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Life at the Turn of the Century

At the turn of the century, three in five in the United States lived in a town having a population of less that 2,500. The United States of America was still more rural than urban, but it was already a world leader in industry, the U.S. benefiting from both a great abundance in natural resources and an economy organized by giant corporations. The United States led the world in the production of iron and steel, and it led Britain in manufacturing, the U.S. having 23.6 of the world's total against Britain's 18.5 percent. [note]  The United States produced half the world's cotton, corn and oil and a third of its coal and gold. The United States was also experiencing growth in agriculture, with the self-sufficient diversified farm giving way to specialized commercial agriculture. And the unfavorable balance of trade that had plagued the United States since its independence had been reversed.

In rural areas, many people were poor. In inner cities, over-worked factory workers lived in crowded and unsanitary tenements. But, in general, at the beginning of the century people in the U.S. were able to buy more than they had in previous decades. More farm products were available in the cities, and therefore these products there were cheaper. With the rise of industry had come an increase in the variety and abundance of goods. There were department stores and mail-order catalogs. Shopping by telephone had begun. Electricity was reaching more people in the cities, the electric light having the advantage of being without soot or the need to ventilate - while a few feared it, blaming it for fires, explosions and electrocutions, and some claimed that it caused freckles. There were electric trolley cars on which to ride to work or to stores or on Sunday outings. A Brooklyn baseball team acquired the name Dodgers from the ability of its fans to dodge trolley cars.

Middle and upper class Anglo-Americans were feeling brash and optimistic. Despite centuries of Calvinist preaching about the depravity of man, they were cheerful. And among the cheerful in 1900 was the Republican president, William McKinley. He was running for re-election, and he boasted of the pride and prosperity that had come to the United States during his four years in office.

City folks were enjoying more leisure. The middleclass had annual vacations, and many of them looked forward to going to a resort during the summer. On weekends they went to orchestral concerts in a park or city center. They went to vaudeville shows, to amusement parks or to a local baseball game. During the summer a family might go fishing or boating. Family picnics were also popular, as were community socials.

Much in entertainment was home made. Very few people had a phonograph, but there was an abundance of store bought sheet music. And in place of the phonograph, girls of a family played musical instruments. Families frequently gathered around a piano, organ, or pianola for sing-alongs. The most popular song in 1902 was "In the Good Ol' Summertime," which that year sold a million copies in sheet music, a song that evoked in many city people a nostalgia for the rural towns where they had strolled through shady lanes. Another popular song was "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." Soon to follow were songs such as "Sweet Adeline," "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," and "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree." People in middleclass families played lawn games such as croquet or lawn tennis. Young girls, along with their mothers, spent leisure hours at needle crafts, read religious novels. Some among the middleclass read westerns such as The Virginian, or they read sentimental sagas, or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Some read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Red Badge of Courage, and some read from among Horatio Alger's 135 novels. And people conversed more than they would decades later.

Men courted women in the parlor or front porch of the young woman's home, sometimes singing songs, playing their banjo or guitar, or strolling to the village green. As yet, women did not go driving off in automobiles. The automobile, "or horseless carriage," was just beginning to make its appearance in the United States, disturbing the city traffic of horse drawn wagons and bicycles. In San Francisco and Cincinnati a speed limit was established at eight miles an hour. Debates in bars and at dinner tables arose over whether the horseless carriage or the horse was better transportation. Animal power, it was argued, was better on mud-slick roads. With automobiles, some said, city streets would have less horse manure and smell.

At the turn of the century, more women were finding work outside of their homes - the result of enlarged office bureaucracies and the coming of the typewriter. Women had become a third of the nation's clerical workers. Women were also filling positions as telephone operators. And teaching, once a male preserve, was now eighty-six percent women - but still managed by male principals and superintendents.

Morality, Feminism and Class

At the turn of the century, three quarters of the states forbade married women to have property in their own name. In these states a woman's property became her husband's upon marriage. In a third of the states, a woman's earnings belonged to her husband. And in all states except Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, women were not allowed to vote - frontiers being less conservative on the woman's suffrage issue than the older, metropolitan areas, similar to Australia being ahead of England on this issue. Women active in the suffrage movement were described as neurotic, as suffering from an urge to imitate men, as hysterical or as homosexuals. It was argued that with their big sleeves, women would be able to hide numerous ballots and vote more than once.

Widespread among Americans was a desire for self-improvement - a constant force though the twentieth century. Since 1890 the number of students attending high school had been rising an average of around thirty percent a year, and high schools were increasing in number at an average of nineteen percent a year. The number of college graduates was also increasing: from a mere one percent of the population in the 1870s and on its way to eight percent by the 1920s.

A part of the striving for self-improvement was religion. Many Americans gave credit to Christianity for the nation's prosperity, and they saw their own material successes as God's reward for their virtue, industry and thrift. While church attendance was declining in some of the more technologically advanced European societies, in the United States the number of churches being built increased and church memberships were growing. It was common among middleclass parents to try to put the fear of God into their children, and God and morality reached the children in the schools through the McGuffey Readers, with titles such as "Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded" and "The Bible the Best of Classics." These books suggested that to succeed one had to be sober, frugal and energetic, and they suggested that prolonged poverty was a sign of God's disapproval.

People whose lives improved economically moved to the suburbs, bringing a decline in religious devotion in the urban centers. The urban centers were peopled more by immigrants who worked twelve or more hours a day. They were less inclined than the middleclass to accept the claim that God had ordained the order of things, and they were unimpressed by the piety of those with more wealth than they - people they saw as greedy, soft and with too much leisure. Middleclass suburbanites were inclined to look upon the inner-city immigrants as more morally challenged than they, but the inner-city workers had less time than the affluent for any of the deadly sins - except envy.

What little leisure inner-city  men had away from home was likely spent having a beer in a local saloon - frowned upon by the middleclass, who did most of their drinking with their dinners at home or at clubs. In some inner cities, saloons were community centers where workers picked up their mail, left messages, had access to a telephone or learned what work was available. The saloons provided water troughs for horses and a free newspaper, and the saloon often cashed a check or lent money. Some sold cigars, cigarettes, headache powers, and bonbons nicknamed wife pacifiers. In the immigrant sections of working-class  Chicago, saloons outnumbered grocery, meat market or dry goods stores. Fraternal organizations met at saloons, and, in some inner cities, union meetings and ward and precinct politics were conducted there - and weddings.

Feminine Virtue

At the turn of the century, to appear morally decent a woman had to wear dresses that went to the ankles, even when playing tennis. A short skirt was one that exposed the shoes. Women who wished respect remained virgins until marriage, while the common age for marriage among the middleclass was around 22. Men and women of blue-collar families found it more difficult to scrape together enough money to leave their parents, and it was common for them to wait until their early thirties before marrying.

A well-known fighter for morality at the turn of the century was Anthony Comstock, who opposed all forms of contraception. Because of Comstock's influence, it became illegal for people to discuss birth control, including a doctor with a patient. It became illegal for a library to have a book on contraception. Comstock drove the word pregnant from books, and he campaigned against the works of Margaret Sanger. Sanger was twenty-one at the turn of the century, a nurse in New York who began advocating birth control, which was available to the affluent but not to the poor, and Sanger was arrested for sending birth control literature through the mail.

Debate about the Bible

By the turn of the century, many Christian scholars were analyzing the Bible in great detail. Some of them were siding with what was known as Higher Criticism. Evolution had become an issue - a view that rivaled the theory that everything had been created at once just a few thousand years before. Geology - the Grand Canyon, for example - had given people the perspective of an earth old enough for increments of gradual transformations in genetics. Some Christian theologians accepted the theory of evolution as God's way of doing things while some others who considered themselves common sense Christians remained convinced that the Bible was absolutely accurate word by word.

A vociferous debate was taking place among Christians, with some Christians denouncing those who no longer believed in taking the scriptures literally. Among the denouncers was Billy Sunday - born William Ashley. He had been a farm boy from Iowa and a hard drinking, woman chasing outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings. He was the country boy awed and tempted by the big city called Babylon, and he continued to describe himself as brawling with the devil. "Hitting the sawdust trail" with his revival specialists and huge choir, he liked to preach the gospel wearing a good suit and expensive shoes. He preached with emotion and a rapidity of words, mixing wisecracking, slang and baseball terms, attacking rum, prostitutes, card playing and gambling. He railed against science, Galileo, Plato, Darwin, intellectuals in general and the modern world. He admitted that he knew nothing about theology, but he felt qualified to denounce Christians who no longer believed in heaven and hell. He was quick to proclaim his patriotism, and he announced that immigrants complaining about working conditions should "go back to the land where they were kenneled."

Churches, meanwhile, were expressing their passion for humanitarianism. Males, they believed, were inclined to have more moral defects than females and to be in greater need of improvement through religious instruction. There were fallen women to save, but men, the more aggressive of the sexes, had to be saved from drunkenness, from straying from God's word and from seducing innocent women. Churchmen, meanwhile, were joining educators, social scientists and writers in fretting over what was called the youth problem. Concern over boys turning bad through idleness was motivating the trend toward the passage of compulsory education laws.

Churches might maintain a house for the homeless, send flowers to a local hospital or support missionaries in Africa. One evangelical crusader was Carrie Nation, doing what she called the work of the Lord. With Billy Sunday she fought for prohibiting the drinking of alcohol. She and five hundred of her followers invaded taverns, breaking bottles of liquor, mirrors and wooden kegs of beer. One of Carry Nation's motives was to stop men from beating their wives, done mainly when they were drinking. For many women the prohibition movement was their only hope against such beatings, except for choosing the economic hardship that went with walking out on their marriage.

Despite all the efforts at morality, unwanted pregnancies were numerous, and abortions were common - the Michigan Board of Health in 1898 estimated that one third of all pregnancies were artificially terminated. Abortions were inexpensive: ten dollars being the standard rate in New York and Boston. Divorces were also on the rise. By 1915, the United States would have the highest divorce rate in the world, with one in seven marriages ending in divorce. In Los Angeles the rate was one in five, and in wicked San Francisco one in four. The United States was experiencing the results of a sense of freedom greater than many other nations.

Black Americans

At the turn of the century, most Americans of African descent still lived in the South, and the South was changing. The South had been sending its cotton to factories in the north and in England, but now fabric manufacturing was rising in the south. Atlanta Georgia was already a factory town, and, with its skyscrapers, it looked like a northern city.

At the turn of the century it had been only thirty-five years since the American Civil War had ended, and Negroes, as they were then called, had not yet acquired equality. The victorious north had disenfranchised the South's most able white leaders, and with the failure of reconstruction most Afro-Americans had emerged disenfranchised, with no property, no wealth and no education. At the turn of the century, many blacks were still working on plantations or as sharecroppers. Many Southern whites still believed that the Bible proclaimed blacks inferior and a damned people. Southern whites had as much of a capacity for myth as people elsewhere, and they saw blacks, in general or uniformly, as uneducable and culturally primitive. Among those who believed in Darwin's biologically evolution was the view that blacks were lower in evolutionary development than whites. Like other people, whites tended to view people who looked different from them as ugly in appearance - for example, the way that indigenous people in the Americans in the 1500s saw Europeans. Many whites believed in the divine right of whites to rule, which fit with what they saw in the growth of Europe's empires. Many whites, themselves wanting in status, were content to have blacks identified as lower in status than they. However superior the southern whites believed their white race to be, they feared that this superiority would melt away by the granting of equal rights to blacks. To preserve their culture and maintain the status they had they favored keeping the races publicly separate. Many whites in the South were conforming to what they saw as the values of whites in general - as most individuals do regarding the society with which they identify. And there remained a legacy among whites in the South from the days of Reconstruction, a time when whites feared that by blacks being able to elect to state legislatures representatives of their choosing whites were going to be overwhelmed and ruled by blacks.  

In 1896, the Supreme Court, in a case called Plessy versus Ferguson, sided with Southern states that wanted "separate but equal" facilities for blacks. And, by the turn of the century, many Southern whites were exercising what discrimination they could. "White Only" and "Colored Only" signs appeared, as did laws describing where blacks could and could not reside, attend church, eat, use public toilets, or drink water. Laws appeared against the ultimate in integration between the races: intermarriage. And outside the South, most whites either cared little about segregation in the South or they welcomed it.

Some in the Democratic Party - which dominated southern politics - were resorting to demagoguery. They associated Yankee intrusions with the Republican Party - the party in power in Washington. A few demagogic southern politicians spoke of Republican misrule and the threat of Negro domination. And to limit the power that blacks might exercise through voting, southern states were creating literacy tests, poll taxes and long residency requirements. In the South, except in Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky, nearly all Afro-Americans became disenfranchised, and fifty percent of the whites were caught by the requirements and also disenfranchised. But voting by Afro-Americans remained in Memphis, Houston and San Antonio, where black voters had helped progressive city administrations come to power.

At the turn of the century, vigilantism still existed. Lynching was its common method. Most lynching of whites took place in the western states. It was not only Southern whites who were lynching blacks: ten percent of the lynching of blacks took place outside the South, where blacks were fewer in number. In 1900, more than a hundred black males were lynched, one quarter of them accused of raping a white woman. If a white man raped a black woman he might be fined twenty dollars.

In Mississippi, "night riding" whites attempted to force black farmers to abandon land they owned or rented. And in many places in the Deep South, blacks remained at the mercy of the whims of white folks. So as not to offend, black men shuffled and cringed. And rather than understanding the source of this, it reinforced the belief among some whites that whites were superior. And some whites with a status-problem could salve their wounded egos by lording over blacks while characterizing all blacks as figures even less worthy than they.

Another defense for blacks was migration. In the north and west were few jobs for blacks, but many blacks, filled with hope for a better life, left anyway, and some southern landowners were distressed at losing the labor of blacks. In the north, blacks found employers hiring immigrant white workers, and they found urban slums, prejudice, resentment and fear. In the north, blacks were being ridiculed in vaudeville shows and in some popular songs. And the jobs that blacks found paid only about half what whites were paid for the same or comparable work.

Hardship and Disease

At the turn of the century, the average workweek was twelve hours a day and six days a week. Coal miners were suffering and dying in appallingly large numbers from both accident and the environment in which they worked. Poor and immigrant children often worked alongside their parents, kids as young as seven or eight working twelve hours a day - for low wages that poor families needed mainly for food.

By 1900 half the states had some sort of restrictions on child labor, such as a law that children work no more than ten hours a day. But only about ten states made a serious effort to enforce such laws. For factory owners, children were a cheap supply of labor, and employers preferred children for many jobs because their fingers were quick and nimble and because the children's small size enabled them to tend machines in cramped spaces. By 1900, 1.7 million kids under sixteen were employed in cotton mills in New England and in the South, and children were still working in West Virginia's coal mines. The view prevailed among some devout Christians that all this was good for the children in that idle hands were the devil's tools. Some others claimed that children should be in school rather than working, and they were criticized for being unrealistic and utopian.

A lot of child labor was on farms, including tenant farming, where sharecroppers were turning as much as half of their crops over to the owners of the property they worked. The debts of tenant farmers often matched or exceeded the income from their share of the crops they grew. They were paying higher prices for the goods they were buying at country stores, usually on credit, and they were often cheated. Their houses were run down, some with a view of the stars through the roof or the land under the floor boards. It was widely believed that it was the responsibility of these people to raise themselves up through hard work. And a few did and became examples referred to in arguing its possibility.

At the turn of the century in the United States there was no income tax, and no social security, unemployment insurance or public housing for the aged or disabled. Families were obliged to take care of their aged and their handicapped, and grandmothers baby-sat the children of their sons and daughters.

Also at the turn of the century, many people in rural areas had to haul their water, and so did some in the cities, where water was obtained from barrels filled by water-hauling tank wagons. Some tenement dwellers received their water from a tap in the hallway, or outside in the courtyard.

As for the comforts of central heating, only a few families among the middle and upper classes had this convenience. In the winters most of the rest of the nation stayed together around their stove, and people used iron ingots, ceramic bricks and soapstones as bed warmers. Without electricity, many in rural areas in the west used cow manure, "grassoline," for fuel. And in rural areas, families were still being impacted by drought, soil erosion, plagues of grasshoppers, floods and boll weevils.

At the turn of the century, typhus was prevalent, and tuberculosis was rampant. Statistics claimed that the United States had 194 cases of tuberculosis for every 100,000 persons, the disease appearing mostly in areas that were crowded and lacking hygiene, such as tenement buildings that lacked indoor bathrooms and where refuse was allowed to pile up in streets and pollute drinking water. Syphilis was also widespread at the turn of the century. Mental institutions were filled with patients whose illnesses were late-state syphilitic infections, syphilis in its late stage attacking the brain.

Infant deaths and the deaths of women giving birth were high compared to later in the century. Most births took place in a woman's home, but hospital deliveries were on the rise, where better equipment was available for emergencies. In hospitals anesthetics were used in place of the more painful natural childbirth, while resistance remained among Christians who quoted scripture that "in pain though shalt bear children."

Hopes for a Better Life

At the turn of the century, science and medicine was benefiting from the increase in communications between scientists of the world, and science was bringing a better understanding of diseases and greater prevention. It had recently been discovered that beriberi was caused by dietary deficiency, and it was learned that a proper diet was a defense against disease in general. In the area of preventative medicine - as old as Hypocrites - a New York woman, Lillian Wald, acting alone, convinced the city of New York to hire nurses for its public schools for health maintenance and health education, and this kind of nursing began spreading across the nation. And by 1900, water supplies were being tested periodically to guard against water-borne infections.

Government funding of medical research was almost non-existent, and most medical research was being funded by wealthy philanthropists, such as John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, who established the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and donated millions of dollars for research on tuberculosis. The one area of research financed by tax dollars was the U.S. Army's work against yellow fever and malaria. The connection between malaria and mosquitoes had been recently discovered, and a program by the army was able to control malaria and yellow fever in Havana and in Central America along the world's most notorious "fever coast" - enough to allow the stationing of American troops there with only minor incidents of these diseases.

Many of those living in misery were optimistic enough to fight to improve their lives. By the turn of the century, blacks had reduced their illiteracy to 44.5 percent, down from forced illiteracy during slavery and the 95 percent illiteracy rate at the end of the Civil War. Among those who were optimistic was Booker T. Washington. Washington was a former slave who had worked in a coal mine, struggled in his spare time to acquire an education and had graduated in 1875 from an agricultural institute in Virginia. He worked as a teacher and founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He advocated blacks advancing themselves through hard work. Another who was hopeful was W.E.B. du Bois, half-black, half-white, who had graduated from Harvard in 1895 and in 1900 founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had grown up around whites and, unlike Booker T. Washington, he advocated integration.

White immigrant labor also fought for improvements - against the belief among businessmen that wages should be determined by the market place. Employers believed that they should be free to pay their workers as little as possible - in other words, according to market forces. There was no minimum wage law, nor laws that prevented poor working conditions. And with the cost of labor determined partly by the supply of workers, employers had been skewing down the market price for labor by importing large numbers of immigrants. Labor wished to organize to control against their wages being bid down. They wished to force an improvement in working conditions. And the labor movement had succeeded in establishing itself in many industries.

The union movement in the form of trade unions was as old as the nation, and at the turn of the century it was dominated by about one hundred craft unions - crafts such as printing, carpentry and shoemaking. The trade union movement was led by the American Federation of Labor, whose leader at the turn of the century was Samuel Gompers. Gompers favored collective bargaining and cooperating with the industrialists. He opposed the failed attempts of the past to form one great union of all workers, the skilled and unskilled, and to form a labor party. He was opposed to the notion of class struggle and to what he saw as the utopianism of some intellectuals who associated themselves with the labor movement.

To the left of Gompers were the socialists. Foremost among them was Eugene Debs, who had risen from treasurer of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and had organized the American Railway union. Debs believed that industrial unions were better than trade unions at meeting the power of the industrialists. He favored a unified socialist movement of working whites - both native born and immigrants. He advocated government intervention in the economic life of the nation in order to promote social justice. He was for a shortened workweek, unemployment relief, and abolishing child labor. He favored voting reform, including women's suffrage, giving people more influence through referendums, and more proportional representation. Debs believed that big business and labor had opposing interests that could never be resolved. His socialism derived from a belief in doing right for working people and replacing the existing system of private ownership of the means of production with public ownership. He urged people to join the labor movement to better themselves economically and to join the Socialist Party to give political power to the working class.

Among the optimistic were the enthusiastic readers of a book entitled Looking Backward, a book by Edward Bellamy first published in 1888 and translated into twenty languages. Between 1890 and 1891 across the U.S., one hundred and sixty-five "Bellamy Clubs" had formed. These clubs were devoted to the discussion and propagation of the aims expressed in Looking Backward. After Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur, Looking Backward was the most popular book at the turn of the century. The Bellamy dream was that finance, industry and commerce would no longer be conducted by "irresponsible" corporations. Rather than government regulation of industry - laws to prevent corporations from stealing, conning people and damaging public assets - Bellamy foresaw the economy governed by a single syndicate for the common interest of "the people." The story of his book takes place in Boston Massachusetts, and the book describes Boston in the year 2000 as a city with many parks and fountains and everyone devoted to group values.

Capitalism, Politics and Progress

Some socialists attacked the capitalists for practicing "wage-slavery" and for exploiting children. Some socialists saw capitalists as inherently immoral and capitalism as something to be done away with rather than modified through law. Many Capitalists, on the other hand, were devout Christians and saw themselves as highly moral. They were mostly Protestants, belonging to a tradition that respected frugality and enterprise.

However moral or immoral the capitalists, values were changing. A hundred years before, many Christians and entrepreneurs had seen slavery as moral, and that was changing. Slavery was now illegal, and capitalism was destined to change with the values of the times - values expressed in laws that regulated the behavior of members of society including capitalists.

Slavery, moreover, did not fit well with modern industrial manufacturing. Slaves had to be fed and housed, and they had to be supervised with more care and force than free persons working for wages. Easier than all this was just paying people a wage and letting them go home after work, to make their own meals. Slavery remained suitable for capitalists only with  prison labor. And when a government would permit this, it would occur - as in Germany during World War II. This was in keeping with the existing values of the times - the prisoners widely believed to be deserving of their fate. The hope was that values of a society as a whole would improve.

The McKinley Presidency and Imperialism

In a relatively bloodless war in 1898, the United States defeated Spain - a war fought mainly in Cuba and at Manila Bay in the Philippines. That year, Guam was transferred from Spanish control to a U.S. possession. The Philippines declared itself an independent republic and the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution annexing the Hawaiian Islands. The following year, the island of Guam was transferred from Spain's control to the United States, and the rest of the Mariana Islands were transferred to the Germans. The British, Germans and Japanese were interested in the Philippine Islands and were watching what the United States would do there. Some Americans urged that the American flag in the Philippines not be hauled down, and they called for annexation. Some Church leaders saw annexation as an opportunity to evangelize, and they spoke of America's moral duty to its "little brown brothers." Some in the U.S. believed in taking up the "white man's burden," spreading America's superior culture including the blessings of Christianity to backward peoples of the world. Some believed that America should take its rightful place in a world of colonial powers. Some businessmen who had viewed the war unenthusiastically at the outset began talking of a great enterprise for American trade with the Far East.

The President of the United States, William McKinley, came down on the side of rule over the entire Philippine archipelago, not wishing any rival power to control any of the Philippine islands. Choosing to stay in the Philippines without approval from the Filipinos brought war between the U.S. and Filipino patriots, led by the declared President of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo. Across the United States the cry of "support our troops!" was heard, while others, Mark Twain, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1900, William Jennings Bryan, among others, spoke against the McKinley administration's effort to conquer the Philippines. And an American general leading troops in the Philippines complained about the loyalty of some at  home, saying that if he were shot it might as well be from the rear.

The Elections of 1900

The war in the Philippines was debated in the race for the U.S. presidency. William Jennings Bryan began by making imperialism his major issue. It was Bryan's second run as the Democrat Party's nominee - at the age of forty. Bryan was influenced by evangelical Protestantism. He was from Nebraska and had rural values. He was suspicious of the industrialized eastern part of the United States. Never having been a mayor of a major city he had little understanding of big-city problems. As a rural man, he was little interested in the concerns of industrial workers or organized labor. But some considered him a great orator, while one of his critics described him as jellified sentimentality.

Bryan was not a pacifist. He had supported the war against Spain, but he remained adamantly opposed to the U.S. taking control of the Philippines. Imperialism, he argued, was motivated by those seeking money, by those seeking to spread their religion and by those who argued that once we were in there was no getting out. He declared that America's involvement in the Philippines violated American traditions of self-determination. "No nation," he said," can long endure half republic and half empire." And he warned that imperialism abroad would lead to despotism at home.

Running for re-election, the Republican candidate, William McKinley, gave little attention to the Philippines as an issue. McKinley came across as a kind and warmhearted man. He was for continuing protective tariffs and reciprocal agreements on trade with other nations, and he spoke of reforming the civil service and building a canal through a narrow point somewhere in Central America.

McKinley's running mate was the highly energetic and sometimes over-emotional Theodore Roosevelt, a military hero from the war against Spain and the recent governor of New York. Roosevelt campaigned with enthusiasm in the West, and he fired the enthusiasm that common Americans had for their nation's military efforts in foreign affairs.

Finding audiences in the western states unresponsive to his attacks on imperialism, Bryan turned his speeches against economic monopolies - commonly known as "the trusts."  He called for using the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission against these monopolies. He spoke against special privileges and called for the direct election of Senators in order to take power away from insiders and give more power to the public. And Bryan supported adding silver, with gold, as the standard for money - a policy that would amount to increasing the money supply.

The public was not interested in the issue of the dollar based on silver versus gold, and Bryan and the Democrats failed to profit from the widespread dislike and fear of "the trusts." Small farmers and small business people who feared big business still saw the Republican Party as the party of reform, and they voted Republican in large numbers. McKinley received 7,219,525 votes to Bryan's 6,356,737, and McKinley won the Electoral College, and therefore re-election. The Republicans emerged with solid control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. And the voting public demonstrated once again its interest only in mainstream politics, the socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, receiving only about 100,000 votes.

Theodore Roosevelt and His First Reforms

Six months into his second term, McKinley was visiting the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo and was shot twice in the abdomen, by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz - a mill worker from Detroit who believed he was striking a blow against oppression and for working people. On the ground and bleeding, the kindly McKinley called Czolgosz a "poor, misguided fellow" and asked that he not be hurt. McKinley was rushed to the hospital, where the operation on him was bungled, and eight days later he died. His death saddened the nation and increased its hostility toward anarchism and leftists in general. And within a month, the state of New York electrocuted Czolgosz and destroyed his body with sulfuric acid.

Elevated to the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt, promised to continue McKinley's "path of peace, prosperity and honor for the country." Then two and a half months later Roosevelt appeared to be starting on a new course. This was on December 3, in his first annual message to Congress, when Roosevelt showed signs of responding to the clamor from many citizens for reforms.

A crusade for reforms was apparent among editors of newspapers. Magazines such as McClure's, Cosmopolitan, American Magazine and Colliers had begun publishing articles on abuse against workers, widespread corruption, and misuse of land by big business. One writer, Lincoln Steffens, in his book The Shame of the Cities, exposed government and police corruption. And pleas for reform were pouring into the President Roosevelt's office.

Some intellectuals believed that reforms were needed to forestall or abort socialism taking power in the United States. Privileged college students were hearing their instructors speak of poverty, squalor, injustice and the need of government reforms, including the beginning of some intervention in the economy - intervention being the only way to reform an economy.

It was all a product of optimism and hope - a belief that things could be better as opposed to those who believed that the system of things was as good as could be. Roosevelt shared in the belief in reforms. He believed in putting controls on child labor and in legislation for minorities and women. But he had to work with Congress and realized that he did not have the power to make Congress pass such legislation. So Roosevelt joined with Congress in leaving issues involving child labor and civil rights to the states.

Roosevelt was a moderate. He spoke against class hatred - the poor denouncing the rich. He spoke in favor of strong industries, which he said benefited the nation. He addressed the issue of monopoly control over industry and crusaded against a financial combination called the Northern Securities Company, which controlled railroads in the nation's northwest. His move was followed by the Department of Justice taking North Securities to court for violations of the Sherman Act - a law for combating monopoly and improper restraints on competition which had been passed by Congress in 1890 but ignored. The issue went to the Supreme Court, which sided with the Department of Justice, demonstrating the power of government over large corporations. The public responded by seeing Roosevelt as a hero, while some business leaders saw Roosevelt as destroying the foundation of private property and undermining the institution of private enterprise.

The next big issue was a strike by coal miners in Ohio, Illinois, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which threatened to shut down industries that used coal as their fuel, and threatened to leave people to freeze in their homes. The strikers wanted recognition of their unions, a twenty-percent increase in pay and an eight-hour day. Roosevelt disliked radical and aggressive labor leaders, and he was opposed to the closed union shop, but he gave some support to labor - the first president to do so. He encouraged owners of the mines and union representatives to accept arbitration by an outside party. The mine owners were indignant, but the strike ended in a compromise settlement. The miners failed to win recognition of their unions, but they received a ten percent increase in wages, an eight-hour day for engineers, firemen and pump men, and they received the right to submit future grievances to a board of conciliation.

Roosevelt was sensitive to issues about the great outdoors. In recent decades, lands had been passing out of government hands and into private ownership, for mining, oil extraction and timber cutting. Roosevelt wished to protect forests, watershed and federally owned lands. In 1902, he and Congress created reforms - the Newlands Reclamation Act - which requisitioned money from the sale of public lands and applied this money to the construction of dams and other works to improve the supply of water to agriculture.

The Panama Canal

In the area of foreign affairs, Roosevelt jumped at the opportunity to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. He had stated that "to hold its own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy" the U.S. had to strengthen itself as a world power and it had to build a canal through Central America. In 1903, the British government gave up its rights to the joint construction of such canal with the United States, and a French company was eager to sell to the United States its right-of-way across Panama.

Panama was then a part of Colombia, and the will of the regime in power in Colombia was an obstacle to Roosevelt. Colombian politicians were bent on holding up negotiations and getting from the U.S. as much as it could in exchange for an agreement over the canal - with Roosevelt describing Colombia's president, Marroquin, as "a villainous monkey."

Opportunity presented itself to Roosevelt in the form of people in Panama wishing to free themselves from Colombian rule. A rebellion in Panama soon followed. The rebels announced Panama's independence, and the Roosevelt administration recognized Panama within hours. In agreement with the new regime in Panama, Roosevelt sent troops there to combat any attempt by Colombia to crush the new regime. Colombia backed down and there was no violence - with Roosevelt citing the benefits of being strong. Then the U.S. signed a treaty with Panama for the building of the canal, and work began on the canal without delay, a project that was to take eleven years to complete.

More Reform and Change

Some people in the United States continued to blame the rich for their miseries, and commonly among people of modest means was the opinion that people who had gained great wealth had done so through greed. A leading target of these people was John D. Rockefeller. Now retired, Rockefeller had been a Sunday school teacher with ascetic tendencies, and he had risen in business by holding back from spending on himself and by being better organized and less wasteful than his competitors. But responding to the common view of Rockefeller, a "muckraking" journalist, Ida Tarbell, wrote a series of articles for McClure's magazine on Rockefeller that distorted his past. .

But in the United States, optimism proved stronger than class consciousness, and Americans had good reason to be optimistic. The United States was a functioning democracy. It was stable and industrious, and real wages (wages according to what they can buy) were rising. Events would justify this optimism. Real wages would rise at an average rate across the century of 1.6 percent a year despite the Great Depression of the thirties. In the first decade of the century, fresh beef was around 13 cents a pound, equivalent to about $30 a pound relative to 1990 dollars. Soap was 5 cents a bar, equal to $11.50 in 1990 dollars. A refrigerator early in the century cost $3,000 in 1990 dollars.

In the 1904 presidential elections, Roosevelt was returned to office, running on what he called "the Square Deal. " Said Roosevelt: " I shall see to it that every man has a square deal, no less and no more." In his second term, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act became laws, and with these laws the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was created, whose task was to protect the American public by testing and approving drugs before they were allowed on the market. And in his second term, Roosevelt turned again to the issue of conservation. Lumber, oil and mining companies opposed his moves, and many western politicians feared that Roosevelt's conservationism would retard economic growth in their districts. But the Roosevelt administration went ahead and created more parks and made reserves of 17,000,000 acres of forest.

A necessary part of democracy was freedom of the press - which, of course, includes the publication and distribution of books. And in the latter half of the first decade, a socialist, Upton Sinclair, wrote a book called The Jungle in which he exposed conditions in the meat industry, specifically in the Chicago stockyards. The book became popular, and while it was Sinclair's intention to sell socialism to the American public, what resulted was not socialism but more reform - the passage of pure food laws. Americans were inclined toward solving one problem at a time rather than ideological leaps of faith.

In addition to reforms at the federal level, political reforms were taking shape in the states - reforms that followed the example of Wisconsin. Candidates for public office were to be chosen by primaries rather than by behind-the-scene power brokers. And states were beginning to establish referendums, and to establish a short ballot, limitations on contributions to political campaigns, and to establish the direct election of senators rather than senators being chosen by state legislatures.

The Internal Combustion Engine

Adding to what might be called progress was the continuing proliferation of the "horseless carriage." In the summer of 1903, an automobile had been driven from San Francisco to New York City in sixty-three days. That year, another car, a Packard, did it in fifty-three days, and that year auto sales soared, Oldsmobile selling around 4,000 cars. In 1904, numerous people took cross-country driving vacations. The American Automobile Association organized a tour from New York to the Exposition in St. Louis, and fifty-nine autos made the trip.

The internal combustion engine made flying possible, the Wright brothers in 1905 having flown 24.3 miles in thirty-eight minutes. Then, in 1906, a benevolent aspect of the automobile became more apparent. That year the San Francisco earthquake became a turning point in the acceptance of engine powered vehicles. During that emergency, horses were dropping from heat exhaustion while supplies from motor trucks kept hauling needed supplies. The San Francisco Chronicle claimed the automobile had proved indispensable in saving parts of the city from fire.

Toward 1910

Amid the progress, of course, was a lot of ballyhoo, noise, struggle and conflict. In 1908, the Republican candidate, William Howard Taft, was elected to succeed Roosevelt. That was the year that Isadora Duncan began dancing, and the middle classes viewing her flimsy dresses and exposed arms and legs as ridiculous and shocking. And in 1908, in Sydney Australia, an American black named Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns of Australia for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world - his victory followed by some violence outside the boxing ring. In 1910, a former American champion, Jim Jeffries, came out of retirement to reclaim the title for the white race. Jack Johnson knocked him out, and a race riot ensued at ringside, followed by race riots across the United States in which nineteen persons died.

Meanwhile businesses including banks from the United States were increasing their investments in Latin America. The U.S. share of trade with Latin America was on the rise, and during the decade this created what was called "dollar diplomacy." And in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was in operation. The United States government believed that it had the right to intervene in Latin American nations to promote political stability and financial responsibility, to prevent European intervention in the area, and this was supported by a majority of U.S. citizens interested in foreign affairs. The United States was invited into the Dominican Republic to manage the collection of customs revenues, and the U.S. presence discouraged attempts by revolutionaries to overthrow the government there. In Nicaragua, the U.S. intervened with money and marines in support of conservatives who overthrew the liberal government of Jose Zelaya, who had been harassing U.S. businessmen - the beginning of what would become a larger intervention in Nicaragua in the coming decade.

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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

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