Unit 7 · America on the Move

The California Gold Rush of 1849 was only the beginning. In 1858 and 1859, gold was found near Pikes Peak in Colorado. In 1859, miners in Nevada struck a huge deposit of silver and gold called the Comstock Lode. News spread fast. Thousands of fortune seekers rushed to the mountains, hoping to strike it rich.

Near each strike, a boomtown popped up almost overnight. Virginia City, Nevada, grew from a few tents into a busy city with hotels, theaters and newspapers. Merchants, cooks, laundry workers and saloon owners often made more money than the miners did. Women ran boardinghouses and restaurants. Chinese, Mexican, Irish and Cornish miners all worked in the camps, though Chinese and Mexican miners often faced unfair taxes and violence.

Most single miners never got rich. The easy gold near the surface ran out quickly. Digging deep into rock took costly machines, so big mining companies took over. When the ore was gone, many towns emptied out and became ghost towns. Mining also brought settlers onto Native lands, which led to conflict across the West.

In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act. It gave two companies land and loans to build a railroad across the country. The Central Pacific started in Sacramento, California, and built east. The Union Pacific started in Omaha, Nebraska, and built west. This line would be the first transcontinental railroad, meaning it crossed the whole continent.

The Central Pacific had to cut through the steep Sierra Nevada mountains. It hired thousands of Chinese immigrants, who soon made up most of its workers. They blasted tunnels through solid granite and worked through deep snow. They were paid less than white workers and had to buy their own food. Many died in accidents and avalanches. On the Union Pacific, many workers were Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans.

On May 10, 1869, the two lines met at Promontory Summit in Utah. Leaders tapped in a ceremonial golden spike, and a telegraph message told the nation the job was done. A trip across the country that once took months by wagon now took about a week. More railroads followed. They brought settlers, carried cattle and crops to market, and changed the West forever.

After the Civil War, millions of longhorn cattle roamed Texas. A steer worth a few dollars in Texas could sell for much more in the North, where cities wanted beef. The answer was the cattle drive. Cowboys herded cattle hundreds of miles north to railroad towns in Kansas, such as Abilene. From there, trains carried the cattle to places like the Union Stock Yards in Chicago.

The cowboy’s skills came from Mexican vaqueros, who had herded cattle for generations. Words like lasso, rodeo and chaps come from Spanish. Cowboys were a mixed group. Many were Mexican or Mexican American. Historians estimate that perhaps one in four was Black, many of them formerly enslaved. Nat Love, a Black cowboy, later wrote a book about his life on the trail.

A drive could take two or three months. Cowboys faced storms, stampedes and river crossings for low pay. The era of long drives lasted only about twenty years. Railroads reached farther into Texas. Farmers fenced their land with barbed wire, a cheap fence invented by Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, in 1874. Then the terrible winter of 1886–1887 killed huge numbers of cattle, and the open range came to an end.

In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act. It offered 160 acres of public land to a settler who would live on it and farm it for five years. The settler paid only a small filing fee. Men, women who headed households, and immigrants who planned to become citizens could all apply. Hundreds of thousands of families, including many from Germany, Norway and Sweden, moved onto the Plains.

The Plains had few trees, so there was little wood for houses. Many settlers cut blocks of thick, grassy soil called sod and stacked them like bricks. These sod houses stayed warm in winter and cool in summer, but dirt fell from the ceiling, and snakes and mice sometimes came through the walls. Families burned dried buffalo or cow chips for fuel.

Life was hard. Blizzards, droughts, prairie fires and swarms of grasshoppers could ruin a year’s work. Women cooked, sewed, tended gardens, cared for animals and nursed the sick, often miles from the nearest neighbor. Children hauled water and herded animals. New tools helped: steel plows cut the tough sod, and windmills pumped water from deep underground. Still, many homesteaders gave up and moved away.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, life grew more dangerous for Black families in the South. Many were trapped in debt as sharecroppers. White groups used violence to keep them from voting. Many people began to look west for a fresh start. Kansas stood out. It had been a free state, and it had land for homesteading.

In 1879, thousands of Black Southerners traveled to Kansas. They called themselves Exodusters, after the Book of Exodus in the Bible, which tells how the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. Some came by steamboat up the Mississippi River. Others walked. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a formerly enslaved man from Tennessee, encouraged the move and helped start Black settlements.

One all-Black town, Nicodemus, Kansas, was founded in 1877. Its settlers lived in dugouts and sod houses at first. Farming was hard, and many arrived with almost nothing. Still, the Exodusters built churches, schools and farms. Their migration showed that freedpeople were willing to risk everything to own land and live with dignity.

By the 1870s, many farmers were in trouble. They grew more crops than ever, so prices fell. Many had borrowed money for land and machines and could not pay it back. Railroads charged high rates to ship their crops, and farmers often had only one railroad to choose from. Farmers felt that banks and railroads held all the power.

Farmers began to organize. The Grange, founded in 1867, started as a social club for farm families. It soon pushed states to pass laws limiting railroad and grain storage rates. In the case Munn v. Illinois in 1877, the Supreme Court ruled that a state could regulate businesses that served the public, such as grain warehouses in Chicago.

In 1892, farmers and workers formed the People’s Party, also called the Populist Party. Populists wanted the government to own the railroads, create an income tax, let voters elect senators directly, and coin more silver money so that farmers could pay off debts more easily. In 1896, Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who was born in Salem, Illinois, ran for president with Populist support. He lost to William McKinley, but many Populist ideas later became law.

Many nations lived on the Great Plains, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Crow and Pawnee. Some farmed along rivers. Others moved with the seasons, following the buffalo. After Spanish horses spread north in the 1600s and 1700s, many Plains peoples became skilled riders and hunters.

The buffalo gave Plains families food, clothing, shelter and tools. Plains nations also had their own governments, religions and ways of sharing land. As settlers, miners and railroads moved west, the U.S. government signed treaties with many nations. Treaties promised land that would be theirs forever. Again and again, the promises were broken when settlers wanted the land.

The government pushed Plains nations onto reservations, areas of land set aside for them. Reservations were often small and poor for farming. Government food and supplies often came late or not at all. When the buffalo herds were destroyed in the 1870s and 1880s, Plains nations lost their main source of food. Many felt they had no choice but to fight or to move onto reservations.

In November 1864, a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people was resting at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory. Their leaders believed they were at peace with the United States. One chief, Black Kettle, flew an American flag over his lodge. Colorado soldiers led by John Chivington attacked anyway. They killed more than 150 people, most of them women, children and elders. A later government investigation condemned the attack. It is now known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

In 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie promised the Black Hills to the Lakota. The Black Hills were sacred to them. But in 1874, an army expedition led by George Armstrong Custer reported gold there. Miners poured in, and the government pressured the Lakota to give up the land. Lakota and Cheyenne people who refused to move to reservations gathered around leaders such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

On June 25, 1876, Custer’s soldiers attacked a large village near the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors fought back and killed Custer and all the soldiers with him. It was a great victory for the Plains nations, but it did not last. The army sent more troops, and within about a year most of the fighters had been forced onto reservations. The government took the Black Hills.

The Nez Perce lived in the valleys of what are now Oregon, Idaho and Washington. For years they were at peace with Americans. They even helped Lewis and Clark in 1805. But settlers wanted their land. In 1877, the government ordered one band of Nez Perce, led in part by a young chief named Joseph, to leave the Wallowa Valley and move to a small reservation.

Fighting broke out after a few young Nez Perce men killed some settlers. Fearing punishment for the whole band, about 800 Nez Perce fled. For more than three months, they traveled over 1,000 miles through mountains, heading for Canada. Families, elders and children made the journey, along with their horses. Again and again they held off the soldiers who chased them.

In October 1877, the army caught up with them in Montana, only about 40 miles from the Canadian border. Cold, hungry and exhausted, Joseph and his people surrendered. They had been promised they could go home, but instead they were sent to Kansas and then to Indian Territory, where many died of disease. Joseph spent the rest of his life asking the government to let his people return to their homeland.

By the 1880s, many reformers in the East said they wanted to help Native Americans. But their plan was assimilation, which meant making Native people give up their own ways and live like white Americans. The government and churches built boarding schools, often far from reservations. Children were sent there, sometimes by force.

The most famous was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879. Students had their hair cut and their clothes replaced with uniforms. They were given English names and punished for speaking their own languages. Many were deeply lonely, and some died of disease far from home. Still, many students held on to their identity, and some later became leaders for their nations.

In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act. It broke up reservation land into separate plots, usually 160 acres for each head of a family. Land left over was sold to white settlers. Supporters said owning farms would help Native families. Instead, much of the land ended up in outside hands. Native landholdings fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million acres by 1934.

By 1890, life on the reservations was hard. Food was short, and the old ways were forbidden. Many Lakota joined a new religious movement called the Ghost Dance. Believers danced and prayed for a time when the buffalo would return and the settlers would leave. Government agents feared the Ghost Dance would lead to an uprising.

In December 1890, reservation police killed Sitting Bull while trying to arrest him. Soon after, soldiers stopped a band of Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. On December 29, as soldiers took their weapons, a shot went off. The soldiers opened fire. Hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were killed. The Wounded Knee Massacre marked the end of the armed fight for the Plains.

That same year, the U.S. Census reported that there was no longer a clear frontier line, a border between settled and unsettled land. In 1893, at a meeting in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier had shaped the American character. He said it made Americans independent and democratic. Later historians pointed out that his idea left out the Native nations who had lived on that "free land" all along.

After the Civil War, the United States became an industrial nation, where factories and machines made more and more of what people used. Three things helped power this change: steel, oil and electricity. The country also had plenty of coal, iron, timber and workers, plus railroads to move goods.

Steel is stronger than iron, but it used to be slow and costly to make. The Bessemer process, developed in the 1850s, blew air through melted iron to burn out impurities. Suddenly steel could be made cheaply and in huge amounts. Steel became rails, bridges, machines and the frames of tall buildings. Pittsburgh became a great steel city, and Chicago’s mills grew too.

In 1859, a well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, struck oil. At first, oil was refined into kerosene for lamps. Later, gasoline powered cars. Meanwhile, electricity began to light homes and streets and run factory machines. These new industries created millions of jobs, but many of those jobs were dangerous and poorly paid.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the telephone. A patent is a government paper that says only the inventor may make and sell an invention for a set time. Within a few decades, telephones linked homes and businesses across the country. People no longer had to send a letter or telegram to talk with someone far away.

Thomas Edison set up a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where teams of workers tested ideas day and night. Edison’s lab produced the phonograph, which recorded sound, and a long-lasting light bulb in 1879. In 1882, his company opened a power station in New York City that sent electricity to nearby buildings.

Lewis Latimer, the son of parents who escaped slavery, taught himself mechanical drawing. He drew the patent drawings for Bell’s telephone. Later he improved the carbon filament, the thin thread inside a light bulb that glows, helping bulbs last longer and cost less. Latimer worked for Edison’s company and wrote a book about electric lighting. His story shows that Black inventors helped build the modern world.

Big industries needed huge amounts of money. Many businesses became corporations, companies owned by many people who buy shares called stock. Some corporations grew so large that they controlled almost a whole industry. A company with no real competition is called a monopoly. Without competitors, it can set high prices and low wages.

Andrew Carnegie came to America from Scotland as a poor boy and worked in a cotton mill. He built a steel empire by owning every step of making steel, from iron mines to ships and railroads. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil. He bought out or pushed aside rival refiners. By around 1880, Standard Oil controlled about 90 percent of the oil refining in the United States. Rockefeller joined companies together in a trust, which let a few people run them all.

People argued about these men. Critics called them robber barons. They said the owners got rich by crushing rivals and paying workers little. Supporters called them captains of industry who created jobs and cheaper goods. Both men gave away huge fortunes. Carnegie paid for more than 2,500 public libraries. Rockefeller helped start the University of Chicago. In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to try to break up monopolies.

Before 1880, most immigrants came from northern and western Europe, such as Ireland, Germany and Britain. After 1880, more and more came from southern and eastern Europe: Italy, Greece, Poland, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Others came from China, Japan, Mexico, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Historians call this the era of the new immigrants.

People left home for many reasons. These are called push factors: poverty, lack of land, hunger, and persecution. Jews in the Russian Empire faced violent attacks called pogroms. Pull factors drew people to America: jobs in factories and mines, cheap land, freedom of religion, and letters from relatives who had already made the trip.

Most immigrants crossed the ocean crowded below deck in steamships. Once here, many settled in cities near others from their homeland. They built churches, synagogues, newspapers, mutual aid clubs and shops. Chicago became home to large Polish, Italian, Czech, Swedish, German and Irish communities. Immigrants did much of the hard work that built American cities and industries.

Starting in 1892, most European immigrants arriving in New York passed through Ellis Island, near the Statue of Liberty. Doctors checked them for disease. Officials asked their names, jobs and where they were going. For most, the process took a few hours. Only about 2 percent were turned away, usually for illness. Millions of Americans today have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island.

On the West Coast, many immigrants arrived at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, which opened in 1910. Most were from China. Because of laws that kept most Chinese people out, officials questioned them for days about tiny details of their families and villages. Some were held for weeks or even months.

While they waited, some Chinese detainees carved poems into the wooden walls. The poems speak of loneliness, anger and hope. Many of them can still be read today. Angel Island also processed immigrants from Japan, Korea, India, Mexico, Russia and other countries.

Chinese immigrants had worked in the gold fields and built the Central Pacific Railroad. Many opened laundries, restaurants and farms. But some white workers blamed them for low wages and lost jobs. This feeling against immigrants is called nativism. In the West, Chinese people faced unfair taxes, riots and attacks.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It stopped Chinese workers from entering the country and kept Chinese immigrants already here from becoming citizens. It was the first major U.S. law to shut out people because of their nationality. It was later renewed and made permanent. It was not repealed until 1943, during World War II, when China was an American ally.

Chinese Americans fought back in court. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. When he returned from a trip to China, officials tried to keep him out. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that because he was born in the United States, he was a citizen under the 14th Amendment. That ruling still protects the citizenship of people born in the United States.

Factories needed workers, and workers needed homes. People poured into cities from farms and from other countries. In the crowded parts of town, families lived in tenements, cheap apartment buildings with small, dark rooms. Many had little fresh air, no bathrooms inside and a real danger of fire and disease.

In October 1871, a fire broke out on Chicago’s West Side. Strong winds pushed it across the city. The Great Chicago Fire burned for about two days. It killed about 300 people and left about 100,000 homeless. Much of downtown was destroyed. Chicagoans rebuilt fast, this time with more brick, stone and iron.

In the 1880s, Chicago architects began building skyscrapers, tall buildings held up by frames of iron and steel instead of thick walls. The Home Insurance Building, finished in 1885, is often called the first skyscraper. Safe elevators made tall buildings practical. Electric streetcars let people live farther from work. In 1893, Chicago showed off its new strength by hosting a huge world’s fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Crowded cities had many problems: dirty water, garbage, crime and fire. Two very different groups stepped in to help newcomers. One was the settlement house, a center where reformers lived in a poor neighborhood and offered classes, child care and other help. Hull House in Chicago was the best known. By 1900, there were about a hundred settlement houses across the country.

The other was the political machine, a group that controlled a city’s government. A machine was led by a boss. Its workers found immigrants jobs, gave families coal in winter and helped people in trouble with the law. In return, they expected votes. The most famous machine was Tammany Hall in New York City.

Machines were often corrupt. Bosses took bribes and gave city contracts to friends at high prices. New York’s Boss William Tweed and his friends stole millions of dollars from the city before he was sent to prison in the 1870s. Reformers wanted to replace machines with honest, well-run city governments.

Factory jobs were hard. Many people worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Machines had no safety guards, and injuries were common. If a worker was hurt, there was usually no pay while they healed. Wages were so low that whole families had to work, including children.

By 1900, well over a million children under 16 had jobs. Children worked in textile mills, coal mines, canneries and city streets. Their small hands could fix threads on spinning machines or sort coal. They missed school, and many were injured or became sick. Child labor became one of the biggest issues of the era.

Workers joined together in labor unions to bargain as a group. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, welcomed almost all workers, including women and Black workers. In 1886, Samuel Gompers helped start the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which brought together unions of skilled workers. Unions pushed for higher pay, safer shops and the eight-hour day. When talks failed, workers might go on strike, refusing to work until their demands were met.

In May 1886, workers across the country marched for an eight-hour workday. In Chicago, police shot and killed strikers near the McCormick Reaper Works. On May 4, workers held a protest rally at Haymarket Square. As police moved in to break it up, someone threw a bomb. Police officers and people in the crowd were killed. No one ever proved who threw the bomb.

Eight men with anarchist ideas, who believed in getting rid of government, were convicted. Four were hanged. Many people blamed unions for the violence, and the Knights of Labor lost members. In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three men still in prison. He said their trial had been unfair.

George Pullman built railroad sleeping cars. His workers lived in Pullman, a company town just south of Chicago. In 1894, during hard times, he cut wages but did not lower rents. Workers went on strike. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, refused to handle trains with Pullman cars, and rail traffic across much of the country stopped. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops, a court ordered the strike to end, and Debs went to jail. The strike was crushed.

In the South, states passed Jim Crow laws that separated Black and white people in schools, trains, parks and restaurants. This separation is called segregation. States also used poll taxes and unfair tests to stop Black men from voting. In the North, segregation was often not written into law, but Black Americans still faced unfair treatment in jobs and housing.

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race, sat in a whites-only train car in Louisiana to test the law. He was arrested. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was legal as long as facilities were "separate but equal." In real life, facilities for Black Americans were almost never equal. Only one justice, John Marshall Harlan, disagreed.

Ida B. Wells was a journalist born into slavery in Mississippi. After three of her friends were murdered by a mob in Memphis, she began to investigate lynching, the killing of people by mobs without a trial. She showed that lynching was a tool of terror, not justice. Threatened with death, she moved north and later settled in Chicago, where she kept writing, organizing and fighting for equal rights.

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia. He became head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school that trained Black students in trades, farming and teaching. In an 1895 speech in Atlanta, Washington said Black Americans should build skills and wealth first, and not push hard for social equality right away. Many white leaders praised his view.

W.E.B. Du Bois was born free in Massachusetts and was the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard. He disagreed with Washington. Du Bois said Black Americans should demand full rights now, including voting rights and a good education. He believed a talented group of educated leaders should lead the fight. In 1903, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk.

In 1909, Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Jane Addams and others helped found the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It used lawsuits, protests and its magazine, The Crisis, which Du Bois edited, to fight discrimination. The NAACP would win major court cases in the decades that followed.

Around 1900, many Americans believed the country needed fixing. Cities were crowded and dirty. Big businesses had huge power. Governments were often corrupt. People who wanted to use government and science to solve these problems were called Progressives. They came from both major parties and many walks of life.

Some of the most important Progressives were writers. Theodore Roosevelt called them muckrakers, after a character in an old book who was always raking up dirt. He meant it partly as a complaint, but the writers wore the name with pride. Their job was to dig up hidden facts and tell the public.

Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, used a camera and flash powder to photograph dark tenements in New York. His 1890 book How the Other Half Lives shocked readers. Ida Tarbell spent years studying Standard Oil. Her articles, published between 1902 and 1904, showed how Rockefeller had crushed rivals. Lincoln Steffens wrote about corrupt city governments. Their work led to new laws and reforms.

Chicago’s Union Stock Yards were the center of the nation’s meat industry. Thousands of workers, many of them immigrants from Lithuania, Poland and other lands, worked in the packinghouses nearby. The work was fast, dangerous and poorly paid.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about a Lithuanian immigrant family in Chicago’s packinghouse district. Sinclair wanted readers to care about the workers. But readers were most shocked by what the book said about the meat itself: rats, filth and spoiled meat mixed into products sold to the public. Sales of meat dropped.

President Theodore Roosevelt sent inspectors to Chicago. They found many of the problems were real. In 1906, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act, which required government inspectors to check meat. It also passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which banned harmful or falsely labeled foods and medicines. These laws were the start of the government’s role in keeping food and medicine safe.

Progressives believed that party bosses and big businesses had too much control over government. Their answer was to give voters more direct power. One step was the secret ballot, so voters could choose in private without being pressured. Another was the direct primary, an election in which voters, not party leaders, choose a party’s candidates.

Wisconsin, led by Governor Robert La Follette, became a model of Progressive reform. Other states, such as Oregon, adopted three new tools. The initiative lets citizens propose a law by gathering signatures. The referendum lets voters approve or reject a law directly. The recall lets voters remove an elected official before the term ends.

Before 1913, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, which party bosses and wealthy interests could sway. The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, let voters in each state elect their senators directly. Progressives also worked to improve city government by hiring trained experts to run services like water and garbage collection.

In 1901, President William McKinley was shot and killed. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, only 42 years old, became the youngest president in the nation’s history. Roosevelt was full of energy. He believed the president should act boldly for the public good. He promised Americans a Square Deal, meaning fair treatment for business owners, workers and consumers alike.

Roosevelt did not think all big businesses were bad. But he believed "bad trusts" that harmed the public should be broken up. In 1904, the Supreme Court agreed with his government that a giant railroad company, Northern Securities, broke the Sherman Antitrust Act. Roosevelt’s government brought dozens of lawsuits against trusts. People called him a trustbuster.

In 1902, coal miners in Pennsylvania went on strike. As winter came, people feared they would have no coal to heat their homes. Past presidents had sent troops to break strikes. Roosevelt instead brought both sides to the White House and pushed them to accept a settlement. Miners won higher pay and shorter hours. It was the first time a president stepped in as a neutral judge in a labor dispute.

By 1900, loggers had cut down huge forests, and hunters had wiped out or nearly wiped out several kinds of animals. Roosevelt believed natural resources belonged to the whole nation, including future generations. This idea is called conservation. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created, led by Gifford Pinchot.

Pinchot and John Muir were both conservationists, but they disagreed. Pinchot believed in "wise use." Forests, rivers and grasslands should be used for timber, water and grazing, but carefully, so they would last. Muir believed in preservation. Some wild places should be left untouched, protected for their beauty and for nature itself.

Their biggest fight was over Hetch Hetchy, a valley inside Yosemite National Park. The growing city of San Francisco wanted to dam the valley to supply water. Muir fought hard to save it. Pinchot supported the dam. In 1913, Congress approved it, and the valley was flooded. The debate between using land and preserving it continues today.

William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s chosen successor, became president in 1909. Taft actually brought more antitrust lawsuits than Roosevelt did. In 1911, the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil. But Taft sided with more conservative Republicans on some issues, and Roosevelt grew angry. In 1912, Roosevelt ran against Taft as the candidate of a new Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.

The split among Republicans helped Democrat Woodrow Wilson win. Wilson called his plan the New Freedom. In 1913, the 16th Amendment allowed Congress to collect an income tax. That same year, Congress created the Federal Reserve, a system of banks that manages the nation’s money supply. In 1914, the Clayton Antitrust Act strengthened the rules against monopolies and protected unions’ right to strike, and the Federal Trade Commission was set up to stop unfair business practices.

Progressive reform had limits. Many Progressives cared little about the rights of Black Americans. Wilson allowed several federal departments to segregate their Black and white workers. Black leaders who had hoped for fair treatment protested strongly.

The fight for woman suffrage, or women’s right to vote, began at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. After the Civil War, many suffragists were angry that the 15th Amendment protected Black men’s voting rights but said nothing about women. In 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed a group to push for a constitutional amendment.

In 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, tried and fined $100. She refused to pay. Anthony traveled the country giving speeches for decades. She died in 1906, before women won the vote nationally, but the 19th Amendment would later be nicknamed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

Change came first in the West. Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869. By 1914, most western states had followed. In 1913, Illinois let women vote for president and in many local elections, the first state east of the Mississippi River to do so. That year, Ida B. Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago to help Black women use their new votes.

By the 1910s, suffragists used two different plans. Carrie Chapman Catt led the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her "Winning Plan" worked state by state while also pressing Congress. She believed in patient, polite persuasion. Alice Paul, a younger leader, chose bolder action. Her group, later called the National Woman’s Party, held parades and protests to get attention.

In 1917, Alice Paul’s group began picketing outside the White House. The women, called the Silent Sentinels, held signs asking President Wilson how he could fight for democracy abroad while women at home could not vote. Many were arrested and jailed. When some went on a hunger strike, guards force-fed them. News of this treatment won the suffragists public sympathy.

Women’s work during World War I also strengthened their case. Wilson came to support suffrage. Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919, and it was ratified in August 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it. Still, many Black women in the South were kept from voting by Jim Crow laws. Many Native American women could not vote because they were not yet treated as citizens.

European nations were racing to build empires by taking control of lands in Africa and Asia. This practice is called imperialism. Many American leaders wanted the United States to join the race. Businesses wanted new markets for their goods. Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that a great nation needed a strong navy and bases around the world. Some Americans also believed, wrongly, that their culture was better than others and should be spread.

In 1867, Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. Critics mocked the deal as "Seward’s Folly." Their view changed when gold and other riches were found there. Alaska later became a state in 1959.

Hawaii was an independent kingdom. American planters grew rich there growing sugar. In 1893, the planters overthrew Queen Liliuokalani with help from U.S. Marines. The queen gave up her power under protest to avoid bloodshed. The United States annexed Hawaii in 1898. Many Native Hawaiians opposed the takeover, and in 1993 Congress formally apologized for the overthrow.

Cuba, an island just 90 miles from Florida, was a Spanish colony. In 1895, Cubans rose up to fight for independence. Spain fought back harshly, forcing many Cubans into crowded camps where many died. American newspapers printed shocking and sometimes exaggerated stories. This style of sensational reporting was called yellow journalism.

In February 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, and more than 250 sailors died. The cause was never proven, but many Americans blamed Spain. "Remember the Maine!" became a rallying cry. In April 1898, the United States declared war.

The war lasted only a few months. Commodore George Dewey’s ships destroyed a Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in the Philippines. In Cuba, Theodore Roosevelt’s volunteer Rough Riders and Black soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry fought at San Juan Hill. In the peace treaty, Spain gave the United States Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Cuba became independent, but the U.S. kept the right to step into its affairs.

Filipinos had been fighting Spain for their independence. Their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, expected freedom when Spain lost. Instead, the United States took control of the islands. In 1899, war broke out between Filipino fighters and American troops. The Philippine-American War lasted about three years of major fighting and cost many more lives than the war with Spain, most of them Filipino.

At home, Americans argued. Supporters of the new empire said the islands would help trade and the navy. Some said Americans had a duty to govern the Filipinos. The Anti-Imperialist League strongly disagreed. Its members included writer Mark Twain and Jane Addams of Hull House. They said ruling people without their consent went against the Declaration of Independence.

The United States ruled the Philippines for decades. It built schools and roads, but Filipinos were not free to govern themselves. The Philippines finally became independent in 1946. Puerto Rico and Guam remain U.S. territories today. People born in Puerto Rico have been U.S. citizens since 1917.

Ships going from New York to San Francisco had to sail all the way around South America. A canal across Central America would save weeks. The best route crossed Panama, which was then part of Colombia. When Colombia refused Roosevelt’s offer, Panamanian rebels declared independence in 1903. U.S. warships helped keep Colombia from stopping them. The new nation quickly gave the United States the right to build a canal.

Building the Panama Canal took ten years, from 1904 to 1914. Workers dug through mountains and jungle. Diseases spread by mosquitoes, yellow fever and malaria, had killed thousands during an earlier French attempt. Dr. William Gorgas led a campaign to drain swamps and kill mosquitoes, which saved many lives. Tens of thousands of workers, many from Barbados, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, did the hardest and most dangerous jobs. Thousands died.

Roosevelt believed the United States should be a strong power in its own region. In 1904, he announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It said the U.S. could step in to Latin American countries that could not keep order or pay their debts. The U.S. later sent troops to several Caribbean and Central American countries. Many Latin Americans resented this intervention.