Unit 20 · U.S. History: Industry to the Progressive Era

Picture a polling place in Louisiana in November 1876. Armed white men stand near the door. Some Black voters push past them and cast ballots; many more stay home. When the votes are counted, both parties claim the state. The same thing happens in South Carolina and Florida. The presidential race between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden comes down to those three states, and for months nobody knows who has won.

Congress set up a special commission, and in early 1877 it handed every disputed state to Hayes. Democrats threatened to block the result. Behind closed doors, a deal took shape. Hayes would become president. In return, the last federal soldiers guarding Southern statehouses would go home, and the national government would stop enforcing Black civil rights in the South. Historians call this the Compromise of 1877. It ended Reconstruction, the twelve-year effort to rebuild the South on the basis of equal citizenship.

For Black Southerners, the change was immediate and brutal. Between 1867 and 1877, some two thousand Black men had held public office, including two U.S. senators from Mississippi. Now white Democrats who called themselves Redeemers took over every Southern state. They cut school budgets, rewrote tax laws to favor landowners and used violence to keep Black men from the polls. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments stayed in the Constitution, but for most of a century they went unenforced.

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become the most famous Black man in America, saw it coming. He warned that freedom without land, without the vote and without protection was freedom in name only. The North, tired of the fight and eager for business, turned its attention to railroads and factories. The rest of this chapter is about the country that grew up in those years, and about who paid for it.

In June 1892 a shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket in New Orleans and sat down in a railroad car reserved for white passengers. Plessy was one-eighth Black and looked white, and the railroad had been told in advance. He was arrested on purpose. A group of Black and Creole citizens had planned the test case to challenge Louisiana’s new Separate Car Act. They believed the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection made such laws unconstitutional.

They lost. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court ruled seven to one that separate facilities for the races were legal as long as they were equal. In practice they were never equal. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote that the Constitution is color-blind and that the ruling would prove as harmful as the Dred Scott decision. He was right. For nearly sixty years, Jim Crow laws, named after a mocking minstrel character, separated Black and white Americans in schools, trains, parks, hospitals and cemeteries.

Segregation came with disfranchisement, the stripping away of the vote. Mississippi led the way in 1890 with a new constitution requiring poll taxes and literacy tests that white registrars applied however they pleased. Other states copied it. In Louisiana the number of registered Black voters fell from about 130,000 in 1896 to under 2,000 a decade later. Behind the laws stood terror. Thousands of Black Americans were lynched between the end of Reconstruction and the middle of the twentieth century, often in public, with photographs sold as souvenirs.

Ida B. Wells, a young Memphis journalist, refused to look away. After three of her friends were lynched in 1892 for running a grocery that competed with a white store, she investigated dozens of lynchings and published what she found. The usual excuse, that lynching punished crimes against white women, did not hold up; most victims had been accused of nothing of the kind. A mob destroyed her newspaper office, and she moved north, eventually to Chicago, where she kept writing and organizing for the rest of her life.

On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit in Utah, two locomotives touched nose to nose and a railroad official tapped a golden spike into the last tie. A telegraph wire attached to the hammer sent the word DONE across the country. A trip from New York to San Francisco that had taken months by wagon or ship could now be made in about a week. For the first time, a farmer in Iowa and a merchant in California were in the same market.

The road was a partnership between private companies and the federal government. Congress gave the Union Pacific, building west from Nebraska, and the Central Pacific, building east from California, loans and huge grants of public land for every mile of track they laid. The companies sold the land to settlers to raise cash. In all, railroads received about 130 million acres from the federal government, an area larger than California. Critics called it a giveaway; supporters said no one else would risk the money.

The work itself fell to men who would not appear in the golden-spike photographs. The Central Pacific hired thousands of Chinese immigrants, who blasted tunnels through the Sierra Nevada by hand, sometimes in snow forty feet deep, for lower pay than white workers. The Union Pacific relied on Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. Hundreds died in explosions, avalanches and accidents. Chinese workers struck for equal pay in 1867; the company cut off their food supply and the strike failed.

By 1900 the country had roughly 190,000 miles of track, more than all of Europe. Railroads created the first corporations large enough to need professional managers, the first national timetables and, in 1883, the four time zones we still use, adopted by the railroads before Congress ever acted. They also fed the industries that came next: every mile needed steel rails, every locomotive burned coal and every town along the line needed lumber, wire and oil.

Andrew Carnegie arrived from Scotland in 1848 at age twelve and went to work in a Pittsburgh textile mill for about a dollar a week. He became a telegraph messenger, then a railroad manager, then an investor. In the 1870s he bet everything on a new British process, the Bessemer converter, that blew air through molten iron to burn out impurities and make steel in minutes instead of days. Steel rails lasted many times longer than iron ones. Railroads lined up to buy.

Carnegie’s method was to own every step. He bought the iron mines, the coal fields, the coke ovens, the ships on the Great Lakes and the railroads that carried ore to his mills. Historians call this vertical integration. He watched costs obsessively, replaced older equipment the moment something better appeared and cut prices to drive rivals out. By 1900 Carnegie Steel produced more steel than all of Great Britain.

The men in the mills paid for that efficiency. They worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in heat that could blister skin, and hundreds died each year in accidents. In 1892 the union at Carnegie’s Homestead works near Pittsburgh refused a wage cut. His partner Henry Clay Frick locked the workers out and brought in three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives by barge. A gun battle killed several men on each side. The state militia then took the town, and the union was destroyed.

Carnegie was in Scotland during Homestead and later said he regretted it. In 1889 he had published an essay called Wealth, arguing that great fortunes were a trust the rich must spend for the public good in their own lifetimes. He sold his company to the banker J. P. Morgan in 1901 for about 480 million dollars, creating U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. He then gave away most of his fortune, paying for more than 2,500 public libraries, many of them in Illinois towns that still use the buildings.

Kerosene lit America’s lamps before electricity, and kerosene came from crude oil, first pumped in Pennsylvania in 1859. John D. Rockefeller, a quiet Cleveland bookkeeper, did not drill for oil. He refined it, and he set out to control refining. His main weapon was the rebate: he shipped so much oil that railroads secretly gave Standard Oil a discount and sometimes even paid him a cut of what his competitors shipped. Rivals could not match his prices. He offered to buy them out, and those who refused were driven under.

By the early 1880s Standard Oil controlled roughly ninety percent of the country’s refining. To manage companies in many states, Rockefeller’s lawyers invented the trust in 1882. Stockholders of forty companies handed their shares to nine trustees, who ran everything as one. Sugar, whiskey, lead and other industries copied the idea. A trust that controlled nearly a whole industry was a monopoly, and it could set prices as it pleased.

The public reaction was fierce. Cartoonists drew Standard Oil as an octopus with tentacles around the Capitol. The journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd, writing from Illinois, exposed the rebates in 1881. Farmers, small business owners and workers argued that monopoly was the enemy of the free competition the country claimed to believe in. In 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, declaring illegal every combination in restraint of trade. Its language was broad and vague, and for years courts used it more often against labor unions than against trusts.

Defenders of the trusts had an argument too. Rockefeller pointed out that kerosene prices fell steadily as Standard Oil grew; the company’s size let it build pipelines and research labs no small refiner could afford. Whether bigness was efficient or dangerous, or both, became one of the central debates of American life. In 1911 the Supreme Court finally broke Standard Oil into thirty-four companies. Rockefeller’s shares in all of them made him richer than ever.

Between 1880 and 1900 roughly nine million immigrants entered the United States, and in the next decade nearly nine million more. Earlier arrivals had mostly come from Germany, Ireland and Britain. The newcomers came from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece, Hungary and Bohemia, and on the West Coast from China and Japan. Most were Catholic, Jewish or Orthodox in a largely Protestant country. They came for the same reasons people always have: land was scarce at home, factories here paid cash wages and a steamship ticket cost a few weeks’ pay.

They landed in cities that were bursting. Chicago, New York and Pittsburgh could not build housing fast enough, so landlords divided old buildings into tenements, apartments with tiny rooms, shared toilets and windows facing an air shaft. A photographer named Jacob Riis, himself an immigrant from Denmark, carried a flash camera into New York tenements in the late 1880s. His pictures of children sleeping in alleys shocked middle-class readers who had never seen how the other half lived.

Immigrants answered hard conditions by building institutions of their own. Every large city grew ethnic neighborhoods with their own churches, newspapers, savings societies and mutual aid groups that paid for funerals and sick pay. Political machines, like the one that ran Chicago’s wards, traded jobs and favors for votes and were often the only government that noticed a new family. Reformers called the machines corrupt. Immigrants often called them the only help they got.

Suspicion of newcomers, called nativism, grew with their numbers. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law to bar a whole nationality from entering the country; it stayed in force for sixty-one years. Groups like the American Protective Association campaigned against Catholics. Yet the same newcomers laid the streetcar tracks, packed the meat and sewed the clothes that made the industrial city possible. By 1890 more than three-quarters of Chicago’s people were immigrants or their children.

On the night of October 8, 1871, a fire started in a barn on the Near West Side and, driven by dry wind, burned for two days. It destroyed about three and a half square miles of the city, killed roughly three hundred people and left some 100,000 homeless. The story that a cow kicked over a lantern was invented by a reporter, who admitted it years later. What is true is that within a week merchants were selling goods from tents on the rubble, and within a few years the burned district was rebuilt in brick and stone.

Chicago grew because of where it sat: at the tip of Lake Michigan, where the water routes from the East met the prairies and rail lines fanning west. Grain from Illinois and Iowa farms poured into the city’s elevators; lumber from Wisconsin forests filled its yards; cattle and hogs from the Plains arrived by the millions at the Union Stock Yards, which opened on Christmas Day 1865. Packers like Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift turned meatpacking into an assembly line in reverse, with each worker making one cut as the carcass moved past on an overhead rail. Swift’s refrigerated rail cars sent Chicago beef to New York.

The city’s population roughly doubled every decade. Land downtown became so valuable that builders wanted to go up, but brick walls could only hold so many stories. In 1885 the Home Insurance Building rose ten stories on a frame of iron and steel, with the walls hung on the frame instead of holding it up. Architects like Louis Sullivan made the skyscraper Chicago’s gift to the world. The city also reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900 so that its sewage would stop draining into the lake that supplied its drinking water.

For all its energy, Chicago was a hard place. Smoke from thousands of coal furnaces blackened the air, the stockyards’ smell reached for miles and neighborhoods like Packingtown, just west of the yards, had some of the highest death rates in the country. A visiting British writer in 1893 called Chicago the queen and guttersnipe of cities. Both halves were true, and the next lessons look at what happened when its workers demanded a share.

In the 1880s most industrial workers put in ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. The demand for an eight-hour day united skilled and unskilled workers as nothing else had. The Knights of Labor, which welcomed women, Black workers and the unskilled, grew to about 700,000 members by 1886. Unions set May 1, 1886, as the day for a nationwide strike for eight hours. In Chicago, the center of the movement, tens of thousands marched up Michigan Avenue.

Two days later, police fired on strikers at the McCormick reaper works on the Southwest Side, killing at least two. Anarchists, radicals who believed government itself was the tool of the rich, called a protest for the next evening at Haymarket Square on Randolph Street. The rally was peaceful and rain was falling when about 180 police marched in to break it up. Someone threw a bomb. It killed one officer instantly, and the gunfire that followed killed six more police and at least four civilians.

The bomb thrower was never identified. Instead, eight anarchists were tried for murder. The prosecution admitted none of them had thrown the bomb; it argued that their speeches and newspapers had inspired whoever did. The jury was openly hostile. Seven were sentenced to death. Four were hanged in November 1887, one killed himself in his cell, and three had their sentences reduced to prison. In 1893 Governor John Peter Altgeld studied the trial record, called it unfair and pardoned the three survivors, an act that ended his political career.

Haymarket wounded the labor movement. Newspapers linked all unions with bombs; the Knights of Labor collapsed within a few years. The American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886 under Samuel Gompers, survived by focusing on skilled workers and concrete demands: wages, hours, safety. Abroad, workers made May 1 an international labor holiday in memory of the Chicago martyrs. In the United States, Congress chose a September Labor Day instead. The monument to the police stands in Chicago; so does the monument to the hanged men, in a cemetery in Forest Park.

The chapter’s opening story told how the Pullman strike began. Look now at how it was won and lost. The American Railway Union’s boycott was effective because it spread; within days about 150,000 rail workers in twenty-seven states had refused to move trains with Pullman cars. Freight rotted in the yards, and Chicago, the nation’s rail hub, was the choke point. Union leaders told members to stay peaceful, and for most of June they did.

The railroads’ association, the General Managers’ Association, decided to make the strike a federal matter. Attaching Pullman cars to mail trains meant that any train stopped was a mail train stopped. On July 2 a federal judge issued an injunction, a court order forbidding the union from any act that interfered with the mails or with interstate commerce, including simply urging workers to strike. Two days later President Cleveland ordered federal troops into Chicago. Governor Altgeld protested that Illinois had not asked for them and could keep order itself.

The troops did not calm the city. Crowds that included many people who were not strikers overturned cars and set fires; on July 6 hundreds of rail cars burned. Soldiers and deputy marshals fired into crowds. Debs was arrested for violating the injunction. In 1895 the Supreme Court, in a case called In re Debs, ruled unanimously that the federal government could use injunctions to protect commerce and the mails. For the next four decades, the labor injunction became the employer’s most powerful weapon.

The strike also produced a strange gift. Six days after troops entered Chicago, Cleveland signed the law making the first Monday in September a federal holiday, Labor Day, partly to soothe workers’ anger. A federal commission that fall criticized both the union’s tactics and Pullman’s stubbornness and recommended that government arbitrate such disputes. Debs, reading in his cell, decided the system itself was the problem. He ran for president five times as a Socialist, the last time from prison.

A Kansas wheat farmer in 1890 could grow twice what his father had, thanks to steel plows and reapers, and earn less for it. Wheat that sold for about a dollar a bushel after the Civil War fell to roughly sixty cents by the mid-1890s, because farmers everywhere were producing more. Yet the farmer’s debts were fixed in dollars, and the railroad, often the only one in the county, charged whatever it liked to carry his grain. Grain elevators graded his wheat low; banks charged high interest. He felt squeezed from every side.

Farmers first organized through the Grange, a social and educational society founded in 1867. In Illinois and neighboring states, Granger pressure produced laws setting maximum rates for railroads and grain warehouses. In Munn v. Illinois (1877) the Supreme Court upheld Illinois’s warehouse law, ruling that a business clothed with a public interest could be regulated. Later rulings narrowed that idea, and in 1887 Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency, though it had little power at first.

By the 1890s farmers wanted more. Farmers’ Alliances in the South and Plains joined with some labor groups to form the People’s Party, the Populists. Their 1892 platform, written in Omaha, demanded government ownership of railroads and telegraphs, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, the secret ballot and free silver, the unlimited coining of silver to expand the money supply and raise prices. Their candidate won over a million votes. In the South, some Populists tried to unite Black and white farmers, until Democrats used race and fraud to split them.

In 1896 the Democrats took up free silver and nominated William Jennings Bryan, a thirty-six-year-old Nebraska congressman whose Cross of Gold speech electrified the convention in Chicago. The Populists backed him too. He lost to Republican William McKinley, who was backed by business and by workers who feared inflation. The People’s Party faded, but within twenty-five years the income tax, direct election of senators and the secret ballot were all law.

In 1868 the United States signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Lakota, promising them the Black Hills of South Dakota forever. In 1874 an army expedition led by George Armstrong Custer found gold there. Miners poured in, the government tried to buy the hills, the Lakota refused and the army moved to force them onto reservations. In June 1876, at the Little Bighorn River in Montana, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse wiped out Custer and more than two hundred of his men. It was the tribes’ greatest victory, and their last.

The army could not be beaten in the long run because the buffalo were gone. Herds that had numbered in the tens of millions in the 1860s were hunted almost to extinction by the early 1880s, partly for hides and partly on purpose, since army officers knew that a people who lived on buffalo could not fight without them. Railroads made the slaughter possible. Nation after nation, Nez Perce, Apache, Comanche, Lakota, was confined to a reservation, land set aside and controlled by the federal government, where rations were often late and short.

Reformers in the East believed the way to save Native people was to make them farmers who owned land as individuals. The Dawes Act of 1887 divided reservations into allotments, usually 160 acres for a head of household, and declared the rest surplus to be sold to white settlers. Boarding schools like Carlisle in Pennsylvania took children from their families, cut their hair and punished them for speaking their languages. The founder’s motto was to kill the Indian and save the man. Between 1887 and 1934, Native landholdings fell from about 138 million acres to about 48 million.

The Plains wars ended in December 1890 at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, where soldiers with rapid-fire guns killed roughly 250 or more Lakota men, women and children as they were being disarmed. Sitting Bull had been killed by reservation police two weeks earlier. Native nations did not vanish; they survived, kept their languages where they could and, a century later, went to court to win back rights the treaties had promised. The Black Hills case is still unresolved.

On May 1, 1893, President Cleveland pressed a button and the fountains of the World’s Columbian Exposition sprang to life in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side. The fair marked four hundred years since Columbus’s voyage, a year late. Chicago had beaten New York for the honor, and a New York editor’s sneer about the windy boasters on the lake is one story of how the city got its nickname. Architect Daniel Burnham led a team that built some two hundred white plaster buildings around lagoons: the White City, lit at night by electric lights, which most visitors had never seen.

About 27 million visits were recorded in six months, when the whole country held around 65 million people. Visitors saw the first Ferris wheel, 264 feet tall, and an early moving-picture machine. They ate a new snack called Cracker Jack and heard electricity explained by engineers working for George Westinghouse, who had won the contract to light the fair with alternating current. On the Midway, a mile-long strip of shows, they walked through villages of people brought from Egypt, Java and Dahomey and displayed as exhibits, a reminder of how the era ranked the world’s peoples.

Not everyone was invited in. The fair’s organizers gave Black Americans no part in planning it. Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass wrote and handed out a pamphlet at the gates explaining why the colored American was not in the exposition. A young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper to a meeting at the fair arguing that the frontier, which the 1890 census had declared closed, had shaped American character, and that its closing meant a new era. Historians have argued with him ever since.

Outside the gates the Panic of 1893 was under way. Banks were failing, unemployment in Chicago soared over the winter, and the following spring the Pullman strike began just a few miles south of Jackson Park. In July 1894 a fire destroyed most of the abandoned White City. The Museum of Science and Industry, housed in the one major building that survived, is the fair’s physical remnant. Its larger legacy was the question the whole Gilded Age raised: whether a country could build such beauty while so many of its people lived in Packingtown.

In 1904 a young socialist writer named Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago’s Packingtown, walking through the plants in workman’s clothes and talking to the families who lived in the shadow of the stockyards. His novel The Jungle, published in 1906, followed a Lithuanian immigrant family through injury, fraud, hunger and death. He meant it as an argument for socialism. What readers noticed were the chapters on meat: diseased cattle sold as beef, rats and sawdust swept into sausage, workers who fell into rendering vats.

Sinclair later said he had aimed at the public’s heart and hit it in the stomach. Within months, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, requiring federal inspection of packing plants and honest labels on food and medicine. Patent medicines that had been sold as cures for everything, some laced with alcohol, opium or cocaine, now had to list their ingredients. The packers themselves supported inspection, since European buyers had stopped trusting American meat.

Sinclair was one of a group of writers Theodore Roosevelt called muckrakers, after a character in an old story who was so busy raking filth that he never looked up. Roosevelt meant it as a partial insult; the writers wore it with pride. Ida Tarbell, whose father had been ruined by Standard Oil, spent five years in company records and published a history of the company in McClure’s Magazine that laid out the rebates and threats in detail. Lincoln Steffens traced bribery in city after city, including Chicago, in The Shame of the Cities.

What made muckraking possible was a new kind of magazine. Cheap paper, photographs and national advertising let McClure’s and its rivals sell for ten or fifteen cents and reach hundreds of thousands of middle-class readers. Those readers, many of them women who could not yet vote, wrote letters, joined clubs and pressed legislators. The pattern, investigate, publish, organize, legislate, became the standard method of the Progressive movement, the broad effort between about 1890 and 1920 to use government to fix the problems of the industrial age.

In 1900 the census counted about 1.75 million children between ten and fifteen at work, roughly one in six, and the true number was higher because many were younger than ten. Boys sorted coal in Pennsylvania breakers, breathing dust for ten hours a day. Girls tended spinning frames in Southern cotton mills, some so small they stood on boxes. In Chicago, children rolled cigars in tenement rooms and delivered messages at night. Families needed the wages; a father’s pay in a packinghouse often could not feed a household alone.

The most effective weapon against child labor was a camera. Lewis Hine, a schoolteacher, took a job as an investigator for the National Child Labor Committee in 1908 and spent years photographing children at work, often sneaking into factories by claiming to be a postcard salesman. He measured children against his coat buttons to record their height and wrote down their names and ages. The pictures, of a barefoot girl in a mill, of a newsboy asleep on a stoop, appeared in magazines and exhibits across the country.

Illinois had led with its 1893 factory law barring children under fourteen, though enforcement was weak and the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the law’s limit on women’s hours in 1895. In 1916 Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act, barring goods made by child labor from interstate commerce. Two years later, in Hammer v. Dagenhart, the Supreme Court struck it down, ruling that Congress could regulate commerce but not manufacturing, which belonged to the states. A second attempt using the tax power also failed. Federal child labor limits did not survive in court until 1941.

The wider problem was the workplace itself. In March 1911 a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York killed 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, because the owners kept a stairway door locked to prevent theft. Many jumped from the ninth floor. The state responded with the strongest factory safety laws in the country. A young factory inspector named Frances Perkins watched the fire from the street; twenty-two years later she became the first woman in a president’s cabinet and helped write the law that finally ended child labor.

When the Civil War ended, women who had fought against slavery expected the vote alongside Black men. The Fifteenth Amendment left them out, and the movement split over whether to support it. For decades the suffragists worked state by state. Wyoming Territory let women vote in 1869, and by 1896 Colorado, Utah and Idaho had followed, but every eastern state said no. Opponents, including many women, argued that politics would coarsen women and that the home, not the ballot box, was their sphere of influence.

The new century brought new tactics. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, led after 1915 by Carrie Chapman Catt, ran a disciplined campaign in every state and in Congress at once. In 1913 Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi to give women the vote for president and local offices, a law that suffragists across the country cited as proof that a big industrial state could be won. Chicago’s Black women’s clubs, led by Ida B. Wells, organized the Alpha Suffrage Club the same year and helped elect the city’s first Black alderman in 1915.

Alice Paul, a young Quaker who had learned militant tactics in Britain, thought lobbying was too slow. Her National Woman’s Party organized a parade of thousands in Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913; crowds attacked the marchers while police stood by. In 1917 her Silent Sentinels picketed the White House with banners asking how long women must wait for liberty. Arrested, jailed and force-fed when they went on hunger strike, they made the government look cruel and the cause urgent.

The First World War tipped the balance. Women filled jobs in factories, drove ambulances and sold war bonds, and Wilson finally endorsed the amendment in 1918 as a war measure. Congress passed it in June 1919, and Illinois ratified it on June 10, one of the first states to act. Tennessee provided the thirty-sixth ratification in August 1920 by a single vote, after a young legislator changed his mind on his mother’s advice. The Nineteenth Amendment was the largest single expansion of the electorate in American history. In the South, Black women, like Black men, would still be turned away for decades.

Theodore Roosevelt became president in September 1901 when an anarchist shot William McKinley. He was forty-two, the youngest president ever, a former New York police commissioner, rancher, war hero and governor who had been put on the ticket to get him out of the way. Within months he showed what he meant to do. In 1902 his Justice Department sued the Northern Securities Company, a railroad combination put together by J. P. Morgan, under the Sherman Act. Morgan came to the White House to ask if they could fix it up. Roosevelt said no. In 1904 the Supreme Court ordered the company dissolved.

That same year, 1902, about 140,000 Pennsylvania coal miners struck for higher pay and an eight-hour day. As winter approached, coal prices soared and cities faced cold. The mine owners refused to talk to the union. Roosevelt summoned both sides to the White House, the first time a president had treated a union as an equal party, and threatened to send the army to run the mines. The owners agreed to arbitration, and the miners won a raise and shorter hours. Roosevelt called it a square deal for everyone, and the phrase became his slogan.

Roosevelt did not oppose big business as such. He distinguished good trusts, which were efficient and behaved, from bad ones that cheated, and he preferred regulation to breaking companies up. He signed the Hepburn Act in 1906, giving the Interstate Commerce Commission real power to set railroad rates, and the food and drug laws of the same year. He believed a strong national government was the only force that could stand up to national corporations. Critics on the right called him a socialist; socialists called him a fraud.

His most lasting work was conservation. A lifelong outdoorsman who had watched the buffalo disappear, he used the power to set aside public land more than any president before him: about 230 million acres of national forests, parks, monuments and wildlife refuges, an area larger than Texas. With Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, he argued that forests and rivers should be managed for long-term public use, not sold off for quick profit. John Muir, who wanted wilderness left untouched, thought Pinchot’s approach did not go far enough. That argument continues.

William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, was a judge by temperament who moved carefully and disliked conflict. His administration actually brought more antitrust suits than Roosevelt’s, including one against U.S. Steel that Roosevelt took as a personal insult. But Taft sided with conservatives on tariffs and fired Pinchot in a dispute over Alaska coal lands. Roosevelt came home from an African safari convinced his friend had betrayed the cause and challenged him for the Republican nomination in 1912.

When party bosses gave Taft the nomination, Roosevelt walked out and formed the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party after he said he felt as strong as one. Its platform called for women’s suffrage, an end to child labor, workers’ compensation and a national health service. The split handed the election to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, a former Princeton president and New Jersey governor, who won with about forty-two percent of the vote. Eugene Debs, running as a Socialist, took about six percent, nearly a million votes, the party’s high point.

Wilson called his program the New Freedom and moved fast. In 1913 the Sixteenth Amendment allowed a federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment required that senators be elected by the people rather than chosen by state legislatures, two old Populist demands. The Underwood Tariff cut import duties and used the new income tax to replace the lost revenue. Then came the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created a central banking system with twelve regional banks, including one in Chicago, able to expand or tighten the money supply and lend to banks in a panic.

In 1914 Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened the Sherman Act and declared that labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, and created the Federal Trade Commission to police unfair business practices. On race, Wilson moved backward: his administration segregated federal offices in Washington, and he praised a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Progressivism could include the reformer and the segregationist in the same person, a fact students of the era cannot avoid.

Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, had been fighting for independence from Spain since 1895. Spanish forces herded villagers into camps where tens of thousands died of hunger and disease. American newspapers, especially those of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competing for readers in New York, printed lurid stories, some true and some invented, in a style critics called yellow journalism. Americans who owned Cuban sugar plantations wanted stability; others wanted a fight; many simply pitied the Cubans.

On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, killing about 260 sailors. The cause was never proven and was probably an accident in the coal bunkers, but the press blamed Spain. Congress declared war in April. The fighting lasted about ten weeks. Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in the Philippines in a morning. In Cuba, Roosevelt’s volunteer Rough Riders and the Black soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry took the heights above Santiago. About 2,400 Americans died, most of them from disease, not combat.

In the Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, Spain gave up Cuba and handed Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States, which paid 20 million dollars for the Philippines. Hawaii had been annexed that summer, five years after American planters overthrew its queen. Cuba became independent in name, but the Platt Amendment of 1901, written into Cuba’s constitution under pressure, gave the United States the right to intervene and a naval base at Guantanamo Bay that it still holds.

Secretary of State John Hay called it a splendid little war, and for a time it was popular. Supporters argued that the country needed markets, coaling stations for its navy and a place among the great powers, and that Americans had a duty to bring civilization to peoples they judged unready to govern themselves. Others, including Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers, founded the Anti-Imperialist League, arguing that a republic born in revolt against an empire could not become one without betraying its own founding. The Philippines would test that argument.

When Dewey’s ships arrived at Manila in 1898, Filipino rebels under Emilio Aguinaldo had already been fighting Spain for two years. They believed the Americans had come to help them win independence, and in June 1898 they declared a Philippine republic. President McKinley decided otherwise. He later said he had concluded that the Filipinos were unfit for self-government and that the United States must take the islands and uplift and civilize them. Most Filipinos were already Catholic and had a written constitution.

Fighting between American and Filipino forces began in February 1899, two days before the Senate ratified the treaty. The Philippine-American War lasted officially until 1902 and in some regions for years longer. It became a guerrilla war, and both sides committed atrocities. American troops burned villages, used a torture called the water cure and, in the province of Samar, were ordered to make the interior a howling wilderness. More than four thousand American soldiers died. Filipino deaths are harder to count; standard estimates run to roughly 200,000 or more, most of them civilians who died of famine and disease.

At home the war forced a debate the country had avoided. Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana argued that God had made Americans the master organizers of the world and that the Philippines were the door to China’s markets. The Anti-Imperialist League published soldiers’ letters describing the burned villages. Mark Twain wrote that the flag should have its white stripes painted black and the stars replaced with a skull and crossbones. The Supreme Court ruled in the Insular Cases of 1901 that the Constitution did not fully follow the flag, so people in the new territories were subject to American rule without American rights.

The United States built roads, schools and a public health system in the Philippines, and Filipino elites gradually took over local government. The islands became independent in 1946. Puerto Rico remains a U.S. territory whose residents are citizens but cannot vote for president, a status still debated. The question of 1899, whether a democracy can rule people who did not choose it, did not go away with the empire; it returned in every later argument about American power abroad.

In 1898 the battleship Oregon steamed from San Francisco around the tip of South America to join the war in Cuba, a trip of about 12,000 miles that took more than two months. A canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama would cut the voyage to about 4,000 miles. A French company had tried in the 1880s and failed, defeated by mudslides and by yellow fever and malaria that killed thousands of workers. Roosevelt wanted the canal for the navy and for trade, and he wanted it fast.

Panama belonged to Colombia, and in 1903 Colombia’s senate rejected the treaty the United States offered. Roosevelt was furious. That November, Panamanian leaders, working with the French company’s agent, declared independence. An American warship stood off the coast and prevented Colombian troops from landing. Within days the United States recognized Panama and signed a treaty giving it a ten-mile-wide Canal Zone forever, for 10 million dollars and rent. Roosevelt later said he took the canal and let Congress debate. Many Latin Americans have never forgotten it.

The dig itself began in 1904. The first task was medical. Dr. William Gorgas, who had helped rid Havana of yellow fever, had learned that mosquitoes carried both yellow fever and malaria. His crews drained swamps, screened windows, sprayed oil on standing water and fumigated houses. Yellow fever vanished from the Canal Zone within two years. The engineering plan changed from a sea-level ditch to a system of locks and a huge artificial lake, which meant damming a river and lifting ships eighty-five feet.

Most of the labor was done by tens of thousands of workers from the West Indies, especially Barbados and Jamaica, who were paid in silver while white American employees were paid in gold, ate in separate mess halls and lived in separate housing. Roughly 5,600 workers died during the American construction, most of them West Indian, from disease and accidents. The canal opened in August 1914, the same month the First World War began in Europe. The United States kept the Canal Zone until a treaty signed in 1977 returned it to Panama in stages, completed at the end of 1999.

In the spring of 1917 a young man in Mississippi reads a copy of the Chicago Defender that came north-to-south in a Pullman porter’s bag. It tells of jobs in the stockyards at wages three times what he earns picking cotton, of schools his children could attend all year and of a city where he can vote. He and thousands like him board the Illinois Central Railroad, whose tracks run straight from New Orleans to Chicago’s Twelfth Street Station. The Defender, founded by Robert Abbott in 1905, called it the Great Northern Drive.

The Great Migration had pushes and pulls. In the South, the boll weevil was destroying cotton, floods drowned farms and lynching went on unchecked. In the North, the war in Europe had cut off immigration, and factories making steel, meat and munitions for the Allies needed workers. Between about 1916 and 1920, roughly 500,000 Black Southerners moved north. Chicago’s Black population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to about 109,000 in 1920, and kept rising. Most settled in a narrow strip on the South Side that came to be called the Black Belt and later Bronzeville.

The migrants built institutions fast: churches like Olivet Baptist, which became one of the largest congregations in the country; the Defender itself; banks, insurance companies and the Wabash Avenue YMCA. Musicians from New Orleans brought jazz up the same railroad. In 1928 the district elected Oscar De Priest, the first Black congressman from the North. Black women who had been maids in Mississippi worked in packinghouses and garment shops for cash wages.

The North was not the promised land the Defender described. Landlords charged Black families more for worse housing and white property owners signed restrictive covenants promising never to sell to them, so the Black Belt grew more crowded rather than larger. White unions were often hostile, and packers used Black workers as strikebreakers, deepening the resentment. The migrants had come for freedom and found a different, less official kind of segregation. In the summer of 1919 those pressures exploded.

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, President Wilson asked Americans to be neutral in thought as well as deed. It was hard. Many Americans had roots in Germany or Ireland and disliked Britain; more traded with Britain and France and lent them money. In May 1915 a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania, killing about 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. Germany backed off from unrestricted submarine warfare for a time. Wilson won reelection in 1916 with the slogan that he kept us out of war.

In early 1917 Germany gambled: it resumed sinking all ships heading for Britain, betting it could starve Britain before America could act. The British then handed Wilson an intercepted telegram in which Germany’s foreign secretary, Zimmermann, offered Mexico help in recovering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it joined a war against the United States. On April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war, saying the world must be made safe for democracy. Six senators and fifty representatives voted no, including Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman in Congress.

The army had about 130,000 men; it would need millions. The Selective Service Act of 1917 registered about 24 million men and drafted nearly three million. The American Expeditionary Force under General John Pershing began arriving in France in the summer of 1917, and by the autumn of 1918 about two million American soldiers were there, including some 370,000 Black troops, most assigned to labor units, though the all-Black 369th Infantry, the Harlem Hellfighters, spent longer under fire than any other American regiment. Illinois’s own Black regiment, the 8th Illinois, fought as the 370th Infantry in France.

The Americans arrived as Germany made its last great offensive in the spring of 1918. Fresh troops at Belleau Wood and along the Marne helped stop it, and in the autumn more than a million Americans fought through the Meuse-Argonne forest in the war’s largest American battle. Germany asked for peace, and the fighting stopped at eleven in the morning on November 11, 1918. About 116,000 Americans died in the war, roughly half of them from disease, especially the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed some 675,000 Americans at home and abroad.

Wars are won with factories as much as with soldiers. The War Industries Board, run by financier Bernard Baruch, told companies what to make and set prices; the Food Administration under Herbert Hoover persuaded families to eat less wheat and meat with slogans rather than rationing. Some 20 million Americans bought Liberty Bonds to lend the government money. With millions of men in uniform, about a million women took jobs in munitions plants, railroads and offices, and the argument that women were doing their part helped win the suffrage amendment.

The government also sold the war. The Committee on Public Information, led by journalist George Creel, produced posters, films and 75,000 volunteer speakers, the Four Minute Men, who gave short patriotic talks in theaters. The campaign fed suspicion of anything German. Schools dropped German classes, orchestras stopped playing Beethoven and sauerkraut was renamed liberty cabbage. In Collinsville, Illinois, in April 1918 a mob lynched a German-born coal miner named Robert Prager; the men tried for it were acquitted in less than an hour.

Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, which made it a crime to say anything disloyal about the government, the flag or the military. About two thousand people were prosecuted. Eugene Debs, then sixty-two, gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, in June 1918 saying the working class had always fought the wars while the master class declared them. He got ten years in prison and ran for president from his cell in 1920, winning over 900,000 votes.

In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the conviction of a socialist who had mailed leaflets urging draftees to resist. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that speech could be punished when it created a clear and present danger, and added that even free speech would not protect a man who falsely shouted fire in a theater. Within months Holmes began to doubt his own rule and started writing dissents that argued for broad protection of dissent. Those dissents, not the Schenck ruling, became the law of free speech decades later.

On Sunday, July 27, 1919, a seventeen-year-old named Eugene Williams was floating on a railroad tie off the 29th Street beach on Chicago’s South Side. The beach had no legal color line but an understood one, and his raft drifted across it. White bathers threw stones; Williams went under and drowned. A white police officer refused to arrest the man witnesses pointed to. Fighting broke out on the beach and spread through the South Side by nightfall.

For seven days white gangs, many of them organized athletic clubs from the neighborhoods near the stockyards, attacked Black workers on streetcars and pulled them from their homes, and Black residents fought back and, in some cases, attacked whites who entered the Black Belt. By the time the state militia restored order, 38 people were dead, 23 Black and 15 white, more than 500 were injured and about a thousand families, mostly Black, had lost their homes to fire. Chicago’s was the worst of some two dozen outbreaks that summer, from Washington to Omaha to Elaine, Arkansas, in what the writer James Weldon Johnson called the Red Summer.

Illinois responded with something rare: an investigation. Governor Frank Lowden appointed the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, six Black and six white members, which spent two years studying housing, jobs, policing and the press. Its 1922 report, The Negro in Chicago, found that the riot grew out of competition for housing and work, hostile policing and newspapers that printed rumors. It recommended equal treatment and open housing. Most of its recommendations were ignored for decades, but its method, evidence before judgment, was the Progressive method applied to race.

Thirteen months after the beach, on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment became law and about 26 million women became eligible to vote. Two decades of reform had produced the income tax, the Federal Reserve, food safety, the direct election of senators, national forests and the largest expansion of the vote in the country’s history. It had also produced an empire, a wartime attack on free speech and a color line the reformers had mostly left alone. The next chapter picks up the story in a country that was about to try to forget all of it for a decade.