Hayes to Arthur 1877 - 1885 Flashcards
During the second half of the 19th century, the American Frontier pushed westward, driven by farmers, cattlemen, and the railroad. This deck covers the beginnings of federal regulation, the rise of the Grangers and Greenback Parties, and the push for Free Silver.
What term did novelist Mark Twain coin to describe the political corruption that characterized the American government following the end of Reconstruction?
The period became known as the Gilded Age, derived from a novel Twain published in 1873 about political corruption.
Define:
Laissez-faire
Laissez-faire is a French term, translated roughly as “let them be,” and refers to a belief that natural market forces, rather than the government, should regulate the marketplace.
Although part of American economic policy since the country’s birth, laissez-faire began to show its weakness in the late 1800s, as consolidation reduced natural competition, prompting the first government regulations of business and the economy.
What significant political change did Rutherford B. Hayes advocate during his Presidency?
President from 1877 to 1881, Hayes advocated civil service reform, setting him at odds with Stalwart Republicans, who continued to support the spoils system.
The Spoils System was more about hiring your friends for a job, rather than who is the most qualified. Rutherford B. Hayes was trying to remove corruption by requiring that people take an exam in order to get a government job.
How did President Hayes react to French attempts to build a transoceanic canal across Central America in the 1870s?
Hayes contended that “The true policy of the United States as to a canal… is either a canal under American control, or no canal.”
Hayes need not have worried, as the French plan was impracticable and failed miserably. Nevertheless, he anticipated American interest in a canal during the early 20th century.
How did the growth of railroads during the 1870s and 1880s affect the farmers of the Great Plains?
During the 1870s and 1880s, railroads proliferated and were significantly overbuilt. To make a profit, many of these railroads reached discount agreements with frequent customers. To make up the shortfall, the railroads charged high rates to farmers, whose areas were often only serviced by one railroad line.
Define:
Price fixing
Price fixing is an anti-competitive measure that takes place when competitors agree that they will match prices.
During the later half of the 1800s, competing railroads often agreed amongst themselves on the prices that they would charge farmers for shipping produce, leading to increased costs to the farmers.
What is the National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry?
The National Grange of Patrons of Husbandry (the “Grange”) is a cooperative association of farmers. Originally founded as an educational organization, the Grange fought against unfair prices charged by railways.
What were the Granger Cases (1877)?
By 1877, several states had established “Granger Laws,” which served to regulate the rates charged by railroads, grain elevator operators, and the like. Six of these laws came before the Supreme Court. The decisions, known as the Granger Cases, upheld the Granger Laws, protecting farmers from railroad price-fixing.
This would only last for 9 years since the court case Wabash v Illinois virtually destroyed the Granger Laws since it ruled that an individual state could not regulate railroads that entered multiple states since those railroads were considered interstate commerce.
How did railroads affect consumerism during the late 1800s?
- Both food and durable goods were shipped throughout the country via railway.
- The development of the refrigerated railroad car meant that meat could be shipped long distances
- An increased number of canned goods meant that vegetables grown in Illinois could be eaten in Boston without spoilage.
- Shopping by catalog became the new standard, allowing distant farm families to purchase goods, which were then shipped to them via railroad.
What were some of the positive effects of the growth of railroads in the years following the Civil War?
The massive growth of railroads resulted in a rise of mass consumption, spurring economic growth as manufactured goods were shipped throughout the country, and farmers and ranchers moved their products into urban areas.
Other positive effects were:
- The coal and steel industry experienced exponential growth during the period.
- Creation of more complex forms of corporate structuring such as trusts and corporations.
- The standardization of time, resulting in the four times zones in the US today.
What prompted the 1877 Railroad Strike?
In 1877, the largest railroads announced a 10% cut in wages for all workers as a result of the ongoing Panic of 1873 that turned into a Great Depression. Workers struck first in West Virginia, and the strike spread to 10 other states. In sympathy, workers in several other industries struck as well.
The strike ended when President Rutherford B. Hayes used federal troops to put down the strike. Some 100 strikers were killed. This showed how serious the government was willing to get in order to force people back to work.
Who was Cornelius Vanderbilt?
Cornelius Vanderbilt was the President of the New York Central Railroad during the 1860s and 1870s. The New York Central dominated rail traffic between Chicago and New York City, and was the result of the merger of several smaller railway lines in 1867.
What was the goal of federal Indian policy during the latter half of the 19th century?
The goal of federal Indian policy was assimilation, through the de-humanization of the Native Americans, incorporating them into the American way of life.
Assimilation policies led to attempts to convert the Indians forcibly to Christianity, and to Indian boarding schools, where young Indians were taken from their families and forcibly taught to forget their religion, their language, and their history.
Explain what the Carlisle Indian School was about.
Students were forced to change their names, stop speaking their native languages, and cut their hair. Students were also forced to convert to Christianity, sometimes by physically beating them as well as keeping them for days at a time in a dark room by themselves with little to eat or drink.
186 Native American children died while attending due to the physical and mental abuse inflicted upon them by the American government.
What did Helen Hunt Jackson detail in her work A Century of Dishonor (1881)?
Hunt described the treatment of Indians at the hands of the U.S. government and detailed broken treaties.
To date the government has violated 500 treaties with Native American groups since its founding in 1776.
Beginning in the 1880s, Ida B. Wells devoted herself to investigating and exposing what societal ill?
The lynching of blacks
Lynchings had become common in the South. Wells, a prominent speaker and social advocate, investigated lynchings and published Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases, which led to some minor reforms, although lynchings would continue through the Civil Rights Era.
One of the founding members of the NAACP, Wells advocated for black equality in both law and fact.
Who was Booker T. Washington?
Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, a vocational school for Blacks in Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute taught skilled trades, preached the value of hard work, and contended that Black empowerment would come through employment and self-advancement.
Complete the sentence:
In 1882, Congress banned immigration from ______ for a period of 10 years, which was extended an additional 10 years in 1892.
China
The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 under pressure from Western nativists. In the West, Chinese miners and laborers made up a large proportion of the workforce, filling jobs which Western workers felt belonged to them.
What was the Farmers’ Alliance?
The Farmers’ Alliance was officially a nationwide movement that thrived in the 1880s and 1890s, encompassing many regional farmers’ movements such as the Grange, the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, and the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union.
How did the Supreme Court’s decision in Wabash v. Illinois (1886) limit the effects of the Granger Laws?
In Wabash v. Illinois, the Court held that while states had the right to regulate railroads that operated solely within their borders, only Congress could regulate long-haul shipping rates, i.e. rates charged for shipping goods from one state to another, which is considered interstate commerce.
The Court’s decision limited the early rulings in the Granger Cases (1877) to only railroads that stayed within that state. Individual states could not regulate railroads going through multiple states since that was considered interstate commerce.
Define:
Specie
Specie refers to coined money (typically silver or gold).
What was the difference between soft-money and hard-money advocates?
Between the Civil War and the First World War:
- Soft-money supporters argued that paper money should be issued that was not tied to the amount of gold in the U.S. Treasury. By the 1880s, soft-money advocates also pushed for increased silver coinage.
- Hard-money supporters wanted to limit the amount of currency in circulation to the amount of gold possessed by the U.S. Treasury.
What did Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner argue?
Social Darwinists extended the evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” to the world of business, and justified the concentration of large amounts of wealth into the hands of a small few by contending that it benefited the country and humanity as a whole. Essentially, Social Darwinists believed that wealth belonged in the hands of those best suited to control it.
Who invented the telephone in 1876?
Alexander Graham Bell
Bell’s studies in deaf education gave him many of his ideas for the telephone, which mimicked the human ear to transmit sound. The Bell Telephone Company later became one of the world’s largest companies.
Who was known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park”?
Thomas Alva Edison
Working in his laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ, Edison was the most prolific inventor of the late 1800s, inventing the light bulb, phonograph, and movie camera, as well as hundreds of other items.
What two inventions led to the development of the skyscraper in the 1880s?
Elisha Otis’s safety elevator made large buildings practical, while the use of the Bessemer Process to create a steel framework enabled buildings to exceed 10 stories.
The first skyscraper was the 10-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago. Skyscrapers proved exceptionally popular in New York City; driven by a lack of available space, New York City grew upwards instead of outwards.
Define:
Tammany Hall
Tammany Hall was a political organization within New York City’s Democratic Party. Between the 1860s and the early 1900s, Tammany Hall was the headquarters of New York’s machine politics, where political bosses such as Boss Tweed distributed political patronage in exchange for votes and large amounts of cash.
What is machine politics?
In machine politics, a political organization is controlled by a “boss” or small leadership group, which can motivate a large “get out the vote” effort. The boss commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.
Due to their electoral control, political bosses can distribute government positions and government construction projects, often in exchange for bribes or political support.
Who was Boss Tweed?
Boss Tweed was a notorious political boss in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s. Through his control of Tammany Hall, Tweed was able to bilk New York City out of at least $45 million. Most of Tweed’s support came from newly arrived Irish immigrants, whom he courted by distributing food and clothing.
Tweed and other political bosses represented the corruption that led Mark Twain to call the period “The Gilded Age.”
What artist proved instrumental in bringing down Boss Tweed’s political machine in New York City?
Thomas Nast
Nast’s political cartoons in Harpers Weekly, a popular magazine of the day, spurred an investigation into Tweed’s “Ring” (his group of supporters). Auditors of the city books discovered millions in fraudulent charges.
Tweed fled to Spain, but was captured when Spaniards recognized Tweed’s face from Nast’s cartoons.
How did Stalwart Republicans and Half-Breed Republicans differ?
Led by New York’s Roscoe Conkling, the Stalwart Republicans supported the spoils system, under which elected officials distributed jobs to friends and supporters.
In the elections of 1876 and 1880, Stalwart Republicans were opposed by Half-Breed Republicans, who favored civil service reform. Both Rutherford B. Hayes (the 1876 Republican nominee) and James A. Garfield (the 1880 Republican nominee) were Half-Breeds.
Why was Chester A. Arthur chosen as James Garfield’s running mate in the 1880 presidential campaign?
While Garfield was a Half-Breed Republican and in support of civil service reform, Arthur was chosen to appeal to Stalwart Republicans, who supported the spoils system.
What did the Pendleton Act (1883) establish?
The Pendleton Act began the decline of the spoils system on the national level by providing a selection of government employees based on competitive exams, rather than based on who you knew.
In 1883, the Supreme Court heard a number of cases collectively known as the Civil Rights Cases. What did the Court hold?
In the Civil Rights Cases, the Court held that Congress could not outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals. The Court reasoned that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to state acts, but not to the acts of private individuals.
These cases put an end to the efforts of Radical Reconstructionists to ensure black equality in the South, and endemic Southern discrimination continued into the 1960s.
