Chapter 26 Flashcards
The development of engine-driven machines, like the combine, which helped to dramatically increase the productivity of land in the 1870s and 1880s. This process contributed to the consolidation of agricultural business that drove many family farms out of existence.
mechanization of agriculture
Officially known as the People’s party, they represented Westerners and Southerners who believed that U.S. economic policy inappropriately favored Eastern businessmen instead of the nation’s farmers. Their proposals included nationalization of the railroads, a graduated income tax, and, most significantly, the unlimited coinage of silver.
Populists
A strike at a Carnegie steel plant in Pennsylvania, that ended in an armed battle between the strikers, three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives hired by Carnegie, and federal troops, which killed ten people and wounded more than sixty. The strike was part of a nationwide wave of labor unrest in the summer of 1892 that helped the Populists gain some support from industrial workers.
Homestead strike
A regulation established in many southern states in the 1890s that exempted from voting requirements (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) anyone who could prove that his ancestors (“grandfathers”) had been able to vote in 1860. Because slaves could not vote before the Civil War, these clauses guaranteed the right to vote to many whites while denying it to blacks.
grandfather clause
A strike by railroad workers upset by drastic wage cuts. The strike was led by socialist Eugene Debs but not supported by the American Federation of Labor. Eventually President Grover Cleveland intervened, and federal troops forced an end to the strike. The strike highlighted both divisions within labor and the government’s new willingness to use armed force to combat work stoppages.
Pullman strike
A term scholars have used to describe national politics from 1896 to 1932, when Republicans had a tight grip on the White House and issues such as industrial regulation and labor concerns became paramount, replacing older concerns such as civil-service reform and monetary policy.
fourth party system
An act that guaranteed that paper currency would be redeemed freely in gold, putting an end to the already dying “free-silver” campaign.
Gold Standard Act
(1855-1926) A tireless socialist leader who organized the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike in 1894. He was later convicted under the World War I’s Espionage Act in 1918 and sentenced to ten years in a federal penitentiary. A frequent presidential candidate on the Socialist party ticket, in 1920 he won more than 900,000 votes campaigning for president from his prison cell.
Eugene Victor Debs
(1837-1908) President from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897; his first term was dominated by the issues of military pensions and tariff reforms. He lost the election of 1888, but he ran again and won in 1892. During his second term, he faced one of the most serious economic depressions in the nation’s history but failed to enact policies to ease the crisis.
Grover Cleveland
(1854-1951) A wealthy Ohio Populist, he led a 500-strong “army” to Washington, D.C., in 1894 to demand a public works program to create jobs for the unemployed in the midst of a devastating four-year depression.
Jacob S. Coxey
(1856-1922) A Populist leader who initially advocated interracial political mobilization but later became a symbol of the party’s shift to white supremacy.
Tom Watson
(1843-1901) A former Republican congressman from Ohio who won the presidency in 1896 and again in 1900. He was probusiness, conservative, and unwilling to trouble the waters by voicing unpopular opinions.
William McKinley
(1837-1904) The driving force behind McKinley’s rise to the presidency, He was a former businessman who raised money and devised strategy for McKinley’s winning bid for the White House in 1896.
Marcus Alonzo Hanna
