Industrialization, Urbanization, and Labor

GrowthCitiesImmigratiion progressiveera AmericanIndustrialization gildedage

What was similar about the experiences of Irish and Chinese immigrants? What was different? Look at the negative depictions of images of both groups. How is each depicted? What is similar and different in these stereotypes? What does Klein mean when he writes, “Kearney and the other Irish failed to learn the lesson of their own story?” How do the articles add to or complicate the information in the Crash Course videos? What, in the assignment, particularly stands out to you and why? (Such as what interests you, upsets you, confuses you, etc. There is not a wrong answer to this last question, as long as you answer it in your own words.) 

Hi, I’m John Green. This is Crash Course U.S. History, and today we’re gonna continue our
extensive look at American Capitalism.

Me from the Past: Mr. Green! Mr. Green! I’m sorry, are you saying that I grow up to be a tool of the
bourgeoisie?

Present John: Oh, not just a tool of the bourgeoisie, Me from the Past, but a card-carrying member
of it. I mean, you have employees whose labor you can exploit because you own the means of
production. Which, in your case, includes a chalkboard, a video camera, a desk, and a xenophobic
globe. Meanwhile, Stan, Danica, Raoul, and Meredith toil in crushing poverty. Stan, did you write
this part? These are all lies! Cue the intro!

[Intro plays]

Growth of the American West and Metropolises (0:37)

So, last week, we saw how commercial farming transformed the American West and gave us
mythical cowboys and unfortunately not-so-mythical Indian reservations. Today, we leave the sticks
and head for the cities, as so many Americans and immigrants have done throughout this nation’s
history. I mean, we may like to imagine that the history of America is all, “Go west young man,” but
in fact, from Mark Twain to pretty much every hipster in Brooklyn, it’s the opposite.

So, population was growing everywhere in America after 1850. Following a major economic
downturn in the 1890s, farm prices made a comeback, and that drew more and more people out
west to take part in what would eventually be called agriculture’s Golden Age. Although, to be fair,
agriculture’s real golden age was in, like, 3000 B.C.E. when Mesopotamians were like, “Dude, if we
planted these in rows, we could have more of it than we can eat.” So it was really more of a second
golden age, but anyway, more than a million land claims were filed under the Homestead Act in the
1890s, and between 1900 and 1910, the populations of Texas and Oklahoma together increased by
almost 2 million people. And another 800,000 people moved into Kansas, the Dakotas, and
Nebraska. That’s right, people moved TO Nebraska! Sorry, I just hadn’t yet offended Nebraskans.
I’m looking to get through the list before the end of the year.

But one of the central reasons that so many people moved out West was that the demand for
agricultural products was increasing due to the growth of cities. In 1880, 20% of the American
population lived in cities, and there were 12 cities with a population over 100,000 people. This rose
to 18 cities in 1900, with the percentage of urban dwellers rising to 38%. And by 1920, 68% of
Americans lived in cities, and 26 cities had a population over 100,000. So in the 40 years around
the turn of the 20th century, American became the world’s largest industrial power, and went from
being predominately rural to largely urban. This is, to use a technical historian term, a really big
deal, because it didn’t just make cities possible, but also their products. It’s no coincidence that
while all this was happening, we were getting cool stuff, like electric lights and moving picture
cameras, neither of which were invented by Thomas Edison. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but
suddenly there are a lot more photographs in Crash Course U.S. History B roll.

So, the city leading the way in this urban growth was New York, especially after Manhattan was
consolidated with Brooklyn and the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island in 1898. At the turn of the
century, the population of the 23 square miles of Manhattan island was over 2 million, and the
combined 5 boroughs had a population over 4 million. But while New York gets most of the
attention in this time period (and all time periods since), it wasn’t alone in experiencing massive

growth. Like, my old hometown of Chicago, after basically burning to the ground in 1871, became
the second largest city in America by the 1890s. Also, they reversed the flow of the freaking
Chicago River, probably the second-most impressive feat in Chicago at the time. The first being
that the Cubs won two World Series!

Immigration (3:20)

Even though I’m sorely tempted to chalk up the growth of these metropolises to a combination of
better nutrition and a rise in skoodilypooping, I’m gonna have to bow to stupid historical accuracy
and tell you that much of the growth had to do with the phenomenon that this period is known most
for: immigration. Of course, by the end of the 19th century, immigration was not a new
phenomenon in the United States. After the first wave of colonization by English people and
Spanish people and other Europeans, there was a new wave of Scandinavians, French people, and
especially the Irish. Most of you probably know about the potato famine of the 1840s that led a
million Irish men and women to flee. If you don’t know about it, it was awful. And the second-
largest wave of immigrants was made up of German speakers, including a number of liberals who
left after the aborted Revolutions of 1848.

Alright, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Thought Bubble (4:03)

The Irish had primarily been farmers in the motherland, but in America, they tended to stay in cities
like New York and Boston. Most of the men began their working lives as low-wage unskilled
laborers, but over time, they came to have much more varied job opportunities. Irish immigrant
women worked, too, some in factories or as domestic servants in the homes of the growing upper
class. Many women actually preferred the freedom that factory labor provided, and one Irish factory
woman compared her life to that of a servant by saying, “Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s
done, it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every
nice girl that’s tried service. You’re never sure that your soul is your own except when you’re out of
the house.”

Most German speakers had been farmers in their home countries and would remain farmers in the
U.S., but a number of skilled artisans also came. They tended to stay in cities and make a go of
entrepreneurship. Bismarck himself also saw immigration from Germany as a good thing, saying,
“The better it goes for us, the higher the volume of immigration.” And that’s why we named a city in
North Dakota after him.

Although enough German immigrants came to New York that the Lower East Side of Manhattan
came to be known for a time as Kleindeutschland, “Little Germany,” many moved to the growing
cities of the Midwest, like Cincinnati and St. Louis. Some of the most famous German immigrants
became brewers, and America is much richer for the arrival of men like Frederick Pabst, Joseph
Schlitz, and Adolphus Busch. And by “richer,” I mean “drunker.”

Hey, thanks for not ending on a downer, Thought Bubble! I mean, unless you count alcoholism.

Discrimination (5:30)

So, but, by the 1890s, over half of the 3.5 million immigrants who came to our shores came from
southern and eastern Europe, in particular Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
They were more likely than previous immigrants to be Jewish or Catholic, and while almost all of
them were looking for work, many were also escaping political or religious persecution. And by the
1890s, they also had to face new “scientific theories”–which I’m putting in air quotes to be clear,
because there was nothing scientific about them–which consigned them to different races, whose
low level of civilization was fit only for certain kinds of work, and pre-disposed them to criminality.
The Immigration Restriction League was founded in Boston in 1894 and lobbied for national
legislation that would limit the number of immigrants and one such law even passed Congress in
1897, only to be vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. Good work, Grover! You know, his first
name was Stephen, but he called himself Grover. I-I would have made a different choice.

But before you get too excited about Grover Cleveland, Congress and the president were able to
agree on one group of immigrants to discriminate against: the Chinese. Chinese immigrants,
overwhelmingly male, had been coming to the United States, mostly to the West, since the 1850s
to work in mines and on the railroads. They were viewed with suspicion because they looked
different, spoke a different language, and they had strange habits, like regular bathing.

By the time the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect in 1882, there were 105,000 people of
Chinese descent living in the United States, mainly in cities on the west coast. San Francisco
refused to educate Asians until the state supreme court ordered them to do so, and even then the
city responded by setting up segregated schools. The immigrants fought back through the courts.
In 1886, in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the United States Supreme Court ordered San
Francisco to grant Chinese-operated laundries licenses to operate. Then, in 1898 in United States
versus Wong Kim Ark, the court ruled that American-born children of Chinese immigrants were
entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment, which should have been a ‘duh’, but wasn’t.
We’ve been hard on the Supreme Court here at Crash Course, but those were two good decisions.
You go, Supreme Court.

Worldwide Immigration (7:30)

But despite these victories, Asian immigrants continued to face discrimination in the form of
vigilante-led riots, like the one in Rock Springs, Wyoming that killed 26 people, and
Congressionally-approved restrictions, many of which the Supreme Court did uphold, so myehhh.
Also, it’s important to remember that this large-scale immigration–and the fear of it–was part of a
global phenomenon. At its peak between 1901 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, 13 million
immigrants came to the United States. In the entire period touched off by the industrialization from
1840 until 1914, a total of 40 million people came to the U.S. But at least 20 million people
immigrated to other parts of the western hemisphere, including Brazil, the Caribbean, Canada–yes,
Canada–and Argentina. As much as we have Italian immigrants to thank for things like pizza–and
we do thank you!–Argentina can be just as grateful for the immigrant ancestors of Leo Messi. Also,
the Pope, although he has never once won La Liga.

And there was also extensive immigration from India to other parts of the British Empire, like South
Africa, Chinese immigration to South America and the Caribbean. I mean, the list goes on and on.
In short, America is not as special as it fancies itself.

Oh, it’s time for the Mystery Document?

Mystery Document (8:36)

The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the Mystery Document. I get it wrong, and then I get
shocked with the shock pen. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound defeatist, but I don’t have a good feeling
about this. Alright.

“The figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight, father, with his earnest face
and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who
brought his children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the
primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions, like a man inspired, in a common classroom…I
think Miss Nixon guessed what my father’s best English could not convey. I think she divined that
by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.”

Ahhh, I don’t know. At first, I thought it might be someone that works with immigrants, like Jane
Addams, but then at the end, suddenly, it’s her own father. Jane Addams’s father was not an
immigrant.

Mary Antin?! Does she even have a Wikipedia page?! She does? Did you write it? Stan–Stan wrote
her Wikipedia page. AAAHHHH!

Immigrant Labor (9:35)

So, this document, while it was written by someone who should not have a Wikipedia page, points
out that most immigrants to America were coming for the most obvious reason: opportunity.
Industrialization, both in manufacturing and agriculture, meant that there were jobs in America.
There was so much work, in fact, that companies used labor recruiters who went to Europe to
advertise opportunities. Plus, the passage was relatively cheap, provided you were only going to
make it once in your life, and it was fast, taking only eight to twelve days on the new steam-
powered ships.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan became the magnet for waves of immigrants. First Germans,
then Eastern European Jews, and Italians, who tended to recreate towns and neighborhoods within
blocks and sometimes single buildings. Tenements, these four-, five-, and six-story buildings that
were designed to be apartments, sprang up in the second half of the 19th century, and the earliest
ones were so unsanitary and crowded that the city passed laws requiring a minimum of light and
ventilation. And often these tenement apartments doubled as work spaces, because many
immigrant women and children took in piece work, especially in the garment industry.

Despite local laws mandating the occasional window and outlawing the presence of cows on public
streets, conditions in these cities were pretty bad. Things got a little bit better with the construction
of elevated railroads and, later, subways, that helped relieve traffic congestion, but they created a
new problem: pickpockets. “Pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation …
the foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a
headache.” So, that’s changed!

This new transportation technology also allowed a greater degree of residential segregation in
cities. Manhattan’s downtown area had, at one time, housed the very rich as well as the very poor,
but improved transportation meant that people no longer had to live and work in the same place.
The wealthiest, like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, constructed lavish palaces for

themselves, and uptown townhouses were common.

But until then, one of the most notable features of gilded-age cities like New York was that the rich
and the poor lived in such close proximity to each other. And this meant that with America’s
growing urbanization, the growing distance between rich and poor was visible to both rich and
poor. And much as we see in today’s megacity, this inability to look away from poverty and
economic inequality became a source of concern. Now, one way to alleviate such concern is to
create suburbs, so you don’t have to look at poor people. But, another response to urban problems
was politics, which, in cities like New York, became something of a contact sport.

Another response was the so-called Progressive Movement. And in all of these responses and in
the issues that prompted them–urbanization, mechanization, capitalism, the distribution of
resources throughout the social order–we can see modern industrial America taking shape, and
that is the America we live in today.

Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next week.

Credits (12:12)

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. The script supervisor is Meredith Danko.
The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Rojas, and
myself. Our associate producer of the show is Danica Johnson and our graphics team is Thought
Café.

Every week there’s a new caption for the libertage, if you’d like to suggest one, you can do so in
comments, where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will be answered by our
team of historians. Thank you for watching Crash Course, and as we say in my hometown: don’t
forget to be awesome.

Questions? Problems? Email barrkj@gmail.com.

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. history, and today we’re going to talk about
progressives. No, Stan, progressives. Yes. You know, like these guys, who used to want to bomb
the means of production, but also less radical progressives.

[past John] Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Are we talking about like Tumblr progressives, where it’s half
discussions of misogyny, and half high-contrast images of pizza? Because if so, I can get behind
that.
Me From the Past, your anachronism is showing. Your internet was green letters on a black screen.
But no, the Progressive Era was not like Tumblr. However, I will argue that it did indirectly make
Tumblr and therefore J-Law GIF sets possible, so… that’s something.

So, some of the solutions that progressives came up with to deal with issues of inequality and
injustice don’t seem terribly progressive today, and also it kinda overlapped with the Gilded Age,
and progressive implies, like, progress — presumably progress toward freedom and justice —
which is hard to argue about an era that involved one of the great restrictions of freedom in
American history: Prohibition. So maybe we shouldn’t call it the Progressive Era at all I argue —
Stan, whatever, roll the intro.

(Intro)

Defining the Progressive Era

(01:06)So if the Gilded Age was the period when American industrial capitalism came into its own
and people like Mark Twain began to criticize its associated problems, then the Progressive Era
was the age in which people actually tried to solve those problems through individual and group
action. As the economy changed, progressives also had to respond to a rapidly changing political
system. The population of the U.S. was growing and its economic power was becoming ever more
concentrated, and sometimes progressives responded to this by opening up political participation,
and sometimes by trying to restrict the vote.

The thing is, broad participatory democracy doesn’t always result in effective government… he said,
sounding like the Chinese National Communist Party. And that tension between wanting to have
government for, of, and by the people and wanting to have government that’s, like, good at
governing kinda defined the Progressive Era. And also our era. But progressives were most
concerned with the social problems that revolved around industrial capitalist society, and most of
these problems weren’t new by 1900, but some of the responses were.

Companies, and later corporations, had a problem that had been around since at least the 1880s.
They needed to keep costs down and profits high in a competitive market. And one of the best
ways to do this is to keep wages low, hours long, and conditions appalling. Your basic house-elf
situation. Just kidding, house-elves didn’t get wages.

Also, by the end of the 19th century, people started to feel like these large monopolistic industrial
combinations, the so-called trusts, were exerting too much power over people’s lives. The 1890s
saw federal attempts to deal with these trusts, such as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but overall the
federal government wasn’t where most progressive changes were made.

For instance, there was muckraking, a form of journalism in which reporters would find some muck
and rake it. Mass circulation magazines realized they could make money by publishing exposes of

industrial and political abuse, so they did.

Mystery Document

(02:48) Oh, it’s time for the mystery document? I bet it involves muck.

The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document; I’m either correct or I get
shocked.

“Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and all the joints in his
fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floor-men, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his
thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against
which the man pressed the knife to hold it. They would have no nails — they had worn them off
pulling hides.”

Wow. Well now I am hyper-aware of and grateful for my thumbs. They are just in excellent shape. I
am so glad, Stan, that I am not a beef-boner at one of the meat-packing factories written about
in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. No shock for me!

Ah, Stan, I can only imagine how long and hard you’ve worked to get the phrase “beef-boner” into
this show and you finally did it, congratulations.

By the way, just a little bit of trivia, The Jungle was the first book I ever read that made me vomit.
So that’s a review. I don’t know if it’s positive, but there you go.

Anyway, at the time readers of The Jungle were more outraged by descriptions of rotten meat than
by the treatment of meat-packing workers. The Jungle led to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act of 1906. That’s pretty cool for Upton Sinclair, although my books have also
lead to some federal legislation such as the HAOTP, which officially declared Hazel and Augustus
the nation’s OTP.

So to be fair, writers have been describing the harshness of industrial capitalism for decades, so
muckraking wasn’t really that new. But the use of photography for documentation was. Lewis Hine
for instance photographed child laborers in factories and mines, bringing Americans face-to-face
with the more than two million children under the age of 15 working for wages. And Hine’s photos
helped bring about laws that limited child labor.

But even more important than the writing and photographs and magazines when it came to
improving conditions for workers was Twitter. What’s that? There was no Twitter? Still? What is
this, 1812?

Worker’s Response

All right, so apparently still without Twitter, workers had to organize into unions to get corporations
to reduce hours and raise their pay. Also, some employers started to realize on their own that one
way to mitigate some of the problems of industrialization was to pay workers betters. Like in 1914,
Henry Ford paid his workers an average of five dollars per day, unheard of at the time. Whereas
today, I pay Stan and Danica three times that, and still they whine.

Ford’s reasoning was that better paid workers would be better able to afford the Model T’s that
they were making. And indeed, Ford’s annual output rose from 34,000 cars to 730,000 cars
between 1910 and 1916, and the price of a Model T dropped from $700 to $316. Still, Henry Ford
definitely forgot to be awesome sometimes: he was antisemitic, he used spies in his factory, and he
named his child Edsel.

Also, like most employers at the turn of the century he was virulently anti-union. So while the AFL
was organizing the most privileged industrial workers, another union grew up to advocate for rights
for a larger swath of the workforce, especially the immigrants who dominated unskilled labor: the
Industrial Workers of the World. They were also know as the Wobblies, and they were founded in
1905 to advocate for “every wage worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade.” And
not, as the name Wobblies suggest, just those fans of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.

The Wobblies and Consumer Culture

The Wobblies were radical socialists. Ultimately they wanted to see capitalism in the state
disappear in revolution. Now most progressives didn’t go that far, but some, following the ideas of
Henry George, worried that economic progress could produce a dangerous unequal distribution of
wealth that could only be cured by taxes.

But more progressives were influenced by Simon W. Patten who prophesied that industrialization
would bring about a new civilization where everyone would benefit from the abundance and all the
leisure time that all these new labor-saving devices could bring.

This optimism was partly spurred by the birth of a mass consumption society. I mean, Americans
by 1915 could purchase all kinds of newfangled devices like washing machines, or vacuum
cleaners, automobiles, record players. It’s worth underscoring that all this happened in a couple
generations. I mean, in 1850 almost everyone listened to music and washed their clothes in nearly
the same way that people did ten thousand years ago. And then, boom.

And for many progressives, this consumer culture, to quote our old friend Eric Foner “became the
foundation for a new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made
available by modern capitalism.” And this idea was encouraged by new advertising that connected
goods with freedom, using liberty as a brand name, or affixing the Statue of Liberty to a product. By
the way, Crash Course is made exclusively in the United States of America. The greatest nation on
earth. Ever.

That’s a lie, of course. But you’re allowed to lie in advertising.

But in spite of this optimism, many progressives were concerned that industrial capitalism, with its
exploitation of labor and concentration of wealth, was limiting rather than increasing freedom. But
depending on how you define freedom, of course.

The Effects of Industrialization

Industrialization created what they referred to as the labor problem, as mechanization diminished
opportunities for skilled workers and the supervised routine of the factory floor destroyed
autonomy. The scientific workplace management advocated by efficiency expert Frederick W.

Taylor required rigid rules and supervision in order to heighten worker productivity. So if you’ve ever
had a job with a defined number of bathroom breaks, that’s why. Also, Taylorism found its way into
classrooms, and anyone who’s ever had to sit in rows for forty-five minute periods punctuated by
factory style bells knows that this atmosphere is not particularly conducive to a sense of freedom.

Now this is a little bit confusing, because while responding to worker exploitation was part of the
progressive movement, so was Taylorism itself, because it was an application of research,
observation, and expertise to the vexing problem of how to increase productivity. And this use of
scientific experts is another hallmark of the Progressive Era. One that usually found its expression
in politics.

American progressives, like their counter parts in the green sections of not-America sought
government solutions to social problems. Germany, which is somewhere over here [points toward
Europe on globe], pioneered social legislation with its minimum wage, unemployment insurance,
and old age pension laws. But the idea that government action could address the problems and
insecurities that characterized the modern industrial world also became prominent in the United
States. And the notion that an activist government could enhance, rather than threaten, people’s
freedom was something new in America.

Legislation

Now progressives pushing for social legislation tended to have more success at the state and local
level, especially in cities, which established public control over gas and water and raised taxes to
pay for transportation and public schools. Whereas federally, the biggest success was like
Prohibition, which, you know, not that successful. But anyway, if all that local collectivist investment
sounds like socialism… it kind of is. I mean, by 1912 the socialist party had 150,000 members and
had elected scores of local officials, like Milwaukee mayor Emil Seidel.

Some urban progressives even pushed to get rid of traditional democratic forms altogether. A
number of cities were run by commissions of experts or city managers who would be chosen on
the basis of some demonstrated expertise or credential, rather than their ability to hand out turkeys
at Christmas or find jobs for your nephew’s sister’s cousin. Progressive editor Walter Lippmann
argued for applying modern scientific expertise to solve social problems in his 1914 book Drift and
Mastery, writing that scientifically trained experts “could be trusted more fully than ordinary citizens
to solve America’s deep social problems.”

This tension between government by experts and increased popular democratic participation is one
of the major contradictions of the Progressive Era. The Seventeenth Amendment allowed for
senators to be elected directly by the people rather than by state legislatures, and many states
adopted primaries to nominate candidates. Again, taking power away from political parties and
putting it in the hands of voters. And some states, particularly western ones like California, adopted
aspects of even more direct democracy: the initiative, which allowed voters to put issues on the
ballot and the referendum, which allows them to vote on laws directly. And lest you think that more
democracy is always good, I present you with California.

But many progressives wanted actual policy made by experts who knew what was best for the
people, not the people themselves. And despite primaries and direct elections of senators, it’s hard
to argue that the Progressive Era was a good moment for democratic participation since many
progressives were only in favor of voting insofar as it was done by white, middle-class, Protestant
voters.

All right, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Thought Bubble

Progressives limited immigrants’ participation in the political process through literacy tests and
laws requiring people to register to vote. Voter registration was supposedly intended to limit fraud,
and the power of political machines — stop me if any of this sounds familiar — but it actually just
suppressed voting generally. Voting gradually declined from 80% of male Americans voting in the
1890s to the point where today only about 50% of eligible Americans vote in presidential elections.

But an even bigger blow to democracy during the Progressive Era came with the Jim Crow laws
passed by legislatures in southern states which legally segregated the South. First there was the
deliberate disenfranchisement of African Americans. The Fifteenth Amendment made it illegal to
deny the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude, but said nothing
about the ability to read, so many southern states instituted literacy requirements. Other states
added poll taxes, requiring people to pay to vote which effectively disenfranchised a large number
of African American people who were disproportionately poor.

The Supreme Court didn’t help. In 1896 it made one of its most famous bad decisions, Plessy v.
Ferguson, ruling that segregation in public accommodations (in Homer Plessy’s case, a railroad car)
did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. As long as black railroad cars
were equal to white ones, it was a-okay to have duplicate sets of everything. Now, creating two
sets of equal quality of everything would get really expensive, so southern states didn’t actually do
it. Black schools, public restrooms, public transportation opportunities, the list goes on and on,
would definitely be separate, and definitely not equal.

African-Americans

Thanks, Thought Bubble. Now of course as we’ve seen, progressive ideas inspired a variety of
responses: both for Taylorism and against it, both for government by experts and for direct
democracy. Similarly, in the Progressive Era, just as the Jim Crow laws were being passed, there
were many attempts to improve the lives of African Americans.

The towering figure in this movement to uplift black southerners was Booker T. Washington, a
former slave who became the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a center for vocational
education, and Washington urged southern black people to emphasize skills that could make them
successful in the contemporary economy. The idea was that they would earn the respect of white
people by demonstrating their usefulness and everyone would come to respect each other through
the recognition of mutual dependence while continuing to live in separate social spheres.

But Washington’s accommodationist stance was not shared by all African Americans. W.E.B. Du
Bois advocated for full civil and political rights for black people and helped to found the NAACP,
which urged African Americans to fight for their rights through “persistent, manly agitation.”

Conclusion

So I wanted to talk about the Progressive Era today not only because it shows up on a lot of tests,

but because progressives tried to tackle many of the issues that we face today, particularly
concerning immigration and economic justice, and they used some of the same methods that we
use today: organization, journalistic exposure, and political activism.

Now we may use Tumblr or Tea Party forums but the same concerns motivate us to work together,
and just as today many of their efforts were not successful because of the inherent difficulty in
trying to mobilize very different interests in a pluralistic nation. In some ways their platforms would
have been better suited to an America that was less diverse and complex, but it was that very
diversity and complexity that gave rise — and still gives rise — to the urge toward progress in the
first place.

Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

Credits

Crash course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko.
The associate producer is Danica Johnson, the show is written by my high school history teacher,
Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Rojas, and myself, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe.

Every week there’s a new caption for the Libertage. You can suggest captions in comments, where
you can also ask questions about today’s video that will be answered by our team of historians.

Thanks for watching Crash Course, if you like it, and if you’re watching the credits, you probably
do, make sure you’re subscribed. And as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.

[off-screen thud] That was more dramatic than it sounded.

Hi, I’m John Green. This is Crash Course U.S. History, and today we’re going to discuss economics
and how a generation of–

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, is this going to be one of those boring ones with no wars or generals who
had cool last words or anything?

Alright, me from the past, I will give you a smidge of great man history, but only a smidge!

AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIZATION

So, today we’re going to discuss American Industrialization in the decades after the Civil War,
during which time the U.S. went from having, per capita, about a third of Great Britain’s industrial
output to becoming the richest and most industrialized nation on earth.

Eh, you might want to hold off on that Libertage, Stan, because this happened mostly thanks to the
not particularly awesome Civil War, which improved the finance system by forcing the introduction
of a national currency and spurred industrialization by giving massive contracts to arms and
clothing manufacturers.

The Civil War also boosted the telegraph, which improved communication, and gave birth to the
Transcontinental Railway by the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, all of which increased efficiency and
productivity, so thanks, Civil War!

[Intro Music]

IMMIGRATION & ECONOMIC GROWTH

If you want to explain America’s economic growth in a nutshell, chalk it up to GD and L, Gerard
Depardieu and Lohan. No, geography, demography and law. However, while we’re on the topic,
when was Gerard Depardieu and Lindsay Lohan have a baby? Stan, can I see it? Yes! YES!

Geographically, the U.S. was a huge country with all the resources necessary for an industrial
boom. Like, we had coal and iron and later oil. Initially, we had water to power our factories, later
replaced by coal, and we had amber waves of grain to feed our growing population, which leads to
the demography.

America’s population grew from 40 million in 1870 to 76 million in 1900, and a third of that growth
was due to immigration, which is good for economies. Many of these immigrants flooded the
burgeoning cities as America shifted from being an agrarian, rural nation to being an industrial,
urban one.

Like, New York City became the center of commerce and finance, and by 1898, it had a population
of 3.4 million people, and the industrial heartland was in the Great Lakes region. Chicago became
the second largest city by 1900, Cleveland became a leader in oil refining, and Pittsburgh was the

center of iron and steel production. And even today, the great city of Pittsburgh still employs 53
Steelers.

Last but not least was the law. The Constitution and its Commerce Clause made the U.S. a single
area of commerce, like a giant customs union, and as we’ll see in a bit, the Supreme Court
interpreted the laws in a very business-friendly way.

Also, the American Constitution protects patents, which encourages invention and innovation, or at
least it used to. Despite what Ayn Rand would tell you, the American government played a role in
American economic growth by putting up high tariffs, especially on steel, giving massive land
grants to railroads, and by putting Native Americans on reservations.

Also, foreigners played an important role. They invested their capital and involved Americans in
their economic scandals, like the one that led to a depression in 1893. The U.S. was, at the time,
seen by Europeans as a developing economy, and investments in America offered much higher
returns than those available in Europe.

And the changes we’re talking about here were massive: in 1880, for the first time, a majority of the
workforce worked in non-farming jobs. By 1890, two-thirds of Americans worked for wages, rather
than farming or owning their own businesses, and by 1913, the United States produced one-third of
the world’s total industrial output. Now bring out the Libertage, Stan! Awesome! And even better,
we now get to talk about perennially underrated railroads. Let’s go to the thought bubble.

THOUGHT BUBBLE: RAILROADS

Although we tend to forget about them here in the U.S., because our passenger rail system sucks,
railroads were one of the keys to America’s 19th century industrial success. Railroads increased
commerce and integrated the American market, which allowed national brands to emerge, like Ivory
Soap and A&P grocery stores, but railroads changed and improved our economy in less obvious
ways, too.

For instance, they gave us time zones, which were created by the major railroad companies to
make shipping and passenger transport more standard. Also because he recognized the
importance of telling time, a railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears turned a fifty-dollar
investment in watches into an enormous mail order empire, and railroads made it possible for him –
and his eventual partner, Roebuck – to ship watches and then jewelry and then pretty much
everything, including unconstructed freaking houses throughout the country.

Railroads were also the first modern corporations. These companies were large, they had many
employees, they spanned the country, and that meant they needed to invent organizational
methods, including the middle managers, supervisors to supervise supervisors. And for the first
time, the owners of a company were not always day to day managers, because railroads were
among the first publicly-traded corporations.

They needed a lot of capital to build tracks and stations, so they sold shares in the company in
order to raise that money, which shares could then be bought and sold by the public, and that is
how railroads created the first captains of industry, like Cornelius “They Named A University After
Me” Vanderbilt and Andrew “Me Too” Carnegie (Mellon) and Leland “I Named A University After My
Son” Stanford.

The railroad business was also emblematic of the partnership between the national government and
industry. The Transcontinental Railroad, after all, wouldn’t have existed without congressional
legislation, federal land grants, and government-sponsored bond issues. Thanks, Thought Bubble!

MYSTERY DOCUMENT

Apparently it’s time for the mystery document!

The rules here are simple. I guess the author of the mystery document, and if I’m wrong – which I
usually am – I get shocked. Alright.

The belief is common in America that the days at hand when corporations far
greater than the Erie–swaying such power as have never in world’s history been
trusted in the hands of mere private citizens, controlled by single men like
Vanderbilt…–will ultimately succeed in direction government itself. Under the
American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective
resistance.

Corporations directing government? That’s ridiculous. I’m so grateful for federal ethanol subsidies,
brought to you by delicious Dr. Pepper. Mmm! I can taste all 23 of the chemicals. Anyways, Dan,
I’m pretty sure that is noted muckraker Ida Tarbell?

No! Henry Adams? How are there still Adamses in American history? Oh, that makes me worry we’ll
never escape the Clintons. Anyway, it should have been Ida Tarbell. She has a great name, she was
a great opponent of capitalism. Whatever. Aah!

THE ROBBER BARONS

Indeed, industrial capitalists are considered both the greatest heroes and the greatest villains of the
era, which is why they’re known both as captains of industry and as robber barons, depending on

whether we are mad at them. While they often came from humble origins, took risks and became
very wealthy, their methods were frequently unscrupulous.

I mean, they often drove competitors out of business and generally cared very little for their
workers. The first of the great robber barons and-or captains of industry was the aforementioned
Cornelius Vanderbilt, who rose from humble beginnings in Staten Island to make a fortune in
transportation through ferries and shipping, and then eventually through railroads, although he once
referred to trains as “them things that go on land.”

But the poster boy of the era was John D. Rockefeller, who started out as a clerk for a Cleveland
merchant and eventually became the richest man in the world. Ever. Yes, including Bill Gates. The
key to Rockefeller’s success was ruthlessly buying up so many rivals that, by the late 1880s,
standard oil controlled 90 percent of the U.S. oil industry, which lack of competition drove the price
of gasoline up to, like, twelve cents a gallon. So, if you had one of the twenty cars in the world, then
you were mad.

VERTICAL & HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION

The period also saw innovation in terms of the way industries were organized. Many of the robber
barons formed pools and trusts to control prices and limit the negative effects of competition. The
problem with competition is that, over time, it reduces both prices and profit margins, which makes
it difficult to become super rich.

Vertical integration was another innovation. Firms bought up all aspects of the production process,
from raw materials to production to transport and distribution. Like, Philip Armour’s meat company
bought its own rail cars to ship meat, for instance. It also bought things like conveyor belts, and
when he found out that animal parts could be used to make glue, he got into the glue making
business. It was Armour who once proclaimed to use “everything but the squeal.”

Horizontal integration was when big firms bought up small ones. The best example of this was
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which eventually became so big, incidentally, that the Supreme Court
forced Standard Oil to be broken up into more than a dozen smaller oil companies which, by the
way, over time, have slowly reunited to become the company known as Exxon Mobile, so that
worked out.

U.S. Steel was put together by the era’s giant of finance, J. P. Morgan, who, at his death, left a
fortune of only $68 million, not counting the art that became the backbone of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, leading Andrew Carnegie to remark in surprise, “And to think he was not a rich
man.”

THE WORKERS & THE UNIONS

Speaking of people who weren’t rich, let us now praise the unsung heroes of industrialization:
workers. Well, I guess you can’t really call them unsung, because Woody Guthrie. Oh, your guitar,
and my computer! I never made that connection before! Anyway, then as now, the benefits of
economic growth were shared, shall we say, a smidge unevenly.

Prices did drop, due to industrial competition, which raised the standard of living for the average
American worker. In fact, it was among the highest in the world, but due to a growing population,
particularly of immigrant workers, there was job insecurity and also, booms and busts meant
depressions in the 1870s and 1890s, which hit the working poor the hardest.

Also, laborers commonly worked 60 hours per week with no pensions or injury compensation, and
the U.S. had the highest rate of industrial injuries in the world – an average of over 35,000 people
per year died on the job. These conditions and the uncertainty of labor markets led to unions, which
were mostly local but occasionally national.

The first national union was the Knights of Labor, headed by Terence V. Powderly, which grew from
nine members in 1870 to 728,000 by 1884. The Knights of Labor admitted unskilled workers, black
workers, and women, but it was irreparably damaged by the Haymarket Riot in 1886.

During a strike against McCormick Harvesting Company, a policeman killed one of the strikers and
in response, there was a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square at which a bomb killed seven police
officers. Then, firing upon the crowd, the police killed four people. Seven anarchists were eventually
convicted of the bombing, and although Powderly denounced anarchism, the public still associated
the Knights of Labor with violence, and by 1902, its membership had shrunk considerably, to zero.

The banner of organized labor, however, was picked up by the American Federation of Labor under
Samuel L. Gompers. Do all of these guys have great last names? They were more moderate than
the anarchists and the socialist international workers of the world, and focused on bread and butter
issues like pay, hours, and safety.

Founded in 1886, the same year as the Haymarket Riot, the AFL had about 250,000 by 1892,
almost ten percent of whom were iron and steel workers. And now we have to pause to briefly
mention one of the most pernicious innovations of the era: Social Darwinism, a perversion of
Darwin’s theory that would have made him throw up, although to be fair, almost everything made
him throw up.

SOCIAL DARWINISM

Social Darwinists argued that the theory of survival of the fittest should be applied to people and

also that corporations were people. Ergo, big companies were big because they were fitter, and we
had nothing to fear from monopolies.

This pseudoscience was used to argue that governments shouldn’t regulate business or pass laws
to help poor people. It assured the rich that the poor were poor because of some inherent
evolutionary flaw, thus enabling tycoons to sleep at night. You know, on a big pile of money
surrounded by beautiful women.

UNIONS CONTINUED

But despite the apparent inborn unfitness of workers, unions continued to grow and fight for better
conditions, sometimes violently. There was violence at the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 and the
Pullman Rail Strike of 1894, when strikers were killed and a great deal of property was destroyed.
To quote the historian Michael Lind, “in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the United States had five
times as many unionized workers as Germany, at a time when the two nations had similar
populations.”

Unions wanted the United States and its citizens to imagine freedom more broadly, arguing that
without a more equal economic system, America was becoming less–not more–free, even as it
became more prosperous. If you’re thinking that this freewheeling age of fast growth, uneven gains
in prosperity, and corporate heroes/villains resembles the early 21st century, you aren’t alone.

And it’s worth remembering that it was only 150 years ago that modern corporations began to form
and that American industry became the leading driver in the global economy. That’s a blink of an
eye in world history terms, and the ideas in technologies of post-Civil War America gave us the
ideas that still define how we – all of us, not just Americans–think about opposites, like success
and failure, or wealth and poverty. It’s also when people begin to discuss the ways in which
inequality could be the opposite of freedom. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.

CREDITS

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller.

Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko.

The associate producer is Danica Johnson.

The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Halse Rojas and
myself, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe.

Each week, there’s a new caption for the Libertage. You can suggest captions and comments
where you can also ask questions about today’s video that will be answered by our team of
historians.

Thanks for watching Crash Course. Make sure you’re subscribed, and as we say in my hometown,
don’t forget to be awesome.

Introduction

Hi, I’m John Green. This is Crash Course U.S. History, and today we’re going to continue our look
at the Gilded Age by focusing on political science.

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! So it’s another history class where we don’t actually talk about history?

Oh, me from the past. Your insistence on trying to place academic exploration into little boxes
creates a little box that you yourself will live in for the rest of your life if you don’t put your
interdisciplinary party hat on!

So the Gilded Age takes its name from a book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that was
called The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today. It was published in 1873, and it was not that successful.
But while the Gilded Age conjures up visions of fancy parties and ostentatious displays of wealth,
the book itself was about politics, and it gives a very negative appraisal of the state of American
democracy at the time. Which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise coming from Twain, whose
comments about Congress included, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” And also, “It could probably be shown by facts and
figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

So when faced with the significant changes taking place in the American economy after the Civil
War, America’s political system both nationally and locally dealt with these problems in the best
way possible: by becoming incredibly corrupt.

[Crash Course intro]

Ohhh, Stan says I have to taken off my party hat. Ruh, ruhr ruhrrr.
The Urban Political Machine

So former House speaker Tip O’Neil once famously said that all politics is local, and although that
isn’t actually true, I am going to start with local politics today. Specifically, one of America’s
greatest inventions: the urban political machine. So a political machine is basically an organization
that works to win elections so that they can exercise power. The most famous political machine
was New York City’s Tammany Hall, which dominated Democratic Party politics in the late 19th
century, survived until the 20th, and is keenly associated with corruption.

The Mystery Document

Oh, it’s already time for the mystery document? This is highly unorthodox, Stan. Well, the rules here
are simple; I guess the author of the mystery document, I’m usually wrong, and I get shocked with
the shock pen. All right, let’s see what we got here.

Mystery document: “My party’s in power in the city, and it’s going to undertake a lot of public
improvements. Well, I’m tipped off, say, that they’re going to lay out a new park at a certain place
and buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan
public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain’t it perfectly
honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight. Of course it is.

That’s honest graft.”

Stan, I know this one. It’s about machine politics, it’s from New York. It doesn’t say it’s from New
York, but it is because it is George Plunkitt.

[Green check]

Yes! How do you like them apples? Oh, you want to know the name of the book? It’s Plunkitt of
Tammany Hall. Stan, transition me back to the desk with a libertage please.

[Libertage: America! Corruption Eruption!]

Back to the Urban Political Machine

Plunkitt became famous for writing a book describing the way that New York City’s government
actually worked, but he was a small fish compared with the most famous shark-like machine
politician of the day: William “Boss” Tweed, seen here with a head made of money.

“Boss” Tweed basically ran New York in the 1860s and early 1870s and his grandest feat of
swindling helps explain how the machine system worked. It revolved around the, then new, county
courthouse that now houses the New York City Department of Education. Building the courthouse
was initially estimated to cost around $250,000, but ended up costing $13,000,000 by the time it
was finished in 1871. Included in that cost was a bill of $180,000 for 3 tables and 40 chairs, $1.5
million for lighting fixtures, and $41,000 for brooms and cleaning supplies. A plasterer received
$500,000 for his initial job and then $1,000,000 to repair his shoddy work. The standard kickback in
these situations was that Tammany Hall received $2 for every $1 received by the contractor. That
may seem like a bad deal for contractors, but remember, that plasterer still got to keep half a million
dollars, which is worth about nine million dollars in today’s money.

Now, of course, that makes it sounds like political machines were pure evil, especially if you were a
taxpayer footing the bill for that courthouse. But machines also provided valuable services to
immigrants and other poor people in cities. As Plunkitt explained, Tammany could help families in
need: “I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity
Organization Society, which would investigate their case in a month or two, and decide they were
worthy of help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for them, buy
clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up until they get things running
again.” In return for this help, Tammany expected votes, so that they could stay in power. Staying
in power meant control of city jobs as well as city contracts. Plunkitt claimed to know “every big
employer in the district- and in the whole city, for that matter- and they ain’t in the habit of saying
no to me when I ask them for a job.”

But with all the corruption, sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Fortunately, Tammany politicians
could always fall back on fraud. Tammany found bearded men to vote, then took them to the
barber to shave off the beard but left the mustache so that they could vote a second time, and then
they would shave off the stache so they could vote for a third. And then, of course, there was
always violence and intimidation. By the end of the century, a Tammany regular lamented the good
ol’ days when quote, “It was wonderful to see my men slug the opposition to preserve the sanctity
of the ballot.”

But corruption wasn’t limited to big cities like New York and Chicago; some of the biggest

boondoggles involved the United States Congress and the executive branch under President
Ulysses Grant. The first scandal, dubbed “The King of Frauds” by The New York Sun, involved
Credit Mobilier, the construction company that did most of the road building for the Union Pacific
Railroad. This two-pronged accusation involved first, overcharging the public for construction costs
and siphoning off profits to Credit Mobilier and second, bribery of Congressmen. Now the second
charge was, of course, much juicer and also more partisan because only Republican Congressmen,
including the Speaker of the House, were implicated in it. Eventually, Massachusetts Congressman
Oakes Ames was found guilty of giving bribes, but no one was ever found guilty of receiving those
bribes. As you can imagine, that did wonders for the reputation of Congress.

The second major scandal involved the so called “Whiskey Ring,” which was a group of distillers in
Saint Louis who decided they didn’t like paying excise taxes on their product, perhaps a slightly
more noble cause than that of the 2009 Bling Ring, who just wanted to dress like Paris Hilton.

John McDonald, a Grant administration official, helped distillers reduce their taxes by intentionally
under-counting the number of kegs of booze. But then in 1875 the tax evasion grew out of control
and McDonald eventually confessed and was convicted, thereby tainting the presidency with
corruption just as Credit Mobilier had tainted Congress. That leaves the Supreme Court untainted,
but don’t worry, the Dred Scott Decision is worth at least, like, eighty years of tainting.

The Gilded Government

So with all this distrust in government, after Grant served two terms, presidential elections featured
a series of “one-termers”: Hayes, Garfield (whose term was filled out by Chester Arthur after
Garfield was assassinated), Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and then Cleveland again, McKinley
(who was elected twice, but then he was assassinated).

As for their parties, Gilded Age Republicans favored high tariffs, low government spending, paying
off national debt, and reducing the amount of paper money, or greenbacks in circulation.
Democrats opposed the tariffs and were often linked to New York bankers and financiers. In short,
both parties were “pro-business”, but they were “pro-different-businesses.”

Despite that and the widespread corruption, some national reform legislation actually did get
passed in the Gilded Age. The Civil Service Act of 1883, prompted by Garfield’s assassination by a
disgruntled office-seeker, created a merit system for 10% of federal employees, who were chosen
by competitive examination, rather than political favoritism.

But this had an unintended effect; it made American politicians much more dependent on
donations from big businesses rather than small donations from grateful political appointees. But,
you know, nice idea.

And then in 1890 the Sherman Antitrust Act forbade combinations and practices that restrained
trade, but again, it was almost impossible to enforce this against the monopolies like U.S. Steel.
More often, it was used against the labor unions which were seen to restrain trade in their “radical”
lobbying for, like, health insurance and hardhats.

But all and all the national Congress was pretty dysfunctional at the end of the 19th century, stop
me if that sounds familiar, so state governments expanded their responsibility for public health and
welfare. Cities invested in public works like transportation and gas, and later electricity and the
movement to provide public education continued. Some northern states even passed laws limiting

the work day to 8 hours. “What is this, France?” is what courts would often say when striking
those laws down. Reform legislation was less developed in the south, but they were busy rolling
back Reconstruction and creating laws that limited the civil rights of African Americans known as
“Jim Crow Laws.” In the west, farmers became politically motivated over the issue of freight
rates. Wait, are we talking about railroads? Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Thought Bubble

In the 1870s, farmers formed the Grange Movement to put pressure on state governments to
establish fair railroad rates and warehouse charges. Railroads in particular tended to be pretty
monopolistic. They owned the track going through town after all, so it was hard for farmers to
negotiate fair shipping prices. The Grange Movement eventually became the Farmer’s Alliance
Movement which also pushed for economic cooperation to raise prices, but was split into Northern
and Southern wings that could never really get it together.

The biggest idea to come out of the Farmer’s Alliance was the Sub-Treasury Plan. Under this plan,
farmers would store grain in government warehouses and get low rate government loans to buy
seed and equipment using the stored grain as collateral. This would allow farmers to bypass the
banks who increasingly came to be seen, along with the railroads, as the source of all the farmers
troubles.

Eventually these politically motivated farmers and their supporters grew into a political party, the
People’s Party, or Populists. In 1892 they held a convention in Omaha and put forth a remarkably
reform-minded plan, particularly given that this was put forth in Omaha, which included: the Sub-
Treasury Plan, which didn’t exactly happen, although the deal farmers ended up with was probably
better for them; government ownership of railroads, which sort of happened if you count Amtrak;
graduated income tax, which did happen after the passage of the 16th Amendment; government
control of the currency, which happened with the creation of the Federal Reserve System;
recognition of the right of laborers to form unions, which happened both at the state and federal
level; and free coinage of silver to produce more money, which we’ll get to in a second.

The People’s Party attempted to appeal to a broad coalition of producing classes, especially miners
and industrial workers and it was particularly successful with those groups in Colorado and Idaho.
As the preamble to the party platform put it: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures,
the Congress and touches even the ermine of the bench… from the same prolific womb of
governmental injustice we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires.” Thanks Thought
Bubble.

The Populist Party

So some Western states were so Populist they even granted women the right to vote in the 1890s
which added tremendously to the Populist’s electoral power, but most American voters stuck with
the two main parties, industrial workers never really joined in large numbers because the Populists
calls for free coinage of silver would lead to inflation, especially in food prices and that would hurt
urban laborers. But if it hadn’t been for that threat of silver inflation, we might have three major
political parties in the U.S. today, or at least two different ones. Stupid inflation, always ruining
everything.

Populist leaders also struggled to unify because racism. Some Populist leaders, like Tom Watson,

argued that black and white poor farmers were in the same boat, but Southern populists were not
inclined to take up the fight against segregation and even Watson himself began spouting anti-
Semitic rhetoric. But in the Halcyon Populist days of 1892 their presidential candidate, James
Weaver, gained 1 million votes as a third party candidate. He carried five western states and got 22
electoral votes, which is better than Mondale did. But the best known Populist candidate was
actually the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan, who once
spoke of America of being crucified on a cross of gold, firmly supported free coinage of silver in
hopes of increasing the amount of money in circulation would raise prices for farmers and make it
easier for people to pay off their debts.

William Jennings Bryan is probably better known for the anti-evolution stance in the famous Scopes
Monkey Trail, where he was up against none other than Clarence Darrow, but he did almost
become president. So, the Populist were really wary of Bryan as a Democrat because they feared
their ideas would be reduced simply to simply, free silver, but they voted for him anyway. But
Bryan still lost the 1896 election to William McKinley in what has become known as the first modern
political campaign because the business classes gave McKinley’s campaign an unprecedented 10
million dollars, which these days will buy you 9 ads in Iowa, but back then won you an entire
presidential election. He won the electoral college in a landslide, 271 to 176. Bryan’s defeat in 1896
effectively put an end to the Populist Party.

The corruption in government, both federal and local, continued and new journalists, called
Muckrakers, began exposing it in the press. And even though they were defeated at the polls,
Populist ideas, especially direct election of senators and a progressive income tax, quickly became
mainstream. Now these days we don’t necessarily associate those ideas with Populists, which
suggests that maybe they were right to worry about hitching their wagon to Bryan’s star.

But in the end, would you rather have your name survive or see your ideas enacted? But of course
many of the problems the Populists were concerned with persisted, as did the scourge of Jim
Crow. We’ll discuss those next week when we look at the Progressive Era. Thanks for watching.

Conclusion

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller, our script supervisor is Meredith Danko, the
associate producer is Danica Johnson, the show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul
Meyer, Rosianna Rojas, and myself, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe. Okay, I’ll make a
transition but I think you’ll wanna keep filming this. Every week there’s a new caption for the
Libertage, if you’d like to suggest one in comments you can do so, or you can also ask questions
about today’s video that will be answered by our team of historians. Thank you for watching Crash
Course, and as we say in my hometown, Don’t Forget To Be Awesome.