Unit+4

=DISSENT, DEPRESSION, AND WAR=

1890s-1910s: Populists to Progressives (and Plenty More)
CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES After reading and studying this chapter, students should be able to: • Identify the economic and social ills that plagued American farmers and laborers at the turn of the century. Explain who the Farmers’ Alliances were and define their goals. Describe the Populist movement, including its leaders and their specific calls to action. • Describe the labor wars of the 1890s. Explain the factors that caused workers at the Homestead steel plant to go on strike and the results. Identify the specific challenges that prompted miners at Cripple Creek to protest and the factors that helped them to succeed. Explain the role played by Eugene V. Debs in the Pullman strike of 1894 and the results. • Characterize the types of reform that American women engaged in during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Describe the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. • Explain the political climate during the depression of 1893. Identify Coxey’s army and its goals. Define the People’s Party and its platform, including the successes it enjoyed in securing its agenda. Characterize the defining issues of the election of 1896, including the atmosphere surrounding it. • Explain what motivated American expansionism in the late nineteenth century. Distinguish the factors that contributed to the emergence of the United States as a world power and the issues that surrounded the debate about American imperialism.

Read Chapter 20, “Dissent, Depression, and War, 1890-1900,” pp. 586-614. media type="file" key="Ch. 20.m4a" width="300" height="50" __Group/Individual Work (depending on class size)__ In-class Jigsaw Activity: 1.Choose a person form the list of Agitators, below. 2.Post at least two pictures. 3.Provide a brief biographical information section (like an "About" tab on facebook). 4.Explain what they did. 5.Explain how they relate to the learning objectives above. @Nineties Agitators: Queen Lili, Coxey’s Army, Anthony and Stanton, Francis Willard, Eugene Victor Debs, Cripple Creek, Tom Watson, William Jennings Bryan. History Workshop – (post on blog) Journal –(do not post on blog this time)  **The Farmers’ Revolt** A. The Farmers’ Alliance > insufficient currency and credit system dominated by eastern interests forced farmers to come together, first to support the Grange and Greenback Labor Party during the 1870s. Then they formed regional alliances starting in Texas, Arkansas, and rural Louisiana.
 * I.**
 * 1) Falling prices, rising railroad rates, and an
 * 1) As the alliance movement grew, the farmer groups consolidated into two regional alliances with more than 200,000 members: the Northwestern Farmers’ Alliance and the more radical Southern Farmers’ Alliance.
 * 2) In an effort to reach African American farmers, the Southern Farmers’ Alliance

worked with the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, attempting to forge a common cause. B. The Populist Movement > movement had convinced members of the Farmers’ Alliance to form the People’s Party, thereby launching the Populist movement.
 * 1) The political culture of the Alliance encouraged the inclusion of women and children, using the family as its defining symbol, and women rallied to the Alliance banner along with their menfolk.
 * 2) Alliance meetings combined socializing and political education and used secular preaching to reach out to illiterate participants.
 * 3) At the heart of the Alliance movement stood a series of farmers’ cooperatives that sought to negotiate better prices for their crops.
 * 4) These cooperatives met with stiff opposition from merchants, bankers, wholesalers, and manufacturers, who made it impossible for them to get credit.
 * 5) As the cooperative movement died, the Farmers’ Alliance moved toward direct political action.
 * 1) By 1892, advocates of a third party
 * 1) The Populists mounted a stinging critique of industrial society and devised the idea of a subtreasury, a plan that would allow farmers to store nonperishable crops in government storehouses until market prices rose.
 * 2) For the western farmer, Populists promised land reform and championed a plan to reclaim excessive lands granted to railroads or sold to foreign investors.
 * 3) Currency reform was the third major focus of the Populist movement; farmers in all sections, hoping to make credit easier to obtain, endorsed platform planks calling for free silver and greenbacks.

5. More than just a response to hard times, Populism presented an alternative vision of American economic democracy. II. **The Labor Wars** A. The Homestead Lockout > squared off against Andrew Carnegie in a decisive struggle over the right to organize the Homestead steel mills.
 * 1) In 1892, steelworkers in Pennsylvania
 * 1) Carnegie, once a champion of workers’ right to unionize, stood poised to do battle with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in order to protect his profits and control the industry.
 * 2) In 1892, the Amalgamated was denied renewal of its contract at Carnegie’s Homestead mill.
 * 3) Eager to avoid a direct confrontation, Carnegie sailed to Scotland and left Henry Clay Frick, a tough antilabor man, in charge of the Homestead plant.
 * 4) Frick erected a fifteen-foot fence around the plant and hired 316 mercenaries from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to defend what workers dubbed “Fort Frick.”
 * 5) On June 28, Frick locked the workers out of the mills; they immediately rallied to the support of the union and blocked the Pinkertons from entering the plant.
 * 6) With more than a dozen Pinkertons and some thirty workers killed or wounded in the scuffle, the Pinkertons retreated to their barges on the Monongahela River.
 * 7) The workers and their families continued to harass the Pinkertons on the barges, and when they finally surrendered and came ashore, they were met with verbal and physical violence.
 * 8) The battle of “Fort Frick” ended in a dubious victory for the workers; at first, public opinion favored the workers, but the workers’ actions struck at the heart of the capitalist system, pitting workers’ right to their jobs against the rights of

private property. Yielding to pressure from Frick, the governor of Pennsylvania called out the National Guard to protect Carnegie’s mills. B. The Cripple Creek Miners’ Strike of 1894 > the Homestead lockout, a stock market crash on Wall Street touched off a bitter depression. support from state troops, took back control of the mines, defeating the WFM and blacklisting all its members. C. Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike 1. By 1894, the economic depression had swelled the ranks of the unemployed to three million.
 * 1) In a misguided effort to ignite a general uprising, Alexander Berkman, a Russian immigrant and anarchist, attempted to assassinate Frick, causing public opinion to turn against the workers.
 * 2) In the end, the workers capitulated and returned to work to find their wages slashed, their workday lengthened, and five hundred jobs eliminated.
 * 3) After Homestead, Carnegie’s profits tripled but it would take another forty-five years before steelworkers, unskilled as well as skilled, successfully unionized.
 * 1) In the spring of 1893, less than a year after
 * 1) In the West, silver mines fell on hard times.
 * 2) When conservative mine owners moved to lengthen the workday from eight to ten hours, the newly formed Western Federation of Miners (WFM) threatened to strike.
 * 3) While some mine owners settled with the union, others refused, provoking a strike in 1894.
 * 4) The striking miners received help from many quarters, including local businesses and grocers; many local officials, including the governor, sympathized with the strikers.
 * 5) Populist governor Davis H. Waite refused to use the power of the state against the strikers, instead serving as arbitrator in the dispute, showing the pivotal power of the state in the nation’s labor wars.
 * 6) The mine owners eventually capitulated, agreeing to an eight-hour workday, but the settlement did not end the conflict. A decade later, mine owners, this time with

2. Workers were particularly demoralized in the company town of Pullman on the outskirts of Chicago. George Pullman had created the town to move his plant and workers away from the “snares of the great city.” Although the housing was clearly better there than in other areas, it was also extremely expensive. Workers could never own their own homes in Pullman, either. 3. The depression brought hard times to Pullman, as workers saw their wages slashed five times in 1893, with cuts totaling at least 28 percent, while their rent remained constant. 4. At the heart of the labor problems at Pullman lay not only economic inequity but also the company’s attempt to control the work process, substituting piecework for day wages and undermining skilled craftsworkers. 5. Pullman workers rebelled, flocking to the ranks of the American Railway Union (ARU), led by the charismatic Eugene V. Debs. 6. George Pullman responded to his workers’ grievances by firing three union leaders the day after they led a delegation to protest wage cuts, leading 90 percent of Pullman’s 3,300 workers to strike. 7. The Pullman strikers appealed to the ARU for help, and the conflict quickly escalated. 8. ARU membership voted to boycott Pullman cars, and switchmen in other states refused to handle any train carrying Pullman cars, prompting the General Managers Association (GMA) to recruit strikebreakers and fire protesting switchmen. > fifteen railroads, affected twenty-seven states and territories, and remained surprisingly peaceful. Anthony and Stanton
 * 1) The boycott/strike spread to more than
 * 1) Management distorted and misrepresented the strike, sending out press releases describing the violence supposedly engaged in by the strikers.
 * 2) In Washington, D.C., Attorney General Richard B. Olney, a lawyer with strong ties to the railroad, convinced President Grover Cleveland that federal troops should intervene to protect the U.S. rails, even though the governor of Illinois, who saw a peaceful boycott, refused to call out troops.
 * 3) Two conservative Chicago judges issued an injunction that prohibited Debs from speaking in public and made the boycott a crime punishable by jail sentence for contempt of court.
 * 4) Olney’s strategy worked; Cleveland called out the army, Debs was jailed, and in the resulting violence, the strike was broken.
 * 5) The events at Pullman demonstrated that workers had little recourse when the government wielded its power in defense of industrialists’ property rights.

Alexander Berkman Eugene v. Debs Queen Lili