
hinder cooperation and coordination among the giant corporations. Nor
need they concern themselves with competition, since government
contracts were given on a cost-plus basis in which the government agreed
to pay the corporations any unexpected manufacturing expenses and
financed the conversion of factories to war production.

Business leaders had bitterly attacked Roosevelt for doubling the
national debt from $19 to $43 billion to help the poor and the
unemployed. During the war, he found that they were willing to accept
unlimited deficit spending for national defense. Between 1940 and 1945,
$200 billion was added to the national debt. Industrial production
doubled by 1942 and increased dramatically again by 1945. More
industrial plants were built than during the years from 1929 to 1941.
Full employment was reached for the first time in the twentieth century.
Workers' income increased 50 percent while corporate profits doubled.

When the war ended in 1945, the country had never been so prosperous.
But a pattern had been set that would lead to severe economic problems
by 1975. Between 1945 and 1970, the federal government spent $1,000
billion, 60 percent of its total budget, on defense spending. The
development of a cold war with Communist Russia and China at the end of
the 1940s provided a convenient rationale for massive government
spending that was acceptable to business, organized labor, and the
average voter. Large corporations, in making an alliance with the
Roosevelt New Deal during World War II, had accepted the
administration's inclusion of organized labor within the establishment.
Union strength, which had risen from three million in 1933 to ten
million in 1941, increased to fifteen million by 1945. As membership
increased another two million by 1950, labor leaders gave their blessing
to the cold war and the large-scale government spending that accompanied
it.

The bulk of this government spending passed to the largest corporations,
where unions had most strongly established themselves. As Charles Wilson
of General Motors said during the war, "This defense business is big
business. Small plants can't make tanks, airplanes, or other complex
armaments." After the war, Wilson as a member of President Eisenhower's
Cabinet further clarified the relationship: "What's good for General
Motors is good for the country."

Roosevelt's success in leading the United States into a war against the
wishes of the majority of voters depended upon his popularity in the
area of domestic politics. From 1933 to 1940, Roosevelt had given groups
outside the male WASP establishment a new sense of participation in
national life. Women, Catholics, blacks, lower- middle-class white
southerners, academic intellectuals, and artists,

who could not obtain a place in the business leadership of the 1920s
were mobilized by Roosevelt in the Democratic party of the 1930s to
support his New Deal programs. Roosevelt tried to give them the same
sense of their necessary and invaluable participation in the war effort
of 1941-45.

The Republicans had been the majority party from 1896 to 1932. The
ability of the Democrats to replace them reflected the steep Republican
losses in the big cities. Jews together with Catholics outnumbered the
Protestant populations in most northern cities by 1900, but it took them
a generation to develop a sense of American politics and to establish
institutions of political solidarity. By 1924, Catholic political power
was strong enough to make Alfred E. Smith, an Irish Catholic from New
York City, a serious contender for the presidential nomination of the
Democratic party. Smith was defeated in 1924 by the resistance of the
southern Democrats, desperately committed to the preservation of WASP
political leadership. But in 1928 Smith carried the Democratic
Convention. His candidacy led large numbers of white southerners,
especially in the border states, to bolt from the party and vote for
Hoover. In the midst of the smashing Republican national victory,
however, there was a dramatic shift of voting in northern cities, which
went for Smith by a slim margin. Many Catholics voted for the first time
in a national election. Four years later, when these cities provided
huge majorities for Roosevelt, the upper-middle-class white Protestant
elite had lost its ability to monopolize the leadership of urban
industrial America. It was the increasing political strength of the
Catholics which helped encourage Roosevelt to support labor unions and
social security between 1933 and 1935. In 1919, the Catholic Bishops
Program for Social Reconstruction had called for minimum-wage laws and
for unemployment, health, and old-age insurance. The bishops also
advocated public housing for the poor. During his campaign of 1932,
Roosevelt often had quoted from the Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, which
denounced the "immense power and despotic economic dictatorship
consolidated in the hands of the few."

Father John A. Ryan, a leading theoretician of welfare capitalism, had
appeared before Congress in 1931 asking the federal government to accept
responsibility for the relief of the poor and unemployed. Cardinal
O'Connell of Boston, Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, and Cardinal
Dougherty of Philadelphia denounced

Hoover's commitment to a "socially irresponsible capitalism" in 1932, as
did many archbishops and bishops. For them, "the Roosevelt plan of
social reconstruction is the Catholic plan." They interpreted
Roosevelt's attempt to minimize competition in the NIRA as the
legislation of the corporate social philosophy of European Catholic
thought. However, they did criticize the NIRA between 1933 and 1935 for
not doing enough to make labor a major participant in the industrial
process. Father Ryan and other priests, who took appointed positions in
the Roosevelt administration, continued to lobby for greater support for
labor as well as for social security. They were delighted when Senator
Robert Wagner, a Catholic from New York, provided the leadership to pass
legislation that encouraged the expansion of labor unions. And when the
Social Security Act was passed in 1935, Father Ryan rejoiced that it
"brings the United States up to date with Europe on the question of
social insurance."

As President, Roosevelt responded to the growing political importance of
Roman Catholics and Jews. He dramatically increased the proportion of
Catholics appointed to federal offices and placed two Catholics, James
Farley and Thomas Walsh, in his Cabinet. He also increased the
percentage of Jews in government service. Both the Jews and the
Catholics had brought an outlook of social responsibility with them when
they began arriving in large numbers in the 1880s and 1890s. As a
consequence they were more willing to support the unionization of labor
and to advocate that labor play a leadership role in national politics.

During the "progressive" era between 1890 and 1917, many Protestant
women were openly advocating social-welfare legislation. Florence
Kelley, a leader of the National Consumers League, and Jane Addams, a
leader in the settlement house movement, had called for minimum-wage and
maximum-hour laws for women workers and subsequently had concluded that
men needed the same kinds of protection. Women activists also endorsed
programs for health, old-age, and unemployment insurance as well as
public housing. Although their political aspirations were blocked in the
1920s, the concept of social welfare gained support as the number of
professional social-work schools increased from fifteen to forty. When
Roosevelt broke precedent in 1933 and brought the federal government
into relief and welfare, he relied upon the experience of professional
social workers. He appointed Frances Perkins, the first

woman Cabinet member, as secretary of labor. He also called upon another
professional social worker, Harry Hopkins, to be a major administrator
of relief programs.

Roosevelt did not take any liberal positions on black issues until 1935.
Early in his administration, he informed Walter White, the head of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that
he would not support an antilynching bill because he needed southern
votes for his legislative program. But northern blacks had shifted their
allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party by 1936. Although
discriminated against in most government agencies, they still benefited
from many New Deal programs. Blacks were appointed to important
positions in the federal government for the first time in American
history under Roosevelt's administration: Robert C. Weaver and William
Hastie in the Department of the Interior, E. K. Jones in the Department
of Commerce, Laurence Oxley in the Department of Labor, Ira DeA. Reid in
the Social Security Administration, Mary Bethune in the National Youth
Administration. The President's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, visualized a
new politics in 1936 in which women, blacks, and organized labor would
play a dynamic role to end all discrimination against these minorities.
The President, however, took no public stand on discrimination against
blacks until they threatened a massive march on the national capital in
1941 to protest the failure of the government to integrate blacks into
war industries. Under this pressure, Roosevelt created a committee on
Fair Employment Practices to require corporations doing government work
to hire black workers. He did nothing, however, to end segregation in
the armed forces.

Roosevelt recruited college professors to come to Washington to serve as
specialists in his administration; a few, the "brain trust," became his
advisers and speech writers. Under the WPA, federal funds were channeled
to support playwrights, novelists, painters, and unemployed academics.
Some responded in their writings by reinforcing Roosevelt's attempt to
equate .his administration with that of Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt saw
himself, like Lincoln, as a leader in a time of great national crisis.
Roosevelt, like Lincoln, was ready to mobilize the whole nation in order
to preserve it. "Compare this panic-stricken policy of delay," Roosevelt
had declared in a campaign speech of 1932 directed against Hoover, "with
that devised to meet the emergency of war fifteen years ago. We met
specific situations with considered, relevant measures of construe

n

tive value. There were the War Industries Board, the Food and Fuel
Administration, the War Trade Board, many others." To meet the economic
crisis of the Great Depression, he called for "a whole nation mobilized
for war, economic, industrial, social, and military resources gathered
into a vast unit."

Roosevelt had hailed "the principle of national government service by
every man and woman" as early as 1917. "We may rejoice," he had written,
"that the day of the man and woman who merely expect to receive things
from the government is disappearing. The day will soon be at hand when
the Army and Navy of this great republic will be looked on by its
citizens as a normal part of their own government." Campaigning in 1936,
Roosevelt continued to evoke a sense of crisis: "Three and a half years
ago, we declared war on the depression. You and I know today that that
war is being won." For Roosevelt, it was unthinkable that he should ever
relinquish his position as commander-in-chief of this war. "I accept the
commission you have tended me. I am enlisted for the duration of the
war."

In an article in the American Historical Review of October 1973, "The
New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression," the historian
John A. Garraty has pointed out that of the four great Western
industrial nations, the United States and Germany experienced greater
economic hardships than England and France. But in 1940, both the United
States and Germany had escaped psychological depression in a way that
England and France had not. Roosevelt and Hitler, unlike the English and
French leaders, had the magic of charisma. They were able, through the
power of their personalities and the genius with which they used radio,
to persuade their followers that their countries were winning the war
against the economic depression. Roosevelt, like Hitler, inspired people
with the joy of victory. It was this power of personality joined with
the power of the role of commander-in-chief that made it possible for
Roosevelt to demand and be given a third and fourth term as President.
The cult of personality was so strong by 1944 that Roosevelt's personal
physicians were afraid to reveal to national leaders that the President
was dying even as he called for his reelection because his leadership
was indispensable in the wartime crisis.

Soon after 1941, Roosevelt and his advisers had decided that the United
States should help create a viable international organization

to replace the League of Nations. The United Nations expressed
Roosevelt's commitment to the permanent use of power in international
relations. Besides a General Assembly, there was to be a Security
Council in which the major powers, the United States, England, France,
China, and Soviet Russia, were to have permanent seats. Each member of
the Security Council was able to veto any decision reached by the
General Assembly, in which all nations were to be represented.

The structure of the UN reflected America's new image of world power.
When Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, American and English leaders
decided that it was necessary to treat the Soviet Union as an ally.
German military power was so awesome in 1941 that it was almost
impossible for Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the English prime
minister, to visualize victory over Hitler without the Russian front.
Lend-Lease aid, therefore, had been extended to the Soviet Union. Both
Roosevelt and Churchill feared, however, the expansion of Russian
Communism and supported right-wing underground groups in France, Italy,
and Greece. And when Russian troops began to push the Germans back, it
became imperative for American and English strategy to land troops in
France and drive into Germany to keep most of that country out of
Communist hands.

Roosevelt died before Germany surrendered with the Russians occupying
most of Eastern Europe. The new President, Harry Truman, soon learned
that scientists had perfected an atomic bomb. Truman ordered its use
against the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. When he heard
that the bomb had worked and obliterated most of the city and its
population, he rejoiced that "this is the greatest thing in history."
Persuaded that he must face the Russians "with an iron fist and strong
language," Truman was certain that the United States held sufficient
power to contain communism and would not have to share control of Japan
with the Soviets. For Truman, the United States stood alone as the
leader of the world. "The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be let loose
in a lawless world," he declared. "We must constitute ourselves trustees
of this new force."

Confronting the Russians with diplomatic toughness, the American
government attempted to force the Soviets to open the Communist world to
the free penetration of American capital. Government leaders agreed with
corporate executives that continued prosperity depended on the expansion
of overseas trade. "Private enterprise in

the United States," declared Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace,
"can survive only if it expands and grows." The country could not
possibly maintain full production and full employment, said labor
leaders, unless it had available a world pool of free and prosperous
consumers. And the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation
argued that surpluses "will wreck our economy unless we can find
sufficient outlets in foreign markets to help sustain the volume of
production."

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, refused to bend under this pressure
and rejected American overtures. Frustrated by his intransigence,
American leaders prepared for a "cold war" with Russia. The Truman
administration persuaded Congress to provide billions of dollars to
rebuild the economies of the Western European nations, including West
Germany. This "Marshall Plan" was followed by the establishment of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For the first time in
American history, the United States was formally committed to go to war
if any of a large number of allies were involved in war. And when the
English no longer had the economic strength to sustain a military
presence in Greece to repress communism there, the President announced
his "Truman Doctrine" and moved American troops into Greece and Turkey
to further build a wall of military containment around Russia.

It was the hope of American policy makers that if Communist Russia were
contained within this ring of military alliances, internal disorders
would erupt and bring about the overthrow of the Communist system. It
was with surprise and horror, therefore, that American policy makers
witnessed the collapse of Nationalist China under pressure from Chinese
Communists in 1949. With Japan under total American control in 1945 and
with a friendly China, Truman and his advisers had felt that Russian
Communism could not expand into Asia. They were aware that there was a
strong group of Chinese Communists in northern and western China, and
they had poured financial and military aid into the Nationalist regime
of Chiang Kai-shek. But they were not prepared for the dramatic
Nationalist collapsed and Chiang's flight to the large island of Formosa
(Taiwan).

American foreign-policy makers thought the American public would not
support a major war on the Asian mainland and so they did not send
troops to sustain Chiang. At the beginning of 1950, officials in
Washington declared that the Republic of South Korea remained outside
the American defensive perimeter in Asia. Korea,

a peninsula jutting out of the Chinese land mass, had been occupied by
Japan since the end of the nineteenth century. At the end of World War
II, it had been divided in two areas, the northern region dominated by
Russia, the southern by the United States. But when North Korea attacked
South Korea on June 25, 1950, Truman instantly committed the American
armed forces stationed in Japan to defend the Republic of South Korea.
"I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall," Truman
informed Americans, "communist leaders would be emboldened to override
nations closer to our shores." Congress supported Truman's "police
action" by tripling the defense budget and instituting peacetime
conscription on a permanent basis, measures which Truman had advocated
for several years.

The United States had dominated the United Nations since 1945 because of
its influence in Latin America, Western Europe, and the former British
Empire. In 1950, the Russian delegates to the Security Council were
absent in a protest against American control. The United States
therefore managed to get the United Nations to take responsibility for
the police action against North Korea. General Douglas MacArthur, who
had directed the American occupation of Japan, was placed in command of
the United Nations forces. MacArthur still hoped that Chiang Kai-shek's
government could be restored in China. When he drove North Korean troops
out of South Korea, he continued to move north and approached the
Chinese border. The Chinese warned the United States not to advance
farther, and when MacArthur continued his northern thrust, the Chinese
entered the fighting and pushed American and United Nations troops back
to the old border between the two Koreas. MacArthur hoped that Truman
would permit him to use atomic weapons against the Chinese Communists
and publicly criticized the President when weapons of total war were
denied. Truman removed MacArthur from his command, and a military
stalemate lasted until General Dwight Eisenhower was elected President
in 1952.

It was easier for Eisenhower as a Republican to make a compromise peace
with the Communists than it had been for Truman as a Democrat. "Liberal"
Republicans, like Wendell Willkie and Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican
presidential candidates in 1940, 1944, and 1948, had accepted the
welfare provisions of Roosevelt's New Deal and his foreign policy of
military internationalism. In 1952, the "liberal" Republicans had again
defeated the "conservatives" led by Senator Tail and nominated the war
hero Eisenhower. At the

same time as Eisenhower promised to preserve the framework of the New
Deal and to continue the foreign policy of "containment," he accused the
Democrats of being politically irresponsible. He linked the legislative
program of the New Deal with un-American radicalism and spoke of the
"creeping socialism" during "the last twenty years," which had corrupted
the United States. Eisenhower also blamed the "loss" of China on the
Democrats because they had been soft on communism.

In attacking the New Deal, Eisenhower especially criticized the academic
intellectuals in government. For Eisenhower, the "longhaired academic
men in Washington" were lacking in the masculinity necessary to defend
their country. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had persuaded
blue-collar and lower-middle-class voters that corporate leaders lacked
the vitality to save America. In 1952, the Republicans generated the
aura of vital executive leadership. They disparaged the Democratic
candidate, Adlai Stevenson, as an "egghead" intellectual who could not
understand the masses of voters.

Roosevelt had ignored civil liberties during World War II and had placed
Americans of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps. Truman had
instituted the Federal Employee Loyalty Program because "subversive
elements must be removed from the employ of the government." In 1948,
when Truman faced the opposition of another Progressive party, headed by
Henry A. Wallace, he sought to identify Wallace in the public mind with
the Communists. "I do not want and will not accept the support of Henry
Wallace and his Communists," stated the President. But the Republicans
nevertheless linked Truman and the New Deal with communism. Senator
Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin declared that "the issue between
Republicans and Democrats is clearly drawn by those that have been in
charge of twenty years of treason." And Senator Richard M. Nixon of
California announced that the Communists had "infiltrated the very
highest councils" of the Truman administration.

A prolonged "Red Scare" rolled across America from 1945 to 1955. The
U.S. Chamber of Commerce demanded that all "Communists, fellow-travelers
and dupes" be barred from jobs in "newspapers, radio, television, book
and magazine publishing, and research institutions" as well from
schools, libraries, and "large manufacturing plants." The House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), supported by many in the
Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Spellman, came to Hollywood,
where its investiga-

tions of Communist influence in the movie industry led to the
blacklisting of four hundred actors, writers, and directors. Members of
Congress, including John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Lyndon B.
Johnson, helped to pass the McCarran Act in 1950, which set up six
concentration camps across the country to hold political prisoners.
Thirty states established loyalty oaths for teachers.

Despite his military background, President Eisenhower relieved some of
the tensions of the cold war. His secretary of state, John Foster
Dulles, had called for the building of many long-range rockets armed
with atomic warheads to serve as "the deterrent of massive retaliatory
power" in a world where "the forces of good and evil are massed and
armed and opposed as rarely before in history." But faced with the rapid
success of the Soviets in developing atomic warheads and long-range
rockets, Eisenhower decided to meet with the Russian leader, Nikita
Khrushchev, to negotiate a limit to the arms race.

As the Russians placed Sputnik, an earth satellite, into orbit in 1957,
jumping ahead of America in the race to pioneer the exploration of
space, it looked as if Lenin's prophecy in 1917 might come true. The
United States had not led the world into a new urban- industrial era in
1918 and, in 1941, it had fought against Germany and Japan to restore
the status quo of 1939. Herbert Hoover's fears that another civil war
among the capitalist nations would allow communism to expand out of
Soviet Russia had been fulfilled. Many American cultural leaders were
interpreting the experience of World War II as marking the end of the
American commitment to the idea of progress, the end of the belief that
an environment of rational space and linear time could be achieved.

To justify Roosevelt's permanent intrusion of political power into the
domestic marketplace and the permanent intrusion of military power
overseas, these men declared that a major revolution had taken place in
America's cultural identity. Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant theologian,
who had been the most important critic of isolation between 1937 and
1941, became the leading interpreter of this cultural revolution. Born
in 1892, Niebuhr was a convert to liberal Protestantism and a believer
that World War I would usher in the kingdom of God on earth. After 1919,
a disillusioned Niebuhr moved to isolation and pacifism. A Detroit
minister, Niebuhr shared the views of the "lost generation" novelists
that industrialism

was irrational and destructive of human beings. "Here manual labor is a
drudgery and toil is slavery; the lowliest peasant of the dark ages had
more opportunity for self-expression than the highest paid employee in
the Ford factory." Briefly, at the beginning of the 1930s, he turned
toward Soviet Russia as he hoped that industrialism under communism
could be a rational and constructive force. "The workers control the
vast machinery of modern civilization," he said. "The future belongs to
the workers." And as the capitalist nations of Europe seemed headed for
another civil war, Niebuhr urged, "Let America hold out as an island of
sanity in an insane world."

As he lost faith in the rationality of a proletarian revolution in the
mid-1930s, Niebuhr began to create a "neo-orthodox" theology that denied
the possibility of earthly harmony for mankind. Niebuhr criticized his
former faith, liberal Protestantism, for believing that history was
progressive. And he criticized communism for holding that same faith.
Niebuhr used this Christian "realism" as the basis of his criticism of
the isolationists. Arguing the need for the United States to fight the
evil represented by Nazi Germany, Niebuhr denied that America was a
virtuous New World that needed to be segregated from an evil Old World.
"Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride," he wrote. "Our
version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and
made a new beginning."

If Americans were part of the same sinful brotherhood of mankind as
Europeans. Niebuhr continued, then "the tragic element in a human
situation is the conscious choice of evil for the sake of good."
Americans must choose the lesser evil of war to defeat the greater evil
of Nazism. For Niebuhr, America had no rational space to preserve from
European chaos, and the defeat of Nazism would not lead Europe and the
rest of the world out of a perpetually compromised human history. The
human choice, Niebuhr insisted, is always that of relative good and
relative evil.

Niebuhr was trying, between 1939 and 1941, to influence the majority of
Protestant leaders away from pacifism. Polls taken during the depression
indicated that a majority of Protestant ministers had lost faith in the
capitalist system. And many, as Niebuhr had much earlier, had turned
toward pacifism.

Growing throughout the 1920s, the pacifist movement reached its
strongest expression between 1933 and 1937. In 1933, 75 percent of
Protestant ministers declared themselves opposed to any war, and in
1937, 95 percent of Americans voiced their opposition to participa-

tion in a European war. Writing in 1933, William Allen White, a Kansas
editor and strong political supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, declared,
"Fifteen years ago came the Armistice and we all thought it was to be a
new world. It is! But a lot worse than it was before." Harry Emerson
Fosdick, a Protestant leader, confessed his "increasing agony" with "the
anti-Christian nature of the war's causes, processes, and results." And
a Jewish leader, Rabbi Stephen Wise, joined the confession: "I committed
a sin when I blessed war banners and I will never again commit that
sin." Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin brought the Catholic Worker Movement
into the peace coalition. With 40 percent of college students
identifying themselves as pacifists, college strikes against war were
organized in 1934 and 1935, efforts were made to drive ROTC off
campuses, and many students took the Oxford Oath, pledging to refuse to
serve in the armed forces.

From 1937 to 1941, however, there were increasing defections from the
isolationist and pacifist movements. The key factor in this shift was a
growing recognition that industrialism was not liberating the individual
from the corruption of bureaucracies as Beard and Dewey had prophesied.
President Roosevelt was willing to preserve and work with the large
corporations. The political rhetoric in the 1936 election campaign
seemed as absurd and irrelevant as that of the Harding-Coolidge years.
And the Russian worker, under Marxism, seemed to be just as much a
captive of bureaucracies run by capricious and evil men as was the
American worker. The erratic and oppressive role of Communists in the
Spanish Civil War had disillusioned many young Americans about
communism. Final disillusionment came in the form of political purges in
Russia and the willingness of Soviet Russia to enter into diplomatic
negotiations with Nazi Germany.

The heart of Niebuhr's new theology was his argument that the individual
was not able to separate his rational mind from his unconscious mind,
that the individual could not escape the biological cycle of the body,
and therefore could not escape death. Given these necessary conditions
of human existence, it seemed that there was no way for Americans to
live only in the realm of rational space and linear time. For Niebuhr in
1940. both the modern capitalist and the Marxist theories of revolution
were based on false and unrealizable principles.

He did not see this theological position, however, as a novel and
revolutionary challenge to the whole modern American cultural

identity. His emphasis on biological cycles seemed to be closer to the
views of Native Americans than to those of AngloAmericans, and his
dismissal of the idea of progress brought him closer to the
Afro-American sense of time. But Niebuhr did not make these connections;
instead he used his new theology in defense of the status quo both in
the United States and on the international scene.

Rejecting the isolationist position as sinful, Niebuhr had insisted that
it did not represent the true American tradition. The
seventeenth-century Puritans and the eighteenth-century Founding
Fathers, according to Niebuhr, were aware of the sinfulness of man and
the need, therefore, for political humility. These wise elders had
wanted "to preserve some relative decency and justice in society against
the tyranny and injustice into which society may fall." Like the great
English conservative Edmund Burke, they were "intent upon developing
politics as the art of the possible, being cautious not to fall into
worse forms of injustice in the effort to eliminate old ones."

"The demonic fury of fascist politics," for Niebuhr, came from the
dictators' rejection of divine judgment of human actions. In their
cynicism the dictators denied the existence of any values other than
those they personally created. Having defeated this heresy by 1945, the
United States faced the even more dangerous heresy of Soviet Russia,
which insisted that the human and the divine could become one. "This
tendency of playing God to human history," Niebuhr insisted "is the
cause of communist malignancy."

Rejecting the progressive intellectual idea that America needed a strong
President who was not frustrated by the checks and balances of the
Constitution, Niebuhr now celebrated the Founding Fathers for creating
those checks and balances that preserved the liberties of a pluralistic
society from any temptation of centralized power. The United States, in
its pluralism, was like the community of nations in the Free World. The
United States must save that international pluralism from the threat of
Communist centralization.

From this position, it was easy for Niebuhr and other neo orthodox
theologians to move to a justification of the cold war against Soviet
Russia in 1945 because, for them, communism was committed to the
messianic redemption of the world. Unfortunately, with the expansion of
Communist influence into Eastern Europe and the victory of the
Communists in China, half the world lived under the control of this
"false religion." For Niebuhr and many Protestant leaders, this
situation created an unprecedented

need for a peacetime military strength to contain communism within its
boundaries. Though the Free World could not destroy communism where it
existed, it could not allow further expansion.

John Dos Passes had moved in parallel lines with Niebuhr, as had many
other secular intellectuals. At the end of the 1930s, Dos Passes
published another fictional trilogy, District of Columbia, in which he
attacked Communists, New Deal reformers, and labor leaders. He also saw
a pluralistic American history full of liberty for the individual,
liberty that might be lost not to the corporations as he had believed in
the 1920s, but to political radicals, liberals, and labor unions. The
defenders of American liberty, for Dos Passes in 1945, were big
businsssmen and the leaders of the armed forces.

By 1950, Dos Passes was articulating a "new conservatism," which he
shared with an aggressive group of young intellectuals including Russell
Kirk, Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, and James Burnham. These writers
considered the major American political tradition to be conservative,
embodying the principles of the political philosopher Edmund Burke, who
had written in opposition to the French Revolution of 1789. And they saw
the Republican party as the vehicle of this conservatism.

But Niebuhr in 1950 linked Burke to a "new liberalism," identified with
the Democratic party. Younger historians like Richard Hofstadter, Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., and Oscar Handlin joined Niebuhr in rejecting the
vision of Charles Beard, who remained a bitter isolationist until his
death at the end of World War II. They dismissed the distinction that
Beard had made between the productive middle class and the parasitical
Robber Barons. They discredited Beard by linking him with Karl Marx.
They argued that it was the perspective of the French visitor Alexis de
Tocqueville, who had described a homogeneous, classless, middle-class
society in his classic of 1840, Democracy in America, which was the
appropriate vehicle for contemporary scholars.

These "consensus" historians found allies among sociologists and
political scientists, among them Daniel -Bell and Seymour Lipset. Bell
described the conversion of many young progressive and socialist
scholars of the 1930s, like himself, away from the hope of a purified
world. "For the radical intellectual who had articulated the
revolutionary impulses of the past century and a half," he wrote, "there
was now an end to chiliastic hopes, to millenarianism, to apocalyptic
thinking--and to ideology."

These self-defined liberal scholars, many of whom had helped

form Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in 1947, seemed to apologize
for having earlier been progressives or socialists by pointing out the
salutory contributions of the business elite. Called Robber Barons in
the 1920s and 1930s, they were described in the scholarly books of the
1940s and 1950s as constructive captains of industry. The liberal
economist John Kenneth Galbraith promised in his book of 1952, American
Capitalism, that the individual was still free in a United States of big
business organizations, big government organizations, and big labor
organizations because, according to his theory of countervailing power,
each of these organizations restrained the influence of the others.

Many of the leading intellectuals of the "consensus" and "end of
ideology" schools were Jewish: Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Daniel
Boorstin, Oscar Handlin, Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and others.
Until World War II, it had been almost impossible for Jews to gain
tenure at the major universities. Although the mainstream white
Protestant establishment had lowered its barriers to Jews in academic
life only in the 1940s, and although Jews continued to be barred from
leadership in the large corporations, these scholars argued that it was
traditional WASP elites who had preserved and nurtured the democratic
tradition in America. They also wrote, in their scholarly books, that it
was the lower middle class that had been antidemocratic and
anti-Semitic. Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform (1955) had
identified anti-Semitism with the Populists of the late nineteenth
century. In Anti-Intellectualism in America, he argued that this
traditional hostility to educated leadership was "founded in the
democratic institutions and egalitarian sentiments of this country." It
followed, he continued, that professors must look to social and economic
elites for support since the "intellectual class is of necessity an
elite in its manner of thinking and functioning."

These intellectuals also identified isolationism with the lower middle
class, while they related internationalism to the "democratic" social
and economic elites. And they cooperated with those elites in creating a
cold-war ideology that involved our overseas allies. The CIA subsidized
the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published its major journal,
Encounter, in England. Sidney Hook, a philosophy professor who had
converted from the radicalism of the 1930s, told a meeting of the
Congress at Berlin in 1950 that soon all "references to 'right,' 'left,'
and 'center' will vanish from common usage as meaningless." Fulfilling
his prophecy, a "new liberal,"

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and a "new conservative," James Burnham, joined
with others to build the American Committee for Cultural Freedom as a
branch of the Congress.

These intellectuals were writing to persuade the youth of America not to
be seduced by Marxist perfectionism. They also feared that young people
might be seduced by reactionaries, the radical right, into believing
that it was possible to return to the perfectly rational space that
supposedly characterized nineteenth-century agrarian America. These
scholars identified a search for perfection with adolescence and the
acceptance of a desanctified world with maturity. An explosion of
scholarly books praised the Founding Fathers as such models of maturity
able to live in an imperfect, an ironic, even a tragic world.

James Gould Cozzens' novel By Love Possessed, published in 1957, marked
the climax of this effort at cultural redefinition. Hailed as "a
masterpiece" in the New Yorker, as "delicate and subtle" in the Saturday
Review, and as "magnificent" by the New York Times, it had as its hero
Arthur Winner, who at the age of fifty-four is finally initiated into
manhood. Winner, described by reviewers as "intelligent," "tolerant,"
"the quintessence of our nation's best qualities," had reached middle
age without the ability to understand or accept the advice given him by
his father. His father had warned him that it was impossible to improve
the world and that it was a sign of maturity and responsibility to work
to sustain the status quo.

Three million hard-cover copies of the novel were sold to readers who
appreciated Winner's slow and painful growth into an understanding of
his inability to make the world fit his dreams. He was bitterly
disappointed by his first wife and his sons. Practicing law as part of
the WASP establishment in a small Pennsylvania town, Winner came to
realize that his social group had been too concerned with its own purity
and that social stability depended upon the admission of a Jewish and a
Catholic lawyer to the town's legal profession. In questioning
traditional symbols of purity, Winner was even willing to permit the
black janitor of the Episcopal Church to take communion with the white
congregation, the janitor waiting to be the last recipient of the
communion cup.

The final test of Winner's manhood comes when he is faced with the fact
that the most elderly member of his law firm has stolen church funds
from the trust he administered. Julius Penrose, another older member of
the firm, persuades Winner that the responsible course is for him not to
accept financial responsibility for his

partner's actions. To hold to the letter of the law would mean
humiliation for an old man and financial ruin for Winner's family.
Winner accepts Penrose's advice that "as a wise old man once said to me:
'Boy--never try to piss up the wind.'" That night, Winner can tell his
wife: "It's all right. Nothing has to be changed."

In 1957, WASP cultural leaders and the Jewish intellectuals who had been
incorporated within the establishment were insisting that the
Anglo-Americans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not
believed in the myth of a New World where young people could escape from
the traditions of Old World elders. They were insisting that fathers had
wisdom, which was more relevant than the frontier experiments of young
people. But, like Arthur Winner, they saw no immediate conflict between
this philosophy of limits and their capitalist institutions,
institutions that assumed that the marketplace was an endless frontier.
And this infinite space for limitless growth was supposed to be capable
of rational, mathematical description. The progressive development of
the marketplace was also described by the regular increments of linear
time. But younger dissidents who were forming a counterculture, as well
as scientists within the academic community, began by the 1950s to
insist that a world of limits was totally incompatible with the
capitalist institutions of the Founding Fathers.

"Who will find peace with the lands?"

******************

Chapter 16.

New Visions, New Ethics, 1950-70

Voices of the beatnik poets Ecology: "a counterculture" science

Children in the counterculture

Changing sex and social roles: women's liberation

Lifting taboos on aging and death

TV: mirror of modern times

Just as the collapse of the Progressive prophecy of a better future
resulted in a youthful "lost generation" in the 1920s, so the
paradoxical rejection of progress by the cultural leaders of the 1950s
resulted in another lost generation of dropouts and hippies. Again there
was a sense of being trapped by a meaningless bureaucracy. Allen
Ginsberg, one of a group of poets centered in San Francisco, wrote of
America as

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable

dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys

sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! . . .

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running
money! . . .

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!*

But in rejecting progress, the Beat poets did not repeat the "lost
generation's" agony about the plight of the individual hero. Looking
west from San Francisco, they saw hints in Asian thought of another way
of perceiving the world. Asian philosophies and religions enjoined the
individual to perceive reality from the inside, to find meaning from
within. Man was not a seeker, as in modern Western thought, looking at
reality from the outside, learning to analyze and map the external
rationally. If man understood from within, then it was not tragic that
the self-conscious mind could never free itself from the unconscious, as
Niebuhr had said in 1940. It was the feeling, the intuition, the
imagination flowing from the unconscious that made it possible to know
the cosmos that surrounded the self. Perhaps man was intended to live
within his personal body and within the earth as a body. Perhaps the
individual was not tragically trapped within those bodies, with their
inevitable cycles leading to death. Perhaps to live and die, to
experience fully the cycles of existence, was to be in harmony with the
universe.

* Allen Ginsberg, from "Howl," in Howl and Other Poems (San 1-rancisco:
City Lights Books, 1956), p. 17.

Ginsberg wrote of his mother,

One night, sudden attack--her noise in the bathroom--like croaking up
her soul--convulsions and red vomit coming out of her mouth--diarrhea
water exploding from her behind . . . urine running between her legs--
left retching on the tile floor smeared with her black feces--

He wrote of her degenerating body,

Too thin, shrunk on her bones--age come to Naomi--now broken into white
hair--loose dress on her skeleton--face sunk, old! withered--cheek of
crone--

And he wrote of her beauty,

O Russian faced, woman on the grass, your long black hair is crowned
with flowers, the mandolin is on your knees--

He wrote of her rebirth,

holy mother, now you smile on your love, your world is born anew,
children run naked in the field spotted with dandelions--*

Unlike the "lost generation," he could write in exaltation,

Come, sweet lonely Spirit, back

to your bodies, come great God back to your only image, come to your
many eyes & breasts, come thru thought and motion up all your arms the
great gesture of Peace & acceptance . . .t

Norman Podhoretz of Commentary magazine summed up the liberal
establishment's view of the Beat poets when he wrote, "In America, we
are witnessing the revolt of all the forces hostile to civilization
itself." They represented, he continued, "a movement of brute stupidity
and know-nothingism." Podhoretz was correct that these poets were
challenging the fundamental attitudes toward space and time in modern
civilization. He was mistaken, however, in thinking that they stood for
no alternative principles and represented no alternative disciplines.

* Allen Ginsberg, from "Kaddish," in Kaddish and Other Poems (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), pp. 22, 29.

t Allen Ginsberg, -from "The Change," in Planet News (San Francisco:
City Lights Books, 1968), p. 61.

Another of the San Francisco poets, Gary Snyder, spent three years
learning Oriental languages before he went to Japan, where he remained
for a decade, to study Zen Buddhism. Zen gave him the power of
discipline necessary to cleanse his mind of the untruths he had learned
in American culture. He had to unlearn the separation of matter and
spirit. He had to learn that nature is matter and spirit. Climbing out
of modern society in his pilgrimage to find meaning, he of necessity had
come to stand alone. Now free, standing as on a mountaintop, he wrote

I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in
cities.*

Once having found meaning, however, Snyder could begin to descend from
his aloneness:

Pressure of sun on the rockslide

Whirled me in a dizzy hop-and-step descent,

Pounded by heat raced down the slabs to the creek

Whole head and shoulder in the water: Stretched full on cobble--ears
roaring Eyes open aching from the cold and faced a trout.t

Baptized, he was within nature, one with the rich multitude of living
things. Now he could share in life, ecstatic in escaping the loneliness
of the "lost generation." He was one with the cycles of nature:

Eating the living germs of grasses Eating the ova of large birds

Eating each other's seed

eating

ah, each other.

Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread: lip to lip.t

* Gary Snyder, from "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout," in

Riprap, and Cold Mountain Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1965), p. 1.

t Gary Snyder, "Water," ibid., p. 10.

t Gary Snyder, from "Song of the Taste," in Regarding Wave (New York:
New Directions, 1968), p. 17.

"I am convinced a time will come when the physiologist, the poet, and
the philosopher will all speak the same language and mutually understand
each other," declared Garrett Hardin, a biologist writing in 1972. "That
language is proving to be the language of ecology." Hardin had just
written a science-fiction fable, The Voyage of the Space Ship Beagle, in
which men attempted to colonize the planets they were certain must exist
around the star closest to our sun. They found no such planets. Hardin's
moral was the need for men to recover the sense of the earth as the
center of their existence and meaning. Another major biologist, Barry
Commoner, also used medieval symbolism to criticize the modern when he
entitled his 1971 book The Closing Circle. Citing Earth Week in April
1970, he stated that "the environment has just been rediscovered by the
people who live in it." Rediscovered, he added, because we saw the
evidence all around us of the disintegration of the ecosphere, "the thin
skin of air, water, and soil which sustains life." We had caused an
ecological crisis, he said, because we had forgotten that "all living
things must fit into the ecosphere or perish." For Commoner, as for
Hardin, modern perception was Newtonian, or mechanical, not Darwinian or
biological. "We have become accustomed to think of separate, singular
events each dependent upon a unique singular cause." Commoner was trying
to educate people into the laws of the ecosystem. The first law of
ecology, he wrote, was "Everything is connected to everything else"; the
second was "Everything must go somewhere"; the third was "Nature knows
best"; and the fourth was there is "no such thing as a free lunch."

By the early 1970s, few intellectual and political leaders challenged
either the scientific validity or the philosophical implications of the
ecology movement. This consensus had not always existed. A few
scientists and laymen had responded to the desanctification of space and
progress in the 1940s in ways similar to the Beat poets. They had
emphasized the idea of limits, of being within the cycles of the earth,
and had questioned the ability of the economic system to continue to
progress and expand. Fairfield Osborn, in Our Plundered Planet, and
William Vogt, in Road to Survival, both published in 1948, raised the
questions later explored by Commoner and Hardin in 1970. They had been
dismissed, however, as fear mongers by the intellectual establishment.

But a slowly growing number of physical scientists and social scientists
were willing to listen to these heretics, as was evidenced

by a major scholarly conference in 1955 on "Man's Role in Changing the
Face of the Earth." The experience of atomic fallout had shocked some
scholars into accepting the premodern notion of life as a chain of
interrelationships. Atomic bombs had been tested in the far Pacific,
thousands of miles distant from the United States. But much to the
dismay of the government, Strontium 90 had been carried across the
ocean, across the United States, precipitated into the ground by rain,
absorbed by grasses, eaten by cows, and finally drunk in milk by
infants, in whose bones it had caused degeneration.

But the idea of nature as a living chain of interrelationships had not
yet been accepted at the level of the popular press. In 1962, Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring brought together evidence that described how DDT
had entered into food chains and threatened the health of mankind. Time
identified her concept of a chain with unscientific mysticism and
emotionalism: "Many scientists sympathize with Miss Carson's love of
wildlife, and even with her mystical attachment to the balance of
nature," Time concluded, "but they fear her emotional and inaccurate
outburst in Silent Spring" may do harm. By the end of the 1960s,
however, intellectual orthodoxy had come to accept concepts of chains
and balance and interdependence. Many business, labor, and political
leaders continued to fight the application of ecological principles to
specific environmental and economic issues. But their arguments, in the
1970s, were pragmatic, not scientific. No longer could these groups call
on science to undermine the credibility of the ecologists.

"The subversive science" was a name applied to ecology, and its
subversiveness was accompanied in the 1950s and 1960s by the development
of a "counterculture" of white American youth searching for alternative
lifestyles. In 1970, polls indicated that a majority of American adults
rated the problem of dissident youth above all other problems: war, the
environment, race relations, the economy. The adult fear and anger
revealed by these polls came from the recognition that the pattern of
"adolescence" established between 1880 and 1914 was breaking down. The
counterculture adolescents of the 1960s were rejecting conventional
virtues such as militant masculinity, competitiveness and
aggressiveness, emphasis on bodily cleanliness and self-discipline in
order to channel energy into economic achievement. Parents were
confronted by "loose" young people, resisting the armed forces and the
world of work.

Ironically, sociologists suggested that these adolescents had learned
many of their "dropout" characteristics from their "straight" parents.
"Parents lack not only the self-assurance that successful
inner-direction brings," wrote David Riesman in his study of American
culture in the 1940s, The Lonely Crowd, but "the loss of old certainties
in the spheres of work and social relations is accompanied by doubt as
to how to bring up children."

For Riesman, "inner-direction" was the character taught to children in
the nineteenth century when production was the most important social
aim. In a society of many small producers, the necessary virtues for
success were self-reliance and self-assurance: a narrow, deeply held,
inflexible set of principles. But since 1920, machines owned by giant
corporations had taken over much of the productive process. Job
opportunities moved into large private and public corporations, and
success in these jobs demanded a more flexible and compromising
personality. These social pressures to create an "other-directed"
personality were reinforced by economic pressures to consume what the
machines produced. To learn to be a good consumer, the individual had to
be sensitive to his neighbors. To keep up with the Joneses was to keep
up with whatever new consumer product brought status. Because
advertising was constantly redefining which product was most
prestigious, the consumer had to be able to respond flexibly to shifting
styles.

The infancy of the consumer was the subject of Dr. Benjamin Spock and
his best-selling book Baby and Child Care, In his view, there were no
problem children, only problem parents. Spock rejected the rigid
schedules that previous child-care books had advised. Children should be
fed according to their own rhythms and not by the clock, he claimed.
Children varied in the age in which they were ready to read. These "new"
parents, therefore, pushed for the replacement of "inner-directed"
schools with "open" classrooms where children developed their
personalities in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and teachers were
opinion leaders.

Riesman quoted a twelve-year-old girl- in 1948 talking about comic-book
heroes to illustrate the shift away from an emphasis on competitive
academic achievement which might separate the individual from the group.
"I like Superman better than the others because they can't do everything
Superman can do. Batman can't fly and that is very important." But when
she was asked if she would like to fly, her reply was, "I would like to
be able to fly if everybody else did, but otherwise it would be kind of
conspicuous."

Riesman also used the Little Golden Book Tootle the Engine to illustrate
other changes in childhood heroes. When most young people went to work
within established corporations, it was no longer socially functional to
encourage children to be independent. In engine school, Tootle was
taught to "always stay on the track no matter what." When he had trouble
learning to be perfectly adjusted to the system, the whole town of
friendly people helped him learn to be socially responsible.

These parents of the 1940s, however, were establishing a major
dissonance in their children. In their crucial first years with their
mothers, they were being raised permissively. In schools they were also
free, in a limited way at least, from rigid timetables. But they
nevertheless would be expected to join an economic system that was
rigidly defined, that ran by timetables. They would have to accept the
uniform clock time of an economy where everyone went to work at eight
o'clock and came home at five o'clock.

This dissonance was intensified by other lessons learned at home. Hard
liquor, along with cigarettes, had become legally and morally acceptable
as bodily pleasures by the 1930s. The appreciation of good food and wine
were added to the list of acceptable bodily pleasures. The consuming
culture of the late 1940s encouraged the consideration of meals as
artistic and sensual events. The elegance and variety of European food
and the European use of wine was to be imitated. Enjoyment of the body
in lovemaking also became more important to the "new" middle class.
Admitting female sexuality by 1920, the middle class had attempted to
contain that sexuality within the home. A wife could learn from sex
manuals how to express herself sexually and be more pleasing to her
husband. These women had learned only to be concerned with being good
mothers and homemakers. These were their areas of skill, while men
expended their energies in the conflicts of the marketplace.

In the 1940s, however, fathers were members of a company team rather
than warriors in the marketplace, and they had the responsibility of
teaching the skills of cooperation and teamwork to their sons while they
were still young. The division between the home as woman's domain and
work as man's domain began to be questioned. And if fathers had social
skills learned on the job to teach to their sons, did they also have the
responsibility to develop an artful social relationship with their
wives, including the art of lovemaking?

The idea of the relationship between men and women as a cooperative one
challenged the cultural tradition of competitiveness

between the sexes. In that tradition an adult male was free and
independent. Someday he would be caught by a woman and trapped into
marriage. In his home, he returned to his childhood dependence on his
mother. In popular culture, in the movies, radio serials, the comic
strips, women ruled the home. In the comic strip "Blondie," for
instance, the husband, Dagwood, was a bumbling child who depended upon
his wife-mother to provide the guidance necessary for his survival. The
appearance of the successful TV series "Father Knows Best" in the 1950s
reflected the effort to make fathers more relevant in the home
situation. Sons, taught the importance of social interdependence by
their fathers, could no longer reject their fathers in the name of
becoming independent, self-made men.

Beginning to feel in the 1950s that their bodies were important and that
they should be noncompetitive in their social relationships,
middle-class teen-agers began to reject the prototypical boy-girl
relationship that had been dominant from World War I to World War II.
According to the traditional rules, the boy developed a skillful line to
persuade the girl that he was seriously interested in her. The girl
simultaneously developed the ability to persuade the boy that she
believed him and that she, in turn, was interested in him. If the girl
was really interested in the boy, she might let him get to first base,
perhaps to second. The boy was the object of peer pressure to advance as
far as possible and finally to "score," so that he could return to his
friends and boast of his conquest. To be equally successful at the game,
the girl had to give up as little as possible and not surrender her
virginity. At the same time she had to keep the boy interested in her.
With a steady boy friend and her virginity, she had proved herself a
winner at the game.

Rejecting this covert and competitive sexuality in favor of a more open
and cooperative attitude toward sex, the adolescents of the 1950s began
to respond to displays of emotion. They applauded singers like Johnny
Ray, who cried when he sang sad songs. They made a cult hero of Elvis
Presley, who augmented the sexuality of the lyrics with body movement.
They danced the Twist, with its explicit body language. They shared in
the renewed influence of Afro-American rhythm with its sense of present
time.

Social and cultural attitudes toward women had been changing gradually
since the 1920s. Although Hollywood continued to present the cultural
convention of the normal woman as a housewife throughout the 1930s, a
few women, among them Mary Pickford

and Clara Bow, became powerful stars. They became rich and famous. Their
wealth, social position, and authority blatantly contradicted the
cultural convention of the good woman as a passive, sexless homebody.
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West went much further in the
1930s in attacking the convention itself as they portrayed strong,
intelligent, and self-reliant women in their roles. Katharine Hepburn,
Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck continued this
tradition through the 1930s and into the next decade.

As men began to realize that their traditional domination of the public
world was being threatened by the changing definitions of male and
female roles, as there was a tremendous rise in the number of working
wives and another dramatic increase in the divorce rate, male fears
began to find expression in certain films of the 1940s. These movies
generally portrayed women as monsters, scheming to destroy men. Rita
Hayworth, Mary Astor, Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and
Dorothy Malone all appeared in such roles. By the 1950s, films would
present less powerful and less "dangerous" stars like Debbie Reynolds
and Doris Day.

Mickey Spillane, one of the best-selling novelists in American history,
expressed this cultural hostility toward women who were not passively
dependent on men. Middle-class men in the 1950s bought Spillane's
detective stories by the millions. All these books centered on the
effort of women to tempt the hero, Mike Hammer, away from self-reliance,
a self-reliance that was necessary, according to Spillane, to Hammer's
task of purging the city of its criminal element. Although he was often
close to being seduced by women with such serpentine characteristics as
a stomach with "smooth parallel rows of light muscles" or "ripply
muscles in her naked thighs," Hammer always saved himself by brutally
and happily killing the seductress. " 'How could you,' she gasped. I
only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. 'It was
easy,' I said." Norman Mailer also presented woman as a source of evil
in his writings, especially in An American Dream, where the hero had to
kill his wife in order to become free.

Almost hysterically, leading magazines like Life and the Ladies' Home
Journal presented the figure of the contented housewife. "I'm so
grateful for my blessings: wonderful husband, handsome sons with
dispositions to match, big comfortable house," declared a heroine of a
story in a woman's magazine. "I'm thankful for my good health and faith
in God and such material possessions as two cars,

two TVs, and two fireplaces," it continued. Leading anthropologists such
as Margaret Mead, and sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, reassured
women that they were happiest in the home, as did the psychologists
Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg in their book Modern Women.
"Feminism was at its core a deep illness," they wrote in 1947, and "the
more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual
disorder."

The dynamic women's liberation movement that emerged in the 1960s simply
brought to consciousness nearly a half-century of doubt about the
traditionally aggressive male role and the passive female role. Women's
Liberation as a movement was precipitated by the generation of
middle-class children born at the end of the 1940s who were coming of
age in the 1960s. Not only had they been raised more permissively, but
also their special experience at the end of the 1950s and the early
1960s gave them such a strong sense of the present as to constitute the
basis of a generation gap with their parents. They had grown up under
the shadow of the atomic bomb. They had been drilled in school on how to
react to an atomic attack from Russia; they had been encouraged to go
home and ask their parents to build bomb shelters. With this giant
threat the specter of death entered the conversation of everyday life.

Another deep cultural taboo seemed to be broken in the 1960s as people
began to speak openly about death and dying. Many barriers between the
sacred and the profane had been broken in this revolutionary decade. The
words "piss," "shit," and "fuck" were brought into polite conversation.
But the discussion of death was probably the most profound violation of
the establishment commitment to an expanding society which was
perpetually young. Psychologists like David Gutmann, who were doing
cross-cultural research on attitudes toward death, reported that the
attitudes of counterculture adolescents were similar to those of elders
in premodern cultures. According to these psychologists, these elders
expressed a tender, affectionate outlook toward life; they disliked
competition; they avoided provocation; they entered conflict only as
peacemakers. They approached the universe that fed them with humility.
The psychologists called this attitude of elders in traditional
societies "religious." Seeing themselves close to death at the end of
the life cycle, they rejoiced in the symbols of plants, animals, and
children, which reassured them that they were part of the larger life
cycles of

the universe and that their deaths would be meaningful within these
cycles.

Counterculture adolescents in the 1960s seemed to be opting for the same
sense of religious interdependence with natural cycles that
characterized premodern culture. They were rejecting stereotyped
adolescent behavior rooted in the past. They also were rejecting
stereotyped ideas about sex roles: that men must suppress their caring,
loving instincts (so-called feminine characteristics) from public view
and that women must control their aggressive qualities and remain pliant
and subordinate in their caretaker roles. Counterculture adolescents
accepted the idea that it was all right for men to allow their feminine
characteristics to become stronger and for women to become more
masculine.

For psychologists studying aging and death, the counterculture children
of the middle class represented a revolutionary shift away from
behavioral models of their parents' modern culture. They were more like
premodern elders in their attitudes than they were like their peers,
those adolescents who kept modern values. They accepted the polymorphous
sensuality of the traditional premodern society. They would not limit
sensuality to their genitals, where it could be quickly and briefly
satisfied. They enjoyed the lingering satisfaction of considering the
entire skin of their bodies as a source of sensual pleasure, as well as
their ears, their noses, their eyes, and their mouths. Taking a
religious attitude toward the environment, they desired to be fed. Not
surprisingly, many counterculture musical groups provided symbolic
food--"The Cream," "The Lovin' Spoonful"--as did counterculture
books--Watermelon Sugar, The Strawberry Statement, The Naked Lunch,

The antiheroism of the counterculture, therefore, like Beat poetry, was
not nihilistic. It expressed values that could be compared to those held
by the elders of premodern societies.

Television had mirrored social values from its inception. In 1948
children were reassured by a variety of western programs that there
still was an American frontier. "The Lone Ranger," "The Cisco Kid," and
"Hopalong Cassidy" all were fulfilling, in fantasy, the hope of the
historian Frederick Jackson Turner that there was a West which allowed
the individual to step outside the area of eastern settlement. These
heroes, operating by their own personal codes, provided justice in a way
that establishment lawmen could not. The children observed that this
independence was related to the freedom

of these heroes from women, who were literally presented as
intellectually inferior to the hero's horse.

The children's horse operas, however, were replaced after 1955 by adult
westerns. With the gun as an important symbol, "The Rifleman," "Colt
.45," "Restless Gun," "Have Gun, Will Travel," "Yancey Derringer," and
twenty-five other adult westerns expressed a high level of violence.
Often they dealt with men trying to fight their way out of a trap. The
area of open space was receding. The irony of the trap, however, was
that these killers were not enforcing a personal code; they were being
paid for doing a job--they were institutional men trying to preserve
individual autonomy. In this masculine world women usually appeared as
prostitutes. But there were no good women to trap men into a community
where feminine characteristics were important.

As the adult westerns moved into the 1960s, they changed into male
communities that were in motion, as in "Wagon Train" and "Rawhide."
Paralleling the unprecedented popularity of professional football, the
western hero became a member of a team, where the orders were given by
the captain of this overland ship. But this all male community soon
reached a final destination and began to defend the boundary lines of
its property. In "Bonanza," "High Chaparral," "The Big Valley," and "The
Men from Shilo," the open space of the West was replaced by large
parcels of property. The virtues of masculine aggressiveness, of normal
adolescent violence were still necessary to the protection of this
property. The most popular TV western, "Gunsmoke," made the transition
from gun western to property western. Its original opening focused on
Marshall Matt Dillon and his gun. In a series of subsequent openings,
the camera came to spend more and more time on the town setting.
Finally, a totally different opening had Dillon riding across the
prairie toward the town. Reversing Turner's frontier hypothesis, the
town had become the center of virtue that Dillon protected against evil,
which hid within the open spaces of the prairie. The major Hollywood
directors of the 1950s and 1960s also had expressed in a more bitter way
the end of the West, of a frontier of space and new opportunities. Sam
Peckinpah in The Ballad of Cable Hague and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and
Monte Hellman in Ride the Whirlwind, presented a West in which all
traditional heroes must find ironic or tragic defeat.

From the 1890s to the 1960s, Anglo-Americans had tried to escape the
prophecy that their historian, Frederick Jackson Turner,

had given them in 1893. But in a major, prize-winning book of 1972, A
Religious History of the American People, Sydney E. Ahlstrom reasserted
that the sacred hoop of the Anglo-Americans indeed was broken. From 1600
to 1960, a Puritan Protestantism had been dominant in America, Ahlstrom
wrote, but no longer. A new religious era had begun in the 1960s,
Ahlstrom argued, a post- Protestant era.

Simultaneously, the Native American writer Vine Deloria, Jr., published
his book God Is Red. He explained the collapse of the intellectual and
religious structure of white Protestant America by reminding the reader
of the ways in which twentieth-century physics and biology contradicted
Anglo-American assumptions of rational space and linear time. The
fundamental building block of the universe, the atom, was now defined as
a dynamic and energetic complex constantly receding into mystery as
scientists learned to analyze it more deeply. Equally mysterious was
twentieth-century biology with its emphasis on the web of life, the
living interrelationships of all things. Had not all of us come to
accept a cyclical cosmology, that the solar system had been born and
ultimately was to die? For Deloria, the logic of these twentieth-century
sciences then led inexorably to a "relinquishment of temporal attitudes,
an acknowledgement of the reality of places, and the reformation of
social and political ideas around communal rather than individual
considerations." And he argued that the conversion of the AngloAmericans
to these attitudes would mark their recovery of Native American wisdom.
He quoted Chief Luther Standing Bear: "The white man does not understand
America. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock
and soil. But in the Indian, the spirit of the land is still vested, it
will be until other men are able to meet its rhythm. Men must be born
and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their
forefathers' bones."

"Who will find peace with the lands? Who will listen to the trees, the
animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?" Deloria asked.
And then he answered confidently, "As the long-forgotten peoples of the
respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage,
they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is
when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover
that for this land, God is Red."

"The endless horizon no longer exists"

******************

Chapter 17.

The Kennedy-Rostow economy Economic change and the black community

The growth of space technology

Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty

International corporate growth

Inflation and recession Nixon faces the economic crunch

Oil crisis

Curbing environmental exploitation Limits to growth

Toward the end of the 1950s, many cultural leaders began to reject the
new national identity of realism and restraint that they had helped to
create and that was symbolized by the elderly and cautious President
Eisenhower. They were reacting to the emerging counterculture, which
denied that capitalism could continue to exist when people lived within
the circle of nature. They were also reacting to Soviet Communism, which
boasted that it alone represented the progressive march of history
toward ever greater rational control of nature. "We find ourselves as a
nation on the defensive," declared the president of Princeton
University, "and as a people seemingly paralyzed in self-indulgence."
"We must acknowledge that the loss of faith in our world, our destiny,
our religion, is the cloudy and dark climate which most of America finds
itself living in today," added the president of Yale. And the president
of Harvard agreed that America is "adrift with little sense of
purposeful direction, lacking deeply-held convictions, wandering along
with no more stirring thought in the minds of the people than the desire
for diversion, personal comfort, and safety."

In 1960, academic leaders rejoiced at the nomination of a youthful John
F. Kennedy by the Democratic party. Since 1928, it seemed as if the
white Protestant leaders of the corporate establishment needed to tap
new sources of vitality to keep the economic structure from crumbling.
Kennedy was to be the first Catholic President in the nation's history.
Despite his religious background, however, Kennedy's childhood recalled
the older AngloAmerican emphasis on militant adolescence. Kennedy's
father, a self-made millionaire, had been, according to the President,
"very tough when we failed to meet those standards. The toughness was
important." "Coming in second was just no good," Kennedy remembered.
"The important thing was to win."

Kennedy came to the Presidency using the same metaphor of politics as
war that Franklin Roosevelt had used from 1933 to 1945. "I think to be
an American in the next decade will be a hazardous experience. We will
live on the edge of danger." That was Kennedy's promise in 1961. His
Inaugural Address emphasized foreign policy. "I believe that Americans
are ready to be called to greatness," he declared, and that greatness
was to be defined as victory in

the cold war. "We must challenge the enemy in fields of our own
choosing. We must indeed take the initiative again--we must start moving
forward again--at home and abroad." He placed himself in the tradition
of the Democratic commanders-in-chief, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.
"It is a fact that in those administrations, the vitality of the
American system was mostly developed." "We stand on the edge of a New
Frontier. I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that New
Frontier," he concluded, "and so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your
country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Much of Kennedy's confidence that the United States could overcome
Communist Russia and Communist China in the battle for world leadership
came from his academic advisers, especially the economist Walt Whitman
Rostow. During the 1950s, Rostow had developed a theory of
modernization. Like the idea of progress, which seemed to have
disintegrated in the 1940s, modernization theory insisted that human
history moved inexorably in a single direction from primitive societies
to higher forms of civilization. In his book of 1960, The Stages of
Economic Growth, Rostow described the upward drive of modernization as
moving from "traditional societies" to "pre-conditions for take-off" to
"take-off" to "drive to maturity" and finally to the "age of high
mass-consumption." The crucial factor in breaking humanity loose from
the intellectual darkness of traditional societies was the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century. "Newton is a symbol for that
watershed in history," Rostow wrote, "when men came widely to believe
that the external world was subject to a few knowable laws and was
systematically capable of productive manipulation." Rostow offered his
book as "an alternative to Karl Marx's theory of modern history," which
saw the progressive sequence of stages as feudalism, bourgeois
capitalism, socialism, and communism. Under normal conditions, Rostow
declared, the whole world should develop along the patterns first
experienced in Western Europe and the United States. The Great
Depression of 1929, for Rostow, indicated no major flaw of Western
capitalism. A slight difficulty had appeared in moving from the stage of
"maturity" to the final state of "high mass consumption." The theories
of Keynes, however, had clarified the way in which governments could
manipulate spending to help societies into "high mass-consumption." For
Rostow, "the technical tricks of that trade are widely understood," and
government expenditures during World War II had brought the United
States,

Western Europe, and Japan safely into this happy era of constantly
growing standards of living.

Rostow argued that the Communist revolution in Russia had stopped the
normal pattern of modernization in that country. Unfortunately, he
continued, "societies in the transition from traditional to modern
status are peculiarly vulnerable to such a seizure of power."
Communists, committed to the use of military power to force
modernization, were keeping Russia from moving to the final stage of
high mass-consumption by restricting the normal working of the
marketplace. Only under capitalism, declared Rostow, could countries
totally fulfill the evolutionary patterns of modernization. Communism
was tempting many nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to begin to
move away from traditional society. Communism, Rostow insisted, "is a
kind of disease which can befall a transitional society if it fails to
organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get
on with the job of modernization."

Faced with 8 percent unemployment in 1960, the result of the slow rate
of economic growth during the Eisenhower administration, Kennedy and his
advisers decided to use those "technical tricks" of Keynesian economics
to make the economy grow. The budget for national defense was increased
dramatically, and another $25 billion was budgeted for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration. Kennedy also asked Congress for a
tax cut, which was not enacted into law until Lyndon Johnson became
President in 1964. Under this pump priming, the Gross National Product
(GNP) grew from 1961 to 1968 at twice the rate of the 1950s.

With the increase of industrial production in the 1960s, average income
also increased by 18 percent, but corporate profits, as in the 1920s,
expanded even more rapidly, by 65 percent. Defense contracts, especially
for the new complex technology of rockets and nuclear weapons, were not
competitive and, again as during the war, made allowances for cost
overruns. By the end of the 1960s, the job of one of every ten Americans
was tied into the Department of Defense budget. Two-thirds of the income
of aircraft companies and a third of the income of radio and television
companies came from the government. More than 40 percent of the work
force in Seattle and Los Angeles depended on government contracts. Half
the scientists and engineers in private enterprise also depended upon
such government contracts, as did many university scientists and
engineers. Academic departments had become directly involved in

the war economy in the 1940s, and this relationship intensified during
the cold war. Resources put into research and development before 1940
were negligible, but after 1945 a significant part of the GNP was
invested in this area, much of it in major universities. By the 1960s,
more than half the annual budgets of the twenty most important private
and state universities came from the federal government.

Much of this research involved weapon systems, and much of the
expenditure arising from the application of this research by the
Department of Defense was overseas. This investment of billions of
dollars in research and development, therefore, did not benefit the
entire American economy. The Japanese economy grew three times as fast,
the German economy at twice the American rate, and even the French and
Italian economies grew more rapidly. While these nations experienced
labor shortages, the United States had a continuing unemployment rate of
5 to 7 percent through the 1950s. There were several ironic causes of
this unemployment beyond the distortion given the economy by the
Department of Defense. During the years 1941-45, much of the deficit
spending had gone into the South, where the massive fourteen-million-man
army was trained. Southern income jumped from one-half to two-thirds the
national average, and white southerners were able to buy farm machinery
and mechanize their farms. As a result, millions of black sharecroppers
were driven off the land and into southern and northern cities.

Between 1950 and 1970, black populations dramatically increased in major
northern cities. Black population went from 10 to 30 percent in New
York, from 14 to 33 percent in Chicago, from 16 to 40 percent in
Detroit, from 35 to 70 percent in Washington, D.C. By 1970, half of the
blacks in the United States lived in the North. They arrived in northern
cities when job opportunities for unskilled workers were declining. A
million and a half factory jobs disappeared between 1950 and 1960 as
production became more automated. Even worse for the blacks who filled
the central cities, much industry was in the process of moving to the
suburbs.

Government policy in the late 1940s and 1950s had subsidized the
building of bridges and highways, which encouraged the flight of the
white middle class to the suburbs. Federal mortgage policy also enabled
middle-income people to build new homes outside the city limits. Most
federal funds available for urban renewal were

spent on tearing down slums, which were replaced by office buildings,
luxury apartments, theaters, and stadiums. Business leaders, searching
for ways to strengthen the tax base of their cities, concluded that
there was no profit in building public housing. And at the end of the
1960s, only 2 percent of city dwellers lived in housing provided by the
federal government. As the result of this urban renewal, which destroyed
slum housing without providing new dwellings for the poor, low-income
groups, especially blacks, were forced into even more crowded and
rundown housing. In 1960, blacks, as 23 percent of the population of
Chicago, occupied only 4 percent of the physical space of the city.
Black unemployment was twice that of whites throughout the 1950s and
1960s. But besides the 10 percent unemployment rate in 1970, another 25
percent worked only part-time or were paid below the poverty level.
Unemployment for teen-age blacks increased throughout the 1960s and had
reached 50 percent during the recession of 1974-75.

Blacks had made some economic gains during World War II. Black leaders
had forced Roosevelt to establish a committee on Fair Employment
Practices. The prejudice it was designed to combat was expressed by the
hiring instructions of North American Aviation: "The Negro will be
considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities. Regardless
of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." The
percentage of black workers did increase from 3 to 8 percent in war
industries and from 60,000 to 200,000 in the federal civil service. The
CIO had welcomed black production workers, and there were more than a
million in unions in the 1950s. The average wage for blacks had
increased from 50 percent of whites in the 1930s to 60 percent in the
1950s. But the decline of the number of production workers in the
country and the slowdown of union growth in the 1950s because of
automation closed this avenue of economic progress. The skilled trade
unions, which had explicitly barred blacks from membership before World
War II, bent slowly and reluctantly under government pressure in the
1960s. In 1960, 1 percent of apprentices were black, but this figure
rose to only 3 percent by 1970.

The problems of deterioration of central-city slums, with large
unemployed or underemployed black populations, were intensified by the
continual flow of poor whites from the cotton and mountain South into
urban areas. Several cities, especially New York, had hundreds of
thousands of Puerto Ricans added to their slum populations. These
migrants had fled the overcrowded conditions of their

native land. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California also experienced
the influx of a Spanish-speaking population from Mexico. They too had a
very high birthrate, and these Chicanos also sought opportunity in the
cities, especially Los Angeles. The final irony was the explosion of
Native American population, which doubled in the generation after World
War II. There was no space for these young Native Americans on the
impoverished reservation lands, and they came by the tens of thousands
into the slums of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Paul, and
Minneapolis.

Native Americans, who had had their hunting and agricultural economies
destroyed in the 1880s and had been forced to survive on government
welfare for a century on the reservations, were entering city slums
where they found themselves caught up in the same welfare patterns as
the blacks, poor whites, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos, for whom there
also was no functional place in an economy dominated by the corporations
of the Anglo-American elites.

The deterioration of the cities in the 1960s, the poverty, the broken
families, the rising crime rate, and the flight to the suburbs of the
middle class contradicted the prophecy of the KennedyJohnson
administrations that rational urban planning directed from Washington
could make the cities the showcase of Rostow's final stage of
modernization, high mass-consumption. It also shattered the hopes of
liberal Protestant theologians who had abandoned Reinhold Niebuhr's
critique of progress and had accepted the theory of modernization put
forward by Rostow and other social scientists. Harvey Cox, a Baptist
theologian at Harvard University Divinity School, embraced modernization
in his book The Secular City (1964), which proved to be the most
influential theological statement published during the Kennedy-Johnson
years of 1961-68. "Secularization and urbanization," Cox wrote, "do not
represent sinister curses to be escaped, but epochal opportunities to be
embraced," Modern Protestantism, he continued, the religion of
secularization and urbanization, represents the final "liberation" of
humanity from "ancient oppressions." It represents "the disenchantment
of nature," "the desocialization of politics," and "the deconsecration
of values." Seeing history as moving necessarily through stages of
tribal and town life before the final stage of urban civilization, Cox
rejoiced in "the fact that urban-secular man is incurably and
irreversibly pragmatic," "that he is less and less concerned with
religious questions" and "that he is shedding the lifeless cubicles of
the mythical periods and stepping into the functional age."

By 1969, as the Kennedy-Johnson policies to renew the city seemed to
have failed and the policies to regulate the economy were resulting in
an unpredicted inflation to be followed by an unpredicted recession, Cox
reversed his thinking completely. In his book of 1969, The Feast of
Fools, Cox insisted that to be human is to live by myths. "We have
forgotten," he wrote, "that before man made tools, he made myths and
rituals." Converting to the counterculture, he asserted that "ritual
provides both the form and the occasion for the expression of fantasy"
and that "it is through ritual movement, gesture, song and dance that
man keeps in touch with the sources of creativity." As Cox wrote these
words, the KennedyJohnson administration was celebrating its one great
ritual success, putting a man on the moon.

In NASA's publication, Space: The New Frontier, it was asserted that "If
there has been a single factor responsible for our success over the past
two hundred years, it has been the characteristic American confidence in
the future." And President Kennedy had insisted that "No single space
project will be more impressive to mankind" than putting a man on the
moon. "In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon,
it will be an entire nation." For Kennedy, success in the mission would
"demonstrate to a watching world that America is first in the field of
technology and science."

This mobilization of American "know-how," "can-do," and "will do" seemed
to demonstrate the validity of the WASP commitment to modern definitions
of space and time. John Glenn, who first orbited the earth in 1962, and
Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, who first landed on the moon in 1969,
were youthful, clean-cut, male Anglo-Americans; they seemed much like
the heroes of the western frontier. For John Glenn in 1969, the success
of Project Apollo proved that "if we could develop in only eight years
the means of landing men on the moon, we could do just about anything we
set our minds to. We could solve the problems of poverty in the midst of
plenty, correct racial injustice, and ease social tensions." Everything
was possible, Glenn continued, because "in Project Apollo, we learned
how to organize teams of experts in government, industry, and the
universities to define objectives, plan programs, and solve difficult
technical problems."

In 1969, the WASP elite, in spite of failures in the cities and in
Vietnam, still seemed to control the process of economic modernization.

Eighty percent of the top executives of manufacturing corporations were
WASPs, as were 95 percent of the top executives of the major insurance
and banking institutions. The prestigious Ivy League universities and a
number of other private colleges were providing three-fourths of the
recruits for corporate leadership. Episcopalians and Presbyterians
controlled more than half the large fortunes in the country, although
they were less than 6 percent of the population. For them, the 1950s and
1960s had been rewarding. And there was no significant organized dissent
to the affirmation that the capitalist system was working splendidly.
The two major parties were totally committed to the status quo and faced
no serious third-party threats. The universities, integrated into the
economy, were producing scholars who overwhelmingly praised the system.
And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, said labor believed "in the
capitalist system. We are dedicated to the preservation of this system,
which rewards the workers." But the KennedyJohnson management of the
economy through Keynesian principles had shown increasing signs of
weakness throughout the 1960s.

When Lyndon Johnson became President in 1963, the problems of the inner
cities were so obvious that he declared "unconditional war on poverty."
The sweeping Democratic victories in the elections of 1964 gave Johnson
a substantial majority in Congress, which rapidly passed many bills to
support his economic policy. One of these was the Economic Opportunity
Act, which promised "to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the nation."
This legislation would create, according to Johnson, a "Great Society,"
which rested on "abundance and liberty for all." He called, too, for an
immediate "end to poverty and racial injustice."

A bill reducing taxes was passed. Two percent of the taxpayers who had
incomes of more than $20,000 a year received 30 percent of the
reduction. Federal funds to subsidize urban mass transit largely
benefited the middle classes who commuted into the city from their
suburban homes. Funds for universities and hospitals also largely
benefited the middle class, as did Medicate, which provided medical care
for the elderly under social security.

Direct aid to the poor came in the form of a Food Stamp Program and rent
supplements and grants to the states for health service for the poor
through a Model Cities Program. But most of the legislation was designed
to send middle-class employees or volunteers into the slums to teach the
poor how to succeed in the marketplace (Vista). These efforts reached
from a Head Start Program for preschool children to an Upward Bound
program for college students. The program also established a Job Corps
for school dropouts and a Neighborhood Youth Corps. The assumptions of
the Johnson administration blended the conventional wisdom of Herbert
Hoover, that education could provide an equality of opportunity,
enabling the individual to compete in the marketplace, with the
conventional wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the marketplace could
be made to expand by increasing government spending. Only the major
breakdown of the economy between 1929 and 1933 had forced the
establishment to provide a minimum of federal aid to the poor.

In the midst of apparent plenty, the inability of the economy to employ
at least a fifth of the population at a livable wage led to terrifying
riots in the cities during the mid 1960s. The establishment responded by
dramatically expanding funds available to the poor through Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). During the quiet years of the
Eisenhower administrations, as the urban crisis was taking shape, the
number of families receiving AFDC had risen from 635,000 to 745,000.
Even in the more prosperous 1960s, the worsening condition of the poor
forced the number of welfare families to double, totaling 1,545,000
households. KennedyJohnson increases for defense spending, tax cuts, and
the drafting of millions of young men for the war in Vietnam temporarily
had increased the rate of economic growth and had reduced the rate of
unemployment.

But the rapid rate of inflation after 1968 began to cause serious
trouble in the economy, followed by a major recession in 1973 and 1974,
which sent the rate of unemployment soaring over 9 percent. To avoid
social unrest, the number of families receiving AFDC doubled to stand at
3,500,000 families with more than 8,000,000 children. Since 1950, the
work situation for black men had deteriorated. Those who could not find
employment or were underemployed had difficulty committing themselves to
the expected cultural role as father and husband. "I've been scuffling
for five years," a young black husband said. "I've been scuffling for
five years from morning till night. And my kids still don't have
anything, my wife don't have anything, and I don't have anything." Like
many young males who felt defeated, he abandoned his family and looked
for a woman to support him. "She's not pretty, but she's got a beautiful
job. She just got herself a government job. She never misses a day's

work. She's a real mule." When another young male friend asked, "Hell,
who wants to live with a mule?" he answered, "Man, that's the best thing
to live with. When you got somebody who can pull that wagon, you really
got something." As a result of this demoralization, black women had to
take the responsibility for heading their households. By 1973, 35
percent of black families were headed by women, and these families had
more than half the young black children.

A major reason for the national shortage of jobs in the 1960s and 1970s
was the decision of the largest corporations to invest much of their
huge profits overseas. Between 1950 and 1974, $100 billion had been
invested in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. During the
decade of the 1960s, major manufacturers increased their industrial
production in the United States by 70 percent while their overseas
production increased by 500 percent. In 1972, while they exported $50
billion worth of goods from the United States, their overseas plants
were producing $180 billion worth of goods and they received 40 percent
of their profits from these sales.

When the corporations left the central cities for the suburbs, or left
New England for the South, they were following the same logic that
motivated them to leave the United States to go overseas--the pursuit of
profits. "Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations
of our free society," wrote the conservative economist Milton Friedman,
"as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility
other than to make as much money for the stockholders as possible." And
Carl A. Gerstacker, the chairman of Dow Chemical Company, expressed the
corporate desire to operate in a pure marketplace situation without any
social responsibility when he confessed that "I have long dreamed of
buying an island owned by no nation, and of establishing the world
headquarters of the Dow Company on the truly neutral ground of such an
island, beholden to no nation or society."

The production of almost all TV sets, radios, and other electronic
equipment in Asian countries was an example of the way American
companies went abroad to strengthen profits by using cheaper labor. The
increase of the proportion of Americans with incomes above the poverty
level depended, therefore, on the growth of service industries. A "baby
boom" at the end of the 1940s had briefly reversed the long-term decline
of the birthrate. As fifteen million

whites fled the central cities and headed for the suburbs, they created
a great demand for new houses, new appliances, new furniture, new cars.
The "baby boom" also created a demand for many more schoolteachers, and
the new affluence encouraged the rapid expansion of colleges and
universities. The proportion of high-school students going on to college
increased constantly from 1945 until the late 1960s, when it passed 50
percent.

The postwar "baby boom" did not last. The birthrate plunged until by
1975, for the first time in the history of white people in America, it
supported a zero growth or even a declining population. Housing costs
had reached a point where many young married couples had to think in
terms of apartments rather than suburban homes. And the rising prices of
cars and gasoline had started a trend among younger Americans to buy
European and Japanese compact cars.

As the psychology of the suburban frontier disintegrated in the 1960s
and Americans in jobs like teaching no longer were able to see
themselves moving away from a blue-collar past, they lost much of their
contempt for organized labor. The production and craft unions either had
managed to bargain for escalator clauses to tie their wages to increases
in the cost of living or they had organized the power to engage in
successful strikes. Public-school teachers began to unionize to protect
themselves against inflation, and there was even a trend among college
teachers toward collective bargaining. In 1970, most professors had seen
themselves as independent professionals, but when their salaries fell
drastically in proportion to the organized high-school teachers and when
their job security was threatened by declining enrollments, they began
to reconsider the need for collective bargaining. Unions also spread
among government employees, including firemen and policemen.

Government jobs at the federal, state, and local level had provided the
major new opportunity for employment throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
While federal expenditures increased at the rate of 8 percent a year,
rising from $37 billion in 1948 to $246 billion in 1972, state and local
expenditures increased at the rate of 10 percent a year, leaping from
$18 billion in 1948 to $180 billion in 1972. In the four years between
1967 and 1971, state taxes increased on the average of 67 percent and
local taxes by 50 percent. Laboring under the burden of increasing
inflation, the federal government ran deficit budgets every year after
1964 with the exception

of one. After a deficit of $44 billion in 1975, it anticipated a deficit
of $66 billion in 1976 as a result of increased expenditures for welfare
and a major tax cut designed to stimulate the economy and bring it out
of the worst recession since the 1930s. Many states and cities also had
engaged in deficit spending as they worked with the same assumption that
future growth would bring increased taxes to pay off the debt.

All of these economic trends emerged in exaggerated form in New York
City, creating a major financial crisis in the spring of 1975, when the
city admitted it could not pay the interest on its debts. Between 1963
and 1973, New York had increased the number of city employees by 50
percent. These workers, by organizing, had won significant pay
increases. Average salaries for police, for example, had increased from
$12,000 to $17,000 between 1971 and 1975. Out of a city population of
eight million, one million were on welfare, necessitating payments of
more than $2 billion a year. There were 91,000 retired city workers
whose pensions required $1 billion a year from the city budget. City
officials had begun borrowing in 1964 to balance the budget, and in 1975
the interest on the debt had reached about $2 billion a year, more than
the entire city budget had been in 1960. New York, like the nation,
seemed caught in a vicious cycle. As taxes had risen to meet public
payrolls, debt, and welfare costs, business and middle-class people had
left the city, removing 400,000 jobs in the early 1970s. This forced the
city to go further in debt and to raise taxes still higher. By 1976,
economic experts were predicting a crisis for the national government in
meeting the increasing financial obligations of the social security
system.

As city indebtedness paralleled the rise in the national debt, so did
private deficit spending. Commercial bank loans doubled from $198
billion in 1965 to $445 billion in 1973, and consumer installment credit
more than doubled from $8 billion to $21 billion during those same
years, as did indebtedness for new mortgages from $29 billion to $63
billion. Despite this increased indebtedness, which magnified the rate
of inflation, despite all. this pump priming, the national economy had
begun to slide into recession in 1973 and suffered a 10 percent decrease
in the GNP by 1975. Economists and government leaders were baffled by
the unprecedented combination of inflation and recession. "This has been
the worst slump of all," wrote the columnist Sylvia Porter, "for in
1929-32, prices at least fell along with incomes--but this time they
galloped at the start of

the decline and even now, 18 months later, are still climbing at an
intolerable rate."

A medium rate of inflation had been useful to the average American
through the 1950s and 1960s. Most wages had kept up with the rate of
inflation. Long-term debts, especially mortgages, diminished because of
inflation and higher wages. But this steady pattern of inflation was
undermining the value of the dollar in international finance and trade.
The United States had been even more dominant economically at the end of
World War II than in 1918. Japan and Germany, its chief competitors,
were captive nations, and England and France were severely impoverished.
America, therefore, had been able to establish an international
financial community which included the western European nations and
Japan. Within this community, the dollar was the unit of exchange,
convertible to gold at the price of $35 an ounce.

The expenses of the Korean war and the Vietnam war as well as the cost
of large numbers of troops, airplanes, and naval vessels deployed at
bases throughout the world caused a balance-of-payments deficit in which
the United States sent more dollars abroad than it received. As the
value of the dollar shrank because of inflation, American leaders were
able to coerce the European military allies to continue to accept the
dollar at its old value. Nevertheless, American economic power was
diminishing. In 1948, the United States controlled 71 percent of the
money in the "free world"; by 1962, it controlled only 40 percent.
Between 1956 and 1966, its gold reserves fell from $23 to $13 billion,
while foreign reserves increased from $12 billion to $30 billion. Then
in 1971, the country had its first trade deficit since the 1890s,
importing goods worth more than American exports.

President Nixon, faced with trade deficits and balance-of-payments
deficits combined with steep inflation in 1971, devalued the dollar by 9
percent and then again by 10 percent in 1973. He tried desperately to
deal with the economic crisis in 1971 by using the Keynesian technique
of cutting taxes and imposing a ninety-day freeze on all wages, rents,
and prices. He placed a 10 percent tariff on all imports and suspended
the convertibility of dollars into gold. With the collapse of American
financial domination of the free world and the collapse of the value of
the dollar, the price of gold on the world market leaped overnight from
$35 an ounce to $120 and continued to climb.

Then in 1973, the major oil-exporting nations of the world (OPEC)
organized to raise the price of the precious fuel dramatically and
further weaken the American economic situation. As oil reserves in the
United States were depleted (it was predicted in 1975 that only a
twenty-year supply of U.S. oil reserves remained at the current rate of
use), the nation became increasingly dependent upon foreign producers.
An even greater trade deficit resulted as billions of dollars a year
flowed out to pay for the ever more expensive oil from abroad. The
government of Libya, recognizing the deteriorating American economic
situation, would not accept dollars for its oil. The dollar had lost its
value, the Libyans insisted, and they wanted a currency that was
convertible to gold.

The skyrocketing cost of oil endangered the whole system of American
agriculture in which 5,000,000 farmers fed 200,000,000 Americans and
exported food to the rest of the world. The use of gasoline on farms had
quadrupled between 1940 and 1970, and the use of fertilizer had
increased eight times. The manufacture of fertilizer consumed oil. So
too did the generation of electricity, which was being consumed in 1970
at seventy times the rate of 1940. Indeed, the farmers in 1970 were
expending twelve calories of energy to get back one calorie of food. The
rapidly rising cost of oil, therefore, inevitably meant rising food
prices.

As the country became aware of the limits of its resources, it was also
becoming aware of the limits of space--the air, the land, and the
water--into which it could pour its industrial and agricultural wastes.
It was also becoming aware of the living complexity of those spaces. A
Clean Air Act in 1970 hoped to end industrial and automobile pollution
by 1975. The health hazards of industrial and other kinds of pollution
had been accepted. But the complexity of the interrelationships of the
economy with the environment had been vastly underestimated in 1970, and
the air had not been made much cleaner by 1975.

It also had been accepted by the end of the 1960s that economic
exploitation of natural resources took place within a complex and
delicate biological environment, and Congress had passed a National
Environmental Policy Act in 1969 asking that environmental impact
studies be made before new economic exploitation began. In 1975,
however, the administration of President Ford was pressing for speedy
development of coal strip mining and the rapid building of nuclear
electricity-generating plants despite the warnings by

many scientists that both would have a disastrous impact on the
environment.

When President Nixon cut back federal aid to universities and to space
projects in 1969, he accelerated the doubts that had been growing in the
academic establishment about the inevitability of expansion and growth.
The federal government had been expanding its commitment to research
from $3 billion in 1959 to $17 billion in 1969. This had enabled
educational institutions to expand at twice the rate of the GNP. Many
expected this expansion to last forever, and futurism, the science of a
future without work or poverty in which automation made a life of
creative leisure possible for everyone, became a respectable academic
subject. But with major unemployment among engineers and scientists by
1970, Philip Handler, the president of the National Academy of Sciences,
reported that "our national apparatus for the conduct of research and
scholarship is not yet dismantled, but it is falling into shambles." And
for Bentley Gates, retiring president of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, "We are like the explorers of a great
continent who have penetrated to its margins in most points of the
compass and have mapped the major mountain chains and rivers. There are
still innumerable details to fill in, but the endless horizons no longer
exist."

On university campuses, there were scientists and social scientists,
like Professor Jay Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, who were using the computer to predict a future which was
the absolute opposite of that of the futurists. Arguing that all
scientific principles pointed to the reality of limits, Forrester
declared that he saw "no solution for urban problems until cities
develop the courage to plan in terms of maximum population, a maximum
number of housing units, a maximum permissible building height and a
maximum number of jobs."

Orthodox economists, committed to a mechanistic model of the world,
seemed to be discredited by the failure of Keynesian economics to
predict the combination of inflation and recession that plagued the
country from 1969 onward. This situation of "stagflation" made it
possible for the few heretical economists to begin to win converts to
their biological definition of nature. Important books, Small Is
Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and Toward a Steady-State Economy by
Herman Daly, reached increasing audiences of economists and lay people
with their messages of the

necessity to limit growth, decentralize economic and social life, and
use renewable sources of energy that came from the cycles of nature.

Even the leaders of the great corporations were talking about the limits
to growth. "You can bet that for the next generation we're going to have
to live with the conditions we've seen over the past couple of years,"
reported one. And another declared that the limited availability of
energy "puts constraints on the rate of economic growth, constraints
that were not apparent in the preceding twenty years." At a seminar in
1975, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, a stockbroker declared, "I
would think it unlikely my kids will live as well as I have and I would
doubt that your kids will either." The increasing reluctance of the
children of the upper middle class to choose business careers had
reached some of their fathers. "Well, I made it," reminisced a corporate
dropout, "but I wasn't happy. I felt the need for some kind of renewal."

The prophecies of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford had failed by 1975.
The discipline of the machine had not kept either management or workers
loyal to linear time and to the vision of the factory as rational space.
Union leaders, recognizing the unhappiness of assembly-line workers,
insisted that "workers are not seeking self fulfillment on the job. They
are looking for a pay check. The job is the means by which they can
support their families. And if it pays enough, they can seek
self-fulfillment in other ways." But older workers spoke of the need to
escape the pain of meaningless work. "You dream, you think of things
you've done. I drift back continuously to when I was a kid and what me
and my brothers did. The things you love most are the things you drift
back into."

Younger workers increasingly were in rebellion against the gospel of
Frederick Taylor. "What I demand of the worker is not to produce any
longer by his own initiative," Taylor had declared, "but to execute
punctiliously the orders given, down to their minutest details."
Refusing to accept a speed-up of the assembly line at the new General
Motors plant at Lordstown, Qhio, the young workers sabotaged the work
process. "Occasionally, one of the guys will let a car go by," was the
cheerful description given by one employee. "At that point, he's made a
decision: 'Aw, fuck it. It's only a car.' It's more important to just
stand there and rap. With us, it becomes a human thing. It's the most
enjoyable part of my job, that moment. I love it."

"We have concealed our true circumstances even from ourselves"

******************

Chapter 18.

American Foreign Policy

and Domestic Politics,

1960-76

John F. Kennedy and Cuba Escalating involvement in Vietnam

Johnson's Vietnam war

Civil-rights activism and change

Native Americans and "Red Power"

Political women

Nixon reunites the Republican party, 1968 Abuses of the Presidency:
Watergate

On the November day in 1963 when he was assassinated at the end of a
thousand days in office, President Kennedy was planning to deliver a
speech on the "painful, risky, and costly effort" that was being made in
Southeast Asia. He was going to ask Americans to be good soldiers and to
make the sacrifices necessary to win the cold war because "we dare not
weary of the task." Kennedy and his advisers were sure that they could
stop a Communist revolution in South Vietnam. They had confidence in
Rostow's model that the normal evolution of a traditional society was
toward capitalism. They believed that communism was abnormal, a disease
that could strike a society in transition. But if the United States
applied temporary force to contain the Communist malignancy, then
countries such as South Vietnam would continue their normal development.

When Kennedy had taken office, he was so certain of capitalist strength
and Communist weakness that he endorsed a CIA plan to invade Cuba to
topple the new regime of the Communist leader, Fidel Castro. It was
assumed that the Communist disease had no strength among the Cuban
people and that a small force of anti Castro Cubans supplied and trained
by the United States in Florida could spark a massive anti-Castro
uprising. The invasion at the Bay of Pigs proved a total disaster.
Kennedy was deeply embarrassed by the fiasco and he became distrustful
of his military advisers. He also was angry at the press for discussing
the abortive invasion. "Details of this nation's covert preparations,"
he criticized, "have been available to every newspaper reader." Without
consulting the public, Kennedy went on to make decisions in October 1962
that threatened nuclear war if Russia did not withdraw missiles it had
placed in Cuba. Khrushchev removed them under this threat of all-out
war.

Kennedy, however, was opposed to a policy of "brinkmanship." He believed
that the rigid commitment to a policy of massive deterrence --the threat
of total atomic war--in the Eisenhower administration had made it
impossible for American leaders to use the small but necessary amount of
conventional military force that could have kept Cuba out of Communist
control. The mistake must not be repeated in Vietnam.

In 1954, the Eisenhower administration had paid 80 percent of

the cost of the French effort to retain its colony in Indo-China in the
face of a national revolution for independence. When the French finally
withdrew, Vietnam was divided. The revolutionary group of Ho Chi Minh,
identifying itself with Marxism, held the north. The United States
encouraged an anti-Communist military group in the south. The
instability of the South Vietnamese government, its unpopularity in the
countryside, and the strength of South Vietnamese rebels forced the
Kennedy administration to increase financial and military aid. Kennedy
and his advisers proposed an increase of conventional ground forces and
air power with an emphasis on special troops, Green Berets, skilled in
guerrilla warfare. Kennedy informed the public only that he was
increasing the number of military advisers. He doubted whether he had
public support for the overt use of armed forces to suppress a national
revolution.

In the 1964 presidential election campaign, the Republican candidate,
Barry Goldwater, took the position that the United States should not get
involved in another stalemate like the Korean war. He declared that he
was even willing to use atomic weapons to win decisively. President
Lyndon Johnson bitterly criticized Goldwater's threat of total war and
reassured the people that there was no possibility of large-scale
American involvement. "We are not about to send American boys nine or
ten thousand miles away from home," Johnson declared during the
campaign, "to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

While making these public declarations, Johnson informed Congress that
American ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in
the Bay of Tonkin. Although no firm evidence of North Vietnamese
aggression was presented, Congress voted 416 to 0 in the House and 88 to
2 in the Senate to give President Johnson full authority to use all
necessary military power to defend Americans from attack. Johnson used
this power to move hundreds of thousands of troops into South Vietnam
and to begin heavy bombing of North Vietnam. "I am not about to-lose
South Vietnam," Johnson told his advisers.

Johnson had accepted Rostow's advice that "it is on this spot that we
have to break the liberation war. If we don't break it here, we shall
have to face it again in Thailand, Venezuela, elsewhere." Johnson had
Kennedy's confidence in the ability of the economists to manage the war
as they managed the economy. It was expected that Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara, the former president

of the Ford Motor Company, could efficiently mobilize the resources
necessary to suppress the rebellious forces. Careful calculations of
infantry and artillery firepower, of electronic devices for detecting
the enemy, of numbers of air strikes and weight of bombs dropped, all
would add up to produce a "body-count" of the enemy and indicate the
disappearance of an effective Communist fighting force.

McNamara's attempt to define Vietnam as the rational space of the
marketplace where "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're
winning this war" crumbled by 1967. American generals kept promising
that one more army division would tip the balance until five hundred
thousand troops were committed. They promised that another wave of
bombing would cause the collapse of the Viet Cong until, by the end of
1967, more tons of bombs had been dropped than in World War II. McNamara
confessed failure and urged President Johnson to negotiate peace.
McNamara was relieved of his position; Johnson was not ready to accept
the failure of American planning. But the steady escalation of the war
during 1965, 1966, and 1967 led to massive criticism within American
borders. Johnson, his Cabinet, and the generals responded to critics
with reassurances that the last increase in troop strength had finally
pacified the countryside and the most recent increase in bombing of
North Vietnam had finally broken their will to wage war. But in January
1968, Viet Cong operating in the South and Communists in the North
launched a major attack during the season of Tet. The Tet offensive, in
the words of Senator Robert Kennedy, "shattered the mask of official
illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from
ourselves." Defecting from his brother's commitment to sustain South
Vietnamese generals at any cost, Kennedy joined Senator Eugene McCarthy
of Minnesota in challenging Johnson's leadership of the Democratic
party. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced his withdrawal from the
presidential race and curtailed the bombing of North Vietnam.

A major reason for President Johnson's withdrawal from national politics
in 1968 was his sense that the legislation of his Great Society program
had failed to provide domestic stability. Johnson had created the
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission)
to study the cause of the ghetto riots of the 1960s. The commission's
report found "white racism" to be the major cause and warned that "our
nation is moving toward two

societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." To overcome the
economic and social plight of blacks caused by endemic racism, the
commission recommended that the federal government create two million
jobs and build six million housing units. It also recommended a massive
attack on school segregation and "a national system of income
supplementation." But Johnson turned his back on the commmission's
report because he was sure that the majority of white southerners and
northern Catholics, who were essential parts of the Democratic party's
national majority, would not support such a legislative program.

As early as World War II white southerners had become fearful that an
effective policy of racial integration would be implemented, even though
Roosevelt had preserved segregation in the armed services. When the
Democratic party advocated civil rights in 1948, a States' Rights party
appeared throughout the South to oppose it. The party had its greatest
membership in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana. More than the President or Congress, the Supreme Court was
free from immediate political pressures and therefore could better
express symbolic changes in the national identity. The white Protestant
business and political elite tried to change its image during World War
II in order to separate itself from its racist profile. In future
patriotic ceremonies the Protestant chaplain would be flanked by a
Catholic and a Jewish chaplain. Jews were admitted into major
universities. In 1944, the Supreme Court reversed an older Court
decision and ruled that blacks could not be barred from primaries in the
southern states on racial grounds. This decision permitted blacks to
participate in the elections in those states where the Democrats had
one-party control. A small number of blacks began to vote, especially in
southern cities and the border states, and the number grew steadily
throughout the 1950s. Then in 1954, the Court again reversed a decision
of 1900 and ruled that legal segregation in school systems was
unconstitutional. The southern states refused to comply. But moderates
within the South, supported by the presence of federal troops, effected
some measure of compliance with the Supreme Court decision. In 1957,
however, Eisenhower was forced to send troops into Little Rock,
Arkansas, to desegregate a high school Southern blacks sensed the
inability of whites to maintain rigid racial discrimination. In
Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Rosa Parks, an elderly black woman, refused to
obey the law and move to the back of the bus. Her arrest led to a
spontaneous mass protest of

Montgomery blacks in which Martin Luther King, Jr. a Baptist minister,
emerged as a major leader. From Montgomery, protests spread throughout
black communities everywhere in the South. All aspects of the Jim Crow
caste patterns were being challenged.

King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
dedicated to a philosophy of nonviolent protest in an effort to
overthrow the caste system. Black college and high school students
initiated "sit-ins" at lunch counters and other areas of public
segregation and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) in 1960. In the North, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
picketed businesses that supported segregation. Violence between black
demonstrators in the South and police was not infrequent. But nonviolent
sit-ins, "Freedom Marches," and "Freedom Rides" against public
segregation continued nevertheless. These demonstrations eventually
penetrated the conscience of white liberals, who began to join the
southern marches. Some were beaten and even killed. As northern whites
were attacked by southern mobs, President Kennedy and his brother
Robert, the attorney general, were forced to extend protection to the
protestors and to sanction a massive March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom in August 1963. Surrounded by a crowd of two hundred thousand,
Martin Luther King, Jr., described his apocalyptic dream "that one day
the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be
able to sit together at the table of brotherhood."

Under massive pressure from black and white liberals, President Kennedy
called for civil-rights legislation in 1963. After Kennedy's death,
President Johnson maneuvered a Civil Rights Act through Congress in
1964. According to the law, racial, religious, and sexual discrimination
were barred in public accommodations as well as in employment. The law
also provided for the enforcement of the desegregation of schools and
public accommodations. Congress also passed a Voting Rights Act, which
authorized sending federal registrars into counties where the majority
of persons were not registered. By 1970, nearly 70 percent of blacks had
registered to vote, in contrast to the 2 or 3 percent in 1944 when
blacks began their reentry into southern politics.

The triumph of civil-rights legislation in 1964 coincided, however, with
a new kind of black activism. Spontaneous riots exploded in black
ghettos throughout the North and West. Led by young unemployed blacks,
these rebellions were an expression of dissatis-

faction with economic and social conditions, and they spotlighted the
disastrous condition of the black community. Achieving integration in
the political system, blacks discovered the limitations of economic and
social opportunity. Disillusionment came to Stokely Carmichael, a leader
of SNCC, for whom "this nation, from top to bottom is racist, and does
not function by morality, love, and nonviolence, but by power." "Black
Power" became the cry of many young black leaders after 1965. Even
Martin Luther King, Jr., redirected his emphasis toward a search for
jobs and economic justice. He was in Memphis to support a strike of
black sanitation workers when he was assassinated in April 1968. Radical
groups such as the Black Panthers urged economic revolution and a
coalition of poor blacks with poor whites.

Most black leaders, however, continued to hope that the exercise of
political power within the system would achieve social and economic
justice. In 1965, blacks were still vastly underrepresented in the
political life of northern cities. In Chicago, for example, fewer than 5
percent of governmental positions were held by blacks although more than
20 percent of the city's population was black. After 1965, blacks
struggled to gain a fair share of political leadership. They began to
win the mayorships of cities like Cleveland, Ohio; Gary, Indiana;
Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and even Atlanta, Georgia. But
the flight of white population to the suburbs, which made these
victories possible, also left black mayors facing segregated school
systems. They also inherited deteriorating tax situations as white
middle-class taxpayers and white-owned industry moved to the suburbs.

A similar pattern of increasing political power coupled with the absence
of economic power described the situation of Native Americans. In 1924,
the government had ruled that Indians were citizens even if they were
not landholders. This "toleration" of Native Americans culminated in the
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which recognized tribal cultures and
permitted the establishment of tribal governments. As the morale of the
Native Americans strengthened, they formed the National Congress of
American Indians (NCAI), which pressured Congress to respect the treaty
rights of Indians. By 1961, a national Indian Youth Council had been
established to express the growing militancy of young Native Americans.

"Red Power" developed in the 1960s as young Native Americans

worked to develop a sense of cultural pride. No longer was it necessary
to think themselves and their culture inferior to whites, and young
Sioux danced their Sun Dance for the first time since the defeat of
Sitting Bull. Radical Native Americans like Dennis Banks, Russell Means,
and Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt helped to form the American Indian
Movement (AIM) to pressure the government to provide social and economic
justice for their people, whose average income was $1,500 a year, whose
unemployment rate was 40 percent in 1970, whose infant-mortality rate
was three times the national average, and whose teen-age suicide rate
was a hundred times that of whites. In November 1972, Native Americans
briefly seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington,
D.C., to protest the corruption and inefficiency of the government's
Bureau of Indian Affairs. And in February 1973, AIM warriors occupied
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and fought FBI forces for more than two
months.

A recurring theme in the Native American movement in the twentieth
century was colonial rebellion. "We have more in common with the
Africans and Vietnamese and all the nonWestern people than we do with
the Anglo-Saxon culture of the United States," declared Vine Deloria,
Jr. "We are a tribal people with tribal sympathies. An Indian doesn't
have to know, or understand, anything about Kenya, or Burma, or Peru, or
Vietnam. He feels the way they feel." Chicanos, too, had lost their
deference for Anglo-Americans in the 1960s. They were no longer
"grateful" for the right to vote, to citizenship, without the
accompanying social and economic power. Their population swelled in the
Southwest and the West as the exodus from Mexico continued. A high birth
rate also contributed to the growth of the Chicano communities. In 1960,
their income was less than half that of the whites among whom they
lived, and they enjoyed vastly inferior public services. The struggle
for political and economic power continued throughout the 1960s. Cesar
Chavez led an effort to unionize farm workers, while Jose Angel
Gutierrez was beginning a LaRaza Unida party in Texas as a vehicle for
Chicanos to take political power where they were a majority of the
population. Newspapers like La Raza, published in Los Angeles, and El
Guito: A Journal of Contemporary MexicanAmerican Thought encouraged
young Chicanos to reject AngloAmerican culture and participate in a
revival of their native heritage. Leaders like Rudolfo Gonzales of the
Denver Chicano

community were working to have the people take over the schools to see
that Spanish was taught as a language along with SpanishAmerican
culture. The militancy of the movement was expressed by the formation of
the paramilitary Brown Berets, committed to the defense of their people
against police brutality and interference with Chicano autonomy.

As other groups grappled for economic and political power, so too women
stirred to action during the 1960s. The gradual increase since 1900 in
the number of women working outside the home, including working mothers,
accelerated drastically during World War II. Despite the hope of
business leaders that "too many should not stay in the labor force"
after the war because "the home is the basic American institution,"
women continued to become a larger part of the work force, and by 1970
more than 50 percent of mothers were employed. Most of this increase was
in "traditional" women's work--clerical, sales, and domestic-service
jobs. The percentage of women in the professions had decreased between
1920 and 1970, and between 1950 and 1970, the median wage of women had
slipped from 65 percent to 59 percent of that of male workers. In 1963,
Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, which bitterly pointed to
the contradiction between the social ideal of the woman as "young and
frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive, gaily content
in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home" and the
reality of most women working at dull and poorly paid jobs.

Women in 1960, like blacks and Chicanos and other groups at the bottom
of the economy, had little influence in politics. Like them, women were
dissatisfied with the status quo. Polls indicated an almost universal
desire on the part of mothers that their daughter have a different
lifestyle. Pressure from women forced President Kennedy to create a
National Commission on the Status of Women, and by 1967 every state had
followed suit in creating such commissions. But male leaders throughout
the country, as represented by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC), had no intention of enforcing the equal-employment
section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, considering it, as one
commission member said, "a fluke, conceived out of wedlock."

Frustration with male apathy and hostility led lo the formation in 1966
of the National Organization of Women (NOW) to force change. NOW lobbied
for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution
(prohibiting discrimination in government on the basis of sex),
enforcement of laws on sex discrimination in employment in private
industry, maternity-leave rights for working women, tax deductions for
child care, child-care centers, equal and unsegregated education, equal
job-training opportunities and allowances for women below the poverty
level, and the right of women to control their reproductive lives.
Special-interest groups also organized, such as the Women's Equity
Action League (WEAL) to represent women in higher education and the
Federally Employed Women (FEW).

These groups largely represented moderate women activists. But radical
feminist groups apeared in reaction to the sexism of male radicals. Jo
Freeman and Shulamith Firestone helped to form a National Conference for
a New Politics to express feminist radicalism. Small journals appeared
across the country such as Off Our Bodies, Ain't I a Woman, and Majority
Report; feminist leaders exhorted women to see themselves as a group
that had been successfully colonized and to see their need to break from
the subordinate cultural identity given them by their male colonizers.
By 1972, the movement had gained such strength that it was able to
support a major national magazine, Ms.

A national Women's Political Caucus led by Congresswomen Shirley
Chisholm and Bella Abzug had forced much greater representation by women
in the conventions of the major political parties in 1972, and there was
a dramatic increase in the number of women elected to public office.
Women took seats in state legislatures as well as in the United States
Congress. This trend was even stronger in the 1974 elections, which also
saw the election of Ella Grasso to the governorship of Connecticut, the
first woman in American history elected to a governorship in her own
right.

Radical political groups proliferated on college campuses in the early
1960s. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was one of the major
ones. Polls indicated, however, no significant shift of students toward
the political left between 1960 and 1972. The polls did indicate
dramatic shifts in cultural values and a tremendous loss of faith in
established political, economic, and social institutions. Students
widely engaged in premarital sex; abortion became a conventional method
of contraception to some; marijuana was as available as cigarettes; and
homosexuality was tolerated. At the same time students shrank from the
idea of fighting wars for national

honor, and in general they eschewed the use of violence. Students
expressed growing distrust of business corporations, the national
government, and established churches, and skepticism about the modern
work ethic.

It was within this context of student alienation that blacks, Native
Americans, Chicanos, and women succeeded in helping to form new college
departments or programs in their respective ethnic cultures, areas once
defined as worthless by educational leaders. College students, supported
by high-school students, wanted to grow up and erase the definition of
adolescence established earlier in the century. Colleges responded by
ending their in loco parentis role. Congress and the states responded by
passing a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen.
Many states lowered the permissible age for alcohol consumption and were
easing their penalties for the possession of marijuana.

Many of these pressures for social change sought political expression at
the Democratic Convention meeting in Chicago in 1968. But young people
protesting against "politics as usual" were met by massive police
violence directed by Mayor Richard Daley, who represented the power of
the old politics within the Democratic party.

Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1968 because party
leaders believed he could reunite their party. Vice-president under
Eisenhower, Nixon had been the Republican presidential candidate in 1960
and lost to Kennedy. He then ran for the governorship of California in
1962 and lost. He was on the political sidelines in 1964 when a
rebellion against "liberal" control of the party took place. Many
Republicans throughout the country had never accepted the "liberal"
Republican compromises with welfare capitalism and the cold war. In
1964, these conservatives organized at the local level to take control
of the selection of delegates to the national convention, where they
nominated Senator Barry Gold- water to express their views. Goldwater
lost-disastrously to Johnson, however, and Nixon faced the difficult
task of building a new coalition in 1968. The number of Americans
identifying themselves as Republicans had continued to shrink during the
1950s and 1960s. But the Democratic party did not benefit from these
defections. Many people, especially the young, were turning away from
politics completely. Many others were defining themselves as
"independents." Nixon's strategy for election in this unprecedented
situation

of party weakness was to de-emphasize his relationship with the
Republican party and to appeal to independents and dissatisfied
Democrats.

Large numbers of white southern Democrats had voted for Eisenhower in
1952 to express their discontent with the national party's commitment to
civil rights. But they continued to vote for local Democrats and to send
Democrats to Congress. They also worried that Republican control of the
legislative process might change the pattern of government intervention
in the economy established since 1933, a pattern that had provided
benefits and subsidies for the middle-class and blue-collar workers. A
similar political outlook had developed among many northern lower-middle
class and blue-collar Catholic voters. They continued to vote as
Democrats except at the presidential level, where they expressed their
anger at civil-rights programs that affected northern cities and at
welfare legislation for the poor. They had expected the work ethic to
provide avenues of upward mobility for their children. The public
support of large numbers of permanently unemployed people called into
question the validity of the competitive system. It also challenged the
sacrifices they were making in hopes that their children would have
better lives. "Those lazy sluts having kids like it was a factory. You
don't work, you don't live, right?" was the way in which a blue-collar
worker expressed his fear and anger at the increase of welfare in the
1960s.

Although Nixon was a wealthy Wall Street lawyer when he became President
he was a model for many who admired the self- made man. Born into a poor
California family, Nixon associated his rise to the White House with the
Lincoln tradition. "I believe in the American dream because I have seen
it come true in my own life." Wilson was Nixon's greatest hero because
he had spoken so eloquently for the Protestant work ethic. "The way to
assure maximum growth is not by expanding the function of government,"
Nixon wrote, "but by increasing the opportunities for investment for
millions." Competition in the marketplace, he declared, was still the
American way. "I never in my life wanted to be left behind," he said,
and "When you have won one battle is the time you should step up your
effort to win another."

The average voters showed at the polls their resentment of the
privileged upper class. This upper class called into question the belief
in a classless society of self-made men. Nixon had never been

comfortable with leaders from the eastern establishment, and as
President, he chose two self-made millionaires from the South and West
as his closest friends. Every President from Theodore Roosevelt to John
F. Kennedy had heard political, educational, and church leaders of the
eastern establishment preach the virtues of the militant and competitive
life. Suddenly, after 1965, these leaders seemed to have capitulated to
the permissiveness and pacifism of the college students. As the
resentment of the lower-middle-class and blue-collar workers turned to
anger, so it seemed did the attitudes of Richard Nixon. He saw a "great
spiritual crisis" in the nation because there was "a breakdown in,
frankly, what I would call the leadership of this country." Because "the
Establishment is dying," he saw signs of national collapse. "Drugs,
crime, campus revolts, racial discord, draft resistance--on every hand,
we find old standards violated and old values discarded."

Nixon won the Presidency in 1968 by the slimmest of margins as the
third-party candidacy of Governor George Wallace of Alabama split off a
number of southern and northern Democrats. In his Inaugural Address,
however, he asked the people of the United States to see him as a strong
President who, like Kennedy, would fulfill the goal of Woodrow Wilson to
Americanize the world. We will have, Nixon affirmed, "a crusading zeal,
not just to hold our own but to change the world--including the
Communist world-- and to win the battle for freedom and true economic
progress without a hot war."

Nixon knew that Wilson's dream had been put on the defensive in the
1930s by Germany and Japan and in the 1940s by Soviet Russia. Under
Eisenhower, the United States had tried to create the image of
invincible power through massive nuclear armaments, and then Kennedy had
tried to create an image of strength through conventional armed forces.
But the threat of nuclear weapons had not stopped a Communist revolution
in Cuba, and the use of conventional weapons had not been able to
destroy such a revolution in Vietnam.

Having struggled from poverty to the White House, having paid the price
of tremendous inner discipline, which repressed all impulses to relax or
play, Nixon could not admit that he had taken over a Presidency that had
lost its meaning to the American people. He could not admit that it was
his destiny to be the first President who commanded the retreat of
American armies. "For the United States," he declared, "the first defeat
in our nation's history would

result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership not only in
Asia but throughout the world."

During the four years of his first administration, he withdrew hundreds
of thousands of troops committed to Vietnam by Lyndon Johnson. He
conducted this retreat, however, within the illusion of an America on
the military offensive. In the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Truman,
Kennedy, and Johnson, Nixon, as commander in-chief, made secret
decisions that threw the enemy off balance. He ordered the bombing of
Cambodia, the invasions of Cambodia and Laos, the mining of Haiphong
harbor, and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972. Nixon praised
professional football as the perfect embodiment of the American spirit.
Under his quarterbacking, the American team was not "a pitiful and
helpless giant." Under his direction, the nation moved with quickness
and precision, with power and deception. His play-calling was
unpredictable and successful.

Nixon's leadership, however, brought the country ever closer to his own
goal line, not the enemy's. For Nixon, it was disastrous for the
individual to stop expanding, and it was disastrous for the nation to
stop expanding. "We stand at a crossroad in our history," he proclaimed.
"We shall reaffirm our destiny for greatness or we shall choose to
withdraw into ourselves." He reacted against those who advocated peace
for a price in Asia: "North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the
United States," he cried out. "Only Americans can do that." Nor was
Vice-President Agnew silent on the subject of the eastern establishment,
calling them an "effete corps of impudent snobs," given to "sniveling,
hand-wringing, and fawning." But Nixon continued to direct the retreat
of American power.

Nixon saw himself standing alone as President in his commitment to the
preservation of American power. The Supreme Court encouraged cultural
permissiveness. Congress refused to support further war. Academic
intellectuals, churchmen, and media leaders had renounced their 1964
position as cold-war warriors. The press especially infuriated Nixon. It
had supported the military secrecy of Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and
Truman. He thought it was undermining "respect for the office of
President of the United States." Alone in the White House, without the
support of a powerful party, without the support of the establishment
figures who had traditionally shaped public opinion, Nixon believed that
"the press is the enemy" and that "a full-fledged drive should be put
against the media." Public relations was brought to a fine art within
the

White House to manipulate the hostile media. Nixon's public-relations
experts were supposed to create images to the public that were favorable
to the administration. "When we have our public relations discussion
Saturday," Nixon ordered, "I think we ought to put down five or six
public relations goals that we want to impress on public consciousness."

Nixon was outraged that the power to use the FBI, the CIA, or Army
Intelligence to harass his enemies (as Johnson had used them against the
peace movement in 1967 and 1968) had been taken from him. He knew of J.
Edgar Hoover's FBI program, COINTELPRO, which since 1956 had disrupted
the personal lives of radicals, but Hoover would no longer cooperate
with the President. Nixon began his own undercover activities:
wiretapping members of the press as well as officials in his own
administration. An undercover team was sent into Democratic party
headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., to place
wiretaps in telephones. Nixon seemed to think the Democrats were among
the domestic enemies against whom he must wage war because they no
longer believed in the image of invincible American international
strength. Without the assurance of a viable Republican party to support
his bid for re-election in 1972, the President and his men initiated a
series of political "dirty tricks" to be played against the strongest
Democratic candidates, especially Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. "We
ought to go down to the kennels and turn all the dogs loose on Ecology
Ed," Nixon remarked. Secret money was sent into Alabama to undermine
Governor Wallace.

When White House burglars were caught at the Watergate on June 17, 1972,
Nixon endorsed a cover-up. He later advised Attorney General John
Mitchell "I don't give a shit what happens, I want you to stonewall it,
let them plead the Fifth Amendment, or anything else, if it'll save
it--save the plan." With the White House connection to the burglars
successfully hidden for the moment, Nixon advanced to a great personal
triumph in the November election. He successfully identified the
Democratic candidate, Senator George McGovern, with the social
revolution of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" feared by so many voters.
His advisers put pressure on corporations to contribute $60,000,000,
much of which was illegal, to the President's campaign. But his smashing
victory had no institutional base. The Republican party made few gains
at the local level or in Congress. "Let's face it," Nixon told an aide,
"nobody is a friend of ours."

Unable to cope with the disintegrating economy or the deep social
divisions, Nixon continued to manufacture the image of great
presidential power. He received huge media coverage during his trips to
Russia and China, where he seemed to achieve detente with the great
Communist powers, and he made a peace with North Vietnam that permitted
North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam. By concentrating on
the President's role in foreign policy, by traveling abroad, by flying
constantly from the White House to his mansions in Florida and
California and to Camp David in Maryland, he presented the illusion of
active leadership. But he found no personal security in his role as
national leader. Instead, he enriched himself as a private citizen,
arranging for the expenditure of $17,000,000 of government funds for his
estates at Key Biscayne and San Clemente, and falsifying his income tax
to retain $400,000. His fears that there was no substance to his
Presidency began to be fulfilled when Vice-President Agnew had to resign
because of tax evasion and bribery charges and when one of the Watergate
burglars, James McCord, decided to inform Judge John Sirica that the
burglary was part of a larger conspiracy. "But the point is that
everything is a crisis," Nixon reassured an aide. "I mean, Christ, it'll
be mainly a crisis among the upper intellectual types. You know, the
soft heads."

A Senate investigation of the Watergate break-in was initiated in
addition to the grand jury investigation, and suddenly it was revealed
that Nixon taped all conversation in his Oval Office at the White House.
Throughout the spring of 1974, Nixon provided carefully edited
transcripts of the White House tapes. But even with the most
incriminating evidence of the President's role in the Watergate cover-up
repressed, the circumstantial evidence was great enough for the House
Judiciary Committee to bring several articles of impeachment against
him. And when the Supreme Court ruled that he must give the tapes
containing the incriminating evidence to the grand jury, his aides
persuaded him to resign rather than face conviction by the Senate.

In his second Inaugural Address, Nixon had called for a rewriting of
American history because "our children have been taught to be ashamed of
their country, ashamed of their parents, ashamed of America's record at
home and its role in the world." One reason he taped all conversations
in the Oval Office might be that he wanted to be assured control over
the materials he would use when he wrote the history of his
administration in the hopes of proving that

the system that he had learned at his mother's knee was still valid. In
his resignation speech, he affirmed that "I have tried to remain in
control of the Presidency." Only the President had the power to define
the American past and the American future. But on August 9, 1974,
Richard Nixon was a "pitiful and helpless giant."

*****************

Chapter 19.

Gerald Ford and the Legacy of Watergate

The rise and fall of Jimmy Carter

Resurgence on the right Reaganomics and the economic crisis

IranContragate Social Issues: the family, the elderly, and the poor

The resignation of Richard Nixon thrust into prominence a most unlikely
successor, Gerald Ford, about whom The New York Times said, "there is no
whiff of charisma." Ford, a longtime congressman from Michigan, had
sponsored no major legislation. Political insiders questioned his
intelligence. But he had a reputation as a loyal Republican and his
connections on Capitol Hill made him the ideal replacement for Nixon's
Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign in 1973 for
accepting bribes. Now, with Nixon gone, Ford assumed a responsibility
for which he was ill prepared.

While public confidence in Washington politicians reached a nadir,
conservatives argued that the Watergate proceedings validated the wisdom
of the American political system: the crooks had been driven from
office. But Ford rapidly squandered that good will when he chose as his
Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the huge Standard Oil
fortune. Congressional investigation revealed Rockefeller's arrogant use
of personal wealth to further his political career. Still, in the spirit
of healing the wounds of Watergate, Congress agreed to accept his
appointment. For the first time in American history, neither the
President nor the Vice-President had been elected to office. Then, in an
even more devastating decision, Ford moved to end the Watergate fiasco
by granting Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon ... for all
offenses against the United States." The pardon blocked any further
investigation of Nixon's criminality. Overnight, Ford's popularity
rating plummeted from 72 to 49 percent.

Ford's efforts to ease the burdens of Watergate and Vietnam
underestimated the force of public anger. Although he offered "clemency"
to draft evaders and military deserters and appointed a presidential
panel to consider such cases, only 6 percent of the eligible persons
bothered to apply. In the 1974 congressional elections, voter
participation dropped to 38 percent, the lowest since World War II. The
Republican party lost almost every major election, and the Democrats
overwhelmingly controlled both houses of Congress. But beyond
criticizing the administration, the Democrats offered no new programs
for the nation.

Ford's policies, meanwhile, failed not only to resolve major foreign and
domestic problems, but also exacerbated public despair about the
competence of government. Relying on Nixon's secretary of state,

Henry Kissinger, to continue the policy of detente with the Soviet
Union, Ford met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to discuss a second
round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). The talks failed
to produce an accord. Indeed, the negotiations exposed a fundamental
contradiction in American foreign policy. Underlying the concept of
detente was the realization that the United States did not have the
power to dominate the international order. But hawkish leaders in both
parties--Democratic senator Henry Jackson and Defense Secretary James
Schlesinger, for example--refused to accept military equality with the
Communist superpower. "Don't try to reach agreements with the Russians,"
wrote Nixon's former defense secretary, Melvin Laird, in Reader's
Digest, "because you can't trust them."

The widespread criticism of detente, which just a few years earlier was
considered a major achievement of the Nixon Presidency, reflected a
profound disgust at the loss of American prestige in world affairs.
Although Nixon had described the Paris Treaty ending the Vietnam war as
"peace with honor" in 1973, the regimes of South Vietnam and Cambodia
were defeated by North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Kissinger,
who had pleaded with Congress to intervene again in Southeast Asia, now
urged Americans to "put Vietnam behind us." Instead, congressional
criticism of the administration increased. Ford's admission that the CIA
had participated in the overthrow of the Al lende regime in Chile in
1973 brought loud protests. So, too, did revelations that the CIA had
illegally engaged in domestic spying-- wiretapping, burglary,
surveillance, and mail intercepts--against United States citizens.
Further congressional investigation in 1975 disclosed a gigantic web of
illegal activities: assassination attempts by the CIA against foreign
leaders; the creation of one million domestic intelligence files; an FBI
counterintelligence program to discredit the Black Panther party, the
Socialist Workers party, and Martin Luther King, Jr. personally.
Congress attempted to gain greater control of the intelligence apparatus
and liberalized the Freedom of Information Act to allow access to
certain secret documents. It also blocked Ford's attempt to use the CIA
to intervene in a civil war in Angola.

The failure of Ford's foreign policies mirrored his problems on the home
front. None was more serious than the economic crisis he inherited from
Nixon: high inflation, high interest rates, weak securities markets,
worsening international trade and payments, and rising unemployment.
Ford, like Nixon, viewed these problems as temporary rather than
structural. With OPEC raising world oil prices, Americans

faced a runaway inflation. But the President rejected wage and price
controls and instead pleaded for voluntary restraint. In a major
television speech in 1974, he recommended that each citizen "make a list
of some ten ways you can save energy." He appeared in public with a
lapel button, "WIN" ("whip inflation now"), and reminded the Future
Farmers of America: "Clean up your plate before you leave the table!"
Democrats, led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, demanded government
unemployment programs, but dared not pass a legislative package that
included higher gasoline taxes and mandatory rationing. "The state of
the Union," said Ford in his first annual address in 1975, "is not
good."

As the economy worsened, public confidence continued to wane. Twice in
1975, Ford narrowly escaped assassination attempts. The most popular
Hollywood genre of the period was the "disaster" movie-- Airport, The
Towering Inferno, and Jaws--epics of mass death and chaos caused by
technological arrogance or the blind forces of nature. "Such movies,"
suggested novelist Gore Vidal, "distract people from the thoughts of
robbery and deceit to which they are subjected daily by oil companies,
politicians, and banks."

This popular mistrust dampened the celebration of the nation's two
hundredth birthday in 1976. The city of Philadelphia, which had hosted a
centennial fair one hundred years earlier, rebuffed plans to commemorate
the Bicentennial. At Independence Hall, President Ford said, "we lead
because our whole history says we must." But history played a small role
in the Bicentennial. On July 4, 1976, the media highlighted extravagant
fireworks displays and a fleet of sailing ships in New York harbor. "It
was a people's day," remarked political columnist Elizabeth Drew. "No
doubt the good feeling one observed today, even the patriotic feeling,
came out of confidence in our country, as distinguished from confidence
in our government."

This skepticism about Washington and the ability of either political
party to provide solutions to the nation's economic and social problems
set the tone for the presidential campaign of 1976. Jimmy Carter, the
former governor of Georgia, took advantage of this mood to win the
nomination of the Democratic party. Presenting himself as a political
outsider who stood apart from Washington, he demanded "this chasm
between people and government... be bridged." As a peanut farmer from
Plains, Georgia, Carter projected the image of the lost smalltown
America. He promised to restore morality to the White House.

Each Sunday, he interrupted his vigorous campaign to return home to
teach Bible classes at his local Baptist church. He vowed never to lie
to the American people.

Carter, who began the presidential race with the slogan "Jimmy Who?"
skillfully used the media to overcome his obscurity. As part of the
political reforms within the Democratic party, state primary elections
had weakened the power of the traditional party bosses. Thus Carter
could appeal to voters at the grass roots. He succeeded, for example, in
bypassing the black leadership in Congress and spoke directly to
evangelical blacks through their churches. Such a strategy reinforced
his image as a nonprofessional politician. It also enabled the candidate
to disguise his political agenda. Polls showed that liberal voters
believed he was a liberal, while conservatives thought he was a
conservative.

Although Carter tried to minimize his connections with big business, his
campaign nonetheless was financed largely by corporate contributions.
The candidate also participated in an elite business organization: the
Trilateral Commission. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, this
multinational group designed plans for America's world leadership.
(Later, as President, Carter tapped the Trilateral Commission to fill
key administration positions.) The corporate elite welcomed Carter
because he promised to end the political threat of another, less pliant
southern populist, George Wallace. Carter's popularity in the South was
crucial to the Democratic party. The growing migration of corporations
to that region in the 1960s and 1970s had changed its political
character. White southerners, once a basic part of the New Deal
coalition, had deserted the party to vote for Nixon. But Carter could
appeal to southern pride as well as to a new spirit of racial
moderation. His nonprofessional style also extended his strength among
blue-collar workers who had supported Nixon four years earlier.

While Carter captured the Democratic nomination, Ford had to defeat a
right-wing ground swell for Ronald Reagan within the Republican party.
Reagan, like Carter an ex-governor, posed as a Washington outsider and
demanded basic change,s of policy. On foreign affairs, he represented
the conservative faction that rejected the Nixon Ford policy of detente,
particularly nuclear arms limitations and recognition of the People's
Republic of China. "Americans," Reagan declared, "are hungry to feel
once again a sense of mission and greatness." He also condemned the
large budget deficits of the Ford administration. "Balancing the
budget," he quipped, "is like protecting your virtue--you have to learn
to say 'no.' " This combination of bluntness

and wit proved very popular. But in the end the President maintained
control of the Republican party and gained the nomination.

In the presidential campaign, Ford symbolized the same small-town values
as Jimmy Carter. He also had the advantage of incumbency. Although the
candidates met in three televised debates, Ford preferred to run a "Rose
Garden" campaign, using his White House activities to demonstrate his
qualifications. Carter, forced to speak more frequently, dismayed voters
by his vagueness on the issues. The race proved extremely close, with
Carter winning by only 2 percent of the popular vote and a narrow margin
in the electoral college. Crucial to Carter's victory was the black
vote, an increasingly significant factor in southern balloting. The
Democrats also won huge majorities in Congress. No less significant,
however, was the continuing decline of voter participation, dropping
from 55.7 percent in 1972 to 54.4 percent in 1976.

In his inaugural address, President Carter called for "a new spirit" in
government. "I have no new dream to set forth today," he declared, "but
rather urge a fresh faith in the old dream." Promising to simplify
government, he reduced the size of the White House staff, ordered
cabinet members to drive their own cars, and instituted a televised
"fireside chat," reminiscent of Roosevelt. Carter also surrounded
himself with a core of cronies from Georgia, who lacked extensive
political experience. This casual style of politics, immensely popular
at first, reflected the desire to restore trust in government.

Carter's inexperience in Washington, however, rapidly eroded his base of
power. He quarreled with congressional leaders about public works
projects, threatened vetoes, and then backed down. He pardoned Vietnam
draft resisters, which provoked storms of protests, and then promised no
additional reprieves. He criticized violations of human rights in the
Soviet Union, but then ignored similar problems within allied countries
such as South Korea. Such shifts and contradictions created a public
image of vacillation, uncertainty, and weakness. Instead of inspiring
confidence, Carter personified hesitancy. After a year in office, his
popularity rating dropped from 75 to 50 percent.

Like Ford, Carter was the prisoner of the deteriorating economy, haunted
by simultaneous inflation and unemployment. In his first major
legislative program, he presented a comprehensive energy program-- "the
moral equivalent of war," he called it--which emphasized conservation,
greater efficiency, and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power Conservatives
quickly denounced the plan for emphasizing less, rather

than more, oil production. "Our problem isn't a shortage of oil," said
Ronald Reagan, "it's a surplus of government." Congress eventually
passed a national energy act in 1978, but it contained few restraints on
energy consumption.

The shortcomings of the nation's energy policy were soon made obvious.
In 1979, a breakdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility in
Pennsylvania threatened to produce a major catastrophe. The limits of
technology were instantly apparent. Equally significant was the
simultaneous release of the movie, China Syndrome, about a reactor
failure, which emphasized the political dimension of the crisis-- the
dishonesty of the nuclear power industry and the inability of government
to regulate it. Such popular suspicions led to a grassroots movement to
oppose the proliferation of nuclear reactors. But it was the rising cost
of nuclear energy and the economic inefficiency of the reactors, rather
than safety considerations, which forced the cancellation of thirty-one
projects.

The economic consequences of the energy crisis became even more apparent
when OPEC abruptly announced a 50 percent increase of oil prices in
1979. The feeling of helplessness struck a blow at national morale.
Carter eventually persuaded Congress to pass emergency legislation
providing for a strategic petroleum reserve. But the rise of oil prices
pushed inflation to 13.3 percent in 1979. The nation faced a trade
deficit of $28 billion and an unemployment rate of 6 percent. Underlying
the decline of the economy under Nixon, Ford, and now Carter was a
steady weakening of American productivity; by 1979, the productivity
rate was minus .9 percent. These statistics carried a grim message: the
wealth of the average American was declining. A generation which had
experienced unprecedented expansion of per capita income in the postwar
decades was now angered and bewildered by this disastrous turn of
events.

While acknowledging the existence of a profound "malaise," Carter's
response to the economic crisis seemed to make things worse. To curb
inflation, he encouraged the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest
rates to a record-breaking 15 percent. But this policy would also check
economic expansion, cause recession, and increase unemployment. Never
before in the twentieth century had a Democratic President deliberately
assaulted the economic position of lower-class Americans.

The domestic crisis had direct consequences for United States foreign
policy. American domination of world markets, already weakened by
deficits of trade and payments, was now challenged by the rising
economies of Japan and West Germany. The United States could no longer

even sustain its special relationship with Latin America. Hoping to
improve relations in the Western Hemisphere, Presidents Johnson, Nixon,
and Ford had recognized the importance of negotiating a surrender of the
Panama Canal. Carter determined to complete these arrangements and
succeeded in convincing the Senate to ratify two treaties in 1978
transferring the canal to Panama by the year 2000.

Carter's initiatives provoked bitter opposition from conservatives. So
did his policy toward Nicaragua: he refused to send additional military
assistance to the right-wing dictator, Anastasio Somoza, and instead
recognized the victorious Sandinista guerrillas. American conservatives
expressed greater anger when Carter extended formal diplomatic
recognition to the People's Republic of China and terminated the mutual
defense treaty with Taiwan. Such a shift, Carter believed, not only
recognized the realities of power in Asia, but also promised to
stimulate American trade with the mainland. Similarly, Carter endeavored
to improve relations with black Africa. Indeed, he was the first
President to visit that part of the world.

At the beginning of his administration, moreover, Carter seemed
interested in continuing detente with the Soviet Union. He reopened the
SALT talks in 1977 and, to the dismay of conservatives, cancelled
production of the B-l bomber. But his overtures did not relax
international tensions. Increasingly, Carter relied on cold-war rhetoric
to warn the Soviets against aggression. Thus, the signing of the SALT II
agreement in 1979 satisfied neither doves nor hawks. Although the treaty
established a parity of nuclear strength between the superpowers, it
permitted a doubling of the number of nuclear warheads. To appease
conservative critics, Carter also endorsed more Trident submarines, the
mobile MX missile system, and compulsory "national service" for men and
women. The treaty stalled, nonetheless, on the question of verification,
and Carter lacked the political clout to overcome his opponents.

Carter did achieve a diplomatic triumph by persuading Egyptian leader
Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to sign a treaty
ending thirty years of warfare. But the truce did not address the
problems of Palestine refugees. Nor was Carter prepared for the eruption
of Islamic nationalism in Iran. Despite his public stand against
violations of human rights, he supported the right-wing dictatorship of
the Shah of Iran. When a nationalist revolution toppled the Shah, Carter
refused to negotiate with the revolutionaries. After the Shah went into
exile in 1979, Carter permitted him to enter the United States for
medical treatment. Anti-American anger exploded

in Iran. Militants seized the United States embassy, took sixty
hostages, and demanded the return of the Shah and his fortune. Appeals
to international law failed to gain release of the hostages; so did an
aborted military expedition. The hostage crisis lasted more than a year.
In that time, United States prestige dwindled, and Jimmy Carter appeared
utterly impotent. "If one works for years at becoming a pitiful,
helpless giant," said Ford's former defense secretary, James
Schlesinger, "one might just succeed."

Despite diplomatic failures and the economic crisis at home, Carter
decided to seek another term. His main challenger within the Democratic
party was Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Criticizing the
President's economic policies, Kennedy charged that unemployment, not
inflation, was the nation's primary problem. He called for wage and
price controls and urged a plan for national health insurance. Such an
agenda, reminiscent of the New Deal, was soon obscured by the foreign
policy crisis. In the moment of national peril, Democrats rallied to the
President. Carter's success depended, in no small measure, on reigniting
the cold war. In submitting the SALT II treaty, he had requested a 25
percent increase in military expenditures. When the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in 1979, Carter described the situation as "the most severe
threat to world peace since the Second World War." He promptly ordered
an embargo on certain trade with the Soviet Union and asked the Senate
to delay consideration of SALT II. He also ordered a boycott of the 1980
Olympic Games in Moscow. Carter's militancy overcame Kennedy's
insurgency. But by July 1980, the President's popularity ratings had
fallen to 32 percent.

His problems were compounded the next month when the Republicans
nominated Ronald Reagan. A New Dealer in the 1930s, the former movie
star became a conservative in the cold war atmosphere of the 1950s. He
backed Barry Goldwater in 1964 and won the support of conservative
western business leaders, who helped him win the governorship of
California in 1966 and later backed his candidacy against Gerald Ford.
By 1980, the corporate conservatives were reinforced by an influx of
Protestant fundamentalists into the Republican party, especially in the
South. Inspired by such ministers as Jerry Falwell, these conservative
Protestants viewed themselves as the "moral majority" and claimed a
responsibility to redeem America from liberal permissiveness on such
matters as abortions, prayers in the public schools, and the rights of
homosexuals.

More important to Reagan's nomination was the decision of many corporate
leaders to abandon the "social contract" they had supported

since 1952. That contract had meant acceptance of the principles of the
limited welfare state established by the New Deal; it had also meant
acceptance of organized labor as a legitimate, but subordinate partner
of the business community. By 1980, however, business leaders were
extremely worried by the rapid decline of American dominance of the
world economy. During the previous two decades, Japan and West Germany
had matched or surpassed American productivity, and the United States
was losing a significant share of world trade. Thus many corporate
leaders were willing to abandon Carter and moderate Republicans in favor
of Reagan's commitment to "supply-side" economics. Ironically, many
blue-collar workers, in despair at Carter's economic policies, also
turned to Reagan as a panacea for their troubles.

In the campaign, Carter continued to emphasize the world of limits-- the
global and structural conditions that worked against a philosophy of
growth. Reagan, by contrast, promised boundless opportunities. He denied
that the rising cost of energy or the revitalization of international
competition caused the economic woes. "Those people who keep talking
about the age of limits," he said, "are really talking about their own
limitations, not America's." Instead, Reagan summoned a return to the
nineteenth-century free marketplace, unencumbered by government
regulations or by a welfare state that sapped the traditional work
ethic. He offered, in short, the possibility of unlimited expansion.

In a climate of economic decline and foreign policy defeat, Reagan's
message prevailed. He won a large victory in the electoral college, even
though he received only 51 percent of the total vote. The third party
candidacy of liberal Republican John B. Anderson claimed 7 percent of
the vote, leaving Carter with only 41 percent. But, once again, voter
turnout had declined to 52.3 percent. Polls showed that most non-voters
were poor, less educated, and young.

Despite the limitations of his support, Reagan and the press treated his
victory as a mandate. With Republicans controlling the Senate for the
first time since 1953, the new President persuaded Congress to act
decisively on his economic proposals. Taxes were cut sharply, especially
for the rich. Congress also reduced funding of food stamps, health care,
and aid for dependent children. At the same time, the administration
convinced Congress to increase military appropriations without raising
taxes. The anomaly, once described by Vice-President George Bush as
"voodoo economics," required a deliberate falsification of government
statistics. "We got away with it," explained Reagan's budget director
David Stockman, "because of the novelty of all these budget reductions."

The recession that had begun during Carter's tenure deepened, however,
and by 1982 unemployment reached 10 percent, the worst since the great
Depression of the 1930s. Bankruptcies and farm foreclosures reached
levels untouched since 1941. And when government-employed air-traffic
controllers went on strike in 1981, the President fired them
permanently. Between 1979 and 1983, poverty increased 40 percent, a
problem compounded by the reductions of government assistance. At the
same time, the proportion of wealth controlled by the richest Americans
sharply increased. In other words, "Reaganomics" encouraged a
polarization between rich and poor.

Nor did Reagan's supply-side economics reverse the decline in the
economy. His prediction, known as the "trickledown" theory, was that
wealthy Americans, when freed from taxes and government regulation,
would invest in new industrial plants whose productivity, in turn, would
create jobs and tax revenues. The theory, however, did not work in the
1980s. The recession of 1979-82 forced eight million Americans into
poverty, in contrast to the one million who became poor during the
previous downturn of 1974-75. These figures reflected basic structural
changes, including the loss of millions of high-paying blue-collar jobs
to foreign competition in steel, auto production, textiles, shoes, and
electronics. As individuals were forced to take lower-paying jobs, eight
million family incomes slipped from the $20,000-40,000 range in 1978 to
below $20,000 in 1983. More than half of the nine million new jobs
created between 1981 and 1986 paid less than $7000 a year.

The failure of trickledown economics brought serious budgetary problems.
Since military expenses increased from $157 billion in 1981 to $233
billion in 1986, social security expenditures from $138 billion to $200
billion, medicate payments from $41 billion to $74 billion, and interest
on the national debt from $69 to $136 billion, without increases in
taxes, annual deficits under Reagan soared to more than $200 billion a
year. By the end of his first term, the national debt had doubled from
one to two trillion dollars.

Herbert Stein, economic advisor to Nixon and Ford, explained this ocean
of red ink by declaring that "the Vestal Virgins of the Radical Right
were tired of saying life is real and there is no free lunch." But
Reagan gained popularity with the general public, because it, too,
refused to believe that the economic world of the 1950s and 1960s no
longer existed. Although the income of the average family fell between
1973 and 1985, per capita increases in consumption continued at the
level of the Eisenhower "happy days." Such patterns were possible
because people married at an older age and had few children. The

personal savings rate also dropped, while consumer credit jumped to $2.4
trillion by 1986.

The willingness of the Reagan administration and so much of the public
to deny economic and ecological constraints resulted in a dramatic
change in the nation's role in the world economy. During World War I,
the United States first emerged as a creditor nation, spending more
capital abroad than it borrowed. But when foreign trade deficits leaped
from $70 billion in 1983 to $160 billion in 1986 and the Reagan
administration had to use foreign capital to finance the huge budget
deficit, the United States suddenly became a debtor nation. And this
debt rose dramatically from $107 billion in 1985 to $220 billion in
1986. The United States now led all other nations in foreign
indebtedness.

Reagan's foreign policy was also fraught with basic contradictions.
Although he condemned the Soviet Union as the "evil empire," Reagan
continued to respect the terms of the unratified SALT II treaty. He did
advocate the installation of a satellite missile defense system, dubbed
"Star Wars," but at the same time continued arms controls talks with the
Soviet Union. Earlier, Reagan had criticized Presidents Nixon, Ford, and
Carter for expanding relations with the People's Republic of China; now,
he welcomed continued American trade with the mainland. In October 1983,
Reagan ordered 10,000 troops to invade the tiny republic of Grenada,
where they easily defeated a paltry number of opponents; but when 274
Marines were killed in Lebanon that month, he prudently retreated from
further confrontation with Islamic fundamentalists, "Ronald Reagan
resembles Jimmy Carter more than anyone conceived possible," observed
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the conservative ambassador to the United Nations.

The Reagan administration demonstrated more energy in waging war against
the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Creating anti Sandinista
military organizations, known as "contras," Reagan strove to overcome
what he called the "Vietnam syndrome," the belief that the United States
could not control indigenous revolutions influenced by Marxist theory.
Although public opinion polls showed that a majority opposed United
States intervention in Nicaragua, the President persuaded Congress to
authorize limited expenditures for "nonmilitary" purposes. Reagan also
allowed the CIA to conduct subversive activities against Nicaragua,
including the mining of its ports in violation of international law.
And, reversing Carter's appeal to the World Court during the Iran
hostage crisis, Reagan refused to participate in a suit brought by
Nicaragua.

In his bid for re-election in 1984, however, Reagan did not have to
confront the contradictions of his first administration. A sharp drop in
world oil prices had helped ease inflationary pressures, and the economy
was recovering from the depths of 1982. The President's campaign slogan
was: "We Brought America Back." Nor did the Democratic nominee, Walter
Mondale, seriously challenge the huge military budget or the economic
policies that intensified the hardships of the poor. Indeed, Mondale's
promise to raise taxes alienated the blue-collar workers who had once
been the backbone of the Democratic party. Mondale did appeal to women
voters by choosing Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. But he was
never a popular candidate, even among Democrats.

Mondale's choice of a woman vice-presidential candidate reflected
important gains made by feminists in the 1970s. Government affirmative
action programs and private lobbying had eliminated overt discrimination
against women in education, employment, and most social activities.
Feminists, moreover, self-consciously attempted to create a distinctive
perspective, which was institutionalized in feminist publications, local
health facilities, rape crisis centers, as well as women's studies
programs on many college campuses. Such changes challenged the
traditional image and role of American women. Consequently,
conservatives, many with fundamentalist religious values, launched a
militant counterattack--blocking federal funding for abortions, opposing
affirmative action standards as "reverse discrimination," and stalling
the equal rights amendment in the state legislatures (it was finally
defeated in 1982).

Reagan continued to draw upon this backlash in winning a landslide
victory in 1984. He captured 59 percent of the vote, taking every state
but Mondale's Minnesota. The election indicated a significant shift in
American voting behavior. Whereas Eisenhower and Nixon had succeeded in
winning votes among Democrats--Reagan himself led "Democrats for
Eisenhower"--most voters continued to register as Democrats and
supported Democratic candidates on the congressional, state, and local
levels of government. Between 1976 and 1984, however, millions of voters
shifted their allegiance to the Republican party, creating an almost
equal balance of party identification. By 1984, according to public
opinion polls, voters viewed the Republicans as the party of prosperity.
Equally important was the Republican advantage in fund-raising. In the
aftermath of Watergate, Congress had attempted to restrict the amount
and use of campaign contributions. But the courts held that "political
action committees" (PACs) could serve as legal

conduits for financing campaigns. The result was that corporation money
became increasingly important in shaping political strategies. In 1984,
for example, the Republicans had four times as much money as the
Democrats. But despite the new strength of the Republican party,
Reagan's victories did not introduce a major party realignment; the
Republicans were not yet the majority party.

In his second inaugural address, President Reagan repeated his vision of
America as the "blessed land" inhabited by a "chosen people" who had
escaped the historical experience of others less fortunate. "Our nation
is poised for greatness," he stated. "There are no limits to growth and
human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams." One
of Reagan's dreams in 1980 had been to replace the policy of detente
with victory in the cold war. But by his second term, the large budget
deficits had weakened the cold-war taboo against criticizing military
appropriations. Despite Reagan's personal popularity, he could not win
automatic approval of a larger military budget. Motivated, in part, by
the growing cost of waging the cold war and by a desire to leave a
lasting legacy, Reagan reopened arms limitation talks with the Soviet
Union in 1985.

The cold-war legacy was also challenged by a grass-roots movement
opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. Between the signing of the
atmospheric test ban treaty of 1963 and the end of the Vietnam War in
1975, the subject of nuclear weapons had receded from public attention.
The SALT agreements seemed to control the arms race, even though the
treaties permitted an expansion of arsenals on both sides. By the late
1970s, however, the issue again became a subject of public discussion.
In pursuit of SALT II, for example, President Carter stopped the
implementation of the neutron radiation bomb, a weapon that had been
perfected, unbeknownst to the public, in the 1960s. Meanwhile, the
question of nuclear bombs emerged in the popular culture. Hollywood
films, such as Star Wars, acknowledged the possibility of planetary
annihilation. After Reagan's election, these trends continued. In 1982,
a movement to freeze the size of nuclear arsenals attracted enormous
support throughout the country. A television movie, The Day After,
showing the effects of nuclear war, focused public attention on the
issue, and the fear of holocaust became a basic theme in youth culture
films, such as Repo Man and The Terminator.

The President seemed impervious to such criticism of his military
stance. Known in the media as the "teflon" President because nothing bad
stuck to his public image, Reagan used his skills as a speechmaker to
deflect opposition. To avoid public scrutiny, he held far fewer press

conferences than other recent Presidents. And he succeeded in escaping
personal responsibility when important members of his administration
were charged with crimes or malfeasance of office. After two decades of
presidential "credibility gaps," Reagan appeared to restore public trust
in the White House.

This carefully constructed image cracked abruptly when the public
learned in 1986 that the Reagan administration had illegally sold arms
to Iran to gain release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Islamic
fundamentalists. Such a policy not only violated the American embargo on
military shipments to Iran, but undermined Reagan's demand that other
nations follow his lead in enforcing the embargo. It contradicted the
President's claim never to deal with terrorists. It also raised
questions about his decision to bomb Libya in 1985 to retaliate for
terrorist activities.

Compounding the Iran arms sales was the revelation that the profits had
been spent on arming the contra rebels in Nicaragua--a direct violation
of congressional instructions. And Reagan, like Nixon during the
Watergate scandals, offered a vague, implausible defense. "We did
not--repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages," he
told a press conference in 1986. But when a special investigatory
commission questioned him further, Reagan replied, "I don't remember--
period."

Although Congress and the public hesitated to challenge the President's
legitimacy and feared opening an investigation akin to Watergate, the
administration had suffered a devastating blow to its image and
authority. Despite ill health and age, Reagan would remain in office,
but the credibility gap that had so often thwarted his predecessors was
again a factor in American politics. In 1987, the Senate rejected the
nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, a major political defeat
for the President. Underlying this rift in the body politic was the
realization that the administration had neglected the welfare of large
segments of American society. It had also attempted to deny irreversible
historical trends of the twentieth century.

Reagan himself was the first divorced President in American history, and
his relations with his own children were frequently estranged. Yet to
conservatives, particularly to religious fundamentalists, the Reagan
Presidency promised to restore traditional morality in domestic affairs
by opposing the equal rights amendment, curtailing abortions, denying
the rights of homosexuals, and by restricting First Amendment
definitions of obscenity and pornography. These issues, because they
touched

on volatile matters of sexuality, distracted attention from basic
changes in American society.

By the time Reagan entered the White House, the federal government's
standard for a "typical" American household--a working father, a
homemaker mother, and two children--described only 7 percent of all
families. The divorce rate, which had steadily increased through the
twentieth century, doubled in the 1970s. Moreover, no more than
one-third of the nation's jobs paid enough to support a family.
Consequently, half of all American mothers, including those with
preschool-age children, participated in the work force. And because the
birthrate among women over the age of 35 increased in the late 1970s, a
greater proportion of child care moved beyond the confines of the
family. At the same time, the pregnancy rate among unmarried teenagers
skyrocketed, creating a seemingly endless cycle of poverty and
dependence on government assistance.

The collapse of the traditional family encouraged new varieties of
kinship. Four-fifths of all separated couples remarried within two
years. Liberalized "no-fault" divorce laws, visitation rights, and
nonmarital cohabitation patterns stimulated the growth of extended
families that provided nurturance, support, and role models for the
young. Despite the necessity of two-income families, surveys indicated
that men were slow to assume the responsibilities of child care. But the
expansion of female roles in the work force prompted more males to
redefine their activities on the home front. In poor families, however,
the majority of which were headed by women, children were supervised
only by the television screen, watching twelve to sixteen thousand hours
by their sixteenth birthdays!

Ronald Reagan was the oldest man to serve as President, a phenomenon
associated with a reevaluation of old age in American society. Increased
longevity and the decline of the birthrate made the elderly the fastest
growing segment of the population. Old people assumed a new importance
culturally, economically, and politically. In the popular media,
stereotypes of decrepitude gave way to positive portrayals of the
elderly as vital people. Older Americans also formed effective lobby
groups--the American Association of Retired People, the Gray Panthers
--to protect their economic position. Reagan had once advocated the
elimination of social security, but he could not overcome the power of
the elderly. Instead, because of the inevitable graying of America,
spending for social security and medicate rose from $179 billion in 1981
to $274 billion in 1986. As the burdens of the program shifted to a
narrower base of younger citizens, Congress extended the age of
mandatory retirement from sixty-five to seventy in 1978 and in 1986
ended mandatory retirement.

While elderly Americans successfully defended their interests, the
traditional outgroups--blacks, Hispanics, and women--experienced modest
gains mixed with significant losses. Since the 1960s, changes in
discrimination laws and racial attitudes, together with affirmative
action programs, had encouraged the emergence of a new black middle
class. But despite President Reagan's rhetoric of opportunity, the
economic environment of the 1980s threatened its prosperity. Although
the average annual income of middle-class black males increased 53.5
percent between 1974 and 1981, income gains for comparable whites was
68.2 percent. The gap between middle-class blacks and whites, in other
words, increased. In 1982, the black middle class actually declined in
size, while the white middle class grew. The top one hundred black
businesses increased their total sales from $601 million in 1973 to over
$2 billion ten years later. Yet they were all small businesses,
primarily providing services for the black community. "Black businesses
have come a long way since the forties and fifties," concluded
sociologist Bart Landry, "but are still playing in the bush league."

The sluggish economy had even more severe consequences for inner city
blacks, creating an unemployed, unemployable "underclass" that turned
increasingly to crime and drugs. The root of the problem was structural.
Automation had eliminated many unskilled entry jobs that had once been
available to foreign immigrants. The migration of business from inner
cities to the suburbs reduced both the number of jobs and the tax base
to provide vital social services. Other work went overseas as
multinational corporations sought cheap labor. Still other jobs
succumbed to foreign competition. Through the 1970s, the rate of black
unemployment ran twice as high as that for whites. By the mid-1980s,
approximately 45 percent of black males did not have jobs. The result
was an extraordinary rise in female-headed households. In 1984,18
percent of white families with children were headed by women; the figure
for black families was 56 percent.

The economic problems of blacks, therefore, were closely related to the
status of the female work force. During the 1970s, earnings of black
women achieved a parity with earnings of white women. And affirmative
action programs had helped women penetrate formerly male sectors of the
economy. Between 1962 and 1982, the number of women working as engineers
increased from 1 to 6 percent; as physicians from 6 to 15 percent; and
as college teachers from 19 to 25 percent. But most new jobs of the
1970s and 1980s were in the service and retail

areas, places of traditional female employment. In the 1980s, women
constituted 99 percent of all secretaries; 94 percent of bank tellers;
and 75 percent of food-service workers. As a whole, they still earned
only 60 percent of the average income of men.

Thus, the rise of female-headed households resulted in the feminization
of poverty in the United States. And since women were increasingly the
primary breadwinners, the inequities of the work force had horrifying
consequences for American children. In 1984, the poverty rate for
children under the age of six was 24 percent, twice the national
average. But the poverty rate for children living in female headed
households was 53.9 percent. Under Reagan, cuts in medicaid and maternal
and child health programs aggravated this problem. Consequently, the
poorest Americans did not support the President in 1984. It was Mondale
who attracted 90 percent of the black votes; 65 percent of the
Hispanics; 68 percent of the unemployed; 53 percent of the lowest
economic levels. But most low-income voters simply did not vote. Reagan,
by contrast, won 80 percent of born-again Christians; 72 percent of
southern whites; and 68 percent of those with incomes over $50,000.

These divisions of wealth and power testified to an enduring, even
intensifying schism within American society. During the 1984 election,
the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the first black candidate to campaign
aggressively for a major party nomination, condemned the political
leadership, Republicans and Democrats alike, for "encouraging us to
spend millions to beat our plowshares into swords, while leaving the
disadvantaged begging for bread." Ronald Reagan's call for greatness,
the militarization of the federal budget, the exercise of imperial power
abroad--these actions ignored the realities of life among disadvantaged
groups. In the 1980s, therefore, the cry for justice moved, once again,
outside traditional institutions. On college campuses, students
protested corporate support of apartheid in South Africa; whites and
blacks marched against a resurgent Ku Klux Klan in Forsythe County,
Georgia; a majority of Americans opposed United States intervention in
Central America. Reagan's popularity had not stilled these voices of
dissent. There were still two Americas--coexisting, in unequal balance.

"We are not there yet"

******************

Chapter 20.

The Crisis of

National Identity,

1987-2000

The legacy of Ronald Reagan

The brief presidency of George Bush

Cultural plualism and the rise of Bill Clinton

Prosperity, polarization, and political gridlock

Washington scandals and impeachment Multiculturalism and the election of
2000

In 1987. the nation celebrated the bicentennial of the adoption of the
U.S. Constitution. Although the preamble of that document spoke in the
name of "We, the People," the Founding Fathers had defined national
citizenship not in universal terms of human rights, but in a specific
historical context. When Washington. Jefferson, or Madison spoke of "the
people." they were referring to men like themselves. The rights and
privileges protected by the Constitution included only a particular
social category--white, propertied, male Protestants. Other resident
peoples--Native Americans, African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and
women--did not receive the same advantages and could not participate in
the political life of the nation.

This exclusive definition of citizenship drew upon historical traditions
that dated to the European explorers and colonizers who settled on the
Atlantic coast. For those first Anglo-Americans, the native populations
represented unwelcome enemies who had to be subdued and expelled from
their homelands by persuasion or. when that failed, by force. So. too.
the colonists viewed the first African Americans who had been
transported across the ocean in chains as less than humans, to be
enslaved and later segregated from full citizenship. And they regarded
their own women, of whatever age. as children who remained dependent on
the power and leadership of fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons. The
world of the Founding Fathers thus reached two hundred years back as
well as forward. President Ronald Reagan, the most popular elected
official of the late twentieth century, epitomized the strength of their
legacy. Like the nation's first leaders, he surrounded himself mostly
with white Protestant men. In his speeches, he identified with the
traditions established by the Puritans. He defined America as a chosen
nation, which under divine guidance had escaped from the bondage of the
Old World into a promised land. "Can we doubt." he declared, "that only
a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a
refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free."
Like Governor John Winthrop, who had founded the Massachusetts colony in
1630, Reagan described America as "a shining city upon a hill" ready to
guide the rest of the world to salvation.

Reauan shared the Founders' faith in the nation's "manifest destiny"

441

to expand the realm of liberty, individualism, and patriarchy,
regardless of the values or views of other peoples. "There is absolutely
no substance to the charge," he insisted, "that the United States is
guilty of imperialism or attempts to impose its will on other peoples by
use of force." Although he sent U.S. troops into lands near and far--
Grenada in the Caribbean and Lebanon in the Middle East--he saw the use
of military power as innocent as the advance of AngloAmerican culture
from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. He viewed the United
States as the virtuous republic embattled against the "evil empire" of
the Soviet Union.

As a former Hollywood movie star, moreover, Reagan embodied the frontier
mythology of self-made men who left the confines of small towns to
achieve fame and fortune in the national marketplace, peddling images
and consumer products that promised a better life for all. This dream of
self-betterment had never extended fully to the nation's minorities.
Reagan's popularity among the country's wealthiest conservatives merely
underscored his disregard for the poor and the nonwhite citizens. By the
end of his presidency in 1989, Reagan's glamour had collided with the
realities of his political limitations. Although he remained personally
popular, Reagan's legacy forced his successors to grapple with a shaky
economic structure and a volatile electorate that demanded
representation of irreconcilable differences.

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed an intensification of
the struggles about the nation's cultural identity. The greatest surge
of economic prosperity since World War II stimulated the globalization
of U.S. corporate influence, but simultaneously produced glaring
extremes of wealth and poverty at home and abroad. In foreign policy,
the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought, in
the words of President George Bush, "a new world order," but also
limited the ability of the United States to impose its will in other
parts of the world. Crises in the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, the
Caribbean, and central Africa ignited continuing national debate about
the limits of U.S. interventionism overseas. Meanwhile, efforts to
achieve a domestic consensus about issues of social welfare, civil
rights, and multiculturalism produced polarization rather than accord.
Divisions between Republicans and Democrats intensified as each party
dominated separate branches of the national government and rejected
compromise. Neither liberals nor conservatives could claim political
supremacy. And the nation's historical outgroups--women, racial
minorities, and the poor--remained halfway residents within the
political family.

Nothing so clearly demonstrated the divided national identity as the
rise and fall of President George Bush. Running for president in 1988,
Bush displayed impressive credentials within the political
establishment. The son of a U.S. senator, a former diplomat in China,
exdirector of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Reagan's vice
president, the Republican candidate spoke for conservative white voters
who felt threatened by the emergence of a multicultural society. "We
don't need radical new directions," said Bush. "We don't need to remake
society--we just need to remember who we are." At a time when workers of
all ethnic groups were losing their jobs to overseas manufacturers, Bush
successfully distracted attention from their common economic problems by
emphasizing issues of racial and cultural division.

Bush's Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, a Greek American from
Massachusetts, tried to address questions of taxes, budgets, and health
insurance. But the Republican candidate bypassed those issues merely by
pointing to Dukakis's veto of a measure that would have banned prisoner
furloughs in Massachusetts. In emotional televised advertisements,
Republicans depicted the story of Willie Horton, an African-American
criminal who had raped a white woman while on prison leave, and accused
Dukakis of being "soft on crime." Polls found that the Horton commercial
had an inordinate influence among voters.

The issue illuminated the growing discomfort of white conservatives with
social change. Prior to the 1970s, the number of prisoners in the United
States had remained a constant proportion of the total population, but
then it began to escalate rapidly. Many states passed mandatory
sentencing laws that limited a judge's discretion to decide prison
terms, established lengthy sentences for minor drug offenses, reduced
the possibility of parole, and built elaborate prison systems to isolate
convicts from social contact. Although the national crime rate began to
fall in the 1990s, the United States held more prisoners-- nearly two
million, or about 3 percent of the adult population--than any other
country in the world. A disproportionate number of prisoners were racial
minorities. Nearly half of the nation's AfricanAmerican population spent
some time behind prison walls. In 1976, moreover, the Supreme Court
accepted the constitutionality of the death penalty (reversing an
earlier decision that had recognized capital punishment

as disproportionately targeting racial minorities). The result was a
rise in state executions, especially in southern states like Texas and
Florida. By the 1990s, the United States was the only industrial country
that killed prisoners.

The Willie Horton case thus served as a code to attract white voters to
Republican candidates while ignoring the causes--or solutions--of
race-related crime. Bush won the 1988 election with 54 percent of the
popular vote; his following among white men reached 63 percent.
Republicans also gained strength in the South and the northern suburbs.
Yet racial minorities and women favored Democrats. Significantly,
Democrats increased their control of the Senate and the House of
Representatives, a pattern of divided power between Congress and the
president that would cause political gridlock in the next decade.
Equally important, the political victors in 1988 could be counted not by
their party affiliation but by their incumbency as corporate campaign
contributions increased to the advantage of sitting politicians.

Unwilling to address the nation's economic problems, Bush proved most
active in the realm of foreign policy. The disintegration of Soviet
power in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a
political entity in 1991 eliminated the nation's major adversary.
Fearful of causing a backlash by communist reactionaries, Bush prudently
offered trade concessions and financial assistance to persuade Russian
leaders to enter disarmament agreements. The 1993 START II treaty called
for the gradual elimination of land-based nuclear arsenals, dramatically
reducing the global tensions that had existed since the end of World War
II. The erosion of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe also opened
opportunities for U.S. business in countries previously locked into the
Soviet orbit, encouraging a globalization of economic relations.

The end of the Cold War undermined the primary basis of all U.S. foreign
policy, the war against communism. Accordingly, the Bush administration
could now accept peace settlements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, ending
brutal civil wars that had depended on the secret support of the CIA.
Meanwhile, U.S. allies in,Latin America, such as Colombia and Venezuela,
which had used anticommunism as a justification for obtaining military
aid, found new forms of subversion to wage war against in the so-called
international drug cartel. Panama's leader. Manuel Noriega, long a
recipient of CIA payments to promote the war against communism, was
indicated in a U.S. court for his involvement with drug traffic,
prompting Bush to order U.S. troops to capture the former friend and
bring him to justice in Florida. This invasion of a friendly country led
the Organization of American States, formerly a rubber stamp for U.S.
policy in the western hemisphere, to condemn the United States for
violating Panama's sovereignty. What the end of the Cold War did not
change, however, was U.S. hostility toward the Castro regime in Cuba.
Spurred by the CubanAmerican community centered in Florida, Washington
maintained an economic boycott of the island and attempted
unsuccessfully to isolate Castro's government from other nations.

Bush did create unprecedented international cooperation in blocking the
aggression of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf. After Iraq
invaded Kuwait in 1990 and threatened access to the region's oil fields,
Bush built a coalition of thirty countries, including the Soviet Union
and other Arab states, and demanded that Iraq retreat to its previous
borders or face open warfare. Under the leadership of General Colin
Powell, the first African American to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
and General Norman Schwartzkopf, Washington proceeded to develop
Operation Desert Storm, involving a military force of 700,000 Allied
troops to confront the Iraqi army. Bush also established a domestic
consensus in favor of the effort by invoking the War Powers Act to gain
congressional approval. A small antiwar movement declared "no blood for
oil," but public opinion overwhelmingly supported the president.
Tremendous air attacks softened the Iraqis for invasion, and the Allied
forces moved into action in 1991, defeating the enemy in a mere four
days.

"We've kicked the Vietnam syndrome," exclaimed Bush, viewing the
military victory as evidence of continuing U.S. commitments to
interventionism overseas. But the president showed reluctance to push
U.S. power too far. Concerned about increasing Allied casualties,
offending Arab nationalism, or provoking dissent at home. Bush ordered
U.S. forces to curtail offensive attacks against Iraq and instead
establish defensive positions to encircle the enemy. As a result, Saddam
Hussein remained in power, a thorn in the side of U.S. foreign policy
for the remainder of the decade. Yet the multinational effort proved the
end of Cold War divisions and became a model for subsequent U.S.
strategy in other crisis areas. Bush's innovative foreign policy
contrasted with his lack of initiative at home. To be sure, he did not
share Reagan's antipathy to government regulation, and in 1990 he signed
the Clean Air Act, which established federal standards against
pollution. But Bush rejected related measures that would compensate
workers who would lose their jobs because of the law. He also approved
the Americans with Disabil-

446	The Closing of Frontiers at Home and Abroad, 1920-2000

ities Act of 1990, a landmark measure that prohibited discrimination
against handicapped people and mandated that public facilities be
accessible to those with disabilities. More reluctantly, Bush accepted
the Civil Rights Act of 1991, curtailing discrimination in the
employment of women and minorities.

Such reforms aside, Bush adopted a conservative position by blocking
legislation with his power of veto. Indeed, he made his mark by issuing
forty-four vetoes, of which Congress managed to override only one,
involving the regulation of the cable television industry. The others
affected a variety of social measures, such as unemployment benefits,
family and medical leave for employees, civil rights reforms, regulation
of campaign financing, and abortions. With Democrats controlling
Congress, these conflicts created political gridlock, resulting in the
closure of government offices briefly in 1990, when the president
rejected an appropriation measure. Bush also clashed with Congress in
demanding a constitutional amendment to prohibit the burning of the U.S.
flag. Although Bush eventually signed a statute to that effect, the
Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional as a violation of free
speech. Such political bickering exploded in 1991 when Bush nominated
the conservative African American Clarence Thomas to replace the
retiring Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, an outspoken liberal
famous for arguing for the desegregation of public schools in the 1954
Brown decision. As the first African American to serve on the high
court, Marshall epitomized the liberal dream of the 1960s about the
possibility of creating a society based on equality. Yet Thomas opposed
programs like affirmative action in education and employment and
insisted that individual effort without government assistance could
overcome race prejudice. Midway through the nomination process, the
discussion shifted drastically when one of Thomas's former colleagues,
African-American law professor Anita Hill, accused the judge of sexual
harassment. The ensuing televised hearings provoked angry debates in
Congress and the country about the persistence of racial and sexual
discrimination. Responding to the Senate's apparent indifference to the
issue, twelve women congressional representatives protested the handling
of the case. When the Senate confirmed the nomination anyway, the
question of women's rights became a key issue in the next presidential
election. Sexual harassment in the workplace remained a sensitive legal
and political issue, leading to a 1999 Supreme Court ruling that
extended protection in same-sex situations.

Bush's greatest vulnerability appeared in his economic record. Dur-

ing the 1988 presidential campaign, he had made only one clear promise
to Republican voters: "no new taxes." But by 1990, the federal
government faced a $3.2 trillion national debt and budget deficits of
$200 billion. The problem was aggravated by a serious recession, which
reduced expected tax collection. To limit congressional spending
measures, Bush agreed to a plan involving higher taxes. The deal, an
apparent violation of Bush's campaign oath, angered conservative
supporters. Even worse, the compromise did not ease the recession. By
1992, the nation's trade deficit reached $150 billion, tax revenues fell
short by $300 billion, and unemployment exceeded 7 percent. Public
disgust with government officials prompted the ratification of the
Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which prevented congressional representatives
from raising their salaries without first giving voters the opportunity
to vote them from office. Responding to such pressure, over ninety
members of the House, more than ever before, chose not to run again in
1992.

The election of 1992 expressed the divisions of a polarized electorate.
When an all-white Los Angeles jury voted to acquit police officers who
had been videotaped beating a black motorist named Rodney King,
African-American mobs went on a four-day spree of violence, attacking
whites and Asians. Deep cultural divisions also emerged as evangelical
Christians used aggressive tactics to block abortion clinics, and the
Supreme Court approved congressional restrictions on government funding
of abortions. Repelled by the liberalization of sexual standards,
Republican conservatives threatened to eliminate the National Endowment
for the Arts because of its support of homosexual artists. These
rumblings reflected widespread dissatisfaction with public life. A 1992
public opinion survey found that most citizens were content with their
personal lives, but less than one-quarter expressed satisfaction with
the state of the nation.

Taking advantage of this public mood, the Democrats nominated William
Jefferson "Bill" Clinton of Arkansas, a charismatic moderate who could
challenge the Republican leadership in his native South. Indicative of
the shift of political power to the southern states, Clinton chose as
his running mate another southern politician, Tennessee's Albert Gore.
The Democrats adopted a campaign slogan that highlighted Bush's greatest
failure--"The economy, .stupid"--and reminded voters that they did not
have to support "tax and spend" liberalism to obtain reform of the
welfare system, lower unemployment, and health care. Clinton proposed
moderate changes, but he also defended abor-

tion and gay rights, while upholding the death penalty and opposing
racial quotas. This centrist position further benefited by the presence
of a third-party candidate, billionaire H. Ross Perot, who created the
Reform party to challenge the established leadership. Appealing to
independent voters hostile to Washington and to small business interests
worried about corporate growth and trade deficits, Perot attracted a
constituency that usually supported Republicans.

Despite the growing feeling that politicians did not represent their
constituencies, voter participation increased for the first time in
thirty years. In the final tally, Clinton easily captured the electoral
college, but the popular vote appeared more ambiguous, indicative of
deeper social and economic conflicts. Perot won 19 percent of the vote;
Bush took 37 percent; Clinton carried 43 percent. Although Democrats
held majorities in both houses of Congress and more women and racial
minorities won election to government offices, Republicans viewed
Clinton as a minority president. Many conservatives, including southern
Democrats, refused to support the president's basic program of
government-funded health insurance and acceptance of homosexuals in the
military. The persistence of political discord after the election
weakened the possibility of legislative compromise. Equally significant,
it encouraged office holders to appeal continuously to their
electorates, using "media opportunities" to sustain campaigns for public
support.

After his election, Clinton proceeded to give government jobs to people
who "looked like America," choosing more women, Hispanics, and African
Americans to hold public office than his predecessors. His nominations
to the Supreme Court, including the profeminist Ruth Bader Ginsberg, now
assured a majority support of abortion rights. Clinton also lifted
restrictions on fetal medical research and defended late-term abortions.
Unlike President Bush, Clinton approved the Family and Medical Leave Act
of 1993, which permitted workers to take unpaid leaves from work for
family emergencies. He endorsed the Brady bill to limit the purchase of
hand guns, signed a law easing voter registration of licensed drivers,
and backed a National Service Plan that allowed college students to
finance their education through community service. Yet the centerpiece
of the president's legislative package, a plan to make health care
available to all citizens, aroused bitter opposition among
conservatives, medical practitioners, and the insurance industry who
warned against socialized medicine, government bureaucracy, and rising
taxes. The measure's defeat in 1994 left the Democrats weakened for the
ensuing congressional elections.

Under the leadership of Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich,
conservative Republicans embraced a "Contract with America" in 1994 that
disavowed further government activism. The program proposed term limits
on the length of service of elected officials; a constitutional
amendment mandating a balanced budget; increased punishment of
criminals; decreased support of welfare; and "profamily" legislation
that aimed to repeal the legality of abortion, the rights of
homosexuals, and the separation of church and state that forbade prayers
in public schools. This ambitious political agenda attracted 62 percent
of the white male vote, but attracted less than a majority of women.
Indeed, only 38 percent of the eligible electorate went to the polls.
Yet Republicans won strong majorities in Congress for the first time
since 1952. Sensing the trend of public opinion, Clinton sounded more
conservative than before, declaring in his 1995 State of the Union
address that the era of big government had passed.

Republican leadership in Congress accentuated the political gridlock.
Although the House passed a proposed constitutional amendment mandating
a balanced budget, the measure failed in the Senate. Another proposal to
require term limits did not gain the necessary two-thirds majority. When
Congress voted to reduce appropriations for health care, education, and
the environment in 1995, Clinton vetoed the legislation. Twice in 1995,
Congress rejected compromise proposals and allowed the government to
close its operations, disrupting public services. The public
overwhelmingly sided with the president.

With the 1996 presidential elections approaching, both parties
recognized the need to reach agreements. The most important of these was
passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 that effectively ended the New
Deal tradition of federal responsibility for social welfare payments.
Instead, Washington would make block grants to the states, which would
determine their distribution to welfare recipients. The law mandated
that beneficiaries leave the welfare rolls within two years, with or
without a job, and limited the length of welfare aid that anyone could
receive to five years. Clinton promised that the program would encourage
the poor to enter the workforce, but most new jobs remained low-paying
positions in retail sales, health care, and fast-food outlets. The
resulting incomes were insufficient to support families. Yet the
continuation of the booming economy brought unemployment rates to their
lowest point in thirty years, muting criticism of federal welfare
reductions.

Clinton's centrist position on domestic issues mirrored a cautious

foreign policy modeled on that of his Republican predecessor. Like Bush,
he supported the dismantling of the Soviet state by offering economic
assistance to the Russian republics to ensure stability and encourage
nuclear disarmament. He also overlooked political repression in China to
extend U.S. trade. Despite allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage,
Clinton stressed the importance of bringing China into a global trade
alliance, finally reaching a major commercial agreement in 1999.
Clinton's regional strategies continued Bush's policy of cautious
interventionism. In Iraq, for instance, the United States supported
economic sanctions enforced by the United Nations and defended "no-fly
zones" that led to sporadic attacks against Iraqi military
installations. The Democratic White House maintained a hostile position
against Cuba, preserving the economic boycott, even though most western
allies repudiated the policy.

Following Bush's coalition strategy in the Persian Gulf, Clinton built a
network of support before intervening in the ethnic strife within the
former Yugoslavian nations in the Balkans. To stop genocidal "ethnic
cleansing" of Muslims by Serbs, Clinton persuaded the warring factions
to accept a peace treaty in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. The agreement obliged
the United States to participate in an international peacekeeping force
under NATO supervision. When genocidal warfare erupted in Kosovo in
1999, Washington supported a strong NATO response, including the bombing
of Serb cities. The intense military attacks forced the Serbs to halt
the aggression and no U.S. lives were lost. Clinton hailed the military
effort as a NATO victory. Yet, as in Iraq, the bombing did not topple
the Serb regime or alter local political conditions. The limited gains
reflected the cautious nature of U.S. overseas commitment in the 1990s:
no longer the isolationism that had characterized American policy before
World War II, but neither was it the knee-jerk anticommunist
interventionism that had brought the nation into Vietnam in the 1960s
and Central America in the 1980s. This middle position emerged again in
1999 when the Senate rejected a proposed test ban treaty supported by
the administration. In refusing to ratify the pact, conservative
Republicans insisted that the United States pursue an international
foreign policy as an independent world power rather than as a member of
a community of nations.

With the communist menace gone, Clinton's foreign policy emphasized the
expansion of U.S. trade and investment around the world, regardless of
ideology and politics. Soon after taking office, the Democratic
president embraced Bush's proposed North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) of 1993, which removed trade restrictions

with Canada and Mexico. Union leaders and environmentalists opposed the
treaty because it threatened domestic jobs and allowed lower pollution
standards. But Clinton drew upon Republican support to gain approval of
the treaty. In 1994, the Senate ratified another international treaty,
the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which lowered tariffs
with over one hundred countries. This commitment to free trade enabled
Clinton to offer U.S. goods and food to communist North Korea to
persuade that nation to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Such
policies stimulated a surge of U.S. exports, particularly electronics.
Washington insisted that the advantages also included a relaxed
political atmosphere with friend and foe alike. When the newly created
World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999, however, a loose
coalition of labor unions and environmentalists challenged the wisdom of
unlimited free trade. As workers denounced the threat to U.S. jobs and
wage protections and environmentalists criticized the lack of pollution
controls, the issue focused on the erosion of U.S. laws by the decisions
of an international consortium. As with the nuclear test ban proposal, U
.S. citizens fought to preserve national sovereignty in economic
matters.

Prosperity nonetheless proved to be the key to Clinton's success.
Running for reelection in 1996, he faced opposition from conservatives
led by former Kansas Senator Robert Dole and a weak campaign by
independent Ross Perot. With stock prices soaring and unemployment low,
the incumbent administration reiterated its centrist position on most
social issues, such as welfare and gun control. Male voters split evenly
among the candidates, but Clinton won decisively among women and racial
minorities and coasted to victory. Yet the election also revealed
unyielding partisan divisions as the Republicans won majorities of both
houses of Congress. With the Republican Party dominated by militant
conservatives, such as House Speaker Gingrich, political differences
between Congress and the Executive branch assumed a bitter ideological
tone.

These tensions erupted in 1998 with the discovery of a presidential sex
scandal that captivated media attention. Despite considerable criticism
of Clinton's specific policies, such as health insurance, the White
House had developed a media program that enabled the president to speak
directly to a public less interested in politics than in vague
assurances of executive leadership. Thus Clinton had overcome numerous
allegations of impropriety involving real estate fraud, conflict of
interest loans, and sexual harassment that dated to his tenure as
governor of Arkansas. The report that Clinton had sexual relations

with a young female aide, Monica Lewinsky, actually produced higher
personal ratings. As one White House aide explained, "It's almost
impossible not to be charmed by him, and it's almost impossible not to
be disappointed by him."

Republican leaders, however, refused to allow the president to escape
from the latest accusations, though they cloaked their partisan motives
in the language of the law. After the Special Independent Prosecutor
Kenneth Starr charged that Clinton had lied to a grand jury
investigating earlier sexual harassment charges and had attempted to
influence witness testimony, the House of Representatives voted on
strict party lines to impeach the president. Such a step had only
occurred once before, in 1867, when the House had accused President
Andrew Johnson of high crimes and misdemeanors for failing to enforce
Reconstruction laws. (Nixon had resigned from office in 1974 before the
legal proceedings led to a trial.)

Clinton was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. Although
deeply offended that the president had committed sexual offenses inside
the White House, the public opposed the prosecution by Republican House
managers, who argued their case before the entire Senate. Reflecting
these sentiments, the Senate voted acquittal on both charges in 1999.
Afterward, Clinton apologized to the people for his moral lapses and
paid a fine for contempt of court. The scandal had nearly cost him his
office. And yet, according to polls, a majority of the public considered
his acts of little significance.

The impeachment process thus indicated a fundamental split within the
national identity. Since the late 1970s, evangelical conservatives had
entered the political arena in an effort to stop what they perceived to
be the moral decline of the nation. Based primarily in the southern
states, these white conservatives had belonged to the Democratic Party,
but after the empowerment of southern blacks during the 1960s, they had
found a political home within the Republican Party. They remained
hostile to affirmative action programs that attempted to redress the
historic discrimination against racial minorities and women. They also
opposed abortions, civil rights for homosexuals, and the separation of
church and state that forbade prayers in public schools and government
assistance for religious education. In their eyes, Clinton's sexual
escapades, his support of gays in the military, and his easy acceptance
of racial minorities indicated his personal and political corruption.
The failure of the impeachment effort merely encouraged their efforts to
purge the nation of sin. At the end of the twentieth cen-

tury, this evangelical movement challenged the teaching of evolution in
public schools, winning a ban of that topic in Kansas schools and
advocating education vouchers to permit government support of religious
schooling. Before agreeing to the payment of U.S. dues to the United
Nations in 1999, conservatives also forbade the support of international
programs that encouraged abortion.

The evangelicals' hatred of Bill Clinton was matched by their hostility
toward his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who personified the success of
a secular professional woman. Indeed, her advocacy of health insurance
reforms had inflamed opposition to the measure and contributed to its
defeat by Congress in 1993. These religious conservatives had led the
attack on a proposed Equal Rights Amendment since the 1970s, arguing
that such a law would threaten the stability of the American family,
remove marital protections for women, expose them to service in the
military, and encourage promiscuity. Because of such pressure, the ERA
was dead by 1982. Yet the rights it embodied had gained approval anyway,
through executive orders, congressional legislation, and judicial
rulings.

By the last decade of the century, women held half the nation's paying
jobs and a majority of married women worked outside the home. Rejecting
a traditional patriarchy, the number of couples "living together"
quintupled between 1970 and 1990, and a high divorce rate indicated that
half of all marriages ended in permanent separation. By the 1990s, the
proportion of women in college had surpassed that of men, and more women
than men were earning advanced degrees. Women also penetrated the
academic administrative hierarchy, acting as department chairs, deans,
and executive officers. As women obtained equal rights to education, so
the federal government ordered equal opportunity in athletic programs,
stimulating a boom in women's sports. In high schools, colleges, and
professional arenas, women athletes achieved recognition formerly
limited to men, climaxing with the World Cup victory of the U.S. women's
soccer team in 1999. During the decade, the Supreme Court forced
all-male military academies to accept women as officer candidates. Women
also served equally in the armed forces, achieved officer status over
men (increasing from 6 percent to 14 percent since the 1970s), and saw
combat duty during the Persian Gulf War. In 1999, a woman piloted a
space vehicle for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA).

The economic and social gains by women paralleled the growing influence
of ethnic and racial minorities in national life. Following the

passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which overturned the racist
criteria that restricted immigration by national origins, a surge of
newcomers arrived from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. During
the 1990s, the number of Hispanic Americans increased by 35 percent.
Asian Americans by 40 percent. In California and Texas, white people
constituted a minority of the population. The 1990 census found that 14
percent of U.S. households spoke languages other than English. The
religious mix was equally striking. Mostly as a result of new
immigration patterns, the country was home to approximately 4 million
members of Eastern Orthodox denominations, 5 million Muslims (only a
small fraction of whom were U.S.-born Black Muslims), and increasing
numbers of Buddhists and Hindus. Since most immigrants settled in
cities, the nation's urban communities now had multicultural enclaves
with foreign-language newspapers, radio stations, schools, shops, and
cultural programs.

The vitality of ethnic communities mirrored the growth of a sturdy
African-American middle class. By the 1990s, the wage rates of
African-American women were nearly equal to those of white women,
helping to lift fully 70 percent of black households out of poverty
(compared to 90 percent for whites). This black middle class saw a
rising rate of higher education and access to professional positions.
And the presence of influential African Americans ranged from
entertainers like television's Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, Hollywood's
Spike Lee and Whoopi Goldberg, and performers Michael Jackson and
Whitney Houston to literary figures like Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and
Toni Morrison. The decade also saw the election of black political
leaders like Carol Moseley-Brown of Illinois, the first African-American
member of the Senate since Reconstruction, and Virginia Governor L.
Douglas Wilder as well as three dozen members of Congress.

Despite the emergence of a black middle class, one-third of African
Americans still lived below the poverty line and experienced
unemployment rates nearly three times as high as for whites. The
polarization of income placed black families at the -lowest economic
levels, where other poverty-related problems, such as drug abuse and
crime, proliferated. The situation put a disproportionate number of
African Americans on welfare rolls, among AIDS patients, and behind
prison bars. Indeed, frustration at poverty and police abuse prompted
the Rodney King riots of 1992 and led a predominantly black Los Angeles
jury to acquit football star O. J. Simpson in a highly publicized murder
trial. Amid the general prosperity of the 1990s, black unemployment

reached the lowest levels in thirty years, but most new jobs offered
minimum wages that were insufficient to support a family.

The emergence of a multicultural society intensified competition among
ethnic groups and alarmed whites who experienced displacement by women
and racial minorities. In Los Angeles and New York, for instance,
African Americans organized boycotts against AsianAmerican shopkeepers
who dominated local trade. Displeased by the growing presence of
foreigners, whites started English-only movements, pressing twenty-three
states by 1995 to declare English the official language. (Such measures
were seldom enforced.) In Texas, California, and Florida, conservative
groups attacked affirmative action programs in education, forcing state
universities to establish nonracial criteria for admissions that
discouraged minority enrollment. More extreme groups, such as the Ku
Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation, flaunted their racist values, demanded
an end to immigration, and engaged in sporadic violence against
different racial groups.

Angered by the changing social order, by the loss of jobs to foreigners
overseas and to cheap labor at home, and by the decline of patriarchy
within their families, many men experienced a crisis of masculinity.
Some expressed their prowess in fantasy games such as "Paintball," which
permitted mock combat, or in computer simulated warfare. Others turned
to warrior comic books, such as Vigilante and Scout, which contrasted
the impotence of bureaucratic men with the success of the
individualistic heroes. Others collected hunting knives and weapons,
whose sales grew rapidly during the decade. Police data showed a rise of
domestic violence (for both men and women). Some right-wing extremists
organized armed militia groups and prepared for warfare against the
federal government. In 1995, two such militia men retaliated for a
government attack on a religious cult by blowing up the federal building
in Oklahoma City. Significantly, the bombing provoked spontaneous
attacks against Arab Americans and Muslim mosques around the country
rather than against the racist organizations. Violence also flared among
white teenage males, who used armed weapons to intimidate and kill
classmates and teachers. This wave of outlawry--like the epidemic of
drug abuse, the rising prison population and, indeed, even the violent
rhetoric of political discourse --indicated a loss of coherence within
the national identity. It showed the absence of shared social values,
the disruption of institutional commitments, and the lack of agreement
about the purposes of government.

The social divisions of the late twentieth century mirrored disturbing
trends within the national economy. The expansion of foreign trade
stimulated a boom in electronics, including computers, software,
communications, and the Internet. Microsoft's founder, William Gates,
merely forty years of age, became the richest man in the world, one of
thousands of young entrepreneurs who became millionaires on the
information frontier. In the quarter century after 1970, the richest 1
percent of Americans increased their control of national wealth from 20
percent to 40 percent. The average pay of the nation's chief executive
officers (CEOs) skyrocketed. In 1970, their average pay had been forty
times higher than the average pay of their workers; by 1999, the ratio
had reached four hundred times higher! Prosperity thus made the rich
richer and provided the wealth to finance corporate contributions to the
electoral process.

For workers, however, the economic situation appeared less desirable.
Corporate mergers, factory consolidations, the introduction of
computerized manufacturing, and the export of jobs overseas reduced the
number of skilled jobs, undermined pay scales, and gutted pension funds.
To reduce overhead costs of health and retirement benefits, employers
relied more heavily on temporary and part-time workers and "downsized"
the number of management employees. Between 1979 and 1995, the median
incomes of all employees declined 5 percent. The uncertain job market
weakened labor militancy. The number of strikes dropped from about four
hundred annually in the mid-1970s to about forty per year in the 1990s,
and union membership declined from 25 percent to 14 percent of the labor
force. Even when unemployment dropped after 1995, every major city in
the country had a homeless population, often comprising working people
who earned too little to support a household and exceeded the number of
beds provided by public and private charitable institutions.

For white collar workers, hours of labor steadily increased, exceeding
fifty hours per week by the end of the decade. Such employees enjoyed
fewer holidays for vacation or sick leave and so contributed to the rise
in productivity that brought corporate prosperity. The "overworked
worker" became a cultural type. Linked to the workplace by electronic
innovations, such as e-mail and wireless telephones, management
employees could hardly escape into a world of leisure. Among the
successful new businesses were high-tech service firms that offered home
deliveries, online shopping, and twenty-four-hour seven-day
availability, conveniences suited to consumers who had little time to
shop or relax. It was perhaps no coincidence, then, that the coming of
the millennium brought no visions of a Utopian future with

promises of a perfect society, but only the fear of total chaos in the
form of a "millennium bug" or a "Y2K" catastrophe when computers would
cease to function.

Such a calamitous deadlock did indeed occur in the presidential election
of 2000, which accentuated the nation's deep cultural divisions and took
six weeks to resolve. The contest underscored the tension between those
who defined the national identity as a country of white Protestants and
those who embraced a new multicultural society. The Republican George W.
Bush, governor of Texas and the son of the former president, swept rural
counties and towns with populations under 50,000. Southern whites who
had split their votes between Clinton and Dole in 1996 now voted
overwhelmingly for Bush: He won every southern state and the Great
Plains and Rocky Mountain states except New Mexico. Clinton's vice
president, Al Gore, carried the Democratic standard. Although Gore was
an evangelical Protestant from Tennessee, he won every large
metropolitan area with their multicultural populations, as well as the
liberal Pacific coast states and all of the Northeast and Midwest except
Ohio and Indiana. The groups that voted most strongly for Gore were
African Americans, Hispanics, union members, and college-educated women.

Gore won a small majority of the popular vote, but Bush claimed the
majority of the electoral college, provoking a bitter conflict over
Florida's balloting that was decided by the United States Supreme Court.
The extreme closeness of the voting spoke volumes about the great chasm
within the national identity. Although Bush seemed to win Florida by a
few hundred votes. Gore contested the victory in the state's courts
because of widespread evidence of undercounting or disqualifying the
ballots in pro-Democratic areas, particularly among African Americans.
The intensity of the ensuing litigation reflected a refusal of either
party to seek compromise. After Florida's Supreme Court unanimously
ordered a recount, Bush appealed to the United States Supreme Court. In
a split decision, five conservative justices outvoted their four
colleagues and ordered a halt to the Florida recount. The ruling
effectively ended the legal dispute, making Bush the winner, but one of
the dissenting justices, John Paul Stevens, who supported the recount,
warned that the majority decision had disenfranchised thousands of
voters and would divide the nation far into the future. He also warned
that the obvious political bias of the conservative majority of the
Supreme Court could "only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of
the work of judges throughout the land.

The bitter presidential contest reinforced anxieties associated with the
new multicultural society. "We have grown into an experiment in
democratic diversity," said President Clinton as he began his second
term in 1997. But amid "abiding bigotry and intolerance," he admitted
soberly, "we are not there yet." The problem for Clinton and other
contemporary politicians was to find a common denominator that brought
citizens of diverse origins and classes into a shared national identity.
The conventional sense of American history--the story that begins at
Plymouth Rock in New England and proceeds through the War for
Independence and the Civil War to the twentieth century wars against
fascism and the victory in the Persian Gulf--seemed inadequate for
creating a common heritage. For women and nonwhites, such a history
excluded multitudes of citizens who could not identify with the old
pantheon of white male warriors.

A history that embraced all people, however, a history of the rich and
poor, white, black, brown, yellow, and red, female and male, held the
roots of a united future and a shared identity. Such a history may tell
the story not only of those who clung to freedom for themselves, but
also of people who struggled to obtain and extend the principles of
liberty and so made freedom their country's most precious heritage.
"America," said the last president of the twentieth century, "is an
idea, the most powerful idea in the history of nations. We are now the
bearers of that idea into a new world." From an American history that
includes both the free and the unfree, we can begin to find the threads
that bind us together. We can affirm the heritage that weaves us into a
community alive both in time and in place. And we may then fulfill the
promise of those who dedicated their lives to making this country, for
all its residents, a land of the free.

Epilogue.

He had come a long way . . . and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was
already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the
city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by
year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--
tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further. . . . And one
fine morning--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In 1987, Americans celebrated the Bicentennial of the adoption of the
United States Constitution. Two hundred years earlier, the Founding
Fathers had denned national citizenship in specific historical terms.
"We, the People of the United States," stated the preamble of that
document. But when Washington, Jefferson, or Madison spoke of "the
People," they were referring to men like themselves. For the rights and
privileges of the Constitution served a particular social category--
white, propertied, male Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Other peoples-- Native
Americans. Afro-Americans, and women--did not receive the same
advantages and could not participate in the political life of the new
nation.

This exclusive definition of citizenship drew upon historical traditions
that dated to the European explorers and colonizers who built beachhead
communities on the Atlantic coast. For those first AngloAmericans, the
native population represented an alien enemy who had to be expelled from
their homelands by persuasion or, when that failed, by military force.
So, too, the colonists viewed the first Afro-Americans, who had been
transported across the ocean in chains, as less than human beings,
worthy only to be enslaved and segregated. And they regarded their own
women, of whatever age, as perpetual children, who must depend upon the
leadership of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. The world of the
Founding Fathers thus reached two hundred years back as well as forward.

At the end of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan epitomized the strength of their
legacy. Like the first Presidents of the United States, he surrounded
himself mostly with white, Protestant males. And in his speeches, Reagan
claimed to continue the traditions established by the Puritans. Like
them, he denned America as a chosen nation, a New Israel, which under
divine guidance had escaped from the bondage of the Old World into a
promised land. "Can we doubt," he declared, "that only a Divine
Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge
for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free." Like them,
he described America as "a shining city upon a hill" ready to guide the
rest of the world to salvation.

President Reagan also shared the certainty of these earlier
AngloAmericans that the United States had a "manifest destiny" to extend
the realm of liberty: to overrun the Native Americans and the Spanish-

speaking people of northern Mexico; to enslave and rule over black
people; to assume the duty of patriarchs to the women in their families.
For Reagan, none of these experiences contradicted the AngloAmerican
definition of American history as the story of expanding liberty. "There
is absolutely no substance to the charge," he insisted, "that the United
States is guilty of imperialism or attempts to impose its will on other
peoples by the use of force." For him, the use of American power around
the world in the late twentieth century was as innocent as the advance
of Anglo-American culture from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific
coast.

Ronald Reagan, who dressed frequently as a cowboy, embodied a
distinctive frontier tradition. He saw himself as a self-made man who
left a home in a typical American town to forge a career on the frontier
of the marketplace. The small-town America he represented was not a
place in which to dwell, but a home to be left. His migration fit
perfectly with the mythic geography of the first Anglo-Americans: the
idea that the Old World was a home and the New World was a frontier to
be crossed. In this vision lay the familiar celebration of individual
mobility and the denial of responsibility for a community. But as long
as Americans continued to define their land as a frontier, they could
not be a people who lived at home on this continent.

One hope for a positive American future, then, is to redefine the
frontier experience: to replace the values of rootlessness with a
respect for roots, to reject the doctrine of endless mobility and to
cultivate instead a reverence for a sense of place. Since World War II,
Americans have struggled to understand this redefinition of their
history. Two developments shed light on this process: the rediscovery of
Native American history and the simultaneous emergence of the science of
ecology. Pioneers, who pass through a territory, pay no heed to
environmental pollution or the limits of resources. Yet ecologists
remind us that the earth is not a frontier. It is a home--a sacred place
to be cherished and treated with respect. That has always been the
Native American vision. Surely it is no coincidence that Native American
values have been a central component of American historical
consciousness since the 1960s.

The view of America as a frontier also excluded people with homes
elsewhere. Afro-Americans, unlike Europeans and their descendants, did
not choose to leave home. Catholics and Jews were denied full membership
in the American family precisely because they were seen as people with
loyalties to other homelands--to Rome or to Israel. Asians, too, were
regarded as inherently unassimilable. Japanese could

not become citizens even if they wanted to, and their children, who were
citizens by birth, would be treated in World War II as enemy aliens and
denied their birthright. Yet as the frontier culture dies, another
obvious truth emerges: Native Americans are home. Afro- Americans are
home. Mexican-Americans are home. AsianAmericans are home. Jews and
Catholics are home.

These groups may now provide a pantheon of American heroes. Until
recently, the nation's heroes were soldiers or men with soldierly
characteristics. For frontiers were the domain of soldiers, of the
strongest young men. Those who were left at home, however, were largely
ignored in the saga of American history. But historical perceptions have
changed radically in the last generation to include these home dwellers,
these non-soldiers, these civilians. What significance can be attached
to this widened perceptual field? Do not all these changes of historical
consciousness indicate the possibility of creating a new type of
heroism? Are we formulating a new mythology in which men and women might
be equal? And their virtues and talents also equal? Surely social and
sexual roles in America would be dramatically different if we saw the
country as a home and not as a frontier.

There is also hope that we may take better care of this home. Biologists
and physicists have offered new definitions of nature which contradict
the ideas of rational space and linear time and the notion of endless
expansion. Heretical economists have used these new scientific
principles to challenge marketplace economics and to urge responsibility
to the environment. Heretical poets, mystics, and religious prophets
have asked us to see ourselves within the body of the earth, which is
also an expression of the spirit and the soul.

The hope for the future, therefore, may be the shared logic of the
peoples whose American citizenship has only recently been recognized. If
there is indeed a connection between twentieth-century biology and
physics and ecology--an understanding of the interconnectedness of
nature--and the appearance of the liberation movements of the once
considered worthless Americans--black and red and brown and yellow
liberation, ethnic liberation, women's liberation--then the old American
history may be finished. At the end of the twentieth century, Americans
may well be standing at the beginning of a new era.

The next step is ours: Each of us must now choose our personal
understanding of American history. Some will choose to believe that the
patterns that have been dominant since the seventeenth century still
have the strength and vitality to endure in the future. Some of us,
however, believe that these patterns have been losing their power since

the closing of the geographic frontier at the end of the nineteenth
century. Since the 1880s, we have experienced a century of alternative
cultures in America, a world with science, art, music, poetry,
literature, and social institutions that are not based on the concepts
of rational space and linear time. For us, this alternative view of the
American past leads in a new direction and holds the promise of an
alternative view of the American future.

Selected References.

The following books, arranged chapter by chapter, have been especially
valuable in preparing The Free and the Unfree, and they are also good
introductions for readers who wish to pursue the subject further. Most
of them are secondary works that contain full bibliographies and
additional references. The list has been revised and updated to include
the latest scholarship of the 1990s.

chapter 1. Native Americans Meet Native Europeans

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial

North America. New York, 1985.

Bindoff, S. T. Tudor England. London, 1950.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the
Ecology of New England. New York, 1983.

Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural
Consequences of 1492. Westport, Conn., 1972.

Eccles, W. J. France in America. New York, 1972.

Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New: 1492-1650. Cambridge, Eng.,
1972.

Pagan, Bryan M. The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America. New
York, 1987.

Huizinga, J. The Waning of the Middle Ages. Londo, 1924.

Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way. Berkeley, Cal., 1978.

Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective. New
Haven. Conn., 1986.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher
Columbus. Boston, 1942.

	. The European Discovery of America. 2 vols. New York,

1971-74.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974.

O'Gorman, Edmundo, The Invention of America. Bloomington, Ind., 1961.

Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance. New York, 1963.

Phillips, William D. and Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worlds of Christopher

Columbus. New York, 1992.

Quinn, David B. North America from Earliest Discovery to First
Settlements. New York, 1977.

	. Raleigh and the British Empire. London, 1947.

Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the
Iroquois League in the Era of Colonization. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992.

Rowse, A. L. The Expansion of Elizabethan England. New York, 1955.

Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the
Making of New England, 1500-1643. New York, 1982.

Washburn, Wilcomb E., ed. The Indian and the White Man. Garden City,
N.Y., 1964.

Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.,
1992.

chapter 2. The Transplantation

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery

in North America. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

Brandao, Jose Antonio. Your Eyre Shall Burn No More: Iroquois Policy
Toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701. Lincoln, Neb., 1997.

Breen, T. H. Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early
America. New York, 1980.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996.

Carroll, Peter N. The Other Samuel Johnson: A Psychohistory of Early New
England. Rutherford, N.J., 1978.

	. Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance

of the New England Frontier. New York, 196_9.

Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Berkeley, Cal.,
1967.

Cowing, Cedric B. The Great Awakening and the American Revolution:
Colonial Thought in the 18th Century. Chicago, 1971.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the
Ecology of New England. New York. 1983.

deMause, Lloyd, ed. The History? of Childhood. New York, 1974.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture

of Early New England. New York, 1982.

	. A Little Commonwealth: family Life in Plymouth Colony.

New York, 1970.

Erikson, Kai T. Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance.
New York, 1966.

George, Charles H. and Katherine George. The Protestant Mind of the
English Reformation. Princeton, N.J., 1961.

Greven. Philip J.. Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in
Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca, N.Y., 1970.

Heimert, Alan and Perry Miller, eds. The Great Awakening. Indianapolis,
Ind., 1967.

Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America. New York, 1975.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in
Colonial New England. New York, 1987.

Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. New York, 1965.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. New
York, 1970.

McLoughlin, William G. Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic
Tradition. Boston, 1967.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge.
Mass.. 1953.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia. New York, 1975.

	. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston,

1958.

	. The Puritan Family. New York, 1966.

-. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York, 1967.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974.

New, John F. H. Anglican and Puritan: The Basis of Their Opposition.
Stanford, Calif., 1964.

Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the
Forming of American Society. New York, 1996.

Notestein, Wallace. The English People on the Eve of Colonization. New
York, 1954.

Thomas. Hugh. The Slave Trade. New York, 1997.

Thornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,
1400-1680. Cambridge, Eng., 1992.

468	The Free and the Unfree

Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York, 1943.
Vaughan, Alden T. American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the

Founding of Virginia. Boston, 1975.

Ver Steeg, Clarence L. The Formative Years. New York, 1964. Walzer,
Michael. The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins

of Radical Politics. New York, 19698. Webb, Stephen Saunders. 7676.- The
End of American Independence.

New York, 1984. Wright, Louis B. Religion and Empire: The Alliance
between Piety

and Commerce in English Expansion. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943.

chapter 3. Colonial Economy and Social Structure

Bailyn, Bernard, ed. The Apologia of Robert Keayne: The Self

Portrait of a Puritan Merchant. New York, 1965.

	. The Peopling of British North America. Madison, Wise., 1985.

	. Voyagers to the West. New York, 1986.

Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social
Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Cambridge, Mass., 1967.

Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America.
New York, 1994.

Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1998.

Grant, Charles S. Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent.
New York, 1961.

Hofstadter, Richard. America at 1750: A Social Portrait. New York, 1971.

Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1982.

Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York, 1984.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968.

Kammen, Michael. Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the
Politics of Mercantilism. Philadelphia, 1970.

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern
Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1886.

McCusker, John J. and Russell R. Menard. The Economy of British North
America, 1606-1789. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985.

Merrell, James H. The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their

Neighbors. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia. New York, 1975.

Mullin, Gerald. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth
Century Virginia. New York, 1972.

Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political
Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge,
Mass., 1979.

Perdu, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 17001835.
Lincoln, Neb., 1998.

Silver, Timothy. A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and
Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. Cambridge, Eng., 1990.

Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in
Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton, N.J., 1987.

Tolles, Frederick B. Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker
Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1948.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empire, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York, 1991.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority. New York, 1974.

chapter 4. Politics and the American Revolution

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

Cambridge, Mass., 1967.

	. The Origins of American Politics. New York, 1968.

Batinski, Michael C. Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor. Lexington,
Ky., 1996.

Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York, 1974.

Brown, Wallace. The King's Friends: The Composition and Motives of the
American Loyalist Claimants. Providence, R.I., 1966.

Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and
Diversity in Native American Communities. New York, 1995.

Countryman, Edward. The American Revolution. New York, 1985.

Ernst, Joseph Albert. Money and Politics in America: 1755-1775. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1973.

Frey, Sylvia R. Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary

Age. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Greene, Jack P. The Quest for Power. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963.

Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes,
Policies, and Practice. New York, 1971.

Jensen, Merrill. The Articles of Confederation. Madison, Wis., 1940.

	. The New Nation. New York, 1950.

	,ed. Tracts of the American Revolution: 1763-1776. Indianapolis, Ind.,
1967.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the
Development of Opposition to Britain. New York, 1972.

	. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York,
1997.

Main, Jackson Turner. Political Parties Before the Constitution. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1973.

	. The Upper House in Revolutionary America, 1763-1788.

Madison, Wis., 1967.

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause. New York, 1982.

Morgan, Edmund S. and Helen Morgan. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to
Revolution. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1953.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black
Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.

Nelson, William H. The American Tory. Oxford, Eng., 1961.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of
American Women, 1750-1800. Boston, 1980. Rakove, Jack N. The Beginnings
of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental
Congress. New York, 1979.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War. Chapel Hil, N.C., 1979.

Sydnor, Charles S. Gentleman Freeholders. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1952.

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1969.

Zuckerman, Michael. Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the
Eighteenth Century. New York, 1970.

chapter 5. The Constitution and American Identity

Akers, Charles W. Abigail Adams. Boston, 1980. Boorstin, Daniel J. The
Lost World of Thomas Jefferson. New York, 1948.

Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York

1974.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian
Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore, 1992.

Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism. New York,
1993.

Henretta, James A. The Evolution of American Society, 1700-18]5.
Lexington, Mass., 1973.

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. New York, 1948.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968.

McDonald, Forrest. We the People: The Economic Origins of the
Constitution. Chicago, 1958.

Main, Jackson Turner. The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961.

	. The Social Structure of Revolutionary America. Princeton,

N.J., 1965.

Miller, John Chester. The Wolf By the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and
Slavery. New York, 1977.

Nye, Russel B. The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830. New York,
1960.

Rakove, Jack. Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the
Constitution. New York, 1996.

Robinson, Donald L. Slavery in the Structure of American Politics. New
York, 1971.

Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and
the American Indian. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973.

Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity
in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. New York, 1997.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the
American Revolution. New York, 1986.

Storing, Herbert J. What the Anti-Federalists Were For. Chicago, 1981.

Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence. Garden City, N.Y., 1978.

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1969.

472	The Free and the Unfree

chapter 6. Social Patterns, North and South

Bailey, Chris. Two Hundred Years of American Clocks and Watches.

Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1975.

Banner, Lois W. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Boston, 1980.

Baker-Benfield, G. L The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes
Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York,
1976.

Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western
Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood. New Haven, Conn., 1977.

Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New
York, 1991.

Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women's Work. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.

DuBois, Ellen C. Feminism and Suffrage. Ithaca, N.Y., 1978.

Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston, 1974.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and
White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind. New York,
1971.

Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York, 1965.

------. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York, 1974.

Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925.
New York, 1976.

Handlin, Oscar and Mary Handlin. Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of
Government in the American Economy. New York, 1947.

Hansen, Marcus L. The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860. Cambridge, Mass.,
1940.

Hartz, Louis. Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania,
1776-1860. Cambridge, Mass., 1948.

Henretta, James A. The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815.
Lexington, Mass., 1973.

Katz, Michael. The Iwnv of Early School Reform. Cambridge, Mass., 1968.

King, Wilma. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century
America. Bloomington, Ind., 1995.

Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in

Antebellum America. Middletown, Conn., 1986.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619-1877. New York, 1993.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York,
1977.

McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian
America. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Miller, Perry. The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to
the Civil War. New York, 1965.

Pessen, Edward. Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War.
Lexington, Mass., 1973.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New
York, 1995.

Rozwenc, Edwin C., ed. Ideology and Power in the Age of Jackson. Garden
City, N.Y., 1964.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County,
New York, 1790-1865. New York, 1981.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.
New York, 1991.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity.
New Haven, Ct., 1973.

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York,
1789-1860. New York, 1986.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations
of Black America. New York, 1987.

Tadman, Michael. Speculators and Slaves. Madison, Wis., 1989.

Taylor, George R. The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860. New York,
1951.

Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American
National Character. New York, 1961.

Temin, Peter. The Jacksonian Economy. New York, 1969.

Thernstrom, Stephan. Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a
Nineteenth Century City. Cambridge, Mass., 1964.

Watts, Steven. The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal
America, 1790-1820. Baltimore, 1987.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the
American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York, 1984.

Wishy, Bernard. The Child and the Republic. Philadelphia, 1968.

chapter 7. The Organization of Space

Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum

South. New York, 1974. Billington, Ray Allen. America's Frontier
Heritage. New York, 1966.

	. The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860. New York, 1938.

Curry, Leonard P. The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850.

Chicago, 1981. Dangerfield, George. The Awakening of American
Nationalism,

1815-1828. New York, 1965.

Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln, Neb., 1983. Faragher,
John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. New

Haven, Conn., 1986. Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery,
1830-1860. New York,

1960. Green, Michael D. The Politics of Indian Removal. Lincoln, Neb.,

1982.

Holliday, J. S. The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush
Experience. New York, 1981. Knights, Peter R. The Plain People of
Boston, 1830-1860. New York,

1971. Lapp, Rudolph. Blacks in Gold Rush California. New Haven, Conn.,

1977. McLoughlin, William G. Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic.

Princeton, N.J., 1986. Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison
and the Abolition

of Slavery. New York, 1998. Merk, Frederick. Manifest Destiny and
Mission in American History.

New York, 1963. . The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism:
18431849. New York, 1966. Nye, Russel Elaine. Society and Culture in
America, 1830-1860. New

York, 1974. O'Connell, Barry, ed. On Our Own Ground: The Complete
Writings of

William Apess, A Pequot. Amherst, Mass., 1992. Rawls, James J. Indians
of California: The Changing Image,. Norman,

Okla., 1984.

Richards, Leonard L. "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti
Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. New York, 1970. Rogin, Michael
Paul. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the

Subjugation of the American Indian. New York, 1975.

Rohrbough, Malcolm J. The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies,

and Institutions, 1775-1850. New York, 1978.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln, Neb., 1984.

Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder
in the New Republic. Boston, 1971.

Sheehan, Bernard W. Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and
the American Indian. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth.
Cambridge, Mass., 1950.

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915. New York,
1973.

Sweet, Leonard I. Black Images of America: 1784-1870. New York, 1976.

Tyler, Alice Felt. Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History.
Minneapolis, Minn., 1944.

Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846. Albuquerque, N.M.,
1982.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of National Expansionism.
Baltimore, 1935.

White, Shane, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York
City. Athens, Ga., 1991.

chapter 8. Politics and Power

Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican

Vision of the 1790s. New York, 1984.

Banner, James M., Jr. To the Hartford Convention. New York, 1970.

Barney, William. The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old
South. New York, 1972.

Baxter, Maurice G. One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union.
Cambridge, Mass., 1984.

Brock, William R. Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas,
1840-1850. New York, 1979.

Chambers, William. Political Parties in a New Nation. New York, 1963.

Channing, Steven A. Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina. New
York, 1970.

Curtis, James C. Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication. Boston,
1976.

Eaton, Clement. Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics. Boston,

1957.

Fehrenbacher, Don E. The Dred Scott Case. New York, 1978.

Fischer, David Hackett. The Revolution of American Conservatism: The
Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York, 1965.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the
Republican Party before the Civil War. New York, 1970.

Freehling, William W. Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification
Controversy in South Carolina. New York, 1966.

	. The Road to Disunion. New York, 1990.

Gienapp, William E. The Origins of the Republican Party. New York, 1987.

Greenberg, Kenneth S. Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of
American Slavery. Baltimore, 1985.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate
Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840. Berkeley, Cal., 1969.

Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York, 1978.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of the American Whigs.
Chicago, 1979.

Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion. Stanford, Cal., 1957.

Miller, John C. The Federalist Era, 1789-1801. New York, 1960.

Niven, John. Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics.
New York, 1983.

Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis. New York, 1976.

Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Bank War. New York, 1967.

Sewell, Richard H. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the
United States, 1837-1860. New York, 1976.

Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic. New Haven,
Conn., 1993.

Stagg, J. C. A. Mr. Madison's War. Princeton, N.J., 1983.

Sydnor, Charles. The Development of Southern3electionalism, 18191848.
Baton Rouge, La., 1948.

Ward, John William. Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. New York, 1962.

Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America.
New York, 1990.

Wilson, Douglas L. Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln.
New York, 1998.

chapter 9. The Civil War and American Identity

Berlin, Ira and Leslie S. Rowlands, eds. Families and Freedom: A

Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War

Era. New York, 1997.

Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots. New York, 1990. Current,
Richard N., ed. The Political Thought of Abraham Lincoln.

Indianapolis, Ind., 1967. Donald, David, ed. Why the North Won the Civil
War. Baton Rouge,

La., 1960. Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the
Slaveholding

South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996. Fehrenbacher,
Don E. Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's.

Stanford, Cal., 1962. Frederickson, George M. The Inner Civil War:
Northern Intellectuals

and the Crisis of the Union. New York, 1965. Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged
in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black

Soldiers and White Officers. New York, 1990.

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. New York, 1948.
Linderman, Gerald F. Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat

in the American Civil War. New York, 1987. McPherson, James M. The
Negro's Civil War. New York, 1965. . Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil
War Era. New York,

1988. Paludan, Philip Shaw. "A People's Contest": The Union and the
Civil

War. New York, 1988. Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William
Tecumseh Sherman,

Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans. New York, 1990. Strozier, Charles
B. Lincoln's Quest for Union. New York, 1982. Thomas, Emory M. The
Confederate Nation. New York, 1979. Weeks, Philip. Farewell My Nation:
The American Indian and the

United States, 1820-1890. Arlington Heights, 111., 1990. Wills, Garry.
Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York, 1992. Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary
Chestnut's Civil War. New Haven,

Conn., 1981.

chapter 10. The Collapse of Nineteenth-Century Culture

Andrist, Ralph. The Long Death. New York, 1964.

Bannister, Robert. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in AngloAmerican
Social Thought. Philadelphia, 1979.

Berkhofer, Robert, Jr. The White Man's Indian. New York, 1978. Bordin,
Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty. New
Brunswick, N.J., 1981.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York, 1971.

Brown Mark, The Flight of the Nez Perce. New York, 1971.

Carter, Paul. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb, 111.,
1971.

Cell, John. The Highest Stage of White Supremacy. New York, 1982.

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an
Anglo-Hispanic Frontier. New York, 1987.

Dippie, Brian. The Vanishing American. Middletown, Conn., 1982.

Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian History.
Minneapolis, Minn., 1980.

Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture
of Reconstruction. Urbana, 111., 1997.

Frederickson, George. The Black Image in the White Mind. New York, 1971.

Gillis, John. Youth and History. New York, 1974.

Greene, Theodore. America's Heroes. New York, 1971.

Hoover, Dwight. The Red and the Black. Chicago, 1976.

Howe, Daniel, ed. Victorian America. Philadelphia, 1976.

Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the
Indians. Lincoln, Neb., 1984.

Jackson, John B. American Space. New York, 1972.

Jaher, Frederic. Doubters and Dissenters. New York, 1964.

Kern, Stephen. Anatomy and Destiny. Indianapolis, Ind., 1975.

Kirby, Jack. Darkness at the Dawning. Philadelphia, 1972.

Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long. New York, 1979.

	. Trouble in Mind. New York, 1998.

Marty, Martin E. Modern American Religion. 7893-7979. Chicago, 1986.

Martin, Waldo. The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York, 1964.

Miner, H. Craig. The Corporation and the Indian. Columbia, Mo., 1976.

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Witness to a Vanishing America. Princeton, N.J.,

1981. Moses, Wilson. Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms. University Park,
Pa.,

1982. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven,

Conn., 1967. Prucha, Francis. American Indian Policy in Crisis. Norman,
Okla.,

1976. Rydell, Robert. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at
American

International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago, 1984. Saloman, Roger.
Twain and the Image of History. New Haven, Conn.,

1961.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment. New York, 1985. Smith, Henry
Nash. Virgin Land. Cambridge, Mass., 1950. Toll, William. The Resurgence
of Race. Philadelphia, 1979. Trachtenberg, Allan. The Incorporation of
America. New York, 1982. VanDeburg, William. Slavery and Race in
American Popular Culture.

Madison, Wis., 1984.

Weiss, Richard. The American Myth of Success. New York, 1969. Wissler,
Clark. Red Man Reservations. New York, 1938. Ziff, Larzer, The American
Eighteen Nineties. New York, 1960.

chapter 11. The New Industrial Economy

Earth, Gunther. City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in

Nineteenth-Century America. New York, 1980. Benson, Susan Porter.
Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and

Customers in American Department Stores. Urbana, 111., 1986. Borchert,
James. Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion and
Folklife in the City. Urbana, 111., 1980. Chandler, Alfred. Strategy and
Structure. New York, 1961. . The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution
in American

Business. Cambridge, Mass., 1977. Cross, Robert. The Emergence of
Liberal Catholicism in America.

Cambridge, Mass., 1954. Diamond, Sigmund. The Reputation of the American
Businessman.

Cambridge, Mass., 1955. Fink, Leon. Working Men's Democracy: The Knights
of Labor and

American Politics. Urbana, 111., 1983.

Fite, Gilbert. The Farmer's Frontier. New York. 1966.

Gordon, David, Edward Richards, and Michael Reich. Segmented

Work, Divided Workers. New York, 1982. Grossman, James R. Land of Hope:
Chicago, Black Southerners, and

the Great Migration. Chicago, 1989.

Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America.
New York, 1976.

Hays, Samuel P. The Response to Industrialism. Chicago, 1957.
Heilbroner, Robert. The Economic Transformation of America. New

York, 1977. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization
of the

United States. New York, 1985. Katzman, David. Seven Days a Week: Women
and Domestic Service in

Industrializing America. New York, 1978. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to
Work: A History of Wage-Earning

Women in the United States. New York, 1982. Kirkland, Edward C. Industry
Comes of Age. New York, 1961. Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead.
Pittsburgh, 1992. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and
the Rise of a

New American Culture. New York, 1993.

Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising
in America. New York, 1994. McAvoy, Thomas. The Great Crisis in American
Catholic History.

Chicago, 1957. Matthaei, Julie. An Economic History of Women in America.
New

York, 1982. Meier, August. Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915. Ann
Arbor,

Mich., 1963. Messbarger, Paul. Fiction with a Parochial Purpose: Social
Use of

American Catholic Literature, 1884-1900. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963.
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Women Adrift. Chicago, 1988. Montgomery, David.
The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace,

the State, and American Labor Activism. New York, 1987. Nelson, Daniel.
Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory

System in the United States, 1880-1920. Madison, Wis., 1975. Rischin,
Moses. The Promised Land: New York's Jews, 1870-1914.

Cambridge, Mass., 1962.

Strouse, Jean. Morgan: American Financier. New York, 1999. Taylor,
George R. The Transportation Revolution. New York, 1951. Thernstrom,
Stephen. Poverty and Progress. Cambridge, Mass., 1964. Warner, Sam.
Streetcar Suburbs. Cambridge, Mass., 1962.

Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State Boston

1968.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order. New York, 1967. Wyllie, Irvin. The
Self-Made Man in America. New Brunswick, N J

1954. Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate: 1870-1920. Chicago

1990.

chapter 12. Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century

Allswang, John. Bosses, Machines and Urban Voters. Baltimore,

1977.

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South. New York, 1992.

Bullough, William. Cities and Schools in the Gilded Age. Port
Washington, N.Y., 1974.

Cohen, William. At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White
Quest for Racial Control. Baton Rouge, La., 1991.

Cox, Lawanda, and John Cox. Politics, Principle, and Prejudice. New
York, 1963.

Donald, David. Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man. New York, 1970.

Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction. New York, 1935.

Edwards, Rebecca. Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party
Politics. New York, 1997.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. New York,
1988.

Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879. Baton Rouge,
La., 1979.

Glad, Paul. McKinley, Bryan, and the People. Philadelphia, 1964.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America.
New York, 1976.

Grimes, Alan. The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage. New York, 1967.

Gusfield, Joseph. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American
Temperance Movement. Urbana, 111., 1961.

Hahn, Stephen. The Roots of Southern Populism. New York, 1983.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. New York, 1955.

Hoogenboom, Ari. Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service
Reform Movement. Urbana, 111., 1961.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion. New York, 1995.

Kleppner, Paul. The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern
Politics, 1850-1900. New York, 1970.

	. The Third Electoral System: Parties, Voters and Political Cultures.
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979.

Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage
Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. New
Haven, Conn., 1974.

Kraditor, Aileen. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. New York,
1965.

McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism: A Social History. New York,
1993.

Morgan, David. Suffragists and Democrats: The Politics of Woman Suffrage
in America. East Lansing, Mich., 1972.

O'Neill, William. Everyone Was Brave: The Rise and Fall of Feminism in
America. Chicago, 1969.

Palmer, Bruce. Men Over Money: The Southern Populist Critique of
American Capitalism. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Paul, Arnold. Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law. Ithaca, N.Y.,
1960.

Piess, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women in Turn-of-the Century New
York. Philadelphia, 1986.

Rothman, David. Politics and Power: The United States Senate, 1869-1901.
Cambridge, Mass., 1966.

Sklar, Katherine Kish. Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work. New Haven,
Conn., 1995.

Sproat, John. The Best Men: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. New
York, 1966.

Williams, R. Hal. Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s. New
York, 1978.

Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race. New York, 1984.

Woodward, C. Vann. Reunion and Reaction. New York, 1951.

	. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York, 1957.

Youngdale, James. Populism: A Psychohistorical Perspective. Port
Washington, N.Y., 1975.

chapter 13. The End of Isolation, 1898-1920

Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Bell, Sidney. Righteous Conquest: Woodrow Wilson and the Evolution of
the New Diplomacy. Port Washington, N.Y., 1972.

Burton, David. Theodore Roosevelt: Confident Imperialist. Philadelphia,
1968.

Chambers, John Whiteclay. The Tyranny of Change: America in the
Progressive Era. New York, 1980.

Collin, Richard. Theodore Roosevelt: Culture, Diplomacy and Expansion.
Baton Rouge, La., 1985.

Conn, Peter. The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America,
1898-1917. New York, 1983.

Cooper, John Milton Jr. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and
Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven, Conn., 1987.

Crosby, Alfred W., Jr. Epidemic and Peace, 1918. Westport, Conn., 1976.

Cuff, Robert. The War Industries Board. Baltimore, 1973.

Davis, Allen. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the
Progressive Movement. New York, 1967.

Dubofsky, Melvin. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers
of the World. New York, 1968.

Dyer, Thomas. Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Baton Rouge, La.,
1980.

Erenberg, Lewis. Steppin' Out: New York Night Life and the
Transformation of American Culture. Chicago, 1981.

Gardner, Lloyd. Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to
Revolution , 1913-1923. New York, 1984.

Gilbert, James. Work Without Salvation: America's Intellectuals and
Industrial Alienation. New York, 1977.

Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War
I on Women Workers. Westport, Conn., 1980.

Grubbs, Frank, Jr. The Struggle for Labor Lovalty: Gompers, The ALL, and
the Pacifists, 1917-1920. Durham, N.C. 1968.

Gruber, Carol. Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher
Learning in America. Baton Rouge, La., 1976.

Hall, Raymond. Black Separatism in the United States. Hanover, N.H.,
1978.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism
1860-1925. New Brunswick, N.J., 1955.

Karp, Walter. The Politics of War. New York, 1979.

Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society.
New York, 1980.

Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism. Chicago, 1963.

LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central
America. New York, 1984.

	. The New Empire. Ithaca, N.Y., 1963.

Levin, N. Gordon. Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. New York, 1968.

Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. DuBois. New York, 1993.

May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the
Motion Picture Industry. New York, 1980.

Noble, David F. America by Design. New York, 1978.

Noble, David W. The Progressive Mind. Minneapolis, Minn., 1981.

Parrini, Carl. Heir to Empire: U.S. Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923.
Pittsburgh, 1969.

Penick, James. Progressive Politics and Conservation. Chicago, 1968.

Polenberg, Richard. Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court,
and Free Speech. New York, 1987.

Preston, William. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of
Radicals, 1903-1933. New York, 1963. Salvatore, Nick. Eugene V. Debs.
Urbana, 111., 1982.

Schaffer, Ronald. America in the Great War. New York, 1991.

Stone, Ralph. The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of
Nations. Lexington, Ky., 1970.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore. Boston, 1989.

Thelen, David. Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in
Industrializing Missouri. New York, 1995.

Tishler, Hace Sorel. Self-Reliance and Social Security, 1870-1917. Port
Washington, N.Y., 1971.

Watson, Richard, Jr. The Development of National Power. Washington,
D.C., 1982.

Weston, Rubin. Racism in U.S. Imperialism. Columbia, S.C., 1972.

chapter 14. Prosperity and Depression, 1920-40

Abrahams, Edward. The Lyrical Left. Charlottesville, Va., 1986.
Bernstein, Irving. The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker,
1920-1933. Boston, 1970.

Biles, Roger. A New Deal for the American People. DeKalb, 111.,

1991. Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and

the Great Depression. New York, 1982. Brown, Dorothy M. Setting a
Course: American Women in the 1920s.

Boston, 1987. Cohen, Liz. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in
Chicago. New

York, 1990.

Cohen, Warren. The American Revisionists. Chicago, 1966. Cooperman,
Stanley. World War I and the American Novel. Baltimore,

1970. DeLoria, Vine, Jr., and Clifford Lytle. The Nations Within: The
Past

and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. New York, 1984. Dumenil,
Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in

the 1920s. New York, 1995. Pass, Paula. The Damned and the Beautiful:
American Youth in the

1920s. New York, 1977. Flynn, George. American Catholics and the
Roosevelt Presidency.

Lexington, Ky., 1968. Goldberg, David J. Discontented America: The
United States in the

1920s. Baltimore, 1999.

Gordon, Linda. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History
of Welfare. New York, 1984. Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust
Bowl Migration and

the Okie Culture in California. New York, 1989. Haber, Samuel.
Efficiency and Uplift. Chicago, 1964. Handlin, Oscar. Al Smith and His
America. Boston, 1958. Heald, Morrell. The Social Responsibilities of
Business. Cleveland,

Ohio, 1970. Hoffman, Frederick. The Twenties: American Writing in the
PostWar

Decade. New York, 1955. Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists during

the Great Depression. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990. Leonard, Neil. Jazz and
the White Americans. Chicago, 1962.

	. Jazz: Myth and Religion. New York, 1987.

Leuchtenburg, William. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.

New York, 1963.

	. The Perils of Prosperity. Chicago, 1958.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York, 1981.
Maclean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku
Klux Klan. New York, 1994.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising and the American Dream. Berkeley,

Cal., 1985.

Meyer, Leonard. Music, the Arts, and Ideas. Chicago, 1967. Miller,
Robert. American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919-1937.

Chapel Hill, N.C., 1958. Moore, MacDonald. Yankee Blues: Musical Culture
and American

Identity. Bloomington, Ind., 1985. Nash, Roderick. The Nervous
Generation: American Thought, 19171930. Chicago, 1970.

Ogren, Kathy. The Jazz Revolution. New York, 1989. Peeler, David. Hope
Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America.
Athens, Ga., 1987. Pells, Richard. Radical Visions and American Dreams.
New York,

1973.

Pleasants, Henry. Serious Music and All That Jazz. New York, 1969.
Rosenberg, Emily. Spreading the American Dream. New York, 1982. Sidran,
Ben. Black Talk. New York, 1981.

Stein, Judith. The World of Marcus Garvey. Baton Rouge, La., 1986.
Sternsher, Bernard, ed. Hitting Home: The Great Depression in Town

and Country. Chicago, 1970. Stock, Catherine McNichol. Main Street in
Crisis. Chapel Hill, N.C.,

1992.

Susman, Warren. Culture as History. New York, 1984. Ware, Susan. Holding
Their Own: American Women in the 1930s.

Boston, 1982.

Warren, Frank. Liberals and Communism. Bloomington, Ind., 1966. Zieger,
Robert. Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929. Lexington, Ky.,

1969.

chapter 15. War, Economic Prosperity, and Consensus, 1936-60

Ambrose, Stephen. Eisenhower. 2 vols. New York, 1983-84.

Anderson, Karen. Wartime Women. Westport, Conn., 1981.

Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at
the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York, 1985.

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and
War. New York, 1995.

Broadwater, Jeff. Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade. Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1992.

Brody, David. Workers in Industrial Society. New York, 1981.

Campbell, D'An. Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic
Era. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.

Carroll, Peter N. The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans
in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford, Cal, 1994.

Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and
Eisenhower. New York, 1978.

Dallek, Robert. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Diplomacy. New York,
1979.

Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps, U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and
World War II. New York, 1971.

Divine, Robert. The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War
II. New York, 1965.

Doherty, Thomas. Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and
World War II. New York, 1993.

Donaldson, Scott. The Suburban Myth. New York, 1969.

Dower, John W. War without Mercy. New York, 1986.

Drinnon, Richard. Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S Myer and
American Racism. Berkeley, Cal., 1987.

Freeland, Richard. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of Me Carthyism.
New York, 1972.

Gaddis, John. Strategies of Containment. New York, 1982.

Galbraith, John K. The New Industrial State. Boston, 1967.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy. Madison, Wis.,
1964.

Hamby, Alonzo. Beyond the New Deal: Harry Truman and American
Liberalism. New York, 1973.

Heardon, Patrick J. Roosevelt Confronts Hitler. DeKalb, 111., 1987.

Honey, Maureen. Creating Rosie the Riveter. Amherst, Mass., 1984.

LeFaber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War. New York, 1985.

Leffler, Melvyn P. A Preponderance of Power. Stanford, Cal., 1992.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor's War at Home. New York, 1983.

Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s.
Urbana, III, 1994.

Marchand, Roland. Creating the Corporate Soul. Berkeley, Cal., 1998.

Meyer, Donald. The Protestant Search for Political Realism. Berkeley,
Cal., 1960.

Morton, Marian. The Terrors of Ideological Politics. Cleveland, Ohio,
1972.

Navasky, Victor. Naming Names. New York, 1980.

Polenberg, Richard. One Nation Divisible. New York. 1980.

Reinhard, David. The Republican Right since 1945. Lexington, Ky.,

1983.

Rogin, Michael P. The Intellectuals and McCarthy. Cambridge, Mass.,
1967.

Rupp, Leila J., and Verta Taylor. Survival in the Doldrums: The American
Women's Rights Movement, 1945-1960. New York, 1987.

Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes. New York, 1998.

Sherry, Michael S. The Rise of American Air Power. New Haven, Conn.,
1987.

Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand
Alliance. New York, 1975.

Sitkoff, Harvard. The Struggle for Black Equality. New York, 1983.

Tuttle, William M., Jr. "Daddy's Gone to War". New York, 1993.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His
Legacy. New York, 1983.

Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987.

Wood, Robert. Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics. Boston, 1958.

Wyman, David. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust,
1941-1945. New York, 1984.

Yergin, Daniel. A Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the
National Security State. Boston, 1977.

chapter 16. New Visions, New Ethics, 1950-70

Barnouw, Erik. The Tube of Plenty. New York, 1982.

Benthall, Jonathan, and Ted Pothermus, eds. The Body as a Medium of
Expression. New York, 1975.

Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, N.Y., 1981.

Berman, Ronald. America in the Sixties. New York, 1968.

Biskind, Peter. Seeing is Believing. New York, 1983.

Braden, William. The Age of Aquarius. New York, 1976.

Brauer, Ralph. The Horse, the Gun, and the Piece, of Property: Changing
Images of the TV Western. Bowling Green, Ohio, 1975.

Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Berkeley, Cal., 1975.

	. The Turning Point. New York, 1982.

Garden, Maren Lockwood. The New Feminist Movement. New York, 1974.

Catton, William. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary
Change. Urbana, 111., 1980.

489'

Commoner, Barry. The Closing Circle. New York, 1971.

Cottrell, Fred. Energy and Society. New York, 1955.

Curtis, James. Culture as Polyphony. Columbia, Mo., 1978.

Deckard, Barbara. The Women's Movement. New York, 1975.

Deloria, Vine Jr. God Is Red. New York, 1975.

Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

New York, 1977. Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Humankind and the
Environment.

Toronto, 1985.

Perm, Deane. Contemporary American Theologies. New York, 1981. Guilbaut,
Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.

Chicago, 1983. Hardin, Garrett. Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The
Voyage of the

Spaceship Beagle. New York, 1972.

Harrell, David, Jr. All Things Are Possible. Bloomington, Ind., 1975.
Henderson, Hazel. Creating Alternative Futures. New York, 1978. Hunter,
Robert. The Storming of the Mind. New York, 1972. Isserman, Maurice. If
I Had a Hammer. New York, 1987. Jones, Landon Y. Great Expectations:
America and the Baby-Boom

Generation. New York, 1980. Keniston, Kenneth. Youth and Dissent. New
York, 1971.

	. The Uncommitted. New York, 1965.

King, Richard. The Party of Eros: Radical Social Thought and the

Realm of Freedom. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972. Lasch, Christopher. The
Culture of Narcissism. New York, 1978. Mack, Arien, ed. Death in
American Experience. New York, 1973. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound:
American Families in the Cold

War Era. New York, 1988.

Melville, Keith. Communes in the Counter Culture. New York, 1972.
Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets. New York, 1987. Roszak,
Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. New York,

1969.

Sayres, Sohnya, ed. The Sixties. Minneapolis, Minn., 1984. Shepard,
Paul, and Daniel McKinley, eds. The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an
Ecology of Man. Boston, 1969. Slater, Philip. The Pursuit of Loneliness.
Boston, 1970. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for Television. Chicago, 1992.
Stannard, David, ed. Death in America. Philadelphia, 1975. Thompson,
William Irwin. At the Edge of History. New York, 1971. Ungar, Roberto.
Knowing and Politics. New York, 1975. Vernon, John. The Garden and the
Map. Urbana, 111., 1973.

Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society. Berkeley, Cal., 1971. Yorburg,
Betty. The Changing Family. New York, 1973.

chapter 17. Patterns of Economic Change, 1960-76

Aviel, S. David. The Politics of Nuclear Energy. Washington, D.C.,

1982. Baltzell, E. Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and

Caste in America. New York, 1964.

Barber, Richard. The American Corporation. New York, 1970. Collins,
Robert. The Business Response to Keynes. New York, 1981. Commoner,
Barry. The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic

Crisis. New York, 1976. Daly, Herman, ed. Toward a Steady-State Economy.
San Francisco,

1973.

Dunlop, Thomas. DDT, Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy. Princeton,
N.J., 1981. Ferkiss, Victor. The Future of Technological Civilization.
New York,

1974.

Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool. Chicago, 1997. Georgescu-Roegen,
Nicholas. The Entropy Law and Economic Process. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.

Graebner, William. A History of Retirement. New Haven, Conn., 1980.
Greenstone, J. David, and Paul Peterson. Race and Authority in Urban

Politics: Community Participation and the War on Poverty. New

York, 1973.

Harrington, Michael. The Twilight of Capitalism. New York, 1976. Heath,
Jim. John F. Kennedy and the Business Community. Chicago,

1969. Humphrey, Craig, and Frederick Buttel. Environment, Energy and
Society. New York, 1982.

Johnson, Warren. Muddling toward Frugality. San Francisco, 1978. Lodge,
George C. The New American Ideology. "New York, 1975. Logsdon, John. The
Decision to Go to the Moon. Cambridge, Mass.,

1970. McDougall, Walter. The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History
of

the Space Age. New York, 1985. Melosi, Martin. Coping with Abundance:
Energy and Environment in

Industrial America. New York, 1985.

Parker, Richard. The Myth of the Middle Class. New York, 1972.

Patterson, James. America's Struggle Against Poverty. Cambridge, Mass.,
1981.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard Cloward. Regulating the Poor. New York,
1971.

Price, Jerome. The Anti-Nuclear Movement. New York, 1982.

Ridgway, James. The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis.
New York, 1968.

Rothschild, Emma. Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age.
New York, 1973.

Russett, Bruce. What Price Vigilance: The Burden of National Defense.
New Haven, Conn., 1970.

Schnaiberg, Allan. The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. New York,
1980.

Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful. New York, 1973.

Seymour, Ian. OPEC: Instrument of Change. New York, 1981.

Toffler, Alvin, ed. The Futurists. New York, 1972.

Warren, Donald. The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of
Alienation. Notre Dame, Ind., 1976.

chapter 18. American Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics,

1960-76

Acuna, Rudolfo. Occupied America: The Chicano 's Struggle toward

Liberation. San Francisco, 1972.

Appy, Christian G. Working-Class War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993.

Bernstein, Irving. Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson. New
York, 1996.

Branch, Taylor. Parting of the Waters: America in the King Years. New
York, 1988.

	. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years. New York, 1998.

Branden, Henry. The Retreat of American Power. New York, 1972.

Chafe, William. Women and Equality. New York, 1977.

Chavez, John. The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest.
Albuquerque, N.M., 1984.

Dallek, Robert. Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and his Times. New York,
1998.

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in
Mississippi. Urbana, 111., 1994.

Evans, Sara. Personal Politics. New York, 1979. Farber, David. The Age
of Great Dreams. New York, 1994. Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake:
The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York, 1972. Gatlin,
Rochelle. American Women since 1945. Jackson, Miss.,

1987.

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York, 1972. Harrison,
Cynthia. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues.

Berkeley, Cal., 1988. Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape: The
Treatment of Women in

the Movies. New York, 1974.

Herring, George. America's Longest War. New York, 1986. Hertzberg,
Helen. The Search for an American Indian Identity. Syracuse, N.Y., 1971.
Kearns, Doris. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York,

1976.

Kimball, Jeffrey. Nixon's Vietnam War. Lawrence, Kan., 1998. Kluger,
Richard. Simple Justice. New York, 1976. Krickus, Richard. Pursuing the
American Dream: White Ethnics and

the New Populism. New York, 1976. Kutler, Stanley. The Wars of
Watergate. New York, 1990. Ladd, Everett, and Charles Hadley.
Transformations of the American

Party System. New York, 1975. Levine, Stuart, and Nancy Lurie. The
American Indian Today. Deland,

Fla., 1965.

Logevall, Fredrik. Choosing War. Berkeley, Cal., 1999. Martin, Calvin,
ed. The American Indian and the Problem of History.

New York, 1987.

Matusow, Allan. The Unraveling of America. New York, 1984. Miroff,
Bruce. Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John

F. Kennedy. New York, 1976. Murphy, Reg, and Hal Buliver. The Southern
Strategy. New York,

1971. Novak, Michael. The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. New York,

1971.

Schell, Jonathan. The Time of Illusion. New York, 1976. Schrag, Peter.
The Decline of the WASP. New York, 1970. Small, Melvin. The Presidency
of Richard Nixon. Lawrence, Kan.,

1999.

Steiner, Stan. The New Indians. New York, 1968. Walton, Richard. Cold
War and Counter-Revolution. New York, 1972.

Weisbrot, Robert. Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil

Rights Movement. New York, 1990. Yates, Gayle Graham. What Women Want:
The Ideas of the Movement.

Cambridge, Mass., 1975.

chapter 19. Politics and Society, 1976-86

Barnet, Richard. The Lean Years: Politics in the Age of Scarcity. New

York, 1980. Bluestone, Barry, and Bennett Harrison. The
Deindustrialization of

America. New York, 1982. Burnham, Walter Dean. The Current Crisis in
American Politics. New

York, 1982.

Burns, E. Bradford. At War in Nicaragua. New York, 1987. Carroll, Peter
N. It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy &

Promise of America in the 1970s. New York, 1982. Dallek, Robert. Ronald
Reagan. Cambridge, Mass., 1984. D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities. Chicago, 1983. Dumas, Lloyd. The Overburdened Economy.
Berkeley, Cal., 1986. Edelman, Marian Wright. Families in Peril.
Cambridge, Mass., 1987. Ennals, Richard. Star Wars. New York, 1986.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American

Women. New York, 1991.

Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991.
Glad, Betty. Jimmy Carter. New York, 1980.

Greene, John Robert. The Limits of Power. Bloomington, Ind., 1992.
Halberstam, David. The Reckoning. New York, 1986. Harrington, Michael.
The New American Poverty. New York, 1984. Hill, Samuel, and Dennis Owen.
The New Religious Political Right in

America. Nashville, Tenn., 1982. Kaufman, Burton I. The Presidency of
James Earl Carter. Lawrence,

Kan., 1993.

Kwitny, Jonathan. Endless Enemies. New York, 1984. LaFeber, Walter. The
Panama Canal. New York, 1979. Landry, Bart. The New Black Middle Class.
Berkeley, Cal., 1987. Marable, Manning. Black American Politics. London,
1985. Melman, Seymour. Profits without Production. New York, 1983.
Noble, David W. The End of American History. Minneapolish, Minn.,

1985.

Phillips, Kevin. Post-Conservative America. New York, 1982. Pinkney,
Alphonso. The Myth of Black Progress. New York, 1984. Ramo, Simon.
America's Technology Slip. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980. Reichley, James.
Conservatives in an Age of Change. Washington,

D.C., 1981. Reimers, David. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes
to

America. New York, 1985. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Power Shift. New York, 1978.
Side), Ruth. Women and Children Last. New York, 1986. Steinfels, Peter.
The Neo-Conservatives. New York, 1979. Wilson, William J. The Truly
Disadvantaged. Chicago, 1987. Yankelovich, Daniel. New Rules: Searching
for Self-Fulfillment in a

World Turned Upside Down. New York, 1981. Zwerdling, Daniel. Workplace
Democracy. New York, 1978.

chapter 20. The Crisis of National Identity, 1987-2000

Balz, Dan and Ronald Brownstein. Storming the Gates: Protest Politics

and the Republican Revival. Boston, 1996.

Bane, Mary Jo and David T. Ellwood. Welfare Realities. New York, 1996.

Barkan, Elliot R. Asian and Pacific Islanders Migration to the United
States. Westport, Conn., 1992.

Berman, William C. America's Right Turn: From Nixon to Bush. Baltimore,
1994.

Blau, Joel. Illusions of Prosperity. New York, 1999.

Faludi, Susan. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. New York,
1999.

Fox-Piven, Frances and Richard Cloward. The Breaking of the American
Social Compact. New York, 1997.

Gibson, James Wilson. Warrior Dreams. New York, 1994.

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White. New York, 1995.

Kuttner, Robert. Everything for Sale. New York, 1996.

Linenthal, Edward T. and Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars. New York,
1996.

Massey, Doug S. and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and
the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

Mervin, David. George Bush and the Guardianship Presidency. London,
1996.

Parmet, Herbert S. George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee. New

York, 1997.

Phillips, Kevin. Arrogant Capital. Boston, 1994.

Posner, Richard A. An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment,
and Trial of President Clinton. Cambridge, Mass., 1999.

Quadagno, Jill. The Color of Welfare. New York, 1994.

Renshon, Stanley Allen. High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the
Politics of Ambition. New York, 1996.

Suro, Roberto. Strangers among Us: How Latino Immigration Is
Transforming America. New York, 1998.

Thelen, David. Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television: How Americans
Challenged the Media and Seized Political Initiative During the
Iran-Contra Debate. Chicago, 1996.

Wills, Garry. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home. New York, 1987.

Index.

Abolitionism, 181.202

Adams, Abigail, 15, 16. 115

Adams. Charles Francis. 213

Adams, Henry. 246, 248

Adams, John, 15, 119, 123. 145, 192

Adams, John Quincy, 171, 196

Adams. Sam, 110

Afro-Americans, 52-53. 60. 454, 455; antebellum. 158; and cities in
1950s, 388-389; and civil rights, 406-8; and colonies. 84; and
colonization, 176; and frontier expansion, 176; and Harlem Renaissance,
325-28; and Jefferson, 138, 159; and Lincoln, 222; in middle class, 454;
and New Deal, 350-51; and northern ghettos, 273-77; and poverty since
1960. 392-94. 436; in prisons, 443; and vote, 198; and white racism in
1890s. 252-56. See also Slavery

Agnew, Spiro, 421

Ahlstrom, Sydney E., 381

Alger, Horatio. 267

American Federation of Labor (ALL), 266,332,341

American Indian Movement (AIM), 409

American Indians. Sec' Native Americans

American Woman Suffrage Association, 295

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). 363

Anderson. John B., 429

Anglican Church, 49-50. 54. 62-63

Anthony. Susan B., 245, 295

Arawak. 25-26. 34-35

Armstrong, Louis, 325

Articles of Confederation, 121, 123. 129-30

Astor. John Jacob, 155

Aztec, 31-32

Bacon's Rebellion, 81, 84 Balkans, 450

Bank of the United States, 190, 200

Bartram, John, 87

Baseball, 250, 251

Baum, L. Frank, 242

Beard, Charles, 322, 323, 345, 346, 362

Beecher, Catherine, 160

Bell, Daniel, 362-63

Berkeley, William, 81,82

Biddle, Nicholas, 200

Birney, James G., 174

Black Elk, 236

Black Hawk War, 170

Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 245

Blackwell, Elizabeth, 245

Blair, Francis P., 176

Bleeding Kansas, 205

Booth, John Wilkes, 226

Bork, Robert, 434

Boston Massacre, 111

Braddock, Edward, 102

Bradford, William, 61

Brezhnev, Leonid, 422

Brooke, Edward, 285

Brooks, Preston, 205

Brown, John, 206

Brown, Sterling. 327

Bruce, Blanche K., 284

Bryan, William Jennings, 290, 291, 292

Buchanan. James, 177, 205, 208

Burke. Edmund, 113, 360

Bush. George. 429, 443, 444, 445-47,

448, 449. 450 Bush, George W., 457

Calendars, 59

Calhoun, John C., 167, 174, 175, 195,

196,201.202 Calvert. George, 57 Canals, 151

Capital punishment, 443-44 Carmichael, Stokely. 408 Carnegie, Andrew,
261

497

Index

Carson, Rachel, 373

Carter, Jimmy. 423-29, 431, 433

Castro, Fidel, 445

Catholics: development of an American Catholic culture, 267-69; and New
Deal, 350-51; and prejudice against in early nineteenth century, 179;
and prejudice against in late nineteenth century, 293

Can, Carrie Chapman, 295, 296

Cemeteries, 181-82

Chamber of Commerce, 330

Channing, William Ellery, 147

Chavez, Cesar, 409

Cherokees, 171-72

Chiang Kai-shek, 354, 355

Chicanos, 389-90, 404, 410

China, 450

Chisholm, Shirley. 411

Church of England. See Anglican Church

Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. See Mormons

Citizenship, definition of, 441

Clay, Henry, 153, 174, 195, 196, 200, 204

Cleveland, Grover, 263, 291

Cleveland, Horace, 165

Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 453

Clinton, William Jefferson "Bill," 447, 448, 449-52, 453, 457-58

Clocks: in colonies, 58-59; in nineteenth century, 148-50

Coercive Acts, 112

Cold War, 442, 444-45

Cole, Thomas, 183

Columbian Exposition, 237

Columbus. Christopher, 34-40

Committee on Public Information, 331

Commoner, Barry, 372

Compromise of 1850, 204

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 340

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 407

Continental Congress: First, 112; Second, 113

Coolidge. Calvin, 323, 324, 333

Cooper, James Fenimore, 183

Cotton, John, 64

Cox, Harvey, 390-91

Cozzens. James Gould. 364-65

Creeks, 171

Crime, 443, 444

Cuba, 445, 450

Currency Act, 107

Custer. George Armstrong, 234

Daley, Richard, 412

Dana, Richard Henry, 179

Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 248

Davis, Jefferson, 204, 207-9, 219

Dawes Act, 235

Dawes Plan, 333

Day, Dorothy, 360

Death penalty, 443-44

Debs, Eugene V., 262, 263, 264, 265

Declaration of Independence, 114-15

Declaratory Act, 110

de Crevecoeur. Hector St. John, 134

Delawares, 77

de Lery, Jean, 36

Deloria, Vine, Jr., 381.409

Democratic Party, 199-201, 442, 444, 447, 448, 452; and civil rights,
412-13; and Great Depression, 338-42; and Progressivism. 304-8; and
Reconstruction, 282-87; and World War I, 330-31

Democratic-Republican Party, 192-94

DePriest, Oscar, 285

de Tocqueville, Alexis. 148

Dewey, John. 322, 323

Dickinson, John, 110

Dixon, Thomas. 253-54

Dole, Robert "Bob," 451, 457

Dos Passes, John, 324. 362

Douglas, Stephen, 204. 206, 207

Douglass, Frederick, 218

Drake, Francis, 42. 46

Dred Scott Decision, 205-6

Dreiser, Theodore, 323-24

Drew, Elizabeth, 423

Dukakis, Michael. 443

Dulles, John Foster, 358

Edwards, Jonathan, 67 Eisenhower, Dwight D.. 349-50,

356-358, 385.406, 413 Eliot. Charles W., 246 Emancipation Proclamation,
217-19

499

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148, 160, 214,

281

Employees, 456

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 453 Ericson, Leif, 39

Falwell, Jerry, 428

Family, 453; and adolescence in 1890s, 249-53; and adolescence in 1950s,
374-75; and Afro-Americans, 60, 85, 393-94; and childhood in 1890s,
241-42; in colonies. 60-62; and generation gap in 1920s, 323-26; and
generation gap in 1960s, 379-80; and Iroquois, 29-30; and Native
Americans, 235; and new sexuality, 376; in 1970s and 1980s, 435, 436; as
political metaphor, 103, 108; and republicanism, 145-46

Federalist Party, 192-94

Ferraro, Geraldine. 436

Fillmore, Millard, 180, 205

Finney, Charles Grandison, 147

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 323, 439

Font, Father Pedro, 15-16

Football, 250, 251

Ford, Gerald, 425-29, 431, 432

Ford, Henry, 329

Franklin, Benjamin, 66, 87-88, 103. 118-19, 127-28, 155

Fremont. John C., 205, 216

Friedan, Betty, 410

Gadsden Purchase, 204

Galbraith, John K., 363

Galloway, Joseph, 112

Garnett, Henry Highland, 223

Garrison. William Lloyd, 160

Garvey, Marcus, 328

Gates, William "Bill," 455-56

General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs

(GATT), 451 G.I. Bill of Rights, 12 Gingrich, Newt, 448 Ginsberg, Allen,
369-70 Ginsberg. Ruth Bader, 448 Glenn. John. 391 Goldwater. Barry, 404,
412 Gompers, Samuel, 264-65

Gore, Albert "Al," 447, 457 Grant, Ulysses, 284 Great Awakening, 66-68;
and Afro Americans, 86

Hakluyt, Richard, 47

Hall, G. Stanley, 249, 250

Hamilton, Alexander, 123, 128, 131, 189,

190, 191

Hancock, John, 110-11 Hanna, Mark, 265 Hardin, Garrett, 372 Harding,
Warren G., 323, 333 Harrison, William Henry, 169-70 Hartford Convention,
194 Hayes, Rutherford, 286 Hemings, Sally, 138 Hemingway, Ernest, 324
Henry, Patrick, 133 Henry the Navigator, 39-40 Hill, Anita, 446
Hofstadter, Richard, 362-64 Hoover, Herbert, 320, 323, 324, 333, 334,

335, 336, 377 Hoover, J.Edgar, 331,416 Horton, Willie, 443, 444 Hughes,
Charles Evans, 324, 333, 334 Hughes, Langston, 327 Hull, Cordell, 347
Humphrey, Hubert, 427 Hussein, Saddam, 445 Hutchinson, Anne, 64
Hutchinson, Thomas, 108

Immigration: early nineteenth century,

150; late nineteenth century, 239; late

twentieth century, 453-55; and labor,

265-66

Indentured servants, 52, 83

Indians. See Native Americans

Ingersoll, Robert, 213-14

Intolerable Acts. See Coercive Acts

Iraq, 445, 450

Iroquois, 28-30, 76-77

Jackson, Andrew, 196; and War of 1812,

171; and Native Americans, 171 -73; as

President, 199-201

Jackson, Henry, 422

Index

Jackson,Jesse. 437

James, William, 17

Jamestown, 51

Jay, John, 119, 123, 131, 133

Jay Treaty, 192

Jazz, 320-22, 325

Jefferson, Thomas, 441; and Afro Americans, 159; and American identity,
127-28, 134-39; and American Revolution, 116; and Declaration of
Independence, 15, 114; and Missouri Compromise, 196; and Northwest
Ordinance, 122; and politics, 189-93, 196

Jehovah's Witnesses, 240

Jews: and anti-Semitism, 246-48; and consensus, 363-65; and New Deal,
352

Johnson, Andrew, 282-83, 452

Johnson, Lyndon, 387; and urban reform, 392-93; and foreign policy,
404-6, 407

Johnson. William Samuel, 114

Kearney, Stephen, 175 Keayne, Robert, 73, 80 Kennedy, Edward, 432
Kennedy, John F, 385, 386, 391; and foreign policy, 403-4, 407 Kennedy,
Robert, 405 Kent, James, 197 Khrushchev. Nikita, 358, 403 King, Martin
Luther, Jr., 407-8, 426 King, Rodney, 447, 454 King Philip's War, 75
Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 431 Kissinger, Henry, 422 Knights of Labor, 263
Know-Nothing Party, 180, 205. 224-25 Knox, Henry, 169 Korean War, 356 Ku
Klux Klan, 294, 295

LaFollette, Robert. 302, 333

Laird, Melvin, 422

Land Ordinance (1785), 122

Land speculation, 74. 75. 77, 102. 107; in

nineteenth century, 166-67 Landry, Bart. 436 League of Nations, 313. 333
Lee, Richard Henry, 114 Lee, Robert E.. 219

Lenin. Nikolai. 314

Levin, David, 246

Lewinsky, Monica, 451

Lewis, John L.. 341

Lincoln, Abraham, 170-75, 281, 282; and American identity, 221-26;
election of, 206-7; and Civil War, 213-26; and popular sovereignty,
204-5; and secession, 208-9

Lincoln, Thomas, 166-225

Little Crow, 232

Locke, John, 19, 84

Long, Huey, 340

Lovejoy, Elijah, 181

Loyalists, 116, 119, 121

McCarthy. Eugene, 405

McCarthy. Joseph. 357

McGovern. George, 416

McKinley, William, 209. 297, 298, 301

McNamara, Robert, 404-5

Madison, James, 128, 131-32, 189.

191-93,441 Mahan, A. J., 308 Mailer, Norman, 377-78 Manifest Destiny,
167-68; and race, 175,

441-42

Mann, Horace, 153-54 Manuelito, 231 Marsh, George Perkins, 183 Marshall,
John, 172 Marshall, Thurgood, 446 Marshall Plan, 355 Mather. Increase.
74 Mayhew, Jonathan, 104, 105 Mead, Margaret, 378 Meany, George. 392
Mercantilism, 78-80 Mexican War. 174-75 Militia groups. 455 Missouri
Compromise, 195-96, 204,

206

Mitchell, John, 416 Molly Maguires, 262 Mondale. Walter, 432, 437
Monroe, James. 195 Morgenthau. Henry. 346 Mormons, 177-78 Morris.
Robert, 123, 128

501

Natchez, 30-31

National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 295

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 352

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 265

National Civic Federation, 265

National Labor Union. 262

National Organization for Women (NOW), 410-11

National Woman Suffrage Association, 295

Native Americans: and balance of power. 106-7; and Constitution, 129;
and ecology, 381, 446; and expansionism, 168-69; and Jefferson, 139; and
land, 75; and late nineteenth century. 231-37; and Lincoln, 223-24; pre
Columbian. 25-37; and Puritans. 56-57; and Red Power. 408-9. See also
under names of separate tribes

Navaho, 231

Navigation Acts. 78. 79, 82, 98. 107. 109. 110

Niebuhr, Reinhold. 358-62, 369

Nixon, Richard. 452; and economic crisis, 397-98; and foreign policy.
415-17. 421, 422, 427; and self-made man. 412-14

Noriega, Manuel. 444

Norris, Frank, 323

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 450-51

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). 355. 450

Nullification crisis, 201

Nye. Gerald P.. 345

Ohlones, 16

Olmsted. Frederick Law. 184 Open Door Policy. 308 O'Sullivan, John L.,
167

Paine. Thomas, 114 Palmer. A. Mitchell. 331 Panama. 444 Parks. Rosa. 406
Penn. William, 57-58. 66

Pequots. 56-57

Perkins, Frances. 352

Perot, H.Ross, 447-48. 451

Persian Gulf. 445, 450

Pierce. Franklin. 204

Pinchback, P. B. S.. 284

Pint-hot, Gifford. 303

Pitt, William, 102. 109, 113

Podhoretz, Norman, 370

Political ideology: colonial, 103-6; and state governments, 120: and the
Constitution, 128-33

Political institutions: local, 94-95; provincial, 97-100

Political parties, founding of, 189-92

Polk, James K., 174

Pontiac. 107

Popular sovereignty. 204

Population: in colonies, 86. 87; in early nineteenth century. 150; in
late nineteenth century, 271-77; in twentieth century, 320, 336, 340.
394

Populist Party, 290-91

Powderly, Terence V., 262

Powell, Colin, 445

Powhatan, 51, 54

Presley, Elvis, 376

Prisoners, 443-44

Proclamation of 1763. 106

Prosser, Gabriel. 158

Pueblos. 40

Puerto Ricans. 389

Puritanism, 49-50, 54-56, 62-63; and work, 72

Quakers. 58. 65-66. 77-78 Quartering Act. 110. 112

Railroads. 152. 259-61 Raleigh. Walter. 42. 46 Ransam. Reverdy C.. 256
Rauschenbusch, Walter. 322. 323 Reagan. Ronald. 426. 441-42; candidacy

of. 424. 428-29; presidency of,

429-36,437.441-42.445 Red Cloud, 233 Republican Party. 205, 442. 444.
447.

448-49. 450-51. 452; and crisis of

1890s. 287-94: and decline of voter

Index

Republican Party (com.)

support. 4 12-16: and normalcy,

333-38; and Progressivism, 297-98;

and Reconstruction, 281-87 Revels, Hiram R., 284 Revolutionary War,
117-19 Riesman, David, 374-75 Roanoke, 42 Robber Barons. 261-62
Rockefeller. John D., 261 Rockefeller, Nelson, 421 Rolfe, John. 52-53
Roosevelt, Franklin D.: constituency of,

349-52; and New Deal, 338-42; and

United Nations, 353-54; and World

War II, 347-48 Roosevelt, Theodore: and frontier crisis,

248-51," 265-66, 288; and presidency,

301-4,306,309,330 Rostow, Walt Whitman, 386-87, 404 Russell, Charles T.,
240 Ryan, Father John A., 350

Sanger, Margaret. 320

Schlesinger, James, 422. 428

Schumacher, E. K, 399

Schwartzkopf, Norman, 445

Scott, Winfield, 173, 175

Seneca Falls Convention, 162

Serbs, 450

Serviceman's Readjustment Act, 12

Seven Years War. 102-3, 106

Seward, William H., 204, 217

Shays, Daniel, 123

Sheridan, General Philip, 233

Simpson, O. J., 454

Sioux (Dakota), 231. 232, 233, 234

Sitting Bull, 233, 234, 235. 236

Slavery: antebellum, 156; and American Revolution, 121; in colonies,
52-53, 57, 83-86: and Constitution, 129; justification of, 202; and
Lincoln, 222; Native American, 75-76. See also Afro-Americans

Smith, John, 51,54, 153

Smith, Joseph, 177

Snyder, Gary. 371

Social structure: Elizabethan. 48-49; Colonial, 80-83; pre-Civil War.

155-56; late nineteenth century, 250-56: mid-twentieth century,
349-52,406-12

Socialism, 263, 297, 302, 202, 331, 332

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 407

Soviet Union, 442. 444, 445, 449

Spanish American War, 301

Spillane, Mickey, 377

Spock, Benjamin, 374

Stalin, Joseph, 355

Stamp Act, 107-10

Stamp Act Congress, 108-9. 114

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 162-63, 244

START II treaty, 444

Stein, Herbert, 430

Stephens, Alexander, 208

Stevens. John Paul. 457

Stevens, Thaddeus, 282-83

Stockman, David, 429

Story, Joseph, 198

Stowe. Harriet Beecher. 204

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT). 422. 427, 428, 433

Strong, Josiah, 240

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 407

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). 411

Sugar Act. 107

Sumner. Charles, 205, 282-83, 287

Supreme Court, 443, 446, 447, 448, 453, 457

Sylvis, William, 262

Tail, Robert. 347

Tail, William Howard. 303

Taylor, Zachary, 175

Tea Act, 111

Tecumseh, 170

Terry. Eli. 149-52"

Texas, annexation of. 173-74

Thomas, Clarence. 446

Tories. See Loyalists

Townsend, Francis. 340

Townshend Acts. 110-11

"Trail of Tears," 173

Transcontinental Treatv, 171

Transportation, nineteenth century, 151

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 175, 177

Treaty of Paris (1763), 102

Treaty of Paris (1783), 119

Treaty of Versailles, 313

Truman, Harry, 354; and Cold War, 355;

and Korea, 356 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 221, 244, 379,

380

Turner, Nat, 159 Twain, Mark, 240-41 Tyler, John, 174

United Nations, 354, 450. 453 Urban planning, 178

Vallandigham, Clement. 216

Van Buren, Martin, 173, 199, 200, 203

Veblen, Thorstein, 322, 323

Vespucci, Amerigo, 35

Vidal. Gore, 423

Vietnam war, legacy of. 421, 431

Voting: in colonies, 95-97; decline since 1960, 425, 429, 433;
disenfranchisement in 1890s, 292-95; in early nineteenth century,
197-98; in New Deal, 349-52: in 1980s, 432-33; in Reconstruction, 282-86

Wallace. George. 414, 424 Wallace, Henry A., 357 Wampanoags. 75 War of
1812, 193-95 Washington, Booker T., 275 Washington, George, 96, 97. 113,
117,

119. 128. 187, 189, 191, 196.441 Watson, Tom. 293-94 Webster. Daniel.
196,200 Webster, Noah, 127, 196

503

Weems, Mason Locke, 160, 196

Welfare Reform Act, 449

Whig Party, 199-201, 204

White, Walter, 353

Whitfield, George, 66

Whitman, Walt, 213-14, 221

Whitney, Eli, 156

Willard, Frances, 244

Williams, Roger, 63

Willkie, Wendell, 347

Wilmot, David, 175-76, 203

Wilson, Charles, 348, 349

Wilson, Woodrow, 303; academic ideas, 303-5; and anti-Negro crusade,
255; and foreign policy, 310-11; as presidential reformer, 306-7; and
World War I, 312-14, 319

Winthrop, John, 36, 54-55, 64, 72, 441

Wise. Stephen, 306

Wister, Owen, 252

Women: antebellum, 161-62; Iroquois, 29-30; and Jefferson, 138; and
Lincoln, 225; and Puritanism, 63-64; in late nineteenth century, 242-46;
and suffrage, 295; and white racism, 296; in novels, 323-24; in movies,
276-77; in 1950s, 377-78; in 1970s and 1980s, 436, 439, 440-41; in
1990s, 453; and New Deal, 351-52; and liberation, 410-11

Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 244, 295

World War I, 310-14

World War II, II, 12

Wovoka, 234, 235

Wright, R. R., Jr., 254-55

Young, Brigham, 177

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts
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"If We Must Die" from Selected Poems of Claude McKay by Claude McKay.
Copyright 1953 by Twayne Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of
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"O Ma Rainey" by Sterling Brown from Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany
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"Howl," "Kaddish," and "The Change" from Collected Poems 1947-1980 by
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"Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout" and "Water" from Riprap, and
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"Song of the Taste" from Regarding Wave by Gary Snyder. Copyright © 1968
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Corporation. "Song of the Taste" was first published in Poetry.

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