Chapter 26
The Great West
and the Agricultural Revolution, 1865–1896
Chapter
Themes
Theme: After the
Civil War, whites overcame the Plains Indians’ fierce resistance and settled
the Great West, bringing to a close the long frontier phase of American
history.
Theme: The farmers
who populated the West found themselves the victims of an economic revolution
in agriculture. Trapped in a permanent debtor dependency, in the 1880s they
finally turned to political action to protest their condition. Their efforts
culminated in the Populist Party’s attempt to create an interracial
farmer/labor coalition in the 1890s, but William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in the
pivotal election of 1896 signaled the triumph of urbanism and the middle class.
chapter summary
At the close of the Civil War, the Great Plains
and Mountain West were still occupied by Indians who hunted buffalo on
horseback and fiercely resisted white encroachment on their land and way of
life. But the whites’ railroads, mining, and livestock broke up Indian
territory, while diseases undercut their
strength and numbers. A cycle of environmental destruction and intertribal
warfare eventually overcame Indian resistance and soon threatened Native Americans’
very existence. The federal government combined a misconceived “treaty” program
with intermittent warfare to force the Indians onto largely barren
reservations.
Attempting to coerce Indians into adopting white ways, the
government passed the Dawes Act, which eliminated tribal ownership of land,
while often insensitive “humanitarians” created a network of Indian boarding
schools that further assaulted traditional culture.
The mining and cattle frontiers created colorful chapters in
western history. Farmers carried out the final phase of settlement, lured by
free homesteads, railroads, and irrigation. The census declared the end of the
frontier in 1890, concluding a formative phase of American history. The
frontier was less of a “safety valve” than many believed, but the growth of
cities actually made the West the most urbanized region of the United
States by the 1890s.
Beginning in the 1870s, farmers began pushing into the
treeless prairies beyond the 100th meridian, using techniques of dry farming
that gradually contributed to soil loss. Irrigation projects, later financed by
the federal government, allowed specialized farming in many areas of the arid
West, including California. The
“closing” of the frontier in 1890 signified the end of traditional westward
expansion, but the Great West remained a unique social and environmental
region.
As the farmers opened vast new lands, agriculture was
becoming a mechanized business dependent on specialized production and
international markets. Once declining prices and other woes doomed the farmers
to permanent debt and dependency, they began to protest their lot, first
through the Grange and then through the Farmers’ Alliances, the prelude to the
People’s (Populist) party.
The major depression of the 1890s accelerated farmer and
labor strikes and unrest, leading to a growing sense of class conflict. In 1896
pro-silverite William Jennings Bryan captured the
Democratic party’s nomination, and led a fervent
campaign against the “goldbug” Republicans and their
candidate William McKinley. McKinley’s success in winning urban workers away
from Bryan proved a turning point
in American politics, signaling the triumph of the city, the middle class, and
a new party system that turned away from monetary issues and put the Republicans
in the political driver’s seat for two generations.
Note Cards: Analyze the
following terms; include historical context, chronology, drawing conclusions,
and cause/effect where appropriate. Each note card you complete is worth one
extra credit point; pick the terms you need the most help with to understand.
Chapter 26 Study Guide
Thought Questions: While you are reading
the chapter for the first time, write down a couple questions or observations
that come to mind for class discussion. These
thoughts could be about ideas you do not understand or ideas you find curious
or interesting.
1.
2.
The Clash of Cultures on the Plain
3.
Describe the effect of westward expansion on Native Americans.
Receding Native Americans
4. How was the West "won?"
Bellowing Herds of Bison
5. How were the Buffalo reduced from 15 million to less
than a thousand?
The End of the Trail
6. What did the government do to try to
assimilate Native Americans?
Mining: From
Dishpan to Ore Breaker
7. How did the discovery of precious
metals affect the American West?
Makers of America: The Plains Indians
8. How was the cu1lture of the Plains
Indians shaped by white people?
Beef Bonanzas and the Long Drive
9. Why was cattle ranching so profitable in the 1870's?
The Farmers’ Frontier
10. Did the Homestead Act live up to its
purpose of giving small farmers a descent life on the plains?
The Far West Comes of Age
11. What were some milestones in the “closing” of the West?
The Fading Frontier
12. What effects has the frontier had on the
development of the United States?
The Farm Becomes a Factory
13. Explain the statement, "The amazing
mechanization of agriculture in the postwar years was almost as striking as the
mechanization of industry."
Deflation Dooms the Debtor
14. What
problems faced farmers in the closing decades of the 19th century?
Unhappy Farmers
15. How did nature, government, and business all harm farmers?
The Farmers Take Their Stand
16. How did the Grange attempt to help farmers?
Prelude to Populism
17. What steps did the Farmers’ Alliance believe would help farmers?
Coxey’s Army and the Pullman Strike
18. Why did President Cleveland send in
federal troops during the Pullman Strike?
Golden McKinley and Sliver Bryan
19. Was William McKinley a strong
presidential candidate? Explain.
Class Conflict: Plowholders versus Bondholders
20. “The free-silver election of 1896 was
probably the most significant since Lincoln’s victories in 1860 and
1864.” Explain.
Republican Standpattism
Enthroned
21. Did McKinley possess the characteristics necessary to be an
effective president?
Varying
Viewpoints: Was the West Really “Won”?
22. Which criticism of the Turner Thesis
seems most valid? Explain.
expanding the “varying
viewpoints”
·
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of
the Frontier in American History” (1893).
A view of the West as a place permanently shaping the
formerly “European” American character:
“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American
development.…This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this
expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the
simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American
character.…In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the
meeting point between savagery and civilization.…”
·
Richard White, The Middle Ground (1991).
A view of the West as the product of the interaction of whites
and Indians:
“[The West] is not a traditional world either seeking to
maintain itself unchanged or eroding under the pressure of whites. It is a
joint Indian-white creation.…The real crisis came…when Indians ceased to have
power to force whites onto the middle ground. Then the desire of whites to
dictate the terms of the accommodation could be given its head.…Americans
invented Indians and forced Indians to live with the consequences.”
questions about the “varying
viewpoints”
23. What
does each of these historians understand to be the essential characteristics of
the West?
24. How
does White’s assessment differ from Turner’s view of the frontier as a “meeting
point between savagery and civilization”?
25. How
would each of these historians interpret the Plains Indian wars and the
confinement of Indians on reservations?
great debates in american
history
Great Debate (1890–1896):
Government, finance, and the farmer: Should the government
adopt monetary and other measures to aid American farmers and laborers?
|
Yes: Reformers: Populists led by
Ignatius Donnelly, Jerry Simpson, and others; writers like Henry George and
Henry Demarest Lloyd; free-silver Democrats like William Jennings Bryan and
Richard Bland.
|
|
No: Conservatives: most Republican
businesspeople and politicians like William McKinley and Mark Hanna; “gold
Democrats” like Cleveland; most
eastern newspapers and economists.
|
26. ISSUE #1: Free silver. Should the United
States adopt free coinage of silver and
thereby inflate the currency to aid farmers?
|
Yes: Reform Democrat William
Jennings Bryan: “To recapitulate, there is not enough of either metal to form
the basis for the world’s metallic money; both metals must therefore be used
as full legal tender primary money.…If metallic money is sound money, then we
who insist upon a base broad enough to support a currency redeemable in coin
on demand are the real friends of sound money.…If all the currency is built
upon the small basis of gold those who hold the gold will be the masters of
the situation.”
|
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No: Conservative Republican
William McKinley: “Now they tell you that free silver is the panacea for all
our ills.…As free wool degraded your industry so free silver will degrade
your money.…We do not propose now to inaugurate a currency system that will
cheat labor of its pay. The laboring men of this country whenever they give
one day’s work to their employers want to be paid in full dollars good
everywhere in the world. We want in this country good work, good wages, and
good money.”
|
27. ISSUE #2: The tariff. Should the government maintain high
protective tariffs against foreign imports?
|
No: Reform Populist Congressman “Sockless Jerry” Simpson of Kansas: “The enormous amount
collected for this extraordinary privilege . . . fell heavily upon
the agricultural classes. They are the consumers of sugar and window glass
and of all those things that the four hundred and fifty trusts that have been
formed under your protective system produce, and that is what has brought the
agricultural interests of this country to poverty and bankruptcy today.”
|
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Yes: Conservative Republican
William McKinley: “[The protective system] has dignified and elevated labor;
it has made all things possible to the man who works for a living and cares
for what he earns; it has opened to him every gateway to opportunity. We
observe its triumphs on every hand: we see the mechanic become the manufacturer,
the workman the proprietor, the employee the employer. Is this not worth
something? Is it not worth everything? The Republican Protectionist would
give the first chances to our people, and would so levy duties upon the
products of other nations as to discriminate in favor of our own.”
|
28. ISSUE #3: Trusts. Should the federal government act more
forcefully to control trusts?
|
Yes: Reform Democrat William
Jennings Bryan: “Every trust rests upon a corporation, and every corporation
is a creature of law. The corporation is a man-made man.…My contention is
that the government that created must retain control, and that the man-made
man must be admonished, ‘Remember now thy creator.’…What government gives,
the government can take away. What the government creates it can control.…In
my judgment a government of the people, by the people, and for the people
will be impossible when a few men control all the source of production and
dole out daily bread to all the rest on such terms as the few may prescribe.…It
will be a government of the syndicates, by the syndicates, and for the
syndicates.”
|
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No: Conservative Democrat W.
Bourke Cockran: “For the same reason I would
suppress the monopoly built on favor I would protect the monopoly created by
excellence. There is no way to suppress a monopoly arising from conspicuous
merit except by the suppression of merit. If the producer of the best
commodity may not dominate the market for that particular article, neither
should the possessor of particular ability in any other department of human
endeavor.…Mr. Bryan’s position is that monopoly in private hands is always
oppressive. Instead of distinguishing between corporations which dominate the
market by excellence and those dominating it by favor, he appears to distinguish
between those which are successful and those which are not.”
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29. ISSUE #4: Government aid to farmers. Should the federal
government adopt measures such as the subtreasury
plan to provide economic aid to indebted farmers?
|
Yes: Texas
Populist Harry Tracy: “Now if the government can loan these bankers money at
one percent on collaterals, why can’t the government loan it to the people on
their collaterals? If the government can bridge the bankers over a close
money market and keep them from having to sacrifice their collateral, why
can’t the government do the same by the people? What a burlesque on
democratic government for 4000 men, because they are rich, to enjoy
privileges that are denied 65,000,000 people.”
|
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No: Conservative Democrat Secretary
of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton: “The free and independent farmers of this
country…are not mendicants; they are not wards of the Government to be
treated to annuities, like Indians upon a reservation.…Legislation can
neither plow nor plant. The intelligent, practical, and successful farmer
needs no aid from the Government. The ignorant, impractical, and indolent
farmer deserves none.”
|
REFERENCE: Paul Glad, McKinley,
Bryan, and the People (1964).
Analysis Questions
“I don’t want a white
man over me. I don’t want an agent.…I want to do right by my people, and cannot
trust anyone else to trade with them or talk with them.” Sitting Bull (1834–1890) (1882)
“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are
killed.…It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to
death.…From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” Chief Joseph (1840–1904) (Statement of
surrender, 1877)
“[This Congress] could cover itself with the lustre of glory
as the first to cut short our nation’s record of cruelties and perjuries—the
first to attempt to redeem the United States from the shame of a century of
dishonor!” Helen Hunt Jackson
(1830–1885) (A Century of Dishonor, 1881)
“I am glad that there is one
member of the Convention who has the intelligence to ascertain how this
nomination was made. By the people. What feeble efforts I have contributed to
the result, I am here to lay at the feet of my party.…” Mark Hanna (1837–1904) (Statement after McKinley’s
nomination, 1896)
“While there is a lower class
I am in it.…While there is a soul in prison I am not free.” Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926)
“The poor man who takes
property by force is called a thief but the creditor who can by legislation
make the debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed it is lauded as the
friend of sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the
government is an anarchist but the man who wants government to destroy the
people is a patriot.” William Jennings Bryan
(1860–1925) (Congressional speech, 1893)
“There is no situation in Illinois which warrants the sending of federal
troops. It is not soldiers that the railroads need so much as it is men to
operate trains.” John Peter Altgeld
(1847–1902) (Statement, 1894) Altgeld
was the Illinois governor whose pardon of the Haymarket anarchists and support
for organized labor made him a hero to reformers and a hated figure among
conservatives and businessmen.
1. Why
has the Plains Indians’ resistance to white encroachment played such a large
part in the popular American view of the West? How is that mythical past
related to the Indians’ actual history?
2. What
was “romantic” about the final phases of frontier settlement, and what was not?
3. Why
was the “passing of the frontier” in 1890 a disturbing development for many
Americans? Was the frontier more important as a particular place or as an idea?
4. Was
the federal government biased against farmers and workers in the late
nineteenth century? Why or why not?
5. Was
McKinley’s election really a “conservative” one, or was it Bryan and the
Populists who represented the agrarian past resisting a progressive urban
American future?
HISTORIC NOTES
·
Federal land grants entice whites to seek out
new lives in the West, which brings them into conflict with the Indians, many
of whom had been earlier pushed west by the U.S. government.
·
By the end of the century the frontier is closed
– all of the land of the continental U.S.
is settled or can no longer be considered frontier, according to the Census
Bureau.
·
As commercial farming overtakes the smaller
family farm, the nation dramatically expands its agrarian sector, producing a
bounty of crops while driving out smaller farms. Small farmers and others are hurt by a deflationary
cycle, which drives many into debt and ultimately into foreclosure.
·
Outraged that their profits are consumed by
unregulated and unrestrained railroad companies, grain storage and elevator
operators, as well as the government’s failure to address the deflationary cycle
that has ruined many of them, farmers in the West establish the Grange. The Grange and other grassroots organizations
coalesce into a political party, the Populists.
·
One key political conflict of the post-Civil War
era, especially late in the century, is over currency. Debtors, farmers, the Democratic Party, and
others who favor silver backed specie, which is inflationary. Gold-backed specie is favored by, among
others, businessmen and the Republican Party.
William Jennings Bryan, an opponent of the gold standard, passionately
advocates the silver standard in his famous cross of gold speech.
·
Adding to the already considerable woes of the
nation’s Indian population, the Dawes Severality Act
of 1887 compelled Indians to relinquish legal control of their land.
·
Coxey’s Army was a dramatic if not necessarily
effective illustration of the plight of the nation’s unemployed in the midst of
the deepest depression the nation had yet experienced.
Advanced
Placement United States History Topic Outline
9. Territorial Expansion and Manifest Destiny
A. Forced removal of American Indians
to the trans-Mississippi West
B. Western migration and cultural
interactions
C. Territorial acquisitions
D. Early U.S. imperialism:
the Mexican War