Ch.8, Sec.1- Politics in the Gilded Age

Laissez-faire Policies

• Laissez-faire- A French phrase that says means that government should play a limited role in business. Supporters of this believe if the government does not interfere, the strongest businesses will succeed and bring wealth to the nation.

• This phrase was mainly developed by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations. Most businesses in the U.S. supported this until they needed the government’s help, then they didn’t.

The Spoils System

• Under the spoils system, elected officials appointed friends and supporters to government jobs, regardless of their qualifications. Soon, the government had several unqualified, dishonest employees, which led to corruption.

Garfield’s Term Cut Short

• On July 2, 1881, a mentally unstable lawyer named Charles Guiteau shot Garfield at a Washington D.C. railroad station. Garfield died 3 days later. It was later learned Guiteau expected a government job from Garfield. When he didn’t get it, he murdered the president. This caused more people to be against the spoils system. Chester Arthur then became president.

Sec.2- People on the Move

Immigrants Hopes and Dreams

• In 1860, the resident population of the U.S. was 31.5 million people. Between 1865 and 1920, close to 30 million more people entered the country.

• They came to get rich, receive free land through the Homestead Act, and get personal freedoms. The immigrants heard in the U.S., everyone could go to school, young men were not forced to serve in the military, and citizens could take part in a democratic government.

• In the 1880s, Russia was experiencing a wave of pogroms, or violence against Jews. America offered them freedom of religion and the opportunity to start a new life.

Arriving in America

• These immigrants arriving usually came in steerage, which was a large open area beneath the ship’s deck that had limited toilets, no privacy, and poor food, but it was cheap.

• 70 percent of all immigrants came through New York City, which was called the “Golden Door”

Physical Exams

• In 1892, the federal government required all new immigrants to undergo a physical examination. Those who were found to have a contagious disease like tuberculosis were quarantined, which was a time of isolation to prevent the spread of a disease. Some could even be deported. For example, if they had trachoma, an eye disease, they were automatically deported.

Ghettos

• Ghettos, an area in which one ethnic or racial group dominated, formed in the U.S. as immigrants arrived. Some formed because immigrants wanted to live with their own ethnic group, some because of threats from whites, and some from restrictive covenants, which was an agreement among homeowners not to sell real estate to certain groups of people.

Chinese Excluded

• Chinese immigrants were disliked by American workers because they would work for less wages, taking jobs from Americans and causing wages to drop. Some white Americans claimed Asians were physically and mentally inferior to white Americans.

• Congress responded by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country. It did allow ones who were already here to stay. The act was not repealed until 1943.

Japanese Restricted

• Most Japanese immigrants came from Hawaii.• Japanese immigrants also faced prejudice. For example,

San Francisco ruled that all Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans must attend a separate school. The Japanese government condemned this policy, so Theodore Roosevelt reached a compromise with Japanese officials in 1907 called the Gentlemen’s Agreement. It called on San Francisco to end its school policy, and for Japan to stop issuing passports to laborers.

• Hatred for Japanese did not end. In 1913, California passed the Webb Alien Land Law, which banned alien Asians from owning farmland.

Immigration from Mexico

• The immigration Restriction Act of 1921 limited immigration from Europe and Asia, bringing many Mexicans across the border due to labor shortage. Mexicans also wanted to escape the violence on their country between 1910-1920.

Sec.3- The Challenge of the Cities

How Cities Grew• The introduction of public,

horse-drawn carriages that traveled on rails led to many people moving to cities. Between 1880 and 1910 the percentage of people living on farms dropped from 72 to 54 percent.

• Buildings also began getting taller, leading to the invention of the safety device that made passenger elevators possible in 1852 by Elisha Graves Otis.

• The first skyscraper in the U.S. was Chicago’s Home Insurance Company Building in 1885.

Conditions in the Slums

• Immigrants also would often live in tenements, low-cost apartment buildings designed to house as many families as they could pack in. Conditions in these tenements was terrible with waste and trash piling up leading to diseases spreading. In one tenement in New York City, 6 out of 10 babies didn’t live to see their first birthday. The sad thing is most of these diseases were preventable.

• Things did improve a little in New York when a law required and outside window in every room in 1879. In 1901, also in New York, they made a law saying hallway bathrooms must replace backyard outhouses. Soon, most apartments had small bathtubs and sinks with running water.

The Rise of Political Bosses

• The most notorious of these bosses was William” Boss” Marcy Tweed. He controlled Tammany Hall which was a political club that ran New York City’s Democratic Party. He and his friends stole millions of dollars by using fraud and graft, the using of one’s job to make a profit. Tweed was finally exposed by a political cartoon writer named Thomas Nast. Tweed was convicted of crimes in 1873 and died in jail.

Sec.4- Ideas for Reform

The Settlement Movement

• Some people wanted to apply the teachings of Jesus to society, and they started settlement houses where they would live amongst the poor and offer social services, and see how the poor live.

Nativism

• People who believed in Nativism wanted to see only American culture and the English language in schools. They also demanded tighter rules on citizenship and employment of aliens, and wanted to only hire and vote for protestants.

Prohibition

• Three groups wanted to see the end of alcohol consumption: The Prohibition Party founded in 1869, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League founded in 1893. However, by 1890, only 3 states had completely embraced prohibition: Maine, Kansas, and North Dakota.

Purity Crusaders

• Drugs, prostitution, and gambling became big business in cities. Even police in the late 1800s would demand payment from gamblers in return for ignoring illegal activities.

Ch.9, Sec.1- The Expansion of Education

The Growth of Public Schools

• By the time of the Civil War, more than half of the nation’s white children were attending the nation’s free public schools. However, most left at an early age. In 1870, only 2% of all 17-year-olds graduated from high school, and even lower went to college. The majority of American children learned only to read, write, and do basic math. By 1900, 31 states had laws requiring children between the ages of 8 and 14 to attend school. By 1910, nearly 72% of American children attended schools. The percentage of 17-year-olds graduating from high school rose to 8.6 percent.

• In the early 1900s, about half of the nation’s children attended one-room schools where kids ages 6-14 were taught by one teacher. The older students would help the younger ones.

Uneven Support for Schools

• Americans tries to assimilate, or make one culture become more like their own, by teaching immigrants American ways in schools. For this reason, some immigrants sent their children to religious schools.

• Whites and blacks typically attended separate schools where the black schools received a lot less money. Also, some Mexican-Americans had to attend separate schools.

Women and Higher Education

• The first private women’s college with high academic standards was Vassar College in New York in 1865. Rather than admitting women to men’s colleges, they would establish women’s colleges, like Harvard establishing Radcliffe College in 1879. Even if a female was admitted to a male college, they were treated unfairly. For example, the University of Wisconsin would make all women remain standing until all the men had been seated.

Two Perspectives on African American Education

• Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 as an all black school. He taught them to forget trying to be equal with whites and instead focus on getting a good education and getting a good job. Whites embraced Washington’s ideas.

• W.E.B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He went against Washington’s teachings and instead taught that blacks had to become educated and be leaders in obtaining equality with whites. In 1905, he helped found the Niagara Movement, which was a group of African Americans that wanted to see an end to racial discrimination.

Sec.2- New Forms of Entertainment

Performances and Recreation

• The most popular kind of live theatrical performance was vaudeville, which were comic sketches based on ethnic or racial humor, song and dance routines, magic acts, and performances by ventriloquists, jugglers, and animals.

• Silent movies was another popular form of entertainment.

• Another popular development was amusement parks.

Sports

• In 1869, the first true professional sports team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed. By the 1870s the sports best players were being paid.

• Football became very popular in the 1880s when Walter Camp began playing rugby.

• In 1891, Dr. James Naismith invented basketball.

• Women also began playing sports, although they made special women’s rules because they thought the competition and physical exertion were too much for women.

What People Were Reading

• Newspapers became very popular and competitive, being encouraged to find the best stories to make their newspaper the best, called yellow journalism.

• Magazines also became popular.

• Mark Twain wrote popular fiction, his most famous being The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

Musical Diversions

• Spirituals became very popular. A popular group at making them so popular was the Fisk Jubilee Singers who toured around to save Fisk University.

• Ragtime and Jazz also became very popular during this time.

• The player piano and the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 also were very popular.

Sec.3- The World of Jim Crow

Voting Restrictions

• To keep blacks from voting in the south, many southern states came up with things like owning a certain amount of property, a poll tax, and literacy test, all designed to specifically keep blacks away fro the polls. Because this also hurt poor white farmers, they made special grandfather clauses to allow these farmers to be able to vote.

Segregation

• Segregation, or the separation of races, also was brought about in the south by the Jim Crow Laws. These laws made everything with blacks and whites separate.

Plessy vs. Ferguson

• The courts had already overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which allowed African Americans into public places. Now comes Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, which Homer Plessy argues they didn’t have a right to kick him off a train in Louisiana just because he was in the all white section. The court ruled that they could if there were separate but equal facilities available. This led to all sorts of unfair treatment for blacks particularly in the south.

Violence

• One of the worst kinds of violence was lynching, or the murder of an accused person by a mob without a trial. An estimated 1,200 blacks were victims of lynching between 1882 and 1892. To add fear, lynching victims were sometimes mutilated before being hanged or shot up with bullets.

• Many blacks tried to escape this by moving north, but they found the same things happening there, there just wasn’t laws like the Jim Crow Laws there.

The NAACP and Civil Rights

• The NAACP forms to abolish segregation and discrimination.

Sec.4- The Changing Roles of Women

From Producer to Consumer

• As more and more women began to start buying things, department stores like Macy’s and Marshall Field began opening. There even was mail-order catalogs where you could purchase goods by mail. Two large mail-order catalogs were Montgomery Ward and Sears.

Working Outside the Home

• Most married women still generally did not work, but single women did. Because it was assumed that a woman would quit when she got married, women were generally paid 30-60 percent less than men for the same work. Society did not believe women had the mental capacity for professional work, so women instead became nurses, teachers, secretaries, or telephone operators.

New Women, New Ideas

• Women in the early 1900s began wearing shorter hair, raised their hemlines, wore skirts and blouses, went on dates, pushed for women’s suffrage, and wanted to legalize the spread of birth control, this being led by Margaret Sanger. Also, divorce rates began to rise as well.