Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History from 1877

by Jane Dailey

Overview

Building the American Republic combines centuries of perspectives and voices into a fluid narrative of the United States. Throughout their respective volumes, Harry L. Watson and Jane Dailey take care to integrate varied scholarly perspectives and work to engage a diverse readership by addressing what we all share: membership in a democratic republic, with joint claims on its self-governing tradition. It will be one of the first peer-reviewed American history textbooks to be offered completely free in digital form. Visit buildingtheamericanrepublic.org for more information. 

The American nation came apart in a violent civil war less than a century after ratification of the Constitution. When it was reborn five years later, both the republic and its Constitution were transformed. Volume 2 opens as America struggles to regain its footing, reeling from a presidential assassination and facing massive economic growth, rapid demographic change, and combustive politics.

The next century and a half saw the United States enter and then dominate the world stage, even as the country struggled to live up to its own principles of liberty, justice, and equality. Volume 2 of Building the American Republic takes the reader from the Gilded Age to the present, as the nation becomes an imperial power, rethinks the Constitution, witnesses the rise of powerful new technologies, and navigates an always-shifting cultural landscape shaped by an increasingly diverse population. Ending with the 2016 election, this volume provides a needed reminder that the future of the American republic depends on a citizenry that understands—and can learn from—its history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226300825
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/18/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jane Dailey is associate professor of American history at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia and Jim Crow America: A Norton Casebook in History and the coeditor of Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Incorporation, 1877–1900

On July 2, 1881, the 20th president of the United States, James A. Garfield, was shot in the back as he walked through a railway station in Washington, DC. His deranged assassin, Charles Guiteau, is frequently described as a "disgruntled office-seeker," and indeed he was: Guiteau considered himself responsible for Garfield's election and demanded repeatedly to be appointed consul to Paris. The stricken president lingered through the summer heat, suffering from infection, blood poisoning, and pneumonia. He succumbed to a massive heart attack on September 19, 1881.

Garfield's death was deeply disturbing to a nation still governed by the Civil War generation. Poet Walt Whitman, who had spent the war caring for wounded soldiers, captured the apprehension occasioned by the second presidential assassination in fewer than 20 years. Of the tolling bells that announced "the sudden death-news everywhere," Whitman wrote

The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,
Americans who had lived through the Civil War were not easily rattled. They pulled up roots and settled the continent their fathers had claimed but never truly conquered. They endured colossal loss of life to achieve monumental feats of engineering such as the transcontinental railroad and the Brooklyn Bridge. They adapted to shifting, even convulsive, economic conditions, spurred by a deluge of inventions (like electricity). They tolerated if not necessarily celebrated the strange languages and customs tucked away in the bags of millions of newcomers to the nation's shores.

What did frighten many Americans was anything that undermined the fragile mutual understanding — the rapport — of the people. This was especially true of future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the most influential American thinkers of his (or any other) time. Holmes saw the worst of the worst during his three years with the 20th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which suffered more battle deaths than all but four Union regiments. Wounded three times himself, Holmes survived, but the war convinced him that certitude is dangerous, and that only democracy can prevent competing conceptions of how to live from overheating and leading to violence. Whereas some — for example, white supremacists and opponents of woman suffrage — worried that expanded access to democracy would destroy American civilization, Holmes was convinced that the only way to preserve the Republic, restored through the sacrifice of millions, was to make sure that the political playing field was as accessible and even as possible. Everyone must have a say.

For Holmes, participatory government — government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Lincoln had put it at Gettysburg — was the Republic, not a means to it. Lose one and the other disappears. The fundamental unity of the people was maintained through the democratic process. Threats to that process, whether violence, corruption, unchecked power, overbearing wealth, or disenfranchisement, endangered that sense of unity. Holmes understood that today's losers have to believe that victory is possible tomorrow. Loss of faith in the system imperils the Republic itself.

A higher percentage of eligible voters participated in American politics during the last third of the nineteenth century than any time before or since. In presidential election years, turnout averaged 78 percent, and this takes into account the suppression of black and white Republicans by white supremacists in the South. Voters perceived fundamental differences between the two political parties. Democrats, dominated by their southern wing, argued for the rights of the states against an ever-expanding federal government. Republicans, empowered by the war and Reconstruction, embarked on a 40-year crusade of nation-building. The future of that nation depended, in great measure, on the capacity of the American political system to absorb newcomers — African Americans, immigrants, women — into the political system, and keep the peace.

In Motion

During the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a rapid and profound economic revolution. This economic transformation was rooted in abundant natural resources (e.g., land, lumber, coal, and oil), an expanding market linked by new transportation and communications networks (railroads and telegraphs), a brimming pool of labor constantly restocked from abroad, new forms of business organization that facilitated both economic growth and contraction, and a strong federal government determined to incorporate into the nation the territory (if not necessarily the indigenous peoples) of the great American West.

Iron Horses

The importance of railroads to late nineteenth-century American history cannot be overstated. US railroad mileage tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, opening vast western expanses to commercial farming, facilitating a boom in coal and steel production, and creating a truly national market for manufactured goods and staples like beef and grain. Railroad cars transported the army that "pacified" the Indians, and then unloaded the settlers who organized and incorporated the West into the nation. No models of efficiency or rationality themselves, railroads nonetheless created the conditions that allowed other industries such as steel, grain, and meat-packing to incorporate and innovate a new capitalist logic. Railroads came to symbolize American progress. In his book Triumphant Democracy (1886), steel magnate Andrew Carnegie declared, "The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express."

Railroads changed everything they touched, beginning with space. The transcontinental railroads effected a massive spatial turn: the axis of North America, which had previously run North–South, was turned East–West. Railroads altered people's sense of time and space. Because people experience distance in terms of time, linked by rail, places grew closer together: what German philosopher Karl Marx called "the annihilation of space by time." It took less time in 1880 to travel from Boston to Montana (a distance of circa 2,000 miles) than to Charleston (a mere 1,017 miles). Together, railroads and telegraph systems, whose lines were strung alongside tracks, "shrank the whole perceptual universe of North America."

Beyond people's understandings of time and space, railroads reorganized time itself. Before 1883, clocks were set locally according to the sun. Noon was the moment when the sun stood highest in the midday sky, which varied according to longitude. When clocks read noon in Chicago, it was 11:50 a.m. in St. Louis, 11:27 a.m. in Omaha, and 12:18 p.m. in Detroit. Two trains running on the same tracks at the same moment but with clocks reading different times could find themselves suddenly occupying the same space, with deadly consequences. In November 1883, the railroad companies carved the continent into four "standard" time zones, in each of which clocks would be set to exactly the same time. Not that this meant the trains ran on time. As one rider complained, the train "was seldom there when the schedule said it would be, but occasionally it was, and [people] were amazed and angry when they missed it."

Railroads even liberated people from weather. When the Great Lakes were frozen and nothing could move by ship, the railroads ran. As one railroad promoter announced, "It is against the policy of Americans to remain locked up by ice one half of the year." Railroads allowed an entrepreneurial butcher named Gustavus Swift to "store the winter" by transporting ice, a large-bulk, low-value commodity, to the stockyards in Chicago, where meat-packers used it to create refrigerated boxcars, which enabled them to ship beef and pork in all directions.

By the 1890s, five transcontinental rail lines linked western mines, ranches, farms, and forests with eastern markets. The South, which laid track even faster than the rest of the nation, became integrated into this national market economy. With the trains came towns. Previously dominated by plantations, the southern landscape was dotted with villages, whose numbers doubled between 1870 and 1880, and then doubled again by 1900.

"Vast, Trackless Spaces": The Trans-Mississippi West

What Walt Whitman referred to as the "vast, trackless spaces" of the Trans-Mississippi West was first an extension of the Mexican North. The expansive territory that became the American West was nearly all acquired from Mexico in 1848: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. Many people were included in this transfer, among them several major Indian nations, including the Papago, Navajo, Puebloan, and Apache, as well as approximately 75,000 Mexicans. The frontier experience of the American West was never an encounter with virgin land. It was, instead, a process in which new wilderness zones were created in places where civilizations had once existed.

At first, Indians remained in their homelands. Americans were quickly incorporated into the extensive Indian agricultural and trading networks that characterized the southwestern United States. For example, the Pima and Papago "River People" who dwelt along the Gila and San Pedro Rivers supplied the US Army with a million pounds of wheat in 1862, plus cotton, sugar, melons, beans, corn, and dried pumpkins.

In 1869, Congress created the Board of Indian Commissioners, which was composed of prominent evangelicals and humanitarians, including old abolitionists, to oversee what President Ulysses S. Grant and others termed the nation's "Indian problem." The commission recommended replacing the treaty system, which had treated Indian tribes as akin to sovereign nations, with a new legal status for "uncivilized Indians" as "wards of the government."

In a departure from the prior policy of Indian removal en masse to another location, the commission recommended the creation of reservations located far from ancestral lands as well as other population centers. The goal was to isolate Indians from outside influences. Under this plan, missionaries were in charge of Indian life. They replaced Indian languages, practices, and religion with English, American models of domestic agriculture, and Christianity. They sent Indian children away to boarding school. In addition to supplanting native cultural practices, the reservation arrangement also undercut the ability of Indians to sustain themselves through trade or employment off the reservation.

What was called the "Peace Policy" was welcomed with hostility by many Indian nations. War with the Apaches broke out in Arizona. In the Great Plains and on the West Coast, the US Army battled the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Modoc Indians. President Grant remained unperturbed. In his opinion, Indians — even the warlike Apaches — could "be civilized and made friends of the republic."

Republicans considered tribal sovereignty incompatible with the national unity forged in the Civil War. In 1871, Congress stopped negotiating new treaties with Indians and refused to recognize the independent nation status of tribes. Under the terms of the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Plan, Indians were required to distribute communal land among individual families. Those who cooperated became US citizens. So-called surplus land was sold to whites.

Indians held 138 million acres in 1887. During the following 47 years, 60 million acres were declared to be "surplus." All told, nearly two- thirds of tribal land was conveyed to Americans through a variety of devices. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Amasa Walker, the government's guardian for the native peoples, declared in 1872, "The westward course of population is neither to be denied nor delayed for the sake of the Indians. They must yield or perish." Most tribes did both.

Manifest Destiny

Americans settled more land between 1870 and 1900 than in all their previous history. The population of the territory to the west of Illinois and Missouri mushroomed from 300,000 in 1860 to 5 million in 1900. Much desirable land was beyond the reach of homesteaders, however. Enormous grants of public land to subsidize railroad construction, the distribution of land to Union veterans, and the use of dummy corporations allowed speculators (who acquired land not for its use but for its resale value in a rising market) and mining, timber, and cattle companies to acquire land under falsified claims. Under the terms of the Railway Act of 1864, railroad companies received 12,800 acres of public land for every mile of track they laid. This land could serve as security for bonds, or be sold to settlers, who paid for land their government had given away to the railroads.

Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stipulated that "the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent." Americans never lived up to this ideal. Instead, they negotiated treaties that pushed Indians westward, broke those treaties to expand farther, and killed Indians who resisted. Sometimes white settlers wanted Indian land to farm. Other times, they coveted water or right-of-way (in the case of railroads) or minerals. In California, white settlers fought a genocidal campaign against the native peoples there. Of some 150,000 Indians in California when gold was discovered there in 1848, only 30,000 remained by 1860.

With Native American control weakened in the West, settlers poured into the vast central plains. European immigrants, particularly Scandinavians and Germans, established themselves in the northern territories of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. During the period of mass immigration, one out of every two western settlers was foreign- born.

American-born settlers also set out across the continent, including large numbers of white and black southerners. Many rural blacks migrated west to Kansas, Indiana, and Oklahoma, where land was plentiful and cheap. "The Negro exodus now amounts to a stampede," exclaimed one North Carolina white in 1890. African Americans also gravitated toward industry, particularly mining. "It was easy," one miner recalled. "All you needed was a pair of gloves, overalls and experience and you could get hired anywhere." The West had another advantage over the South: as one settler wrote to a friend in Louisiana, "They do not kill Negroes here for voting."

Mass influx of settlers from the South and East provoked conflict with Indian nations, some of whom defended their land fiercely and resisted relocation to reservations. In 1876, during the Sioux Wars, Cheyenne and Lakota warriors defeated an overconfident Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, killing him and all his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

In the midst of a serious drought in 1889, Congress cut food aid to several Indian nations, including the Lakota. Deaths from hunger and disease rose on the reservations. Instead of an armed uprising, starving Native Americans turned to the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement associated with the teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka. The circle dance of the Ghost Dance represented a broad credo of working the land, Anglo education, and, above all, nonviolence.

In 1890, the US Army massacred more than 150 Lakota, mainly women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Some of the Lakota at Wounded Knee were among those who had routed George Custer at Little Bighorn. The massacre has been associated with the Ghost Dance, but in fact was unrelated. The Ghost Dance continued into the twentieth century, practiced by Indians across the country.

Immigration, Migration, and Urbanization

The population of the United States quadrupled in the half century following the Civil War. High birth rates and wave after wave of immigrants pushed the population to more than 75 million by 1900, leaving America the second-most populous nation in the world.

Immigrants gambling on the wonders of America flooded embarkation centers in New York, Galveston, and San Francisco. Some were pulled by the prospect of a higher standard of living. Others were pushed by one or more of several factors, including political oppression, religious persecution, war, and interethnic rivalries. Still others were simply trying to escape overbearing parents. Between 1879 and 1915, 25 million immigrants arrived "yearning to breathe free," in the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. By then, immigrants made up nearly 15 percent of the American population.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Building the American Republic Volume 2"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jane Dailey.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents

Preface

1          Incorporation, 1870-1900

In Motion
Iron Horses
“Vast, Trackless Spaces”: The Trans-Mississippi West
Manifest Destiny
Immigration, Migration, and Urbanization

The Labor Question
Free Labor
Risk Management
From Strife to Cooperation
Labor Politics
Labor Wars

Enlightened Selfishness: Reforming Politics and People
Patronage Politics
The Business of Government
Farmers
The Farmers’ Alliance

Upheavals
Organized Women
Onward Christian Soldiers
Pullman
The Great Commoner
The Election of 1896

Race and Equality in the Turn-of-the-Century South
Wrestling with the Fourteenth Amendment
The Politics of White Supremacy
Making Jim Crow
The New South

2          Interconnected, 1898-1914

Into the Open Arena of the World
The Spanish-American War
American Empire
The Civilization Trust
America in the World

The Republican Roosevelt
Taking on the Trusts
Trains and Coal
The People’s Welfare
“English Economics” and Its Critics
Perpetual Censors

America in the World, 1901-1912
Duty, Dollars, and Destiny
The Best Herder of Emperors since Napoleon
Dollar Diplomacy
Americans Abroad

The Progressive Era
The Progressives
Petticoat Politicians and Sewer Socialists
The Panic of 1907
Republican Fracture, 1908-1912

New Freedoms
The Revolution of 1913, Part 1: Money
The Revolution of 1913, Part 2: Banks
The Revolution of 1913, Part 3: Jim Crow Comes to Washington
The Revolution of 1913, Part 4: Foreign Policy

3          War, 1914-1924

The War to End All Wars
A Less-than-Principled Neutrality
Be Prepared
America Enters the War
A War of Ideals

Perilous Times: The United States at War
The Espionage Act of 1917
Forging Consensus at Home
America’s Moment
Meester Veelson

Progressives at High Tide
The Wartime State
Mobility and Mobs, Law and Lawlessness
Operation Occupy the White House: Militant Woman Suffrage
Prohibition

Reconstruction
Rival Utopias
We Return Fighting
Red Scare
Discovering the First Amendment
Illegal Activities

4          Vertigo, 1920-1928

The Roaring Twenties
Engines of Growth
“Businessmen’s Government”
The Countryside
Get Rich Quick

Modern Women
From Women’s Rights to Feminism
Obscene Literatures and Articles of Immoral Use
Reproductive Politics
Work and Home Life

Social Control
“Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough”
Prohibition
“Americanizing” America
America for Americans

Teach Your Children Well
Standardized Children
Science, Schools, and Religion
Freedom from Science
Freedom from Religion

Division
The Jim Crow North
The Shame of America
“We Stand Defeated America”
The 1928 Presidential Election

5          Depression, 1928-1938

Meltdown, 1928-1933
The Premier Bureaucrat of the Decade
International Economic Complications
Smash-Up
Coping with Crisis
From Bad to Worse

“Strong Medicine,” 1933-1935
Roosevelt Redux
Do We Need a Dictator?
Nothing to Fear
100 Days: Money and Crops
100 Days: Markets and Workers

A Government of Humanity
Forging an Economic Constitutional Order
Chasing Security
Social Security
Labor Rising
Triumph of the Will

Balance
The Supreme Court and the New Deal
Judocracy
Vindicated
Defending Dixie
Isolationist-in-Chief

6          Assertion, 1938-1946

Entangling Alliances
Not Our Problem
Blitzkrieg, Sitzkrieg, and Sitting on Hands
Self-Preservation
Rising Sun

Mobilizing for War
The Gross National Product War
Why We Fight
Domestic Violence
“Ill-Advised, Unnecessary, and Cruel”: Japanese American Internment

War without Mercy
The War in Europe
The War in the Pacific
Endgame in Europe
Race War
Victory in Asia

At the Summit of the World
Beyond Belief: The Holocaust
The United Nations
A New World at Home
Civil Rights and Human Rights

7          Containment, 1946-1953

Postwar/Cold War
New Divisions
The Marshall Plan
New Alliances and New States
Korea

To Secure These Rights
Creating the Permanent War State
Postwar Civil Rights
Challenges from the Right and the Left
The 1948 Presidential Election

Anti-Communist Crusades at Home
Seeing Red
Scared
Assaults on Liberty
Fightin’ Joe

The American Way of Life
The Consumers’ Republic
Flushing Together
“Horror in the Nursery”
Good Rockin’ Tonight

8          At Odds, 1954-1965

A Nation of Men or of Laws? Responses to Brown
Massive Resistance
Violence
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Trouble in Little Rock

A Divided America in the Cold War Years
The Dangers of a Bipolar World
Brinksmanship
Superpower Confrontations in Europe and the Middle East

The New Frontier
JFK
Berlin and Cuba
Economic Growth and Economic Equity
The Woman Question

Civil Rights: The Next Generation
The Sit-Ins
Freedom Riders and Other Disturbers of the Peace
Birmingham and the March on Washington
Civil Rights and Voting Rights Laws
The Warren Court and Civil Liberties

9          Riven, 1965-1968

Lyndon Johnson’s America
The Great Society
The War on Poverty
Pursuing Equality
Racial Inequality in the Cities
Rage

Johnson’s Dilemma
Engagement
Escalation
On the Ground
1968: The Beginning of the End

We Can Change the World: The Rising Generation
Question Authority
Black Power
Ballots and Bullets
The Antiwar Movement

1968
Lyndon’s Fall
Spring: Killing Season
Summer in Chicago
Autumn: The Election

10        Breakdown, 1968-1974

Bringing the Nation Together, 1968-1972
Realignment
Standards
“It’s Not the Bus, It’s Us”
White Flight

Americans Abroad
Vietnam
Bloodletting
Further Foreign Fault Lines
Middle Eastern Complications

A Government of Laws or of Men?
Reelection: The “Silent Majority” Speaks
The New Majority
Dirty Tricks
Breach of Faith
Abuse of Power

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Women’s Work
Rights and Obligations
“Our Bodies, Ourselves”
Pushing Back

11        Right, 1974-1989

Harsh Economic Realities
Competition
Inflation
Political Economy 101, Part 1
The Politics of Scarcity

The Californiaization of American Politics
Holy Warriors
The Election of 1976
Bad Luck
The Californian

The Reagan Revolution
Reaganomics
Government Is the Problem
Taking Back the Courts
Political Economy 101, Part 2

Defeating the Evil Empire
Containment 2.0
Contra the Constitution
Arms for Hostages

The End of the Cold War
Repercussions of Iran-Contra
Peaceful Coexistence
Light at the End of the Tunnel

12        Vulnerable, 1989-2001

The United States in the Post-Cold War World
A New World Order
Afghanistan, 1978-1996
Iraq, 1980-1990
The Gulf War
The Saudis

New Republicans and New Democrats
Republican Fracture
A “New Democrat” at the Helm
Clinton in Office
Crime, Guns, and Race
Family Values

The Road to the Twenty-First Century
The “Goldilocks Economy”
Immigration
The Unipolar Moment: Foreign Policy under Clinton
Terrorism

Regime Change
The 2000 Election
Indecision 2000
The Bush Administration
Compassionate Conservatism in Action
Catastrophe

13        Forward, 2001-2016

The Post-9/11 World
Hyperpower
“A Strategic Error of the First Magnitude”
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Not a Blank Check
The Shame of America

The Great Recession
The Great Bubble Transfer
Moral Hazards
Meltdown
Recession

Of the People, by the People, for the People?
Voting Rights: Access and Boundaries
Campaign Finance Reform, Part 1
Campaign Finance Reform, Part 2

Land of Opportunity?
The Great U-Turn
At Last
Blowback
A Postracial Society?

Change We Can Believe In
Expanding the Social Safety Net: Health Care
Marriage Equality
“Doubt Is Our Product”
Geronimo

The Rise of the Radical Right and the Election of 2016

Acknowledgments
For Further Reading
Index

Editorial Reviews

Written by two leading political historians, Building the American Republic provides an engaging and accessible narrative of US history that combines a lucid discussion of American political institutions with an analysis of major social movements and cultural developments. Students will find the book an invaluable point of departure for gaining a deeper understanding of the American past.

Rosemarie Zagarri

Most of our teaching materials have morphed into four-color glossy multimedia extravaganzas with interactive features, hot-links, and ‘chat with the author’ interfaces that confront students with a food court of undifferentiated choices. But these new volumes look like and read like books. Without reverting to a pompous omniscience, which so often mars this kind of effort, these books manage to exhibit many perspectives and voices in a narrative that provokes discussion and invites reflection.

Journal of the Early Republic

Building the American Republic tells the story of the United States with remarkable grace and skill, its fast-moving narrative making the nation’s struggles and accomplishments new and compelling.  Weaving together stories of a broad range of Americans, drawing from the best scholarship, and writing in a warm and engaging voice, Watson and Dailey have crafted an inclusive history that is a pleasure to read.

Edward L. Ayers

Learned and inviting, this beautifully realized consideration of the American experience deploys the craft of history to advance a profound account of fundamental themes. By integrating political, social, demographic, and economic understanding, the combination of analysis and narrative power in Building the American Republic will prove stimulating to teachers as well as their students.

Ira Katznelson