Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era

935 Pages·1993·3.75 MB·English

by  Painter

STANDING AT ARMAGEDDON
THE UNITED STATES, 1877–1919
Also by Nell Irvin Painter
Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to
the Present Southern History Across the Color Line
Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol
The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South
Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl (editor) Narrative of Sojourner Truth (editor)
STANDING AT ARMAGEDDON
THE UNITED STATES
1877 — 1919
Nell Irvin Painter
Copyright © 2008, 1987 by Nell Irvin Painter
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 1989; reissued 2008.
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Painter, Nell Irvin.
Standing at Armageddon.
Includes bibliographies
1. United States-History-1865-1921.
2. United States-Social conditions-1865-1919. I. Title.
E661.P33 1987 973.8 86-33111
ISBN 978-0-39333192-9
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR FRANK AND MADELINE FREIDEL
Contents
Preface to the 2008 Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 THE TOCSIN SOUNDS
Chapter 2 THE GREAT UPHEAVAL
Chapter 3 REMEDIES
Chapter 4 THE DEPRESSION OF THE 1890s
Chapter 5 THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
Chapter 6 PROSPERITY
Chapter 7 RACE AND DISFRANCHISEMENT
Chapter 8 WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND WOMEN WORKERS
Chapter 9 THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
Chapter 10 WARS
Chapter 11 THE EUROPEAN WAR TAKES OVER 306
Chapter 12 THE GREAT UNREST
Epilogue
Afterword
Index
Preface to the 2008 Edition
SO MANY strange names and terms! Nineteenth-century history can seem so
foreign: the Knights of Labor, Henry George, the graduated income tax, the
People’s Party, the protective tariff. But when you take a second look—when
you grasp the symbolic meaning behind the words—you see that unfamiliar
names attach to familiar concerns. In our present-day return to the Gilded Age,
we realize the issues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never
really died. The old issues, in fact, are with us still. As Henry George said way
back in 1879, the “unequal distribution of wealth” is the curse of our times.
More than a century ago, thoughtful Americans pondered the meaning of
wealth generated by a modern economy. They asked how it could be that the
people who worked the hardest were the poorest, but the people who seemed not
to work at all rolled in dough. How could it be that political power served the
people with the most but did so little for the people with the least? What is—
what should be—the relation between the power of money and the power of the
people?
In the last generation, Americans (among other people) have faced old and
new crises. An energy crisis remains with us as we grapple with global warming.
We now call hard times recessions, but their toll in human suffering remains. We
used to be able to grow out of every crisis at home and send in friendly GIs to
help out the people overseas, but wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have
divided the American people without producing the victorious finale of the
“good war” of the 1940s. Today, as when the war in question was the Philippine
insurrection, Americans argue over the wisdom of trying to improve another
country by occupying it. William Jennings Bryan’s question from 1899 bears
repeating: Is the United States a democracy or an empire?
Wars are with us still, and their costs in money and blood remain staggering.
As Americans asked in 1917, they wonder now: Who should pay and how? Who
should serve in the battlefield? Who are the enemy at home and abroad? These
pressing issues of the First World War remain pressing issues today. The
enemies, though, have changed, and the threat of terrorism seems to be
everywhere. We no longer trade in “red scares,” because the Soviet Union no
longer exists and the Cold War is over. But we still question the trade-offs
between freedom and security. Is the loss of American freedom the cost of
between freedom and security. Is the loss of American freedom the cost of
vigilance, and who decides who will pay?
At the end of the First World War and in the midst of the Great Unrest, a
Chicago journal predicted that “unless the issue is decided once and for all now,
through the firmness and courage of the American people, Americanism for a
time at least will perish from the face of the earth and the war will have been
fought in vain.” Whether the challenge is economic hard times, religious
antagonism, or the gap between the rich and the poor, this warning from nearly a
century ago still rings in our ears.