The Spanish-American War Begins

By the late 1890s, the Spanish Empire included Cuba, the Philippine Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico, along with various other territories around the world. The people in Cuba wanted to be independent; they did not wish to remain a colony of Spain.

In the United States, people read about Cuba’s struggle for freedom. Americans had sympathy for Cuba, because the United States had been England’s colony and had to fight for its independence, just as Cuba was Spain’s colony and was now fighting for its independence.

Although America had sympathy for Cuba, it did not immediately help Cuba with military aid in its struggle. Two events would change the minds of Americans: First, newspaper reports revealed that Spain had begun rounding up Cubans, placing them into concentration camps, and committing inhumane atrocities. Second, an American battleship parked in a Cuban harbor met a tragic end.

In January 1898, the naval ship USS Maine was sent to Cuba by President William McKinley. The ship was there to protect U.S. citizens who were in Cuba, and also to take some or all of those citizens back to the United States, so that they could be safely away from the fighting in Cuba.

The United States was still not part of the fighting. The ship was in Havana Harbor simply to protect and transport U.S. citizens. That changed suddenly, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

On the night of February 15, 1898, a Marine bugler played “Taps” aboard USS Maine, anchored in Havana’s harbor since late January. Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, the ship’s commander, finished writing a letter as the notes drifted off into the evening stillness. Just as he reached for an envelope, “a bursting, rending, and crashing roar of immense volume” rocked the ship, which trembled, listed to port, and settled into the mud. Out of 354 officers and men on board, 266 died in the explosion. What caused the disaster? No one knew for sure, but one thing was certain: The incident made war between the United States and Spain more likely.

More than 100 years later, the exact cause of the explosion remains uncertain. Did Spain attack the ship, fearing that the U.S. would use it to support the Cuba rebels? Did the Cubans themselves do it, hoping that the U.S. would assume it was done by Spain? Or was it simply an accident, a mechanical failure in the ship which allowed the coal and gunpowder in the ship to catch fire?

The ship’s destruction caused increasing tensions between Spain and the United States. In April 1898, the U.S. Congress confirmed a decision that the U.S. would not attempt to annex Cuba. (To “annex” means to take possession of land: Congress was saying that America wanted Cuba to be free and independent, and not controlled by the U.S.) At the same time, Congress also said that Spain must stop its military aggression toward Cuba. This was an application of the Monroe Doctrine.

In that same month, as a response, Spain declared war on the United States. The Spanish-American War had begun.

The war was brief. It ended in August 1898.

At war’s end, Cuba became a free and independent nation, and would enjoy that freedom for the next sixty years, until it was taken over by the international communist conspiracy.

Spain also surrendered three other territories to the U.S.: Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

The United States developed a plan to make the Philippines into its own independent country, so that it would not be a part of the United States.

In the United States at the time, there was a strong anti-imperialist political movement, which argued that America should help small nations become independent, and that America should not try to annex these small nations. So, when America had a chance to take over Cuba and the Philippines, it didn’t. Instead, it helped those nations become their own countries.

Guam and Puerto Rico, on the other hand, remained part of the United States.

The Spanish-American War was brief: it lasted less than four months. But it changed the world, and today places like Guam, Cuba, The Philippines, and Puerto Rico are still shaped by this war.

Urbanization in America Between 1865 and 1900: Changing Technology, Changing Lifestyles

The United States became an independent and sovereign country in 1776, less than 4% of the nation’s population lived in cities. By the year 2020, more than 80% of the people lived in urban areas. This change affected society, culture, and technology.

When the nation began, the vast majority of citizens lived on farms. They could largely determine their own schedules. They decided when to chop wood, take care of the animals, tend the crops in the fields, and do housework. Farming families didn’t often look at their clocks.

When most people began living in cities, their schedule was determined by the starting times of the schools they attended, the streetcars and trolleys they rode, the opening and closing hours of stores and shops, and the working hours set by their employers. Clocks became important.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, the urbanization trend accelerated. While cities had grown slightly until that year, they expanded dramatically afterward.

This sudden growth was due in part to technology.

Farmhouses were rarely more than two stories tall. Early cities often featured five-storied buildings, and the invention of the elevator suddenly allowed for ten- and twenty-storied buildings.

Large-scale industrial factories became common in cities after 1865. This created a need for workers. Thousands of people moved to cities and got jobs in factories.

The need for workers created opportunities for individuals and families to improve their lives. A steady wage from a factory job, combined with lower prices for ordinary products, lured people from the poor parts of the country. Prices were lower because industrialization allowed for the mass production of basic goods, as historian Wilfred McClay writes:

In 1790, 3.3 percent of the population lived in cities, defined as a population of eight thousand or more. By 1890, that number was 33 percent. The nation grew, but cities grew faster; the nation’s population increased by 12 times between 1800 and 1890, but the population of cities increased by 87 times. By 1890, there were not merely six cities but 448 cities with greater than eight thousand in population. And there were six metropolises by 1900 with populations totaling more than a half million. Much of this growth took place in the postwar years; Chicago tripled its population between 1880 and 1900, while New York grew from two million to three and a half million in the same years.

People moved to the cities not only from other parts of the United States, but also from other countries around the world. A new wave of immigrants came to America. Until the Civil War, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe. They were called the “Old Immigration.”

After the Civil War, people from southern and eastern Europe began coming to America. They were called the “New Immigration.”

There were also immigrants from Japan and China.

Many immigrants faced difficulties when they first arrived. Some could not speak English. Others had no money at all. Sometimes, their new neighbors — people who’d already lived in the United States for a while — were not happy to see them make a new home here.

But in the long run, the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, as Wilfred McClay explains:

Why did they come? Some came for the same reasons that immigrants had always come to America: to escape the poverty, famine, and religious or political persecution of their native lands. But many more were pulled to America by its promise than were pushed to it by the conditions in their homelands. Those who had seen relatives become successful in America were inclined to follow in their wake, and in time whole extended families were affected. Real wages were relatively higher in the United States than in Europe, and burgeoning American industries, ever in need of fresh sources of unskilled labor, were only too happy to appeal to members of economically struggling groups in European countries with the promise of steady employment and an ability to rise in the world. Such companies sought out immigrants in their native lands and actively recruited them to come to America and work in the steel mills and on the railroads. Many did just that.

“In the experiences of these people,” McClay says, industrialization, urbanization, and immigration converged. To tell the story about why and how large cities grew in America, one must also tell the story about technological developments, and about immigrants from other nations.

New technology like the electric lights, telephones, and recorded music were a part of these large, new, and growing cities, as were the people who found opportunities for a better life by moving into those cities.

By the year 1900, a new way of life — an urban life in which people rode powered streetcars, spoke on telephones, listened to recorded music, had electric lights after dark — a life which was scheduled and organized by the operating hours of schools, stores, shops, factories, cable cars, and trams — was offering serious competition to the agricultural way of life. Life on a family farm, which had once been the only option for the majority of Americans, was now merely one option — and a shrinking one at that.

Andrew Carnegie Develops Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty

The life story of Andrew Carnegie is not only amazing, but also reveals economic principles which society can use to help those who are at the bottom of the economic system. Andrew Carnegie had two disadvantages: he was an immigrant, and he had no money.

In 1848, he came to the United States with his family. His first job was working, at age 12, in a textile factory. He worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. He earned barely enough money to stay alive.

Yet he didn’t give up. He was determined to work as hard as he could, and he was determined to understand the economic system. He not only worked in various factories, but he thought about how they were organized, and about who paid for the factory to be built, and who paid for the raw materials that came to the factory. He learned how products were distributed and sold.

Andrew Carnegie worked his way up in business, and eventually could save enough money to buy part of a business. Later, he owned his own business. By the time he died in 1919, he was one of the wealthiest people in America.

Through his own experience, Andrew Carnegie learned that it was possible for an immigrant to rise from the lower class to the middle class, and eventually to the upper class. He received no special help, had no privilege, and his family was unable to help him. Yet he succeeded.

Later in life, he wanted to help others who were poor, or were immigrants. He began massive charitable efforts. He donated money to build hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, and museums. Poor children received better healthcare and better educations, and had a chance to work their way up from poverty.

Driven by moral and spiritual convictions, he believed that people with wealth had a responsibility to use that money to improve society for all people. Andrew Carnegie wrote:

Thus is the problem of the rich and poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community.

He believed that the hundreds of millions of dollars he had earned were not his to keep. Andrew Carnegie understood that this money was only his temporarily, and that he was obliged to help others with it.

The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race in which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good. This day already dawns.

The word ‘philanthropy’ refers, in the words of a common dictionary, to “the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.” Andrew Carnegie helped people by giving away hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s right: not millions of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars, but hundreds of millions of dollars. Hospitals, schools, universities, museums, and libraries in dozens of towns and cities exist still today because of Carnegie’s generosity more than a hundred years ago.

But he helped in other ways, too. His business activities were related primarily to steel. Steel was and is used to make everything from railroads to cars, from washing machines to airplanes.

Carnegie’s steel business provided thousands of well-paying jobs for working-class people. His steel company was a path out of poverty for many families.

The steel he produced also lowered the costs of consumer goods. Over the decades between 1870 and 1900, the price of many ordinary products sank. At the same time, wages were rising. Lower-class and middle-class families experienced an improvement in their standards of living.

To be sure, Carnegie didn’t do all this by himself. Other leaders were developing other industries during these same years. Notably, John Rockefeller developed the Standard Oil Company, which provided similar economic opportunities for workers. Many of these other business leaders, who created prosperity for families across America, were immigrants like Carnegie. Alexander Graham Bell, for example, who created the telephone industry, was also an immigrant who arrived in the United States with no money.

From Carnegie’s example, it is clear that America offers opportunities to poor immigrants. It is also clear that successful business leaders can help lower-class families rise up from poverty.

The Industrial Growth of the Late 19th Century: Caring for Society’s Vulnerable Members

Between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the end of the 19th century in 1900, a dramatic expansion in the U.S. economy provided for four massive benefits: an increase in well-paying industrial jobs; a decrease in the price of consumer goods; more charitable contributions to help the poor; and philanthropy to grow educational and social institutions.

The word ‘philanthropy’ refers to voluntary donations.

The industrial growth involved industries like steel, railroads, coal, petroleum, and the new communication technology: the telephone. These businesses were created and led, in typical American fashion, by immigrants. Two examples stand out: Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell. They came to the United States in poverty, having left their homes for opportunities.

As these companies grew, thousands of jobs were created, giving new chances both to the urban poor and the rural poor. Many workers were able to move up from poverty.

At the same time, new manufacturing technologies reduced the prices on many ordinary products, allowing families to experience a higher standard of living, being able to afford better and more goods.

Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie earned millions of dollars, but refused to live an extravagant lifestyle of wealth. Instead, he donated millions of dollars to schools, museums, hospitals, universities, and libraries. He wrote:

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community – the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer.

Carnegie understood an important economic principle. Voluntary donations by individuals are the most effective way to address poverty. Government programs, which were almost nonexistent during the late 1800s anyway, are inefficient and unproductive.

So it was, then, that charitable efforts to help the poor grew during this era, fueled in part by spiritual motives. Three major social institutions were religious organizations which were effective in addressing poverty: The International Red Cross was founded in 1863 and the American Red Cross in 1881; the British YMCA in 1844 and the American YMCA in 1851; and the British Salvation Army in 1865 and the American Salvation Army in 1880. All of these organizations proclaimed that they operated on the Christian principle of offering help to all people, regardless of race or religion.

Industrial growth made society more humane and more able to offer help to those in need.

What kind of economic expansion made such charity possible? Historian Wilfred McClay explains:

Hundreds of thousands of patents were granted during this dynamic economic period of American history. There were too many important advances in technology in this era to be able to enumerate them all here, but a few deserve mention. An advance that occupies a category by itself involved the manufacture of steel, which is iron with 1–2 percent carbon added, a material that combines the hardness of cast iron with the toughness of wrought iron. Steel is superior to iron for most purposes, particularly railroad tracks, girders for tall buildings and bridges, and machine tools, but was too expensive to manufacture until the 1855 invention in Great Britain of the Bessemer process, which revolutionized steel production. The numbers tell the story; from 77,000 tons of steel produced in 1870, the number had made an astronomical leap to 11.4 million tons in 1900. By then, Pittsburgh had become the iron and steel capital of the United States, mostly due to the abundant coal deposits in the western Pennsylvania area. Its most prominent entrepreneurial figure was Andrew Carnegie, a poor Scottish immigrant who rose from working as a bobbin boy in a textile mill to becoming the titan of the steel industry.

Science and technology led the way for this economic expansion. The development of new manufacturing techniques did more than increase the amount of iron and steel produced. Industrial development funded schools for children who otherwise would have no education. It funded hospitals for those who otherwise would receive substandard care.

The Growth of the West: Its Relationship with the Industrial Northeast

After the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, and after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the nation, with the glaring exception of the South, found itself in a time of growth, of economic expansion, and of opportunity. In the Northeast, this took the form of industrial development and the development of retailing and wholesaling businesses.

In the West, this took the form of land.

People who wanted to work their way up from the lower classes to the middle classes found opportunities in ranching and farming. Farming meant growing crops like corn, wheat, and beans, and having farm animals that lived on relatively small fields. These animals were fed with some of the corn that the farmers grew.

Ranching, on the other hand, meant not growing any crops, and having animals roam over huge amounts of land, grazing on the grass and other plants which grew there.

The difference between ranching and farming would lead to social tensions. The livestock belonging to the ranchers would sometimes trample across farm fields, causing great damage to the crops.

Farmers and cowboys often clashed. The word ‘cowboy’ had originally a negative connotation. The cowboys were supposed to guide the cattle from place to place, and the farmers held the cowboys responsible for damage done to farm crops. The image of the ‘cowboy’ at that time was one of an irresponsible troublemaker.

A big change came with the invention of barbed wire. Fences built around farm fields kept the plants safe, and kept the animals where they were supposed to be. Barbed wire brought peace to the conflict between ranchers and farmers.

The Northeast was being transformed by modernization, urbanization, and industrialization. Those ideas seem to be the very opposite of the popular image of the West, as historian Wilfred McClay writes:

But what of the great American West, that other mythic land of dreams? Had it been affected by these forces? With its great open spaces, its magnificent mountains and craggy canyons, its mighty rivers and verdant timberlands, surely it was majestically unconquerable, still resolutely the land of individualism and personal freedom so central to the American identity and way of life?

Yet the barbed wire which brought progress to the West was a product of the Northeastern industrial establishment, as were many of the tools and firearms needed to build and feed the West’s growing population.

The West consumed a large share of the Northeast’s industrial output, providing customers for manufactured goods. The West also provided the raw materials for the Northeast’s factories.

But aside from this economic relationship, maybe the West could maintain its unique character. The West was and is associated, in the popular imagination, with fierce independence. Maybe the West could retain its peculiar sense of liberty?

Maybe, but maybe not. The flow of migrants into the region after the Civil War was just as relentless as it was elsewhere, and the growing importance of the mining and cattle industries combined with the reach of the railroads was bringing the West into the more general range of the nation’s consolidating forces. The heyday of the romantic cowboy, riding the open range and steering cattle drives of three thousand head or more northward to cow towns like Sedalia and Abilene, looms large in our imaginations. But it was actually quite brief, only a couple of decades between the end of the Civil War and the late 1880s, as farmers and ranchers began butting up against one another and settled property lines became a necessity. Ironically, the heavy involvement of the federal government in the western states, and federal ownership of roughly half the land of the West, would soon make the West the region least free of federal influence.

More enduring was the impact of mining. The California Gold Rush brought adventurers and speculators to the West in the late 1840s, but more serious mining trends began: in 1858, gold was discovered near Pikes Peak in Colorado.

In 1859, silver was discovered near Virginia City, Nevada. This discovery was called ‘The Comstock Lode,’ although Henry Comstock had sold the land before the silver was discovered.

In the 1870s, silver was discovered at Leadville, Colorado, and gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In the same decade, copper was discovered in Montana.

Miners had already come to Arizona in the 1860s and 1870s to work in the copper mines there, but in 1877, silver was discovered near Tombstone Arizona.

Each of these mining discoveries brought a sudden increase in population. Tiny towns suddenly had hundreds or thousands of new residents. Towns appeared and grew quickly where there had been no towns before. These fast-growing places were called ‘boomtowns.’

Although economically vibrant, boomtowns had problems of their own. The vast majority of their population was made up of men between the ages of 17 and 40. There were few women, and even fewer children and old people.

When a town lacks a balanced population, social problems arise. When there are few women, children, and old people, there is more crime. The boomtowns in the mining areas of the West were often dangerous places to be.

As the mining industry developed, however, the boomtowns matured into healthy communities, with families balancing the population. With a full range of ages — from small children to the elderly — and with an even distribution of men and women in the population, the boomtowns became prosperous cities with less crime.

Preserving Black Freedom in the Postwar South: The Struggle for Liberty Continues after 1865

When the United States Civil War ended in early 1865, the questions could be asked: What was accomplished? What remained to be accomplished? The Republicans had achieved two goals: First, they had ended slavery and freed the enslaved African-Americans. Second, they had preserved the Union.

A third goal had not been addressed during the war. It would be addressed in the postwar years, during an era called the ‘Reconstruction.’

The Confederacy had failed to preserve its “peculiar institution,” as it called slavery. It had also failed to destroy the Union, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

Although war involves killing, killing is not the object of war. Men fight for vital reasons, as defined by their country’s political leadership. The North fought for the preservation of the Union and the destruction of slavery, while the South fought for independence and the preservation of its “peculiar institution.” In saving the Union and freeing the slaves, Lincoln believed the North would be achieving goals of cosmic significance, transcending national boundaries into the infinite future. Like many of America’s leaders, he thought the United States had a special destiny to safeguard and foster its democratic institutions as an example for the world. The North, he said in December 1862, “shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” And in the Gettysburg Address he urged his fellow citizens to take increased resolve from the northern soldiers who had given “the last full measure of devotion” on the battlefield. Let us ensure “that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The Civil War permanently changed the way Americans thought and spoke about the nation. Until 1861, the United States was viewed as a collection of sovereign and largely independent governments that cooperated on a few common tasks.

After the Civil War, the United States was understood as a single entity, and the individual states as having limited autonomy within the federal system.

Those northerners who fell at Gettysburg and elsewhere did not die in vain, since the North achieved its dual war aims. The conflict delivered a deathblow to the doctrine of secession and considerably weakened (though it did not destroy) the idea of states’ rights. Within the American federal system, the balance of power shifted from the states to the national government. People no longer said “the United States are” but instead “the United States is.” In the process of saving the Union, the North also destroyed slavery. Advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation undermined the institution, and the Thirteenth Amendment killed it.

The Thirteenth Amendment ensured that the gains made during the war — i.e., the end of slavery — would be permanent and irreversable. It finalized the achievement of the Republicans: the abolitionist movement had won.

Southerners had seemingly died in vain, since the Confederacy achieved neither of its war aims. And yet merely saying that the Union lived and slavery died left several crucial questions unanswered. What was the status of the defeated states? How and when were they to return to “their proper practical relation with the Union”? Who would control the restored states, former secessionists or southern Unionists, perhaps in league with the freedmen? And what was the status of the former slaves?

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would do much to answer those questions. While the Civil War, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment had decisively ended slavery, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would go further: The goal was now full legal citizenship, not only for the former slaves, but also for the millions of free African-Americans who had never been slaves.

Legal equality was a radical change, as radical as ending slavery. Gaining this legal status for African-Americans could only be achieved by the presence of large numbers of Republicans in the South after the war’s end, during the time called the “Reconstruction” Era.

When the war ended in 1865, many of the Confederate states attempted to return to their prewar systems. The local political leaders were almost exclusively members of the Democratic Party, and they moved swiftly to enact many “Black Codes” – laws designed to prevent former slaves from enjoying their civil rights.

Even though the Republicans had won the war, they realized that there was a danger of losing the gains they had made. They had fought so hard to end slavery, but now the political leaders in the Confederate states were trying to take away the liberties which had been won for the former slaves.

The Republicans took several steps to protect the civil rights of the African-Americans. They adopted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they created the Freedmen’s Bureau, and they wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

Life in the postwar South was an up-and-down experience for the newly freed African-Americans. The immediate postwar year of 1865 and 1866 were grim, as the Democratic Party reasserted itself. The next decade was better, as the Republicans worked to guarantee civil rights during the Reconstruction Era.

When Reconstruction came to an end around 1877, many of the Republican leaders were forced out of the South, and the ex-slaves again experienced an erosion of their liberties, as Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski explain:

As solutions to these perplexing problems emerged during Reconstruction, southerners salvaged much that looked like victory from their apparent defeat. Former secessionists regained effective control over the former Confederate States and maintained unquestioned white supremacy. Furthermore, southerners soon took as much pride in the legend of the Lost Cause as northerners did in the fact of Appomattox. Ironically, even perversely, by 1877 both North and South could proclaim success. How and why the North lost so many of the fruits of victory is a complex story in which the Army played a central role.

Although the war had ended with surrender of the Confederate military forces at Appomattox, the North found it necessary to keep a substantial military presence in the South, because groups of former Confederate soldiers terrorized the freed Blacks using guerilla-style tactics.

The Republicans in Congress authorized the Army to keep troops in the South as one of several measures necessary to protect the lives, properties, and freedoms of the former slaves.

A System Designed to Undermine Slavery: The Electoral College

When the United States began, there was a flurry of events within a few years: In 1775, the American Revolution began when the war broke out at Lexington and Concord; in 1776, the country was created by the Declaration of Independence; in 1777, a provisional government was designed under The Articles of Confederation, and those articles went into effect in 1781; the war ended in 1781; the treaty officially ending the war was signed in 1783; finally, the Constitution was written in 1787, and by 1790, all thirteen original states had ratified it.

It was during these years that the “thirteen colonies” became the “thirteen states.”

The writing of the U.S. constitution was a group effort. Approximately 55 delegates from the thirteen colonies gathered in Philadelphia from May to September in 1787. A broad spectrum of different political philosophies was represented in the intense exchanges of views. They debated and discussed the various details of a national government: one of the most complex political projects ever undertaken.

One of the many topics considered was the process by which the new country would choose its presidents.

The simple and obvious choice of direct popular election was quickly rejected and had few supporters. Such a system would mean that the votes of individuals who lived in smaller states would have little or no impact on selecting presidents. A candidate would need to win only a few of the larger states — far less than half of the states — in order to win the election.

If not a direct election, then how? One proposal was to let either the House of Representatives, or the Senate, or both elect the president. Another proposal was to let the thirteen state legislatures choose the president, as historian Sean Wilentz writes:

How, then, would the president be elected, if not directly by the people at large? Some delegates had proposed that Congress have the privilege, a serious proposal that died out of concern the executive branch would be too subservient to the legislative. Other delegates floated making the state governors the electors. Still others favored the state legislatures.

The method finally chosen, and the method which has been in effect for over 230 years, is the famous Electoral College.

Why was this process chosen? What were its real or perceived benefits?

One advantage of the Electoral College is that the formula bridged the gap between the large states and the small states, as Wilentz reports:

Instead of election by direct popular vote, each state would name electors (chosen however each state legislature approved), who would actually do the electing. The number of each state’s electoral votes would be the same as its combined representation in the House and the Senate.

By including the number of senators, two from each state, the formula leaned to making the apportionment fairer to the smaller states. Including the number of House members leaned in favor of the larger states.

Although the Electoral College was a step toward justice, ensuring that all thirteen states would have a meaningful role in selecting the president, not everyone was happy with the idea. Slave owners opposed the Electoral College.

In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention.

Why did the pro-slavery states oppose the Electoral College? At first, some people thought that the Electoral College would actually promote slavery, because the slave-owning states had more representatives in Congress. But upon closer examination, it was clear that the Electoral College would ultimately undermine slavery.

Sean Wilentz continues:

When it first took shape at the convention, the Electoral College would not have significantly helped the slaveowning states. Under the initial apportionment of the House approved by the framers, the slaveholding states would have held 39 out of 92 electoral votes, or about 42 percent. Based on the 1790 census, about 41 percent of the nation’s total white population lived in those same states, a minuscule difference. Moreover, the convention did not arrive at the formula of combining each state’s House and Senate numbers until very late in its proceedings, and there is no evidence to suggest that slavery had anything to do with it.

Here’s where it gets complicated: some media reports alleged “that the slaveholding states” had “extra electoral votes” and “unfairly handed Thomas Jefferson the presidency in 1800-01.” But such reports “ignore anti-Jefferson manipulation of the electoral vote in heavily pro-Jefferson Pennsylvania that offset the Southerners’ electoral advantage. Take away that manipulation, and Jefferson would have won with or without the extra Southern votes.”

Whether or not the machinations of the election of 1800 are understood in their intricate detail, it became clear that the Electoral College favored the abolitionist cause. The fears of the slaveholders were realized: the Electoral College supported justice and supported the end of slavery.

The Electoral College helped anti-slavery President John Quincy Adams obtain the presidency. For this reason, pro-slavery President Andrew Jackson bitterly fought against the Electoral College.

The early president most helped by the Constitution’s rejection of direct popular election was John Quincy Adams, later an antislavery hero, who won the White House in 1824-25 despite losing both the popular and electoral votes to Andrew Jackson. (The House decided that election.) As president, the slaveholder Jackson became one of American history’s most prominent critics of the Electoral College, which he blasted for disallowing the people “to express their own will.” The Electoral College system made no difference in deciding the presidency during the 36 years before the Civil War.

While the Electoral College was an obstacle to the rabidly pro-slavery Andrew Jackson, the Electoral College proved a congenial route for Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

Arriving in America: English Civilization Shapes the New World

While Spanish and Portuguese explorers organized most of Central and South America, it was the British, along with French and Dutch, who began the settlement of North America. Later, it would be the Germans who built most of the agricultural and industrial base, but initially, the British shaped the area.

The first groups of settlers from Britain — i.e., from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales — journeyed for a variety of reasons. Some went to America for financial opportunities: money could be made by selling animal fur, or by growing tobacco. Others arrived seeking religious freedom: in North America, they could organize their worship and live their faith as they pleased. A third reason for the relocation was political liberty: the thirteen British colonies had an atmosphere which tolerated diverse opinions and public debate. Finally, some came with ambitions of becoming political leaders: in the New World, ordinary people could be elected to town councils or colonial legislatures, something rarely possible in Britain.

Society in North America, specifically in the regions that would become the United States, was built by ideas and cultures from many nations: Germany, France, Holland, etc. But the early years, and some of the most formative influences, came from the English, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski writes:

Crossing the Atlantic during the seventeenth century was a perilous voyage, entailing weeks or months of cramped quarters, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Yet in the late 1500s Englishmen had begun to hazard the venture, and in 1607 they planted their first permanent settlement on the North American continent at Jamestown. By the early 1730s, thirteen separate colonies hugged the seaboard. Although great diversity prevailed among the colonies, most colonists shared a common English heritage and clung to it tenaciously. Their religious attitudes, economic views, political thoughts, and military ideals and institutions were all grounded in English history. In no aspect of colonial life was this heritage more important than in regard to military matters. The colonists' most revered military institution (the militia) and their most cherished military tradition (fear of a standing army) both came from England.

The difference between the ‘militia’ and the ‘standing army’ shaped American history for several centuries. The ‘militia’ is a group formed of ordinary people — farmers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, etc. — who had some basic military training and could be called upon when needed. The men in the militia weren’t full-time soldiers, and spent their weekdays at their normal jobs. Only in cases of emergency were they called upon to meet and go into action.

By contrast, the ‘standing army’ is a group of full-time professional soldiers, who usually wear uniforms, don’t have other employment or jobs, and live in some type of army housing.

The settlers from England brought with them a distrust of ‘standing armies’ and a preference for ‘militia’ units. They passed this disposition on to the other settlers in North America. The British suspicion of standing armies arose from the fact that, when a full-sized trained and equipped army is not usefully occupied, government leaders can use it to harass ordinary people.

The appropriate use of an army is for it to fight with other armies from other countries. But the English government had used the army to intimate civilians into paying excessive taxes, silencing their political opinions, and preventing diverse forms of religious worship. In summary, the army was a ‘muscle’ or ‘enforcer’ for the whims of the King or the Parliament. Instead of protecting the British people, the army was being used to intimidate the British people. So the attitude developed among the British: they didn’t really like the army, and prefered to have a militia.

The events that created this attitude in England were followed by events in America that reinforced the attitude. British soldiers in North America were supposed to be there to protect the colonists who’d settled there; but the colonists were capable of defending themselves, as they did on several occasions, and didn’t need the British army. But the British government placed extra taxes on the settlers to pay for the army to be there. So the settlers were forced to pay for an army they didn’t need.

It got worse. The British soldiers were used, in America as in England, to harass the local population.

These circumstances merely reinforced the anti-army attitude which the settlers brought with them from England.

So, the settlers turned to the idea of the ‘militia’ — which turned out to be less costly, to be a more effective way of defending themselves, and to be less of a danger to the rights and freedoms of the settlers.

The American militia grew to be not only a powerful fighting force, but also a part of the American culture and American mentality. At that time, as at the present time, a large percentage of Americans had a rifle or other firearm at home anyway. Men and women were familiar with rifles, knew how to use them, and used them on a regular basis to provide food for their families. American villages had a communal spirit: neighbors helped each other with barnraising and harvesting, with quilting and tanning, with butchering and fence building. So it was an obvious step that they should help each other in the defense of their villages, joining together to form a local militia.

The militia was a local institution, not commanded by officials in a far-away government center. The militia was self-organized, self-funded, and self-directed.

In this way, we can see one source in the American preference for local government over national government, for self-government over imposed power, and for private citizen initiatives instead of enforced tax-funded projects.

The Quest for Freedom and Equality: Liberalism vs. Classical Liberalism

Three distinctive features of the United States are the establishment of freedom and equality as goals, the steady effort applied in the service of these goals, and the measurable forward movement toward these goals. This is a consistent American trend over several centuries.

In political vocabulary, this can be expressed in a variety of ways. It is worth noting that the word ‘liberalism’ has several different meanings. A particular type of liberalism called ‘classical liberalism’ was and is found as a foundation for the peculiarly American values of freedom, equality, and individualism.

Classical liberalism is found in the thoughts and writings of authors like John Locke, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Otis, along with many others who influenced the American Revolution in the 1700s. Classical liberalism places emphasis on the freedom of the individual: personal political liberty. Classical liberalism wants to protect the individual from government control, taxation, and regulation.

By contrast, the word ‘liberalism’ was used in a different way in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The liberalism of the late 1900s and early 2000s desired to regulate personal behavior, public speech, and economic transactions. This type of liberalism also sought higher taxes.

So the ‘classical liberalism’ of the 1700s and early 1800s is different from the liberalism of later eras. It was classical liberalism that began and completed the fight against slavery, as historian Jonathon Bean writes:

In the era of antislavery, classical liberal voices for racial freedom drew upon the Constitution, Christianity, and belief in the right to self-ownership.

The antislavery movement drew from a diverse set of philosophical underpinnings: the classical liberal framework of the U.S. Constitution, the values of freedom and equality as articulated by Christianity, and the somewhat abstract concept of self-ownership. The ideological and intellectual matrix of the abolitionist movement was robust.

These ideas were intertwined with each other in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft argued that “these truths” were “sacred and undeniable,” while the final draft called them “self-evident.” Jefferson’s draft stated that all people are created “equal and independent,” while the final draft said simply that they were “equal.” These differences may be subtle, but the fact that the changes were made between the first draft and the final draft show how logically, carefully, and philosophically the members of the Second Continental Congress were thinking and writing.

The Declaration of Independence was also a touchstone of abolitionism quoted and discussed by James Forten, David Walker, Lysander Spooner, Frederick Douglass, and nearly every other antislavery writer in the tumultuous period leading up to the Civil War.

African-American leaders like James Forten, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass used the Declaration of Independence to express and support their views, because it combined various versions of Natural Law thought. The tradition of Natural Law asserts that there is a foundation in the structure of the universe which determines what justice is, i.e., that justice is not the arbitrary opinion of some person or group of people, but rather that justice stands objectively and enduringly above, beyond, and outside of mere personal opinion.

Natural Law theory has a diverse range of supporters: some argue that Natural Law is the result of reason, that people who think logically and precisely will come to a clear conclusion about what justice is; others argue that Natural Law is divine, and has been established and articulated by God; a third group argues that Natural Law is known intuitively and instinctively by people.

The Declaration of Independence brought these three different groups together, allowing them to cooperate in the American Revolution, and in opposing slavery.

Natural Law theory is a foundation for the antislavery movement, because it was necessary to show that slaver is unjust and immoral. It is not enough to say merely that slavery is unjust in the opinion of some people; it must be demonstrated that slavery is unjust in an objective and absolute sense, as Jonathan Bean explains:

Strong, often violent, opposition to antislavery activists led them to develop a coherent tradition that dominated the civil rights movement well into the twentieth century and still persists today.

As Jefferson phrased it in his first draft, people are created equal, and “from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” The final draft says that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Again, the difference is slight, but the mindfulness devoted to the wording is detailed.

While Jefferson spoke of “the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the final draft shortened this summary to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Early African-American leaders were keenly aware of the irony of the fact that several of the men who laid the groundwork for the antislavery movement were themselves slave owners. These early black leaders embraced these documents, but certainly did not approve of every detail of the men’s lives.

Although the author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was a slaveholder, that fact did not undermine the meaning and power of the natural rights theory set forth in that famous document, which mentions God four times as the source of those “unalienable Rights.”

The power of the words — and more importantly, the power of the ideas — put forth by the classical liberals of the 1700s was strong enough that it would not be nullified by failings and weaknesses of the authors who expressed them.

It was the power of classical liberalism thought that exposed the falsehoods presented by the pro-slavery political leaders. By means of careful analysis, the classical liberals understood that there was a dichotomy between authentic Christianity and fake Christianity. Slaveholders sought to justify their actions by appealing to a counterfeit version of Christianity which they manufactured to justify their crimes.

Classical liberals understood that true Christianity supported Natural Law theory and was therefore opposed to slavery. One of the greatest and earliest religious conflicts in American history is the struggle between real Christianity and fake Christianity, as Jonathan Bean reports:

Throughout this period, classical liberal Christians found themselves fighting proslavery interpretations of Christianity advanced by southerners.

So it was that the abolitionist movement represented a harmonization of diverse views. Whether people held that Natural Law was known by logical reasoning, by spiritual faith, or by intuition and instinct, they could all agree on Natural Law theory and its opposition to slavery. So it was that both men and women, both white Americans and black Americans, agreed from early 1700s onward that American Revolution and its drive for independence was identical to the demand that slavery be ended.

This diverse set of thinkers, agreed on this unifying thought, together rallied around the words of the Declaration of Independence:

In response, classical liberals invoked the concept that “all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It was ‘classical liberalism,’ not later forms of liberalism, which both launched the American Revolution and launched the abolitionist movement. The drive for American independence and the drive to end slavery were both fueled by Natural Law. The quest toward individual political liberty, toward personal freedom, and toward respect for the individual person arose from a concept of equality; the notion of equality arose from the idea of human nature in which all people equally share, and which demands both independence for America and freedom for slaves.

The Enlightenment’s Revolution: America’s Reasonable Rebellion in 1776

Historians have long asserted that the cultural and philosophical trends lumped together under the label “The Enlightenment” were decisive in shaping the American Revolution. The independence movement in North America in the 1770s could not have happened a few centuries earlier.

To be sure, there have been rebellions throughout history. But, e.g., the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 had no ideological system, no analysis of history, and no rational or empirical program to justify or explain itself, and had little idea what it would do if it succeeded.

By contrast, the American Revolution analyzed both the past and the present, evaluating and comparing both. The independence movement based its actions on an examination of human nature and a systematic worldview, as historian Jill Lapore writes:

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine, the spitfire son of an English grocer, wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings — “would we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise” — we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” James Madison explained Americans’ historical skepticism, this deep empiricism, this way: “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” Evidence, for Madison, was everything.

Obviously influenced by John Locke’s political writings, the founders of the United States were also influenced by Locke’s philosophical writings, and by the not-so-obvious link between Locke’s politics and his epistemology.

The independence movement studied the past, not in order to slavishly imitate it, but rather to take only the best from it. Indeed, the American Revolution contains within itself the consciousness of major points in world history: working backward from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to the Magna Carta 1215, to Roman law, to Greek political thought, to the historical events recorded in both the New and Old Testaments.

Rather than viewing history as simply precedent to be copied, the American Revolution saw history as a data set, a collection of evidence, and the task was to formulate conclusions based on the raw material of history.

“A new era for politics is struck, Paine wrote, his pen aflame, and “a new method of thinking hath arisen.” Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let fact be submitted to a candid world.”

Writers have been using ‘The American Experiment’ as a phrase to capture the distinct nature of the country’s origins. This phrase has been used at least since an 1860 article in the New York Daily Tribune and perhaps since even earlier dates.

In any case, this phrase articulates the rational approach found in the writings of the independence movement. This was no rebellion of blind anger. It was a deliberate response, not only to the immediate aggression of Britain toward America, but also to the development of civilization over millennia, and the rational analysis of that development.

Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history. In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell.

Unlike the Constitution of the United Kingdom, which is a haphazard accretion of precedents accumulated over centuries, ad hoc inventions dealing with specific situations rather than general principles, the Constitution of the United States is an expression of an axiomatic body of thought, stated in general principles so as to apply to various unforeseen situations and developments.

The intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is found in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Crisis, in the speeches and writings of James Otis, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. It is found in the works of John Locke, and in both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers.

There was no philosophical or ideological program behind the Constitution of the United Kingdom. To be sure, the American Revolution respected and even copied certain aspects of that British Constitution. But instead of allowing a series of situational precedents to slowly accumulate into a structure of governance, the independence movement chose to begin with foundational principles which can be stated in ways which free them from a specific context and thereby capture a general truth in paradigmatic form which can then be applied to new situations as they arise. This was the rationalist bent in the creation of the United States.

President Coolidge Speaks at Howard University: A Civil Rights Milestone

From the beginning of his presidency, Calvin Coolidge made civil rights one of his administration’s top priorities, as is seen not only in his words, but also in his actions. Shortly after taking office in 1923, Coolidge appealed to Congress and obtained significant funding for the medical school at Howard University.

The next year, 1924, Coolidge made history by giving the commencement address there. Howard University is what is now called a ‘HBCU’ — a historically Black college or university. Coolidge was the first U.S. president to ever speak at the graduation ceremonies of a HBCU.

Coolidge’s speech at Howard was a major advance for civil rights, as historian Kurt Schmoke writes:

Coolidge gave the commencement address at Howard and signaled a significant change in progressive race relations. In reading his words it must be recalled that he spoke at a time when separate but equal was the law of the land, when lynchings trumped due process in criminal cases involving black men, and when the most recent Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, had praised a film which glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

Words alone, however, were not enough for Calvin Coolidge. Concrete actions were needed to promote opportunities for African-Americans. His objective was to move millions of Blacks from the lower classes to the middle classes, as a report from the Coolidge Foundation explains:

President Coolidge called for funds to be appropriated to establish a medical school at Howard University in his first State of the Union message to Congress in December 1923. “About half a million dollars is recommended for medical courses at Howard University to help contribute to the education of 500 colored doctors needed each year,” the President said. By this act, Coolidge hoped to improve the state of medical care for the black population. He also sought to grow the black middle class by adding more black professionals to society.

1924 was an election year, and Coolidge’s appearance at Howard University sent a signal: Coolidge was firmly opposed to the KKK. He and his predecessor, President Warren Harding, had also promoted anti-lynching laws in Congress.

But Coolidge’s opponent in the election, the Democratic Party, had failed to make a clear anti-Klan statement in the platform adopted at their convention. The platform failed to make any statements about race or civil rights, and failed to endorse anti-lynching laws.

The Democratic Party was divided. Many anti-Klan Democrats didn’t vote for their party’s nominee in the general election in November 1924. The Democrat nominee, John Davis, did make an anti-Klain statement, but the party failed to back him up.

Entry into the middle class was important for African-Americans in the 1920s. During Coolidge’s presidency, the number of Blacks in federal employment reached a high of 51,882 in 1928, up from 22,540 in 1910. This represented measurable progress as African-Amercans left the lower classes and moved upward.

Coolidge sent a continuous series of signals, by words and by actions, of his dedication to civil rights.

Education as a Gateway into the Middle Class: President Coolidge Opens the Door for African-Americans

The civil rights movement has long understood the importance of education. Indeed, although the era from the early 1950s to the late 1960s is often called the ‘civil rights era,’ Blacks knew that education was a major opportunity decades earlier.

President Calvin Coolidge saw a link between the ascent into the middle class and contributions to society: as African-Americans rose into white-collar college-educated professions, they also played more important roles in the country.

Encouraging Black students to become physicians would benefit not only the African-American community, but the entire nation. So Coolidge worked to inspire Black students to go to medical school, as historian Kurt Schmoke writes:

In his First Annual Address to Congress in 1923 he wrote: “About half a million dollars is recommended for medical courses at Howard University to help contribute to the education of 500 colored doctors needed each year.” This appropriation was to grow over the years, leading to the production of healthcare and other professionals who would stimulate the growth of an African-American middle class and develop leaders in all walks of life, nationally and internationally.

Coolidge also understood that professional advancement is closely associated with political liberty. When Charles Gardner, otherwise unknown to history, wrote to Coolidge to protest the fact that the Republican Party was nominating Black candidates for Congress, Coolidge defended the party’s promotion of African-American engagement in the political process, as a publication from the Coolidge Foundation makes clear:

Not only that, but Coolidge spoke out in defense of the political enfranchisement of blacks. In 1924 Army Sergeant Charles Gardner wrote to Coolidge in protest when Republicans nominated a black dentist as their candidate in New York’s 21st Congressional District, based in Harlem. Coolidge’s response encapsulated his disdain for racism: “th­e suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party.”

In September 1923, Coolidge hosted leaders of the Negro National Educational Congress at the White House. Calvin Coolidge’s civil rights strategy emphasized the connection between advancement into the educated professions and participation in the electoral process.

Howard University: How President Coolidge Empowered Historically Black Colleges and Universities

The presidency of Calvin Coolidge marked a high point for civil rights. Coolidge took several significant actions designed to help African-Americans move from the lower classes into the middle class. Several of those actions centered around higher education.

In 1924, Coolidge became the first U.S. president to give a commencement address at a Black college — an HBCU (Historically Black College or University).

His decision to speak at Howard University was not random. It was paired with two other aspects of his administration. First, his speech was linked to his successful efforts to increase the number of African-American students who would study medicine. The Coolidge administration effected an increase in the number of Black physicians in the United States: this meant an increase in the number of Blacks who moved from the lower class to the middle class by studying for a white-collar, college-educated profession, as historian Kurt Schmoke writes:

The 30th president, Republican Calvin Coolidge, was a major supporter of Howard University and an overlooked figure in advancing the cause of racial equality in the United States. In one of his earliest acts as president, Coolidge proposed and persuaded Congress to pass an appropriation bill that reinforced the unique relationship between Howard and the federal government.

Secondly, Coolidge’s landmark speech at Howard’s graduation ceremonies was linked to his 1924 election campaign. While Coolidge took a clear stand in rejecting the KKK and promoting anti-lynching laws, his opponent, the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidential contest, was left to defend his party’s platform, which equivocated on racial questions, and failed to clearly reject the Klan.

Coolidge’s presence on Howard University’s campus, located in Washington, D.C., also symbolized a continuity between Coolidge and his predecessor, President Warren Harding. Like Coolidge, Harding had also been a civil rights advocate and a champion of anti-lynching laws, as a report from the Coolidge Foundation notes:

President Calvin Coolidge is known for many things, including his championing of limited government, his deft handling of the 1919 Boston Police Strike, and his responsible stewardship of the federal budget. But how often do we recall his pioneering gestures to improve race relations in the fraught decade of the 1920s?

The 1920s were fertile years for civil rights in the United States. Preceded by the racist and segregationist Wilson administration (1913 to 1920), and followed by FDR’s neglect of African-American concerns (1933 to 1945), the years of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were years in which Blacks gained both political liberty and a concrete move into the middle class.

Coolidge vs. the Klan: How an American President Opposed the KKK

During the U.S. presidential election of 1924, the Ku Klux Klan was one of several issues to gain public attention. The Klan had significant influence in the southern states, and even had a presence in some states north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The Klan dreamed of obtaining the endorsement of a presidential candidate. It was clear that Calvin Coolidge, the incumbent, would never do this. Coolidge had become president in 1923, when his predecessor Warren Harding died. Coolidge had been vice president, and so immediately became president.

Both Coolidge and Harding had been steadily anti-Klan.

The KKK, having no hope of receiving support from the Republicans, turned to the “the Democratic convention of 1924, where many delegates were fervently pro-Klan,” as historian Charles Johnson writes.

The Democratic Party was split, half wanting to embrace the Klan, and half wanting not to publicly endorse the Klan. The debate went on for days; neither side could get a solid majority to overcome the other.

The eventual Democratic nominee was John Davis, who finally denounced the Klan, but because the Democratic Party failed to denounce the Klan, many voters “bolted from the Democratic nominee,” in the words of Charles Johnson.

John Davis denounced the Klan, but because the Democratic party didn’t, it was clear that it was a personal statement by Davis, and not the party’s view. The 1924 Democratic platform committee had discussed some statement about the KKK, but in the end, the platform said nothing about the Klan, about race, or about lynching.

Coolidge and Harding, by contrast, had both endorsed anti-lynching laws to protect Black lives.

In the midst of the Klan’s efforts to make trouble, Coolidge calmly snubbed the KKK by becoming the first U.S. President to deliver a commencement address at a historically Black college. In June 1924, Coolidge spoke in Washington, D.C., at the campus of Howard University. The Klan was enraged, and Coolidge was quietly pleased that he’d managed to do something to promote both the civil rights and the economic opportunities of African-Americans.

As Klan leaders became nearly apoplectic at Coolidge’s support of the Black community, the Coolidge campaign mocked the KKK by choosing a campaign slogan: “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” Comedians quickly changed it to “Keep Kool with Koolidge.”

In any case, African-Americans voted in large numbers for Coolidge in 1924. They weren’t the only ones voting for Coolidge. Citizens who’d formerly voted for the Democratic Party were dismayed when the Democrats failed to take a clear stance against the KKK, and so many of them also voted for Coolidge.

In the end, Calvin Coolidge won the election by an unprecedented landslide. He was enormously popular during the 1920s.

Misery Leads to Innovation: Imagining Alternative Economic Systems During the Great Depression

When the Great Depression started in late 1929 and early 1930, it soon became clear that long-established patterns would not suffice to sustain the people through what was to become more than a decade of suboptimal economic performance. Individuals and groups began to experiment with alternative forms of business transactions.

For example, historian Amity Shlaes reports that in 1931, for a sustained period of time, the residents of Salt Lake City abandoned cash transactions. Money had become not only scarce but unreliable, because its purchasing power was not predictable. So the people of the city turned to bartering system.

Other Americans looked to subsistence farming. The nation living through the Great Depression was only a generation or two removed from a lifestyle earlier in the nation’s history, when many families provided for nearly all their own wants and needs. Many people experiencing the Great Depression had heard stories of self-sufficient living from their parents and grandparents. Some were old enough to have experienced it themselves.

As it became clear that the government’s attempts at help would reach only a few individuals adequately, thoughts of subsistence farming turned into action, and handfuls of people in various parts of the country radically changed their lifestyle, as Amity Shlaes writes:

The improvisation was not confined to Utah. Communities across the country were beginning to find new ways to get through the trouble. Out in California, city people were beginning to think about moving to abandoned farms, taking up plows, and trying to make a life independent of money. Back east, Ralph Borsodi, an author and social thinker, was readying a book titled Flight from the City, about his own family effort to live on the land an hour and three quarters outside New York. Borsodi concluded that self-sufficiency of the family was the new ideal, that with his poultry yard of fat roasting capons, his self-built swimming pool, and his apiary, he had found the solution to downturns like that of 1921 or 1929. The family ought to be the next factory.

For the majority of the nation’s people, subsistence farming was neither desirable or possible. But the movement manifested both people’s creativity and their desperation.

Other experiments included turning to the black market to defy various regulations. If the government was unable to help most people, why would those people want to obey the rules imposed on them, especially when those rules were imposed with the promise ending their misery? The regulations, in fact, often increased the suffering.

It’s worth remembering that the Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon. Not only the United States, but nations around the globe were profoundly impacted. As people realized that governments were inadequate to face the situation, they turned to their own creativity, inventiveness, and ingenuity.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 04)

In American History, most of the 1800s can be divided into three time spans: the prewar years, the Civil War, and the postwar years. But while these are three separate segments of time, they are shaped by one single conflict: a conflict between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The Democrats, from the founding of their party by Andrew Jackson in 1828, were committed to defending, supporting, and maintaining slavery.

The Republican Party, and its first major candidate, Abraham Lincoln, were unswervingly focused on the goal of ending slavery.

The political debates and negotiations of the prewar years, the half-million lives lost during the Civil War, and the brutality directed toward African-Americans in the postwar years are simply three phases of the same partisan conflict, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

The Civil War was a deliberate attempt by the Democratic Party, both in the North and the South, to kill America by carving her into two. Had secession worked, Lincoln would have been viewed as a failed president. The North and the South would have come to terms over the bifurcation long before 1865. Slavery would have continued, and on a firmer foundation than before. White supremacy would have continued to be its bedrock, and would have reigned unchallenged throughout the United States. Lincoln’s dark warning about all of America becoming a plantation might have proven prophetic in his own lifetime.

The Democrat strategy, then, was that the Democrats in the South would secede from the Union, and the Democrats in the North would try to use their political influence to persuade the North to get the South back by promising the South that it could keep slavery. In the process, the North would be obliged to accept slavery as well.

The goal of the Democrats was, then, that the entire country, not only the South, would become slaveholding territory.

The Republicans, however, would not go along with the Democratic Party’s plans. The Democrats wanted slavery so badly that they were willing to start and endure a war in which more than 500,000 men died.

The war ended when the South faced its inevitable undersupply of men and materiel. But while the Democrats had been militarily defeated, they had not given up their dreams of slavery. The postwar years would be known as the ‘Reconstruction’ era, and the Democrats would use a mixture of political maneuvering and domestic terror strategies to maintain slavery, or at least a slavelike status.

Although the Republicans had achieved their goal of ending slavery, it was clear that they had to defend and solidify that accomplishment to make sure that the Democrats did not succeed in bringing slavery back, and it was clear that the Republicans would push for full citizenship and full civil rights for the newly-freed ex-slaves.

The Republicans in Congress worked to guarantee civil rights for African-Americans, as Dinesh D’Souza writes:

The Republicans in Congress who drove Reconstruction realized that, perhaps for the first time in history, there was an elected government that supported not merely empancipation from slavery but also full equality of rights and full enfranchisement for blacks. Admittedly this majority would not have existed had Southern Democrats also been represented. By their own choice, however, they had resigned their positions in Congress and thus forfeited their right to have their votes counted.

During the Reconstruction era, not only did the Republicans succeed in ensuring that African-Americans could freely exercise their right to vote, but they even succeeded in getting Black candidates elected to the House of Representatives and to the U.S. Senate. This was the apogee of civil rights.

Electrifying America: Power Revolutionizes Daily Life

During a few decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, most homes in the United States were connected to electrical power. This development changed ordinary life in many ways.

The simplest, but perhaps most significant, change was light. Before electrical lighting, people had candles and oil lamps, but they were not very effective. The amount of light they gave off was not sufficient for many tasks, and there was even less outdoor lighting.

Before electrical lighting was common, most people simply went to bed when it got dark. If they had oil lamps, they might stay up for an hour and do some reading or sewing, but the lamps were smelly and dangerous, and the oil cost money.

With the advent of electrical lighting, people could stay up long after the sunset, and there was enough light for all kinds of activities.

Of course, lighting was only one of the many changes which electrification brought to daily life. Dozens of electrical appliances for households quickly became common, once most homes had electricity. But how did this electrification occur? A report from Mercury Radio Arts explains that it all began when

In 1881, a young English clerk named Samuel Insull sailed from England to America and took a low-paying job as a private secretary for a determined inventor named Thomas Edison. Insull worked hard, coming in before his boss in the morning and staying until long after Edison, who wasn’t exactly lazy himself, had gone home at night.

Edison was one of the greatest and most prolific inventors in history. Samuel Insull had a job which would give him a better technical education than most universities. Insull realized that not only could he get paid for working with Edison, but more importantly, he could learn while working with Edison.

Over time, Insull’s hard work and loyalty did not go unnoticed. He was promoted several times, eventually winding up in charge of Edison’s business affairs.

Having a responsible management position in Edison’s company placed Insull in the center of technological development. The products which came from Edison’s workshops changed the world, and Insull got to see from the inside what a world-changing business looked like.

After twelve years absorbing as much knowledge as he could, Insull finally left to pursue his own American dream. He moved to Chicago, took out a personal loan for $250,000, and built the largest power plant in the world.

Samuel Insull took a huge risk. He had knowledge and experience, but he didn’t have much money. He had to borrow the money to start a business.

If the business succeeded, he’d earn enough money to repay the loan. If the business failed, he’d have to repay the loan anyway. He’d have to pay the $250,000 back to the bank, and in the 1890s, that was a lot of money.

At the time, electricity was like private jets are today - grossly expensive and available only to those who don’t spend much time worrying about their bank account. But Insull had a dream that electricity could be produced on a much larger scale and used by the masses. By developing revolutionary ideas, like variable pricing and inexpensive home wiring, he turned electricity from a luxury into a virtual commodity.

Samuel Insull found a way to lower the price of electricity. In one single year, the average family found that their electricity bill was more than 30% lower.

Electricity became affordable and became part of everyday life.

Before long, Insull’s new company was servicing over ten million customers in 32 states and had a market value of over $3 billion (somewhere around $66 billion in today’s dollars, which is about the size of Amazon.com and Kraft Foods, combined). Insull also benefited personally. At one point, his net worth was estimated to be $100 million. Time magazine even celebrated his success by putting him on their cover in 1929. He was a true American success story - a foreigner with virtually nothing to his name who had made it big through hard work and innovation.

Samuel Insull was a symbol for successful immigration. He came to the United States with no money, but he came with the desire to work hard and learn.

Such examples of successful immigration gave rise to the phrase “land of opportunity” when people spoke of immigration into America. Naturally, not all immigrants became as wealthy as Samuel Insull. But they found that they experienced a better standard of living after coming to the United States. They found that they had chances and opportunities.

Entrepreneurs like Insull not only were able to work themselves out of poverty, but they created opportunities for others. They created well-paying jobs in their factories and offices. They created investment opportunities for families.

But, as the Mercury Radio Arts report continues, “then the world changed.”

As the Roaring Twenties morphed into the Great Depression, Insull’s business struggled. The debt and equity he’d financed his company’s growth with had become virtually worthless, leaving over a million middle-class Americans who’d invested in his stock in financial straits. The public outrage was palpable.

What could have been a short-term economic downturn in 1929 became a long-term economic crisis. Samuel Insull lost his wealth, as did millions of his customers and his investors. Losing the wealth was a minor problem. The major problem was that people blamed Insull for the crisis.

It is easy, in hindsight, to understand that there was no way that Insull could have created these problems, and there is no way that he would have wanted to destroy his own wealth. But sometimes, during disasters, people’s desire to find someone to blame - people’s desire to punish a scapegoat - is strong enough to make them act irrationally.

In the matter of a few short years Insull had gone from hero to villain; from the poster boy for everything great about American capitalism to the poster boy for everything wrong with it.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from the Great Depression, and how people joined forces against Insull to blame him and eventually to attack him in court. Economists have developed various competing theories to explain the Great Depression, but none of them would hold Samuel Insull as responsible for the collapse of his own company.

Eventually, the courts failed to validate people’s irrational rage, and declared Insull innocent:

The government, seizing on the public’s fury over their lost wealth, charged him with fraud, and though he was acquitted at trial, it didn’t matter - the damage was done. Insull was the most hated man in America.

It is a basic fact about economies that they have occasional downturns - this is sometimes called the “business cycle.” There will be years when wages and profits increase, and there will be years when they decrease. It is not pleasant to live through these cycles, but if people wait patiently, the economy works its way back toward positive growth.

Such short term downward trends can become long term - the business cycle can get stuck - if the government takes action. Although such government intervention is usually well-intended, it nonetheless stymies the economy’s organic tendencies to return itself to levels which are closer to equilibrium.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was not the fault of Samuel Insull. It was caused by government intervention into the ordinary buying and selling which shape the economy. But Insull was the scapegoat, the target of people’s unjust rage.

All he'd done to deserve it was to build a remarkable company that, like so many others, suffered during the Depression.

Although declared innocent in a court of law, Insull’s reputation and career were permanently damaged. Eventually, he left the United States.

As an immigrant, Samuel Insull arrived in America with no money. He’d worked hard and studied, he took risks and looked for opportunities. He’d gained a lot of wealth, and in the process, he’d created income for millions of other people, lifting them from the lower classes to the middle class. He’d benefitted from the chances which are made available in a free economy.

But when the government took the economy’s freedom away, by regulating and taxing, the income went away, too. Even though the government thought it was doing something to help people, it was actually harming them.

Although Samuel Insull was the most dramatic victim of the government’s terrible mistake, he wasn’t the only victim. Millions of Americans would suffer through the Great Depression. Their suffering could have been avoided if the government had simply done nothing.

Insull became a symbol, both for amazing possibilities offered by America’s free economy, and for the misery and anger caused by governmental regulation.

In 1938, Samuel Insull, who’d fled America for France (oh the irony), died of a heart attack in a Paris subway station. He had eight cents in his pocket. It was a sad and lonely ending for a man who exemplified the American dream by bringing affordable electricity to millions.

He’d done nothing wrong and nothing illegal. He’d been praised by millions of people around the nation, people who’d benefitted materially from his work. When people suddenly felt sharp economic pain, they lashed out blindly, needing someone to blame and to punish. Samuel Insull was an innocent man who was also a convenient target.

Forced to defend himself at trial, he said:

I find myself somewhat in this sort of situation. What I did, when I did it, was honest; now, through changed conditions, what I did may or may not be called honest. Politics demand, therefore, that I be brought to trial; but what is really being brought to trial is the system I represented.

The sad fact is that innocent men are sometimes made into scapegoats simply because people are angry and don’t know who to blame.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 03)

When the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, the victorious Republican Party saw a chance to solidify its gains. The Republicans had created their political party with the goal of ending slavery. Now that the war was over and slavery was ended, the Republicans wanted to make sure that slavery was permanently gone and would never come back. They also wanted to make sure that the newly-freed African-Americans would have the full rights of citizenship.

Meanwhile, the defeated Democrats were angry. They had defended slavery, and sought maintain and support slavery. But now their former slaves were free citizens and able to vote. Even though the Democratic Party had lost the war, it hoped to find ways to prevent African-Americans from having civil rights.

This conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans in the postwar years was actually the same conflict they had in the prewar years. This postwar era is called the ‘Reconstruction’ era.

In the prewar years, the conflict took the form of the Republican Party, its goal of abolishing slavery, and its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

In the years leading up to the war, in multiple addresses and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln himself stressed the main issue that separated the two parties. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties,” Lincoln said in a September 11, 1858, speech at Edwardsville, Illinois, “is that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong.”

The Democrats defended slavery so strongly that they were willing to start a four-year-long war about the issue, causing more than 500,000 deaths.

During the war, in the election of 1864, the Democrats nominated George McClellan, a pro-slavery candidate, to be president. McClellan lost, and Abraham Lincoln won reelection.

After the war’s end, the Democratic Party had a strong affection for the “plantation” lifestyle, a lifestyle which ended when Lincoln freed the slaves in 1863. The Democrats wanted their slaves back, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:

Even in the aftermath of the Civil War, so strong was their attachment to the plantation that an overwhelming majority of Northern Democrats refused to vote to permanently end slavery. Again, we are speaking of Northern Democrats; Southern Democrats who may have been expected to vote against the amendment were not permitted to vote at all. And when the Thirteenth Amendment went to the states for ratification, only Republican states carried by Lincoln voted for it; Democratic states that went for McClellan all voted no.

The Republican Party promoted three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment, which protected and made permanent Lincoln’s decree that slavery be permanently abolished; the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that former slaves would have full citizenship and enjoy equal protection under the law; and the Fifteenth Amendment, which specified that all citizens, including former slaves, had right to vote, regardless of race.

These three “Republican Amendments” revealed the core beliefs of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party opposed all three.

Even after the end of the Civil War, the Democrats hoped somehow to recreate a slave-like condition for African-Americans. Their main way of doing this was the ‘sharecropping’ system, which exploited certain legal agreements to keep former slaves, and other Blacks, in poverty.

Sharecropping was one way the Democratic Party fought against the “Republican Amendments” during the ‘Reconstruction’ era. Opposing the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments was another way. After 1877, the end of the Reconstruction era, Democratic legislatures began to write “Jim Crow Laws,” another attempt to reverse the Republican Party’s achievements.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 02)

The U.S. Civil War (1861 to 1865) grew out of political disputes between the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1850s. When the war ended, those disputes continued. In the years after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, Democrats and Republicans continued to argue. Historians call these postwar years the ‘Reconstruction’ era.

In all three eras — before the war, during the war, and after the war — the conflict was about slavery. The Democrats defended the institution of slavery, and wished to support and maintain it. The Republicans had created their political party with the goal of ending slavery. The two parties were absolutely opposed to each other.

“The slavery debate was not a North-South debate but rather a partisan debate,” writes historian Dinesh D’Souza. A leader in the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, wrote the following to a leader in the Democratic Party:

You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Commenting on this letter, written by Lincoln, historian Dinesh D’Souza notes that:

In 1860, at the time Lincoln wrote this letter, no Republican owned a slave. I don’t mean merely that no Republican leader owned a slave. No Republican in the country owned a slave. All the slaves in the United States at the time — all four million of them — were owned by Democrats.

It is clear that this opposition between the parties during the prewar years is the same conflict that continued between them in the postwar years. During the ‘Reconstruction’ era, the Republicans overcame the Democratic Party to ratify three amendments to the Constitution.

The three Reconstruction amendments formed the basis for civil rights, not only for African-Americans, but eventually for all citizens. These amendments grew organically out of the Declaration of Independence, out of the U.S. Constitution, and out of the Bill of Rights.

The magnificient scope of Republican Reconstruction can be seen in three landmark constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; the Fourteenth Amendment extending equal rights under the law to all citizens; and the Fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote. These amendments went beyond unbinding the slave and making him a freeman; they also made him a U.S. citizen with the right to cast his ballot and to the full and equal protection of the laws.

Yet the Democrats stubbornly opposed these amendments. The Reconstruction era is the time when the Republicans worked to solidify the civil rights of African-Americans, while the Democrats were simply angry that their slaves had been taken away.

The anger and resentment which lingered in the Democrats would last for many years. The bitter feud between the two parties did not go away quickly, and did not go away even after the painful and bloody Civil War.

Before, during, and after the war, the hostile relationship between the two parts was largely the same, and based on the same disagreement about the same issue.

The Politics of Reconstruction (Part 01)

Historians use the word ‘Reconstruction’ to refer to the years immediately after the U.S. Civil War.

The war ended when General Grant and General Lee signed the terms of surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. Some historians argue that the ‘Reconstruction’ began somewhat earlier, in those regions of the Democrat territory that had already been taken over or occupied by the Republicans.

The Reconstruction is generally thought to have ended around 1877, but again, that date is subject to some interpretation.

The Reconstruction marks a transition: the conflict about slavery was fought with military weapons during the war; after the war, the conflict continued, but not as a military conflict. Before, during, and after the war, the Democratic Party supported slavery.

The Republican Party was created for the purpose of ending slavery. The Democrats felt angry and humiliated that the Republican Party had succeeded in its goal. The Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, had freed the slaves by signing his Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republicans had supported the Union Army to ensure that the slaves were freed.

There were people who voted for the Democratic Party both in the northern states and in the southern states. In the North, the Democrats were in the minority; in the South, they were in the majority. During the Civil War, the Democrats in the northern states were in communication with the Democrats in the southern states. Their continuous goal was to maintain slavery. After the war, their goal was to restore and renew slavery.

Likewise, the Republican voters in the North were the majority, but in the South they were a minority. Because the Republicans had dedicated themselves to ending slavery, the Republican voters in the South — although they were in the minority — carried out sabotage operations to undermine the Democratic Party’s war effort.

After the war, the Republicans worked to solidify the end of slavery, by passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. These amendments to the Constitution guaranteed civil rights for African-Americans. The Democratic Party opposed these amendments furiously.

Historian Dinesh D’Souza explains that, given the nature of political events before, during, and after the Civil War, it is clear that events “blame the conflict mostly on” the Democratic Party, and further blame the Democratic Party “again for the postbellum resistance to” the efforts of Reconstruction. Looking at the leadership of the Confederate States of America, “the Democratic Party affiliation of the Confederates” is clear.

The President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, was a member of the Democratic Party, as was his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. But support for slavery was not limited to the Democratic Party in the southern states.

In the northern states, the words and actions of elected officials, party officials, and ordinary voters show “the role of the Northern Democrats in upholding slavery before and during the Civil War, and then reestablishing a form of neo-slavery in the South after the war.” Not only was the Democratic Party composed of “apologists for slavery,” but Democrats established the system of sharecropping as way to push African-Americans back down into an inferior status.

“The Civil War arose” because of a conflict between two political parties. The basis of the war was “a bitter struggle between a Republican Party that sought to block the spread of slavery and a Democratic Party North and South that sought to continue it.” It was “the role of the Northern Democrats, even during the war, to undermine the Union war effort, to force a peace treaty with the South and to give slavery a permanent place in America’s future.”

The Democratic Party, before, during, and after the Civil War, was united in its desire to preserve and promote slavery. In the first few years of postwar peace,

the Northern Democrats attempted to block the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and worked closely with the Southern Democrats to defeat Reconstruction, which was a Republican project to create multicultural democracy in America. Instead the Democrats deplyed a new weapon, racial terrorism, to disperse white Republicans, subjugate blacks, and reestablish their political hegemony in the South.

After the Civil War, leaders in the Democratic Party asked the rhetorical question, “What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?” The famous Democrats who’d argued heatedly for slavery before and during war continued to be the leaders of their political party after the war. Alexander Stephens, one of the first to use this rhetorical question, was the Vice President of the Confederate States of America during the war, and cheerfully nominated by the Democratic Party to run for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, influenced policy inside the Democratic Party during the postwar years, giving speeches and writing books.

Although the Republican Party had the majority of voters in the northern states, there were still a significant number of Democrats in the North, and they continued to agitate for slavery during and after the war. Before the war began, President Lincoln, as a leader in the Republican Party, wrote to a leader in the Democrat party:

You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

It is no surprise that the Democrats in the South supported slavery. It is shocking to learn that the Democrats in the North supported slavery, and did so long after the Civil War ended. The Republican Party had been created for the purpose of ending slavery, and the Democrats were angry that the Republicans had succeeded. Regarding the words quoted above from Lincoln’s letter, Dinesh D’Souza writes:

Lincoln was not actually distinguishing the positions of the North versus the South. The North certainly did not unanimously share the view that slavery was wrong. Only Republicans in the North held that position. Democrats in the North — Stephen Douglas notably among them — emphatically rejected that view. Northern Democrats led by Douglas contested the 1860 election against Lincoln on the basis of that disagreement.

The Reconstruction Era was a struggle between the Democrats and the Republicans. The Reconstruction Era was simply a continuation of the war, which had been a conflict between the two parties.