History Quiz 3- Ch 19 & 20

The U.S.S. Maine

President McKinley, concerned about the safety of American lives and property in Cuba ordered the U.S.S. Maine to Havana harbor in January 1898. The U.S.S. Maine sat undisturbed in the harbor for about two weeks, until an explosion tore open the ship, causing it to sink and the death of 75% of the ship's 354 occupants. A naval board of inquiry immediately began an investigation to find the cause of the explosion, but the loudest Americans had already decided that Spanish treachery was to blame and were calling for war with Spain. When urgent negotiations failed to produce a mutually agreeable settlement, Congress officially declared war on April 25.

Anti-Imperialism

The American Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1899 and populated by such prominent Americans as Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Jane Addams, protested American imperial actions and articulated a platform that decried foreign subjugation and upheld the rights of all to self-governance. Still others embraced anti-imperialist stances because of concerns about immigration and American racial identity, afraid that American purity stood imperiled by contact with strange and foreign peoples. For whatever reason, however, the onset of imperialism was a controversial and landmark moment in American history.

The Conservation Movement

The potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history. Professional bison hunting expeditions nearly eradicated an entire species, industrialized logging companies denuded whole forests, and chemical plants polluted an entire region's water supply. As American development and industrialization marched westward, reformers embraced environmental protections. Historians often cite preservation and conservation as two competing strategies that dueled for supremacy among environmental reformers during the Progressive Era. Pinchot, on the other hand, led the charge for conservation, a kind of environmental utilitarianism that emphasized the efficient use of available resources, through planning and control and "the prevention of waste." Conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the "greatest good for the greatest number" was very nearly the catchphrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation's financial interests

American interventions in Latin America

***see Section IV in Ch 19 of American Yawp

William McKinley

Focused on imperialism/expansionism; ordered the U.S.S. Maine to Cuba and asked Congress to declare war on Spain after it was bombed (the Spanish-American War); decided to occupy the Philippines instead of giving them their independence- directly causing the Philippine-American War; appointed Theodore Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy in return for his support in the 1896 presidential election, was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901- causing Roosevelt to become president

"The Big Stick," "The Roosevelt Corollary," and Theodore Roosevelt's Foreign Policy

-Roosevelt insisted that the "big stick" and the persuasive power of the U.S. military could ensure U.S. hegemony over strategically important regions in the Western Hemisphere. The United States used military intervention in various circumstances to further its objectives, but it did not have the ability or the inclination to militarily impose its will on the entirety of South and Central America and opted to use informal methods of empire, such as the so-called dollar diplomacy, to assert dominance over the hemisphere. -Roosevelt pronounced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, proclaiming U.S. police power in the Caribbean. Roosevelt reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine and expanded it by declaring that the United States had the right to preemptive action through intervention in any Latin American nation in order to correct administrative and fiscal deficiencies. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine asserted that the United States wished to promote stable, prosperous states in Latin America that could live up to their political and financial obligations. -Roosevelt's policy justified numerous and repeated police actions in "dysfunctional" Caribbean and Latin American countries by U.S. Marines and naval forces and enabled the founding of the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This approach is sometimes referred to as gun-boat diplomacy, wherein naval forces and Marines land in a national capital to protect American and Western personnel, temporarily seize control of the government, and dictate policies friendly to American business, such as the repayment of foreign loans.

Sources of Immigration

Between 1870 and 1920, over twenty-five million immigrants arrived in the United States. This migration was largely a continuation of a process begun before the Civil War, though by the turn of the twentieth century, new groups such as Italians, Poles, and Eastern European Jews made up a larger percentage of the arrivals while Irish and German numbers began to dwindle. Although the growing U.S. economy needed large numbers of immigrant workers for its factories and mills, many Americans reacted negatively to the arrival of so many immigrants.

Business Regulation

An unregulated business climate allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in a single state, so individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. The federal government eventually ruled that it could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that "unreasonably" stifled free trade.

Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. Dubois on Black Progress

Booker T. Washington- isn't using everyday words because he is highly educated -uses the analogy of a lost ship trying to get water to tell African Americans to make the best of their situation even if they're treated badly -"gradual equality" -"it is the bottom of life we must begin and not at the top" -African Americans should be okay to work with their hands and learn to dignify it -says it's not going to be easy to gain equality because you can't force equality (must focus on the progress no matter how slow) -African Americans need to prove themselves to be able to be educated W.E.B. Dubois- calls out Washington for having an "old attitude" and claims that African Americans deserve self-respect and shouldn't have to earn it -claims that Washington asks African Americans to give up political power, insistence on civil rights, and high education of African American children, which caused the disfranchisement of African Americans, the legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority, and the steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of African Americans -says that these rights need to be given back and that they can't prove themselves to white men because they don't have any opportunities to -"immediate equality"

W.E.B. DuBois

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. He was raised by a hardworking and independent mother; his New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois's sojourn to the South in the 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life's work to study what he called the "Negro problem," the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the problem of the twentieth century. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring, the NAACP. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises, and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.

Booker T. Washington

Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, located in Alabama. Washington envisioned that Tuskegee's contribution to black life would come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures. Washington became a leading spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass's death in early 1895. Washington's famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech from that same year encouraged black Americans to "cast your bucket down" to improve life's lot under segregation.

"Civilization"

Civilization, while often cloaked in the language of morality and Christianity, was very much an economic concept. The stages of civilization were primarily marked by their economic character (hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial), and the consumption of industrially produced commodities was seen as a key moment in the progress of "savages" toward civilized life.

The Spanish-American War

Congress officially declared war on April 25, 1898; Although America's war effort began haphazardly, Spain's decaying military crumbled and military victories for the United States came quickly. Some famous battles include the Battle of Manila Bay (Commodore George Dewey engaged the Spanish fleet outside Manila, destroyed it, and proceeded to blockade Manila harbor) and the Battle of San Juan Hill (Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders); The two nations agreed to a cease-fire on August 12 and formally signed the Treaty of Paris in December. The terms of the treaty stipulated, among other things, that the United States would acquire Spain's former holdings of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Women and Imperialism

Debates over American imperialism revolved around more than just politics and economics and national self-interest. They also included notions of humanitarianism, morality, religion, and ideas of "civilization." And they included significant participation by American women. U.S. imperialism, which focused as much on economic and cultural influence as on military or political power, offered a range of opportunities for white, middle-class, Christian women. In addition to working as representatives of American business, women could serve as missionaries, teachers, and medical professionals, and as artists and writers, they were inspired by and helped transmit ideas about imperialism. White women thus potentially had important roles to play in U.S. imperialism, both as symbols of the benefits of American civilization and as vehicles for the transmission of American values

Reform

Events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform. Reformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation's poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order. Reform also opened new possibilities for women's activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women's suffrage.

The Chinese Exclusion Act

In 1875, the anti-Chinese crusade in California moved Congress to pass the Page Act, which banned the entry of convicted criminals, Asian laborers brought involuntarily, and women imported "for the purposes of prostitution," a stricture designed chiefly to exclude Chinese women. Then, in May 1882, Congress suspended the immigration of all Chinese laborers with the Chinese Exclusion Act, making the Chinese the first immigrant group subject to admission restrictions on the basis of race. They became the first illegal immigrants. 30

"The Trusts"

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a trust was a monopoly or cartel associated with the large corporations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras who entered into agreements—legal or otherwise—or consolidations to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity; for powerful entities to control entire national markets was something wholly new, and, for many Americans, wholly unsettling. Some of the most notable trusts include Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Steel and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first used vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.

Women's Suffrage

It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women—and, occasionally, men—had pushed for women's suffrage. Suffragists' hard work resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions. Women's suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women's votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils. Many suffragists adopted a much crueler message and argued that white women's votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy by counteracting black voters. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women's suffrage amendment, and two years later women's suffrage became a reality in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

"Muckrakers"

Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption—labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as "muckrakers"— aroused public demands for reform. The muckrakers detailed political corruption and economic malfeasance and confirmed Americans' suspicions about runaway wealth and political corruption.

Disfranchisement

Mississippi's Democratic Party created a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state's African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so-called "understanding clause" allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. Between 1895 and 1908, the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded through mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests would still be eligible, at least until grandfather clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915.

Significance of The Club Movement and Temperance Movements

Much energy for women's work came from female "clubs," social organizations devoted to various purposes. In the 1890s women formed national women's club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women's rights were the General Federation of Women's Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896). Few of these organizations were biracial, and, as a result of the segregation of black women into distinct clubs, organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all blacks as well as equal rights for women were created. Other women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life through the Temperance Movement. Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. Powerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns.

Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

Nativists opposed mass immigration for various reasons. Some felt that the new arrivals were unfit for American democracy and that Irish or Italian immigrants used violence or bribery to corrupt municipal governments. Others (often earlier immigrants themselves) worried that the arrival of even more immigrants would result in fewer jobs and lower wages. Such fears combined and resulted in anti-Chinese protests on the West Coast in the 1870s. Still, others worried that immigrants brought with them radical ideas such as socialism and communism. These fears multiplied after the Chicago Haymarket affair in 1886, in which immigrants were accused of killing police officers in a bomb blast.

Jane Addams and Hull House

Powerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. Addams embarked on a multiyear "grand tour" of Europe. After visiting London's Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr. Hull House workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, administering classes for parents and clubs for children, organizing social and cultural events for the community, and, eventually, began exposing conditions in local sweatshops and advocating for the organization of workers.

Walter Rauschenbusch

One of the most notable advocates of the social gospel; After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1886 he accepted the pastorate of a German Baptist church in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City, where he confronted rampant crime and stark poverty, problems not adequately addressed by the political leaders of the city. He joined with fellow reformers to elect a new mayoral candidate, but he also realized that a new theological framework had to reflect his interest in society and its problems. He revived Jesus's phrase, "the Kingdom of God," claiming that it encompassed every aspect of life and made every part of society a purview of the proper Christian and believed that every Christian, whether they were a businessperson, a politician, or a stay-at-home parent, should ask themselves what they could to enact the kingdom of God on Earth.

Looking Backward

One of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy's 1888 Looking Backward, was a national sensation. In it, a man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find society radically altered. Poverty and disease and competition gave way as new industrial armies cooperated to build a utopia of social harmony and economic prosperity. Bellamy's vision of a reformed society enthralled readers, inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs, and pushed many young readers onto the road to reform. It led countless Americans to question the realities of American life in the nineteenth century

The Panama Canal

Roosevelt reasoned that the United States must create and maintain fiscal and political stability within strategically important nations in Latin America, particularly those affecting routes to and from the proposed Panama Canal. As a result, U.S. policymakers considered intervention in places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic a necessity to ensure security around the region. Roosevelt deployed naval forces to ensure Panama's independence from Colombia in 1901 in order to acquire a U.S. Canal Zone.

Segregation

Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle-class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of blacks into the very geography of public spaces. As with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the Constitution—in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities- only by states. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888

The Philippine-American War

The United States could have given the Philippines the independence they had long fought for against the Spanish, but, instead, at the behest of President William McKinley, the United States occupied the islands. Under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, Filipinos who had fought for freedom against the Spanish now fought for freedom against the very nation that had claimed to have liberated them from Spanish tyranny. The Philippine-American War was a brutal conflict of occupation and insurgency. Amid fighting to secure the Philippine Islands, the federal government established a civilian colonial government with military support. Although President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war to be over in 1902, resistance and occasional fighting continued into the second decade of the twentieth century.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union

The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combating the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a "do everything" policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women's rights. Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.

The Concept of "Empire"

The word empire might conjure images of ancient Rome, the Persian Empire, or the British Empire—powers that depended variously on military conquest, colonization, occupation, or direct resource exploitation—but empires can take many forms and imperial processes can occur in many contexts. In the decades after the American Civil War, the United States exerted itself in the service of American interests around the world. In the Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East, and most explicitly in the Spanish-American War and under the foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the United States expanded on a long history of exploration, trade, and cultural exchange to practice something that looked remarkably like empire.

The 1912 Presidential Election

Trust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt's return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom agenda neither trust-busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances.

Theodore Roosevelt

gained fame during the Spanish-American War; rose to the presidency after McKinley's assassination; under his leadership, the United States emerged from the nineteenth century with ambitious designs on global power through military might, territorial expansion, and economic influence; he also expanded the military, bolstering naval power especially, to protect and promote American interests abroad; the hero of San Juan Hill, assistant secretary of the navy, vice president, president, and arguably the most visible and influential proponent of American imperialism at the turn of the century

Yellow Journalists

capitalizing on the outrage, these newspapers- promoted sensational stories, notoriously at the cost of accuracy- such as William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal called for war with Spain

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

the Supreme Court's decision that legalized segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine