His. 181.01: U.S. History: from the Gilded Age to the Present
Spring 2010
Prof. John McClymer, ext. 7278


Margaret Bourke-White, "At the time of the Louisville Flood" (1935)

Description: The second semester of this survey of American history will analyze the simultaneous and synergistic impact of industrialization, urbanization, and immigratio; the ongoing battles between capital and labor; the shift in American imperialism to overseas possessions and protectorates; twentieth century wars; reform movements from suffrage and temperance to Civil Rights and women's liberatio;, the continued salience of religion in American culture; and the ongoing culture wars that have characterized the last century and a half.

Format: The course will function as a workshop. Students will explore primary sources bearing upon key events and developments in addition to reading secondary accounts by historians. Elementary and secondary education concentrators will have the opportunity to work on topics keyed to the Massachusetts curriculum frameworks for history, geography, and social studies.

Prerequisites: None.

Requirements: Students will write two brief essays (4-6 pages) and give several oral reports over the course of the semester in addition to submitting notes on the readings via email one hour prior to class. I will edit and post these to the class web site, and will use them to organize class discussions. Students will also complete a final project on a topic of their choosing. There will be no quizzes or examinations.

Grading: Each brief paper will count for 15% of the final grade. The two oral reports will count for 10% each. The emailed notes and the final project will each count for 30%. This adds up to 110%. I will appropriately reduce the weight of your lowest grade. Note: You have complete control over the grade for the emailed notes. Do them conscientiously and get them in on time (one hour before class) and you will receive the full 30 points.

Readings: Most of the required reading is available online, including a digital textbook created by Steven Mintz (now of Columbia University) at the University of Houston. Students will read the Mintz textbook as needed to, e.g., to acquire background information. Textbooks are tools and should be used as needed. We will begin by reading John McClymer, Mississippi Freedom Summer (Thompson * Wadsworth, 2004) very thoroughly. This will serve as an introduction both to key themes of the course and to the historian's craft.

Attendance: Because of the centrality of class participation and of student reports attendance is mandatory. If you must miss a class, please contact the instructor in advance.

Plagiarism: This is the use of someone else's work without crediting that person. It is a form of cheating. We will follow college policy in handling cases of suspected plagiarism.

Disabilities: Any student with a learning or other disability that necessitates special treatment, e.g., extra time for completing assignments, should contact the instructor as soon as possible so that we can work out the necessary arrangements.

Outcomes: Students completing this course should:

Materials:
John McClymer, Mississippi Freedom Summer (Thompson * Wadsworth, 2004)
+ relevant web sites

Americans sought to make sense of the bewildering possibilities they faced by developing first four and then five frames within which they organized their ideas, hopes, and fears.

Four (and Then Five) Frames for Thinking About American History: Race, Republicanism, the Market, Evangelicalism, and Gender

Republicanism:Whether they were organizing a new territory or a society to ban the delivery of mail on Sunday, Americans wrote charters or constitutions. They elected officers. They held meetings in which they used parliamentary rules of order. They assumed that the majority should rule, that individuals were free to do as they pleased so long as they did not interfere with the rights of others, that everyone was entitled to have and express an opinion. These republican ideas, institutions, and practices first took root in the colonial period, flowered during the Revolutionary Era, and then undergirded the new Republic. Even when that republic split in two, Southern secessionists organized the Confederate States of America as a republic.

Lincoln and his party transformed the republic, not only with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution but also by treating the Declaration of Independence as a preamble to it. In the 1930s Franklin Delano Roosevelt would transform it again. Lincoln's republic made citizenship national and greatly expanded the range of government activity. It subsidized the transcontinental railroad; it created a national currency; it financed the state universities. But its attempts to guarantee individual rights fell woefully short. FDR's republic fundamentally altered the relationship between the individual and the national government by turning it into an employer of last resort, a provider of social security, a guarantor of individual saving accounts, and much more. This republic undertook to regulate the economy, starting with the banks. It undertook to transform the South through the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and Rural Electrification among other measures. It protected unions. And it effectively repealed the tenth amendment, which reserved to the states powers not given explicitly to the federal government. Modern-day Republicans, starting with what is often called the "Reagan Revolution," seek to change key aspects of the FDR republic.

Capitalism provided another powerful frame. Several of the colonies started as companies. Investors risked their own capital to found Massachusetts Bay, for example. Where proprietors, such as William Penn, held title, they offered financial inducements to prospective settlers. Even indentured servants, i.e., those bound to work for another for five or seven years in return for passage to America, could become property owners. Each man was supposed to find his own way in the world and could, Americans came to believe, because the market rewarded talent and perserverance. If you worked hard, you would succeed. Success did not necessarily mean great wealth. It meant independence. There were few great fortunes in antebellum America. There were a great many small farms and mills and shops. Getting ahead meant winning a place for yourself and your family. By the middle of the nineteenth century Benjamin Franklin had become the representative American, the self-made man. Schoolchildren read his Autobiography as a self-help manual.

After the Civil War industrialization changed the scale of economic activity and the impact the market had on ordinary Americans. Corporations changed the meaning of opportunity. Great wealth contrasted with desperate poverty. Small farms decreased in numbers as agribusiness arose. Small shops had to compete with huge retail establishments like Sears. In the twentieth century corporations would change patterns of consumption so drastically as to create a new ethos of consumption, one that competed with more traditional religious ideas about the good life. Not until the late 1930s did trade unions provide effective representation for industrial workers.

Evangelical Protestantism: Some colonists made the dangerous voyage to the New World for explicitly religious reasons. Such were the Puritans and Pilgrims in Massachusetts, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland. Those settlers who came for economic gain or adventure also took it for granted that religion was a cornerstone of any viable community. Their disagreements lay over which religion. Over time efforts to create colonies characterized by religious uniformity failed, but all of the colonies on the eve of the Revolution had established churches and afforded only limited toleration to dissenters. The revolution ushered in a era of secularism and separation of church and state. Church membership and attendance plummeted. Skeptics read Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and founded "Infidel Clubs." Even so, Evangelical Protestantism revived during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. Millions found salvation in the Second Great Awakening of the late 1820s and 1830s and in the "Holiness" revivals of the late 1850s and 1860s. Church membership grew rapidly. To meet the chronic shortage of clergy, Home Missionary societies formed. Boosters starting towns that they hoped would become the next Rochester, Worcester, or Chicago routinely began by organizing a church. The denomination did not matter. If a Baptist minister was available, it would be Baptist. If a Methodist or a Presbyterian were available, it would be Methodist or Presbyterian. What mattered was that there be preaching.

After the Civil War, evangelicals faced several challenges. One was that, despite their successes (anti-slavery, temperance, Victorian propriety), America was no closer to being a "Redeemed Nation" than ever. Worse, industrialization and urbanization raised critical moral questions — seven-day work weeks in steel mills, child labor, insanitary housing stock — that did not yield to traditional notions of sin, guilt, and repentance. Trinity Church (Episcopal) was the largest slumlord in New York City. Here was a moral evil. But, who was the sinner? Carnegie Steel required its workers to work twelve consecutive days of twelve hours each. Not observing the Sabbath was a sin. But, who was the sinner? Clearly not the workers, but they were the ones working on the Lord's Day. Some evangelicals would seek to create a "Social Gospel." Others would repudiate it as an attempt to import social and political ideas into religion. Still another challenge arose from the "Higher Criticism," the application of history, linguistics, and archeology to the study of the Bible. Evangelicals generally repudiated this scholarship and instead formulated the "Fundamentals," the core group of doctrines (the divinity of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, for example) that they insisted all Christians must believe. This gave rise to a battle between Modernists and Foundamentalists that still rages. Modernists also sought to accommodate an unending stream of scientific discoveries that undermined traditional understandings of Scripture. Evolution is the classic case in point. Even more threatening to the evangelical outlook, perhaps, was the rise of a corporate-sponsored consumer ethos. This legitimated pleasure as a goal of human striving and repudiated the notion of loving the world with "weaned affections," as the Puritans had phrased it. Instead one was to pack all the pleasure (and consumption) possible into one's life.

Racism: All Americans are willing to acknowledge the centrality of republican political institutions, capitalism, and religion in the development of their society. Racism is problematic. For one thing, racism conflicts with the other frames. Republican ideals cherish the individual as individual. People, as Dr. King reminded us, should be judged on the "contents of their characters, not on the color of their skin." That is the dreamSimilarly, the market purportedly assesses worth in terms of ingenuity and industriousness. It is manifestly uneconomical to suppress talent by systematically withholding opportunity. And evangelical Protestantism, ardently espoused by blacks and whites alike, deals in the salvation of immortal souls, each equally valued in the eyes of God. In fact, anti-slavery did take root in American churches, that is, in some American churches. Others supplied biblical justifications for slavery and racism. The Revolution's ideology of "natural rights" also undermined support for slavery, especially in the North. Yet settlers brought racial ideas and prejudices with them. They saw native peoples through racial lenses. They understood slavery in racial terms. They earnestly sought, from the beginning, to make America a white man's country whether this meant dispossessing Indians, enslaving Africans, limiting citizenship to white immigrants (one of the first acts of the first Congress in 1790), or segregating free blacks. As with republicanism, capitalism, and evangelicalism, racism evolved and developed over time. In 1751, for example, Benjamin Franklin complained of the influx of so-called Pennsylvania Dutch settlers (German immigrants and their children), in part because they were a "tawny" and not a white people. Later immigrants would encounter similar prejudice. So would those who became unwilling Americans as a result of the Mexican War.

The period 1877-1932 marked the nadir in race relations in the U.S. As whites regained political control in the South, they moved systematically to erase all the gains blacks had made during Reconstruction. The results were disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, and indiscriminate violence. Racial theories claimed scientific standing. High school and college students read in their textbooks of the superiority of whites of northern and western European extraction and of how all of the various "stocks" could be arranged from highest to lowest. A new science, Eugenics, claimed that society should involuntarily sterilize the "unfit." More than thirty states adopted such laws. They also banned intermarriage between blacks and whites and, in California, between whites and "Mongolians," that is, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Congress adopted quotas for immigration explicitly designed to keep out Asians, Africans, Pacific Islanders, and southern and eastern Europeans. Clamping down on immigration from Poland, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, to cite several examples, also had the intended effect of keeping out Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians.

World War II was the great watershed in terms of race relations and racism. Racial theories and Eugenics were discredited. Blacks became more assertive and more successfull in regaining their rights. Whites learned to see the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian Americans as model minorities rather than as the "Yellow Peril." Anti-Catholicism faded as did, to a somewhat lesser degree, anti-Semitism. Intermarriage became more common and more accepted.

Gender: It became a central frame, in the sense used here, by the 1830s. By then white Americans had worked out "spheres" of activity for men and women and ascribed gendered meanings to basic human traits. Women, in this scheme, were supposed to be nurturing, pious, and submissive by nature. Men were supposedly rational, ambitious, and aggressive. By this same time efforts to overturn or at least modify this gendered understanding of human possibilities were well underway. And they fed off the anti-slavery movement as both drew upon republican and evangelical ideals as well as upon societal transformations associated with capitalism's development.

Women's rights came slowly in the decades after the Civil War. 1920 was the first time women could vote in national elections. And notions of women's sphere proved highly resistant to change. Even in the twenty-first century we continue to acknowledge the relevance of a complaint voiced at the first national woman's rights convention in 1850 that women were expected to be either dolls in the parlor or drudges in the kitchen.

As gender became contested, so did sexuality. Gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals had long been considered "deviants." Only in a handful of communities, such as Greenwich Village, and in a handful of professions, such as hairdressing and the theatre, could people openly express their sexuality without fear. This started to change in the late 1960s, in part because of the so-called Second Wave of feminism and in part because of the example of other liberation movements by African Americans and Latino/a Americans. Gay Liberation drew heavily upon republican ideals, as did all liberation movements. And it encountered fierce opposition from evangelicals and their new allies, conservative Catholics.

All four (and then five) frames were sets of institutions, values, and behaviors as well as ways of thinking. The family was a gendered institution as was the church, to cite two important examples. Women and men played out specific roles in these settings and were expected to adhere to specific values. This fact is central to understanding American history. It accounts for the enormous influence each frame exercised over Americans in virtually every aspect of their lives.

These frames could conflict with each other, as emphasized above. They could also reinforce each other. Slavery was an essential part of the international market of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries despite the apparent economic irrationality of the institution. Typically, frames both reinforced and contradicted each other. We will watch this play out over the course of the semester.

Class Schedule:

Jan. 19: Introduction; we will begin the course in the summer of 1964 with a close look at how historians write history. John McClymer set a double task for himself in Mississippi Freedom Summer. One was to put together a "documentary narrative," that is, to collect materials that would tell the story of the Summer of 1964. The other was to explain the great irony of that summer. It was the high point of the Civil Rights movement, the time when blacks and whites came together and forever shattered the Old South of Jim Crow. The summer also marked the splintering of the coalition that achieved that triumph. Why did the people who finally forced the "system" to work conclude that it was impossible to work within the system? Why did those who proved whites and blacks could effectively work together adopt the racially separatist ideology of "Black Power"? Key to both tasks is the selection and sequencing of sources. For each of the next three classes, submit notes one hour beforehand in which you discuss specific passages from three documents (DO NOT CHOOSE HEADNOTES) in terms of:

  1. What you can learn about the Civil Rights movement in general and the Mississippi Freedom Summer in particular from each specific passage.
  2. What specifically you find enlightening and/or confusing.

Jan. 21: Mississippi Freedom Summer, pp. 1-72 (be sure to include the first part of Robert Moses' speech at Stanford, pp. 27-37 among your choices)

Jan. 26: Mississippi Freedom Summer, pp. 73-176 (be sure to include the second part of the Moses speech at Stanford, pp. 91-101 among your choices)

Jan. 28: Mississippi Freedom Summer, pp. 177-242

Race, Class, and Nationality, 1876-1907

Introduction to The Railroad Strike of 1877 — We will divvy up some of the resources on this site and several others to create a documentary history of the strike. We will start with this map of the progression of the strike. The strike was triggered by this announcement from the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad of a ten percent wage cut and first broke out in Martinsburg, West Virginia on July 16. It then spread to Baltimore by July 20 and then to the west. Workers on the Pennsylvania Railroad also struck as did those on several other lines. On the evening of the 20th a riot broke out in Baltimore involving some 15,000 people. Even worse violence took place in Pittsburgh, as this headline from the Pittsburgh Daily Post for July 23, 1877 indicates.

Reign of the Mob!
A Black Sunday for Pittsburgh.
The Firing on the People by the Philadelphians on Saturday.
Over Thirty Killed and Nearly One Hundred Wounded.
Troops Driven into and Beseiged in the Round House. They Make their Escape Yesterday and Take Refuge in the Work House.
All the Outer Depot Buildings and Workshops Burned.
One Hundred and Forty Locomotives Destroyed or Badly Injured.
Over a Thousand Freight Cars Burned.
The Union Depot Hotel and Grain Elevator Burned.
Spread of the Fire on Washington and Fountain Streets.
Scenes in the Streets of Mob Audacity and Cruelty.
The Citizens Hold a Sunday Mass Meeting. And Organize Vigilance Committee and Special Police.
The Loss of the Day Many Millions of Dollars. Railroad Travel Interrupted.
The Strike and Rioting Extending All Along the Central Line.
Troops Destined for this Point Intercepted at Altoona.
General Sheridan and U.S. Troops to Arrive Here Soon.
Measures of the Local Civic and Military Authorities to Preserve Order To-Day.

West Virginia and Maryland: The Railroad Strike of 1877 + Archives of Maryland, Documents for the Classroom, Newspaper Accounts
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8.		 Pittsburgh and Points West: The Railroad Strike of 1877 + The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 at the University of Pittsburgh (photographs)
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Feb. 2: Reports on the Strike. Choose specific documents, including illustrations where relevant, to trace the beginnings of the strike, the efforts of Baltimore & Ohio and other railroad officials to get first state militia and then federal troops to put down the strike, the rioting and other forms of violence, and the aftermath. Below is an example of how you might select an account of a specific incident and attach a suitable illustration.

FIRING ON THE CROWD.

It was not the purpose of the officers to fire on the crowd, but after the first recoil, when Company I again moved to the door and were received with another terrific stone assault, the soldiers seemed to lose control of themselves so far as to think only of their own defense. The firing began at the door, and the officers claim that it was without orders from them. Company I, with fixed bayonets, moved on Front street toward Baltimore street and were followed at an interval of about thirty feet by Company F, who were also received with showers of missiles and responded with occasional volleys of musketry. A volley was fired along Fayette street towards the bridge, driving the crowd in that direction. Theses two companies marched by Front street to Baltimore street, and up Baltimore street to Gay, fighting their way at every step and doing sad execution with the Minnie balls from their rifles. By the time they had passed the corner of Baltimore and Harrison streets, one man [was] dead with a ball through the breast and three others dangerously wounded, had been carried into Laroque's drug store at that point. The two companies continued up Baltimore street toward the Camden Station. Company B Captain [unclear], by order of Colonel Peters, being the last to leave the armory, marched by way of Front street to Gay street and up Gay to Baltimore street, and thence towards the depot. This route was taken to avoid the hostile crowd. While moving out of the armory Col. Peters directed the companies from the head of the stairs, going with the less experienced officers to the door, and once saying to a youth in one of the companies, who seemed on the point of giving way to his terror, "go forward and fight like a man," pushing him on. — Baltimore Sun, July 21, 1877


MARYLAND.—THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD STRIKE—THE SIXTH REGIMENT, N.G.S.M., FIRING UPON THE MOB, ON THE CORNER OF FREDERICK AND BALTIMORE STREETS, JULY 20TH.— Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, August 4, 1877 [N.G.S.M. stood for National Guard, State of Maryland]

Feb. 4: Working Class Family Budgets workshop + Introduction to Chinese Exclusion

The Chinese — Facts for Atlantic Papers
All comparisons between Irish and German immigration and that of the Chinese are unjust. The former make their homes here, buy farms and homesteads, are of the same general race, are buried here after death, and take an interest and aid in all things pertaining to the best interests of the country. The Chinese come for a season only; and, while they give their labor, they do not expend the proceeds of such labor in the country. They do not come to settle or make homes, and not one in fifty of them is married. Their women are all suffering slaves and prostitutes, for which possession murderous feuds and high-handed cruelty are constantly occurring. To compare the Chinese with even the lowest white laborers is, therefore, absurd.

Our best interests are suffering [because] of these Asiatic slaves; we are trying to make them live decently while here, and to discourage their arrival in such numbers as to drive white laborers out of the country. Nineteen persons out of every twenty here desire and intend that all this shall be done peaceably and without oppression; all that is asked is that motives and acts not entertained or practiced shall not be charged against California by those who discuss this question with but a slight knowledge of the facts, and that knowledge distorted and one sided. — San Francisco Real Estate Circular (September, 1874)

"At Frisco" is from Harper’s Weekly, March 20, 1880, page 183.

Feb. 9: Discussion of Bret Harte, "Plain Language from Truthful James" + Thomas Nast cartoon lampooning James G. Blaine for supporting exclusion + Nast, "Every Dog Has His Day" and "Let the Chinese Embrace Civilization . . . "; Denis Kearney, "Chinese Invasion" (1878) + "The Chinese Must Go" Workingman's ballot.

Submit notes one hour before class exploring the following questions. Since this is the introduction to an important and complicated topic, I am looking for superficial comments. Profound insights are always welcome but not expected at this point.

  • The cartoon Irishman of "At Frisco" refers to the Chinaman as a "Haythun," that is, a Heathen. The most celebrated use of the phrase "heathen Chinee" is Bret Harte's in "Plain Language from Truthful James". What difference, if any, is there between Ah Sin and Bill Nye? Between the Irishman and the Chinaman in the cartoon? Remember, details matter.
  • Thomas Nast returns to Harte's poem in his "Blaine Language." Blaine, the Republican nominee for president in 1884 and a Senator from Maine, was a leading supporter of Chinese Exclusion, the law that in 1882 banned immigration from China. How does Nast use the poem? How does he depict the Irish and the Chinese?
  • Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant, led the "Chinese Must Go" movement. Hence Nast's use of an Irish brogue in "At Frisco." Pick several phrases and/or passages from "Chinese Invasion" that strike you as especially interesting, revealing, and/or confusing.

Feb. 11: Discussion of materials on Kearneyism at the Museum of San Francisco, specifically Jerome A. Hart's "The Sand Lot and Kearneyism" and "The Kearney-Kallock Epoch"; there is an extensive collection of materials on the Chinese experience in America drawn from Harper's Weekly at HarpWeek. Read "A BREACH OF NATIONAL FAITH," Harper’s Weekly, March 9, 1879, page 182 (Editorial) + any three other documents on the site. Submit notes one hour before class exploring the following questions:

Feb. 16: "The Chinese of the Eastern States": Carroll Wright and French Canadian Immigration — excerpts from Wright's Twelfth and Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor (1881, 1882). In the first Wright accused French Canadians of being a "horde" of industrial invaders who "care nothing for our institutions" and whose only good trait was docility. The second report contains the proceedings of a hearing Wright called to placate outraged French Canadians who protested that they were a "white people." In this Wright wrote that the "complete assimilation" of the Canadian French was simply a matter of time.

Twelfth Report: submit notes one hour before class exploring the following questions:
  • What, according to Wright, were the most objectionable traits of the "Canadian French"? Be specific and cite specific passages.
  • What parallels to the Chinese did Wright point to? Be specific and cite specific passages.

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 Thirteenth Report: submit notes one hour before class exploring the following questions:
  • Wright based his revised view of the Canadian French to a significant extent upon his new understanding of the role of the Catholic Church in their communities? What was that role, according to him? Be specific and cite specific passages.
  • How did Wright explain the continued likelihood of so-called Old Stock (and Protestant) Americans thinking of the French Canadians as unassimilable? Be specific and cite specific passages.

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Feb. 18: Discussion of Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley on "Immigration"; Jacques Barzun argues in From Dawn to Decadence (2000) that "it is a disgrace to American scholarship" that Dunne "is not studied, and thus republished and enjoyed on a par with Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. The dialect in which Mr. Dooley dialogues with his crony is no more an obstacle than the several types of backwood speech in Huckleberry Finn." Barzun quotes Mr. Dooley on John D. Rockefeller as proof of his point: "He is a kind iv Society f'r th' Prevention of Croolty to Money. If he finds a man misusin' his money, he takes it away fr'm him and adopts it." We willl give Mr. Dooley the last word on the subject of immigration and nativism, at least for now. Submit one hour before class three passages from "Immigration" that strike you as most revealing, interesting, and/or confusing along with a brief explanation for each of your choices.

+ Introduction to Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee materials and divvying up of topics. For an account of the beginning of the wars with the Plains Indians, see McClymer, The Dakota Sioux Uprising of 1862

Feb. 23: Little Bighorn is the most famous victory of the Plains Indians over the U.S. Army. Materials include battle maps from True West showing Custer's troop movements and a detailed battle map + The Battle of Little Bighorn: An Eyewitness Account by the Lakota Chief Red Horse recorded in pictographs and text at the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1881 [at PBS Archives of the West] + images at the same site; George Herendon's account of the battle; dime novel versions of the battle at Stanford — "Custer's Last Shot," "Sitting Bull on the War Path," Part 1 and 2. There are several dimensions to the story. One is what happened. For this we have the maps, some photographs, and the two eyewitness accounts. Another is how the battle came to be perceived in the popular imagination. For that we have the dime novels.
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Wounded Knee (1890) and the Vanishing Indian — The massacre of a band of Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek brought decades of warfare between Plains Indians and the U.S. to a brutal end. By the late 1880s, the Plains Indians had all been penned up in reservations. A Paiute mystic named Wovoka (his white name was Jack Wilson) had a dream in which God showed him the future. All of the Indians who had died were to return. The whites would all be banished from the land. To bring this about, the Indians were to perform the Ghost Dance and wear the Ghost Shirt. The latter would make the white man's bullets miss the wearer. Wovoka's message combined Paiute and Christian ideas. Jesus had already returned, he claimed. And the whites would be supplanted because they had killed him. While waiting for the great moment, Indians were to be peaceful, continue to work for the white man, and continue the dance.

We will use materials collected for the PBS series "The West." These include:
Two Representations of the Battle of Little Big Horn
Drawing by Red Horse, a Minneconjou Sioux:
Illustration from Harper's Weekly

As with the Strike of 1877, we will create a documentary history of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. Thus you should choose specific excerpts from specific sources and seek to illustrate them where feasible.

Introduction to Lynching


Ida B. Wells, c. 1890

Feb. 25: White Southerners defended lynching in terms of "racial retrogression." This notion, rooted in the biological theory that behaviorial characterists were inherited rather than learned, held that blacks, loosed from the retraints of slavery, were reverting to African savagery. One of its chief advocates was Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a professor at Harvard and Dean of its Lawrence Scientific School. In 1890 he published "Science and the African Problem" in the Atlantic Monthly. Sen. Benjamin "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, Speech on the Senate floor, in 1907 gave a classic statement of this theory. Ida B. Wells, "Lynch Law in America" + "Without Sanctuary" — the latter is a collection of photographs of lynchings. They are very disturbing. If you wish, you are free to not view them. Wells devoted her life to the campaign against lynching. There is a good brief biography at the University of Mississippi. Submit one hour before class notes that address the following:

Mar. 2: The Lynching of Ed Johnson (1906) as described in the Chattanooga Times:

  1. Awful Crime at St. Elmo (January 24, 1906)
  2. Feeling at High Pitch (January 25, 1906)
  3. Law and Order Victorious Over Overwhelming Odds (January 26, 1906)
  4. Wheels of Justice Turn Quickly (January 28, 1906)
  5. State Presents Its Case (February 7, 1906)
  6. Ed Johnson Sentenced to Die on March 13 (February 10, 1906)
  7. Justice Harlan Allows Appeal of Ed Johnson (March 19, 1906)
  8. "God Bless You All -- I Am Innocent"/Last Words of Ed Johnson Before Being Shot to Death by a Mob Like a Dog (March 20, 1906)

"Pitchfork Ben" described the way whites went about lynching black rapists:

Our rule is to make the woman witness, prosecutor, judge, and jury. I have known Judge Lynch's court to sit for a week while suspect after suspect has been run down and arrested, and in every instance they were brought into the presence of the victim, and when she said, 'That is not the man,' he was set free; but when she said, 'That is the man,' civilization asserted itself, and death, speedy and fearful, let me say—certainly speedy—was meted out.

Mar. 4: A "Road Not Taken" and the Consequences — Thomas E. Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” The Arena 6 (October 1892): 540-550 offered a plea to poor whites and blacks to cooperate in the new Populist Party. The plea went unheeded. Instead poor whites rallied around the Democratic Party and its battle cry: White Supremacy. The result can be seen in the Wilmington, N.C. Race Riot of 1898. Read "A Statement of Facts Concerning the Bloody Riot in Wilmington, N.C." by the Rev. J. Allen Kirk + THE STORY OF THE WILMINGTON, N.C., RACE RIOTS BY COL. ALFRED M. WADDELL. Submit one hour before class notes that address the following issues.

Introduction to Populism and the Elections of 1892 and 1896

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SPRING BREAK

Mar. 16: Reports on the elections of 1892 and 1896

Gender, Sex, and Woman's Rights

Mar. 18: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, "Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s," Journal of American History (September 2000) [available via Assumption College library subscription; link will not work off campus.] "Get thee behind me (Mrs.) Satan" illustrated the cover of that issue of the Journal. For a much larger version, click on the image. Victoria Woodhull discussed Thomas Nast's "coarse, vulgar attempt at pious wit" in her own weekly newspaper. You can find more about the Beecher-Tilton Scandal, discussed by Horowitz, in THE NOTORIOUS ADULTERY TRIAL OF THE REVEREND HENRY WARD BEECHER by RICHARD K. SHERWIN. "Testimony in the great Beecher-Tilton scandal case illustrated" / Commercial Lith. Co. ; des. & drawn by James E. Cook, is well worth serious examination. There is a useful brief biography of Woodhull at Spartacus. A fuller but still brief sketch of Woodhull by Susan Kullmann is available on her Feminist Geek site. A good brief sketch of Comstock's career is RALPH K. ANDRIST, "Paladin of Purity," American Heritage (June 1973). We will all read the Horowitz article.

Reports on the Beecher-Tilton scandal; on Victoria Woodhull; on Anthony Comstock. Submit one hour before class notes that you will use in your report. Reports should focus upon those specific elements of your topic that deepened, complicated, and/or confused your understanding of the "conflict over sex in the United States in the 1870s."

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Victoria Woodhull
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 Anthony Comstock
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Mar. 23: In 1872 Susan B. Anthony registered and voted. She was subsequently indicted for voting illegally. As the indictment noted, when she voted she was "“then and there a person of the female sex.” We will work with The Trial of Susan B. Anthony, by Ann D. Gordon, Editor, Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Rutgers University — We will all read "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: A Short Narrative" and "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: Media and Press Coverage" and we will divvy up the Historical Documents. Reports on the trial. Submit one hour before class notes that you will use in your report. Reports should focus upon those specific elements of your reading that deepened, complicated, and/or confused your understanding of the arguments over suffrage. http://memory.loc.gov/master/pnp/cph/3b40000/3b49000/3b49800/3b49804u.tif

Mar. 23 document assignments

When I found I could effect nothing through the officials, I was sad, indeed. I saw that Kansas homes, hearts and souls were to be sacrificed. I had lost all the hopes of my young life through drink, I saw the terrible results that would befall others. I felt that I had rather die than see the saloons come back to Kansas. I felt desperate. I took this to God daily, feeling He only, could rescue. On the 5th of June [1900], before retiring, I threw myself face downward at the foot of my bed in my home in Medicine Lodge. I poured out my grief in agony to God, in about this strain: "Oh Lord you see the treason in Kansas, they are going to break the mothers' hearts, they are going to send the boys to drunkards' graves and a drunkard's hell. I have exhausted my means, Oh Lord, you have plenty of ways. You have used the base things and the weak things, use me to save Kansas. I have but one life to give you, if I had a thousand, I would give them all, please show me something to do." The next morning I was awakened by a voice which seemed to me speaking in my heart, these words, "GO TO KIOWA," and my hands were lifted and thrown down and the words, "I'LL STAND BY YOU." The words, "Go to Kiowa," were spoken in a murmuring, musical tone, low and soft, but "I'll stand by you," was very clear, positive and emphatic. I was impressed with a great inspiration, the interpretation was very plain, it was this: "Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them." I was very much relieved and overjoyed and was determined to be, "obedient to the heavenly vision" (Acts 26:19).
--The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, Written by Herself, 1908.

Once she got to Kiowa, she smashed the largest saloon there. Carry Nation was a long-time member of the Kansas chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In 1880 Kansas had banned the sale of alcohol but the courts ruled that the law could not prohibit the sale of alcohol in "original packaging." This permitted saloonkeepers to re-open. Nation always argued that she and her followers — hundreds joined her "Home Defenders" — had to resort to force: "You refused me the vote and I had to use a rock."

The poster dates from 1901. Carry [note spelling] was in jail in Topeka for destruction of property when James E. Furlong signed her up for a lecture tour. In her autobiography she commented:

"I never made a note or wrote a sentence for the platform in my life. I have spoke extemporaneously from the first and often went on the platform when I could not have told what I was to say, and for several weeks God compelled me to open my Bible at random and speak from what my eyes fell on. I have literally proved that: 'You shall not think of what you shall speak, but it shall be given in that same hour.'"

Nation had personal reasons for crusading against alcohol. Her first husband was an alcoholic who died after only two years, leaving her with an infant daughter. But, religious conviction was at least as important. In the poster she carries both her famous hatchet and the Bible. She refused to be photographed without a Bible. Saloons fostered other social evils in addition to drunkenness and alcoholism. They were often centers of gambling and prostitution. And the customers smoked. In addition to smashing saloons, Nation often snatched cigars out of the mouths of men she passed on the street. She would crush the cigar under her heel while lecturing the startled victim that he had no right to contaminate the air she and other passersby had to breathe.

The tour got off to a profitable start but in September, upon hearing the news that President McKinley had been shot, Nation said "I have no tears for this McKinley. Neither have I any for his assassin. I have no sympathy for this friend of the brewers." Furlong cancelled the rest of the tour.

Mar. 25: Read the Kansas City Star account of Carry Nation in Topeka (Jan. 31, 1901) + LEGAL STATUS OF PROHIBITION AND JOINT SMASHING & MY TRIAL FOR DIVORCE from Nation's autobiography. Submit one hour before class notes that address the following issues:

Class Schedule Continued