THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR

In 1865 the Civil War was drawing to a close.  It had been the bloodiest war in history, with more casualties than there had 
been combatants involved in all previous American wars.

As victory approached, Lincoln had won reelection to the presidency, and only a few days after Washington DC had errupted 
in celebration of Lee's surrender, Lincoln was dead, and with him died his plans for a benevolent settlement with the south.  
John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln as he sat in a box at Ford's Theatre watching Our American Cousin, and Lincoln was dead 
by the next dawn.  Booth escaped, with the help of Southern sympathizers in Maryland, but was eventually caught and burnt 
in a barn outside Washington.  Booth's act of vengeance was to assure untold suffering for the south, because Lincoln's calm 
moderation was the only force that could have kept northern radicals from ravaging the south in reconstruction.

Lincoln wanted a settlement made 'with malice towards none, with charity for all.'  On hearing of his death, Lee said that the 
south had 'surrendered as much to Lincoln's goodness as to Grant's artillery.'

Melville summed the situation up best when he wrote in The Martyr...

        He lieth in his blood--
          The father on his face;
        They have killed him, the forgiver--
          The avenger takes his place...


RECONSTRUCTION

Certainly, following Lincoln's death, the treatment accorded the south at the hands of the north was far harsher than it might 
have been if he had lived.

While both the north and south had suffered loss of lives and money in the war, the south had also taken great physical 
damage, with large parts of Richmond, Charleston, ATlanta, Mobile and Vicksburg burnt to the ground.  The $4 Billion the 
north had spent on the war had fed the nothern industrial system and led to a boom, while the south spiraled the south into a 
depression.  The value of land in the south was 1.5 billion before the war.  By 1870 it had dropped to half that value.  All of 
the investments and banking in the south were gone, as were southern investments made in northern banks.

After the war, southern slave holders gathered their slaves together, informed them they were free, and for the most part offered 
to hire them back as wage-earning farm hands.  Many slaves took up this offer, but many did not, believing as one said, 'I 
must go, for if I stay, I'll never know I am free.'  Those who chose not to stay did just what northern workers feared, they 
migrated in huge numbers to the northern cities, where they took unskilled laboring jobs away from Irish and Italian and 
German immigrants.

Being free did not bring the slaves to true equality, and it did not necessarily mean an improvement in the conditions u under 
which they lived.  They traded slavery for responsibility, and only those prepared to accept that burden improved their lot.  As 
one freed slave said, 'The Master he say we are all free, but it don't mean we is white.  And it don't mean we is equal.  Just 
equal for to work and earn our living and not depend on him for no more meats and clothes.'

In many cases the transition from slavery was easier for the slaves than for the masters.  Slaves were at least accustomed to 
working for a living, and many in the white master class who had lost everything in the war were ill prepared to be part of a 
new class of post-war poor.

In some states the union permitted the transition to share-cropping arrangements where the slaves essentially moved from 
slavery to serfdom, getting land and dividing the crops they harvested with their former masters.

In Texas, which was less hard hit by the war and reconstruction than many other states, the state government rounded up all 
of the blacks into internment camps, one of them still stands on Bull Creek here in Austin.  They were housed in these 
camps until they could be relocated on vacant land or moved out of state.

When the war was initiated, its expressed purpose was, 'to defend and maintain the supremacy of the constitution and 
topreserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired, and as soon as these objects are 
accomplished, the war ought to cease.'

However, very quickly after the war was over, radical northern politicians moved in and plans were developed to go beyond 
those limits and carry on a wholesale reformation and reconstruction of the south.

At the very end of the war Lincoln formulated what was called the '10 Percent Plan' for reconstruction.  It offered amnesty to 
any southern citizen, except for high ranking military and government officials, who would take an oath of loyalty to the 
constitution and the union.  All confiscated property except slaves would be returned.  As soon as 10% of the people who had 
voted in the presidential election of 1860 had taken the oath, the state would be allowed to write a new constitution, elect new 
state officers, congressmen and senators, essentially being restored to statehood.

Lincoln was very soft on the south in the matter of slavery, stating that he 'would not object to any provision they might 
wish to make regarding freed slaves which may yet be consistent with their present condition as a laboring, landless and 
homeless class.'  He hoped that this would encourage southern states to step in and provide some resolution to the plight of 
the freed blacks.  Instead, it opened the door for the development of Black Codes in the south in the mid 1860s which 
restricted the rights of blacks, and while they did not restore slavery they made the situation much more difficult in the south.  
Until the end, Lincoln believed that the black population would be a problem for the nation and supported the concept of 
colonization.  He said, 'Thereis an unwillingness on a part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to 
remain with us.  It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.'  This plan was rejected by black leaders, and Lincoln did 
eventually suggest that states extend suffrage to blacks who had served as soldiers.  This was up to the states, and none really 
took the concept seriously.

While Lincoln urged a hands off approach to dealing with the south, other leaders took a more radical position.  Thaddeus 
Stevens led this faction, and declared that 'to make the confederacy a safe republic, the whole fabric of southern society must 
be changed.'  His plan was to break up southern estates and give the land to the slaves, and to give blacks the vote, while 
witholding it from confederate sympathizers.  He was joined in this by the no-longer bloody, but still very radical Charles 
Sumner.

This radical program was offered as an alternative to Lincoln's plan in the Wade-Davis Bill.  This required a majority of the 
citizens of a state, not just 10% to swear loyalty to the union before it could be readmitted as a state.  Only southerners who 
had never served in the armed forces would be allowed to vote in the new state.  It also insisted that new state constitutions 
provide for harsh limits on confederate veterans and outlaw all forms of slavery.

Many northerners felt that when the south was readmitted to the union, even if blacks weren't given the vote, it would quickly 
gain a majority in congress and troubles would begin again.  This led to growing support for the plan of the Wade-Davis Bill.

These same radicals pushed through the 13th Ammendment to the Constitution in Devember of 1865, which abolished 
slavery constitutionally and it was ratified by 27 states, including 8 former confederate states.

They went on to refuse to admit Louisiana to the union when it had fulfilled the requirements of the 10% Plan, against 
Lincoln's express instructions.  They also created the Freedman's Bureau to deal with the problems of assimilating free blacks 
into the society.

These tasks done, the radical congress adjourned.  When it returned it discovered a new president in office, Andrew Johnson.  
Johnson had been put on the ticket to moderate Lincoln's supposed radicalism, and though he was a strong unionist, he was 
not a great hater of slavery, and had once said, 'I wish to god every head of a family in the US had one slave to take the 
drudgery and menial service off his family.'

Johnson decided to follow through with the 10% Plan, offered statehood to Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Virginia, 
appointed military governors of the remaining states, and offered amnesty toe everyone in the four states he had readmitted, 
except high ranking confederate officials and large land holders.  Johnson resented the southern elite, and wanted to make them 
grovel before him for amnesty and various rights, but he was willing to let the states as a whole have free reign in 
reconstruction.  Under his leadership all of the states except Texas were readmitted to the union.

With Johnson's approval many states adopted Black Codes in 1865 and 1866.  These gave blacks some basic rights, but 
forbade them to serve on juries and gave life sentences for interracial marriage.  They also forbade them to bear arms, hold 
public office or assemble freely.  Many states also forbade them tofreely quit their jobs or to rent land or houses.  Some, like 
Georgia, even instituted vagrancy laws which allowed the state to arrest and try unemployed blacks and set them to work on 
chain gangs or hire them out as convict labor to planters.  The Black Codes did generally insure the right of blacks to sue in 
court, to marry and to send their children to school, but they were used more to limit freedom than to grant it.  With one hand 
they gave and with the other they took away.

These codes fulfilled all of the worst fears of northern radicals, and in response they introduced the Fourteenth Amendment in 
congress toassure civil rights for blacks, giving them citizenship and all of its rights.  While it did not give the right to vote 
to blacks, it penalized states which did not give this right to its blacks.  It also barred confederate officials and officers from 
public office and outlawed confederate debts and any claims for compensation for loss of slaves.

It was hard to get the amendment ratified, and its vague language left it open for far reaching interpretations, including 
arguments in support of womens suffrage.  Radicals insisted that southern states ratify it to be readmitted to the union, but 
President Johnson advised against support of it.  All but Tennessee followed his advice and the amendment was rejected.

Radicals then passed the First Reconstruction Act over Johnson's veto in March of 1867.  It declared the newly established 
southern state governments illegal and organized new military districts in the south, giving the vote toall blacks and insisting 
that the states also ratify the 14th Amendment to be readmitted to statehood.  Under these conditions most of the southern 
states ratified it and by 1870 all the states were readmitted to the union.  On the wave of this success they went on to pass 
provisions limiting presidential power to control the army and to remove officials from office without the consent of 
congress.

They went even farther in November of 1867 to call for the impeachment of President Johnson who they said had tried to 
reorganize the southern states, 'in accordance with his own will, in the interests of the great criminals whohad carried them 
into rebellion.'  The impeachment failed by only one vote, but it sent a clear message as Johnson concluded his term.

The candidatechosen by the radicals to take over the presidency was Ulysses S. Grant, and he won with ease against a 
democratic party which republicans described as 'a common sewar and loathesome receptacle, into which is emptied every 
element of inhumanity and barbarism which has dishonored the age.'

Because blacks had been prevented from voting in many southern states, the radicals then passed the 15th Amendment which 
said that 'The Right of the Citizens of the US to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by any state on account of 
race, color, or previous condition of servitude.'

Finally, in march 1875 when the liberal republicans knew they were about to be displaced by a southern democratic majority, 
they passed the Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed equal rights and access to public facilities to blacks.

With these reforms, blacks began to organize and come to power in the south.  One shocked republican, who had been against 
slavery, painted a surprising portrait of the SC legislature...'The speaker is black, the clerk is black, the doorkeepers are black, 
the little pages are black, the chairman of the ways and means is black, and the chaplain is coal-black.  At some of the desks 
sit colored men whose types would be hard to find outside of Congo...It is the dregs of the population habilitated in he robes 
of their intelligent predecessors...It is barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force.  It is the slave rioting in the 
halls of his master.'

At first about half the eligible voters in the south were black.  There were black lieutenant governors, secretaries of state and 
even 14 black congressmen and 2 black senators, beginning with Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi and congressman J. H. 
Rainey of SC who took office in 1870.  Many of these black office holders did they jobs well, and to the southern whites this 
was even more frightening than their failures might have been.  As W. E. B. DuBois said, 'there is one thing that the White 
South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was negro honesty, knowledge and efficiency.'

The white south was determined to restore its political power.  Southern educators warned, 'if a negro is fit to make laws for 
the control of our conduct or property, he is certainly fit to eat with us at our tables, to sleep in our beds, to be invited into 
our parlors, and to do all acts and things which a white man may do.'

At the same time that the first blacks were taking public office southern states began to be readmitted to the union, president 
Johnson granted amnesty to southerners who fought in the civil war, and just as southern blacks got their first taste of self 
determination, it was already  being snatched away.

Secret organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were established, and though congress and 
President Grant attempted to supress them, when the Democrats finally gained power again on the strength of returning 
southern voters in 1875 many of the reforms of the 1860s were reversed.  The democrats formulated the 'shotgun plan' to 
'carry the election peacably if we can, forcibly if we must.'

The KKK was a leading force in the 1870s, and achieved national support and prominence, though the government arrested 
and imprisoned many of its leaders.  Its rallying cry was the chant...

'Niggers and leaguers, get out of the way,
We're born of the night and we vanish by day.
No rations have we, but the flesh of man--
And love niggers best---the Ku Klux Klan;
We catch 'em alive and roast 'em whole,
Then hand 'em around with a sharpened pole.
Whole leagues have been eaten, not leaving a man,
And went away hungry---the Ku Klux Klan...

Through the violence of semi-legitimate paramilitary groups like the Rifle Clubs, White Leagues and Red Shirts, white 
Republicans or Carpetbaggers who had moved south in reconstruction were driven out and defiant blacks were assaulted and 
even murdered.  In the face of this many chose to give up their political activism and settle for what the reemerging white 
society was willing to offer them.  Despite the fact that black leaders had exercised their political responsibility with 
competence and seemed to be learning from their experience, the atmosphere which had made Black rule possible was ending 
in the 1870s, and it would be almost 100 years before anything like that freedom would be restored.

The political climate had changed with the reemergence of the Democrats, and the social climate had become unhealthy for 
uppity blacks, and with the compromise of 1877 the last troops were pulled out of the south and those states were left to 
govern themselves as they saw fit.

By the 1890s, Jim Crow laws for segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests and residence requirements in the southern states had 
essentially disenfranchised the black population.  In Louisiana, where there had been 130,000 Black Voters in 1896, only 
1,342 voted in 1904.

While blacks were still no longer slaves in the aftermath of reconstruction, despite initial victories, the nation still had a long 
way to go towards true justice and equality.


POLITICS IN THE GILDED AGE

Prior to the Civil War, the careers of politicians like Benjamin Wade and James Buchanan had made it clear that the era of the 
professional politician was on its way, and from the chaos of reconstruction party-politics, political machines and all manner 
of corruption blossomed in the national government and the various states.

In an era of growing economy and big business, the new financial and tax systems introduced during the civil war (including 
the first income tax) made the government the biggest business of all once that war was over and there were plenty who 
wanted to make use of that wealth and power.

The first polical machines had begun back during Van Buren's Albany Regency, and that tradition continued in New York 
under Boss Tweed, whose Tamany Hall organization ran New York city, had been responsible for draft riots and labor unrest, 
and was supported mainly by the Irish immigrant population.  Although he was arrested and jailed twice in the early 1870s 
and then finally convicted on 204 counts of fraud and fined $12,500 and given 12 years in jail, though in 1874 he escaped and 
fled to cuba and from there to Spain, where he was captured and returned to the US to serve out his term.

During all of this Ulysses S. Grant was president.  Later he tried to excuse the errors of his presidency on the grounds that he 
was inexperienced, but governmental corruption certainly reached its height in his administration.  Although grant was 
popular, the fact that the economy collapsed in the Panic of 1873, that the southern democrats returned to power, that several 
of his appointees were impeached and indicted, that a civil war occured in Arkansas, and that he seemed to support legislation 
to the economic benefit of his cronies, all counted against him.  Although he remained popular with the people, he lost the 
support of his own party, and in the election of 1876 his aspirations for an unprecedented third term were thwarted.

In the election of 1876 Samuel Tilden of New York came out with an easy victory over Rutherford Hayes, based mainly on 
southern votes.  Then it was revealed that Republicans, led by Tamany hall experts, had stuffed the ballot boxes in Florida, 
SC and LA and a special comission was established by the house and senate to evaluate the election.  Evidence indicated that 
although republicans had stuffed ballot boxes, democrats had prevented blacks from voting.  Lew Wallace commented on the 
election in the south, 'It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win.  Money and 
intimidation can obtain the oath of white men as well as black to any required statement...if we win, our methods are subject 
to impeachment for possible fraud.  If the enemy win, it is the same thing.'  Supposedly the governors of Florida and LA had 
agreed to sell their states electoral votes for $200,000 each.  Basically both sides were totally corrupt.

Supreme Cout Justice Bradley cast the deciding vote in the comission for Hayes, but there was such grumbling in congress 
that a compromise had to be worked out in which Hayes promised to remove troops from SC and LA and let the south return 
to running its own affairs, in exchange for which southerners ended their objections to his selection.

No one was punished, no cleansing of the system took place.  The problem was resolved, and apparently this sort of 
corruption was accepted as grease on the wheels of the governmental machine.

Southern whites resumed control of their state governments, black self-determinationcontinued to be whittled away, and the 
lure of profit and economic boom in the 1880s turned mens eyes towards the popular vision of a 'Gilded Age' of industry and 
growth and away from the more mundane problems of urban poverty in the north and the return to near bondage for blacks in 
the south.  There was money to be made and causes of civil rights and social justice were unnecessary distractions.

As John Altgeld, a controversial governor of Illinois said at the time in a letter to the Tribune, 'What would be my advice to 
the young man of today who is anxious to beome a millionaire?  If you wish to get rich very quickly, then bleed the public 
and talk patriotism.  This may involve bribing public officials and dodging public burdens, the losing of your manhood and 
the soiling of your fingers, but that is the way most of the great fortunes are made in this country now.'


RAIL ROADS & ROBBER BARONS

July 4, 1829: Construction  begun on Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  Founder was Charles Carroll of Maryland, who had 
signed the declaration of independence.  The B&O was completed from Baltimore to Wheeling, VA in 1853.

1832: The Emigrant newspaper of Ann Arbor, MI, suggested the idea of a transcontinental railroad

Nonetheless, the railroads were slow getting started.  In 1840 there were only about 3300 miles of track, mostly in the 
northeast,  but by 1860 there were over 30,000 miles of track and rails reached as far west as the western border of Missouri.  
After the civil war the rails would eventually unite the east and west coasts.

Passenger trains whipped along at 20 miles an hour taking settlers west to Chicago and St. Louis on the first leg of their 
journey, and freight trains got goods to market at a blinding 11mph.

Most of the early railroads grew out of the canal industry.  Canal builders built rails to expand their trade over mountains and 
when rails began to become cheaper than canals they gradually switched over to building railroads instead.

Most of the early railroad companaies, like the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Erie, began as canal 
companies.

Pennsylvania was the most active railroad state becaus of its relatively easy access to the west.  The Pennsylvania Railroad, 
which began running from Harrisburg to Pittsburg in 1846 was required to pay 3 cents per ton-mile of freight hauled to the 
state canal commission.  The first railroads in NY state parallelled the course of the erie canal and eventually took its place as 
the main road for freight west.  Eventually the Pennsylvania Railroad bought out the canal system in PA to put an end to that 
form of competition.

Massachusetts worked hard to catch up, and by 1850 almost every town in the state was connected by trains.  Boston led the 
investment in western rail lines, under the leadership of John Murray Forbes, they moved their money west to build rail lines 
to Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis.

Engineering problems held back railroad growth, including the lack of durability in iron-shod wood rails and dangers of sparks 
starting fires, but most of these problems were solved by:

Chicago became the rail hub of the west, and in the 1860s it was served by no fewer than 45 different rail roads.

Railroads were faster and more competitive than barges on rivers or canals and very quickly they began to put these businesses 
to rest, with only the erie canal surviving with any strength.

The census of 1860 reported, 'So great are the benefits, that if the entire cost of railroads between the atlantic and the western 
states had been levied on the farmers of the central west, they could have paid it and been immensely the gainers.'

In the 1850s there were four great railroads.  The longest of these was the Erie, with 537 miles of track in 1851, followed by 
the B&O, the Pennsylvania and The New York Central, consolidated out of 8 short lines in New York by Erastus Corning.

By 1855 passengers could travel from Chicago or St. Louis to the eastcoast at from $20 to $30 in less than 48 hours.  A 
generation before the journey would have taken 3 weeks.  The trip from Buffalo to NY was $4, and freight could travel from 
Pittsburgh to Philadelphia at $1.50 per ton.

Investment in railroads led to a new sort of economy and a new kind of businessmen, the big investor.  Bonds to finance 
railroads became so popular that many banking houses started to just trade in bonds and became the first investment brokers.  
Railroads were given large grants of land by the government and used these lands as collateral to finance the issuing of bonds 
to fund their high initial expenses.  In the 1850s these expenses amounted to over $800 million.

Many railroads were financed by public sale of shares.  Erastus Corning established the New York central with 20,000 shares, 
valued at $100 each.  They actually sold for around $75 and by the time the line was complete in 1844 they were selling for 
$129, a handsome profit for investors.

Most railroads aside from the NYC were funded partly with private money and usually with about a third of the money 
coming from state or federal grants.  Many of these grants wer in the form of land, or 'right-of-way', 200 foot wide strips of 
land for the rails to run on.

Many of the Rail Barons as investors cam eto be called made money off of the actual construction of the railroads, by 
providing essential goods and serviced.  Erastus Corning was an iron mill owner, and took no salary for his work on the Utica 
and Schenectedy and later the NYC.  As he said, he was 'asking only that he have the privelege of supplying all the  rails, 
running gear, tools and other iron and steel articles supplied.'  Those goods he couldn't make he bought and sold to the 
railroad at a good profit.  Although stockholders objected, when they investigated he was able to convince them that he was 
on the up and up, though they did report that, 'The practice of buying articles for the use of the Railroad Company from its 
own officers might, in time, come to lead to abuses of great magnitude.'  This proved to be prophetic in the second great rail 
boom of the 1870s and 1880s.

Corning was relatively legitimate in his dealings.  Other Rail Barons were far less scrupulus.  They took stock without 
paying for it and then sold it to investors for inflated prices, they juggled the books, used inside information to 'gut' or 'milk' 
rail stocks on the market, manipulating the price and trading stocks back and forth for repeated profits.  After the civil war 
this got much worse, with fraudulent companies being established to provide services for the railroads and being paid 
outrageour fees.  The rail boom led to the emergence of America's first big-time crooks.  These rail barons also established 
some of America's leading families.  They included Cornelius Vanderbilt who founded the New York and Harlem Railroad, the 
Hudson Railroad, and later took over the NYC from Cyrus Corning.

Rail Roads proved to be a major factor during the civil war.  The fact that the north had three times the rail road miles of the 
south made it possible for northern troops to be moved from place to place with greater speed so that the northern forces were 
better supplied and could react to enemy actions more rapidly.

Once the civil war was over agriculture and the westward movement of the population were of preeminent importance and rail 
roads once again began to move wetward.

In the 1830s, Stephen Douglas said of the railroads, 'No one can keep up with the spirit of this age who travels on anything 
slower than the locomotive, and fails to reveive intelligence by lightning.  We must therefore have Rail Roads and Telegraphs 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, through our own territory.  Not one line, but many lines...'

While the Civil War interrupted his plans for expansion, by the end of the 1860s this idea was becoming a reality.

Already, by 1865 people and goods were moving westward at an amazing rate.  Wagon trains going from Misouri and Kansas 
westward were huge.  During 1865 almost 9000 wagons went west, with 15000 mules, 60,000 cattle and 12000 men, 
hauling some 54,000 tons of freight with them.  The cost of the teams and wagons alone was almost 8 million dollars.

In 1862 Congress had adopted measures promoting the idea of a transcontinental railway.  The Union Pacific was to build 
west from Omaha, while the Central Pacific was to build east from Sacramento.  The proposed date of completion was July 
1, 1876, for the centennial celebration.

Ground for the railway was broken on Nov 5th of 1865 near Omaha.  Enthusiasts predicted that it would be completed in five 
years.  Few believed them.  General Sherman commented 'I should be unwilling to buy a ticket on it for my grandchildren'.

Most of the material had to be transported from the east, by land to the UP and by sea to the CP, carried in wagons, or 
eventually by small trains following the track as it was laid.  At first the UP track was not even hooked into the easter rail 
system and they had to build 150 miles of track back east before they could get their goods by rail.  Because there was no 
suitable timber in Nebraska wood had to be brought from Pennsylvania, Michigan and New York.  Each tie ended up costing 
$2.50.

In fact, despite all these costs and difficulties, the line was completed in 3 and a half years.  About 300 miles were completed 
from each direction each year, and they met at Promontory Point Utah on may 10th of 1869.  The total distance covered was 
1914 miles.  The last link was made with a gold spike from california, a silver one from nevada and an iron one from 
Arizona.  The Central Pacific's Jupiter and Engine 116 of the UP met at that point and the line was completed.

The total cost was 186 million dollars, 900,000 tons of rails were used, 6.8 million bolts, 6 million ties and 23.5 million 
spikes.  Much of the speed of the completion can be attributed to rivalry between the crews of the two railroads, who were 
kept informed of each others progress by telegraph, and towards the end both crews broke the track-laying record by laying 10 
miles in one day.  This record setting effort required the work of 4,000 men in a period of 12 hours.

San Francisco had been a months trip from NYC by water or two months by land.  With the Railroad the trip took only a 
week.  Mail was carried weekly and the dangers of the trip were enormously reduced.

One of the things which made all this expense and effort practical was massive government support.  The government granted 
the railroads 'every alternate section of land for twenty miles on each side of the road', or a total of 12,800 acres per mile of 
track laid.  The total once the road was built was more than 23 million acres.  This was a valuable resource which money 
could be borrowed against.  In addition, the government issued 36 year bonds to raise operating money totalling $16,000 per 
mile in the plains, $32,000 per mile in hill areas and $48,000 per mile in mountain areas.  This sum totalled more than $51 
million, which, added to the money borrowed against the land grant, more than paid the costs.

Many people objected to this as an extravegance, but once the railroad was completed, the bonds raised to full market value 
and eventually doubled in value, becoming a very sound investment.

Woodrow Wilson, then a senator, commented, 'I give no grudging vote in giving away either land or money.  I would sink 
$100 million to build the road, and do it most cheerfully and think I-had done a great thing for my country.  What are $75 
million or $100 million in opening a railroad across the central regions of this continent, that shall connect the people of the 
Atlantic and Pacific, and bind us together.  Nothing!'

Calculations once the railroad was in operation showed that the improved transport and communication it made possible saved 
the government more than $3 million dollars a year, which would pay the cost off within the lifetime of the legislators who 
had made it possible.

With the west opened up, people began to head there.  By the 1880s the population center of the country was moving 
westward at a rate of fifty feet a day, or three and a half miles per year.

Because of the success of the UP and CP line, other railroads also began to build westward, some of them with much private 
funding,  but all with at least some governmental support.

In July of 1864 while the UP was starting to be planned, Henry Villard's Northern Pacific was authorized to build a second 
transcontinental line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound.  The Right of Way land grant for the NP was twice what it had 
been for the UP, but they got no cash or loan assistance from the government.  It was the second line to reach the Pacific in 
1883.

The third transcontinental was the Great Northern, built with private funds by James J Hill, who was called 'The Great 
Empire Builder', it followed a similar route to the NP, and reached Seattle in 1893.

In the south, the AT&SF reached San Francisco from Chicago in 1882 and the SP, which was built by the 'Big Four' 
investors who had built the Central Pacific, reached San Francisco from New Orleans in 1883.

Other major lines emerging in this period were the Kansas Pacific, the Denver and Pacific, the Misouri Pacific, the Frisco and 
the Texas Pacific.  The Illinois Central (Douglas' RR) had received the first land grant in 1850.  The TP got the last in 1871.  
Interesting to note that many RR with Pacific in their names never made it there.

Ultimately the government granted a total of 155 million acres of land to RRs and the western states another 50 million 
acres.

Along with the increase in speed, all this competition increased the quality of travel, with special luxury cars, like the 
Pullman cars for sleeping and the Silver Palace Cars with private rooms and toilets.  Even coach cars were comfortable, and 
for those who could not afford them, emigrant cars were endurable.  Every train had dining cars and there were restaurants at 
every station.  The trains also brought prosperity, and violence erupted more than once between towns vying to be the 
location for a new stop.

The economy as a whole also profited.  Cities grew, raw materials fed rapidly expanding factories more quickly, immigrants 
came to buy land grant farms from the railroads, produce got to market more efficiently, and someone had to reap the profit 
from all of this expansion.

Building railroads was expensive and profitable, and it took big money to make big money.  The government was the only 
source with the land and wealth to start out the rail boom, but although the government profited modestly from increased 
efficiency, individuals who managed the railroads and obtained private loans and funding and ended up running the lines reaped 
the real profits.

Men like Cornelius Vanderbilt of the NYC, who boasted that he owned a majority of the senators in Washington became 
increasingly common after the civil war.  Vanderbilt once said, 'Law! What do I care about the law?  Haint I got the power?'  
and his son William coined the phrase, 'The Public Be Damned!'  These were men who would do what they wanted, weilded 
great power, and cared very little who criticized them.  Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, J. Pierpont Morgan all made vast 
fortunes in the railroads and went on to invest in other emerging industries, particularly steel and make even larger fortunes.

Even worse than these rail barons and empire builders were the Railroad Wreckers, who speculated in stock, traded illegally, 
created fraudulent companies and made massive profit off the manipulation of railroad funds.  Jubilee Jim Fisk and Uncle Dan 
Drew led the way in this, but others followed.  These promoters engaged in price fixing, bribing judges, blackmailing and 
extortion, sabotage, and kickbacks.  One popular technique was to force a line out of business, have its equipment go into the 
hands of a court, and then buy its equipment at rock bottom prices.  They ruled and lived like monarchs and saw only their 
enemies as their equals.  Popular technique was to undercut another company by offering to transport goods a larger distance 
for a lower price, something big companies could afford to do by making up profits in a less competitive area, but which 
smaller lines could not cope with.

Probably the most successful of these wreckers was Jay Gould, who manipulated the stocks of the Eerie, Kansas Pacific 
Union Pacific and Texas and Pacific for 30 years, through booms and busts to enormous personal profit and the repeated 
bankrupting of other investors.  One newpaper comented of Gould's presence on wall street in 1890, 'Millionaires tremble 
like innocent sparrows...when a hungry hawk swoops down upon them.'  Railroads were a game where great wealth could be 
made, but only if you started with the wealth and power you needed to play with the big boys.

Of course, the laborers who actually did the work of building the railroads fared rather more poorly.  The poor Irish who built 
the UP and Chinese who built the Central Pacific worked hard to lay 10 miles in a day, but lived short, taxing lives, 
underpaid and overworked, in primitive conditions, and while some went on to settle on right of way land once the 
government had taken it back from the rail roads, most returned to poverty in the cities of east and west once the great push 
was over.

In the 1870s this inequity began to change.  The panic of 1873 led farmers into protesting against the railroads and groups 
like the Grange pushed some state governments in the midwest into attempting to regulate the railroads.  In the Wabash case 
these attempts were squashed by the Supreme Court in 1886, because states could not interfere with interstate commerce.  It 
was left up to Washington to deal with the problem and it took time.
In 1892, General Weaver, a Progressive Party nominee for president, wrote, 'In their delirium of greed, the managers of our 
transportation systems disregard both private right and public welfare.  Today they will combine and bankrupt their weak 
rivals, and by expenditure of a trifling sum possess themselves of properties which cost the outlay of millions.  Tomorrow 
they will capitalize their booty for five times the cost, issue their bonds, and proceed to levy tariffs upon the people to pay 
dividends upon the fraud.'

The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 established the Interstate Commerce Commission to oversee the Railroads, prohibited 
rebates and pools of shared revenues, required railroad rates to be openly published, forbade discrimination against particular 
shippers and outlawed price fixing and gouging.  At the time, Richard Olney commented on the potential misdirection of this 
effort he said, 'The Comissioncan be made of great use by the railroads.  It satisfied the popular clamor for a government 
supervision of railroads at the same time that such supervision is almost entirely nominal'.  The comission sounded good on 
paper, but had no real power, especially when the railroad interests controlled so many votes in washington.

The IC Act was the first attempt by Washington to regulate interstate commerce, and while it was not wholly effective, it did 
promote a more gentlemanly environment for competition, and cause rate wars to be argued in meetings rather than in the 
pocketbooks of the consumer.

Although the railroads were somewhat curbed, they had made possible a new boom of industrialization and men of daring and 
capital moved on into new areas of industry rapidly.

Andre Carnegie made a vast fortune in steel, John D. Rockefeller in Oil and J. Pierpont Morgan in banking.  Each of these 
men made small fortunes into vast ones by controlling all of a particular industry, by establishing Trusts or monopolies.  As 
trusts became more powerful in the 1890s they proved to be even more profitable than railroads, because railroads had always 
been hampered by competition, and if one held a trust there was no competition.

Carnegie found the way to wealth by owning the steel mines, the railroads to transport the ore and the ironworks where it was 
processed.  The invention of the Bessemer process had made steel easier to produce and Carnegie and his partners  were in on 
the ground floor and became kings in steel.  By 1900 Carnegie had control of 1/4 of the nations steel output and sharing in 
profits of $40 million a year, of which 25 million went directly to 'The Napoleon of the Smokestacks' himself.

Morgan achieved the same sort of results working with the purest resource, money itself.  He solved the problem of 
competition by buying his competitors so that many banks with different names were in fact all part of his empire.  
Eventually, when he had allied with Rockefeller, Morgan controlled 112 corporations worth over 22.2 billion dollars.  As part 
of this expansion, Morgan became involved in steel, and when faced with the prospect of war over the steel industry or 
settlement, Carnegie sold his companies to morgan for $492 million, which he then spent the rest of his life disposing to 
charity.  All told he gave 350 million away by the end of his life.  Morgan eventually formed all this into the US Steel 
corporation which was worth $1.4 billion and became the first billion dollar corporation, larger than the total estimated 
wealth of the nation a century earlier.

  Rockefeller's Standard Oil took over the entire petroleum market from the well to the sale of the product, forcing smaller 
companies out of business.  Through ruthlessness and a disregard for the law, Rockefeller eventually controlled 95% of the 
nations oil production by 1877.

Other industries followed this same pattern, including Sugar, Tobacco, Meat and Grain trusts.

Just as an attempt had been made to control the railroads, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 forbade 'restraint of trade in the 
form of a trust or otherwise', imposing large fines and jail terms and the right to sue for losses if you were the victim of a 
trust.  It was intended to restore competition, but ultimately it failed, because it was vague, and in the case US vs Knight 
Company (1895) the SC held that the American Sugar Company had not violated the act, even though it controlled 98% of 
the sugar in the US.  The SC made this decision on the principle that while the ASC controlled Sugar, it did not necessarily 
exclude another company from entering that market just by controlling it as it then existed.

More and more people saw society dividing,  between the rich, who saw money as a justification for everything and the 
growing class of poor laborers who had nothing and could do nothing to influence the course of the nation.

As the populist party platform said in 1892, 'The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes 
for a few...and the possessors of these, in turn despise the republic and endanger liberty.  From the same prolific womb of 
governmental injustice we breed the two great classes---tramps and millionaires.'

The natural response to this, as it had been during the first great phase of industrialization in the 1830s, was for workers to 
organize.

With several hundred thousand unskilled workers coming to America every year and industry becoming more efficient in its 
use of labor there were a lot who were unemployed or underemployed.  Unions began to form, but they found the deck stacked 
against them.  Industrialists could hire scabs to do their jobs and thugs to punish them.  As Jay Gould said, 'I can hire one 
half of the working class to kill the other half'.  Federal courts also supported the corporations, blacklists were used against 
agitators, and companies would even buy up entire towns so there was nowhere for resless workers to rurn.

Nonetheless, by 1872 there were hundreds of thousands of workers in some 32 unions.  The National Labor Union was 
formed in 1866 and lasted for 6 years with some 600K members.  It pushed for an 8 hour day and labor-management 
arbitration, but it was crushed in the depression of 1873, though that crisis ended in 1877 with wage reductions so severe that 
workers almost broke into armed rebellion.

The Knights of Labor was formed in 1869 as a secret union to prevent persecution by management.  Their slogan was 'An 
injury to one is the concern of all'.  For the first time, even blacks were allowed to join the union.  Under the leadership of 
Terence Powderly they claimed a million members by 1886 and led many successful strikes for the 8 hour work day.  The 
Knights were ultimately brought low by the coincidental association of a series of strikes in the Chicago area in 1886 with an 
anarchist bombing, and they were blamed unfairly for sheltering the anarchists, and by the 1890s they had melted away.

The third great labor union of this ear was the American Federation of Labor, created mainly by a Jewish cigar worker named 
SAmuel Gompers who was its president for every year but one from 1886 to 1924.  Gompers made the telling statement, 
'Show me the country in which there are no strikes and I'll show you a country in which there is no liberty.'

The AFL avoided the problems of earlier unions which had internal conflict between groups with very different interests, by 
being a federation of different independent groups and working only on the common goals while each member operated in 
other areas on its own.

The AFL was very successful with walk outs and boycotts and because of Gompers promotion of the 'closed-shop', it began 
to  be called the 'Labor Trust', a fairly accuracte appelation.  During the 1880s and 1890s there were over 23,000 strikes 
involving almost 7 million workers, and many of the demands made by the AFL began to be met by industrialists.

Although in 1900 union members only made up 3% of the total working population, as their power grew, it became clear 
that the increasingly accepted labor movement was a force of a magnitude equal to that of the great trusts, featuring differnt 
goals, but similar methods, and a threat they would have to face to survive.


THE WEST

When we talk about the American West, we aren't really talking so much about California or the far west, but rather about 
the middle west, territories like Texas and Oklahoma and Montana and Nevada.

California had been settled by the Spanish since the 1600s and there had been an American presence there by Clipper Ship 
since the 1830s.  Americans had also settled the Oregon territory in that same period.

By the time the pacific coast was absorbed into the United States in the 1840s it was already a well established society with 
major cities like San Francisco, a society very different from that of the east coast,  but very valuable for its mineral and 
agricultural resources, well populated, and at least as civilized as well established eastern states like Michigan or Illinois.

From the 1830s on there was continual contact between east and west, primarily by sea, with the ships that brought the 49ers 
to California and gold back to the east, and later in the form of settlers making the perilous journey west on the Oregon Trail, 
though the numbers of these travellers was never great.

All of this travel was from the atlantic coast to the pacific coast, with no attention paid to the great open lands inbetween, 
lands which were seen as only viable for cattle farming and fraught with dangers of nature and of hostile indians.

Even once the transcontinental railroads were established most people took those lines to make a full transcontinental trip, 
not to stop off along the way.

Gradually, with California already well populated, and with the availability of cheap land in the plains from the government 
and from the railroads, settlers began to move into vast area between the mississippi and the rockies which had been 
overlooked up until that point.

This westward movement of population really began with the end of the civil war and was accelerated by the growth of the 
railroads and the rapid rate of immigration in this period.  Many western settlers were immigrants literally straight off the 
boat, and while the average movie of the 1940s portrays cowboys as clean-cut american boys, more than a third of them were 
immigrants, and the bunkhouse would likely be characterized by a mix of tongues and accents, with Irish and German the 
most common.

As everyone knows from the movies, the west was a wild and lawless land, where brave pioneers were massacred by heartless 
indians, outlaws robbed every stage coach, gunfire was the common accompanyment for the noon meal, and lawmen wore the 
only law that really mattered on their hip.  While western society was certainly more violent than it was in the east, it was far 
from the total anarchy it is often portrayed as.


INDIANS & THE CAVALRY

In dealing with the conquest of this western frontier, we're talking about a 25 year period in which 1 million square miles of 
land was conquered and settled and made into states, between 1865 and 1890.  

In the 1860s tens of thousands of horse-mouneted Indians roamed these western lands following the buffalo herds.  In 1851 
the US government planned a policy to open the southern parts of the west to colonization and move the indians northward 
into specified territories.  In the course of this, the greed for land was in constant conflict with guilt-prompted desires to 
provide native americans with a protected homeland, but the net result was that indians got moved around into smaller and 
smaller and less desirable areas, and when they complained, war ensued.  One Sioux complained 'Since the White Father 
promised that we should never be removed we have been moved five times...I think you had better put the Indians on wheels 
so you can run them about wherever you wish.'

Once Indians were on reservations, they were supposed to be provided with food and medicine and supplies, but more often 
than not, these were stolen and sold off  by the indian agents who represented the government.  One of these agents, on a 
salary of $1500 per year took home $50,000 in savings after only 4 years.

Treaties were violated liberally from the start of the civil war on, and the only logical response to the Indians was war, which 
went on in the west almost constantly from 1868-1890.  This conflict and the generally hostile atmosphere put settlers in 
danger and also required the significant military presence of the US Cavalry to deal with the Indian threat.

Civil war veterans and generals, like Custer and Sherman and Sheridan led the cavalry in the west, and over a fifth of the men 
under their command were black soldiers.  Ironically, though the cavalry were well organized, the indians were often better 
equipped, having traded furs for the most recent guns with white fur traders.

While the Indian wars lasted for 22 years, there were actually many different tribes involved and many campaigns, making it 
more of a series of semi-related conflicts.

Probably the most famous conflict was with the Sioux tribes in the 1870s.  To escape white expansion the Sioux tribes had 
moved into the Black Hills of the Dakotas and had obtained a treaty to hold it from the US government.  When gold seeking 
settlers invaded their territory in 1875 they were ready to go to war under the leadership of thier chief Sitting Bull.  They 
began raiding against the whites.  After one of these raids, Colonel George A. Custer and some 264 men pursued the raiding 
party, only to discover that it led him to a 2500 man army under the leadership of Crazy Horse which was waiting at the 
Little Big Horn River in Montana.  The Sioux slew custer and all his men, the only survivor being a single horse.  Later the 
Sioux were driven into Canada and ultimately subdued.  Later, in 1884 the remnants of the Sioux attempted to make a 
comeback, but they were crushed at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

The Nez Perce made a stand against the whites at about the same time in Idaho, where gold miners again aggravated them by 
invading their territory.  After attacking white miners they attempted to retreat into Canada and join up with the Sioux, but 
although their Chief Joseph managed to take them 1500 miles, they were caught 30 miles short of safety, and Chief Joseph 
surrendered, making his famous speech, 'I will fight no more forever', which he later repeated nightly for audiences at Buffalo 
Bill's Wild West Show.

Athe Apache under Geronimo also put up a strong resistence in Arizona and New Mexico, but ultimately they were also 
defeated and forced to settle in Oklahoma.

The history of Oklahoma is typical of white treatment of Indians.  It was the first large territory guaranteed to the Indians in 
the 1830s, when fifteen thousand Cherokee were forced to march there along the Trail of Tears.  The cherokee were among the 
most peaceful, organized and technologically and socially advanced tribes, with their own written language and newspapers.  
In the 50 years they controlled Oklahoma they turned it into a successful agricultural society.

Unfortunately, as western land proved to be hard to farm, demand for land in the mississipi valley was enormous, and 
inevitably, in 1889, because of demands from settlers the treaty with the cherokee was broken and Oklahoma was made 
available for a land rush which forced indians off their land, led to considerable violence, and destroyed what had been a 
successful attempt to settle and civilize indians in the west.

The ultimate expression of the desire to crush the indians culturally as well as militarily came in the Dawes Severality Act of 
1887, which broke up tribes and forced indians to live as farmers instead of nomadic hunters.  The Dawes Act was not 
rescinded until 1934, by which time many tribal links and traditions had been permanently destroyed.

All told by 1887 the indian population of the US had been reduced from several million to only 243 thousand, though there 
are some four times that many native americans today.

One of the reasons for the decline of the Indian was the decline of the buffalo.  When the plains indian had survived by 
hunting the vast herds they had killed only what they needed and both the indian population and the buffalo population had 
lived in equilibrium.  With the coming of the white man this changed, and their goal was to kill as many buffalo as possible, 
one result of which was that the plains indian lost a key source of food and raw materials and was forced to change his 
lifestyle.  In the period from 1860 to 1890 the buffalo population was reduced from some 15 million to less than 5 million.  
Some hunters killed over 3000 each a year, and demand for buffalo hides and horn was great in the east and in Europe.  
Buffalo hunting was even looked on as sport.  Buffalo Bill Cody led a famous expedition in 1871 where Grand Duke Alexis 
of Russia and hundreds of followers killed thousands of Buffalo.  Buffalo were even hunted from railway cars and their carcases 
just left to rot.  The buffalo were the lifesblood of the plains indian, and without them they were forced to change or starve 
and they did a good bit of both.

As John Collier, former comissioner of Indian Affairs said of the Indians, 'They had what the world has lost...the ancient, lost 
reverance and passion for human personality, joined with the ancient, lost reverance and passion for the earth and its web of 
life...they had...this power for living...as world view, as self view, as tradition and institution, as practical philosophy 
dominating their societies, and as an art supreme...', but all that ability to live as part of nature meant nothing if they could 
not live in harmony with their unwelcome whie neighbors, and so they were dominated.


COWBOY  LIFESTYLES

While mineral resources and land had attracted the first settlers to the west, these resources were played out fairly quickly or 
had limited profit potential.  Land had more potential, but it needed to be made profitable and the answer to that was cattle.

By the end of the civil war there were already several million cattle in Texas and the industry was expanding westward and 
northward.

The problem with cattle was getting them to market, and the problem with that was that the stockyards were in Chicago 
which was almost 2000 miles away.  Because of this, prior to the 1870s most cattle were killed for their hides and the meat, 
which was much needed in the east, was mostly wasted.

The transcontinental railroads solved some of that problem by making it possible to drive the cattle to a railroad stop and send 
them on by train.

New towns began to spring up where the railroads met the cattle trails across the plains.  Dodge City, the Bibulous Babylon 
of the Frontier, led the way.  Others included Abilene, Oglala and Cheyenne.  Cattle ranchers would drive their herds across 
the plains where long grass was easily available for fodder to reach these towns.  From 1866 to 1888 over 4 million cattle 
were herded from Texas to the north with profits of as much as 40% for successful ranchers.  Some 1.5 million for these head 
travelled the Chisolm Trail from here in Round Rock to Abilene in Kansas.

Unfortunately, just as the railroads made cattle profitable, they also spelled its doom.  When trains arrived to pick up cattle, 
they dropped off settlers, and soon sodbusters and sheep herders began to fence in the open range, stake claims, plant crops and 
make it impossible to drive cattle over plains which were no longer open and were becoming increasingly crowded.

With all this competition cattle ranchers became organized, and though there was violence and there were attempts to drive 
away the homesteaders, the ultimate solution was to adopt some of their methods, so successful ranchers fenced in their range 
and hired cowboys to tend their herds, making the 1880s and 1890s the era of the cowboy.

One reason why so many people were coming west was that the Homestead Act of 1862 was making free land available at a 
rate of 160 acres per family at a nominal fee of $10.  This idea of homesteading had originally been intended for the 
mississipi vallye, and many who went farther west discovered that 160 acres was not sufficient to live off of in less arrable 
territory.  In fact, a geological survey in 1879 suggested that over 2000 acres was necessary to support a family in the far 
west, and suggested common pasturage as a solution, a solution which was ignored in Washington.  This situation inspired 
one Oklahoma Folk Song:

    Hurrah for Greer County!  The land of the free,
    The land of the bedbug, grashopper and flea;
    I'll sing of its praises, I'll tell of its fame,
    While starving to death on my government claim.

As with so many things in this period, greed and fraud made use of the homestead act.  Land grabbers filed false claims and 
created fraudulent homesteads to grab the best land and access to mineral resources and timber.  In addition, the Desert Land 
Act of 1877 which allowed claims of up to 640 acres of semi-arid plains to people willing to irrigate the land.  Over 2.6 
million acres of land were claimed under the act.  95% of these claims were fraud and the land was never irrigated.

Overcrowding, water shortages, disease and contested boundaries became serious problems by the 1880s, and the crowning 
blow to western agriculture was the Great Blizzard of 1886, which killed as much as 80 or 90 percent of all cattle in the west.  
Suddenly people who had moved west found themselves bankrupted with too little land which was essentially worthless, and 
nowhere else to go, and though they rebuilt slowly, the west had ceased to be a dream and had become harsh reality.

As more population moved west, the character of the land gradually changed, until it was at least as civilized and as 
overpopulated as most of the rest of the nation, but the period from 1865 to 1890 has probably given rise to more legends 
than any other era of american history and for a time of only 25 years the volume of stories and myth which has come out of 
this era of the great west are amazing.


OUTLAWS & MARSHALS

Much of the lore of the great west centers around the cattle towns, particularly the greatest of them Dodge City.  Today we 
have the image of these cities as lawless places, but in fact, that view is exagerated.  Careful examination of records shows 
only 45 homicides in the major cattle towns between 1870 and 1885, though lesser violence was certainly far more common.

It is an axiom of history that border areas are always where anarchy reigns and where the potential for profit is the greatest.  
Towns like Dodge City represented this potential, because they were the border between the west an the wealth of cattle and 
the east in the form of Trains headed back to the stockyards of St. Louis or Chicago.

There was a lot of money in these towns and at first, very little law, and there were people who felt that their power and 
wealth put them above the law, as well as human parasites who wanted to see what part of all that wealth they could shave 
off by underhanded means.  As a more domesticated population began to move in, they wanted to have their rights protected, 
and in response to the problem of the great outlaws of the west you had the creation of the great lawmen of the west.  To deal 
with men like Billy the Kid, Bill Doolin, Jesse James and Sam Bass, you had men like Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, Bat 
Masterson, Bill Tilghman and Judge Roy Bean.  Sometimes the line between outlaw and lawman was awfully fine, if a line 
can be drawn between different kinds of professional killers at all.  For example, Judge Roy Bean, who set himself up in west 
texas as the 'Law West of the Pecos' had a habit of trying men and sentencing them to death so that he could fine the corpse 
all its worldly wealth to pay for the funeral and court costs.

Many outlaws were forced to the life they led, and in many ways they were more sympathetic characters than the lawmen who 
fought against them.  Jesse and Frank James only turned to crime after their land was taken from them by land grabbers.  Sam 
Bass turned to robbing stage coaches when he was bankrupted on a cattle drive.  Bill Doolin was an honorable thief who 
avoided killing and spared his enemies if he could get away safely.  Billy the Kid initially turned to murder to avenge the 
murder of his employer John Tunstall who was killed as part of the great Lincoln County Range War in New Mexico.

Along with the stone killers like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and Judge Roy Bean, there were western lawmen who had 
redeeming qualities.  

One of the first great lawmen was Wild Bill Hickock, who had been a scout in the Civil War and against the Indians and 
ultimately became marshal of Hays City and later Abilene in the early 1870s.  He was a renowned marksman, and after a 
notorious gunfight in Abilene he worked as a marksman with Buffalo Bill's Travelling Show.

One of the more unusual frontier lawmen, Bat Masterson began his career as a buffalo hunter and later became a gambler.  
After he got into a fight with Marshal Larry Deger of Dodge City he ran against him and defeated him fo sheriff.  Masterson 
served there for two years and then for two years in Tombstone, earning a reputation for the quick draw, before moving on to 
his true interest, writing.  He was one of the most popular sportswriters of the early 1900s, writing for the NY Morning 
Telegraph until 1921.

Of all the western lawmen, possibly the most interesting was Bill Tilghman, who Bat Masterson described as 'the greatest of 
us all', and there had been a time in the 1870s when Tilghman, Masterson and Earp had all served in the Dodge City sheriffs 
office together.

In many ways, Bill Tilghmans life exemplifies the character of the west, despite the fact that he isn't seen much in the 
movies, so it deserves some more detailed attention.

Bill Tilghman was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1854.  His father served in the union army and was blinded there.  When 
Tilghman was 12 he met Wild Bill Hickock who taught him to shoot.  Later, when his father had regained partial vision he 
taught Tilghman to box.  

Tilghman, like so many others, made his way west as a buffalo hunter in 1872.  At that time hunters were killing Buffalo 
with Sharps Rifles, huge guns which could knock the buffalo down, but also break the shoulder of the hunter.

Tilghman didn't like the slowness and pain of the sharps rifle, so he developed his own, faster and more dangerous technique 
of riding up behind the buffalo and shooting them behind the ear with a solid shotgun shell, firing directly into their brain and 
killing them instantly.  This technique allowed Tilghman to achieve the dubious honor of setting the world record by killing 
almost 4000 buffalo in one year.

After three years at buffalo hunting, Tilghman arrived in Dodge City, where he became a deputy sheriff.  Because Tilghman 
was not terribly fast on the draw he surprised troublemakers by punching them unconscious before they could draw their guns, 
a technique which he used more than once in law enforcement.  As a gunfighter, Tilghman had learned great accuracy from 
Hickock, but because he had had his thumb shot off early in his career he was very slow cocking his pistol and prefered to 
work with his fists or rely on his accuracy.

In Dodge City he also fought his first and only gunfight, shooting Bill Clay in the gun hand.  While in Dodge City 
Tilghman served with Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.

In 1877 Tilghman married a widow and became a homesteader, but he was burnt out by indians in the Kiowa Rebellion of 
1881 while he was out fighting.  He rebuilt, but in 1886 his ranch was wiped out along with many others in the west.

In 1889 Tilghman joined the land rush of 'sooners' and 'boomers' into Oklahoma where he became a farmer and eventually a 
US Marshall.  In 1895 in Oklahoma Tilghman first came into conflict with Bill Doolin and his gang, who he captured in 
1895 by disguising himself as a preacher visiting the health resort where Doolin had gone for his rheumatism.

Tilghman went on to serve as Sheriff of Lincoln County and as a congressman from Oklahoma and became a very successful 
farmer and horse breeder, with many winning thoroughbreds, though he always continued to be involved in law enforcement.

In the new century Tilghman adjusted to deal with new problems.  In 1911 when the Hays and Evans bunch had taken over 
the town of Oklahoma City as racketeers, Tilghman was sent in by the US Marshalls office and cleared up the rackets in 
Oklahoma City in 2 years.

In 1924 when Tilghman was 72 years old the governor of Oklahoma asked him to go deal with bootleggers in the oil town of 
Cromwell, and when he had pretty much cleared the problem up and was arresting one of their leaders he was surprised in a 
crowd and shot in the back.

Tilghman's long career as buffalo hunter, farmer, indian fighter, lawman and eventually statesman shows how fast the west 
grew and changed.  In the 1870s Tilghman was hunting buffalo, in the 1880s he was hunting outlaws, but by the 1900s he 
was breaking up racketeering and bootlegging in the cities which had grown up in only 20 years on land where he had once 
hunted buffalo and fought indians.

Tilghman's life coincided perfectly with the period of growth, change and stabilization in the west, and by the time it ended 
the west was clearly no longer a frontier and was on the brink of having to fact the problems and disasters which it shared 
with the rest of the nation in the 1920s.

Nonetheless, for a brief quarter century there was an era of adventure and opportunity in the west so great, so unprallelled, that 
it has been the stuff of hollywood dreams for years and years.


SOCIAL CONDITIONS

Coming into the 1890s, all was not well in America.  While this was a nation of great wealth and prosperity, that wealth was 
distributed very unevenly and for a growing portion of the population the prosperity of the 'American Dream' was a carrot held 
out on a stick but never brought near enough for them to grasp.

By 1890 conditions were pretty bad both in the cities and in the country, in the factory and on the farm and there was agreat 
deal of discontent and many voices cried out for reform.

In the 1870s and 1880s the introduction of harvesting combines and other technological advancements had made large-scale 
farming profitable for investors with the money to buy the land and equipment for a superfarm.  By 1890 there were at least a 
half dozen of these superfarms with over 15,000 acres each.  They had their own internal telephone and utility sevice, their 
own stores and even post offices.

By the end of the 1880s, things looked increasingly bad for the smaller farmers.  Farmers who borrowed money were severely 
hurt by the deflation of the currency which took place in 1890.  If they had borrowed $1000 when their wheat was worth $1 a 
bushel in the 1850s or 1860s and had to pay that money back plus interest in the 1890s when overproduction had lowered 
wheat to 50 cents a bushel they were clearly taking an enormous loss.  In addition, mortgage rates ran as high as 40%, which 
led to many bankruptcies and forclosures.

A vicious circle existed, where farmers borrowed money to buy machinery to produce more wheat.  As they produced more the 
price dropped and then they had to borrow more money to buy more land and machinery to produce more wheat to pay off 
their debts.  Ultimately this drove them into the ground.

By 1890, in Nebraska alone there had been 100,000 farms forclosed on.  More and more farmers found themselves working 
land which their fathers had owned, but doing it as tenant farmers for a bank or large farming corporation.

A contemporary protest song went--

    The bankers followed us out west;
    And did in mortgages invest;
    They looked ahead and shrewdly planned,
    And soon they'll have our Kansas land.

Trusts made the situation even more difficult.  The Barbed Wire Trust, the Fertilizer Trust and the Harvester Trust charged 
exorbitant prices as did railroad freight rates.  As wheat became worth less and less, the cost of producing, storing and 
shipping it rose ever higher.

Although farmers were half the nations population, they were disorganized and lacked direction and became victims for the 
more organized trusts and banks.

Some movements to save the farmers did form in this period.  The greenback movement of the 1860s sought relief from their 
difficulties by urging the issuing of more paper money.  The Grange movement or the National Grange of the Patrons of 
Husbandry was organized in 1867 by Oliver Kelley with the objective of waking up and organizing farmers.  The Grange was 
a secret organization which borrowed a lot of masonic rituals, and provided education and even entertainment for desperate 
farmers.  By 1875 it had 800,000 members and began organizing cooperatives which would allow farmers to get better prices 
for their produce by trading as a group.  They also attempted to manufacture their own farm machinery to break up the trusts, 
but the effort was mismanaged disastrously.  Grange politicians eventually moved to form the Greenback Labor party, but its 
presidential candidate General James B. Weaver was unsuccessful in the 1880s.

By the 1890s the Grange had combined with groups known as Farmers Alliances to form the Peoples Party or Populist Party.  
They were led by passionate public speakers like Mary Lease (Mary Yellin) and Ignatius Donnelly (Spellbinder).  Lease 
suggested that Kansans raise 'Less corn and more hell'.  She was known as the 'Patrick Henry of the Petticoats' and declared 
America to be a country formed 'of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street'.

Although national leaders scoffed at the populist party, as conditions in the farming states worsened, their influence grew and 
through aggressive campaigning they became a political force to be reckoned with at the turn of the century, and their cries for 
reform were eventually heard and adopted by politicians in the major parties.  The ultimate failure of the party itself came in 
the 1890s when because it had allied with black sharecroppers in the south it was unable to attract the rather racist northern 
laborers and after poor showings in several elections it faded into obscurity, though many populist causes were picked up by 
political leaders in other parties because they had become fashionable.

Conditions were not any better for the equally outraged workers of the industrial cities.  The population of industrial workers 
had grown from 885 thousand in 1860 to more than 3.2 million by 1890.

The lives of workers were regulated severely by timeclocks and company rules, mechanization was reducing the available 
jobs, wages were low, and opportunities for advancement were increasingly few.  for the first time a clear line was drawn 
between labor and management and it ceased to be possible to rise from the ranks to become part of the elite.  Women and 
children continued to be a major element in the work force.

The skilled worker fared somewhat better than the unskilled worker.  For the unskilled worker there was only the factory, but 
skilled workers, particularly women could get jobs in stores and offices where wages were better and conditions much more 
congenial.

Conditions were improving somewhat.  In 1860 the average workday was 11 hours.  by 1880 it was down to less than 10 
hours and there was talk of a 8 hour workday in the future.

Nonetheless, there was discontent.  Only by massively underconsuming and by having three workers per family could any 
money be saved, and inevitably workers tried to improve their lot by forming unions.

After the failure of earlier unions like the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor really took off in the 1880s.  
By establishing a simple set of political goals they were able to coordinate the efforts of a million members by the end of the 
century and weild considerably influence.  Their leader, Samuel Gompers once commented, 'I have my own philosophy and 
my own dreams, but first and foremost I want to increase the workingmans welfare year by year...'

Like other unions, the AFL used the strike as its primary weapon, and by the 1890s its membership was large enough to 
have national impact.  Strikes among steelworkers in 1892 and railroad workers in 1894 were broken up by the courts who 
issued injunctions against the strikers and even jailed Eugene Debs of the American Railway Union for contempt of court.  
Their argument was that strikes were unfair restraint of free trade.

Although expanding industry was creating more jobs, one problem which went with it was that people around the world knew 
of America's industrial boom and began to immigrate in search of jobs.  In earlier periods immigrants had come in search of 
farms, but more and more they came to the cities and stayed there.  In 1900 immigration was such a large factor that 58% of 
the labor force was found to be foreign born.

Up until the 1890s many immigrants came to America with jobs already waiting for them and immigration was virtually 
unrestricted.  Earlier immigrants organized job banks and paid the cost of bringing workers from their countries to America 
and took back hefty payment from their paychecks, or they brought over masses of laborers under a group contract for an 
employer.  Many of these practices were outlawed in 1885 in the Foran Act, but nonetheless many of these new workers were 
exploited, often by their predecessors from their own country.

The sources of immigrants were also changing.  Prior to 1880 only about 200 thousand immigrants had come to America 
from eastern europe.  Between 1880 and 1910 about 8,4 million came from eastern europe.

The Irish and the Germans had been assimilated and their place was being taken by Italians and Greeks and Poles and 
Russians.  Many of these were economic or political exiles who tried to maintain as much of their native culture as possible, 
resulting in clannish groups of immigrants relatively unwilling to join American society on its terms.  Some groups of 
southern italians were so clannish that they referred to anyone outside of their own immediate family as foreigners and feared 
and mistrusted them.

Conflict between different immigrant groups in the cities led many older americans to be fearful and suspicious.  Particularly 
concerned were laborers whose fathers had been irish or german immigrants a generation before who saw the new immigrants 
as a threat.  One labor paper commented, 'The poles, slavs, huns and italians come over without any ambition to live as 
Americans live and accept work at any wages at all, thereby lowering the tone of American labor as a whole.'

Employers were happy to get strong  backs at lower prices, but they were worried about the apparent political radicalism of 
many immigrant groups.  Anarchism and socialism were rampant in Europe and it was assumed that immigrants brought 
these political diseases with them.  Comments referred to them as 'Long haired, wild eyed, bad smelling, atheistic foreign 
wretches,' or as 'europes inhuman riubbish,' or as 'cuthroats of beelzebub from the rhine, the danube, the vistula and the 
elber'.

Nativists founded the American Protective Assn in 1887 to fight against the 'catholi menace', because most of the immigrants 
were catholic, while REAL americans were supposed to be protestant.  It tried to keep immigrants out of the best job and 
keep them from rising socially and economically.  Another nativist organization, the Immigration Restriction League 
managed to get a literacy requirement passed in 1897 which required that all immigrants be able to read and write, because 
fewere eastern europeans could write than western europeans, but President Cleveland vetoed it as a contradiction of the 
tradition of open immigration.  He also pointed out that if anyone in europe could read it was more likely to be the dangerous 
radical than the reliable worker.  From that point immigration continued unchecked up to WW I.

One result of all this immigration cities grew rapidly.  Even at the end of the Civil War the US was one of the most urban 
nations in the world, and by the end of the century it was in the lead in urbanization.  By 1890 1/3 of the population lived in 
cities, by 1900 1/2 did.  And most of this population was recent immigrants.  In 1890 the immigrant population of Chicago 
was as large as the total population had been 10 years before.  1/3 of the population of boston were immigrants, 1/4 in phila 
and 4/5 in NYC.

Ethnic neighborhoods, like the ghettos of Europe began to develop, where crowding and poverty and squalor reigned.  There 
were areas in each city where little or no English was spoken, there were ethnic newspapers, churches, schools and social 
organizations.

Chicago became so over crowded that the Chicago River became an open sewer, and H. L. Mencken commented that every 
summer Baltimore smelled 'like a billion polecats'.

Services could not keep up with growth.  Garbage piled up in the streets, there was inadequate fire and police protection, 
streets were built so fast they could not be paved, and overcrowding led to the spread of disease.  One slum in New York came 
to be known as the 'lung block' because of the high incedence of tuberculosis.  By 1890 more than 1.4 million people lived 
in Manhattan, with a population density as high as 900 persons per acre.

In 'How the Other Half Lives' Jacob Riis described life in a slum tenement:

All the fresh air that enters these stairs comes from the hall door that is forever slamming...the sinks are in the hallway, that 
all the tenants may have access..and all be poisoned alike by their summer stenches...here is a door.  Listen!  That short, 
hacking cough, that tiny, helpless wail--what do they mean?  The child is dying of measles.  With half a chance it might have 
lived, but it had none.  That dark bedroom killed it.

In this overcrowded environment morals declined rapidly.  In the 1880s the homicide rate tripled.  Youth gangs were formed, 
like the Alley Gang, the Rock Gang and the Hells Kitchen Gang.  Eventually these gangs moved from shoplifting and 
vandalism to housebreaking to bank robbery and ultimately murder.  Ultimately the leaders of these gangs either destroyed 
themselves or became more organized for self-preservation and protection, and as they became more organized and more 
sophisticated urban organized crime rings were formed, taking the name gangsters from their origins and often organized along 
lines of nationality and competing with other immigrant groups.

Ciy governments were little better than organized crime gangs themselves.  Boss Tweed and Tamany Hall were among many 
groups which controlled the cities for their own benefit.  Although these city leaders were of immigrant background and rose 
out of the slums, they had little regard for improving conditions and were interested mainly in their own welfare.  As one 
reformer commented, the cities were run by 'a proletarian mob of illiterate peasants, freshly raked from irish bogs or 
bohemian mines or italian robber nests.'  A British visitor to Chicago commented, 'Everybody is fighting to be rich...and 
nobody can attend to making the city fit to live in.'

Looking at the conditions in the cities and the farms at the end of the century, it is not surprising that one newspaper writer 
commented, 'The wheel of progress is to be run over the whole human race and smash us all'.  Although industrialization had 
brought many benefits, in 1900 it was not at all clear that the nation was really moving forward.


POLITICS

One of the main problems of the end of the 19th century was that politicians, like so many other leaders of industry and 
business, were not particularly concerned with the welfare of the nation, having their eye on more lucrative prizes.  But in the 
1890s with the rise of populism the nation's leaders began to achieve a greater awareness of the need for social reform and 
progress, and politics once again became interesting.

Attempts at reform began in the late 1880s in the presidency of Grover Cleveland.  Cleveland was an intelligent and capable 
man and genuinely interested in reform, though he was inexperienced in national politics having served previously as 
governor of new york.  One of his main goals was to reduce the national tarriff, which got him into hot water because it 
seemed to be to the benefit of the south.  He also wanted to reform the civil service, which Republicans generally resented.

Cleveland was the first democratic president since the civil war and though he was not a southerner, many suspected him of 
having southern sympathies.  Cleveland was an honest man and a credit to the presidency.  He said, 'what is the use of being 
elected or reelected unless you stand for something'.  Unfortunately, in the election of 1888 standing for something was not 
enough, and he was defeated by Benjamin Harrison, the republican candidate and grandson of President Wm Henry Harrison, 
though the election was so close that Cleveland was actually ahead by 100,000 popular votes.  To his defeat, mostly over the 
issue of the tarriff, Cleveland responded in characteristic fashion that he would 'rather be right than be president.'

The Tariff was the big issue of the period.  Cleveland and the democrats were for a low tariff, saying that 'unnecessary 
taxation is unjust taxation', because the tariff took money from workers and farmers in order to protect big business from 
foreign competition.  Harrison and the republicans were for the tariff because their party was largely supported and funded by 
big business who had raised 3 million dollars for Harrisons campaign.  Ultimately, the Republicans won out, and the 
McKinley Tariff Bill of 1888 raised the tariff slightly on various items.  The McKinley Tariff was the highest ever passed, at 
48.4% on dutiable goods and all later tariffs have been lower.  Ironically, this turned against them, and democrats were able to 
exagerate the price increases resulting from the tariff in the public eye and gain 78 seats in congress in the next election.

As president, Harrison was a good party man, but not particularly warm or charming.  He didn't seem to do anything but give 
out offices and special favors to his supporters, and lost a lot of support because of the McKinley Tariff Bill.  Members of his 
administration like James G. Blaine, a powerful politician he was forced by his party to make Sec of State, ran out of control.

In the election of 1892 Cleveland rose again, stronger than ever before.  He had gained skill and savvy as a lawyer in New 
York and had made good business contacts, and crushed his opponents fairly completely.  Competing against him were 
General James Weaver of the populists and Harrison who the Republicans weren't happy with, but couldn't really dump, since 
they needed the strength of his incumbency.  Cleveland won with a good margin of the popular and electoral vote and was the 
only president ever elected again after having previously been defeated.

Clevelands second term was troubled by economic problems.  The panic of 1893 battered the economy for 4 years, and 
accelerated problems with the currency.

US currency had been on a gold standard until the passage of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1890, which put it on a 
silver standard and allowed gold to be removed from the treasury.  This pleased gold purchasers and silver miners, but when 
the gold reserve had declined to $41 million by 1894 the currency had become unstable, forcing Cleveland to borrow $65 
million in gold from J. P. Morgan and his associates at a hefty interest rate.  Cleveland stood behind this action, but it 
generated a lot of criticism.

In 1894 at the height of this depression the poor and unemployed marched on washington led by Jacob S. Coxey, promoting 
the idea of issuing more paper money, which would lead to massive deflation of the economy.  They cried out:

    'We're coming, Grover Cleveland,
       500,000 strong,
     We're marching on Washington
       to right the nations wrong.'

A bold chant for an army of only about 100 men, who were arrested for illegally walking on the grass when they arrived in 
the capital.

There was also a great deal of labor unrest in response to this depression, which Cleveland dealt with fairly harshly with 
federal troops and jail terms for the agitators.

When Cleveland came in the Democrats had gained control of Congress, and they begant tampering with the tariff, lowering 
it, but then making up for the lost income with the first income tax since the civil war.  Cleveland refused to sign the bill, 
but allowed it to become law, which the supreme court promptly struck down the income tax as unconstitutional.  
Unfortunately, the income tax had been popular with workers and the poor, and the tariff remained even more unpopular 
without it.

Just as Harrison and the republicans had  been sunk by the tariff, now Cleveland and the democrats were in the same boat.  By 
1894 the republicans had regained control of congress and were claiming that they could nominate a rag doll or a yaller dog 
and put it in the whie house.

Instead of a yellow dog, they opted for William McKinley of Ohio, despite the fact that he had authored the reprehensible 
tariff of 1890, which had presumably bbeen forgotten.  McKinley was the darling of big industry, and though he personally 
was favorable to silver, he endorsed gold and/or bimetalism in the party platform.

Cleveland had  become so unpopular that he was now a liability to his party because of his apparent support for the gold 
standard and the tariff.  Apparently Cleveland had become more conservative with age as so many politicians do.

The democrats found a dark horse candidate, the Boy Orator of the Platte, the handsome young William Jennings Bryan, 
whose foes claimed that like the Platte River, he was 'six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth'.  Certainly, though 
Bryan was charming and a great orator, he was no great intellectual, even a bit slow.

Bryan was an ardent supporter of silver over gold.  He said at the convention, 'We will answer the demands for a gold standard 
by saying to them, 'you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind 
upon a cross of gold'.  Bryan inspired the democrats and won the nomination easily.  Some conservative democrats like 
Cleveland balked at his radical silver policy, but the populists endorsed him to balance things out.

Silver was popular with the lower classes and in the west, while gold was popular in the east and with the monied classes, the 
more conservative element of the population.  This metallic division was the main issue of the election.

Bryan began making speeches all over.  Vachel Lindsay wrote a poem about his campaign, saying in part:

    Prairie avenger, mountain lion
    Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan
    Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun
    Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the west

The problem with Bryan's silver plan was that it was going to effectively halve the value of the dollar, by overvaluing silver, 
which made eastern financiers very unhappy, since they would lose enormous amounts of real wealth.  One of the results of 
this was that the republicans raised $16 million in conributions to the $1 million raised for Bryan.

As the election worked out, Bryan won an enormous number of western and southern states and McKinley won Ca, Or and all 
the northeastern states, but because the populations were greater in these states, McKinley came up with a fairly good victory 
in the Electoral college.  Lots of eastern workers voted for McKinley because they were afraid their factories would fold if 
Bryan was elected.

The election was clearly a class struggle, with the poor farmers and dispossessed debtors against the big businessmen and their 
employees.  It was a clear victory for conservatism, gold and business.

Under McKinley the tariff was once again a problem.  The Dingley Tariff Bill passed in 1897 had 850 amendments and set the 
highest rates since McKinley's own tariff 7 years befoe, whcih obviously was not popular.

But nonetheless, the economy had finally recovered, through no effort of McKinley or anyone else, and this reflected well on 
his administration.  Ultimately the question of gold vs. silver was resolved with the Gold Standard Act of 1900 which 
established the gold standard once and for all.  The only result was a mild and gradual inflation, which was generally good, 
because it accompanied an overall growth in the economy.

McKinley looked pretty good going into the election of 1900, but when he arrived at the republican convention he was 
confronted by the specter of a popular hero everyone wanted for vice president.  McKinley accepted Teddy Roosevelt as his VP 
candidate after he was elected unanimously in the convention, though his supporters referred to Roosevelt as a madman and 
that damned cowboy.

Bryan was again the democratic candidate,  but his adherence to the doomed issue of the silver standard damned him from the 
start.  Bryan might have had a chance if he had been campaigning against the stolid, uninspiring McKinley, but out in the 
field he found himself going one on one with the wild man Roosevelt who roared, raved, waved his fist and waved the flag.

McKinley won by a large margin, and the republicans were pleased.  McKinley was in office again, big business was safe, 
nothing unexpected was likely to happen.  Then six months into his term an anarchist gunned McKinley down and there was 
Teddy waiting in the wings, a heartbeat away from the presidency, and he was nothing the republican leadership had ever asked 
for or wanted.

Roosevelt had expressed this philosophy:
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with 
those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or 
defeat."

It is the history of the youngest, wildest and possibly the most popular president ever to serve which we'll look at next class.


IMPERIALISM

We've already looked at America's domestic problems and strengths at the turn of the century, but more and more as the new 
century began the focus of American politics was on foreign affairs, an area where a lot of American leaders felt obligated to 
flex their muscles.

Two philosophies of foreign diplomacy had emerged prior to the Civil War.  One was Isolationism, the idea that we should 
not be entangled in foreign problems, as formulated by George Washington in his farewell address.  The other was the 
Monroe Doctrine, the idea that we were the protector of the americas, north, south and central.

For most of the period after the civil war isolationism had been dominant because the nation was still concentrating on 
rebuilding and dealing with domestic problems.  It was in the 1880s when James G. Blaine became Sec of State under 
President Garfield and president Harrison that our foreign policy for the first time began to look overseas aggressively.

Blaine wanted to find new sources of profit and expansion in the far east, the pacific and latin america.  He initiated what was 
called the 'Big Sister' policy of supporting and encouraging the development of latin american nations, and organized the first 
Pan American Conference and the founding of the Pan American Union in which 19 nations in the Americas worked together 
on common problems, with America providing the meeting place and the resources its little sisters needed.

blaine was known as Jingo Jim by his enemies for his rather fiery language which was often not very diplomatic.  In fighting 
with Britain over the right to hunt seals in the north he said, 'The Law oof the sea is not lawlessness...one step beyond that 
which her majestys government has taken in this controversy and piracy finds its justification.'  Not tactful,  but his 
belligerence was effective.

Under Blaines adminitration in the 1880s and 1890s America went through a series of near-war conflicts with foreign powers.

When we had acquired Alaska we got the Priblof islands off its coasts, breeding grounds for 4 million seals.  The canadians 
were hunting there without restraint, literally turning the waters red with blood.  4 million seals on two very small islands 
made easy hunting.  Because America owned the breeding grounds, Blaine claimed that we had the right to protect the seals, 
not only on the islands, but also in the surrounding waters.  He began having US ships seize fishing vessels.  Blaine failed to 
save the seals in a hearing before an international court in 1893 and they ruled that the slaughter could continue by Canadians, 
but neither the US or GB could hunt there.

In 1889 we almost went to war with Germany over Samoa, with three warships there on both sides preparing to make war, 
when a hurricane blew into harbor and sank all six ships, leaving only one British observer to actually take control of the 
islands.  A deal was worked out dividing the islands between the US, Germany and GB in 1889, and then ten years later GB 
was squeezed out and just the US and Germany remained in control.

By the 1890s we had come to pretty much look on Hawaii as our property, even though Queen Liluokalani insisted that 
Hawaii should control its own destiny.  In 1893 US troops and local white planters overthrew her government and deposed the 
queen.  The planters then petitioned congress to be annexed into the union.  Cleveland was suspicious and on investigation 
found the native population overwhelmingly opposed to this idea, but Cleveland could not step in and remove the white 
government without causing trouble at home, so annexation was put off for five more years.

In 1891 we almost had a naval war with Italy when 11 italians were lynched for mob activities in New Orleans, a war which 
was averted by a $25,000 bribe to the Italian government.

More serious was our clash with Chile ioin 1892.  Because our government had supported the losing faction in their civil 
war, when sailors from the USS Baltimore were on shore leave in Valparaiso a fight broke out in the True Blue saloon in 
which 2 sailors were killed.  President Harrison was ready to go to war with Chile, but they backed down and paid us 
$75,000.  Our willingness to use force on Chile destroyed a lot of the good will Blaine had built up in the Pan American 
Union.

Meddling generally characterized foreign policy in this period.  In 1895 Britain and Venezuala were arguing over who 
controlled British Guiana because gold had been discovered in the area.  President Cleveland who disliked the British decided to 
protest against their claim to the region.  His secretary of State, Olney was a follower of Blaines tradition, and wrote to 
GB...'Today the US is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon those subjects to which it confines its 
interposition... its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically 
invulnerable against any or all other powers.'  Cleveland called Olney's statement to GB the 'twenty inch gun'.  The British 
response denied the Monroe Doctrine and the claims Olney made to dominate the entire hemisphere.

This made Cleveland mad.  He created a comission to draw a boundry line between Guiana and Venezuela and the people were 
ready to go to war, despite the fact that our navy was outnumbvered by the British 6 to 1.  Fortunately, when war broke out 
in S. Africa between England and German supported Boers, England was distracted and seemed to cave in, much to the benefit 
of the credibility of the Monroe Doctrine.  From that point on England began to cooperate more willingly because of 
pressures on its empire and in europe, especially from Germany.

In the 1890s the old idea of Manifest Destiny was revived, this time implying American domination of the Pacific and far east 
as well as all the Americas.

Social Darwinism implied tha the earth belonged to whoever could take it, and yellow journalists like William Randolph 
Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were agitating for conquest.  The philosophy was 'expand or explode', that america needed new 
markets for its massive production and constant expansion of sales was needed to feed the booming economy.

To make this overseas conquest work, America began to build a new steel navy, which kicked off an arms race with England, 
Germany and the Japanese because naval power was seen as the only route to real world power.  Along with this build up 
leaders began toying with the idea of a canal through central america.

By 1898 the world was clearly divided between three great powers, America, Japan and Germany.  America had not been in a 
war for over 30 years and the people and the economy were just about ready for one and there could be no better target than the 
weak and disorganized remnants of Spain's fading empire.

Cuban insurgents, upset with spanish rule and with the failing sugar industry, began burning cane fields and sugar mills and 
even blowing up trains.  The US had an investment of about $50 million in loans to Cuba and another $100 million in trade 
obligations and spanish mismanagement threatened those investments.

In 1896 the Spanish/Austrian general 'Butcher' Weyler attempted to crush the rebellion in Cuba by herding the population 
into concentration camps where victims dies like flies from disease.  The American population demanded action.  Cleveland 
was anti-war and refused to mobilize the army, even though most of his advisors and the American people were itching for a 
fight in what seemed a pretty good cause, championed by the press which published bold headlines of the attrocities of 
Spanish rule there.  Hearst sent Frederic Remington to paint pictures of the horrible conditions, and when he reported back 
that there was nothing bad enough to bother to draw, Hearst replied, 'You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.'  
Remington went ahead and fabricated pictures or drew them out of context to give Hearst fuel for his paper.

In 1897 Weyler was removed from command, but conditions got worse, with riots in Havana between pro and anti spanish 
factions.

In early 1898 the battleship Maine was sent to Havana for a 'friendly visit' and to evacuate American if war broke out.  On 
Feb 15th 1898 the Maine mysteriously blew up in Havana harbor with 260 men killed.  Both Spain and the US investigated, 
but the US government kept such a wrap of secrecy on the wreck that little could be discovered.  The Spanish announced that 
it was an accidental boiler explosion.  The US investigators claimed it was an underwater mine.  Many theories have been 
proposed since that time, including a very popular theory that the US Secret Service deliberately mined the ship to start a war.  
In the 1970s conclusive evidence from suppressed US navy documents was presented by Admiral Hyman Rickover, 
supporting the Spanish theory that a coal bunker adjacent to a powder magazine had exploded.

The people of the US believed the version they wanted to hear, and the battle cry went out, 'Remember the Maine, to Hell 
with Spain'.

One spaniard responded to the accusations...'The American Jingos imagine us capable of the most foul villanies and cowardly 
actions.  Scoundrels by nature, the American Jingos believe that all men are made like themselves.  What do they know about 
noble and generous feelings?  We should not in any way heed the jingoes: they are not even worth our contempt, or the saliva 
with which we migh honor them in spitting at their faces.'

Although American diplomats were at work negotiating Cuban independence and were almost done, the American demanded 
that 'Wobbly Willie' McKinley take action.  Teddy Roosevelt declared that Mckinley did 'not have the backbone of a chocolate 
eclair.'  People were even hanging McKinley in effigy.

Under public pressure and in the belief that Spain would not honor a purely diplomatic bargain, McKinley asked congress to 
declare war on Spain on April 11, 1898.  Congress approved enthusiastically, adding the Teller Amendment to the declaration, 
which insisted that Cuba be given full independence once war was over.

At the start of the war the US had only 30,000 men in its army in comparison with 200,000 Spanish soldiers in Cuba alone.  
In addition, while our navy was of high quality, we had fewer ships.  All of the European powers except England supported 
Spain.  One of our advantages was our access to Cuba and to Spanish ports in the pacific.  In every case our fleet was closer 
and faster and more modern.

The US was well prepared for war, largely because of undersecretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt who had kept 
Commodore George Dewey and the Asiatic Squadron ready for action.  On Feb 25, 1898, while Secretary of the Navy Long 
was away for the weekend, Roosevelt ordered Commodore Dewey to attack the Spanish Philippines, a strange way to take 
Cuba.

Dewey sailed into Manila at night with six warships, and when the spanish fleet awoke, they were totally surprised, 400 were 
killed and wounded without a single American casualty.

Dewey became a national hero overnight.  He was promoted to Admiral on the spot.  Nonetheless, his naval victory had not 
captured the Philippines.  He had no marines or soldiers and could not storm the city or the Spanish army forts in  Manila 
until ground forces arrived from the US.  Meanwhile, Germany sent 5 ships to Manila to observe, quickly balanced out by a 
fleet of British observers.  Finally on August 13th, more American ships and troops arrived, and in combination with 
Philippine insurgents led by Emilio Aguinaldo they captured Manila.

Having taken Spain's easter pearl, it remained to deal with the main objective, Cuba.  Four Spanish cruisers and six torpedo 
boats set out from Spain to Cuba under command of Admiral Cervera.  The spanish navy was in such bad shape that three of 
the torpedo boats were abandonned as unseaworthy en route.  Cuba was blockaded by a powerful American fleet, and many 
feared that Cervera would make an attack on the coast of the US.  There was so much panic that mothballed Civil War ships 
were recommissioned to defend the coast.  Ultimately Cervera pulled into Santiago harbor where he was surrounded and 
immobilized by the US Navy.

All that remained was the actual invasion of Cuba under the command of General William R. Shafter, an obese man, crippled 
by gout with an ill-equipped army used to fighting indians on the cold, open plains and very unfamiliar with the warmth and 
humidity of the tropics.

Part of Gen Shafters army was a group of volunteers known as the Rough Riders, made up of cowboys, polo players and ex-
convicts under the command of Colonel Leonard Wood and his assistant Lt. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt who had resigned 
from the Navy Dept to take part in the war personally.  Roosevelt had used political influence to pass the normal army 
admission standards which he could not meet because of his poor vision.

The Rough Riders had been formed as a cavalry unit, but because there were not enough ships to transport the 17,000 man 
army, horses were left behind and the Rough Riders eventually came to be known as Wood's Weary Walkers.

Like most of the Americans in the attack on Cuba the Rough Riders looked on it as a bit of sport and a chance to gain some 
glory, and although Wood was in command they looked to the unbridled ego and inspiring Jingoism of Roosevelt for 
leadership.

Roosevelt wrote of his men, 'In my regiment nine tenths of the men were better horsemen than I, and probably two thirds of 
them better shots than I was, while on the average they were certainly hardier and more enduring.  Yet, after I had them a 
short while they all knew, and I knew too, that nobody else could command them as I could.'

Shafter and the army landed near Santiago where they easily drove off some 2000 disorganized spaniards.  The first real 
resistence came at El Caney and San Juan Hill on July 1st.

In the battle of San Juan Hill, the Rough Riders earned the glory they had sought, though there were heavy casualties.  They 
charged up the hill, at the spanish fort, roosevelt on his horse and the rest on foot.  Roosevelt had the time of his life and was 
pleased to recall that a Spaniard he shot 'doubled up like a jack-rabbit.'

Admiral Cervera, who had  been protesting that an attack on the US fleet would be suicide, was ordered by spain to attack and 
his antiquated ships were blown out of the water.  The USS Oregon alone had more fire power than his entire fleet and 500 
Spaniards were killed to 1 American.  Captain Philip of the USS Texas said to his men, 'don't cheer, men...the poor devils 
are dying.'  To quiet his enthusiastic crew.

After Cervera surrendered, General Nelson A. Miles invaded Puerto Rico in what came to be known as 'General Miles Grand 
Picnic and Moonlight Excursion', where he met no resistence and the population welcomed him eagerly.

Spain surrendered on August 12, 1898.

All told in the Spanish American war there were more US casualties as a result of disease than from bullets.  At the end of 
the war 80% of the soldiers were sick from heat prostration, malaria, typhoid, dysentery and yellow fever, or from eating bad 
meat in canned army rations.  All told, 400 men died in the war from bullets and 5000 from disease.  If the spanish had held 
out a few months, disease might have won the war for them.

The Spanish American war had only lasted 113 days and had been badly mismanaged,  but it was an inspiring success 
nonetheless, and announced to the world that America was a real international power.  Admittedly there were problems 
absorbing 7 million rebellious filipinos who wanted their own freedom, not just American rule, but national enthusiasm was 
unbounded.


TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Riding the crest of victory, McKinley easily won the Republican nomination in 1900.  A lot of people felt, quite rightly, 
that McKinley had not been entirely behind the war with Spain, and it was felt that a more aggressive running mate might 
help him in the general election.

When McKinley arrived at the republican convention he was confronted by the specter of a popular hero everyone wanted for 
vice president.  McKinley uneasily accepted New York Governor and former Rough Rider, Teddy Roosevelt as his VP 
candidate after he was elected unanimously in the convention, though his supporters referred to Roosevelt as a madman and 
that damned cowboy.  Part of the plan of the Republican leadership was a hope that if they put Roosevelt into the degrading 
position of VP he might embarass himself while not harming the nation and become a political joke as they felt he deserved.  
He commented, 'The Vice Presidency is a most honorable office, but for a young man there is not much to do.'

Bryan was again the democratic candidate,  but his adherence to the doomed issue of the silver standard damned him from the 
start.  Bryan might have had a chance if he had been campaigning against the stolid, uninspiring McKinley, but out in the 
field he found himself going one on one with the wild man Roosevelt who roared, raved, waved his fist and waved the flag.

McKinley won by a large margin, and the republicans were pleased.  McKinley was in office again, big business was safe, 
nothing unexpected was likely to happen.  Then six months into his term an anarchist gunned McKinley down and there was 
Teddy waiting in the wings, a heartbeat away from the presidency, and he was nothing the republican leadership had ever asked 
for or wanted.

Roosevelt had expressed this philosophy: 'Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though 
checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in 
the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.'

Roosevelt was from an upper class New York background, the youngest man ever to serve as president at age 42.  He had 
built himself up from a spindly, asthmatic lad through a program of exercise, and had graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa.  
He had published his first book by age 24, the first of a total of thirty.    He owned a ranch in the Dakotas and worked there 
as a cowboy and captured a gang of rustlers.  He had been police commissioner of NYC, and had personally gone undercover 
to catch officers fraternizing with criminals.  Ultimately he moved into various poltical posts.  He was 5ft 10in, had buck 
teeth, squinted, sported a droopy mustache and had a high, piercing voice.  Although he had excellent credentials he was a 
little too wild and a bit too real for a lot of his political colleagues.

More than anything else, Roosevelt had energy.  In a day of campaigning he might shake 6000 hands, and he surrounded 
himself with atheletes of all sorts, nicknamed the 'tennis cabinet'.  He was boyish and loved a fight, praising the virtues of 
the outdoors over the softness of civilization.  Mark Twain called him 'The Tom Sawyer of the political world...always 
hunting for a chance to show off'.  He boxed with champions in the white house, hunted bear in the Rockies, and once, when 
hunting a fox he fell off his horse, broke his arm, but carried on to the kill.  He commented afterwards, 'I was in at the death.  
I looked pretty gay, with one arm dangling, and my face and clothes like the walls of a slaughterhouse.'  After the hunt, with 
his arm set, he attended a dinner party.

He was a militarist, with no toleration for pacifism or hesitancy.  His motto was 'Speak softly and carry a big stick', and he 
pursued it as national policy.

He was somewhat radical, but seemed far more so because he was so outspoken and he had a powerful ego and was rather self-
righteous.  In practice he was pragmatic, and although he hated party bosses he was able to compromise and work with them.  
He was a clever politician, but believed strongly that the president should guide national policy regardless of the congress or 
the constitution.

When political leaders like Mark Hanna urged him to 'Stand pat and continue Republican prosperity', Roosevelt was a 
dynamo of unexpected effectiveness.

He set out to do a few things which he felt were of great importance to the nation, and did very well with them through 
cunning and intimidation.

Roosevelt said of the trusts, 'Much of the legislation enacted against trusts is not one whit more intelligent than the medieval 
bull against the comet, and has not been one particle more effective.'  He set out to right that situation.

Roosevelt chose as his target the Northern Securities Company, a company run by J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill and E. H. 
Harriman, who had put aside their rivalry and created a holding company to control all the major western railraods.  In 1904 
the supreme court dissolved the Northern Securities Trust, and then under Roosevelts guidance it proceeded in the same way 
against Standard Oil, American Tobacco and meat packing companies.

Companies like US Steel which agreed to cooperate and allow competition were spared, but those which were obstinate were 
destroyed.  Roosevelt said, 'In our industrial and social system, the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the 
immense majority of cases a straight dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself, 
must also benefit others.'  He also said, of his willingness to compromise, 'The man who advocates destroying the trusts by 
measures which would paralyze the industries of the country, is at least a quack and at worst an enemy to the Republic'.

Roosevelt also had to deal with unions, and during a coal strike in 1902 he stepped in and forced the union and management 
to meet and reach a settlement, threatening to take control of the mines and have the government run them if a deal were not 
made.  The result was a 10% wage increase, a 9 hour work day and a 10% increase in the price of coal.  Adequate for all 
involved, and what Roosevelt called his 'Square Deal.'

Perhaps the issue for which Roosevelt is most famous is conservation.  In 1907 he said to congress, 'We are prone to epeak 
of the resources of the country as inexhaustible; this is not so.  The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas and 
the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately, and wastefulness in dealing with it today 
means that our descendents will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would.'

By 1900 only a quarter of the forest land in America was left.  Roosevelt set aside 125 million acres of forest land on federal 
reserves, and did the same with coal deposits and water sources.  Roosevelt also worked for intelligent use of the land, 
establishing parks for recreation,   but also, in the Newlands Act of 1902 providing for the irrigation of desert in the western 
states.

In 1908 Roosevelt summoned the Conference of Governors to DC along with other national leaders and inspired them so 
much that within two years almost all the states had established their own Conservation Commissions.

This preservation of the land was probably his most lasting contribution.  As he said, 'of all the questions which can come 
before this nation, there is none which compares in importance to the great central task of leaving this land an even better 
land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on.  conservation 
is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuation of the nation.'

Ironically, one of Roosevelts other big issues was the Panama Canal, which involved considerable social and natural 
destruction, though not within the US.  A great traveller Roosevelt knew more about situations abroad than many other 
presidents, and his experience in the war had shown the need for a way to get from Atlantic to Pacific to strengthen the navy 
and make it more maneuverable, as well as providing benefits for the merchant fleet.  The big question was where to build the 
canal.  Traditionally Americans had been interested in using the convenient chain of lakes in Nicaragua, but the French New 
Panama Canal Company was eager to draw their attention farther south and dropped its price for its land holdings in Panama 
from $109 million to $40 million, trying to salvage something from their failed canal plans.  Panama was at the time part of 
Colombia, which wanted to lease a 6 mile wide path for $25 million plus $250 thousand a year.  Roosevelt was outraged, but 
french supported panamanians revolted against the columbian government, and when Colombia tried to stop the revolution he 
sent in the Navy to keep them out.  A somewhat better deal was struck with the puppet panamanian government, but this all 
made the US look rather heavy handed abroad, though Roosevelt looked good.  Canal construction proceeded, but there were 
problems with disease, labor and engineering, and when the project was finally completed in 1914 it had cost $400 million.

In the wake of his panama successes, Roosevelt won election to a second term ioin 1904 with a landslide in which even 
former foes like J. P. Morgan supported him.

Encouraged by his own popularity, Roosevelt pushed for new reforms.  He wanted to establish a minimum wage, make the 
District of Columbia a model community, establish Child Labor laws, factory inspections and clear out the slums.  
Unfortunately, congress would not cooperate.

He did manage to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Comission with the Elkins Railroad Act and the Hepburn Act.  He also 
got food and drug legislation passed in the form of the Pure Food and DRug Act of 1906.  This was mostly in response to 
furror over the meat packing business aroused by Upton Sinclair's novel THE JUNGLE about the slaughterhouses of 
Chicago.  Roosevelt said 'As now carried out the meat packing business is both a menace to health and an outrage to 
decency'.  A jingle of the time dealing with impure meat said, 'Mary had a little lamb, and when she saw it sicken, she 
shipped it off to packingtown and now they call it chicken.'

As his second term went on, Roosevelt seemed to become more liberal.  Unlike older, wiser second term presidents who 
became more conservative, Roosevelt began to endorse conservation alws, endorsed an income tax and inheritance taxes and 
denounced 'the speculative folly and flagrant dishonesty of malefactors of great wealth'

Despite his increasing radicalism, Roosevelt was still popular enough to get his secretary of war, William Howard Taft 
elected as his successor, defeating Bryan by a two to one margin.  At 300 pounds, Taft did't have Roosevelt's energy, and 
prefered golf to running the country.  He tried to carry on Roosevelts programs, but lacked his energy and determination.  He 
liked what Roosevelt had done, but not how he had done it, and in trying to follow through he refused to bypass the courts 
and congress, and found himself unable to achieve the same spectacular results.

While Taft was mismanaging things, Roosevelt was off in Africa, bagging 3000 trophies, including 9 lions, 5 elephants and 
14 rhinoceroses.  When he returned he was beseiged by progressives from his party who were unhappy with Taft.

Taft resented Roosevelt's reentry into politics after he had bowed out so graciously, and they finally split when Taft tried to 
break up US Steel.  Roosevelt felt that cooperative trusts should not be broken up, while Taft was against all trusts.

In 1912 Roosevelt declared himself a candidate for the presidency.  Since his first term had not been elective, he was still 
qualified.

In the convention, roosevelt had the public support, even the delegates from Taft's home state, but Taft pulled out the 
nomination through his influence with conservative Republican leaders.

In objection to this treatment, Roosevelt formed the Progressive party, also known as the bull moose party, because 
Roosevelt declared himself strong as a bull moose in entering the campaign.  The party endorsed regulation of corporations, a 
tariff commission, national primaries, minimum wage, workmans compensation, child labor laws and other reforms.

What they were not prepared for was the nomination of Woodrow Wilson, a progressive democrat to run against Roosevelt 
and Taft.  Ultimately in the election of 1812 Roosevelt beat Taft easily, but Wilson beat them both by an even larger margin.  
For most Americans the choice was between the dynamic leadership of Roosevelt and the clear idealism of Wilson, and to 
everyones surprise Wilson won, as much a tribute to the organization and unity of his party as to anything else.

Wilson was surprisingly successful as president, mainly because he had a cooperative congress, and though he received much 
of the blame, it was not at all his fault that America ended up involved in the Great War...our next topic.


The Great War

In the election of 1812 the division of the Republican majority between Roosevelt and Taft and the division of progressives 
between Roosevelt and Wilson allowed Wilson, who had stronger party support to come out on top.

Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson grew up wanting to be a politician.  He was a student of political philosophy from Burke to 
Gladstone and had gone to law school mainly because it was a good route into politics.  had begun his political career as a 
conservative, but by this point he had evolved into a militant progressive.  He was a professor of government who had 
become president of Princeton in 1902, though he was removed from that position at the insistance of alumni who were 
unhappy with reforms he was implementing.   He then ran for governor of New Jersey on an anti-trust and pro reform 
platform.  While he did not win, he achieved a lot of national attention for his clearsighted intelligence, his eloquence and his 
zeal to reform.  Wilson had come into his party's convention as a dark horse, but when Bryan endorsed him he won the 
nomination easily and campaigned very effectively in 1912, but winning by only 41% of the popular vote he was clearly a 
minority president.

There were both similarities and differences between Wilson and Roosevelt politically.  They were both progressive, they 
both wanted to reform the economy and society.  Roosevelt's program was called New Nationalism, Wilson's was The New 
Freedom.  Their methods and immediate objectives were somewhat different.  Wilson was against social welfare programs and 
wanted to break up the trusts rather than just regulating them.  As it turned out, Wilson's programs were far more aggressive 
domestically than Roosevelts had been, while internationally he was far more passive.

Wilson's work as president was made considerably easier by the fact that the democrats controlled both houses of congress 
when he was elected and he was immediately successful in initiating reform legislation.

October 1913, Underwood Tarriff lowered duties for the first time since the Civil War  and lifted duties alltogether from Food, 
wool, iron, shoes and agricultural machinery.

December 1913, Federal Reserve Act created first national finance institution since Jackson destroyed the Bank of the US.  
Divided nation into 12 banking districts, issued paper money, and allowed state banks to invest up to 6% of their capital in 
the Fed.  Protected currency from reliance on gold or silver supply.  Fed Reserve Board regulated interest rates.  Part of the 
function of the Federal Reserve Act was to break up what people called 'the money trust', keeping large private banks from 
dominating too much of the economy.  It was resisted by many banking lobbyists in Washington and outrageous claims were 
made that it would inflate the economy by as much as 2 billion dollars, while others claimed it would deflate the economy the 
same amount.  In actuality it stabilized the economy, which should have been obvioust to anyone without a special interest 
blinding them.

Federal Trade Commission created in 1914 to regulate commerce and investigate interstate corporations to stop unfair trade 
practices.

Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 made price discrimination, interlocking directorates and tying (requiring a retailer to sell only 
one companys products) illegal.

Wilson supported all of these measures and worked closely with congress.  He was the first president since John Adams to 
make his state of the union address in person, he called members in for meetings regularly, and even installed a hotline from 
congress to the white house. 

Despite a lack of experience, Wilson proved to be a capable political leader.  He joked that running a government was childs 
play compared to managing the faculty of a university.

Wilson shied away from some of the reforms Roosevelt had supported.  He did not support low interest farm loans, saying 'it 
is unwise and unjustifiable to extend the credit of the government to a single class of the community.'  He also rejected the 
idea of exempting unions from antitrust restructions and opposed child labor laws as being unconstitutional.  He also objected 
to the suffrage amendment, insisting that suffrage for women should be up to the states.

Although Wilson had campaigned as a trust buster, in practice he took Roosevelt's position of holding off on relatively 
cooperative trusts.  He followed what he called 'the rule of reason' and punished only those trusts which practiced restraint of 
trade.

Also, like many other progressives, Wilson was surprisingly unsympathetic to the problems of black Americans.  While 
leaders like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois were trying to push for the advancement, education and fair treatment 
of their race, Wilson sided with those who professed that 'When you educate a negro, you spoil a good field hand'.  Wilson 
had promised to aid blacks in the election of 1912, but once he had their vote he changed face...one black journalist wrote, 
'Wilson promised a new freedom...on the contrary we are given a stone instead of a loaf of bread.'  And there was a lot of 
controversy when the Wilson administration fired a number of black employees in civil service jobs and maintained strict 
segregation in government work places.

Despite his early successes and reforms the second half of Wilsons first term found the country in an increasingly negative 
frame of mind.  Women and blacks were unhappy that reform had not been extended to address their problems and the 
economy was in a recession.  Unemployment was rising and armies of workers were preparing to march on washington.

Fortunately, in the summer of 1914 war broke out in Europe.  American industry quickly geared up to produce munitions, 
weapons and supplies for the warring armies and the economy went suddenly from bust to wartime boom.  Briefly our 
economy had the best of both worlds, profiting off the war while not actually involved in it.

As the election of 1916 approached Wilson realized that if he wanted to stay in office he needed to reassert his devotion to 
reform.  In this period Wilson signed the Warehouse Act of 1916 allowing loans to farmers,, The LaFollete Seamans Act of 
1915 which guaranteed fair wages and treatment for sailors, the Workingmens Compensation Act of 1916 which granted 
support to disabled civil servants, and the Adamson Act of 1916 which established an 8 hour day for railroad workers.  In 
addition he nominated reformer Louis Brandeis, an anti-trust crusader to the Supreme Court.  Despite all these specific 
reforms, Wilson still refused to hear pleas regarding segregation and womens sufferage.

Wilson also set out to reform American foreign policy.  Instead of trying to dominate small nations abroad he made an effort 
to discourage conflict, and actually had his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan intercede to stop the outbreak of more 
than 20 conflicts.

One thing which Wilson would not tolerate was threats to the recently completed Panama Canal and he felt that security in 
the carribean was the key to that goal.  When there was trouble in Nicaragua he set up a puppet dictator there.  When there 
were revolutions in the Dominican Republic and Haiti he sent in the marines and installed puppet governments, eventually 
making Haiti a US protectorate.

The most serious foreign crisis in Wilson's first term was the civil war in Mecxico.  In 1911 a liberal reform coalition had 
replaced dictator Porfirio Diaz with Francisco Madero.  Madero was a reformer, but a poor administrator and was overthrown 
and executed by one of his generals, Victoriano Huerta.  Huerta was a conservative reactionary who was in the pocket of 
American big business, but his government was recognized internationally.

Wilson was horrified by the murder of Madero and said 'I will not recognize a government of butchers'.  In addition, the contry 
was still in the midst of civil war and it was not at all clear that Huerta would remain in power for long.  Wilson began to 
put pressure on Huerta, persuaded the British to withdraw their recognition of his government and began negotiating with 
Madero's remaining followers.  He insisted that Huerta hold free elections and lifted an arms embargo so that Huerta's 
opponents could buy US guns.  Huerta refused all these demands and everyone in Mexico was united in resenting Wilson's 
blackmail tactics, including Venustiano Caranza, the leader of the Mexican Constitutionalist Reform rebels.

In April of 1914 a small group of American sailors was arrested in the port of Tampico, Mexico, and although they were 
promptly released, the bureaucrat responsible refused to apologize to their commander for arresting them.  Wilson used this as 
a flimsy excuse for sending troops into Mexico to try to oust Huerta for the Mexican people.

An abortive invasion was attempted at Veracruz, where 19 Americans and 200  mexicans were killed.  At that point the 
invasion stalled and Wilson decided to negotiate when Argentina, Brazil and Chile volunteered to mediate.  Ultimately, Huerta 
resigned and fled to Spain and was replaced by Venustiano Caranza, one of the two leaders of the revolutionary opposition.  
The other rebel leader, Pancho Villa continued to contest control of the country, and showed his contempt for America by 
killing 18 US citizens at Santa Ysabel.  He then invaded Columbus New Mexico and shot up the town, leaving 17 dead 
American behind.  General John J. Black Jack Pershing was ordered to break up Villa's band.  Pershing made a quick 
invasion, and though he failed to capture Villa, he destroyed much of his forces.  Pershing withdrew after a few months when 
Mexican government forces began to get restless at the American presence. 

The real problem with Wilsons behavior in dealing with Mexico was that it showed the weakness not only of Wilsons 
foreign policy, but also of the US Army.  It made it clear that the army was ill prepared and disorganized should it come to a 
real war, and also showed that Wilson was unsure of what his policy was abroad.  Intellectually, Wilson was against all forms 
of foreign intervention, but as was clearly shown in Mexico, he was willing to overlook his convictions when it seemed 
expedient, and in Mexico he had vacillated and changed his mind enough so that he looked very weak.  By neither invading 
nor holding off he managed to steer a course right between the two viable positions he could have taken.

As congressman Humphrey commented in 1916, Wilsons policy 'is characterized by weakness, uncertainty, vacillation, and 
uncontrollable desire to intermeddle in Mexican affairs.  He has not had the courage to go into Mexico nor the courage to stay 
out...I would either go into Mexico and pacify the country or I would keep my hands entirely out of Mexico.  If we are too 
proud to fight, we should be too proud to quarrel.  I would not choose between murderers.'  wilson had negotiated when he 
should have fought and fought when he should have left well enough alone, and that made him look pretty weak.

Ultimately the results of Wilsons meddlesome 'Missionary Diplomacy' were good for Mexico, but they were generally bad for 
the US.  One hidden  result of the Mexican affair was that it gave a clear impression to Germany that the US was hardly 
prepared for war and that our shipping would be easy pickings for their recently developed U-Boat fleet which could raid us at 
sea and expect little organized resistence.

On June 28th of 1914 Serbian student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austrian Empire 
in Sarajevo.  He was a member of the Black Hand which was fighting for Serbian independence from Austria.  For complex 
diplomatic reasons mostly having to do with Russian support for Serbian independence and German desires to expand their 
territories, this primarily domestic Austrian problem led to the outbreak of the first world war, which really started when 
Germany, assuming that a war was imminent, invaded Belgium to make a pre-emptive strike at France, which pretty much 
drew up the battle lines, creating a situation in which the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) took on the Allied 
Powers (England, France and Russia).

Americans had been expecting a war in Europe because of a long history of tension there, but they were surprised at the 
suddenness of the war and very glad to be across the Atlantic from it.  Wilson promptly declared our neutrality, but this was 
clearly a World War, and factions in America quickly began to take interest.  Although most Americans wanted to stay out of 
the war, a third of the population had been born in Europe, and there were many with sympathies on one side or another.  One 
good reason for a policy of neutrality was to avoid precipitating domestic conflicts between partisan immigrant groups.  After 
the invasion of Belgium most Americans were anti-German, but the 8 million german Americans and the 5 million Irish 
Americans took the other side.

There was considerably resentment of Germany in America.  There was fear of their rapidly growing navy, which had just 
outpaced US naval buildup, and also anger over their successful exports of low priced goods in competition with America in 
the markets of the far east.  In addition, Germany was the most monarchical government in Europe and Americans were 
traditionally anti-monarchical.  Public sentiment was further aroused by propaganda, mostly from England, which depicted 
horrible German atrocities against innocent French and Belgian captives, almost all completely fabricated.  Tales were 
circulated of a canadian tourist crucified in Germany, of a factory where Belgian corpses were turned into soap, amputation of 
the hands of Belgian babies, and amputation of the breasts of Belgian women with sharp German sabres.  None of this was 
true, though the Germans had executed one British nurse for helping prisoners escape.  

The Germans tried to compete in the propaganda war to win American support, but being Germans, they were rather heavy 
handed.  The Fatherland, a German newspaper in the US wrote, 'We Americans prattle about humanity, while we manufacture 
poisoned shrapnel and picric acid for profit. Ten thousand German widows, ten thousand orphas, ten thousand graves bear the 
legend, 'Made in America'.  This sort of criticism hit a little too close to home, since it was fundamentally true.

The British and the French were placing huge orders for war materials, and American bankers like Morgan and Company were 
there to loan them more money to buy more weapons when they ran out.  All told some 2.3 billion dollars were loaned to the 
allies while only 27 million were loaned to the Gemrans.

At first Germany had hoped it could win some of that same sort of support from the supposedly neutral US, but as time went 
by, Germany began to regard the US as a tacit ally of England and France.

Wilson had always been a great admirer of Britain and its government, and at the outbreak of thew war he said 'everything I 
love most in the world is at stake.  A german victory would be fatal to our form of government and American ideals.'

Normally, the enmity of a nearly landlocked, embattled Germany would mean little to the US, but Germany did have some 
access to the sea, and it was virtually impossible for their enemies to stop their new U-Boats from escaping into the Atlantic.  
Because the U-Boats were vulnerable to attack when they surfaced, they broke the normal rules of naval combat and attacked 
without warning from beneath the waves with torpedoes, preying mostly on merchant ships and causing heavy loss of life and 
considerable cost in lost commerce.

In February of 1915 the Germans declared all the waters around the British Isles to be a war zone and that they would sink all 
enemy merchant ships in that area.  Since merchant ships flew neutral flags to disguise their origin, the German policy was 
to sink neutral ships as well, just on suspicion.

Wilson informed the Germans that he would hold them strictly accountable for any Americans killed, even if they were aboard 
allied ships.  He insisted on respect for neutral rights and maintained that it was barbaric to take the lives of defenseless 
civilians in wartime, merely because it was expedient.

On may 7th of 1915 the German U-20 sank the British liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland.  1200 people died, including 
128 Americans, though it should be noted that in addition to passengers the Lusitania was carrying 4200 cases of weapons for 
Great Britain.  The American reaction was as great as it had been when the Maine sank in 1898.  Wilson demanded reparations 
and a promise to stop attacking passenger ships.  After a year of negotiating and the sinking oftwo more  passenger ships, the 
Sussex and the Arabic, the Germans gave in and pledged, in the Sussex Pledge,  to attack no more ships without warning and 
they agreed to pay damages for the Lusitania. 

Despite this settlement, Wilson began to press for increased spending on money, but his policy of negotiating and preparing 
for war was so wishy washy that both Bryan his Sec of State and Lindley Garrison, his Sec of War, resigned.

During this period Germans were also operating inside America to try to sabotage the arms industry.  They blew up a plant in 
New Jersey causing $22 million in damages, and one spy, Dr. Albert was caught and communiques about sabotage found in 
his briefcase were published in the newspaper.  More and more this turned sentiment against Germany.

Although Wilson was a pacifist at heart, he began to support the idea of war a little, just as he had done in the carribean and 
in Mexico a few years before.  He signed the National Defense Act in June oif 1916, which would enlarge the army to 
175,000 men and the National Guard to 450,000 men, totally inadequate to match the forces in the fields in europe.  He also 
called for congress to create 'the greatest navy in the world', and they appropriated $313 million for that purpose, the largest 
military appropriation to that date.  Wilson also established a council of National Defense to coordinate industry in builing up 
for the war and a Shipping Board, with $50 million for acquiring urgently needed craft.  All these measures were far short of 
what would actually be needed to fight a modern war.

Despite all this preparation for war, when the presidential election rolled around, Wilson ran as an anti-war candidate to win 
the support of the Progressives who had offered their nomination to Teddy Roosevelt, who had declined in the hopes that the 
Republican candidate Charles Evan Hughes would get more votes as a result.

Wilson ran on the slogan, 'He kept us out of war', but Hughes wasn't sure what he was running on, and kept supporting the 
war when talking to his constituents and denying it when talking to German American groups.  Roosevelt was embittered, 
and called Wilson a 'damned presbyterian hypocrite' and called Huges a 'bearded iceberg, a whiskered Wilson.'

Hughes swept the east, but he failed to win California and other Western states, and ironically, Wilson, who Roosevelt hated 
at this point, pulled out a narrow victory in the electoral college mainly because of support from Progressives.

Once elected, Wilson began pushing for a negotiated peace in Europe, saying that it 'Must be a peace without victory...only a 
peac´between equals can last.'    He also suggested the creation of some sort of world peace organization, saying 'there must 
not be a balance of power, but a community of power.'

Much to his chagrin, the German response was to announce the resumption of their U-Boat attacks, with American vessels 
included, except for one ship per week on a pre-arranged route and schedule.  Wilson didn not like having terms dictated to 
him and maintained the principle of freedom of the seas.  For their part, the German Admiral Von Holtzendorff boasted, 'The 
United States can neither inflict material damage upon us, nor can it be of material benefit to our enemies...I guarantee for its 
part the U Boat war will lead to victory.'

From that point on almost an American ship a day was torpedoed for two months, until on March 25, 1917 Wilson called up 
the National Guard, and on April 2nd he asked congress to declare war, saying, 'Throwing to the winds all scruples of 
humanity, America must fight, not to conquer, but for peace and justice...the world must be made safe for democracy.  Its 
peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.  We have no selfish ends to serve.  We desire no 
conquest, no dominion.  We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the saccrifices we shall freely 
make.'

Wilson had tried to find an honorable alternative to war, but it had not worked.  Although many claimed that America had 
been duped into the war by warmongering industrialists, it was very clear that our fate rested with the allies and that they 
could not stand without US aid, and the actions of Germany had made a declaration of war eminently justified.

The First World War was known as the Great War or the War to End all War, and while it was the greatest war fought to that 
time, obviously it did not end all war.

The US entered the  war about as poorly prepared as it had been in the Spanish war.  The war was already nearing completion 
when we joined in, and the main effect of involvement was that the ultimate negotiated settlement was more favorable to the 
allies than it was to Germany.

It took congress six weeks to decide on a draft, and six months after the declaration of war the first recruits were entering 
training.  The $64 million Hog Island naval yard completed its first ship just after the war ended.  Most of our guns and 
amunition during the war were bought from the British, whose production had caught up to more than meet their own 
demand.

Wilson increased efficiency by centralizing administration, with the creation of the Council of National Defense, the War 
Industries Board, the National War Labor Board, the War Labor Policies Board, the Fuel Administration and the Railroad 
Administration.  Agricultural production was rapidly increased through incentives for farmers under the administrationof 
Herbert Hoover and voluntary conservation of resources by citizens also helped raise agricultural exports by more than 50%.  
Between the decline of immigration, the army and new jobs in wartime industry, unemployment vanished and unprecedented 
opportunities were created for women and blacks.  Money for the war was raised by a series of Victory Loan Bond drives 
which paid for over 2/3 of the total cost.  A graduated income tax on the wealthy made up much of the rest of this money.  
Money was even provided through fundraising drives by private charitable organizations.

Not everyone was happy with the situation.  During the course of the war there were some 6000 strikes against reduced wages 
and increased hours.  In this period the Industrial Workers of the World was founded to carry out industrial sabotage.  The 
Wobblies had the slogan:

An Injury to one is an injury to all
The hours are long and the pay is small
So take your time and buck them all

In support of work slow downs.  They also changed a popular song from There'll be pie in the sky by and by to You'll eat pie 
in the sky when you die.

By the time the war was over American industrial production was phenomenal.  All those boards and commissions had 
organized everything to maximum efficiency, though little of it was ever applied to the war.  By 1918 the total shipbuilding 
capacity of the US was twice that of the entire rest of the world combined.  Ships were seen as particularly important, as an 
extension of the railroad network to get American products to Europe on what was called a Bridge of Boats.

The war itself went well once Americans were involved.  It had been the bloodiest war ever fought, with long, drawn out 
trench warfare which was a nightmare and destroyed the lives and the spirits of an entire generation in Europe, but for the US, 
coming in the last couple of years it was a cake walk.

US Destroyers effectively curbed the U Boat menace and the American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing reached 
Paris on July 4th of 1917, where they waited around until the next spring before being put to use.

In March of 1918 the Germans launched a big offensive in france.  By may they had reached the Marne River at the town of 
Chateau Thierry, only 50 miles from Paris.  In June US forces fought in 5 battles, driving the Germand back at the battles of 
Chateau Theirry and Bellau Wood.  Only about 27,500 Americans saw action in these battles, but more were rapidly moved 
in.  When the Germans made a second offensive in July 80,000 Americans held them back and when the allies counterattacked 
there were 270,000 Americans involved.  By the time the Germans were being pushed out of France in August 500,000 
Americans had joined in.  Finally, in the great battle of the Argonne Forest 1.2 million Americans crawled around in the 
underbrush for a month trying to break through Germany's final defenses on the Hindenburg line.  On november 1st the 
Germans were beaten, with the US taking 120,000 casualties.  On November 11th, 1918 the armistice was signed.

All told we had been involved in fighting the war for less than 9 months.  We had lost only 49,000 men killed in action and 
an equal number to disease, compared to 1.7 million for Russia, 1.6 million for Germany, 1.4 million for France, and just 
under a million for England.  In addition, our doughboys got to return to an economically booming US, while in Europe 
everyone faced starvation, destruction on a massive scale, and the emerging threat of communism.

Ironically, small though it was, our involvement came at just the right time, and to a large extent, it was president Wilson 
who didctated terms to Germany.

At the Paris peace conference Wilson came forward with a Fourteen Point plan for peace.  French minister Clemenceau 
commented that since man had been unable to keep God's Ten Commandments, they were unlikely to do better with Wilsons 
Fourteen Points.

Ultimately, Germany acknowledged responsibility for the war and to pay for damages resulting from it and lots of territory in 
Europe was divided up into new nations on ethnic lines, in keeping with principles of Panslavism and Pangermanism which 
were popular at the time.  The treaty signed at Versailles was not at all what Wilson had in mind, punishing Germany way 
too much and giving nothing to Russia, and generally favoring the special interests of minor allies like Italy.  However, 
Wilson did get one of his main goals.

Out of the negotiations emerged Wilson's League of Nations, an organization designed to settle problems of boundaries and 
rights and trade between all the nations involved.  A grand idea which would solve the inadequacies of the peace treaty, Wilson 
brought it home to America as a method of preventing territorial aggression and war in the future.  Then, much to his chagrin 
he discovered that the congress would not agree to join the league without the addition of the Lodge Reservations, a series of 
modifications designed to preserve the Monroe Doctrine and American Imperialism.

Meanwhile Wilson had a stroke and the democrats chose James Cox as his successor to run for President in 1920 on a 
platform supporting the league.  Wilson called the election 'a great and solumn referendum' on the issue of the League, and if 
that was the case, Wilson's grand plan for world peace was soundle rejected by a 16 to 9 million margin when the Republican 
Warren Harding won the presidential election of 1920.

White the League of Nations might not have guaranteed a lasting peace, it was a possibility for one, and the arrival of World 
War II so soon on the heels of the Great War made very clear how inadequate the Treaty of Versailles was and how much 
some sort of larger solution was needed.


SOCIAL UNREST

The fighting of the First World War was over by 1919, but the impact of the war was far more lasting.  Although the United 
States did not lose nearly as many men as most of the European nations did, and an even smaller proportion of their 
population, the war had been so intense, even during their brief involvement, and the resolution of the war was so 
unsatisfying, that a generation found itself living under the shadow of the war.

In 1919 the soldiers returning home quickly found things far less good than they remembered.  Between 1913 and 1919 the 
cost of living had more than doubled.  The price of farm produce was way down, there were shortages of all sorts of goods, 
inflation was running wild and after the momentum of wartime industry died, unemployment  increased dramatically with the 
addition of all the veterans to the workforce and the reduced need for workers in war related industries. 

During the war unions had grown stronger and they went on strike for higher wages once the war was over.  During 1919 
over 4 million workers were on strike at one time or another, more than 1/5th of the workforce.  This created more shortages, 
more inflation and more strikes.  By 1922 the economy was a total mess, with agriculture, industry and government 
floundering and unable to control the complex and violent post-war readjustment.

This was a period of great unrest in the working class.  During a strike of more than 300,000 steelworkers there had been 
violence in industrial towns.  When the Boston police went out on strike there had been looting in Boston.  In addition to all 
the strikes, anarchist assassins had tried to kill John D. Rockefeller, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Attorney General A. 
Mitchell Palmer.  The role of communists in any of this was minimal, in fact anarchism and communism are diametrically 
opposite philosophies and there were only about 100,000 communists in the US, but the recent Russian revolution had 
heightened popular anxiety about communism, and communist leaders welcomed the notoriety, posing as the champions of 
the working class.

Business leaders became increasingly frightened of the potential of a workers revolt.  One wrote to the Attorney General: 
"There is hardly a respectable citizen of my acquaintance who does not believe that we are on the verge of armed conflict in 
this country."  As one newspaper reported, anarchists, socialists, communists and workers were "joining together with the 
object of overthrowing the American Government through a bloody revolution and establishinbg a Bolshevist republic."

Much of this fear and paranoia was directed at foreigners, because alien ideas like communism originated in Europe, and as the 
bearers of this plague, immigrants were targeted as the source of all the problems.  All the political, social and racial fears of 
the WASP majority were directed at the innocent and disorganized immigrant population, and the 'Red Scare' began.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had been a progressive, but in response to public pressure he joined the hunt and took 
the lead.  He said of the presumed communist immigrant revolutionaries, 'Out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap 
cupidity, cruelty, insanity and crime; from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the 
unmistakable criminal type."

Palmer established the General Intelligence Division  of the Department of Justice under the command  of J. Edgar Hoover to 
collect information on dangerous radicals.  In November of 1919 they raided hideouts of the supposed Union of Russian 
Workers and arrested 650 people, 43 of whom were put on trial, all of which trials were dismissed.  Few of those arrested had 
any involvement with anarchist or communist terrorism.  Despite the lack of convictions, in January of 1920 Palmer and 
Hoover obtained warrants for 3,000 more arrests.  Over 6000 were arrested, many held without bail or arraignment for weeks, 
beaten, forced to sign bogus conventions and kept in filthy, overcrowded cells.  Visitors to these prisoners were also arrested 
as suspected communists. 

All of these outrages against civil rights were tolerated by the public because of fear of communism.  Of the 6000 seized, 
only 556 were deported.  The entire armory seized from these supposed revolutionaries was 6 pistols.  In an effort to save his 
program and his bid for the democratic presidential nomination, Palmer announced that there would be a massive terrorist 
demonstration on May Day in 1920, but when it never happened his credibility was burst like a bubble and the red scare 
rapidly declined.

The height of this paranoia came in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.  In April of 1920, two men in S. Braintree Massachsetss killed a 
paymaster and a guard while robbing a shoe factory.  Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with the crime and 
convicted of murder in 1921.  Both men were anarchists and italian immigrants.  The judge in the trial, Webster Thayer, 
referred to the two defendents in private as 'Those Anarchist Bastards', and they were sentenced to be executed.  They were kept 
alive for a while because of appeals, but eventually, in 1927 they were electrocuted.  The case attracted a lot of attention, 
especially because they were clearly innocent.  In court Vanzetti said, "You see me before you, not trembling...I never 
commit a crime in my life...I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, I would live again and do 
what I have done already.'  The public, or at least the intellectual community,  was outraged that these two men had been 
punished, more for being radicals and foreigners than for being guilty.

Fear of immigrants did not go away, however.  Immigration was on the rise, from 110,000 in 1919 to 430,000 in 1920 to 
805,000 in 1921, with that geometric progression being projected into the future.  In 1921 congress responded by setting a 
quota system on immigration, limiting immigration to a total of 350,000 persons per year, broken down by nation of origin, 
based on the already established ethnic make up of the nation in 1910, to reduce the number of eastern Europeans.  In 1924 
the quota was lowered to 235,000 and the ethnic distribution was based on 1890 to further reduce the number of eastern 
europeans.  In 1929 it was reduced to 150,000, and weighted in favor of immigrants from Great Britain, from which less than 
half the alloted number of emigrants were actually coming.  The ultimate result of closing the door on immigration in this 
way was that the foreign-born population fell from 13% in 1920 to less than 5% in 1970.

The population was also becoming increasingly urbanized, with large towns growing and rural towns shrinking away.  In the 
1920s more than 19 million moved from farms to cities.  Those who remained behind in the traditional country lifestyle saw 
the cities as sinful, places of racial mixing and other evils, and they became increasingly conservative and embraced a revival 
of fundamentalist religion, following leaders like William Jennings Bryan.  

This was the rural society was the location of the resergence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had begun after the Civil War and 
really took off in the 1920s.  This was a period of lynchings and race riots, and William J. Simmons, a former preacher, 
became Grand Imperial Dragon of the KKK and added new trappings of mystery and organization for all those who wanted to 
express their fear and hatred of immigrants and other races while hiding behind the anonymity of white hoods.  Crosses were 
burned, large marches and protests too place, businessmen were intimidated into not hiring blacks or foreigners for the best 
jobs.  A massive membership drive brought 5 million people into the Klan by 1923, almost all in small cities and towns and 
rural areas of the mid-west, where few immigrants, jews, catholics or blacks were to be found to start with.  The KKK saw 
themselves as guardians of morality, and expanded their persecution to gamblers, prostitutes, bootleggers and anyone else who 
differed from their White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal.  They even claimed that catholics were stockpiling guns in cathedrals 
to overthrow the government, which they were believed to have already infiltrated.  They had all sorts of trappings of 
mysticism.  They had titles like Imperial Wizards, Grand Goblins, King Kleagles, and lovely slogans like 'Kill the Kikes, 
Koons and Katholics'.  

Despite all their moralistic dogma and rhetoric, the Klan was actually run by con men and grifters who were pocketing most 
of the money and living a high life of sex and drink.   The KKK lost much of its following then the Klan leader in Indiana, 
David C. Stephenson, was convicted of rape and murder.  By 1930 membership had fallen to 9,000.  The KKK showed how 
rural Americans felt that power and control was slipping away from them into the hands of urban minorities, and was clearly 
a last effort to try to reassert what they saw as the traditional domination of the US by WASPs.


PROHIBITION

One aspect of the conflict between rural and urban lifestyles was the reemergence of a temperance movement to fight the evils 
of liquor.  This movement had begun in the 1830s and was seen then as a conspiracy against the drinking traditions of Irish 
and Italian immigrants, and those same groups were very active in opposing prohibition in the 1920s.

In 1919 the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution was ratified, which prohibited the sale, manufacture and transportation 
of all alcoholic beverages.  It passed largely on anti-immigrant sentiment, to deny germans their beer, the irish their whiskey 
and the italians their wine.  Even before prohibition began in 1920 many local regions had outlawed liquor..

Prohibition did reduce alcohol consumption from 2.6 gallons per capita per year to under a gallon, arrests for drunkenness and 
deaths from alcohol related causes also declined.  There might not have been a problem if they had prohibited only hard liquor 
or restricted availability rather than prohibiting it all together.  However, prohibition was so severe and so total that people 
sought to bypass it  and make liquor available.

The Prohibition Bureau, which enforced the ban, never had more than 3,000 agents to enforce the law, and many of them were 
corrupt or inefficient.  In the cities there was virtually nothing they could do to control distribution of liquor and the borders 
were too large for them to patrol to control the entry of illicit liquor into the country.  Bootlegging became big business and 
organized crime quickly got into the profitable enterprise.  Private speakeasys replaced public saloons and bribes to officials 
and law officers kept them open.

Organizations like the one run by Al Capone in Chicago may have been involved in the most violent aspects of bootlegging, 
including murder, hijacking, bombing distilleries and warehouses and the like, they existed well before prohibition, and 
bootlegging was just another profitable element of their large selection of organized crime activities, including prostitution, 
gambling, kidnapping, extortion  and narcotics.  By 1930 the annual take of the underworld was estimated at between $12 and 
$18 billion per year, several times the national budget.  Arrests of gangsters were few, and convictions even fewer.  Al 
Capone saw himself as a businessman.  He said, 'Everybody calls me a racketeer.  I call myself a businesss man.  When I sell 
liquor it's bootlegging.  When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on lake shore drive, it 's hospitality.'

Prohibition encouraged resentments of all kinds, rural against urban, immigrant against native, and was particularly bad for 
the democratic party, where southern democrats were in support and northern democrats in opposition.  Prohibition 
encouraged hypocrisy, because while everyone praised how much it was improving society most of them continued to drink 
on the side.  It was very clear that prohibition did not work and could not be enforced, but politicians were unwilling to do 
away with it because of the very vocal elements which continued to support it.  Similar to the problems with social issues 
like Abortion today, where a very outspoken minority opposes it, while a more passive majority supports it.


ART, LITERATURE & SOCIETY

Just as other elements of society, like racism and organized crime,  seemed to be out of control, the younger generation was 
also a source of fear and wonder.  Young Americans reacted to the horror of the war and the increasing reactionary 
conservatism of their society by running wild.   They danced to the wild, African rhythms of Jazz music, drove around in fast 
cars, drank to excess, and tried to pursue a hedonistic life of lust and imorality.  While exciting, this wasn't really anything 
new.  The wildness of the Roaring Twenties was not all that much different from what their parents had gone through in the 
Gay Nineties, a stage of youth, perhaps more intense and better publicized, but a pattern old and oft repeated, natural rebellion 
against the bonds of authority.

This rebellious decade was characterized by disillusionment among intellectuals.  Although women won the vote in the 1920s 
with the 19th amendment, little had been done to improve their voice in society, and both genders saw the ignorance of 
fundamentalism and radicalism closing in around them while they lived under a government of corrupt and two-faced 
politicians who seemed incapable of formulating effective policies to deal with the nations growing problems.  Although new 
forms of entertainment were beginning to emerge, like the cinema, to divert active young minds from these problems, during 
this decade a group of writers surfaced who tried to express the contradictions they saw in society and came up with very 
pessimistic conclusions about the decadence and failure of the world around them.

Writers like Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken and Henry Adams had set the stage for realistic fiction and social criticism  in 
the first two decades of the century, and their torch was picked up by a younger generation who saw how progressivism had 
failed in the aftermath of the Great War.

The new intellectualism was very urban, the haven for the new intellectuals was New York's Greenwich Village.  It was 
characterized by a distaste for business and society, and a pretty strong dose of self-pity.  The younger generation referred to 
themselves as 'the lost generation' and prefered to self pity to self exploration.

Writers produced in this period included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. 

Fitzgerald first achieved fame in 1920 with the publication of THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, an examination of the follies of 
youth, followed by THE GREAT GATSBY in 1925, which looked at the decadence of the wealthy.  Fitzgerald squandered his 
money, became an alcoholic, and ended up writing some very good scripts for hollywood, though he felt he had prostituted 
his talent.  To be honest, in many ways his later hack novels and screenplays were more coherent and more intelligent than 
his earlier, more serious works.

Ernest Hemingway was part of a body of young artists who took up life in Europe, especially in Paris.  The Rive Gauche and 
the Latin Quarter attracted them and allowed them an inexpensive, libertine lifestyle.  Hemingway had been a reporter for the 
Kansas City Star, had served in the Italian Army in WW I, and then settled in Paris to write.  THE SUN ALSO RISES was 
published in 1926, exploring the decadent life of cafe society in Paris, and in 1929 A FAREWELL TO ARMS examined the 
futility and horror ofwar.  Hemingway's books became bestsellers, despite the fact that his strange, evocative style often 
makes his books virtually incomprehensible, with dialog, narrative and description all jumbled together.  Hemingway lived a 
life of adventure, travelling, hunting, experiencing life, and the strongest quality of his work was its gritty realism and sense 
of presence and involvement.

Sinclair Lewis became instantly popular with the publication  of MAIN STREET in 1920 and its examination of small town 
attitudes.  In BABBITT in 1922 he parodied the brash, overconfident, self-obsessed businessman.  ARROWSMITH in 1925 
looked at hypocrisy in medicine, ELMER GANTRY disected religion in 1927 and IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE looked at the 
threat of fascism in America in 1935.  Lewis was a geat observer of life, and as he got older he lost touch with his own 
society to a certain degree and his works became less effective in their criticism and less popular with the public.  He craved 
public recognition, and though he had won a Pulitzer prize and had been the first American author to win a Nobel prize, he 
considered himself a failure when he died in 1951.

Literature was not the only area of the arts where Americans were finding new forms of expression.  Certainly the two biggest 
new developments were motion pictures and radio.

The first movies were made around 1900 and although early films were crude, they became enormously popular.  By 1908 
there were almost 10,000 theatres in the nation.  By 1930 weekly admissions totalled more than 100 million per year.  
People first began to take film seriously around 1915 with the release of D. W. Griffith's film BIRTH OF A NATION, an 
exhaustive exploration of American history, brilliantly acted and photographed, a clear sign that a movie could have meaning.  
By the mid 1920s Hollywood had become the film capitol, and movie making was the fourth largest industry in the nation.

Movie theatres which seated more than 3,000 people were being built, and with the introduction of sound in THE JAZZ 
SINGER in 1927 and color a few years later costs and profits increased rapidly until million dollar films were being produced 
in the 1930s, and a whole new sub-culture was developing around early film stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, 
Lillian Gish and John Barrymore, people who were earning more than the president, over $100,000 per year in some cases, 
and who were certainly better known and more popular.  

From the very beginning most movies were trash.  Stars tended to be talentless show-dogs recruited for their looks or stage 
actors who were slumming in films because of the high salaries.  However, as time went by the craft became more 
accomplished through the work of men like D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawkes, John Ford and Frank Capra, who directed films 
which were both popular and worthwhile.  By the end of the 1930s hundreds of films were being produced every year by 
dozens of studios, and though there were a hundred instantly forgotten B-Movie melodramas for every film like Grand Hotel, 
people of all walks of life flocked to the theatres to see whatever was showing, and by the mid 30s it was very clear that 
movies had become a central element of popular culture.

Radio was in many ways even more important than movies were.  While movies brought drama and comedy into every town, 
Radio brought all forms of entertainment right into the home.  Although the basic principles of Radio had been worked out in 
the previous century, long-dstance broadcasting was not possible until after WW I.  In 1920, the first commercial station, 
KDKA in Pittsburg began broadcasting,a dn by 1922 there were over 500 stations in operation.  A San Francisco newspaper 
reported 'There is radio music in the air, every night, everywhere.  Anybody can hear it at home on a receiving set, which any 
boy can put up in an hour.'

Beginning in 1924 witht he presidential nominating conventions, radio covered major news events live, and most of the 
musical and dramatic programming was also performed live for the mike.  The popularity of Radio was demonstrated very 
early on.  When the announcer on one of the first music programs in New York asked for phone in requests, they received 
more than 3,000 calls per hour.  Advertisers seized on radio as a way to get their products known in every home, and one of 
the results of this was that programming became increasingly mundane and predictable, aimed at the lowest common 
denominator in the audience in order to sell the product.

To control the growth of radio congress limited the number of stations in 1927 and created the Federal Communications 
Commission in 1934 to encourage stations to operate in the public interest.  Unfortunately, the interests of the public 
appeared to be pretty simplistic, so radio remained a great tool of communication turned to serve the most puerile ends.

The 1920s also saw a change in the nature of popular music.  Black society had become increasingly concentrated in urban 
ghettos, and despite the problems in these rather degraded urban areas, city life stimulated many blacks to new achievements, 
in politics and in the arts, working to improve their lives and living in urban areas which were almost totally dominated by 
the black population.

This produced an automatic audience for homegrown black music, and the first great form to emerge was Jazz.  Black 
musicians from New Orleans had created Jazz at the turn of the century, bt by 1920 it had spread throughout the country and 
was being taken up by white audiences.  The wildness and the improvisational nature of jazz appealed to the desire for freedom 
in the lost white youth of the era as well as in the urban black audience of the ghettos.

Artisits like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington became enormosly popular arond the world, and following on the heels of 
Jazz, other forms of music began to emerge, including ragtime and scat and blues and rhythm & blues.  All of these styles 
were popular with whites and blacks alike, especially in the cities, and rapidly white artists began to borrow from and imitate 
black artists, and this was a major force in the creation of swing music and much of the poplar music from musicals of the 
period.  Artists like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin borrowed from black music and created new 
musical styles which became very popular and continue to this day.


BOOM  & BUST

To a certain degree the quest of youth after understanding, abandonning social conventions for new forms of entertainment, 
was a sign that something was wrong in the society, but no one really realized this because things looked so good in many 
ways.  There had been some political problems during the 1920s, but the nation seemed to be going on stronger than ever 
before nonetheless.

Warren G. Harding, who had come in as president after Wilson, looked good in the job, but managed things very poorly.  He 
was a compromise republican candidate, mildly supported by everyone, but so middle of the road that neither he, nor anyone 
else, could get enthusiastic about his policies.  In comparision with Wilson he looked like a total, uneducated idiot.  One 
Boston businessman asked, 'why does he not get a private secretary who can clothe his ideas in the language customarily used 
by educated men?'  Harding was not actually stupid, but he was a confirmed party man, willing to go along with whatever the 
prevailing wind was, and enormously indecisive.

While he was not corrupt, he made the mistake of appointing real experts to run his executive departments.  This meant, 
essentially, letting the foxes loose in the chicken coop.  It was not wise policy to set a multimillionaire banker like Andrew 
Mellon to running the Treasury.  Mellon initiated a sweeping program of reforms, primarily designed to eliminate all 
government spending and reduce taxes and other sources of income accordingly.  He wanted to deregulate everything, eliminate 
taxes on the rich to stimulate investment, while keeping the same rate of taxes for the middle classes.  He was a great 
proponent of the 'trickle down' theory, and his followers called him the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander 
Hamilton (which can be taken several ways).

Mellons proposals were too reactionary for congress and representatives of agricultural districts formed the Farm Bloc in 
opposition to his tarriff which was designed to stimulate indunstry.  Some of his tax reductions did go into effect, however, 
and he was able to balance the budget and reduce the national debt.  Harding endorsed Mellon's policies and said, 'We want less 
government in business and more business in government'.  He allowed Mellon to emasculate the ITC and the FTC and give 
business basically free reign to do whatever it wanted for a profit.

The fact that Harding let Mellon run wild was typical of his weak leadership.  With Mellon it was a relatively harmless 
weakness, since Mellon was honest and had some good ideas.  However Harding had brought with him a grop of appointees 
from his native state who came to be known as the 'Ohio Gang'.  They included an influence peddler named Jesse Smith who 
used his friendship with the Attorney General to get people jobs and contracts, Charles R. Forbes who embezzled millions 
from the fund to construct veterans hospitals and Thomas W. Miller who was sent to jail for accepting bribes.  All of these 
men were exposed.  Smith committed suicide, Forbes and Miller were sent to prison.

Worst of all was Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall.  He leased government oil fields to private companies, which led to 
the Teapot Dome Scandal.  It turned out that the owner of the companies which had leased the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills oil 
fields had given Fall over 400,000 dollars for access to the land.  Ultimately, Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil served 9 
months in prison and Fall had to pay 100,000 dollars in fines and served a year in jail.  

Shortly after this scandal, Harding died of a heart attack, and was succeeded by his Vice President Calvin Coolidge.  Coolidge 
followed in Harding's mold of serving big business, but was more aggressive at it.  He said, 'The man who builds a factory 
builds a temple.'  Naturally he kept Mellon on to run the economy.  Coolidge handily won reelection in 1924 against John 
W. Davis  who ran for the Democrats and Robert M. LaFollette who was the candidate of a progressive coalition of labor 
unions, socialists and agriculturalists.

Through Coolidge's hands off policy and Mellon's aggressive support of business the economy boomed.  Unemployment was 
down, interest rates were low, wages rose, the US became the wealthiest nation in the world, controlling 40% of the total 
wealth of the world, as much as all the nations in Europe put together.

Industry was becoming increasingly mechanized.  New forms of automation and improved communictions were making 
business more efficient, especially with increased use of electrical power.  By 1929 the US was producing more electricity 
than the rest of thew world combined.

The methods devised by Henry Ford for assembly line production of automobiles and the idea of interchangable machine parts 
sped up production and reduced costs.  In the Ford plant, over the 10 years from 1920 to 1930 production was quadrupled.  
These ideas became 'scientific shop management', and were adopted by many other industries, despite union objections.

While the country was doing well economically, the profits were not being shared equally.  Certain traditional industries, like 
cotton and coal production were losing ground to newer industries, or becoming less profitable as they became more efficient.

More and more control of the economy was going into the hands of only a very few really large companies.  By 1929 200 
companies controlled half of the nations industrial production.  General Motors, Ford and Chrysler controlled 90% of the 
automobile production.  For tobacco companies produced 90% of the tobacco.  One percent of the banks controlled 46% of 
the banking business. Even in retail sales, certain chain stores becan to expand to where they forced smaller local retailers out 
of business.  The A&P Food Stores chain had expanded from 400 stores in 1912 to 17,500 by 1928 and Woolworths five and 
dime stores had followed a similar pattern.

Although trusts had been outlawed, and price fixing was illegal, trade associations began to be founded, in which companies 
in a particular industry worked together voluntarily, which ultimately resulted in the largest company setting its prices and 
letting the others know so that they could follow.  The government allowed this because it was felt that such cooperation 
helped to stabilize the economy.

As long as profits and markets kept expanding, things were good.  There was enough business to go around and the large 
companies cold afford to leave some remnants for the small companies to keep going.

All in all, for the time being, industry was going great.  The problem was that agriculture was not doing so well.  Foreign 
exports and therefore agricultural prices, were down, the cost of machinery was up, and you needed more machinery than ever 
before to keep feeding your family.  As improved fertilizers and equipment raised crop yields per acre, prices fell even further, 
sending the farmer in quest of more technology to produce more so the price could drop some more.

The government did nothing to help.  Harding and Coolidge both opposed aid to agriculture on principle.    They made money 
for loans readily available so farmers could dig themselves deeper into debt, but did nothing to open up new markets.

Farmers were in distress.  As Claude R. Wickard of Indiana said, ' I was disturbed by the trend of things, and I think, what 
was most important of all, my hope began to vanish.  I became discouraged with agriculture.  We didn't know where we were 
going.'  In the period from 1920 to 1932 one in every four farms was sold for debt or taxes.  As a folksong of the period 
went, 'no use talkin, any man's beat, with eleven cent cotton and forty-cent meat.'

To try to deal with the problem of over production, the Farm Bloc in congress came up with the McNary-Haugen bill in 
1927, which proposed that the government could buy up excess production and sell it abroad at a competitive price.  Coolidge 
vetoed it and vetoed another similar bill the next year.  His rationale was that 'A healthy economic condition is best 
maintained through a free play of competition', but he did not realize that American farms could no longer compete.

Few people realized that anything was wrong and Coolidge was complacent.  He said, 'The contry can regard the present with 
satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism' when he stepped down as president in 1928 and was succeeded by fellow 
republican Herbert Hoover.  The Republican party seemed to be totally dominant over the Democrats in the election of 1928.  
They were riding a huge wave of prosperity which blotted out small problems in the nation, like the complete agricultural 
collapse.  The stock market was rising at an amazing rate, and as Hoover entered the presidency everything looked great.

Beneath all this, there were hidden economic problems.  Several hundred banks were failing each year.  Real estate specilation 
was running wild, with land underwater in Florida selling at premium prices (note H. Disston/Suicide in Florida Bust of 
1925).  

In September on 1929 the stock market began fluctuating wildly.  It was explained away as natural adjustments after a period 
of growth before a new plateau was established.

On October 24th 13 million shares (a new record) changed hands.  Prices declined sharply, but bankers and investors worked 
together to prevent a crisis and President Hoover assured the nation that 'the business of the country is on a sound a 
prosperous basis.'

On October 29th, Black Tuesday,  16 million shares were sold, prices plummetted and did not revive, and the depression was 
on, not just in America, but worldwide, and failures of banks and businesses followed rapidly on the heels of the stock market 
crash. 

By the end of 1929 stockholders had lost over $40 billion.  The typical stock had more than halved its value.  By the end of 
1930 7 million were jobless and that number doubled two years later, and many who remained employed found their wages 
severely cut.  Within three years 5000 banks had folded

The popular joke of the time was that desk clerks at NY hotels asked guests if they were registering for 'sleeping or jumping'.

A popular jingle of the time summed up these events pretty well:

 	Mellon pulled the whistle
   	Hoover rang the bell
	Wall Street gave the signal
	And the country went to hell


THE DEPRESSION

In the 1920s the industrial wealth of the nation had become increasingly concentrated in the hands of only a relatively few 
really large companies.  By 1929 200 companies controlled half of the nations industrial production.  

As long as profits and markets kept expanding, this system worked.  When there was enough business to go around, when 
there were small pieces of the pie for the smaller companies, the economy remained in balance, but beneath the prosperity 
enjoyed by the most visible section of the economy, the really large industrial corporations, there were hidden economic 
problems.

The still waters of the surface on which the ship of prosperity sailed hid the turmoil of the maelstrom below.

Several hundred banks were failing each year in the 1920s.  Investors were looking for other avenues to protect their wealth, 
from ill-advised real-estate investments to hording gold.  An increasing amount of money was coming out of the legitimate 
investment market and going into far more uncertain ventures.  

In September on 1929 the stock market began fluctuating wildly.  This was explained away as natural adjustments after a 
period of growth before a new plateau was established.

On October 24th 13 million shares (a new record) changed hands.  Prices declined sharply, but bankers and investors worked 
together to prevent a crisis and President Hoover assured the nation that 'the business of the country is on a sound a 
prosperous basis.'

On October 29th, Black Tuesday,  16 million shares were sold, prices plummetted and did not revive, and the depression was 
on, not just in America, but worldwide, and failures of banks and businesses followed rapidly on the heels of the stock market 
crash. 

By the end of 1929 stockholders had lost over $40 billion.  The typical stock had more than halved its value.  By the end of 
1930 7 million were jobless and that number doubled two years later, and many who remained employed found their wages 
severely cut.   In Chicago alone 700,000 were unemployed.  Within three years 5000 banks had folded.

The irony about this economic collapse was that it was not really the result of any kind of shortage or failure in the economy, 
but really the result of overproduction.  Farms drove themselves into the ground producing more than they could sell on the 
international grain market.  Factories made themselves obsolete by producing more manufactured goods than they could sell at 
a reasonable price.  After WWI the production capability of the United States was much greater than the ability of the US 
population and our foreign markets to consume.

The stock market crash was only one of many symptoms of a large number of economic problems which made up the 
depression.  

Entirely new economic forces were at work in this period.  A large portion of the consumer population had been convinced by 
easy payment terms to do their buying on credit, and that credit became overextended and many found themselves unable to 
meet their obligations.

Technology was also putting people out of work.  Labor saving machines and more efficient methods of factory management 
put many people on the streets even when businesses were doing relatively well.

Too much of the wealth being produced during this period had been concentrated in the hands of company owners and big 
investors, with wages kept artificially low.  The result of this was that the average consumer had to scrimp and save, and was 
not putting much money back into the economy in the form of purchases, while large investors tended to horde and stockpile 
their wealth.

In addition, the economic collapse in America was part of a world wide pattern of depression.  Europe had never really 
recovered from their war losses.  Many European nations were unable to pay off their war debts.  Many European banks were 
going under, and interantional trade had virtually dried up, partially because of the Hawley-Smoot Tarriff of 1930 which placed 
prohibitively high fees on foreign imports.

Man made disaster was accompanied by natural disaster.  In 1930 a massive drought scorched the missisisippi valley, causing 
thousands of farms to be sold at auction, and frequently, once that land was sold, the original farmer was allowed to return as a 
tenant or renter on land now owned by a land speculator.  The result was that  many of the small farmers who had always 
been the backbone of american, found themselves totally broke, farming blighted land with the profits going to someone else, 
often the same land that had been green and productive in their father's time, and which their fathers had owned.  Heat and 
wind turned rich topsoil into dust and created the great dust bowl in Oklahoma and Arkansas.  350,000 of these Okies and 
Arkies were forced off their land to migrate to California where they ended up working as migrant farm laborers paid less than 
25 cents an hour.  Their plight was presented well by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.

By 1930 the depression had taken hold all over the nation.  Through no fault of their own people who wanted to work found 
that there was no work for them.  This led to dispair and degradation on a national scale.  Able bodied men became 
panhandlers, stood in line for soup and bread, fought over the content of garbage can, lived in outdoor shanty towns, and saw 
the American dream vanish away.  Whole families lost all their property and security to forces they could not understand or 
visualize, and found themselves reduced from affluence to poverty and from the security of home and employment to the hand 
to mouth existence of migrant workers and beggars.

Of course, not everyone suffered in the depression.  For those with diversified wealth, or with investments in the right areas 
the depression was merely an inconvenience, and if they held on and didn't panic, there were many businessmen who came out 
of the period wealthier than they had been before.

Much of the blame for this ended up on President Herbert Hoover, who had really inherited a problem which had been 
building for years, but also seemed strangely insensitive to theproblem, despite his background as a progressive reformer.  
Hoover's Treasurer Mellon, expressed the callousness of the administration when he said, 'Let the slump liquidate 
itself...Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers...people will work harder, live a more moral life.  Values will be 
adjusted, and enterprising peopel will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.'   Practical though the idea of allowing 
a natural bottoming out might have been, it was not popular for those who were hitting bottom.

The newspapers under which people slept in the parks to keep warm were known as 'Hoover Blankets', the shantytowns were 
known as 'Hoovervilles'.

Hoover believe that the people of america were 'Rugged Individualists' and continued to insist that American enterprise and 
industry could pull itself up by its boostraps, and he seemed blissfully oblivious of the 'Ragged Individuals' who made up the 
growing body of the poor and dispossessed in his nation.  Hoover felt that setting up public welfare would weaken the fiber of 
the nation, and he made optimistic pronouncements, claiming that prosperity was just around the corner, which were usually 
followed by more economic disaster.  Hoover said, 'I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought 
to be extended to the relief of individual suffering...the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support 
the government, the government should not support the people.'

Hoover's basic theory was that to give money to people to keep them alive and fed was bad for their character, so while he 
supported legislation to subsidize industry and to help farmers through this period, he was criticized for feeding the pigs 
because they had no characters to undermine.

Hoover  supported the trickle-down theory, and attempted to deal with the problem in accordance with that principle, by 
appropriating 2.25 billion dollars for public works programs, though he warned that 'Prosperity cannot be restored by raids on 
the public treasury.'  The largest of these projects was the construction of the Hoover Dam in the colorodo river.  Other 
programs like the Norris Muscle Shoals Bill, designed to dam the Tennessee river to generate power, were vetoed because 
Hoover felt they would set government agencies in competition with private companies.

In 1932 congress established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation with half a billion dollars to lend money to insuarance 
companies, banks, agricultural companies and railroads to create new jobs, but it was specifically restricted from loaning 
money to individuals.  The idea was to 'prime the pump' so that work would be created, rather than just throwing money at 
people.  It was criticized as the 'millionaires dole', benefiting only the wealthy.

Veterans of WWI had been promised a bonus to be paid in 1945, and under the pressure of the depression, they began to 
agitate for it to be paid early.  Congress passed a bill in 1931 allowing up to half of the bonus to be paid early, but Hoover 
vetoed it because the budget was already 2 billion in the red.

Thosands of impoverished, unemployed veterans marched on Washington for immediate payment of their entire bonus.  They 
called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, and some 20,000 arrived in Washington in the summer of 1932.  They set 
up gigantic towns of tents and shacks on vacant lots, which created a menace to public health.  Hoover tried to get them to 
leave by raising money to pay for their return train fare.  They refused his offer, and Hoover called in the army,m which drove 
them off with tear gas at the Battle of Anacostia flats.  Their shacks were burnt, and supposedly an 11 month old 'bonus baby' 
was killed by tear gas.

After this, no one was happy with Hoover and his loss in the election of 1932 seemed inevitable.

Although Hoover had attempted to overcome his prejudices and had initiated some limited programs, his efforts were too little 
too late to deal with the problems of the depression, and ultimately their solution was left to his successor, Franklin 
Roosevelt.

At the time of the election of 1932 there were 11 million unemployed.  Hoover, who had little heart left for the job, was 
nominated by the Repoublicans, and campaigned on an anti-prohibiition platform.

Running against him was the popular governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, who was a fifth cousin of President Teddy 
Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was from a wealthy background, well educated and appealing.  As a young man, many had seen him as somewhat 
superficial, but when he was struck with Infantile Paralysis in 1921 he began to develope some character, with the braces on 
his legs seeming to strenthen his personality as well.

Roosevelt had a great speaking voice and was incredibly charming.  He believed that the human waste of the depression was 
more important than the waste of money needed to deal with it.  He won the Democratic nomination easily and proceeded to 
wage a very energetic campaign.

He said in his campaign, 'The country needs and demands bold, persistent experimentation.  It is common sense to take a 
method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.  But above all, try something.'  At the convention he saiud, 'I 
pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people', which became the watchword of his plan for dealing with 
the depression.

Roosevelt campaigned extra hard, travelling a total of 25,000 miles around the country, to prove to the people that he was not 
an invalid, and that although crippled, he was still strong and able.  Roosevelt's promises were vague, but he claimed to 
represent the 'forgotten man'.  He also promised to balance the budget, with slogans like 'Throw the spenders out' and 'Out of 
the Red with Roosevelt', which was ironically contradictory to his new deal plans.

Hoover campaigned with a depressingly honest approach to the problems of the nation, which did not win him any 
popularity.  Ultimately he lost by a margin of more than 400 electoral votes.  One vital element in the election of 1932 was 
the black vote, because black voters had switched in huge numbers from the Republican party to the Democratic party because 
they felt that Hoover's failure and the depression which had hit them particularly hard, were a betrayal of the party of Lincoln.

One Democratic slogan was 'a Vote for Roosevelt is a Vote Against Hoover', and to a large extent, Roosevelt won because 
the people wanted someone new who would take a different approach to the problems which they still blamed on Hoover.

Between the election and the inauguration the depression reached its lowest depths, with unemployment hitting 25% and the 
national economy virtually shut down.  Later Hoover claimed that Roosevelt allowed the depression to worsen so that he 
would look better when he pulled the nation out of it.

Roosevelt initiated his economic programs with the three Rs, Relief, Recovery and Reform.  He said, 'Let me assert my firm 
belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.'

Almost from the moment he was inaugurated he took an aggressive approach to dealing with the crisis.

He closed the banks down from March 6th to 10th, and during that time congress put together the Emergency Banking Relief 
Act which reopened them with federal support and control, allowing the President to personally regulate banking and to 
reopen banks which were closed down, but still had funds.  Since 1930 over 1000 banks had failed each year, with over 4000 
failing in 1933.  After Roosevelt's actions only 57 failed in 1934 and after that failures steadily declined.

In a period of 100 days, working with an energetic and cooperative Democratic congress, Roosevelt proceded to completely 
overhaul the national economy.  This congress came to be known as the Hundred Day Congress.

Roosevelt's ideas were passed into law without revision by a frantic congress, and he was given unprecedented powers, 
because many of the new laws delegated management and decision making to the President.  One senator complained at the 
time, 'If Roosevelt asked congress to commit suicide tomorrow, they'd do it.'

While making all these reforms, Roosevelt inspired the people with confidence in a series of thirty 'Fireside Chats' delivered 
over the radio too reassure 35 million listeners in the stability of banks and the economy.

Almost every week a new law was passed, creating what were called the 'Alphabetical Agencies', because of all the acronyms.

Beer and Wine Revenue Act (March 22, 1933)-reopened an old industry by lifting prohibition on beer and wine with less than 
3.2% alcohol, with a tax of $5/barrel to help pay for some of these programs.  21st Ammendment later in 1933 repealed 
prohibition alltogether.

Unemployment Relief Act (March 31)- Created Civilian Conservation Corps.   Unemployment was one of the biggest 
problems.  This act provided government empoloyment in a uniformed army of 3 million young men who were put to work 
planting forests, fighting fires, controlling floods and draining swamps.  This kept the youths off the streets and provided 
cheap labor for efforts which would provide future benefits.

Gold Surrender Ordered April 5, 1933, requiring all private hordes of gold to be turned in for paper money.

Gold Standard Abandonned April 19, 1933, paper money made official instead.  Gold content of dollar reduced to 59.06 cents 
in accordance with actual gold reserves.  Idea was to create controlled inflation to stimulate business.  Some complained that 
this robbed people of 40 cents on the dollar, but there was no real impact, except in the foreign currency market. 

Federal Emergency Relief Act (May 12)- Created Federal Emergency Relief Administration.  This dealt with adult 
unemployed, giving $3 billion to Harry Hopkins, a NY social worker to use for wages on public works projects.  Also 
created Civil Works Administration which provided temporary jobs at make work tasks like raking leaves.  Scoffers 
commented, 'The only thing we have to fear is work itself'.

Agricultral Adjustment Act (May 12)- provided millions of dollars to help farmers meet their mortgages.  Idea was to raise 
prices for farm produce by creating artificial scarcity, which would return prices to where they had been in the first decade of 
the century.  Produce was bought up by government which distributed it to the poor and unemployed in the cities, but 
distribution was inefficient, which earned the AAA a bad name, and it was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court.

Tennessee Valley Authority Act (May 18)- Extremely impoverished area with 2.5 million of the poorest people in America, 
with a great natural resource in its river.  The poor were relocated, the river was dammed, the valley was flooded.  Critics 
complained that government run utilities were unfair competition for private utilities, and that it was a symptom of creeping 
socialism.  Relocated farmers complained about their new houses.  One Ezra Hill pointed to the plans for his new government 
home and objected to the bathroom fixtures which were planned, saying 'What's all this?  I won't have it!  I guess an outdoor 
privy is still good enough for me.'  The ultimate result of the TVA was to converta  proverty stricken area into one of the 
best agricultural regions in the country.

Federal Securities Act (May 27)- Required promotors to provide sworn information on soundness of stocks.

Home Owners Refinancing Act (June 13)- Created Home Owners Loan Corporation.  Refinanced old home loans at low 
interest rates.

National Industrial Recovery Act (June 16)- Created National Recovery Administration and Public Works Administration.  
Designed to assist industry, labor and the unemployed.  Identified 200 industries where hours were to be reduced so that more 
workers could have jobs, essentially turning each full time worker into two part time workers.  Also established minumum 
wages.  Guaranteed right to form unions and made it illegal to close unions out of factories.  Also restricted child labor.  The 
symbol of the NRA was a blue eagle, after which the Philadelphia football team was named.  Industrialist critics called the 
NRA 'National Rnn Around' and 'Nuts Running America', and the blue eagle came to be known as the sick chicked because 
so many factory operators were cheating their way arond the act.  One Iowan commented, 'While the farmer is losing his 
pants to his creditors, the NRA is rolling up his shirt...soon we'll have a nudist colony.' Ultimately the NRA fell apart and 
was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  The PWA under Harold L. Ickes spent $4 billion on 34,000 projects, 
including public buildings, highways and dams, including the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia river, the largest man 
made object since the Great Wall of China.

Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act (June 16)-created Federal Depost Insurance Corporation which insured bank deposits for 
up to $5000 which guaranteed security against bank failures.

Securities and Exchange Comission established (June 6, 1934)- part of effort to reestablish reliability in securities trading, to 
make stock market more stable.

National Housing Act (June 28)- Created Federal Housing Administration.  Stimulated building industry with small loans to 
homeowners and builders.  One of few agencies to last to the present day.

Frazier Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act (June 28)- suspended mortgage forclosures for five years, but was shot down by supreme 
court, and then revised to be only 3 years, and was upheld.

Resettlement Administration- established to help farmers from dustbowl move to better land.  the CCC planted trees where 
abandonned farms had been, a total of 200 million, to reclaim the land.

Works Progress Administration Created (April 8, 1935)- spent $11 biullion on public works projects to employ people, 
including buildings, bridges, new roads, zoos, cricket control, and much more, employing 9 million people.  Critics said 
WPA meant, We Provide Alms, but nonetheless, it worked.  People were pleased.  They chanted, We work all day/for the 
WPA/let the market crash/ we collect out cash.  The WPA also found work for writers and artists, decorating public 
buildings, providing free plays and the like.

National Labor Relations Act (July 5, 1935)- Created National Labor Relations Board to protect labor organizations and 
promote collective bargaining.  Encouraged unionization of unskilled workers, who formed the Committee for Industrial 
Organization. which achieved notice through sit down strikes against the auto industry and the steel industry.  Led by John L. 
Lewis, they broke away from the American Federation of Labor and eventually claimed over 4 million members.

Social Secturity Act (August 14, 1935)- Protection against future depressions, with unemployment insurance and payments 
of $10 to $85 for retired workers from a payroll tax on employers and employees.  Also made provision for the handicapped 
and dependents.   Bitterly opposed by republicans, but examples of similar systems in europe clearly worked, and it was 
approved by congress.  By 1939 over 45 million persons were eligible for social security.

Public Utility Holding Company Act (Aug 26, 1935)- Controlled and regulated super-corporations which controlled utilities, 
in response to crash of Samuel Insull's multi-billion dollar utility empire in Chicago.  Utilities were a $13 billion industry 
and needed to be controlled.

Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (Feb 29)- Similar to AAA, tried to raise farm prices by paying farmers not to 
use their land, or to plant soil revitalizing crops like soybeans.  Was approved by Supreme Court.

US Housing Authority (Sep 1, 1937) established, extension of FHA to lend money to communities for low income housing.  
About 650,000 units undertaken, but not totally successful.

Second Agricultural Adjustment Act (Feb 16, 1936)- Revamped version of original AAA which combined food purchases 
with direct payments to keep farm produce prices up.

Fair Labor Standards Act (June 25, 1938)- Set up minimm wages and maximum hours, with 40 cents per hour and 40 hour 
weeks.  Forbade labor by children under 16.  Opposed by industrialists, but futilely.  All this support of unions and workers 
rights made FDR enormously popular with the voters.

In 1936 Roosevelt ran for reelection agains the hapless Alf Landon, Governor of Congress.  Roosevelt was so popular and 
successful at that point that despite his rough charm, Landon had no hope.  He was described as 'the poor man's hoover'.

Roosevelt said in his campaign, 'I should like to have said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of 
lust met their match.  I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.'

Landon got only 8 electoral votes and won only Maine and Vermont.  The Democrats also took 2/3 of the seats in the house 
and senate.

Roosevelt saw his reelection as a mandate to continue the New Deal.  He said, 'I see one third of the nation ill-housed, ill-
clad, ill-nourished...the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is 
whether we provide enough for those who have too little.'

In his hopes to continue the new deal he found himself blocked by the Supreme Court.  It was not only conservative, but 
seen by even its supporters as somewhat arbitrary.  It had blocked a number of his earlier programs, and in his second term, 
Roosevelt targeted it for destruction or at least reform.

Roosevelt said, 'We have reached the point where we must take action to save the constitution from the court and the court 
from itself.  We must find a way to take an appeal from the supreme court to the constitution itself.  We want a supreme 
court which will do justice under the constitution, not over it.'

Ironically, in fact, almost all of FDR's programs were unconstitutional, regardless of how necessary they were at the time, 
but the SC was genuinely at fault, not for opposing Roosevelt, but for doing so with such inconsistency, and often for 
reasons which were political rather than constitutional.  In the press they were referred to as the 'Nine Old Men'.  The 
youngest was 62 and all but 3 in their 70s and 80s.

Roosevelt's plan was to expand the SC from 9 members to 15 members, or to force the six members over the age of 70 to 
retire.  Public reaction was negative, but at least one justice was intimidated by this threat, and Justice Roberts began to vote 
in favor of Roosevelt's policies.  Ultimately, when a conservative member retired Roosevelt got to replace him.  In fact, 
ultimately, Roosevelt was in office so long that he got to appoint a full 9 members to the SC.

However, the distraction of dealing with the SC spelled the end of the New Deal.  Congress was unhappy with what it saw as 
Roosevelt's attempt to consolidate too much power in his own hands, and he found them far less cooperative in enacting new 
reforms after 1937.

From 1933 to 1937 under Roosevelt conditions had been improving, but in 1937 the upward trend in the economy broke with 
a year long recession which destroyed half of the gains from the last 5 years.  The New Deal seemed clearly to have lost its 
momentum, and the press and business leaders geared up against him.

They criticized him for having spent too much money and for having sacrificed the interests of business and his party for 
crackpot relief schemes.  He was accused of encouraging corruption and of being a closet bolshevik  One poem in a Hearst 
paper went: 'The red new deal with a soviet seal/Endorsed by a Moscow Hand/The strange result of an alien cult/In a liberty-
loving land.'

The national debt had more than doubled in 7 years, which was really remarkably little considering Roosevelt's programs and 
their achievements.  

People were fed up with creeping socialism, and while progress had been made, the flow of blood from the nation's wound had 
been slowed, but the wound was not healed.  The depression continued. 

Ultimately, it took the outbreak of WWII to provide a more longlasting solution to the problem and to give Roosevelt the 
political power he needed to complete the work of the New Deal.  Ironically, it was tragedy abroad which returned prosperity 
to America.

Roosevelt had done great things in the New Deal, but it is possible to argue that they were as much the result of luck as 
anything else.  By trying everything, and throwing money and manpower in every direction, he had distracted the public and 
randomly stimulated the economy with varied results, many of them favorable.  His energy was extraordinary and he was one 
of the first presidents to prove that it is better to provide strong leadership in an unproven direction than to hesitantly follow a 
well known course.


THE SECOND WORLD WAR

After World War I, Europe, and the world, entered into one of the longest periods of relative peace ever experienced.    
Traditionally there had been a war every five years or less somewhere in Europe, but the recovery from WWI was so slow and 
so painful that no one really had the energy for war for at least 20 years.  This period of peace was enforced by international 
treaties and by national policies which promoted peace, at least in the short term.

In November of 1921 England, France, Japan and the US signed the Four Power Treaty, which limited the buildup of arms, 
particularly naval battleships, setting a fixed ratio, with 525,000 tons for the US and England, 315,000 tons for Japan and 
175,000 tons for Italy and France.  Later, the Nine-Power treaty allowed even more nations to work together for peace and 
parity in Asia and to open up trade with China.

President Coolidge said, 'The people have had all the war, all the taxation and all the miliatry service they want.'  In America 
societies were formed to promote peace, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, designed to 'hasten the 
abolition of war, the foulest blot on our civilization.'  and the Woodrow Wilson foundation, aimed at helping the 'liberal 
forces throughout the world...who intend to promote peace by the means of justice.'

One aspect of this quest for peace in America was to harken back to the American tradition of neutrality and isolationism, 
originally endorsed by President Washington.  America refused to have anything to do with any foreign war.  We even signed 
the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which we promised never to go to war with any other nation, and declared that 'every 
nation is free at all times...to defend its territory from attack and it alone is competent to decide when circumstances require 
war in self defense.'  This treaty was ratified in the senate with only one dissenting vote.

In this period of isolationism we even refused to join the world court for fear it would entangle us in foreign issues.  This era 
also saw the end of the Monroe Doctrine, when it was amended with the Roosevelt corollary, which said that the US would 
not meddle in affairs of countries within its sphere of influence except for self-preservation.

The problems of isolationism were first made clear in 1931.  The Chinese revolution had been going on for 20 years, and the 
Japanese decided to get their piece of the pie by invading Manchuria and setting up a puppet state there, in violation of the 
Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Nine-Power Treaty.

China appealed to the League of Nations and to the US for help, but neither would interfere.  Hoover announced that the US 
was not the world's policeman, and while he declared his support for the Chinese he refused to take action.  Seeing that no 
action would be taken, the Japanese just withdrew from the league of nations and expanded their role in China.

While the US was sitting back dealing with its domestic problems in isolation, new forms of government were rising in 
major nations like Japan and Germany and Italy.  These countries were coming under the control of totallitarian regimes, 
which went by many political names, but basically consisted of highly centralized governments with authority concentrated in 
the hands of a single charismatic figure.  Totalitarian regimes had no hesitation about expanding their territory and dealing 
with their internal problems ruthlessly, and this gave them a major edge when dealing with the hesitancy of an un-foreign 
policy like isolationism.

The difficulties which Europe faced after WWI made a lot of people pretty desperate.  If anything the European depression was 
worse than it was in the US, especially in the more industrialized nations like Germany and Italy.  In this situation people 
were willing to give up basic rights to anyone who would assume the responsibility and do the painful work necessary to 
save their economy.  These totalitarian leaders justified their power as fascism or national socialism, but ultimately it was 
just a case of the people being willing to let someone else do their thinking for them.

The first major totalitarian regime in Europe was established in 1922 when Benito Mussolini took over Italy and established 
Fascist rule.  Mussolini reorganized italian government, took all the power for himself, blamed the problems of the 
depression on foreign powers.  He said, 'To make a people great, it is necessary to send them into battle even if you have to 
kick them in the pants.'  In a radio speech he actually said, 'We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty'.  No one took 
Mussolini very seriously outisde of italy.  To most Americans he was just another loud, overdressed Italian putting on airs, 
but he was a warning of what was to come.

On January 30th of 1933 Adolf Hitler was elected as chancellor of Germany and his National Socialist or Nazi party very 
rapidly assumed power throughout the German government.  Hitler established a police state which crushed all forms of 
dissent, announced his intention to control all of the German speaking territories around Germany, dismissed previous treaties 
with contempt, and blamed all of Germany's economic troubles on foreigners and the Jews, who he began to single out for 
persecution.  Hitler was a master of the 'Big Lie'.  He hoped to rule by manipulating the people.  He said, 'The primitive 
simplicity of their minds render them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, 
but would be ashamed to tell big ones...the victor will never be asked if he told the truth...success is the sole earthly judge of 
right and wrong.'

Germany's military and industrial power was much greater than Italy's, and Hitler  had expressed a clear, pan-German 
philosophy which made the invasion of countries with German-speaking populations like Poland, Austria and 
Czechoslovakia, inevitable.  From the days when he was sitting in Jail writing Mein Kampf, Hitler had campaigned to rule 
Germany on a platform of paranoia and military expansion, but no one in other European nations and in America took him 
seriously, even after he was in power.

One of the big problems was the war debts left over from WWI.  America had loaned everyone money, and Secretary of the 
Treasury Mellon was intent on getting that money back.  The allies wanted Germany to pay the $33 billion as part of its 
punishment, but Germany felt that the money they paid out just went to enrich the neighbors who had already put them into 
an economic depression.

The war debt situation left everyone unhappy.  The allies were referring to the US as 'Uncle Shylock', the Germans couldn't 
figure out where to get all that money, and the US just wanted some of what it had spent back.

In response to the problem, the Germans destroyed their economy.  Near-deliberate policies intensified the effect of the 
depression until their currency was devalued to 1 trillionth of its pre-WWI value.  The idea being that they would have no 
economy from which to pay the debt.  For their part, France and England made only very feeble efforts to pay at all.

Ultimately, instead of collecting all this money, the US ended up giving Europe more money.  In the Dawes Plan in 1924 
the US gave Germany a $200 milllion loan to stabilize its currency and scaled down the reparations they had to pay to $250 
million a year.  In 1929 the Young Plan lowered that even firther.  Then, when the depression hit for real in 1929 Germany 
defaulted on all these debts and the US was left in the lurch.  The feeble US response was the Johnson Debt Default Act of 
1934 which forbade loaning more money to nations which had already defaulted, which only seems like common sense.

Roosevelt didn't have much time to worry about foreign debt.  In dealing with the depression he put all aspects of foreign 
policy on a back burner.

Although the world was more or less at peace and the US was neutral and isolated, European nations were building up their 
military forces and the US industrial complex was supplying them.  US Arms manufacturers were taking advantage of 
neutrality to supply both sides, and resistence to this was growing in the nation.  As Italian troops massed in Africa and 
Hitler initiated universal conscription, the congress was taking steps to limit arms exports.  The Neutrality Act of 1935 was 
passed and forbade all sales of arms to any belligerent country anywhere, the ultimate expression of isolationism.

The more active the Germans and Italians became, the more isolationist Americans became.

Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1936 and in a second Neutrality act congres outlawed loans to foreign belligerants.

In 1936 General Francisco Franco, with German and Italian backing, overthrew the Spanish Republic and established a 
Fascist nation similar to what Mussolini had in Italy.  In theory America strongly supported the Loyalists in their fight 
against Franco, but while Franco had German planes and Tanks, Isolationism dictated that we not even send bullets to the 
Loyalists.

At this point even Roosevelt began to become an Isolationist, fearing that the situation in Europe was just too volatile to get 
involved in.

In March of 1937 a public opinion poll showed that 94% of the people thought foreign policy should be primarily directed at 
keeping us out of war.  

In April of 1937 congress passed a third Neutrality Act, which forbade Americans to travel on the ships of belligerent nation, 
and gave the president authority to make sales of all goods to foreign nations on a cash and carry basis.

Some commented that Isolation was a reaction against the first world war and the possibility that it might return, but 
whatever the reason, the American people were fleeing from the dangerous situation in Europe, and Roosevelt was too busy 
dealing with other problems to lead them in any other direction.

After 1937, Roosevelt had the supreme court situation in hand, and began to pay attention to foreign policy, and pushed 
Isolationism back a bit.

When the war between Japan and China was stepped up, he allowed shipments of arms to both sides.

Speaking in Chicago in Oct of 1937 he condemned the nations who were 'creating a state of international anarchy and 
instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.'  Apparently at least some leaders were 
beginning to realize that the impending conflicts might be an international problem.

Roosevelt was coming to the conclusion that resisting aggression was more important than keeping ot of war.

Hitler annexed Austria in March of 1938 and was actively persecuting the 500,000 jews in Germany and 200,000 in Austria, 
many of whom fled to the US.

In September of 1938 Hitler demanded that Chechoslovakia give Germany the Sudetenland and its German-speaking 
population.  Mostly out of fear, the British and French persuaded the Czechs to go along with this plan.

Roosevelt did not speak out then, but when Germany seized the rest of Czechoslovakia he said, 'Acts of Aggeession against 
sister nations automaatically undermine all of us', and he called for all 'methods short of war' to be used against Germany.

When Germany demanded Danzig and the Polish corridor and when Italy invaded Albania, Roosevelt asked congress to repeal 
neutrality and allow arms sales to England and France, but Isolationism dictated a refusal in congress.

In August of 1939 Germany and Russia signed a non-aggression pact, and On September 1st Germany invaded Poland.  That 
finally convinced congress, and in a very close vote they allowed cash and carry sales of weapons to the allies.

Everyone in America still wanted to stay out of the war in Europe, but preventing a Nazi victory began to look increasingly 
desirable as an alternative, if not by diplomacy, at worst throug military force.

However, Isolationism continued in the country and in congres, which made it difficult for Roosevelt to achieve much.

Poland fell in less than a Month, and Hitler turned around in early 1940 and began the Blitzkreig, rolling across Denmark, 
Norway, the Netherland, Belgium and France in a period of about two months.  The British army was driven out of Europe 
and evacuated desperately from Dunkirk on fishing boats, and France surrendered on June 22nd.

Roosevelt responded to this in several ways.  He devoted $4 billion to a weapons build up, including research into an atomic 
bomb.  He froze the assets of conquered nations in US banks to keep them out of Nazi hands.  He even sold surplus US arms 
to the allies.

Hitler continued with his plans.  He tried to bomb and starve England into submission.  England survived and defeated the 
Nazis in a series of air battles, but the Royal Navy could not bottle up the English submarine fleet.  Churchill appealed to 
Roosevelt for naval aid, in the form of a loan of 50 unused ships,  to help deal with this threat.

At this point the US navy had 240 destroyers and 50 more under construction, but giving them to England would violate a 
number of isolationist laws.  Roosevelt got around this by trading 50 ships for six unusued British naval bases in the 
Caribbean, which not only helped out England, but got America some very nice real estate.

In December of 1940 Congress enacted the first peacetime draft in US history and called up 1.2 million draftees and 800,000 
reservists.  

At that same time, Japan, Italy and Germany signed a three way pact which brought together the European and Asian 
struggles into a single war.

In the midst of all this, Roosevelt ran for  a third term, defeating the Republican Wendell Wilkie on the strength of returning 
economic prosperity, and his sizeable margin of victory looked like a mandate to continue his policy of greater involvement 
in the war.

After a very successful fireside chat in 1941 about the war, he got congress to give him $7 billion in arms to give to foreign 
friends like England and France as he saw fit under the Lend-Lease Act, which was designed to save Great Britain.

With lend lease, Roosevelt initiated a policy of doing anything short of war to help England out, including patrolling the 
Atlantic against German ships and giving away the locations of German submarines.  The US also occupied Iceland and 
Greenland as bases for naval operations.

Public sentiment had clearly changed, because when Hitler invaded Russia in November of 41 congress approved a billion in 
Lend Lease for the hated soviets, which never would have been possible a few years before. Hatred of Hitler overrode fear of 
the reds.  As Harry Truman expressed the situation, 'If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if we 
see that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.'

In July the German U-Boat U652 attacked the USS Greer, which returned fire with 19 depth charges.  The Greer had provoked 
the attack by tracking the sub and giving away its position to the British, but Roosevelt saw this as enough provocation to 
setp up activity in the Atlantic, giving orders to fire on any German crafts found South and West of Iceland, and when the 
destroyer Reuben James was sunk by the Germans the congress authorized the arming of merchant vessels as well.

By December of 1941 the US was effectively at war with Germany, at least at sea, but it was a passive war, and it took the 
actions of Japan to convince the US to take the offensive and to actually declare war.

For several years congress had been supplying aid and support the Japan's enemies in Asia, particularly China, and had been 
putting pressure on Japan to stop their plans of creating a 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' or Empire.

The US demanded that Japan withdraw from China and from various European colonies it had seized in East Asia, and to stay 
out of Indochina.  The Japanese, for their part, considered American trade sanctions and aid to its enemies to be the equivalent 
of war.

In July of 1941 Japan occupied Indochina and Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the US and embargoed oil shipments to 
Japan.

An impasse had been reached.  The US demanded Japanese withdrawal and Japan insisted that the US lift its trade sanctions.  
Meanwhile Japan was preparing to invade the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya and the US Philippines, and to strike at the 
US Fleet in Hawaii to prevent retaliation.

In November American cryptographers had cracked Japanese codes and knew that war was on its way, as well as knowing 
where the Japanese Navy had its force, but they expected the primary attack to be directed at the Philippines, which it was, 
but they were not prepared for the secondary strike at  Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, though Pearl Harbor had been warned to prepare 
for 'a surprise aggressive move in any direction.'

Not understanding the potential of Japanese aircraft carriers, the commanders in Hawaii believed an attack was impossible 
without good warning before hand.  On the morning of December 7th they were shocked when Japanese planes swooped down 
on them and in less than 2 hours destroyed 150 planes, 3300 men and more than 20 ships, crippling the Pacific fleet before it 
knew what hit it.

The Japanese attack was daring and brilliantly  executed, but it assured American vengeance.  Roosevelt asked for a declaration 
of war with the famous words...'Yesterday, December 7, 1941--a date which will live in infamy--the United States of America 
was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.'

On December 8th Congress decalread war on Japan, and when the Axis powers declared war on the US on December 11th, war 
was on in Europe and the Pacific, and America was fully committed at last.

15 Million Americans entered the armed services and all the might of American industry was directed at the problem of 
winning the war.  The end of the depression was a welcome, but incidental byproduct.

Roosevelt provided strong leadership, but poor administrative skills, and congress was often uncooperative and unreliable.

The war was great for the nation.  Between 1939 and 1945 the GNP almost doubled, agricultural output rose 22%, iron and 
stell production tripled, petroleum production increased 30%, iron ore production increased from 28 million tons to 108 
million tons, copper from 562,000 tons to over 1 million tons, and aluminum from 286 million pounds to 1.8 billion 
pounds.

All of these resources went to massive military buildup.  The US air forces went from 6,000 planes to 96,000, ship 
production rose from 237,000 tons  to 10 million tons by 1945.

Almost all of the 8 million unemployed found instant civilian jobs as a result of the war, including millions of women who 
were needed to augment the male workforce, much of which was overseas fighting.

In his usual way, Roosevelt set up a variety of boards to run the war, but because mobilization had begun before conflict 
broke out, by 1943 the US was fully mobilized.  These boards included the Office of Price Administration and the National 
War Labor Board, which among their functions set and fixed wages and prices for the duration of the war.  Some strikes took 
place against these rigid controls, but they became increasingly unpopular because of the war situation.

Roosevelt kept inflation down by building up an enormous national debt, increasing it by a factor of 5 times to a total of 260 
billion dollars.  In addition,  more money was raised by installing an across the board income tax.

This war was very different from WWI.  America went in with their eyes open, realizing that there was no longer any glory to 
war, just wanting to get the job done and over with.  At first things looked very, very bad, and clearly there would be no easy 
victory.

The Japanese had taken massive portions of the far east.  Hitler was preparing to attack Stalingrad.  Rommel was driving 
towards the Suez Canal.  U-Boats were operating freely on the Atlantic.  England and America had the potential to stop the 
axis, but they were not sure they could bring that strength into play fast enough to win the war.

It was decided to deal with Germany first, to let Japan run wild, and put all the allied resources into winning the war in 
Europe, and then deal with events in the remote far east.

Allied planes began bombing German cities almost immediately, giving them back some of what they had dealt out in 
England for years, hampering industrial production and demoralizing the German people, although the large number of 
Civilian casualties was frowned upon in some circles.

Although many wanted to have an immediate invasion of France, German forces there were just too strong, so General 
Dwight D. Eisenhower struck at the German supported Vichy forces in French North Africa.  The French commander, 
Admiral Jean Darlan immediately changed sides and welcomed in the Allies.  This allowed a rapid advance until the Americans 
met Rommel's Afrika Korps outside of Tunis at the battle of the Kasserine PAss.  The battle was a standoff, but when 
Rommel was recalled to Germany to take over the war in Russia, his army fell apart and the Allies took north africa.

In the summer of 1943, the Russians began to push the Germans back while the Allies invaded Sicily from Afria and then in 
the fall moved on to the Italian mainland.   Mussolini had already been deposed and assassinated, and his successor, Marshal 
Badoglio surrendered eagerly and joined in the fighting against German occupation forces in Central Italy.   Progress through 
Italy was very slow and it was ayear before the Germans were pushed back out of peninsula.

All this time forces had been gathering in England, while the Germans were busy in Italy and in Russia.  While the allies 
were taking Rome, a massive force was preparing to land in France.

Hitler's astrologer gave him bad advice and he concentrated defense in the wrong part of the coast, and suddency, on June 6th 
of 1944 millions of allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and were loose in France.

It still took a year of hard fighting, but an allied victory was inevitable.  Allied armies spread all over france under 
commanders like General George S. Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and by mid September the allies were 
crossing into Germany.  The Russians were advancing from the east, and though Montgomery advised a concentrated assault 
for Berlin, Eisenhower opted for a slower general advance on the entire front. As German resistence crumbled, Churchill 
commented, 'The proud German Army has by its sudden crumbling and breaking up...once again proved the truth of the 
saying, 'the hun is always at your throat or at your feet.'''

The Germans counterattacked on December 16th in the Ardenned forest, striking 50 miles into Belgium in an advance called 
the 'Bulge'.  The Battle of the Bulge pushed this advance back at a cost of 77,000 US casualties, but also the last German 
reserves and the allies were able to push forward.  By April the allies had crossed the Elbe and a few days later Hitler took his 
life and on May 8th Germany surrendered.

This didn't mean the war was over.  

The Japanese had conquered vast territory and were rather pleased with how little American resistence they had encountered.  
They were becoming complacent and overconfident, and as the war in Europe ended, the American forces in the Pacific, which 
had been merely biding time, prepared for a real offensive.

It rapidly became apparent that American airpower was the decided advantage at sea.  In the battle of the Coral Sea the 
Japanese were turned back from Port Moresby.  AT Midway they were turned back from Hawaii and 300 Japanese planes and 
four carriers were destroyed with only 2 US ships lost.

Much of the US success in the Pacific can be attributed to General Douglas MacArthur, who had failed in his defense of the 
Philippines in the start of the war and had become obsessed with coming back and making up for that defeat.

While MacArthur invaded the Philippines, Admiral Chester Nimitz struck by sea towards Tokyo.  In a series of battles lasting 
some six months, the US captured Guadalcanal Island and the Solomon Islands in 1943.  They then moved on to capture 
Tarawa, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, SAipan and Guam by mid 1944.  In every battle the Japanese fought to the last man and 
almost never surrendered.

While capturing the Philippines, MacArthur's portion of the fleet engaged the Japanese Navy at the Battle of the Philippine 
Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and broke the remnants of Japanese sea and air power, which was reduced to kamikaze 
attacks against American shipping.

By early 1945 the US had captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but nonetheless, military experts predicted another year of fighting 
and another million casualties to take the main islands of Japan against the fierce Japanese resistence.

In April of 1945 Roosevelt died during his 4th term in office and was replaced by his VP, Harry Truman, who made the 
fateful decision to use the toy that American ingenuity had offered him, and drop the Atomic Bomb to end the war with Japan 
abruptly.

The Atomic Bomb had been under research since before the outbreak of the war, in the fear that Germany might develop one 
of its own.  When Truman decided to act it had been tested only once and there were only two working bombs available.

Truman called the bomb 'the most terrible thing ever discovered', but he wanted the war over before a million more men were 
killed and wounded and before the Russians could come in and claim credit for a victory in the Pacific.

On August 6th of 1945 the Superfortress B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 78,000 persons 
including 20 American prisoners of war and injuring nearly 100,000 more.  96% of the buildings in the city were destroyed.

When the Japanese had not surrendered three days later, a smaller one was dropped on Nagasaki.  At that point, on August 
15th, Japan surrendered.

All told, in the course of the war,  291,000 Americans had died and 671,000 were wounded.  As was the case in WWI, 
European casualties were far higher.  7.5 million Russians died, 3.5 million Germans, 1.2 million Japanese, 2.2 Million 
Chinese, about 1 million each for Britain and France.

The war had brought an end to Fascism and Totalitarianism in Europe.  It had saved the US economy, and it left a strange and 
tense situation in Europe, with France and England enormously weakened, Germany destroyed, and the US and Russia facing 
each other uneasily accross a heavily armed border, realizing, now that the war had ended, how basically opposed their 
political philosophies were.

Both Stalin and Truman recoiled amazingly rapidly from their positions as allies, and almost before the dust had settled, the 
cold war had begun.


THE COLD WAR

With the Second World War over, international attention focused once again on the formation of a world government of some 
sort to make sure that further world wars did not take place.  Before the war was actually over in the Pacific, the United 
Nations Conference had met in San Francisco and put together the Charter of the UN, preserving many of the ideas of the old 
League of Nations, but at the same time doing more to insure the participation and support of major world powers, including 
granting the US and the Soviet Union a veto power.  Unlike the League of Nations, the UN was welcomed by the US 
congress and became a potentially potent body, very popular around the world, with a World Court and the ability to guide the 
destiny of many areas of the world if the major powers cooperated.

As it developed the UN fell short of its potential, but has done far better than the League of Nations, and remains a guiding 
force for order in the world, though sometimes its well intentioned actions have achieved questionable results.

In the years right after WWII the UN worked to try to rebuild and restructure contested territory, including preserving the peace 
in Iran, India and Indonesia and the questionable policy of establishing a Jewish homeland in the middle east.  The Economic 
and Social Council and the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization worked to improve education and social 
conditions in smaller countries and bring nations closer together.

Unfortunately there was a problem with the UN which was written into its Charter.  The veto power given to the US and the 
USSR had been intended to be used only rarely, and had been used to attract the superpowers into the UN, but the USSR 
began using its veto with unwelcomed frequency whenever UN plans interfered with its plans for world revolution.  Instead of 
the occasional veto they were vetoing dozens of actions every year in the 1940s and 1950s.  Later the US abused the veto 
powers in similar ways in the 1970s.

The area of the UN's greatest failure was in controlling the arms race.  In 1946 Bernard Baruch presented a plan to the Atomic 
Energy Commission of the UN for the control and regulation of nuclear plants, with regular UN inspections, on the 
establishment of which the US pledged to destroy all of its nuclear weapons.  He said, 'We are here to make a choice between 
the quick and the dead.  That is our business.  Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon 
with faith, can work our salvation.  If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear.  Let us not deceive 
ourselves; we must elect world peace or world destruction'

This surprisingly perceptive augury about the coming arms race fell on deaf ears in the USSR.  They refused the idea of 
foreign inspection of their frenzied nuclear researches, and insisted that the US destroy its own nuclear weapons before any 
discussion was undertaken.

In addition, Russia was becoming increasingly uncooperative in other areas.  One of the primary tenets of Communism was 
world expansion and the promotion of world revolution.  Russia refused to give up territory gained in Poland, insisted on 
control in Austria and at least part of Germany, and made things very difficult for a peace settlement in Japan.  Ultimately the 
USSR was granted concessions in Europe, but in Japan which was entirely controlled by the US, the allies negotiated a 
separate treaty in 1951 after 6 years of reconstruction and reform.

As Churchill observed in 1946, with the gap between east and west widening, Russia was cutting itself off from the rest of 
the world.  He said, 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.'

Clearly the intentions of Soviet Russia still followed the idea of expansion and subversion originally suggested by Lenin.  
The US ambassador in Moscow reported back, 'There are no limits to the soviet objectives.  Statements that a great struggle 
between communism and capitalism will take place and that one or the other must go down are still being reiterated by 
Stalin.  They have no inhibitions.'

In response to the iron curtain and soviet expansion, the American solution, in the Truman Containment plan was to throw 
money at countries on the soviet borders like Turkey and Greece to establish and anti-communist governments, many of 
which turned out to be dictatorships.  The plan was first implemented in Greece where communists with Russian support 
were trying to overthrow the government, which was virtually a fascist state.  Truman asked for $400 million for the Greeks 
and their Turkish neighbors, and said, 'It must be the policy of the US to support free peoples who are resisting attempted 
subjugation by armed minorities and outside pressures.'

To go along with this, General Marshall came up with a plan to help out other European nations which were having 
economic problems, to firmly keep them in the capitalist camp.  All told over 12 billion dollars was spent in sixteen 
countries and the plan came under attack as 'The Share the American Wealth Plan'.  There was resistence in congress  to the 
plan, but the soviet supported overthrow of the government of Czechoslovakia and the supposed suicide of the Czech foreign 
minister encouraged the completion of the Marshall plan.  One of the results of all this US spending was a stimulation of the 
international economy which prevented a post-war depression, at least everywhere except in Russia.  This policy of 
containment was a direct response to the Soviet policy of expansion and subversion, and worked fairly well, surrounding 
Russia with hostile nations for almost 20 years, with the greatest success in the south and east.  In addition, radio broadcasts 
from Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty bombarded Russia, trying to provide intellectual as well as 
geographical encirclement.

Another factor of the emerging Cold War which benefitted the economy was that, rather than disarming, as had been planned 
in the post war peace, America found it necessary and politically popular to build up the military, maintaining a selective 
draft, in response to Soviet universal conscription.  Military purchasing continued, as did research of nuclear weapons and the 
construction of the US nuclear arsenal.  And, of course, when Russia developed the Atomic Bomb in September of 1949,  all 
the paranoia of peacetime defense spending seemed justified.  Their rapid success in gaining the bomb was, of course, blamed 
on soviet spies and communist sympathizers, and contributed to growing cold war paranoia.  The public picked as their 
scapegoats for the theft of the bomb, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Harry Gold who were convicted of espionage on flimsy 
evidence, much of it hearsay, and executed in the electric chair in 1953.The discovery of the even more powerful Hydrogen 
bomb in 1952 made the arms race even more frightening.  

Everyone was building bomb shelters in their back yards, stockpiling food and preparing for life after what seemed to be the 
inevitable destruction of the world.  Only a balance of nuclear forces seemed likely to prevent that outcome, and Russia 
seemed bent on making that impossible.

The culmination of direct confrontation in the early period of the Cold War was the Berlin Airlift.  Berlin was located within 
the soviet section of Germany, completely surrounded, but controlled by the allies.  In 1948 the Soviets cut off access to 
Berlin, hoping the allies would be starved out.  For a year the US and Great Britain carried on a massive airlift of food and 
supplies into Berlin, eventually reaching 4500 tons of supplies per day, with one plane landing every three minutes.  This 
determination impressed the russians, and in May of 1949 they ended their blockade.  The ultimate result was the formation of 
two Germanys, one east and one west, with Berlin itself split down the middle.  Another result was that in April of 1949 
Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and the US signed the North Atlantic Pact, creating the North Atlantic 
Treaty Organization which declared it would consider an attack on any member as an attack on the entire membership and 
respond appropriately.  By 1955 Greece, Turkey and W. Germany had also joined NATO, part of the containment efforts to 
ring Russia in.

The next major test of the cold war was over Korea.  The dividing line between Russian and American victories in asia after 
WWII was drawn at the 38th parallell, right through the middle of Korea.  By 1949 both the US and Russia had withdrawn, 
but they had left behind puppet governments in North and South Korea heavily armed and supplied for war.  In June of 1950 
N Korea invaded with Soviet made tanks, pushing S. Korean forces almost all the way back to the sea near Pusan.  Truman 
got the UN to condemn N. Korea for its aggeression, and sent in US Naval and Air units to support S. Korea, and sent 
MacArthur in from Japan with US land forces.  Officially the US was part of a UN peacekeeping force, but almost all the 
troops were American, as was the commander, MacArthur.

Of the war in Korea Truman said: 'The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed 
beyond the use of subversion to conquer indepoendent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.'

MacArthur launched a daring invasion at Inchon, and within two weeks had the N. Koreans back north of the 38th parallell.  
Truman then ordered the invasion of N. Korea.  As Truman had hoped, the soviets stayed out of the conflict, but the Red 
Chinese suddenly stepped in with huge numbers of troops, creating a stalemate at the 38th paraallell by the end of 1950.  
MacArthur announced that 'there is no substitute for victory', and scoffed at Truman's conservative policy, suggesting that we 
attack China itself.  In April of 1951 Truman removed him from command.

MacArthur was very popular, and this left people very upset with Truman and that carried over to his party, whose candidate 
Adlai Stevenson lost to General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Ike was even more popular than MacArthur, and Stevenson was 
seen as an egghead who was soft on communism.  Ike won easily, and the Republicans also gained control of the House of 
Representatives.

Peace negotiations in Korea had been going on for two years and a truce was worked out, restoring the original border at the 
38th parallell.  54,000 Americans had died, tens of billions of dollars had been spent, and nothing had really been achieved in 
Korea, except to show the communist menace how serious the US was about containment.

Eisenhower's dealings with Russia were guided by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, but with Dulles' death in 1959 
Eisenhower took over himself, facing several criseses.  Russia had launched several sputnik satellites the year before, and the 
US had just put up its first one, smaller, less sophisticated and almost totally useless, out of desperation, and for the first 
time Russia seemed to be getting ahead in the technology race.

That same year, Soviet Premier, Nikita Kruschev toured the United States and arrangements were made for a summit meeting 
the next spring.  Then, on May 1, 1960 an American U-2 reconaissance plane was shot down over Sverdlovsk in the USSR 
and the pilot, Commander F. Gary Powers was captured and confessed to being a spy.  The plane contained aerial photographs 
of Soviet military installations.  Powers was imprisoned and Kruschev accused the US of piratical and cowardly acts of 
aggression and the summit was called off, guaranteeing the continuation of the cold war. 


MCCARTHYISM

Truman pointed out the fundamental differences between communism and democracy in his inaugural address in 1949.   He 
said, 'Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore 
requires the rule of strong masters...democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as 
well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.'

The increasing anti-communist sentiment in America was characterized by a paranoia which was to some degree supported by 
the government.  In 1947 Truman began a 'Loyalty Campaign' and had the attorney general put together a list of 90 disloyal 
organizations, none of whom got to speak in their defense.  A Loyalty Review Board was established and it investigated more 
than 3 million federal employees and caused the resignations or dismissal of 3,000.  States and business also became 
paranoid, requiring loyalty oaths from employees.

In 1949 eleven communists were tried in New York for violating the Smith Act of 1940, a anti-sedition act passed before 
WWII, and clearly in violation of the First Ammendment of the Constitution.

Part of the problem was that a lot of good citizens had been involved in questionable movements back in the 1920s and 
1930s.  After WWI communism and socialism had been fashionable among young intellectuals in college, and many of them 
were of the right age after WWII to be taking jobs in the government, and their brief fling with a questionable movement in 
their youth made them open to all sorts of accusations.

In 1938 the House of Representatives had established a Committee on Un-American Activities.  In 1948 Richard M. Nixon 
led the committe in persecuting Alger Hiss, a popular liberal who they accused of being a communist agent in the 1930s, 
based on the accusations of Whittaker Chambers, himself a confessed former communist.  In his defense he denied everything, 
but he was convicted on the flimsiest evidence and given 5 years in prison.

While congress was very enthusiastic about hunting reds, the white house had reservations.  In fact, Truman vetoed the 
McCarran Internal Security Bill in 1950.  It would have allowed him to arrest and detain suspicious persons if there were a 
'security emergency'.  Congress was so enthusiastic that it passed the bill over Truman's veto, giving him enormous powers 
that he neither asked for nor wanted.  Critics justly criticized the act for creating the potential for the establishment of a police 
state.  Fortunately it was never actually employed.

Efforts to deal with the red threat really  reached their height under Eisenhower. In February of 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy 
of Wisconsin took the lead in the congressand made the announcement that he had a list of 205 known communists in the 
State Department (long suspect as a hotbed of liberalism).  He was unable to substantiate his accusations, first saying there 
were only 81, then 57 and then later producing none at all.  In fact, the list he held up when he made his accusations was 
blank, but he launched a juggernaut which was very hard to stop.  McCarthy opened his attack by saying, 'The reason we find 
ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, 
but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation.'

McCarthy was not particularly well known prior to this announcement, but he quickly earned quite a reputation.  Senator 
John Bricker of Ohio said to him, 'Joe, you are a dirty s.o.b., but there are times you have to have an sob around and this is 
one of them.'  Some called him 'low blow joe', because of his ability to seek out peoples weaknesses and use the media to 
expose them.  He charged that 'democrats bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors', and claimed that retired General 
George Marshall, author of the Marshall plan to contain Russia, was 'part of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black 
as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man'.

His accusations were all rhetoric with no substance, but just being accused was enough to destroy careers and reputations 
permanently, because in the atmosphere of the Cold War the American public supported McCarthy.

Eisenhower disapproved, but held off, saying 'I will not get in the gutter with that guy'. 

McCarthy went after everyone, from diplomats, to writers, to film stars.  One of the saddest episodes was the destruction of 
the career of actor Larry Parks, who defended his socialist youth eloquently in hearings, and was never convicted of anything, 
but because he refused to give the names of other actors in Hollywood he was blacklisted and died a few years later 
impoverished and  broken.  Others gave in, like Whittaker Chambers, a former diplomat and journalist who named names 
before McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities and was spared.  He went on to become publisher of Time 
Magazine.  

In keeping with the mood of the time, private businesses kept lists of workers who were suspect.  This problem was 
particularly bad in the arts.  There were writers whose best work only appeared under pseudonyms because no one would dare 
publish them or produce their plays or movies, and many actors just vanished from the screen because their politics were a 
little pink.

Ultimately McCarthyism came to an end as a result of the Army-McCarthy hearings.  In 1954 McCarthy went after the US 
Army and it fought back in 35 days of hearings.  For the first time these hearings were televised, and people could see in their 
homes how brutal, deceptive and abusive and generally un photogenic, McCarthy was, and they began to realize that he was 
not the kind of leader they wanted.  This broke his popular appeal, and allowed party leaders and president Eisenhower to bring 
him down, something they had been waiting to do for several years.

Two months later he was censured by congress for 'conduct unbecoming a member'.  One newspaper here in Texas 
commented that 'Joe McCarthy was slowly tortured to death by the pimps of the kremlin.'  Ultimately McCarthyism faded 
away, though the Cold War continued into the 1960s and 1970s.  With the downfall of McCarthy Americans began to realize 
that if they were going to hate communism it made a lot more sense to direct that hatred at Russia and their nuclear arsenal 
than at each other, since the divisions created by McCarthyism had weakened the nation.

As the decade ended, McCarthyism was behind us, but the cold war continued.  The fear and fervor which had been directed at 
communism was finding other avenues of expression.  A new morality was looking at youth and their diabolic rock and roll 
music with considerable concern, and the social balance of the nation seemed seriously threatened by the outbreak of the 
increasingly active civil rights movement.  The post war period was over and the cold war was an established tradition.  It  
was a new and strange era of US history.  It was the Sixties.


POLITICAL OVERVIEW

Repressive as the 1950s had been, by the end of the decade America was undergoing change at a faster rate than at any other 
time in its history.  On a social and political level new movements, trends and leaders were emerging to guide the nation into 
what was probably the single decade most commonly identified as a discreet historical era, the 60s.

Despite the popularity of Eisenhower, things didn't look good for the Republicans going into the election of 1960.  They had 
lost ground in congress in 58, and while Nixon was a skilled politician with lots of political exposure and experience, there 
was resistence to him within the Republican party, and liberal republicans led by Nelson Rockefeller had put together a 
platform which didn't suit Nixon well.

On the other hand, John F. Kennedy had come in as a sort of Dark Horse in the Democratic party, but he was enormously 
popular and had the full support of his party, despite the fact that the was relatively young and also catholic.

Nixon campaigned against Kennedy's supposed inexperience, despite only 4 years difference in their ages and Kennedy's 14 
years in congress, and Kennedy campaigned on the failures of Eisenhower's administration, especially in foreign policy, even 
though Nixon had been the instrument of some of the great foreign policy victories of the 50s.

What ultimately sunk Nixon was his willingness to debate Kennedy on TV.  By accepting Kennedy's challenge to 4 debates, 
Nixon was essentially acknowledging him as his equal.  In addition, in the debates, 60 million people saw Nixon in a 
rumpled suit, sweating and wearing a suit that blended into the background, while Kennedy appeared calm and vigorous and 
wore a nice light colored suit.

Kennedy won the election by a narrow margin, with a lot of black and Catholic support.  With a congress dominated by the 
democrats as well, he proceeded with his plans to establish what he called his 'New Frontier', to regain the political and 
technological edge he felt the US had lost under Eisenhower.  

Ironically, in his farewell address, Eisenhower astutely pointed out the dangers faced by the nation.  He warned that the 
'conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience...in the 
councils of government, we must guard agains the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sougt or unsought, by the 
military-industrial complex.'

Kennedy brought in what he called 'the best and the brightest' to run his administration, many of them graduates of ivy league 
schools and leaders in academic or business areas.  They included his brother Robert as Attorney General and Robert 
McNamara, president of Ford, as Secretary of Defense.  As part of his New Frontier he created the Peace Corps to export 
American youth and energy to improve foreign goodwill, worked to support civil rights legislation and devoted a lot of 
money to the space program and unfortunately to a military build up.

While Kennedy was charming and intelligent and very very popular, he was not as liberal in many areas as he was in areas of 
social policy.  Kennedy was a firm advocate of the idea of 'peace through strength'.  In his inaugural address he said, 'Let every 
nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any 
friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.'

This strong stance in defense of liberty quickly drew the US into a number of international problems.  US money and 
diplomatic efforts were drawn into civil wars in the Belgian Congo and French Laos when they were removed from colonial 
status and began to lean towards communism.

The real problem came in Vietnam.  In 1954 Vietnam had been partitioned between north and south when the French pulled 
out, and there had been an ongoing civil war, with US money supporting the shaky government of Ngo Dinh Diem in the 
south.  In 1961 Kennedy stepped up the involvement of US advisors in Vietnam, and in 1963 the US engineered the 
overthrow of Diem and the establishment of a more stable government.  By the time of Kennedy's death there were 15,000 
US troops in Vietnam.

The other problem with communist expansion was closer to home, nearby in Cuba.  In 1958 Fidel Castro had overthrown the 
Battista dictatorship, and Castro was firmly in the Soviet camp.  The CIA had a number of plans for overthrowing Casto, 
from assassinating him with exploding cigars, to poisoning him with chemicals to make his beard fall out, but they settled 
on a military invasion.  In April of 1961 Kennedy authorized an invasion by 1200 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.  To 
everyone's shock, the people of Cuba did not rise up in support of these 'liberators', and the survivors of the invasion were 
jailed for two years and then ransomed for $62 million.

The Bay of Pigs made Castro even more pro-soviet, and in October of 1962 aerial photographs showed what appeared to be 
nuclear missile sights under construction in Cuba.  This was a serious problem, because it would give the Soviets much 
better access to targets in the US.  Military advisors suggested that Kennedy bomb the missile sites, but instead he blockaded 
Cuba by sea to keep out further supplies and demanded the removal of the missiles, and advised Kruschev that any attack on 
the US from Cuba would be regarded as an attack by the USSR and that would be where the nuclear counter attack would go.

Kruschev backed down, and removed the missiles, but he lost a lot of face, and was replaced by a government of neo-Stalinist 
hardliners in Moscow.

Part of the race to compete with the soviets was the acceleration of our space program.  Many Americans were awed and 
terrified by the appearance of Sputnik in the skies, and Kennedy had promised that one of his New Frontiers would be in 
space.  He proposed a multi-billion dollar package for landing a man on the moon, and supported early efforts into space.  In a 
speech at Rice University he said, 'Why, some say, the moon...and they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? 
Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the atlantic?  Why does Rice play Texas?'

The ultimate result of this during Kennedy's term was that John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and 
eventually the Apollo missions did land on the moon.

Kennedy also wanted to expand the social frontiers of the nation, with a national health program for the elderly, more money 
for education, economic controls, and many other programs.  Just as congress was becoming cooperative, the Kennedy era 
came abruptly to an end.

On November 22, 1963, while riding in an open limo in Dallas, Kennedy was shot in the brain by a concealed rifleman.  
Then the accused assassin was himself killed by Jack Ruby.  A special investigation was initiated under Chief Justice Earl 
Warren, which more or less whitewashed the incedent, claiming that most of the damage to both Kennedy and Gov. John 
Connolly was done by a single bullet.  If the Single Bullet Theory was true, the bullet would have had to make 2 turns of 
more than 90 degrees, and the bullet which was found was virtually undamaged, despite having left fragments in both 
Kennedy and Connolly.  Presumably the connections between Oswald, Ruby, the Mafia and the CIA were overlooked for the 
good of the nation, and it was felt better to give Kennedy a safe martyrdom after 1000 days than open up dangerous doors in 
the investigation.

Kennedy's vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson took over immediately.  He was a protege of FDR and had been a powerful 
leader in congress.  Johnson was crude and boorish, brutal and conniving, but there was a real liberal under his cynical exterior 
and although  he resented Kennedy and his priveleged background, but he kept on Kennedy's Ivy-League cabinet and preserved 
his basic plan for the nation, even expanding on it creatively.  In fact, because of his political skills and experience, Johnson 
was far more effective at implementing Kennedy's ideas than Kennedy would have been.  He passed civil rights bills, declared 
a billion dollar War on Poverty and promised to create a 'Great Society' of economic and social reforms.

Soon after he took office, Johnson had to meet Barry Goldwater for the presidency.  Goldwater campaigned on a states rights 
platform and massive government reductions in almost all programs, with the slogan 'In Your Heart You Know He's Right', 
to which the democrats responded, 'In your guts you know he's nuts', and Johnson won by a landslide.  While Goldwater was 
charming and appealing, he was clearly very far out in right field and won only in the deep south.

Johnson then proceeded with all his reforms, including 2 billion for the Office of Economic Opportunity to fight the War on 
Poverty, massive federal money for student loans, Medicare for the elderly, a Department of Transportation, a Department of 
Housing and Urban Development, National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the first black cabinet officer.  
Because Johnson had so much influence and power he could get most anything he wanted out of congress.  In some cases they 
got so enthusiastic that they actually increased funding above the levels he had asked for.  In almost every previous 
administration there had been some resistence in the nation to this kind of social spending, either from business or congress, 
but under Johnson, spending was feeding business and congress cooperated, and the result was massive overdevelopment of 
the government and the economy, which we are still paying for today.

Johnson's domestic policies made him enormously popular, but his foreign policy became an increasingly serious problem as 
he allowed us to be dragged farther and farther into involvement in Vietnam.  Liberal though Johnson was, he followed the 
guidance of advisors like McNamara who recommended increased devotion of men and money to win what appeared to be an 
unwinable war.  Many Americans complained that they had voted for Johnson but had gotten Goldwater.

Ironically, mostly because of Vietnam, in 1968 Johnson was defeated for a second term by the much more generally 
conservative Nixon, and it was Nixon who ultimately got the US out of the Vietnam War.

  
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Sticking with the domestic situation for the time being, big things were happening in the area of Civil Rights.  During the 
1950s the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren began taking the lead in promoting civil rights 
reforms, a controversial issue which President Eisenhower and Congress had been avoiding.

In 1954 the Warren Court made a unanimous decision in the case Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which 
said that segregation in public schooling was inherently unequal and unconstitutional.  It reversed an earlier Supreme Court 
ruling from 1896 and the court insisted that desegregation begin with 'all deliberate speed'.  In this case the SC was upholding 
a lower court which had ruled that 'Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon 
the colored children.  The imact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually 
interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.  A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.  
Segregation...has a tendancy to retard the educational and mental development of negro children..."

Over 100 southern congressmen and senators signed a Declaration of Constitutional Principles in 1956 in opposition to 
desegregation.  White Citizens Councils in the south worked to keep integration from being implemented, and many state 
governments cooperated.  After 10 years fewer than 2% of the blacks in deep southern states were in integrated classrooms.

In keeping with the Supreme Court's position, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction in 1957.  It 
created a Civil Rights Commission to investigate violations of civil rights and to protect voting rights through federal 
injunctions.  It wasn't a very strong act of a very strong commission because it had little governmental support because of 
Eisenhower's reluctance to meddle in the affairs of the individual states or to get tangled up in the dangerous racial issue.

In September of 1957 Orval Faubus, Governor of Arkaansas mobilized the state National Guard to prevent nine black students 
from entering Little Rock Central High School.  Although Eisenhower wanted to stay out of the race issue, he was forced to 
send in federal troops to escort the children to class.

During this period Black Activism began to make the public and lawmakers increasingly aware of issues of race.  In 
December of 1955 Mrs. Rosa Parks, a college-educated black seamstress, boarded a bus in Montgomery Alabama and took a 
seat in a 'whites only' section at the front of the bus, refusing to move when ordered to by the driver as the bus filled up.  
Later she stated that she had resolved 'never to move again'.  This touched off a year long black boycott of city buses and 
bringing much publc attention to the organizer of the boycott, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

King advocated nonviolent resistence.  In 1964 he wrote that under his leadership, 'Nonviolent reisstence paralyzed the power 
structures against which it was directed.'  This was an idea borrowed from Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi, and his activities 
eventually earned King the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which 
was one of the leading organizations promoting civil rights.

Nonviolent resistence took many forms.  In 1960 a group of blacks staged a 'sit-in' at the lunch coutner of a Woolworths in 
Greensboro, NC, and it led to a rash of sit-ins and lie-ins and pray -ins all over the south, crying out for equal treatment in 
employment, housing, transportation and voting rights.  By the end of 1961 70,000 had participated in sit-ins.  Another 
weapon was the 'freedom ride', where civil rights workers rode buses to test the effectiveness of federal laws governing 
integration in interstate transport.  Freedom riders had their bus burns in Alabama and were assaulted by mobs.  Many of 
these activists sought to be arrested to test the ordinances in the coursts.

In the spring of 1963 King launched a campaign against discrimination in Birmingham Alabama, where peaceful protest 
marchers were attacked by police with fire hoses and attack dogs and electric cattle prods, all of it broadcast on Television to 
the dismay of audiences outside the deep south.

Activists also tried to integrate universities.  29 year old Airforce veteran James Meredith attempted to register at The U. of 
Mississippi in October of 1962 and was met with violence and protests from both sides.  PResident Kennedy was forced to 
send in 400 federal marshals and 3000 troops.  Two men were killed and scores were injured and it cost 4 million dollars, but 
eventually Meredith got his degree.  Meredith went on to found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee which 
worked to register voters in the south, and he was eventually shot in a march for voting rights in Mississippi.

In Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the State University to keep two black students out in June of 
1963, shouting 'Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"  Eventually he yielded to pressure from the 
federal government, but he had earned a reputation as the most visible public supporter of segregation.

On June 11th of 1963 President Kennedy went on TV and called the racial situation a 'moral crisis' and pleaded for new civil 
rights laws to protect blacks.  In August Martin Luther King led 200,000 demonstrators in a march on washington to demand 
government action in the struggle for equality. At this rally he made his famous speech, 'I have a dream...one america', but 
not all activists followed his nonviolent philosophy or wanted reconciliation between the races.

Violence over the racial issue accelerated.  On the night of Kennedy's speach pleading for sanity a white gunman shot down 
Mississippi civil rights worker Medgar Evers.  In September an explosion destroyed a Baptist church in Birmingham 
Alabama killing four black girls.  Although a new civil rights bill was under consideration in congress blacks were becoming 
increasingly impatient, especially when John F. Kennedy, the president they had voted for and who seemed so sympathetic to 
their cause, was killed himself in November of 1963, to be replaced by a Lyndon Johnson, a southerner of questionable 
convictions.

The new Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and gave the government power to segregate the schools and other public places, 
but not to open up the polls.  In Mississippi only about 5% of the eligible blacks were registered to vote at all.  Things like 
poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation kept blacks out of voting booths.

Starting in 1964 access to the polls was the chief objective of protests and these resulted in the 24th Amendment to the 
constitution, which abolished poll taxes.  Blacks and white civil rights workers from the north  organized massive voter 
registration drives in the south in what was called the 'Freedom Summer', marching down to the polls singing 'We Shall 
Overcome.'

Then, in June of 1964 two white and one black civil rights workers who had been registering voters disappeared in 
Mississippi.  Their bodies were later found, badly beaten and buried under a dam.  Eventually the FBI arrested 21 white 
Mississippians, including a local sheriff, but no white jury would convict them.

In 1965 when Martin Luther King tried to register voters in Selma Alabama where 50% of the popualtion was black, but 
only 1% of the voters, State Troopers attacked marchers with teargas and whips.  On the highway between Selma and 
Montgomery where they were making their march a Boston Unitarian minister was killed and a white woman from Detroit 
was shotgunned to death.

Despite his southern background, President Johnson spoke out on TV and said that all Americans 'must overcome the 
crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.'  And he pushed the Voting Rights Act through congress in 1965, which outlawed 
literacy tests and established a system of federal voter registrars to oversee voter registration in the south.  In 1968 Johnson 
also supported the Open Housing Bill to provide equal access to housing.

All this legislation was great, in the long run, but did not solve the immediate problem, and pressure was building up in 
heavily black populated urban areas led by militants who did not follow Martin Luther King's philosophy of non-violence.

In August of 1965 riots broke out in the black ghetto of Watts in Los Angeles where black mobs burned and looted their own 
neighborhood for a week.  At the end of it 31 blacks and 3 whites were dead and more than 1000 were injured and hundreds of 
buildings had been burnt down.  15,000 National Guardsmen had to be called in to restore order and $200 million in property 
damage was done.

Much of the violent activism centered on the Black Muslim religion, which produced several charismatic leaders.  The founder 
of the Black Muslim movement, Elijah Mohammed said, 'the white government has ruled us and given us plenty hell, but the 
time has arrived that you taste a little of your own hell...there are many of my poor black ignorant brothers...preaching the 
ignorant and lying stuff that you should love your enemy.  What fool can love his enemy?'

One the most significant Black Muslim leaders, Malcolm X, was assassinated in New York that year, but his message of 
destruction for the 'blue-eyed white devils' was well received in the cities.  He had said, 'for the white man to ask the black 
man if he hates him is just like the rapist asking the raped, or the wolf asking the sheep, 'do you hate me?''  It is interesting 
to note that Malcolm X was slain by fellow black moslems, because they felt that he had abandonned his radical roots and 
was favoring compromise with the white establishment.

The new leader of the 'Black Power' movement which advocated the taking of long delayed rights by violence was Stokely 
Carmichael.  Carmichael had been born in Trinidad, and had been a follower of King until 1966 when he left the leadership of 
the SNCC and stated that 'Black Power will smash everything that Western civilization has created.'  He demanded a black 
homeland, and advocated activist exercising of the political rights which were now available to blacks by law, and violence 
when that exercise of rights was opposed.  He said, 'the time for white involvement in the fight for equality has ended...if we 
are to proceed toward true liberation, we must set ourselves off from white people who cannot relate to the black experience.'

To many blacks and whites, Black Power seemed just to be an excuse for rioting.  In Newark NJ in 1967 25 were killed in 
Riots.  In Detroit Federal troops were brought in after 43 had died.  Other riots took place in New York and Chicago.  Most 
of the targets of rioters were the symbols of white oppression in their own ghettos, the property of slumlords, policemen and 
firemen.   

Extremists of the Black Power movement formed the Black Panther Party and collected weapons to fight the police.  Their 
leader, H. Rap Brown, came up with the slogan, 'Shoot, don't loot'.  In 1968 they nominated author and paroled convict, 
Eldridge Cleaver for president.  The Black Panthers pretty quickly became a symbol to whites of all that was dangerous and 
threatening about black power.

At the height of all this violence, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated by a white man, James Earl Ray,  on April 4th 
1968, leading to the most widespread race rioting, burning and looting of the period throughout more than 100 northern and 
southern cities.

It is interesting to note that while the real problems of racism had always been seen in the south, much of the rioting was in 
cities of the north, where economic disparities were strongly resented by black city dwellers.  Through all this activity and 
protesting, voter registration in the south did increase by the end of the 1960s and there were hundreds of black elected 
officials and two black mayors in the mid west.  By 1972 nearly half of the black children in the south were in integrated 
schools, actually more than in the north.  Economically, by the 70s almost a third of the black popultion had entered the 
middle class, though a higher proportion of blacks than whites still remained below the poverty level.  Despite all the 
violence and all the deaths, progress had been made.


SOCIAL CHANGE

Activism and social change were not restricted to the civil rights movement. 

The population was expanding rapidly.  It had gained 9 million people before WWII and in the 50s it had gained 28 million 
people.  Growth was particularly rapid in the sun belt, Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada.

The growth of the military-industrial complex which Eisenhower had warned about was leading to growth in technology and 
science, particularly in high tech areas, and women found increasing opportunities for employment in the workplace.  
Automobile production and the general consumer economy were way up by the 1960s.  77 million cars were rolling off the 
production line by 1960 and gas consumption rose rapidly.  An interstate highway system was developed to facilitate the 
movements of an increasingly mobile population who went where the work was.  Commercial air travel began to boom with 
the introduction of the Boeing 707 in 1958 and railroads and ships began to lose their dominance.

Growth and change was perhaps greatest in the area of communications.  TV had been invented before the war, but not much 
had been done with it because of the expense of the hardware.  Technological advances solved that problem, and by the 1950s 
sets were being bought at a rate of 6 or 7 million per year.  By 1961 there were 55 million in use with 530 stations 
broadcasting.  During the 60s NASA put communications satellites in orbit to make long distance transmission of programs 
more feasible.

The social impact of TV was incredible, seen in elections, in sports, in public tastes and in public awareness of current 
events.  While there was some good broadcasting on the National Educational Television Network, just like Radio before the 
war, most of TVs fare was dreck.  Described by Newton Minow of the FCC as a 'great wasteland'.  Nonetheless, children in 
particular were fascinated by TV and a whole new square-eyed generation was emerging, with new idols and new values set by 
the commercials which aired every 20 minutes.

One of the effects of TV was that it diverted attention away from Radio, but Radio was still there.  The introduction of FM 
broadcasting had improved quality and the cost of running stations had been lowered, and new, specialized stations proliferated 
in the 1950s.  Some of these stations were oriented towards the urban black audience, and began to play blues and rhythm and 
blues music.  Where the airwaves went was not selective by color, and white youths began to listen to this ethnic music, and 
Rock and Roll was born.  Black sounding music with a white audience and racially mixed performers, enormously popular 
and profitable for the record companies.  Although Rock and Roll was decried as 'the devil's music', because of its percieved 
sexual content, the rebelious youth of the 60s and 70s took it to heart.  The older generation tried to deal with rock and roll in 
two ways.  First, they tried intimidating producers and record companies, attacking rock and roll in print and on the air, but 
rockers and businessmen alike laughed at this approach.  More successful was the effort to 'bleach' the music, encouraging 
white performers to make homogenized versions of popular songs by black artists.  These white versions were almost always 
inferior to the originals, and frequently had the sexually provocative lyrics removed.  The worst examples are probably Pat 
Boone's versions of Little Richard's Tutti Frutti and Big Joe Turner's Shake Rattle and Roll (from which a huge number of 
satanic and sexual references were purged)  and the best known is probably Elvis Presley's version of Big Momma Thornton's 
Hound Dog.  The problem with this relatively safe approach was that the music seemed to corrupt the performers and it was 
enormously popular, and while some remained pristine, like Pat Boone, others shocked and terrorized, like Jerry Lee Lewis.  
For the original performs the tragedy was that inferior versions of their songs were making huge amounts of money for white 
artists who could get wider airplay and they were getting little or no royalties because of unfavorable deals with unscrupulous 
record companies.

America in the 1950s was affluent.  The middle class had expanded to its greatest numbers ever, and the children of this 
middle class were doing what children tended to do, rejecting the values of the older generation.  They listened to diabolic 
music, began reading counter culture writers like Joseph Heller and Jack Kerouaac, marching for civil rights, and ultimately 
protesting against the Vietnam war.  As the 60s progressed, the music became more and more degenerate in the eyes of the 
older generation, and the protests, violence and outright rejection of society and morality became more outrageous, 
culminating in a complete break between the generation which had grown up in the 40s and their children growing up in the 
60s.


THE NOW GENERATION

The start of the 60s as an intellectual movement can most accurately be tied to the year 1963.  That was the year that the first 
children born in the post-war baby boom entered college.  All of a sudden college enrollments ballooned.  New institutions 
were founded, including 600 junior and community colleges, and with all these young minds seeking knowledge, the 
incedence of student unrest increased dramatically.

These were the children of an affluent society, and while they had cultivated disdain for the tools of the establishment, like 
schools, bureaucracies, computers and corporations, they wanted instant satisfaction as well.  On the one hand they resented 
the establishment for running a country which could be enormously rich and still have so many poor people, and at the same 
time they sort of had to hate themselves as being the offspring of the priveleged class.

The first outbreaks of public protest came at Berkeley in the fall of 1964.  Angry students took over university buildings and 
staged sit-down strikes and disrupted operation of the school for several weeks.  Governor Reagan had hundreds arrested and the 
president of the university resigned.  Much of this protest was over what were seen as outdated college regulations, like 
restrictions on drinking, or members of the opposite sex in dormitories, or over course requirements which inhibited 
intellectual development.  One of their demands was that students have a role in setting curriculums and running the colleges. 

One of the leading groups organizing all of this was Students for a Democratic Society, which formed a nucleus around which 
less radical students gathered and where they found motivation.  In 1968 SDS organized the occupation of university buildings 
at Columbia and issued demands to the administration regarding minority rights in the neighborhood around the university and 
the cessation of weapons research on campus.  When President Grayson Kirk called in police a riot broke out in which dozens 
of students were clubbed and beaten. The result was that Kirk resigned and many reforms were instituted.

Similar protests took place at almost every university in the nation, and many gave in and allowed students a much large role 
in planning curriculums and also allowed much greater social freedom.  Ironically, when I went to college in the late 1970s 
the administrations were working frantically to negate all of those hard won gains, often with the cooperation of students.

Eventually the largest issue of protest was the vietnam war.  By the end of the period the standard social ritual for college 
students was draft-card burning, and many went to jail or fled the country to avoid the draft, while the majority hypocritically 
enjoyed the luxury of student draft exemptions and continued to speak out.

What made these protestors unusual was that rather than being willing to compromise, they just refused to participate in 
activities they did not agree with.  They saw a sharp line between right and wrong and would not cross or bend it.  War, 
prejudice and proverty were bad things.  Therefore they should be ended.  They should not be discussed, they should just be 
ended instantly.  This desire for instant gratification and simplistic view of complex problems earned the new generation the 
title of the 'now' generation and the 'me' generation.  Many became anarchists and nihilists and maintained that the only way 
to fix a rotten society was to tear it down and start over.  

Many were just turned off by the modern world.  They retreated into communes, drugs and mystical religions.  A 
conterculture developed which was essentially opposite in every way to what their parents held dear.  The Hippie movement 
or mentality rejected money and material goods and power.  Love was more important and feelings more significant than 
thought.  Along with this came other movements like the Free Love movement which advocated open sexual relationships, 
group sex, or as parents saw it, pure licentiousness for its own sake.  It was a hedonistic time for those involved, a time so 
heady just with the drug of new experience that there were many who never recovered, and for them the sixties still 
continue...often here in Austin.  This generation had new goals and new ideaals, goals which often seemed like pure self 
indulgence to their parents.  They found leaders like Dr. Timothy Leary, who advocated mind expansion through the use of 
LSD and other hallucinogens.  They discovered new kinds of writers and new kinds of books, like Robert Heinlein's Stranger 
in a Strange Land and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and on the Campaign Trail.  They dressed 
strangely, wore their hair long, and developed their own slang language.  Their rock music became even scarier, making the 
rock of the early sixties look tame, with artists like the Doors, Jimmie Hendrix and the Who.  Some of them turned to folk 
music, which was really even more scary, because even if it wasn't as loud, artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had a 
message to sing about.  Ultimately a lot of the ones who dropped out of society gravitated to the west coast, particularly San 
Francisco, because the weather was nice and the living was easy.  And towards the end of the period the whole movement 
found expression in gigantic rock concerts with hundreds of thousands in attendance, sometimes lasting for days, with the 
most famous being at Woodstock and Big Sur.

Critics found the whole movement childish and unimaginative, but even among those students who did not turn on and drop 
out of school and society, there was great appeal in the basic philosophy of rejecting things the way they were.  They were 
disillusioned with society and wanted something better which is laudable, though they can be faulted for not knowing exactly 
what they wanted or how to get it.  It is impossible to sum up everything about the change and turmoil in society during 
those years in only a few words, but a lot of peoples minds and lives changed for ever, and to some degree we are still 
recovering, and now we are in the midst of a backlash with a new young generation which is reacting conservatively against 
the permissiveness of their parents.


VIETNAM

Much of the disillusionment which characterized the attitudes of the youth of the 60s was the result of the war in Vietnam, a 
war which was never declared, but which may have had more impact on American society than any other conflict in which our 
nation has been involved.

The Vietnam war began not long after world war two.  The French who had colonized the area were fighting and ongoing war 
with local insurgents, which they more or less lost, resulting in their withdrawal in 1954.  After the French pullout, 
Eisenhower decided that it would be a bad thing for South Vietnam to be overrun by the communist forces from the north and 
sent military advisors over to help them organize their government to fight against the fifth-columnist forces within South 
Vietnam known as the Vietcong.

Pretty quickly the Vietcong controlled a large portion of South Vietnam and were within spitting distance of Saigon.  With 
their support from China and the Soviet Union, the VC grew in strength quickly.  In response to this more US money and 
supplies were sent to support the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.  By the end of 1961 there were 3200 US soldiers in S. Vietnam.  
By 1963 there were more than 16,000.  None of these were combat troops.  They were employed primarily in training and 
administrative positions and only 120 men had been killed in almost 10 years.

In 1963 the CIA encouraged S. Vietnamese generals to overthrown Ngo Dinh Diem and install what the US hoped would be a 
more efficient and less corrupt government.  Much to the dismay of the Kennedy administration Diem was executed after the 
coup.

In August of 1964 President Johnson claimed that N. Vietnamese gunboats had fired on American destroyers in the Gulf of 
Tonkin and he demanded authorization from congress to 'repel any armed attack against the forces of the US and to prevent 
further aggresssion'.  When congress agreed, in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, they gave him a blank check, and for the first 
time Johnson began sending combat troops to S. Vietnam and initiated air strikes against targets in N. Vietnam and occupied 
areas of S. Vietnam.  War was never declared, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was used as the very questionable basis for all 
US actions in Vietnam.

At first troops were assigned as advisors, then as security forces for air bases, then they were moved into assisting South 
Vietnamese units if they came under enemy fire, and pretty soon US troops were actively participating in independent 'search 
and destroy' missions against the Vietcong.  The air war in vietnam was particularly significant.  All told, more bomb power 
was dropped on vietnam between 64 and 68 than was used on Germany and Japan combined in WW2.  This included the use 
of Napalm and chemical defoliants like agent orange which did enormous damage to unprotected civilians.  Because the 
Vietcong operated entirely as guerilla units, the war was also characterized by the dangerous ambiguity of the enemy, because 
it was often impossible to tell who was an innocent civilian and who was a dangerous enemy in disguise, and this led to 
paranoia among the American troops, and many well publicized incedents of brutality and unwaranted attacks on civilians, 
understandable in an atmosphere of terror, but not excusable becaue of that.

Johnson's escalation of the war proceeded organically with no real plan to it.  When things went badly he just sent more men.  
By the end of 1965 there were 184K Americans there, a year later 385K, a year later 485.  By 1968 American involvement 
was up to 538K men.  With the increase of troops there was a corresponding increase of casualties.  By 1970 more than 
40,000 Americans had been killed and by the end of the way over 20 billion dollars had been spent.  In response to American 
involvement Russia and China stepped up economic and military aid, though they did not actually send troops.

The war in Vietnam was not popular.  From the very start it created two political factions, known as doves and hawks.  The 
hawks believe din President Eisenhower's domino theory, that when vietnam fell to communism so would neighboring 
nations in the area.  They claimed that the US was not the aggressor, because ultimately the domino theory meant that the 
US iteself was in danger.

The doves felt that the war in Vietnam was a purely internal matter for the vietnamese people, a civil war where we should 
not be involved.  The government of S. Vietnam, both before and after Diem, was more or less a dictatorship and certainly 
not a democracy that needed to be defended.  They objected to the aerial bombings.  They did not believe in the domino 
theory, and they felt that the heavy loss of life and enormous cost was unnecessary.  They also pointed out that huge war 
expenses were drawing money away from necessary social programs and all those nice new ideas that Johnson had come up 
with for his 'Great Society'.

The real problem in vietnam was one which President Johnson seemed to be unable to grasp, that the war was basically 
unwinable.  Johnson's advisors kept telling him that one more escalation would turn the tide.  This perspective was the result 
of the arrogant assumption, left over from our role in WW2, that America basically ruled the world and nothing could stop 
our military and industrial might if we put our best effort into something.  In 1965 one of Johnson's advisors, McGeorge 
Bundy told an interviewer, 'The US was the locomotive at the head of mankind and the rest of the world the caboose.'

While Johnson's social policies of the Great Society had been very popular, the fact that he had sacrificed many of them to 
pay for the increasingly unpopular war cost him a lot of credibility with the public, and left him in a very bad situation when 
he came up for reelection in 1968.

Opposition to the war had been growing, and in 1967 Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota declared that he was going to 
run against Johnson for the Democratic nomination and promised to end the war.  It seemed like an impossible task, but the 
war became an increasingly important election issue as massive escalation took place in early 1968.

On the Vietnamese New Year, or Tet, the VC and the NVietnamese Army started the Tet Offensive, attacking 39 out of 44 S. 
Vietnamese provincial capitals.  They captured the major town of Hue and part of Saigon as well.  To get them out of Saigon 
the US had to level much of the city, as they had to do in many other towns as well.  As one officer commented, 'It became 
necessary to destroy the town to save it.'

The Tet offensive was not intended to capture territory, but it was cleverly timed to precede the election in the US in order to 
disorganize and divide America.  In fact, the NVA and VC lost so many men in the Tet offensive that General Wm. 
Westmoreland was justified in calling it a US victory as territory was rapidly recaptured, but the political impact which the 
Tet offensive had was well worth it in many ways.

Word leaked out that Johnson was planning to send over 200,000 more men in response to the Tet offensive and the result 
was that in the democratic primary in New Hampshire, which always kicks off the election, McCarthy got 42% of the vote.

Then things got confusing.  Bobby Kennedy, who had held himself out of the race, decided to enter the contest at that point, 
because McCarthy had made it clear that an anti-war campaign was possible.  McCarthy might have dropped out if Kennedy 
had entered before the primary, but decided he had committed himself at that point, so they began competing, on more or less 
the same platform.  Johnson realized that this was clearly an indication that his approach to the war was unacceptable to his 
party and dropped out of the race alltogether.  His place was then taken by his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, though 
Humphrey came in too late to enter any of the primaries.

Kennedy and McCarthy ran neck and neck in the primary, but right after Kennedy won the key primary in California he was 
assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a young Arab upset over Kennedy's support of Israel.

This left the leading democratic contender dead, the second runner a man who many considered to be a dangerous radical, and 
Hubert Humphrey who had no delegates.  The convention quickly threw out the whole primary process and picked Humphrey 
as a candidate who was stable and reliable.  

The democratic convention was in Chicago, and hundreds of young radicals and activists showed up to protest the war.  Mayor 
Richard J. Daley, the party boss of Chicago ringed the convention with barricades and policemen.  While Humphrey was 
being selected, police outside the convention hall took offense at the insults being hurled by the crowd of protestors, and 
began brutally beating them while millions watched on TV.  This chaos hurt the democratic party, because it led to a 
backlash against Humphrey because he was supported by Daley, and many democrats felt that he was partially responsible for 
the harsh treatment of the protestors.

The Republicans had a relatively easy time choosing Richard Nixon, who came out of semi-retirement to run for the 
presidency and although he picked the ultra-right wing Spiro Agnew as his running mate, he had strong support in his party.  
Agnew earned a reputation as 'Nixon's  Nixon' for essentially outdoing his running mate in rudeness, abusiveness and making 
insulting speeches.  Agnew was the perfect running mate for Nixon, because he could say all the nasty things that Nixon 
believed but could not afford to say in public.

To make matters worth, on the strength of southern unhappiness with civil rights legislation, George Wallace, governor of 
Alabama declared he was running for the presidency as an independent candidate.

The election was very close.  Nixon got 31.8 million votes, Humphrey got 31.3 million and Wallace got around 10 million.  
Although Nixon won with a considerably larger majority in the electoral college.  In the congress, however, the democrats 
remained in firm control.

As president, Nixon had both domestic and foreign problems to deal with.  The economic situation was bad, with America in 
a new kind of economic crisis, the first great recession.  Spending on the vietnam war had caused massive inflation and that 
needed to be controlled, and to make that control effective the war would have to end.

Congress had passed a law allowing the president to control wages and prices.  Nixon used this to freeze wages and prices for 
90 days and place a 10% surcharge on foreign imports to try to help the balance of trade.  He also set up a Pay Board and a 
Price Commission to limit wage and price increases once the freeze ended.  This didn't stop inflation, but it did slow it down, 
upsetting the labor unions in the process.

Nixon's domestic polcy tended to be somewhat heavy handed, and he directed his greatest efforts towards foreign policy, 
initially towards dealing with the situation in Vietnam.

Throughout his career, Nixon had supported the war, but in the election of 1968 he vaguely promised 'an honorable solution', 
and once he was in office he came out clearly in favor of withdrawal.

He proposed a gradual removal of US troops, followed by internationally supervised elections in a united North and S. 
Vietnam.  North Vietnam rejected this plan and insisted on unconditional withdrawal.  The N. Vietnamese would not give in.  
Nixon refused to withdraw in any way which would look like a US defeat.  But it was very clear that additional funding and 
resources for the war would not be made available to him.

Nixon's solution was to try to build up South Vietnamese forces so that they could take over.  He sent them so many planes 
that they soon had the fourth largest airforce in the world.  The problem with this strategy of 'Vietnamization' of the war was 
that because of incompetence, corruption and sheer laziness, the S Vietnamese army wasn't up to bearing that burden and 
never had been. 

Nevertheless, in June of 1969 Nixon pulled 25,000 men out, and in December he pulled out 35,000 more.

Nixon was not moving fast enough for many, and on October 15th antiwar demonstrations were scheduled by students around 
the country on what was called 'Vietnam Moritorium Day', a peaceful protest with more than a million people participating, 
including a group fo 100,000 on Boston Common and 50,000 at the White House.  Agnew described this protest as 'National 
masochism...led by...an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.'  He later called on 
arresting radical students and punishing them 'with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a 
barrel'.  Nixon was not much kinder when he was criticized for calling student radicals bums.  He said, 'when students on 
university campuses burn buildings, when they engage in violence, when they break up furniture, when they terrorize their 
fellow students and terrorize the faculty, then I think 'bums' is perhaps too kind a word to apply to that kind of person'

A second Moritorium was held and 250,000 marched past the white house in protest.  In November Nixon appealed in a 
speach to the 'Silent Majority' to support his slow progress, and his standings in the polls did go up dramatically.

His plan did seem to be working.  As troops pulled out the casualties went down, the draft was changed to a lottery system, 
but the war did continue.

Reports came out in 1970 of a massacre of an entire village of women and children carried out by troops under the command 
of a Lieutenant Calley at a place called Mylai 4.  This brought renewed public attention to the war, and Calley was put on 
trial and eventually sentenced to 20 years, though he made the unprecedented defense that it was his superiors and not himself 
who were responsible, for ordering him to carry out the massacre.

In response to this situation Nixon stepped up the withdrawal and promised to remove another 150,000 troops by the end of 
1970, which would still leave over 300,000 in Vietnam.  Then, a week later, on hearing that there were secret Vietcong bases 
in Cambodia he stepped up activities, announcing 'let's go blow the hell out of them', and ordering bombing mission against 
these bases.  In actuality air attacks on cambodia had already been going on for two years, with over 100,000 tons of 
explosives already dropped.  This sudden turn-around made many people ask if perhaps Nixon was unbalanced, and opposition 
became even more intense.

Student draft protests increased, demonstrations were held, and some broke into riots.  The most famous incedent was at Kent 
State U. in Ohio, where students and police battled for several days, with lots of property damage.  Then the governor of Ohio 
called out the National Guard and students attacked them with thrown stones.  On May 4th poorly trained guardsmen opened 
fire on a group of students.  Four were killed, two of them women who were meerely passing by on their way to class, and 
one of them a demonstrator who had run into a burning building to rescue people trapped there.

This caused many moderate students to join together with radicals and take over buildings and stage strikes and 
demonstrations, until many universities just shut down altogether.

Nixon was shocked by the reaction, not only the protests, but also criticism in congress and the press, and he pulled the 
troops out of Cambodia, though he continued aerial attacks.

In March of 1972 the North Vietnamese mounted another offensiv and Nixon stepped up activities in response.  Although US 
troop strength had been reduced, it didn't really seem like we were withdrawing after 4 years of Nixon's promises.

Nixon then attempted to outmaneuver the enemy, by holding summit meetings with the Chinese and the Russians, and the 
fact that Russia and China seemed so friendly to Nixon got the N. Vietnamese to back down and open up peace negotiations 
in Paris.  By October of 1972 a treaty had been worked out for a cease fire and prisoner exchange and the eventual withdrawal 
of the US troops.  Right before the election of 1972 Sec of State Henry Kissenger was able to announce that 'Peace is at 
Hand', and Nixon won by a landslide of 521 electoral votes to George McGovern's 17.

Nixon was suddenly enormously popular, and this made him enthusiastic, so he stepped up bombing of N. Vietnam to force 
more concessions, even though a treaty had already been negotiated.  A new settlement was reached in January of 1973.  The 
N. Vietnamese retained control of large sections of the south, but agreed to release US prisoners of war within 60 days.  At 
the end of those 60 days the US troops were rapidly pulled out of Vietnam.  All told 46,000 had died and 300,000 had been 
wounded and the total cost was $109 billion.  It was the third most costly war in US history in money, and one which seems 
to have had the same kind of cultural and psychological aftershock effect for America that WW1 had in Europe.


WATERGATE

With the war over, the economy took another big drive, and Nixon began introducing grand plans for economic controls and 
other legal and social reforms, all of them rather imperialistic in tone.  For a while it appeared that Nixon was in total 
command, very popular, fully resolved, and with his toadies H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman issuing his orders as if 
they were handed down from god himself.

Things then fell apart rather quickly.

On my birthday, March 19, 1973, James McCord, a former FBI agent accused of burglary wrote a letter to John J. Sirica, the 
judge in his trial, offering to disclose nasty things about the president in exchange for some leniency.

He had been employed during the 1972 presidential campaign as a security officer for the Committee to Re-Elect the President 
(CREEP).  At 1am on June 17, 1972, he and four other men had broken into democratic headquarters in the Watergate 
apartment and office complex.  They had been caught there rifling files and planting bugs.  They were part of what was 
known as the 'plumbers unit' in the white house.  His confession named several high ranking campaign officials, and implied 
the involvement of the president in the planning, though Nixon announced, 'I can say categorically that no one on the White 
House staff, no one in this Administration presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incedent.'

As the investigation continued, it was revealed that Jeb Magruder, the head of CREEP and John Dean, Nixon's lawyer, had 
been involved, and they confessed.  A special investigating committe in the congress questioned Dean and he claimed that 
while Nixon had not known of the original break in, he had been involved in the subsequent coverup and attempts to get the 
burglars not to talk about what higher ups were involved.

It then emerged that FBI director Gray had destroyed documents relating to the case, that large sums of money had been paid to 
hush up the burglars at the request of the white house, that agents of the president had burglarized the office of a psychiatrist 
for information to use in blackmailing one of his patients, that the CIA had supplied the equipment used in these burglaries, 
that CREEP officials had tried to discredit various democratic candidates in illegal ways, that a number of corporations had 
made large, illegal contributions to the Nixon campoaign, that one of the Burglars, E. Howard Hunt, had forged State 
Department documents to make it look like Kennedy had been involved in the assassination of President Diem of S. Vietnam, 
that the Nixon administration had tapped the phones of some of its own officials and of newspapermen critical of its policies.

All these revelations resulted in the resignations of most of Nixons advisors, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean and 
Attorney General Richard Kleindienst.  While no clear connection was established all of this implied that the president knew 
what was going on, though he continued to deny it.

Then John Dean testified that Nixon had been closely involved in the coverup.  Before he made this admission Dean consulted 
with Barry Goldwater, who commented, 'Hell, I'm not surprised, that Goddam Nixon had been lying all of his life.'

Dean gave lots of strong detail and specific references, but people were reluctant to believe him.  Later in the hearings it came 
out that Nixon had routinely recorded phonecalls and conversations in the white house, and the president was asked to supply 
these tapes, which would surely clear up most of the questions.

Nixon refused to give up the tapes, citing executive privelege, the concept that the private dealings of the executive branch 
were immune from investigation.  Rapidly Nixon's popularity began to decline, and people began to call for his resignation 
or impeachment, assuming that not supplying the tapes which could clear or damn him was an indirect confession of guilt.

In the midst of all this Vice President Agnew was forced to resign because he was accused of taking bribes and kickbacks.  He 
was given three years probation and a $10,000 fine, and he was replaced by  the far more moderate and much more popular 
senate minority leader Gerald Ford.

In October of 1973 things got even worse in the 'Saturday Night Massacre'.  Nixon had appointed Harvard law professor 
Archibald Cox as special prossecuter and had promised to cooperate with him, but then he refused to give him the tapes and 
white house papers.  When Cox subpoenaed them, Nixon tried to fire him, at which point his attorney general and deputy 
attorney general resigned, and Cox was finally fired by the third ranking official in the Justice Department and replaced by 
Leon Jaworski.

Ultimately, when the House Judiciary Committe began considering evidence for an impeachment,  Nixon had to give up the 
tapes, but when they arrived at the special prosecuters office some were missing, some were blank, and sections of 
conversations had been mysteriously erased.  18 particularly important seconds had apparently been erased while one of the 
white house secretaries was transcribing the tapes and performing various unlikely contortions.

Next, Nixon was accused of falsifying his tax returns, and it was revealed that he had paid only 1600 dollars in taxes during a 
period when he had earned half a million dollars, the result of questionable deductions and the fact that public funds had been 
spent to improve his private residences in CA and FL. At this point he went on TV and assured the audience that 'I am not a 
crook', which no one believed by this point.

In March of 74 a grand Jury idicted Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell and named Nixon as a 'unindicted co-conspirator'.  
The IRS then announced that Nixon's tax deductions were unjustified, and asked for half a million dollars in taxes and interest.

To try to restore public confidence, Nixon released a much edited transcript of his tapes, with his frequent use of obscenity 
replaced with the phrace 'expletive deleted'.  The picture of Nixon in private as found even in the whitewashed transcripts, was 
of a confused, indecisive and perhaps even demented man, certainly too unstable to be president.

Nonetheless, there was hesitancy about impeaching Nixon.  The Judiciary Sub-Committe began a full scale investigation, 
which was broadcast on TV.  They charged the president with obstructing justice, misusing the powers of his office and 
failing to obey their subpoenas to hand over missing tapes. Even the republicans on the committe voted in favor of the 
charges, clearly indicating that if the case were presented to congress Nixon would be impeached.

The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the 64 missing tapes.  When he was preparing to do so, his lawyer, James St. 
Clair listened to the tapes and heard three conversations between Nixon and Haldeman which clearly referred to the break ins 
and the cover up.

On August 5th St. Clair met with Nixon as the new, complete transcripts were being circulated.  The next day the Judiciary 
Committe voted unanimously to suggest impeachment to the congress.  On August 8th, presumably at the advice of St. 
Clair, Nixon resigned and the next day Gerald Ford became president.

Quickly the mild-mannered Ford was plunged into controversy when he pardonned Nixon in advance for all crimes he may 
have committed.  

Unquestionably, one result of the Watergate affair was an enormous loss in national confidence, not only in the presidency, 
but a loss of faith in government as a whole.  After Watergate people realized that all the fears they had about abuse of power 
and callous disregard for the responsibilities of office could be true, even at the highest level, and Americans turned away from 
politics in disgust, demonstrated by the lowest voter turnouts since before the Civil War, and a decline in morale which is 
still going on.

With the end of Nixon, the drab and depressing era of the 70s had begun, with gas shortages, national apathy, disco music, 
leisure suits, polyester, Jimmy Carter, the Crisis in Iran, and ultimately the Reagan presidency and its aftermath.

But that isn't history...it's current events.