A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (94 page)

Seed Corn and Cleveland’s Return

Harrison might have won reelection if he’d had only the sour economy to contend with. Other factors worked in favor of Cleveland, who squared off against him again. The summer of 1892 brought several bloody strikes, including the Coeur d’Alene violence in Idaho and the Homestead strike. Despite Harrison’s prosilver attitudes, the cheap-money forces were not assuaged. The McKinley Tariff alienated southerners and westerners; the Sherman Act had laid the groundwork for upheaval in the economy.

The Populist Party nominated James B. Weaver of Iowa, who received 1 million votes. In an election decided by 380,000 votes out of 10.6 million, the Populists split the silver vote enough to ensure Cleveland’s election. In the electoral college, Cleveland’s victory was more pronounced. Harrison spent his final months unsuccessfully attempting to annex Hawaii. As the last Civil War general to hold office, Harrison had pushed the United States onto the world stage—a position it would grab enthusiastically in 1898.

In office for the second time, Cleveland again proved a model of character and firmness on issues. His seed corn veto—a prime act of political courage in that he had everything to gain by signing it and nothing to lose—blocked the provision of millions of dollars in loans for midwestern farmers to buy seed; Cleveland said that no such federal power was sanctioned by the Constitution. Private charity should take care of the farmers, he argued, and it did. Private organizations raised many times the amount that the feds would have provided.

Cleveland nonetheless failed to contain the bloating federal bureaucracy. By the time William McKinley entered the White House, Cleveland’s administration had seen the number of Civil Service jobs doubled. Whether or not the new professional civil servants were more qualified, the Pendleton Act had dramatically increased their ranks.

Of more immediate concern to Cleveland was the massive gold drain and collapse in railroad stocks, which sent the economy into a full-fledged panic in 1893. In a month one fourth of the nation’s railroads had met with financial disaster, dissipating $2.5 billion in capital and sending waves through the economy that culminated in more than 2 million unemployed. More than six hundred banks failed, along with mines, factories, and brokerage houses. At the peak of the depression, Jacob Coxey, an Ohio reformer, set out from Massillon, Ohio, with twenty thousand marchers for Washington, although some came from as far away as the West Coast. They planned to stage a protest at the nation’s capital. The hungry “soldiers” in “Coxey’s Army” descended on Washington and attempted to force their way into the Capitol, whereupon police charged and scattered the marchers.

To continue paying artificially high prices for silver threatened to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury. Cleveland therefore called a special session of Congress for the purpose of repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Silver interests demonized Cleveland. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, a fellow Democrat campaigning for the Senate, called Cleveland “an old bag of beef,” who was acting worse than “when Judas betrayed Christ.”
⁸⁷
Only later was Cleveland praised by the press for standing firm on gold. Although the silver act was repealed, outstanding silver notes continued to be presented for redemption in gold. In 1892 the U.S. gold reserve was $84 million, but by 1894 it had fallen to $69 million.

It appeared the economy might stagger to a recovery when, in 1895, a new panic swept through the banking community. More than $20 million in gold had flowed out of the Treasury in just over a week. To the rescue rode Morgan. He had spoken by telephone to Cleveland about a massive loan to the government when the president mentioned that there was only $9 million left in the New York subtreasury. Morgan, through his sources, “was aware of a large [$10 million] draft about to be presented for payment,” which essentially would have put the U.S. government in default.
⁸⁸
A default would have triggered a nationwide panic and, essentially, bankrupted the government. Morgan recommended immediately forming a syndicate with European bankers to buy 3.5 million ounces of gold for $65 million in long-term bonds. For literally saving the national economy, Morgan and Cleveland were both heaped with abuse—Morgan for the profits he made (approximately $7 million) and Cleveland for having cut a deal with the gold devil. Lost in the debate was the fact that Morgan was already wealthy, and the collapse of the U.S. government would have only inconvenienced him. He could have sailed for England or France with his remaining fortune. Instead, he acted in concert with a sensible president to save the country from the silverites’ idiocy.

The economy and the silver issue dominated the national parties’ conventions in 1896. Silver Democrats continued to heap scorn on Cleveland, with Tillman taking the Senate floor to call him a “besotted tyrant.”
⁸⁹
Whatever hopes Cleveland had of running for a third term were dashed at the Democratic convention in Chicago, where the Cleveland supporters saw the streets lined with crowds sporting silver badges and waving silver banners. A new star now took the political stage, Congressman William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. Bryan had run for the U.S. Senate in 1894 and been defeated, but he had used his time out of politics to reach wide audiences on the Chautauqua speaking circuit. A devout Christian and stirring orator, Bryan captivated the 1896 Democratic convention with his famous “Cross of Gold” speech in which he used the metaphor of Christ’s crucifixion to describe Americans’ enslavement to hard money. The convention voted two to one for a plank calling for taking the country off the gold standard. It sickened Cleveland, who years later still referred to “Bryanism”: “I do not regard it as Democracy,” he told a reporter.
⁹⁰
Cleveland’s departure from American politics ensured a string of defeats for the Democrats, and he was the last small-government candidate the Democrats would ever run.

Inching Toward a Modern America

Harrison and Cleveland saw innumerable changes in the nation in their combined twelve-year tenure. By the time of Cleveland’s second term, telephones were widely available, although the president still functioned without a full-time operator, instead relying on a telegrapher assigned to the chief executive. Most of the daily executive office work was carried out by three clerks, a pair of doormen, and a handful of military aides and attachés. Harrison met with his cabinet twice a week, but the days when a president could run the government single-handedly from the White House were all but gone.

Something else had passed too. The Civil War generation had largely disappeared during Harrison’s term. In 1893 alone, Jefferson Davis, David Porter, William T. Sherman, Lincoln’s former vice president Hannibal Hamlin, Supreme Court Justice Lucius Q. C. Lamar, James Blaine, and Rutherford Hayes all died. In their place came a new generation of politicians, including Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and Woodrow Wilson, and industrialists like Henry Ford, Henry Leland, and Billy Durant, all born during or after the Civil War and too young to remember it. For this generation, “waving the bloody shirt” would not only prove ineffective (at least in the North), but it would also appear to many Americans as anachronistic.

William McKinley was perhaps the first president ever to even obliquely appreciate the staggering changes that had occurred. He captured the direction of the new reality with his pithy campaign slogan, “A Full Dinner Pail.” Far from the end of the Van Buren-originated spoils system, the post-Pendleton era in American politics marked a malignant mutation of the concept of patronage, pushing it down one level further, directly to the voters themselves.

Average Americans at the Turn of the Century

A
popular 1901 magazine,
Current Literature,
collated available census data about American males at the turn of the century. It reported that the typical American man was British by ancestry, with traces of German; was five feet nine inches tall (or about two inches taller than average European males); and had three living children and one who had died in infancy. A Protestant, the average American male was a Republican, subscribed to a newspaper, and lived in a two-story, seven-room house. His estate was valued at about $5,000, of which $750 was in a bank account or other equities. He drank more than seven gallons of liquor a year, consumed seventy-five gallons of beer, and smoked twenty pounds of tobacco. City males earned about $750 a year, farmers about $550, and they paid only 3 percent of their income in taxes. Compared to their European counterparts, Americans were vastly better off, leading the world with a per capita income of $227 as opposed to the British male’s $181 and a Frenchman’s $161—partially because of lower taxes (British men paid 9 percent of their income, and the French, 12 percent).
¹

Standard income for industrial workers averaged $559 per year; gas and electricity workers earned $543 per year; and even lower-skilled labor was receiving $484 a year.
²
Of course, people in unusual or exceptional jobs could make a lot more money. Actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1906 earned $1 million for her movies, and heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson took home a purse of $5,000 when he won the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of 1908. Even more “normal” (yet still specialized) jobs brought high earnings. The manager of a farm-implement department could command $2,000 per year in 1905 or an actuary familiar with western insurance could make up to $12,000 annually, according to ads in the New York
Times.
³

What did that buy? An American in 1900 spent $30 a year on clothes, $82 for food, $4 for doctors and dentists, and gave $9 to religion and welfare. A statistic that might horrify modern readers, however, shows that tobacco expenditures averaged more than $6, or more than personal care and furniture put together! A quart of milk went for 6 cents, a pound of pork for nearly 17 cents, and a pound of rice for 8 cents; for entertainment, a good wrestling match in South Carolina cost 25 cents, and a New York opera ticket to
Die Meistersinger
cost $1.50.

A working woman earned about $365 a year, and she spent $55 on clothes, $78 on food, and $208 on room and board.
⁴
Consider the example of Mary Kennealy, an unmarried Irish American clerk in Boston, who made $7 a week (plus commissions) and shared a bedroom with one of the children in the family she boarded with. (The family of seven, headed by a loom repairman, earned just over $1,000 a year, and had a five-room house with no electricity or running water.) At work Kennealy was not permitted to sit; she put in twelve to sixteen hours a day during a holiday season. Although more than 80 percent of the clerks were women, they were managed by men, who trusted them implicitly. One executive said, “We never had but four dishonest girls, and we’ve had to discharge over 40 boys in the same time.” “Boys smoke and lose at cards,” the manager dourly noted.
⁵

Until 1900, employees like Kennealy usually took electric trolleys to work, although Boston opened the first subway in the United States in 1898, and low-paid workers could enjoy the many public parks—Boston was among the nation’s leaders in playground and park space. Bicycles, though available, remained expensive (about a hundred dollars, or more than a quarter of a year’s wage for someone like Kennealy), and thus most people still depended on either city transportation or their own feet to get them to work.

Nevertheless, the economic progress was astonishing. Here were working-class women whose wages and lifestyle exceeded that of most European
men
by the end of Teddy Roosevelt’s second term. The improvement in the living conditions of average Americans was so overwhelming that even one of the godfathers of communism, Leon Trotsky, who lived in New York City just a few years later, in 1917, recalled:

 

We rented an apartment in a workers’ district, and furnished it on the installment plan. That apartment, at $18 a month, was equipped with all sorts of conveniences that we Europeans were quite unused to: electric lights, gas cooking-range, bath, telephone, automatic service-elevator, and even a chute for the garbage.
⁶

 

This prosperity baffled socialists like the German August Bebel, who predicted in 1907, “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic.”
⁷
Yet by the year 2000, two historians of socialism in America concluded, “No socialist candidate has ever become a vehicle for major protest in the United States.”
⁸

The prosperity that short-circuited the socialists and dumbfounded the communists was the end product of a thirty-year spurt, marred only by the two panics. During that burst, American steel producers climbed atop world markets. National wealth doubled in the 1890s, and in 1892 the United States attained a favorable balance of trade. By 1908, American investments overseas reached $2.5 billion, and would soar to $3.5 billion in less than a decade. The president of the American Bankers’ Association boasted in 1898, “We hold…three of the winning cards in the game of commercial greatness, to wit—iron, steel, and coal.”
⁹

The excesses of the Gilded Age, both outrageous and mesmerizing, concealed, as most people knew, a widespread prosperity generated by the most amazing engine of growth ever seen. The number of patents, which passed the one-million mark in 1911, rewarded invention and innovation. Brilliant engineers like Carnegie’s Julian Kennedy had more than half of his hundred patents in actual operation in Carnegie’s steel mills during his lifetime. American innovation enabled factory workers to maintain rising real wages, enabled agriculture to consistently expand production, and generated enough wealth that waves of immigrants came in, and kept on coming. It was something Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
could not explain: if things were so bad, why did people so desperately try to get here?

“Professionalism” and “scientific” became the buzzwords of the day. To many, science had become the new god, and the theories of Darwin, Freud, and Marx convinced people that only those things one could prove through experimentation were valid—despite the fact that Darwin, Marx, or Freud had never proven anything scientifically. Even Roosevelt, usually levelheaded if somewhat impulsive, called for “scientific management” of the tariff. Although Frederick W. Taylor did not introduce his concepts of labor effectiveness until 1915, when he wrote
Principles of Scientific Management
, the bible of productivity studies, he had already perfected his practices at Midvale Steel Company. Everywhere, however, science and professionalism were mated to the reform impulse to convince the public that a solution existed to all problems.

Two of the most prominent writers of the day, Walter Lippmann and William James, contributed to the broadening consensus that man was in control. Lippmann, publishing
Drift and Mastery
in 1914, celebrated the introduction of scientific discipline into human affairs. As his title implied, all previous human history had been “drift,” until saved by the planners. James, who wrote
Principles of Psychology
(1890) and
The Will to Believe
(1897), introduced the philosophy of pragmatism in which man controlled his own fate. “Truth
happens
to an idea,” James argued in
Pragmatism
(1907): “It
becomes
true, is
made
true by events.”
¹⁰
It was deliciously ironic: by his own definition, James “invented” the “truth” of pragmatism!

James shared with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson the Progressive view that government should reside in the hands of “true men” and trusted reformers who could focus their “battle-instinct” on the social issues of the day.
¹¹
Like Roosevelt’s, James’s father had come from wealth, providing the time and leisure to denounce Americans’ worship of “the bitch-goddess SUCCESS,” even though he obsessively pursued money himself.
¹²

William James absorbed his father’s writings (Henry James worked for Brook Farm founder George Ripley). He also was exposed to the ideas of European intellectuals he met on trips to the Continent. After settling on psychology as a field, the young man expressed an interest in studying “ghosts, second sight, spiritualism, & all sorts of hobgoblins.”
¹³
Yet despite his thirst for God and his fascination with the supernatural, he steadily moved further away from spirituality, seeking to satisfy the “urgent demand of common sense.”
¹⁴
The result was his
Principles of Psychology
, which addressed issues of personal consciousness, the expression of one’s self to others, and of the necessity for action causing experiences “in the direction of habits you aspire to gain.”
¹⁵
James’s famous
Pragmatism
(1907) was the culmination of his attempt to link human action to eternal dispositions. Beliefs, he maintained, were really “rules for action,” which often led him to support social reform and to oppose the war in the Philippines.
¹⁶

On the other end of the spectrum of religious/spiritual thought in the late 1800s came a new wave of cults that spread through the nation under the auspices of Christianity—all well outside the mainstream of traditional Biblical teachings. Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science thrived during this era, as did other mind cure/New Thought doctrines that incorporated pseudowitchcraft practices like Eddy’s “Malicious Animal Magnetism,” whereby a follower could inflict occult harm on others at a distance.
¹⁷
Theosophy, with overtones of Hinduism and Asian mysticism, also surged at this time. Perhaps the most rapidly growing sect, started by Charles Taze Russell, was the Watch Tower Bible Society, otherwise known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Russell had come out of Adventist influences, but diverted sharply from the teachings of Ellen White to claim that God had two sons, Jesus and Lucifer.

A virtual who’s who of mystical and religious figures were born between 1874 and 1890, including Harry Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Father Divine, Aimee Semple McPherson, and H. P. Lovecraft. They reflected a continued trend away from the intellectual and academic search for God posed by thinkers like James. Yet the nature of their ideas necessarily tended to cut them off from mainstream social action through government. Indeed, rather than attracting the emotional, esoteric followers who gravitated to Father Divine and Mary Baker Eddy, the Progressives found a legion of willing allies in a different camp, journalists. After all, journalism had once been the home of religious newspapers, and a few of the sect newspapers not only survived but flourished, including the
Christian Science Monitor.

In general, journalism had secularized at a shocking rate by the late 1800s. The separation of fact from partisanship had imposed on newspapers a little-understood requirement that they also cleave fact from values. So journalism returned to the notions of science, planning, and human control already prevailing in government and business. Typical of the new journalistic Progressives was Walter Lippmann. A former socialist—indeed, the founder of the Harvard Socialist Club—Lippmann served as Lincoln Steffens’s secretary. By the early 1900s, however, he had abandoned his socialism in favor of more moderate Progressivism, supporting Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.

Despite many similarities in their views, Lippmann and James came from different eras. Lippmann’s generation came on the tail end of the mystic boom, and included Babe Ruth (born 1895), Sinclair Lewis (born 1885), Irving Berlin (born 1888), Al Capone (born 1899), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (born 1896). A generation straddled by wars, it differed significantly from William James’s, whose earlier generation included William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson, Frederick Taylor, and Booker T. Washington. Lippmann and James did share a certain relativistic belief that no value could exist for long. Whatever proved effective today would still be subject to time and place, and therefore not valid as eternal truth.