America Aflame (81 page)

Grant won a resounding victory, aided by a strong turnout among black voters in the South despite the perils they faced. He also benefited from quick-footed friends in Congress who lowered the tariff and passed an amnesty law restoring voting rights to almost all former Confederate officials, thus depriving the Liberals of two key issues in their platform. Grant carried all southern states except Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. In the North, Republicans used Greeley's own words against the Democrats, and they “waved the bloody shirt,” reminding voters who had saved the Union. Grant won every state in the North. Many Democrats simply stayed home.

Thomas Nast, who played a significant role in bringing down Tweed, worked his blistering artistry against Greeley. The talk at the office, at the dinner table, and on the streets in towns and cities across the North was of the latest Nast illustration. In a series of “clasping hands” cartoons showing Greeley in various settings shaking or offering a hand, Nast exposed the hypocrisy of the Democratic campaign. The first appeared in
Harper's
on July 20, 1872, and, using Greeley's own denunciation of the Democratic Party's constituents, showed him shaking hands with criminals, Irish immigrants, and assorted subhuman characters clearly on the lower side of the evolutionary continuum. Greeley only made matters worse, retorting, “I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers. What I said was that all saloonkeepers were Democrats.”
50

Perhaps the most famous of the clasping hands cartoons appeared on August 3 and showed Greeley shaking hands with an Irishman hiding a revolver with which he has just killed a Massachusetts soldier, a reference to the attack on Union troops in Baltimore at the start of the Civil War. On August 24, Nast's drawing, “It Is Only a Truce to Regain Power,” portrayed Greeley and Charles Sumner urging a black man to grasp the bloody hand of a Klansman who hides a knife behind his back that he has used to kill the man's wife. Also extending a hand is an Irishman concealing a revolver. Greeley implores the black man to “Clasp hands over the bloody chasm,” in an effort to reconcile North and South. On September 21, “Let Us Clasp Hands Across the Bloody Chasm” summarized the Republicans' strategy. The drawing placed Greeley at the notorious Andersonville stockade, now a Union cemetery, leaning against the fence with hand outstretched over the rows of tombstones below. Nast's offering on October 19 depicted Greeley shaking hands with a Confederate veteran trampling an American flag and standing on the corpses of black men who had attempted to vote in Georgia. A quote on the facade of the polling place, “What Are You Going to Do About It?” recalled Tweed's response to initial allegations of corruption in New York City.

Nast concluded the series on November 13 following Grant's victory. “Clasping Hands Over the Bloodless (Sar)c(h)asm” showed Grant and “Uncle Sam” clasping hands, the latter much relieved by the outcome. The Republic is tranquil once more now that the Liberals and the Democrats have been relegated to the nether regions. Greeley is hanging upside down; below him is Whitelaw Reid, the interim editor of the
Tribune
, who predicted Greeley's victory six weeks earlier. Greeley, discouraged and broken from the campaign, and disconsolate over the death of his wife just before election day, died two weeks later. Shortly after the election, Mark Twain congratulated his friend: “Nast you, more than any other man, have won a prodigious victory for Grant—I mean, rather, for Civilization & progress.”
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The Republican Party began its existence as an ideology. It carried the anti-slavery banner from the 1850s through the Civil War. By the 1870s, the party had benefited from the expansion of government and become a machine for the dispensation of patronage and a partner with large corporations. The ideological bent of the party diminished. During elections, the party would recycle its bloody shirt and then stuff it in a drawer until the next campaign. Carl Schurz, ever the idealist, complained bitterly, “The organization of the Republican party is almost entirely in the hands of the office-holders and ruled by selfish interest.” The Liberals and the Democrats lost the 1872 election, primarily because of Greeley's inept candidacy and Grant's popularity. The Republicans were wise enough afterward to absorb some of the Liberals' ideas such as civil service reform and ending Reconstruction in the South.
52

“Baltimore, 1861–1872,” Thomas Nast, August 3, 1872. Perhaps the most famous of the “Clasp of Hands” series Nast drew opposing the candidacy of Democrat/Liberal Republican Horace Greeley during the presidential campaign of 1872, the cartoon reminds voters of the ambush of Massachusetts soldiers passing through the city at the outset of the Civil War. (
Harper's Weekly
)

The strategy worked, as the Republicans became the majority party in the North. They would lose a national election only twice (to the Democrat Grover Cleveland) between 1865 and 1912, and during that time, the South would secure only seven of thirty-one Supreme Court appointments, two of twelve House speakerships, and only fourteen of 133 cabinet positions. Considering the dominance of the South in the federal government before the Civil War, a historian's comment, “Never in the history of the country, and rarely in the history of any country, had there been a comparable shift in the geography of political power,” is hardly an overstatement. The Republicans no longer needed the South and, therefore, no longer needed the African American.
53

Redemption was well under way by the end of 1872. Despite the strong Republican showing in the South, only Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina remained in undisputed Republican control. Democrats and their paramilitary organizations would redouble their efforts during the next four years to redeem the remaining states. A financial downturn in 1873 and continued revelations of corruption in high places led Republicans to focus on shoring up their majority in the North. Northern public opinion had already turned against the southern Republican governments. The specter of the Paris Commune, growing labor unrest in the cities, corrupt urban political machines, and persistent violence in the South blended in the public mind as assaults on order. Disruptive elements must be contained (as with the Indians), restrained (as with labor), or eliminated and the “natural” order restored.

Early in the 1872 election campaign, Horace Greeley dispatched Republican James S. Pike of Maine to the South. The purpose of Pike's trip was to send back reports to Greeley's
Tribune
substantiating the Liberals' charge that southern Republican governments were corrupt and inefficient. Pike's first stop was South Carolina, where his main source was Wade Hampton. The result of these interviews appeared in the
Tribune
under the title “A State in Ruins.”
54

South Carolina, Pike began, was a state turned “bottom-side up.” “Men of weight and standing in the communities they represent” were displaced in government by “the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw invested with the functions of government.” Pike was unsparing in his depiction of black lawmakers. He called them “snug-built, thick-lipped, woolly-headed, small-brained,” an example of “barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force.” The freedmen were only instruments, however, in Pike's telling. The carpetbaggers used black votes to loot the state treasury. That, ultimately, instigated the violence. Leave the blacks “to the kind feeling of the white race at the South,” and they would benefit as the state was restored to its “natural” order.
55

Pike's report did not have the impact on the election Greeley had hoped. Voters in the North believed that Grant would protect their patrimony and the nation best. The report confirmed for some and convinced many, however, that any further federal intervention in the South or protective legislation for blacks was both futile and dangerous. The lesson Henry Ward Beecher took away from “A State in Ruins,” later published as a best-selling book,
The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government
(1873), was the necessity for “the speedy achievement of rule by the classes who ought always to rule.” A few months after the book appeared, Thomas Nast, who had usually drawn positive portraits of the freedmen, published a hostile caricature of a chaotic South Carolina legislature dominated by blacks while Columbia, against a backdrop reading “Let Us Have Peace,” unsuccessfully attempts to call the body to order. As one scholar noted, Pike's report was “the
Uncle Tom's Cabin
of the redemption of the South.”
56

A consensus was forming that transcended party lines. The consensus was that Reconstruction was over, at last, regardless of what African Americans and their white allies in the South believed. The consensus was stronger for the fact that northerners connected the unrest and discord fomented by immigrants, crooked politicians, and laborers in their midst to the persistent disorder in the South. Poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell expressed the sentiment of many northern intellectuals, noting, “What is bad among ignorant foreigners in New York will not be good among ignorant natives in South Carolina.” Charles Francis Adams Jr., a staunch Republican, expressed concern about the rising “Celtic proletariat on the Atlantic coast, an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.” Expanding the suffrage to include these groups while restricting the franchise of the white southern “intelligent class” was unwise. Adams's brother Henry, talking about northern cities, though he could have been discussing the situation in the South, observed, “The great problem of every system of Government has been to place administration and legislation in the hands of the best men”—those with “the loftiest developments of moral and intellectual education.” This hope would attain partial fruition during the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the meantime, the dissonant elements of American society must be dealt with in a way that comported with natural laws and economic well-being.
57

A black legislature during Reconstruction. The memory of Reconstruction in the South as an era of Yankee oppression and black misrule persisted for nearly a century after the war. This particular caricature was produced in 1901 and comes from a high school textbook. (New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden foundations)

CHAPTER 21

LET IT BE

THE WINTER OF 1873–74
was a bitter time. Jobs were scarce, and the weather was cold. The worst economic depression in American history to that time had settled in. Casualty lists of the unemployed came in from cities around the country as if from bloody battlefields. In New York City, a hundred thousand workers went jobless, one quarter of the city's workforce. It was worse elsewhere. Economists estimated that nearly half of the nation's working population was either wholly or partially unemployed that winter.

In January 1874, fifteen thousand workers gathered in New York's Tompkins Square to protest wage cuts, job losses, and the lack of public relief programs. They carried placards demanding “Work or Bread.” The crowd included a sizable number of German and Bohemian socialists. The press likened the demonstrators to the communards of Paris. By midmorning the workers had packed the square. At 10:30 A.M., a squad of mounted police officers galloped into the square wielding clubs. Samuel Gompers, future labor leader and one of the organizers of the protest, recalled, “The mounted police charged the crowd … riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality.” Gompers barely escaped injury by jumping into a cellar. The police continued their attacks, chasing down workers through the streets of the Lower East Side. The police claimed they were protecting the city from “communists.”
1

The depression overwhelmed local charities. The Society for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the city's largest relief organization, ceased operations. A spokesman for St. John's Guild in New York warned that the charity had run out of food and money and must “bar the door against the prayers and tears of thousands of women and children who are in utter destitution and terrible suffering.” The press and public opinion, however, were unmoved. An “army of tramps” menacing “the peace of the community” had taken advantage of the economic downturn to rob charities. “The bread of charity would be wasted” on such reprobates.
2

“The Red Flag in New York,” 1874. This rendering of the Tompkins Square workers' riot in New York City in January 1874 shows little sympathy for the unemployed workers, the artist noting “riotous Communist workingmen driven from Tompkins Square by the mounted police.” “Communist” referred to the communards of the Paris Commune of 1871, a reference which repulsed many middle-class northerners as proof of the dangers of an excess of democracy. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The depression, later called the Panic of 1873, originated in the nation's overheated railroad finance market. An investment-banking firm, Jay Cooke & Co., had financed construction for a second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific. The road broke ground in 1870. The contraction of the money supply with the return to the gold standard and the retirement of greenbacks issued during the Civil War tightened money markets. When the Northern Pacific required a new infusion of capital in 1873, Cooke tried and failed to float a $300 million bond issue. His firm collapsed, as did other banks and railroads across the country as financial institutions called in loans and companies could not respond.

Despite the genuine misery it caused, the economic downturn was neither as long-lasting nor as severe as many have claimed. The Panic of 1873 was an adjustment during a time of major economic transition. The 1870s were a healthy decade from an economic perspective. Although the economy stumbled downward from late 1873 to late 1874, annual growth rates for every year until the end of the decade fluctuated between 4.5 percent and 6 percent, making the 1870s a period of some of the fastest economic growth on record. Wages went up by between 10 and 20 percent during the 1870s, while the cost of living declined. Consumption, an important indicator of economic well-being, grew even faster than total output. Despite high immigration and population growth, real consumption per capita grew by almost 50 percent during the decade, the highest total in the industrialized world. While railroad construction slowed—the system was built far ahead of demand—freight loadings went up every year of the decade.
3

Steel and oil led the nation's industrial output. The United States scarcely had a steel industry in 1870. By 1880, the nation rivaled Great Britain as the world's top steel producer. Oil production increased by 500 percent in the 1870s, unrivaled in the world. The number of workers employed in manufacturing grew by nearly a third between 1873 and 1880. Mechanized agriculture spurred farm productivity to feed a rapidly growing urban and international market. Americans ate 20 percent more beef in the 1870s and 50 percent more grains. The new industries required vast networks of support services including financial institutions, marketing firms, accountants, and managers. Housing construction increased steadily during the 1870s, and families such as the Russells who moved from Brooklyn to Short Hills, New Jersey, purchased suburban homes at an accelerating rate. The gap between the wealthy and the poor increased, as usually happens during a time of economic transformation. The failure of eighty-nine railroads and dozens of banks contributed to high unemployment during the winter of 1873–74. Railroads, the largest employer in the nation, were responsible for nearly two million jobs. Outside of the railroad sector, business was booming, especially in the new industries.

Technology reduced the need for skilled workers, one reason why Boss Tweed transitioned from making chairs to making friends. American entrepreneurs, confronted with chronic labor shortages, particularly during the war, thought of technological solutions first. Technology depressed wages in some sectors of the economy. This was especially the case in the sewing trades dominated by young women. The sewing machine opened up the garment industry for female workers. Unscrupulous contractors often cheated women out of wages and exposed them to abysmal working conditions. Women sat crowded together in long rows in poorly ventilated rooms sewing piecework, earning between twenty and twenty-five cents a day. The cheapest room for rent in New York cost one dollar a week, so wages barely covered shelter, not to mention food. To survive, many young women often shared a room. Even then, it was difficult to cover basic living costs.
4

Factory work offered higher wages—about two dollars a week by 1880—but harsh working conditions. For a single woman attempting to fend for herself in the city, such wages allowed her to eat, in writer O. Henry's words, little that was more nourishing “than marshmallows and tea.” Lodging rarely meant more than one room, and recreation was affordable only once or twice a year, a trip to Coney Island or a ticket to a vaudeville show.
5

Not surprisingly, some working-class women turned to prostitution. Maggie Johnson's brother in Stephen Crane's novel
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893) described the choice facing young women, many of them immigrants new to the city: “Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've eeder got t' go on d' toif er go t' work.” The rise in prostitution would energize urban churches during the 1880s as ministers came out foursquare against vice. Cities appointed vice commissioners to regulate or eliminate the trade, ignoring its causes. “So is it any wonder,” asked the Chicago vice commissioner, “that a tempted girl who receives only a few dollars per week working with her hands sells her body for twenty-five dollars per week, when she learns there is a demand for it and men are willing to pay the price?”
6

Women organized trade unions and protective associations by the end of the 1870s. At that point, women comprised about 10 percent of the membership of the Knights of Labor, the nation's largest labor union, founded in 1869. After the mid-1880s, however, union activity among women declined. The issues of working-class women rarely engaged the middle class. Many middle-class women frowned upon their gender working at all. They believed married women who worked neglected their families, and single working women skirted the limits of propriety. Besides, many believed working-class women, unlike men, labored for frills, not necessities, as the U.S. commissioner of labor asserted: “A large proportion of [working girls] will work for small pay, needing money only for dress or pleasure,” hence the low wages. Yet his office released a report in 1882 acknowledging, “A family of workers can always live well, but the man with a family of small children to support, unless his wife works also, has a small chance of living properly.” The
Boston Daily Evening Voice
proposed a solution to the problems of working women: “get husbands.” The newspaper solicited funds to ship women to the West, where a gender imbalance existed.
7

Most middle-class urban residents scarcely knew, in the words of Danish-born reformer Jacob Riis, “how the other half lives.” The city was becoming residentially, ethnically, and racially segregated. Separation occurred on the job as well. The array of mid-level managers of large corporations insulated directors from workers. If they interacted at all, it was often as parts of larger organizations. As entrepreneurs organized the components of their industry, workers organized each other. Union membership reached an all-time high by the mid-1870s.

These trends pointed to a distinction between labor and capital that Americans had long denied. Labor, they believed, was a way station to management. Abraham Lincoln had outlined that path of upward mobility in his annual message to Congress in December 1861. The American economy no longer worked that way in 1873 and probably had not in 1861. Technology and industrial workforces of lower skill levels replaced artisans and their shops. Americans were slow to admit that labor was a permanent status and that workers did not see themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting. When workers acted contrary to this image, there was a sense of betrayal. Like Indians protecting their lands and blacks demanding their rights, workers became part of the “dangerous classes,” a phrase that made its first appearance in the decade after the Civil War. That many of these militant workers were also immigrants merely confirmed their place outside “normal” American society. They threatened both democracy and prosperity. The fact that the urban middle classes fared relatively well during the downturn reinforced the view that workers' demands were unmerited. The problem lay not with the economy but with people who lacked the ambition, fortitude, or character to compete.

Science, especially Darwinian applications, and the Paris Commune also informed middle-class perspectives on the “dangerous classes.” Northern Republicans firmly rejected any government aid for the unemployed, fearing that such measures recalled “the revolutionary and Socialistic doctrines of the French.” It was not “the proper sphere of Congress to enter on a general system of providing for pauperism.” Northern clergymen generally agreed with this assessment, especially those who led urban, middle-class congregations. Strikes and protests, Henry Ward Beecher asserted in Darwinian rhetoric, demonstrated that workers were “unfit for the race of life.”
8

Events in Paris served as a prevalent analogy for Americans as they interpreted unrest in northern cities and the South. Charles Loring Brace, a founder of the Children's Aid Society, wrote in 1873, “In the judgment of one who has been familiar with ‘dangerous classes' for twenty years, there are just the same explosive social elements beneath the surface of New York as of Paris.”
Scribner's Monthly
, in language that recalled reformers' denunciations of black suffrage in the South, warned that
“the interference of ignorant labor with politics is dangerous to society.”
The
New York Times
was hopeful that the experience of the Paris Commune would dampen rather than excite labor militancy in the United States. “Possibly the very extravagances and horrible crimes of the Parisian Communists will, for some years, weaken the influence of the working classes in all countries.” Regardless of the merits of workers' grievances, public opinion typically favored the employers or the authorities whenever conflict occurred.
9

Governors who called out state militias against strikers received widespread public approbation. When Governor John Hartranft of Pennsylvania, a former Union general, ordered the militia to disperse striking miners in 1875, both political parties applauded his action. Employers typically used strikebreakers from outside the community, often Eastern Europeans or blacks, calculated to provoke violence from striking workers. Once violence erupted, employers counted on government officials to intervene on their behalf. Northern states and localities passed a flurry of vagrancy statutes in the mid-1870s to use against the unemployed, much as southern states had applied such laws to freedmen. The South, accustomed to a suppressed labor force, issued a warning to any of its textile, tobacco, or iron and steel workers who might consider organizing. “Labor organizations are to-day the greatest menace to this Government,” N. F. Thompson, secretary of the Southern Industrial Convention, asserted. “A law should be enacted that would make it justifiable homicide for any killing that occurred in defense of any lawful occupation.”
10