relations was not only the worst consequence of the period’s economic weakness, but also its most enduring. “It is one of the most unfortunate coincidences of United States history,” wrote Friedman, “that what was at the time the most pronounced period of economic stagnation since the founding of the republic set in just as Reconstruction ended and the federal government finally withdrew its troops from the defeated southern states.… No one will ever know whether the country’s race relations, both in the South and elsewhere, would have taken a different course had economic times been better during this key period.”
Like other forms of intolerance, racial discrimination and violence built slowly, reaching full flower only after years of economic anxiety and disappointment had passed. Reconstruction had ended in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that most southern states began to enact the Jim Crow laws that would segregate society for generations, supported by a Supreme Court that had grown steadily less forceful in its support for equal rights. Demagogues gained traction;“Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, for example, won the governorship of South Carolina in 1890, and then a U.S. Senate seat. He called for the repeal of black voting rights and openly defended lynching.
In nearly every aspect, American politics and government became more reactionary. The Populist movement, a predominantly rural movement that is today identified mostly as an effort to abandon the gold standard, was also highly insular, xenophobic, and at times tinged by racism (although it solicited and received support from black farmers, particularly in its early days). “The populists sought to preserve the agrarian and small-town economy, and the way of life based on it, that had been America’s past,” wrote Friedman.
They were angered by perceived exploitation, and emboldened by a sense of moral superiority. Populism was, correspondingly, an expression of resentment as well as resistance to the advance of the capitalist, industrialist, and therefore more urbanized economy that was to become America’s future.… In their specific policy proposals and even more so in their broader social and cultural agenda, the populists represented a turning backward: a closing of American society, a rigidification, and in many ways a retreat from tolerance, in the face of continual economic disappointment.
The Populist movement was of course diffuse and dynamic, and reactionary thinking jostled with progressive ideas, support for women’s suffrage being perhaps the most notable. But neither women’s suffrage nor other policies that would have expanded individual rights actually advanced as long as hard times endured. Instead, many rights and freedoms were curtailed, and civic life diminished.
“T HERE IS SCARCELY a workman, whatever the present comfort of his life, who is not oppressed by the horrible nightmare of a possible loss of his situation,” reported the
Labor Leader
in 1893. “No faithfulness,no skill, no experience can protect him against the danger of being cast adrift with his family at the next shift of the market. He is part of the grist in the great mill of demand and supply, and when his time comes it remorselessly crushes him between its iron rollers.”
The language of a budding labor movement was at times drenched in Marxism by the 1890s, prompting revolutionary fears among some members of the American elite. Other elites—troubled by society’s unbridled greed; or by the dissipation that characterized city life in hard times; or even by the closing of the American frontier, and with it, the presumed loss of the pioneer spirit—feared the onset of American decline.
Of course, none of this came to pass. The discovery of new gold deposits and better mining techniques increased the gold supply and put an end to deflation. Bad harvests in Europe helped American farmers. And manufacturing technology continued to advance,
Like other forms of intolerance, racial discrimination and violence built slowly, reaching full flower only after years of economic anxiety and disappointment had passed. Reconstruction had ended in 1879, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that most southern states began to enact the Jim Crow laws that would segregate society for generations, supported by a Supreme Court that had grown steadily less forceful in its support for equal rights. Demagogues gained traction;“Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, for example, won the governorship of South Carolina in 1890, and then a U.S. Senate seat. He called for the repeal of black voting rights and openly defended lynching.
In nearly every aspect, American politics and government became more reactionary. The Populist movement, a predominantly rural movement that is today identified mostly as an effort to abandon the gold standard, was also highly insular, xenophobic, and at times tinged by racism (although it solicited and received support from black farmers, particularly in its early days). “The populists sought to preserve the agrarian and small-town economy, and the way of life based on it, that had been America’s past,” wrote Friedman.
They were angered by perceived exploitation, and emboldened by a sense of moral superiority. Populism was, correspondingly, an expression of resentment as well as resistance to the advance of the capitalist, industrialist, and therefore more urbanized economy that was to become America’s future.… In their specific policy proposals and even more so in their broader social and cultural agenda, the populists represented a turning backward: a closing of American society, a rigidification, and in many ways a retreat from tolerance, in the face of continual economic disappointment.
The Populist movement was of course diffuse and dynamic, and reactionary thinking jostled with progressive ideas, support for women’s suffrage being perhaps the most notable. But neither women’s suffrage nor other policies that would have expanded individual rights actually advanced as long as hard times endured. Instead, many rights and freedoms were curtailed, and civic life diminished.
“T HERE IS SCARCELY a workman, whatever the present comfort of his life, who is not oppressed by the horrible nightmare of a possible loss of his situation,” reported the
Labor Leader
in 1893. “No faithfulness,no skill, no experience can protect him against the danger of being cast adrift with his family at the next shift of the market. He is part of the grist in the great mill of demand and supply, and when his time comes it remorselessly crushes him between its iron rollers.”
The language of a budding labor movement was at times drenched in Marxism by the 1890s, prompting revolutionary fears among some members of the American elite. Other elites—troubled by society’s unbridled greed; or by the dissipation that characterized city life in hard times; or even by the closing of the American frontier, and with it, the presumed loss of the pioneer spirit—feared the onset of American decline.
Of course, none of this came to pass. The discovery of new gold deposits and better mining techniques increased the gold supply and put an end to deflation. Bad harvests in Europe helped American farmers. And manufacturing technology continued to advance,
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