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All of history Wednesday, December 11, 2024 1:59 PM "Let them up easy," President Abraham Lincoln had said in 1865 as the Civil War ended. He was talking about the southern states which had seceded, or broken away from, the United States and then waged a four year, bloody conflict to assert...

All of history Wednesday, December 11, 2024 1:59 PM "Let them up easy," President Abraham Lincoln had said in 1865 as the Civil War ended. He was talking about the southern states which had seceded, or broken away from, the United States and then waged a four year, bloody conflict to assert that independence. The effort had failed, the guns had finally fallen silent, and now Abraham Lincoln wanted nothing so much as to see the American house rebuilt, the American family of states come back together as if they had had nothing but a small spat that could be easily forgiven and forgotten. Unfortunately for everyone involved, President Lincoln was not around to see that his wishes for Reconstruction were carried out: he was assassinated as the war came to an official close, and "revenge" replaced "reconciliation" as the tone for the decade that would come. Southern state governments had not helped matters in the immediate aftermath of the war, either: they promptly re-appointed or re-elected many of the same officials who had run the Confederate governments to posts in the state legislatures. Those state governments didn't act like they were made up of defeated men acknowledging a lost cause. Instead, most of the Southern legislatures promptly seemed to develop a kind of quasi-amnesia, forgetting about the war they had just lost and enacting laws designed to circumvent, or downright ignore, the new status of African-Americans as free men. These legislatures, in their refusal to acknowledge a Southern defeat during the war, all but guaranteed a harsher kind of peace than Abraham Lincoln had intended. This is where our look on race relationships in post-Civil War America has to start: with Congress responding to intransigent state governments. One of those responses was the Reconstruction Act of 1867, imposing martial law on the Southern states, replacing their governments (which had mostly been made up of ex-Confederates) with appointed officials backed up by federal soldiers, which was a little bit like your mom and dad coming in and saying, "Well, since you obviously can't handle the responsibility... " Land was seized from former Confederate soldiers and officers and distributed to newly-freed slaves, former Confederate officers were banned from serving in public office, and a series of Amendments known as the Reconstruction Amendments were passed, all of them concerning racial equality. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery (except as punishment for a crime; no kidding, look it up!); the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed all citizens, regardless of race, sex, or age, equal protection in the eyes of the law; finally, the Fifteenth Amendment confirmed that all male citizens, regardless of race, were allowed to vote. The Freedman's Bureau was created in 1865 to help all the former slaves in the South become educated and involved citizens with a fighting chance at integrating into American society. The Bureau built and ran schools and instituted programs to help the former slaves find gainful employment. The organization, along with the Amendments, were truly the positive face of Reconstruction, which was a good thing, since much of the rest of it seemed to be one long slog of retribution and violence. The military governors overseeing Reconstruction in the southern states were not shy about using force, intimidation, and other means of oppression in order to "rehabilitate" southern populations; on the other hand, a sizeable portion of those same southern populations were not adverse to resisting the new status of their former slaves as free men, possessing the same rights guaranteed to all Americans. For some unrepentant rebels, the indignity of losing the war, coupled with the harsh penalties of Reconstruction, demanded a violent response towards freed slaves: these white supremacists, led by former Confederate officers like General Nathan Bedford Forrest, coined a new term when they named their new secret society after the Greek word for "circle". The Ku Klux Klan used terror, violence, and murder to prevent former slaves from voting or holding office in the South. The intimidation and bloodshed reached such a level, in fact, that President Ulysses S. Grant sent more federal troops into the South to pacify and put down the white supremacist vigilantes. Slowly, one by one, the Congress allowed the Southern states to re-enter the Union as troops crushed the worst of the violence. This allowed the new state governments to enact legislation intended to limit the political influence and freedom of African-Americans. Despite the Reconstruction Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, all of which guaranteed freedom and equality to African-Americans, many former Confederates worked with increasingly lax Reconstruction Southern governments to pass "Black Codes", laws that limited the rights of former slaves and effectively segregated the South into two history Page 1 Codes", laws that limited the rights of former slaves and effectively segregated the South into two separate societies: black and white. By 1876, the states of Florida, Louisiana, and, of course, South Carolina, were the only former Confederate states still under occupation by the Army. 1877 was the year that Reconstruction came to an odd, and some would say dirty, end. For the first time since the days of Abraham Lincoln, a Democrat, Samuel Tilden, was gaining enough popularity to win the presidency over the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. In fact, Tilden won a majority of the popular vote but, wouldn't you know it, there was a slight disagreement over who should be awarded the electoral votes from the three "Solid South" states of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina (where the army was still stationed as part of Reconstruction). Democrats swore up and down that Tilden had won those areas, while Republicans claimed it was all a dirty trick of former Confederates, and that Hayes had won it all. Congress formed a committee in 1877 to settle the dispute, and rumors began to swirl of a deal known as the Compromise of 1877: Hayes made it secretly known that he would remove federal troops from the South and effectively end Reconstruction if the Democrats on the committee agreed to support his claim to the presidency. Lo and behold, Rutherford B. Hayes was found to be the true winner of the election of 1876, and Reconstruction came to an end with many former Confederates surging back into power in the various state governments. Hundreds of laws were made across the South, all slyly intended to work around the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution and prevent African-Americans from voting or integrating with Southern society. Even the name eventually given to these laws were insulting: Jim Crow was a caricature of the freed-slave, and the "Jim Crow Laws" would spread across the South and stay in effect for almost a century. Segregation, splitting the two races up and making sure that they never mixed, became the law of the land because of the Jim Crow Laws. Every trick and technical detail in the book was used to make sure that African-Americans didn't have political power, either: poll taxes demanded a certain price for the ability to vote, a price that poor black farmers most likely couldn't meet. Some states enacted a literacy test, which needed to be passed in order to vote, again reckoning that most of the former slaves would not have the education needed to meet the literacy test requirements. Because both the poll tax and the literacy test technically applied to those of any race, southern state legislatures were able to argue that they did not violate the 14th or 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Poor and uneducated whites, however, were given a legal loophole that enabled them to vote regardless of lack of funds or literacy: grandfather clauses. The "Grandfather Clauses" in most Southern states allowed citizens to be excused from a literacy test or a poll tax if their grandfathers had been able to vote (which means that the Southern governments used education, or the lack of it, to prevent freed slaves from voting, since none of those states had allowed slaves or freedmen to vote in previous generations). In Louisiana, 130,000 former slaves registered to vote in 1868, during the heyday of Reconstruction. After the Jim Crow Laws, that number had been reduced to 1300 voters by 1901. Many African-Americans, former slaves and the children of former slaves, rose to prominence in the years following Reconstruction, all of them hoping to make things better for a race that had, so far, gotten the short end of the stick in America. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke and wrote against the Jim Crow laws and segregation, forming a group in 1905 dedicated to that cause known as the Niagara Movement; in later years, it would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, which is a name that rolls off the tongue a little better. The NAACP works to this day to uphold racial equality in the United States, continuing the work that Du Bois started over a century ago. On the flipside were guys like Marcus Garvey, who believed that all blacks needed to take ship and return to Africa, forging their own country in their ancestral homeland and leaving the bitter racism of the United States behind. Garvey continued to encourage a migration "Back to Africa" his entire life, but at the same time he did everything he could to help poor and uneducated blacks find food, shelter, and employment. Some African-Americans and former slaves, like Ida Wells-Barnett, found work as writers, poets, and journalists, and used their pens to try and spread a sense of outrage at the conditions in the South. All of these people were facing a tough question: what do you do when the chips are down and the place where you live seems hostile? It is a bit like landing on Mars and suddenly realizing that there isn't any air to breathe. Do you get back on your spaceship and return to Earth? Do you send messages back to NASA, telling them what life on Mars is like so the next set of astronauts are better prepared? Or do you slap on your space helmet and head out onto the red sands, determined to do history Page 2 prepared? Or do you slap on your space helmet and head out onto the red sands, determined to do your best? Perhaps the most famous African American during these years was Booker T. Washington, who would become the first African-American to dine at the White House at the invitation of President Theodore Roosevelt after the turn of the century. As you can imagine, Teddy got a lot of hate-mail and almost lost the support of his own political party, all over inviting someone to dinner! Like other leaders in the black community, Booker T. Washington focused on job training and education, forming the Tuskegee Institute dedicated to that purpose. Unlike W.E.B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington felt that former slaves needed to become educated before they demanded equality; in a speech known as the "Atlanta Compromise", he articulated this viewpoint, saying: "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top." This didn't exactly go over very well with other black community leaders, but at the very least the focus on education and job training for former slaves and future African-American generations was something they could all get on board with. You might remember that settlers had been streaming west of the Mississippi River since before the ink was dry on the Constitution. These settlers were encouraged by laws like the Homestead Act and the Morrill Act, which awarded lands in the West to anyone brave enough, and crazy enough, to take a risk on a life on the frontier. Fortunately, Americans have a touch of crazy in their genetic makeup, and they took the wide-open spaces and vast lands in the west as a direct challenge: "Here," those wind- swept plains seemed to say, "...take me on if you can. I double-dog dare you!" The Homestead Act thus was a kick in the pants to the American spirit, a kind of "Go Get 'Em" pep talk from Coach Sam, and Americans responded. By the way, tens of thousands of settlers means a lot of money being thrown around: money on supplies, livestock, and transport. The Homestead Act, in many ways, was the original national stimulus package. The term manifest destiny was coined in those days before the Civil War, a phrase that basically summed up how Americans felt about the continent on which they lived: they were destined to control all of it, to spread from sea to shining sea. Unfortunately, many of those settlers had no problem with telling the peoples already living west of the Mississippi, the Native American tribes of the Great Plains, to get packing. What was coming was a clash of cultures. One of them was sedentary, based on settling down on what was considered private property, husbanding crops and animals, and amassing enough cash to one day purchase bigger and better property; the other was nomadic, lacking even the idea that one single person could actually "own" land, moving from camp to camp following the giant buffalo herds that grazed over the Great Plains, relying on the massive and shaggy animals for food and fur. You can guess which represented the American settlers and which the Native American tribes. The collision of the two cultures was not going to be peaceful, their lives almost mutually exclusive, and it didn't help that the settlers moving west viewed natives as "savages" who were stubbornly holding on to land that could be put to far better use. Before, during, and in the years immediately after the Civil War, detachments of the US Army were tasked with moving the Indian tribes onto "reservations" and forcing them into farming and ranching. At times, the removal of the native tribes was not accomplished peacefully: Indian villages became preemptive targets for the Army, especially during the winter months, and hundreds of Native Americans were killed by troopers in attacks at encampments at Sand Creek and the Washita River. Sometimes these villages contained Indian warriors who had been on the warpath, sometimes not; most of the time, history calls these events massacres rather than battles. Of course, this wasn't a one-sided argument with all the wrong placed squarely on one side. The tribes of the West, like the Sioux, Comanche, and Apache, weren't exactly lying down to be massacred. They responded by luring soldiers into ambushes, attacking wagon trains, and scalping settlers. Hostilities by the year 1876 were running rampant; the Indians didn't trust the settlers, and the settlers didn't trust the Indians, and the only solution seemed to be total annihilation of one culture or the other. The American government tried, sometimes rather half-heartedly, sometimes with really good intentions, to find some kind of middle ground: a Bureau of Indian Affairs was set up to oversee the reservations, the land set aside for native use, and make sure that everyone was treated fairly. A lot of the times, these reservations were overseen by Indian Affairs "agents" that represented major religious groups, especially the Quakers, who saw it as their duties to convert and care for the natives. Losing history Page 3 groups, especially the Quakers, who saw it as their duties to convert and care for the natives. Losing your land and then being told a different way to live your life doesn't always go over too well, I've found, and it was no different for the natives who went to reservations. Things got worse when the lucrative appointments to be Indian Affairs agents started to be handed out to political cronies of people in power instead of those with kindness in their hearts. These people would usually take the good food and supplies provided by the government for use by reservation natives and, instead of distributing it, they would distribute a third or even a quarter of it and sell the rest. When tribes got angry at being duped and cheated, and sought to leave the reservations, the Army deemed them "hostile" and often reacted with violence. It had been a century since Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others had signed the Declaration of Independence in far-off Philadelphia, and the tribes of the plains were gearing up for their own act of rebellion and defiance: thousands of Native American men, women, and children gathered at a giant encampment on the Little Bighorn River in the Dakota Territory, led by warrior chiefs like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull , for one last summer living their lives in the way they had always done, the ways of their fathers and grandfathers. Unfortunately, someone was about to crash that little party Ordered to put an end to the Indian Wars once and for all, a vain and arrogant officer named George Armstrong Custer was ordered to lead his regiment, the 7th Cavalry, into the area of the Little Bighorn. Custer had been the youngest general to fight for the Union in the Civil War, a flamboyant commander with a taste for flowing red scarves, gold braid, risky moves, and the sight of his own name in print; picture a famous rock star, but in a military uniform, and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about here. "Long Hair", as the tribes called him, was even pondering running for president in 1876, an election that would be all but certain if he could deliver a final victory against the Indians gathered at the Little Bighorn River. Custer was no stranger to the Indian Wars. He had been fighting them ever since the end of the Civil War, and he had developed a strategy that was decisive, effective, and not just a little bit jerk-ish (another word I've just now made up). Knowing that the native tribes valued the lives of their women and children quite highly, Custer would seek out the Indian encampment, attack at dawn, as the tribe was slumbering, and capture as many of the women and children as he could. With them as hostages, it wouldn't matter how outnumbered his cavalrymen were by Indian warriors: Custer would hold the upper hand. A few years before, he had worked this strategy to perfection by attacking a sleeping village of Cherokee on the Washita River in Oklahoma, and it is possible that he was planning the same maneuver for the camp on the Little Bighorn...but we'll never know for sure, because things didn't quite work out the way George Armstrong Custer wanted that summer of '76. In his mind, I'm sure Custer pictured flags waving and crowds cheering his name as he and his detachment of 260 men stared down at the village of over 3000 warriors, and maybe his imagination even included some fancy fireworks and pyrotechnics. He got his fireworks, alright, and his cheers, only the cheers were the war whoops of braves streaming out of the village to encircle Custer's men, and the fireworks...well, I'll let you figure that one out. Modern archaeologists and historians have written a metric ton of books about what on earth Custer was thinking on that June morning in 1876 (after all, ten-to-one odds don't exactly scream out "victory" to me); regardless of the motive or what Custer hoped to do, the result was the complete annihilation of his detachment in a battle immortalized as "Custer's Last Stand". That's what happens when you get surrounded up on bare bluffs by very, very upset Indian warriors: no one walks away. The reaction to the death of Custer's troopers was predictable: American citizens demanded retribution and more soldiers poured west to avenge the "gallant" Custer and his men. One by one, hostile tribes were either forced onto the reservations or wiped out under the Army's guns. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, which ordered Native American families to settle on a plot of land for 25 years, forced to adopt a sedentary life style and give up all their own traditions. If, at the end of that time, the tribesmen had successfully acclimated to the new way of life, they would become US citizens. Of course, no one mentioned that the land the Indians were given would be desert and scrub land, useless for farming. There were some Americans who realized that the nation's conduct towards the native tribes had been less than stellar: a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson had written a book in 1881 called a Century of Dishonor which had chronicled the various injustices the Native Americans had been subjected to. The sympathy it caused for the Native American tribes was not enough to offset the march of American settlement, and most Americans favored a policy towards the various remnants of history Page 4 march of American settlement, and most Americans favored a policy towards the various remnants of the Indian nations known as assimilation (or Americanization). This policy was best exemplified by the Dawes Act: Native Americans would be pushed to forswear their old way of life, embrace Christianity, and learn to live in the Anglo-American culture. Towards this end, several boarding schools were established by various religious and charity groups that took young Indian children from their tribes and strove to erase in them all traces of their native culture by inculcating American values and traditions. It was, at best, a bad idea with good intentions. By 1890, the "wars" were almost over, and things were getting decidedly spooky: a Native American man named Wakova began to preach a new kind of religion, a mix of Christianity, traditional native faiths and not a small amount of retribution and revenge. According to Wakova, Jesus of Nazareth would return to Earth as a Native American, and when he did, everyone else would basically be very, very out-of-luck; more, that return could be facilitated by performing the Ghost Dance, a ritual that the United States government wasn't just all that pleased about. Some officials were scared it would stir up the simmering hatreds and hostilities that were just then starting to calm down (mostly because the Native Americans had been harassed, harried, massacred, or convinced to relocate to reservations). On the flip-side, the Ghost Dance was pretty appealing to some of the Native Americans who remembered how things used to be and were willing to believe that something -anything- would set things right. That included the great chief Sitting Bull, who was interested in what the Ghost Dance might be capable of; unfortunately, so were reservation officials, who sent troops to arrest Sitting Bull and any participants before they could perform the dance and stir up the local tribes to any kind of hostility. The arrest got out of hand, as they have a tendency to do in tense situations, and Sitting Bull and others were shot and killed (by members of the " Indian Police ", native tribesmen who were employed by the government). Outraged, scared, and still searching for some semblance of their old life, a band of Indians led by a chief named Spotted Elk moved towards an encampment at Wounded Kneed Creek, hoping to find shelter. What Spotted Elk's band actually found at Wounded Knee was the United States Army, which surrounded the camp and asked the band to turn over all firearms. Somehow, a shot was fired- stories suggest that a deaf tribesmen, not understanding the order to turn over weapons, became alarmed when someone grabbed his rifle and pulled the trigger in the scuffle that resulted. No matter how it happened, the result was over a hundred and fifty Native American deaths, and three hundred more wounded, the majority women and children. Grotesquely, in order to justify the bloodshed, the Army awarded 20 Medals of Honor, the highest citation our country can give to a soldier, for the work done that day by rifle fire and cannon. Even L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, would applaud the Army's actions at Wounded Knee in newspaper editorials. Like relations among freed slaves and their former owners, the relationship between Anglo settlers and the Native American tribes would take decades to heal. The Civil War led to another change in the United States that would linger into the next century: industrialization. This was a revolution of machines, money, steam, and class warfare, an Industrial Revolution that might read like the most boring bits of the most boring textbook ever, but was, nevertheless, important. Don't believe me? Fine, that is your prerogative, but let me just lay all my cards out on the table: it was Eli Whitney 's invention of the cotton gin, a machine to separate seeds from the cotton, that pretty much enabled slavery in the South to remain economically feasible. As cotton was processed faster and faster, more hands were needed to pick the raw cotton, which meant that plantation owners needed more slaves. Ironically, there is evidence to suggest that the institution of slavery was slowly proving to be economically unfeasible until the invention of the cotton gin, costing plantation owners more, in the long run, than they were making. It was only after Whitney's invention became commonplace that enough cotton could be produced to economically justify expanding (or even keeping) the institution of slavery. Oh, yes, the Industrial Revolution spread to the United States with a vengeance, and Eli Whitney's little invention wasn't the only result of that little migration: with slavery strengthened by profits flowing in due to Whitney's machine, there was no chance at a peaceful resolution in a little dispute between the North and the South that erupted into a full-scale war. The Civil War was horrible, yep, and cost so many lives that the combined American dead of every other American war still have not touched the overall number of casualties from 1861-1865, but one result history Page 5 American war still have not touched the overall number of casualties from 1861-1865, but one result was somewhat beneficial: the Industrial Revolution got a kick in the pants and started to speed up. Guns were needed, and provided for in factories run by Samuel Colt, among others, with interchangeable parts, each and every one made identically by machine, instead of hand-crafted pieces that could not be easily replaced. Railroads crossed the continent bearing troops and supplies to distant battlefields. Those rails were starting to be made from steel instead of iron because something had crossed the Atlantic other than immigrants looking for a brighter future: a new, cheaper, and quicker way to mass-produce steel. Tougher than iron, steel had been hard to produce for almost a thousand years...until, that is, an Englishman named Henry Bessemer figured out how to simplify it in 1856. Five years later, Bessemer's steel process was in full swing in the United States, in Northern steel manufactories, and suddenly it was a whole new world. Steel could be made quickly and cheaply enough, and in enough quantities, to allow people to construct bridges and buildings using it (meaning those bridges and buildings could be longer, taller, and, most importantly, stronger). Steel rails laid down as tracks for railroads would last ten times as long as iron ones. The manufacture of steel supplied the building material for a new age, and business magnates such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller made money hand over fist. "Robber Barons", these men were called, for their pursuit of power and wealth at the expense of almost anything else; at times, they were more positively known as " Captains of Industry ". Ruthless businessmen, they were also smart and driven, and the industries they built (railroads, oil, steel, electricity, and, eventually, automobiles) could be said to have built the America we know today. Some grumbled about the monopolies these men built; they basically controlled all the companies producing certain goods, like Carnegie's US Steel or Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and had enough power to crush any competition before it ever started. With the actions of these men, the United States saw the whole concept of labor change, and with it the skyline of the world. Smokestacks began to dot the countryside as mills and factories multiplied, especially in the Northern states. These giant factories were workplaces where the workers no longer needed to be master artisans or weavers, no matter the industry. Even the unskilled could work the machines...meaning that factory owners could afford to pay workers very, very low wages, because those workers could be easily replaced. Even better, they could employ children for pennies a day, and that day would itself be longer than anyone could stand: fourteen hours of grueling labor, in factories where the slightest spark could cause an explosion of the floating cotton particles in the air and the mere act of breathing would fill your lungs with those same particles, making it harder and harder to breathe until the day came when you couldn't breathe at all, or in steel mills where molten metal flowed inches from frail human skin and workers died at the rate of one every ten days. The gap between rich and poor grew, as did class hatred. Only tragedy led to reform, disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, where most of the wealthy survived and the poor did not, or the Johnstown flood in 1889, where an entire town was wiped out by the destruction of a dam that had been weakened so that the carriages of the rich could pass over it, or the Triangle-Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, where workers burned to death in a building with unsafe work conditions. In case you're not picking up on the parallels, here, it was mostly those who made very little money who were dying in horrible ways, and dying primarily due to procedures put in place by entrepreneurs in order to maximize profits. Of course, not everyone was greatly pleased by the transformation of the nation into one belching smokestack, or the child labor and low wages in dangerous conditions. Many workers turned to alcoholism, escaping their jobs and their squalid tenement homes by spending hours in the taverns. Philosophers such as Karl Marx in Europe began to talk about the evils of capitalism, the drive for wealth, and the gap between the rich and the poor, and sought to replace the drive for wealth with the need to serve a classless society, a philosophy known as socialism. Marx's philosophy was entirely based on the idea that money was so corrupting a force that the rich and the poor would never be able to agree (and one imagines that incidents such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire only supported that idea); it would be up to the poor to unite and overthrow the society they found themselves trapped in. Any new society that would be formed from the ashes of revolution would have to be based on something other than money; perhaps governments could see to the distribution of wealth and make sure that production wasn't corrupt? The idea of socialism, and the idea of communism that would come from it, history Page 6 production wasn't corrupt? The idea of socialism, and the idea of communism that would come from it, would influence the next century, cause tons of problems, and force thousands of school children to hide under their desks in fear of nuclear annihilation (we'll get to that). As early as 1869, groups of workers were gathering together in order to agitate for an eight-hour workday that didn't include child labor, sinking ships, or jumping out of windows in order to escape fires, and that did include a hike in wages. These groups, such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, focused on organizing laborers into unions that could collectively bargain with the robber barons and wealthy factory owners. If we can somehow move on from the sheer awesomeness of a name like Gompers, we could focus on what labor unions really meant: strength in numbers for those that had been oppressed during the Industrial Revolution in the mad dash for profits. About the only real tactic labor unions had, in the beginning, to show the robber barons that they meant business was to go on strike, refusing to work until conditions improved. The first nationwide strike, the Great Strike of 1877, involved railroad workers, and it was quickly followed by others, with varying degrees of success. Men like Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie's right-hand man at US Steel, fought back by employing mercenaries like the Pinkerton Detective Agency to use force against the striking workers, intimidating them into submission and not shying away from bloodshed and murder. In 1886, a strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago sparked a riot as striking workers were met by armed police and, thrown into the mix, a group of anarchists (people who oppose any form of organized government) who decided to use the event to make a point. One of the anarchists tossed a bomb that killed seven policemen, making the Haymarket Square Riot, as the event was called, a deadly form of protest. Many Americans blamed the labor unions for stirring up the controversy, and for the death of the seven policemen. A similar incident occurred in 1894 at the Pullman Palace Car Company, also in Chicago (we're starting to notice a pattern). Pullman cars were luxury train cars built for the incredibly wealthy; think of them as the equivalent of a really, really awesome RV, fully loaded and towing a hot tub. The workers were pretty upset that the company was planning wage cuts, and, encouraged by a union leader named Eugene Debs, they went on strike. Other railroad workers joined them, calling for a boycott of Pullman cars and the railroads that carried them, and pretty soon the strike Debs had organized was disrupting all traffic in the Midwest for over two months. Eventually the government took a hand in events, sending troops to Chicago to break up the strike on the pretty flimsy excuse that the strikers were preventing the delivery of official US mail. In reality, the power of the robber-barons had influenced government officials to step in. Debs was tossed into a jail cell for six months and wages were cut for workers, but at least the US Mail got delivered! As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, the injustices of the Industrial Revolution inspired the American government to balance the needs of workers and owners both through wage laws, child labor laws, and other legislation about the workplace. Two laws in particular were aimed at curbing the influence of the robber-barons: the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed in 1887 to regulate the railroad business, though it lacked any real teeth, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted in 1890 to prevent the kind of trusts, or monopolies, that Rockefeller had in the oil industry, or Carnegie in the steel business. Just because the laws had been passed didn't mean that the government was prepared to enforce them, however: most government officials and politicians (not to mention business leaders!) believe in a hand's off relationship between commerce and government known by the French phrase laissez-faire. One of the leading lights in American commerce during this time was Thomas Edison, a brilliant inventor who dabbled in everything from the creation of the lightbulb to the first motion-picture cameras. Backed by the money of wealthy "Captain of Industry" JP Morgan, Edison strove to be the one to bring electricity to the massed American public. There were some bumps in the road: his main competition, another brilliant inventor named Nicola Tesla, had some of the better ideas for how to harness and use electric current. In the end, Edison would wind up utilizing Tesla's concepts, and the use of electricity would start to become commonplace in the United States. At the same time, another new invention was taking the nation by storm: the telephone. While the railroads were busy uniting the country on land, a couple of different inventors had been working on connecting the nation via voice, something that was finally practically achieved by a man named Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, just in time for America to celebrate it's one hundredth birthday. history Page 7 America to celebrate it's one hundredth birthday. You want to talk about disappointment, try standing in the shoes of Irish immigrants before the Civil War, stepping off the docks in Boston or New York only to be met by insults, rocks, and fists thrown by rowdy citizens known as nativists who had no desire to see anyone, from anywhere, leave the Old World for the New. These American nativists feared the competition each immigrant represented for jobs in the cities, along with the native languages and religions the immigrants brought with them. Catholics, especially, were mistrusted, as nativists clung to the belief that these immigrants would be far more loyal to the head of the Catholic Church, the Pope, than they would be to the United States. Fear of mistreatment and nativist anger didn't keep immigrants from taking a chance on the New World anyway; before the Civil War, it had mainly been those from England, Germany, and Ireland, streaming across the Atlantic fleeing starvation in Europe, a collection that came to be known to history as the Old Immigrants. The reasons these Old Immigrants had for migrating to the United States was as simple as sheer hunger. About a decade before the Civil War, the potato crop in Ireland, and across Europe, was blighted by a nasty little organism that hit and just wouldn't let go. The crops failed, and failed for a long time, and because the humble potato had been easy to grow cheaply, the poor of Europe lost what had become basically their staple food. In Ireland, especially, the potato blight was responsible for the deaths of over a million people, all of whom starved. While the potato blight was pretty bad, it didn't actually kill all the potatoes; in fact, enough potatoes were grown in Ireland during those years to actually feed everyone who starved...except those crops, by British law, were ordered to be exported from Ireland to be used by the English population first. This insanely not-cool attitude would lead to movements for Ireland's independence, but before even that, this " Potato Famine " also caused over a million poor Irish to seek new horizons, most of them in America. The large cities in the Northeast became less a melting pot and more a series of little miniature towns all mashed together, each housing a distinct immigrant culture that are, for the large part, still visible as ethnic neighborhoods and communities to this day. Immigrants of all cultures wound up being the workers at the mills and factories that were springing up everywhere in the cities of the Northeast. These immigrants were also on the receiving end of the low wages, horrible working conditions, and intimidation that came with laboring in the factories at the time. The Irish, especially, were reviled by nativist groups, despite the fact that many were promptly impressed into the Army once they stepped foot off the boats and sent to fight on the battlefield against the Confederacy. Just in case you don't know, "impressed" doesn't mean that someone was waiting at the docks with pamphlets and awesome speaking skills and just totally won the Irish over. In the late 1800's, the word "impress" meant, essentially, "kidnap into service". Entire "Irish brigades" were formed of these new immigrants, forced to fight for a new home that they barely knew...and fight they did, earning a reputation as valiant soldiers (both North and South). As the war ended, more immigrants came, known as New Immigrants, this time from Eastern and Southern Europe, bringing Italian, Polish, and Russian names to the United States (along with their cooking; can you imagine America without a single decent pizza?!) I guess its human nature to greet anything different with hostility, even if you've received the same treatment at the hands of others; ironically, after the Civil War, the Old Immigrants treated the New Immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia, with the same kind of disdain that nativists had shown them. A station was built to funnel immigrants into the country in New York City, on an island within spitting distance of the Statue of Liberty: Ellis Island. Hundreds of thousands, then millions, of new Americans began new lives at Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty looming large in their vision and promising a hopeful future for those willing to work for it. The model of the United States as a "melting pot" was not universally seen as a great thing: at the time, most immigrants would run into an ideal known as Americanization. The Native American tribes had already seen Americanization in effect, and the New Immigrants were no different: their children would be asked to learn English, dress as Americans dressed, and act as Americans acted. The old ways they had brought with them from Europe would be discouraged by everyone from employers to religious officials. Immigrants of all cultures wound up being the factory workers and employees at the steel mills, dockyards, and oil refineries that made men like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller some of history Page 8 mills, dockyards, and oil refineries that made men like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller some of the richest humans in the history of the world, driving the Industrial Revolution forward. A photographer and journalist, Jacob Riis, visited the tenements, sweatshops, and factories in New York City and compiled his experiences into a book called How the Other Half Lives. For the first time, all Americans could see the plight of the lower classes, mostly immigrants, as they (and their children, before labor laws made employing them illegal) struggled, lived, and worked in filthy, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. Every now and then the dark, dingy, crowded, and super unsanitary clouds would have a silver Clorox lining, and one of those bright spots was musical. All of those immigrants brought more than hopes and dreams with them (just not much more): they brought their music, and when all that music met in the New York melting pot, the American musical scene got a swift kick in the pants! The area where a lot of this music was written and produced was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley, possibly because the sound of all those pianos playing from every other window sounded like a bunch of tin pans being clanged together! Regardless, Tin Pan Alley produced a form of music that, by combining various musical traditions, became something new, and purely American. One imagines it also drove real estate prices in the area down to all-time lows! Not everyone was real psyched about an increasing element of economically dis-advantaged citizens living in squalid tenements, and a movement arose to combat the crazy dirty and poor conditions in overcrowded cities like New York and Chicago. They called it the Social Gospel, and, as the name suggests, it was based in a religious attitude that was sweeping the nation, especially in what would become known as "the Bible Belt", the mid-West of the country: charity, love, and healing were the goals of those preaching the Social Gospel, a kind of attitude that basically amounted to, "...put your money where your mouth is!" Religion was nothing new to America, obviously. Many of the first immigrants had been incredibly religious Puritans seeking a place to practice their religion in their own way, exile or stone those who didn't believe in that way, and wear funny hats with buckles on them. About the same time that America was starting to walk and talk, a toddler-nation, a feeling called the Second Great Awakening had swept the world, a kind of response to the Age of Enlightenment's focus on reason and science; the pendulum swung a different way, and religion, particularly the Baptist and Methodist denominations in the United States, jumped to the forefront of American life in a new way. Almost a century later, the Second Great Awakening was slumbering a bit, but the Social Gospel was definitely bearing the standard forward, and in a way that brought credit to everyone involved: "Hey," these people seemed to say, "...not everyone is as lucky as we are. We're gonna help where we can, because our religion isn't just about sitting in a pew on Sundays!" One American who played a huge part in the Social Gospel was Jane Addams, who founded an establishment named Hull House, in Chicago, dedicated to taking in immigrants and educating them (not to mention feeding them); this organization still thrives today, and still focuses on charity. Meanwhile the robber barons, especially John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, began to give money back to society; Carnegie even wrote an essay entitled "The Gospel of Wealth" to encourage his fellows to use their great wealth to benefit the poor and downtrodden. Today, we call this kind of generosity philanthropy, and Rockefeller and Carnegie applied as much energy to giving away all their wealth as they did to amassing it. Sometimes it seemed as if they were in competition, as each built schools and libraries and donated millions upon millions to charity. Perhaps they were driven by a sense of guilt over the way they had amassed their fortunes, or perhaps they were simply doing what they had always done: competing among each other to be the best. Regardless, the actions of the philanthropists signaled an end to the first phase of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, and a move towards better conditions for the vast majority of working-class Americans. The Industrial Revolution was impacting more than just the cities on the Eastern Seaboard: in the west, especially in California, Chinese immigrants were coming over looking for a new life, many of them finding work building the Transcontinental Railroad, the great rail-system that stretched from coast to coast, linking East and West. If you wonder why that railway was such a big deal, you obviously have never tried to cross the Great Plains while the Sioux are on the warpath, or the Rocky Mountains during a blizzard (I hear the Donner Party tried that, and it didn't work out well for them). The Transcontinental Railroad, built by two different rail companies starting from two opposite sides of the country, was going to do more than make travel easier on Americans wishing to visit the coasts: it was history Page 9 country, was going to do more than make travel easier on Americans wishing to visit the coasts: it was going to open up the entire country to an economic boom the likes of which America had yet to witness. Now cattlemen in Montana could move their beef to market in Kansas; now farmers in Missouri could ship their products to Los Angeles or New York City, quickly and easily. The sound of railway workers driving in the last spike at Independence, Missouri, where the two rail-lines met and connected, could easily have been confused with the sound of a cash-register opening. Oh, and that last spike...it was made of gold. Just like other immigrants, the Chinese who had played such a large role in building the Transcontinental Railroad faced massive amounts of discrimination; Anglo workers complained that the Chinese (and later, the Japanese) were taking away American jobs and overrunning California in what was called, in possibly the most racist way possible, "the Yellow Peril". That racism and discrimination found its way to Congress in 1882, when that body passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which did just what you'd think it would do: it prohibited anyone from the Far East immigrating to the United States for a period of ten years. The end of the Civil War may have marked the passage of Amendments to the Constitution that brought an end to one kind of extreme racism, slavery, but feelings of bigotry and hostility were still something to contend with in American society, and would be for some time. We've already talked about the Industrial Revolution in the United States and the massive profits it generated for American businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan. We've also talked about the widening divide between rich and poor, and the violence that resulted when police and even the US Army were enlisted, on behalf of the wealthy employers, to break strikes and crush labor unions. The connection between the businessmen and their profits and the levers of government were, of course, the politicians elected into office in the years following the Civil War. So many of these were driven by greed and given to corruption that the time period between Reconstruction and the First World War in 1914 is often referred to as the Gilded Age (gild, in case you don't know, is a thin layer of gold used to coat walls, furniture, and other things to make them, wait for it--shiny). Not even war heroes were immune to dirty politics in the Gilded Age. Ulysses S. Grant had led the forces of the Union to victory over Robert E. Lee during the Civil War, and then been carried into office as president on a wave of popularity and good-feeling three years later. Turns out that running an army and running a government aren't exactly the same thing, and success at one doesn't guarantee success in the other; for starters, it's a lot easier to know who the bad guys are when they are shooting at you. Grant's friends and even family members begged him for positions in his administration, and then used those positions to enrich themselves through bribes and whatever other nefarious methods they could concoct. By the time Grant's two terms were up, the government was rife with corruption. Poor Grant just couldn't win: during his terms in office, so many politicians started taking bribes and skimming money off the top that it became a kind of national joke, which might even have been funny if so many Americans weren't starving in the tenements of New York and Chicago. Even Grant's private secretary got caught with his hand in the cookie jar (or, if we're being historically appropriate, the whiskey jug). This secretary, an Army general, along with 110 other politicians and bureaucrats, arranged to steal some of the tax money that was raised through the sale of whiskey; they were caught, but not before millions of dollars was stolen, which was quite a lot of dough in 1875! The Whiskey Ring Scandal was just one of the elements that made up the corrupt cocktail of the Gilded Age. Corruption wasn't limited to Grant's Republican Party, either. In New York City, the Democratic Party had an organization based at a building called Tammany Hall that arranged to rig elections, control mayors and city officials, and otherwise dabble in voter fraud, kickbacks, bribes, and other reprehensible deeds; basically, they might as well have renamed the organization the Legion of Doom and started plans to take out the Justice League of America. Such organizations were often called political machines in the Gilded Age due to the inevitability of their success: corruption was so systematized that those who opposed Tammany Hall, or the political boss in charge, had literally zero, zilch, nada, no chance of changing things. Police were paid to look the other way or, in some cases, to use their billy-clubs in service of men like William "Boss" Tweed of Tammany Hall, whose nickname pretty much told you all you needed to know about Tweed's influence in New York. On the flip-side, political machines often tried to help out the poor and unemployed in their cities, seeing in those masses a bunch of thankful voters who would be more than willing to vote the machine's way. Tweed was often seen on the docks, history Page 10 voters who would be more than willing to vote the machine's way. Tweed was often seen on the docks, handing out bread to recent immigrants, and Tammany Hall often arranged for laws that created new jobs in the poorest areas in order to raise the employment rate. A humble cartoonist, Thomas Nast, used his pen during the Gilded Age to draw political cartoons that harped-on and criticized Boss Tweed and the corruption of Tammany Hall, bringing more and more attention down on what was called "the Tweed Ring". All that attention would result in Tweed being convicted of fraud and extortion, and Congress moving to pass the Pendleton Act in 1883. This law sought to completely reform the civil service system by requiring that all new hires for civil service jobs be employed on the basis of talent and qualifications, not political connections. This reform is pushed and applauded by many, including a young New Yorker with an eye on a career in politics: Theodore Roosevelt. The corruption of the Grant Administration, of political machines like Tammany Hall, and outrage over the government's role in breaking the Pullman Strike and other labor disputes, caused many Americans to seek to reform the whole political process and bring the Gilded Age to an end. It was during this time that we begin to see the first stirring of a movement known as Populism, which basically means that the populace started agitating and campaigning for things that were good for the everyday citizen, not the wealthy elite. The first populists in America came together in tiny Lampasas, Texas, believe it or not, as an institution of farmers and ranchers calling themselves the Grange. The Grange was primarily dedicated to fighting the influence of the Captains of Industry who maintained a monopoly over the railroads, and thus controlled the prices the farmers and ranchers would have to pay to ship their products to market. With no direct competition, the owners of these railroads saw no reason to lower prices...and so the prices soared and farmers and ranchers throughout the Midwest and American South suffered. Together, the organizers of the Grange reasoned, they had a much better chance of influencing the courts and government to either break up the railroad monopoly or enact legislation to protect the American agriculturalists. Populism itself would always remain a movement primarily made up of farmers, ranchers, and, later, labor unions. Populism would really take off after Theodore Roosevelt became president in the next century, and get combined with something called Progressivism, to form a mixture of awesomeness that amounted to Americans saying, "Yo, all this corruption just isn't gonna fly anymore." As a boy, Theodore Roosevelt may have had money and luxury, but he didn't have his health. He was sickly, thin, and weak. He was periodically wracked by asthma and diarrhea (gross), and spent much of his time in bed. Despite these deficiencies, young TR (as he was often called later in life) had a few things in abundance: a near-perfect memory, an ability to read and understand what he had read at a speed that was almost frightening, and a boundless energy. That energy manifested itself in the young boy's determination to conquer anything he might face, including his own body. Inspired by his father, who built him a personal gym in the Roosevelt mansion in New York, the young Theodore set about working out with a vengeance, determined to make himself macho. By the time he finished his years at university, Roosevelt was a bundle of energy, giving off the impression that he was all spectacles and flashing white teeth; he almost always spoke in declarations, at a rapid pace, with an infectious grin and boundless enthusiasm. His appearance must not have bothered Alice Lee, the young woman he fell in love with and married. For an incredibly short time, the couple was happy together, building a life. Then, on Valentine's Day of 1884, TR was struck a severe blow: his beloved Alice died from complications from the birth of their first child, and, a short time later that same day and in the same house, Theodore's mother also perished. He drew a large black X in his diary for that day, accompanied by only a single sentence: "The light has gone out of my life." Roosevelt went west for a time, mending his broken heart, raising cattle and serving occasionally as a deputy US Marshal in the Montana Badlands. When he returned to New York City, he became a politician bent on reforming the corruption so evident during the Gilded Age, including a stint as New York's Police Commissioner. By 1898, Theodore Roosevelt was the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, practically running the entire department as his boss vacationed, pushing Congress and President William McKinley to build more and more modern battleships in case the country would again find itself in the midst of a war. That war was coming quickly. Less than ninety miles from the coast of Florida lay the island of Cuba, history Page 11 That war was coming quickly. Less than ninety miles from the coast of Florida lay the island of Cuba, still under the control of Spain, although the native Cubans were beginning to struggle for freedom and independence, just as the American colonists had done over a century before. American sympathies, including Roosevelt's, were naturally with the Cuban freedom fighters, although few but the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy felt that Cuba's freedom was worth a war with Spain. As a gesture more than anything else, President McKinley ordered one of the newest and most powerful vessels in the US Navy to Cuba, tasked with sitting in Havana Harbor to "monitor" the situation. The USS Maine was still "monitoring" things when it exploded late one night in 1898. Today, historians are pretty sure that the explosion of the Maine was caused by an errant spark in the ammunition storage, not the Spanish mine that many Americans first suspected. Of course, newspaper owners like William Randolph Hearst knew that war and anger sold a lot more papers than simple accidents, so he and other "yellow journalists" blasted headlines that made Spain's treachery seem like a foregone conclusion. "Remember the Maine," one such headline screamed in a huge font, "...and to hell with Spain!" In all truth, despite the headlines, Americans were wary of going to war for the freedom of an island few of them could pinpoint on a map. Congress even demanded the passage of the Teller Amendment, guaranteeing that a free Cuba would not be annexed to the United States, before they allowed war to be declared. Half-halfheartedly, the United States went to war; wholeheartedly, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his position in the government in order to join a regiment of volunteer cavalry as a lieutenant colonel. All the hopes and dreams of the sick little boy from that long-ago time in New York were bubbling up to the surface, and TR was so excited that he pretty much vibrated with energy. Roosevelt's enthusiasm drew plenty of volunteers from his walk of life: Harvard and Yale students, young businessmen and the heirs to great American fortunes, all of them ready to fight for Colonel Roosevelt in a grand adventure. At the same time, Roosevelt had an appeal to those who came from his "other" life in the Montana Badlands: cowboys and drifters, lawmen and Western ranchers, all of whom may have thought TR was an odd-fellow, but knew that he was as tough as iron. This odd group christened themselves the "Rough Riders", and went to Cuba eager for a brawl (though minus their horses, which were quite literally overlooked when the time came for the Navy to transport the Rough Riders to Cuba). The Rough Riders would go through the coming fight without ever doing any riding. What became known as the Spanish-American War was a relatively short affair. In the waters off Spain's possessions in the Philippines, the modern navy that Roosevelt had pushed for so strongly proved its worth by totally smashing their Spanish counterparts. Roosevelt got the satisfaction of knowing he had been right and the United States got a new hero in Admiral George Dewey, who commanded the Far East fleet. In Cuba, the Army landed on the beaches and pressed inland, headed for Santiago, beset by Spanish snipers the whole way. Within days, Roosevelt and his Rough Riders got their moment of fame and glory: outside of Santiago were a pair of low hills, the San Juan Heights, which were fortified by Spanish troops. As a little added and deadly bonus, the Spanish had recently-acquired Maxim machine-guns from the German Army: capable of mowing down approaching soldiers with four or five shots per second, those Maxims made any assault on the San Juan Heights a terrible prospect. Naturally, Teddy and his Rough Riders felt up to the challenge. Straight up the bald hillside they charged, taking at first one, then the second hill and earning for Theodore Roosevelt the accolades of bravery that he had dreamed of as a boy. The short conflict ended with the Treaty of Paris (the 1898 variety, not the 1783 document that ended the American Revolution or the 1763 version that ended the French and Indian War); Cuba gained its independence from Spain and the US made out like a bandit by acquiring former Spanish colonies in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam for a mere $20 million smackeroos. A clause known as the Platt Amendment also made Cuba an "interest" of the United States, leading to the building of an American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (a base US forces still occupy, over a century later). The whole war had two overall effects: it gave Theodore Roosevelt the popularity that he would use to become Governor of New York, then Vice-President, and finally one of our most beloved Presidents, and, in a very real way, it announced to the world that the United States of America was a power to be reckoned with. Many politicians and businessmen in the Gilded Age woke up in a cold sweat in the morning, their history Page 12 Many politicians and businessmen in the Gilded Age woke up in a cold sweat in the morning, their nightmares still lingering in the back of their minds, one image branded in their subconscious: a giant, toothy grin under a pair of pince-nez spectacles. Any political cartoonist could tell you who had been the subject of those nightmares; after all, they loved drawing the guy as much as reporters loved writing about him. Theodore Roosevelt, the vice-president of the United States, had more energy than any ten men put together, and, in the kind of genetic twist that makes everyone else supremely jealous, he had all the charm, drive, and genius to match. But the thing that really scared the businessmen and politicians of the Gilded Age about Teddy Roosevelt were the causes he was interested in: ending political corruption and the political machines and bosses that ran the big cities, and busting up the trusts and monopolies that he saw as inhibiting competition and contributing to corruption. Combined with some social issues involving equality for all, Roosevelt's brand of politics began to be called Progressivism. Roosevelt called his promise of protection of consumers, control of corporations, and conservation of natural resources a " Square Deal ". It was fairness he was interested in: fairness for business owners, fairness for consumers, and fairness in legislation. After the Spanish-American War in 1898, business leaders like JP Morgan were terrified a Progressive politician like Roosevelt would sweep into the White House on the strength of booming popularity and then wreak total havoc on the political and economic norms that everyone had gotten so used to, regardless of claims of fairness. Then those business leaders, influential with the Republican Party leadership, collectively had a brilliant idea: the best way to keep the former colonel of the Rough Riders away from the White House and out of power was to make sure that William McKinley accepted him as a vice-presidential running mate in 1900. John Adams once famously referred to the vice-presidency as the most useless job on the face of the earth; it was widely regarded as the place where political careers went to die. It tickled the barons of the Gilded Age pink to think of Teddy Roosevelt trapped in a powerless office. McKinley and Roosevelt swept the elections in 1900, just as expected, and Morgan and Rockefeller might have chuckled aloud at their own cleverness in sidelining a potential threat. What lesson do we learn from this, kiddos? Simple: don't count your chickens before they hatch. Or: don't count a Roosevelt out...ever. In 1901, an anarchist heard a voice in his head tell him that William McKinley needed to die, so he promptly loaded a pistol, hid it under a handkerchief draped over his arm, and walked right up to the president and shot him in the stomach. McKinley became the third president of the United States to be assassinated and suddenly the corrupt and the monopolists weren't laughing anymore: Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as president, the youngest we've ever had at the age of 42. Once in the office, all that boundless energy made him one of the most effective, memorable presidents the United States ever had. This didn't mean that he wasn't going to rock the political boat: Roosevelt had no problems making waves if he thought someone out there was getting a raw deal and he had the power to fix it. In 1902, he got his first chance to showcase the kind of president he was going to be. In that year, anthracite coal miners got fed up with their working conditions (you would too if you were working over ten hours a day for pennies in a dark hole in the ground) and decided to go on strike. Thomas Edison's advances in electricity were a long way from providing Americans with electric heaters: coal was the fuel that kept people warm during the cold months, and the winter of 1902 was shaping up to be one of the coldest on record. Roosevelt didn't want to see Americans, especially poor Americans, freeze to death because no coal was being mined, so he asked representatives of the coal miner's labor union and the owners of the mines to a meeting. He was hoping for a reasonable discussion and everyone agreeing to what was fair: what actually happened was that the mine owners refused to make any concessions. Roosevelt got upset at this stubbornness, and he unleashed the presidential beast in ways that no one anticipated. He promptly told the mine owners that unless they made some concessions, he was prepared to send federal troops to take over the mines. The mine-owners reconsidered and a settlement was reached: the workers would have nine-hour days and a reasonable ten-percent wage increase. Theodore Roosevelt's actions during the 1902 Coal Miner's Strike was, all in all, a fair, square deal for everyone involved. \ President Roosevelt's idea of a square deal included pushing for a more strict enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and a stronger Interstate Commerce Commission. Roosevelt and other Progressives viewed monopolies as a bad thing for the American economy: after all, they thought, if one company controlled an entire business, then that company was free to operate pretty much as it liked. history Page 13 company controlled an entire business, then that company was free to operate pretty much as it liked. Take railroads: if someone owned a monopoly on railroads, then anyone wishing to move products by rail was forced to work with that someone, who could charge whatever he wished because there was no other option. This was a big concern of the Populist group we mentioned in the last unit known as The Grange: they were farmers and cattlemen who were being forced to pay outrageous sums because a railroad trust, or monopoly, existed. John Rockefeller had a similar monopoly on oil; Andrew Carnegie controlled all methods of steel production. Competition , Populist groups would claim, was better for everyone: the public, the business owners, and the government. Better for the public because the businesses would compete to innovate and make their products better simply because the public would buy the best product, meaning businesses trying to sell subpar products would quickly go under. Better for business owners because the drive for innovation would discourage complacency and encourage the brightest young minds to flock to work for them. Better for the government because prices would be down, the quality of goods would be up, and everyone would be relatively happy! Unfortunately, trusts had one big thing in their favor: they made business owners a lot of money. This made the captains of industry, like JP Morgan, resistant to any scheme that would break up a monopoly. Morgan is said to have called Roosevelt and asked him what it would take to "fix up" any misunderstanding about the various trusts and monopolies; Roosevelt loudly replied that he didn't want to fix them up, he, "...wanted to bust them up!" The phrase trust-buster was coined to apply to this kind of Progressive politics, and few could argue that Teddy Roosevelt hadn't lived up to the term! The railroads would be among the very first businesses that Theodore Roosevelt would attempt to "bust up" by rigidly enforcing, for the first time, the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court agreed that monopolies could be broken up in 1903 with the case of Northern Securities v. United States , a big win for Roosevelt and the Progressive movement. Theodore Roosevelt's interests had always included the entire globe, not just the tiny bit that included the United States of America. As a child, he had gone on a world-tour, witnessing first-hand everything from the grandeur of the Pyramids in Egypt to the inside of a German grammar school in Berlin. The places and people he hadn't visited, he learned about through his books, which he still gobbled up voraciously, often reading two or three a night after a hard day's work in the White House. Surprisingly, given his inclination towards macho-ness and military aggression (we are talking about a former deputy US Marshal and war hero, after all), Roosevelt didn't just look at the world as a giant steak he could devour. As president, he wasn't afraid of using force and sending in the troops...but he thought that the silent threat of force was a lot more effective at getting things done. "Speak softly," went an old saying he was fond of, "...but carry a big stick." Roosevelt's policies that dealt with the rest of the world became known as Big Stick Diplomacy, and were part of what brought America to the world's attention as a power to be reckoned with, and it was all done without the Roosevelt administration ever calling for a single declaration of war. It was a simple idea: force doesn't need to be used to get things done, just the threat of force and the capability of a nation to militarily crush any opposition. As assistant Secretary of the Navy, Teddy had latched on to the ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a military strategist and teacher who served as president of the US Naval War College. Mahan had written a book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History , a book Roosevelt had lapped up eagerly: any country, Mahan wrote, needed a strong and modern navy if they wanted to become powerful. At the time, Roosevelt had pressed for funds from Congress to build bigger and better battleships; now, he had the popularity and power to pretty much get anything he wanted, and what he wanted was a fleet of ships that could be his "big stick". When they were completed and floated gleaming in white paint, massive guns oiled and ready for use, Roosevelt sent his "Great White Fleet" on a world tour. They steamed from ocean to ocean, from port to port, and everywhere they went, they screamed out the same message: Yo, this is what is waiting for anyone and everyone who messes with the United States. The fleet got back from their tour on one of his last days in office. The Great White Fleet had sailed around a world filled with strong nations that had a tendency to dominate peoples that were weaker. You could call this imperialism, or a feeling that a country was destined to conquer other lands and control them, reaping the benefit of whatever natural resources that land might have. European countries had been doing this for centuries, but at just a bit over the 100-year old mark the United States was starting to feel that just maybe we were old enough to jump history Page 14 100-year old mark the United States was starting to feel that just maybe we were old enough to jump into the game (and do better than anyone else while we were at it). In the United States, the term expansionism was preferred to imperialism, but the differences were a bit hard to distinguish. Regardless, in the late Nineteenth Century American eyes had been turning to the Far East, across the Pacific Ocean at nations like China, Japan, and the East Indies. We weren't the only ones: many European powers had basically carved up China into slices and agreed only to trade within their own "slice". Shortly before an assassin's bullet made Theodore Roosevelt the president of the United States, Secretary of State John Hay proposed something to the European powers called the "Open Door Policy", which basically meant that any nation could trade with any part of China (what the Chinese thought about all this...well...you'll see). You have to admit, it's pretty arrogant to go into a far-away land and tell those people who they can and can't trade with, even if you do have the bigger guns. That arrogance really rubbed many Chinese the wrong way, and in 1899 they rose up against the various foreigners in what became known as the Boxer Rebellion. The nations with a stake in China, including the United States, joined forces to defeat the rebellion and basically compel European control on China's economy at gunpoint; it didn't hurt that the Boxers had attacked foreign troops at first thinking that they were going to be magically immune to bullets. Nor was China our only foray into imperialism before the days of Roosevelt: the same year that the Rough Riders were running up the San Juan Heights under machine-gun fire, the Kingdom of Hawai'i was annexed and became a territory of the United States (although the ruler of the Kingdom, Queen Liliuokalani, wasn't exactly pleased with the way it all came about). Since around the time of the Civil War, American businessman had staked out a claim on the chain of Pacific islands, growing sugarcane and pretty much ignoring the island's culture, indigenous people, and government. Would it surprise you to learn that those planters formed a militia, overthrew the Queen, and were then annexed by the United States? A whole boatload of territories came with the victory over Spain in the Spanish- American War, too, bringing Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines into the American fold; the natives of the latter weren't any happier being ruled by Americans than they were being oppressed by the Spanish, shockingly, and declared war on the United States in 1899. That war was still raging into Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, finally ending in 1902 with an American victory. Most Americans viewed the Filipinos as savages and ignorant children who could not be left to rule themselves, and saw themselves as saviors, a mind-set that became known as the "white-man's burden". The Filipinos would much rather that have been a load the United States not picked up, but imperialism was a fever sweeping the Western cultures and it had a ways to go before burning out. Teddy Roosevelt had his own chapters to add to the book of American Expansionism: in 1904, he articulated an addition to the Monroe Doctrine in a speech to Congress that became known as the "Roosevelt Corollary". The original Monroe Doctrine had basically revolved around the young United States, back in the post-Revolutionary days, warning Europeans to stay as far away from North and South America as possible or risk a bit of a scuffle. Roosevelt's Corollary basically took that and added the idea of American Expansionism and a dash of intimidation: basically, he said that the United States might find it necessary and morally proper to interfere in the economics and finances of Latin and South America. If you're yawning and wondering what the big deal is (money is borrrrinnngggg!), consider this: power usually resides with those controlling the cash, and the Roosevelt Corollary was essentially saying that Americans felt that control belonged in their hands. At times, Roosevelt cited this idea when he intervened and prevented European powers like Germany and France from collecting debts from tiny Latin American republics (especially when that debt collection would basically include the Europeans annexing huge chunks of the country); at other times, it was to protect American business interests. Just like in Hawai'i, Americans had moved south and into Latin and South America, looking for land and workers for plantations growing bananas, coffee beans, sugarcane, and cotton. The control these US companies had over the small Latin countries got to be so powerful that they were soon called "banana republics", and the Roosevelt Corollary became the excuse for private companies like the United Fruit Company to appeal to US troops for help suppressing and occasionally oppressing the will of indigenous peoples in Central American countries like Guatemala. Roosevelt's big dream for Latin America, however, didn't include bananas: like many before him, he dreamed of taking a giant shovel to the thin Central American landmass and just digging a giant ditch through it, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and cutting out weeks of sailing time for trade and history Page 15 through it, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and cutting out weeks of sailing time for trade and warships. The French had started digging a canal in Panama years before, but ran out of money and motivation, abandoning the giant ditch and equipment to the jungle. Congress authorized Roosevelt to buy that equipment and the money to negotiate with the Colombian government (which owned Panama) for a long-term lease to the land needed to build a canal across the continent. The Colombian government's representatives temporarily lost their collective minds and started haggling, accepting one offer from the United States and then, at the last minute, pulling their permission unless they got even more money. Roosevelt lost his patience...and his temper. Turns out that the people of Panama had never really been enamored of being under the thumb of Colombia; a revolution had been boiling to a head for decades. When it broke out, it was with the tacit support of the United States. The former Rough Rider in the White House played it really cagey, refusing to send troops to engage in actual fighting: he sent ships from his newly constructed modern naval fleet to Panama to prevent Colombia from landing reinforcements to crush the revolution. This was accomplished with no bloodshed, the Colombian government starting to rethink the whole, "Let's Mess With the US" strategy that they had been pursuing. Panama was independent, and signed off on the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty that gave the US the land known as the Panama Canal Zone for $10 million, granting the United States control over what would become one of the most used waterways in the world. Roosevelt would personally travel to Panama to witness the great ditch being dug straight through the American continent, a marvel of engineering even today. Control of the Panama Canal Zone would remain in US hands until 1979, when authority over the Zone began to be transferred back to the Panamanian people. Shockingly, the energetic warrior in the White House never committed the United States to an actual long-term conflict during his years in office, defying the warnings of his critics. In fact, he actually mediated several conflicts between Latin American countries and European empires in an attempt to avoid bloodshed, and, in what ranks as perhaps the most unexpected event of his presidency (or any presidency), Roosevelt was the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize! During his years in office, Russia and Japan engaged in a massive war over land in northern Asia that both empires claimed: Russia suffered several humiliating defeats at the hands of the Japanese army and navy, but was dug in and determined to keep fighting, employing the standard Russian tactic of throwing millions of soldiers at any problem in a bet that they had more men than you did. Roosevelt offered to mediate between the two empires, met representatives from Japan and Russia in a series of meetings in the United States, and, lo and behold, brokered a peace between them. The great war hero would emerge from his terms in office with a reputation as a peace-maker! Theodore Roosevelt had, by 1908, served two terms: one that, technically, was finishing out McKinley's and one in his own right. Tradition allowed that any man could be elected to the presidency in their own right twice, and TR's popularity was such that he easily could have won the 1908 election and served a second term of his very own. Roosevelt declined to run, however, saying that the spirit of the tradition of two terms was more important than the technicality; he would come to regret this decision, and would run again for the presidency in 1912, but we'll get to that later! His successors would basically keep up the same imperialistic policies when it came to Latin America: President William Howard Taft would develop a concept called Dollar Diplomacy which revolved around using the massive US financial might, rather than the military, to intervene in Latin America, while President Woodrow Wilson would espouse a Missionary Diplomacy that would turn Dollar Diplomacy on its heels and bring the military back into the equation, dedicated to spreading democracy to every Latin American country. The 1912 presidential election was as close as any third party ever came to winning the White House (and it really wasn't that close). With the Republicans split between William Howard Taft and those bailing to support Theodore Roosevelt's new Progressive Party, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson easily won the election and the White House. The Progressive Party had come as close as it ever would to winning a presidential election, and very, very few third parties in American history have every been anywhere near as successful. The impact of the Bull-Moose policies of Theodore Roosevelt's third party was about more than a single office: the popularity of the progressive ideas would influence the politicians of the other two parties to adopt them for their own. We've talked about progressive politics before, but let's take another real quick look. Basically, progressives were all about reforming the corruption around them and pushing social issues like women's rights and racial equality to the history Page 16 the corruption around them and pushing social issues like women's rights and racial equality to the forefront of American society. You could look at it as a response to the crooked politics of the Gilded Age, or an outcry to the wealth inequality and corruption of the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution, or maybe it could even be a reaction to the hatred and bitterness left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction. Regardless, there were many voices crying out for change, and while they may not have put Theodore Roosevelt into the White House in 1912, they were successful in other ways. What if, and stay with me on this, but what if there was a war, but instead of just two countries fighting, the whole world chose up sides like some kind of messed up dodge-ball game? Kinda like a prequel to World War II? Then both sides invented wicked awesome weapons and their soldiers basically spent four years living in muddy holes in the ground trying not to get killed in some horribly painful way? Well, you'd have to call it The Great War, or maybe even, The War to End All Wars, or, when we decided we liked it so much we wanted to have another one, World War I. In many ways, it is a war that has been overshadowed by the events of World War II and the Cold War, particularly in the United States (even though there are more monuments to soldiers of World War I in the US than any other conflict). That neglect is a shame considering what came out of the First World War: the use of modern weapons of war, the death of European imperialism and the birth of the modern Middle East (along with all its problems), the rise of the communist Soviet Union, and the assumption of world leadership by the United States of America. In other word, if it exists today, it is a fair bet that, somehow, it has an origin in the years of 1914-1918. In the late Nineteenth Century, the countries of France and Germany (still a confederation of tiny nations dominated by Prussia) weren't very pleased with each other. There was a lot of bitterness between the two, to put it mildly, most of it revolving around which of them would reign supreme in Europe. They resolved the question in the time-honored fashion: they grabbed up their guns, saddled their horses, hitched up their cannons, and went to war. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 resulted in a total German victory, and the Germans weren't shy about bragging about it...or about inflicting some pretty serious penalties on France for losing. Germany claimed a huge swathe of French territory, the Alsace-Lorraine, and proceeded to sit back smugly, grinning and bragging about France's inability to win a war since the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. The world was watching. There were lessons to learn from the Franco-Prussian War, and chief among them was this: nations couldn't rely on huge volunteer armies any more. The difference-maker for Germany had been the intense training and professionalism of the Prussian armies, men who weren't just signing up for patriotic reasons or for a quick and romantic romp of a war. Militarism was the order of the day: highly trained, professional armies with the best technology, led by generals who did nothing but eat, drink, and sleep warfare. It worked so well for Germany that almost every nation with the means started engaging in militarism (witness, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt's insistence on building up the American navy into a powerful modern force). Now factor in the intense drive of imperialism, with each European nation, along with the United States, racing to scoop up territories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and you've got a fairly potent, and explosive, mixture. Naturally, all contests have winners and losers, and a lot of the time the loser will harbor a bit of resentment; so it was with the contest of imperialism, with tensions rising between the great European rivals of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia as they scooped up (or lost) territories in Africa, Asia, and South America. Of course, with everyone harboring some kind of resentment, and everyone also building up more and more (and bigger and bigger) guns, it was pretty natural for European nations to seek out buddies just in case they got attacked; after all, who wants to fight a war alone if you can fight a war with a friend at your side? In 1914, the nations of Europe were all afraid that one of them might get too powerful, like a comic book villain, and try and conquer all the rest. To prevent that, they instituted the alliance system: they all made treaties and alliances with each other that basically amounted to, "Hey, if I get attacked, you'll come help me, right?" Some politicians thought these alliances would prevent a major war from every breaking out: who in their right mind would start a conflict if you knew that the alliance-system would draw more and more nations into the fight? Far better to just bluster, brag, intimidate, but ultimately just talk it out. Unfortunately, things history Page 17 fight? Far better to just bluster, brag, intimidate, but ultimately just talk it out. Unfortunately, things were in motion that would plunge the world into war regardless of (and actually because of) the various alliances. The European empires, like Rome before them, were growing old and brittle; the territories they were seeking to control were too large, the financial strain too great, the resentment of native peoples too hot. Especially in places like the Balkans, a mountainous area north of Greece, feelings of nationalism (an intense pride in your own people's identity) were growing. The Austria-Hungarian Empire had conquered the various Balkan tribes, none of whom really got along, and made them part of a growing empire that had been ruled by the Hapsburg family for centuries. One of those tribes, the Serbs, had gained their independence but wanted their fellows in Bosnia to join them in freedom. The Serbians would produce a terrorist group called the Black Hand (yet another awesome name!), a group that plotted to assassinate the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austria- Hungarian empire. In 1914, a young Serbian stepped in front of the archduke's car with a pistol and killed the Austrian heir and his pregnant wife, igniting a firestorm of anger in Austria. Austria would declare war on Serbia on July 28th, 1914. And then the alliances came into play, just like falling dominoes. Pay close attention and you might be able to follow what happened next! Russia was Serbia's ally, and promptly declared war on Austria in response to Austria's declaration against Serbia. Austria's ally, Germany, led by Kaiser (king) Wilhelm I, declared war on both Russia and Serbia in order to come to the aid of their Austrian buddies; at the same time, Germany figured that France would eventually come into the war to support Russia, and the German military really, really didn't want to fight a war on two sides. A German general named von Schlieffen had come up with a plan to quickly invade France, defeat them, and then turn to face Russia. The plan depended upon swinging through Belgium to get to northern France and surround the French forces. The Belgians weren't so keen on letting the Germans march through, the Germans marched anyway, and the United Kingdom was like, "Hey, man, don't pick on the Belgians!" And so, in August of 1914, like falling dominoes, the alliance system led to a war involving most of the great imperial powers of the time: the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire facing off against the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. As for the United States, former president Theodore Roosevelt was jumping up and down, screaming at anyone who would listen in order to influence the US to jump into the conflict on the side of the Entente. President Woodrow Wilson, however, wasn't so keen on getting involved in a conflict half a world away. For now, the United States wanted no part of the War to End All Wars. Later, someone would ask a German official how the world could possibly get involved in a mess as horrible as World War I. The old man sat for a moment, then sadly replied, "...if only we knew." Later, academics and professors would write volumes and dedicate entire careers to figuring out just how ten million lives could be snuffed out starting with just a few shots from a terrorist's pistol in the city of Sarajevo. Like falling dominoes, the alliances between the various European powers drew each into the Great War, until, in August of 1914, shots started being fired in deadly earnest. The main players were the Triple Alliance, AKA the Central Powers, mostly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the decaying Ottoman Empire out of Turkey, against the Triple Entente, primarily The United Kingdom, France, and Russia. Notice who isn't involved yet? That's right; America was staying out of it. President Woodrow Wilson had his thumb on the pulse of US feeling, and that pulse was telling him that we wanted to jump into a European war about as much as the average American wanted to sit in a tub full of scissors. Besides, we had our own problems: a revolution had sprung up in Mexico, and the whole border area of the Southwest was in turmoil as revolutionaries like Pancho Villa occasionally snuck into US territory to raid supplies. One of those raids was just a little too bold, a little too bloody, and in response President Wilson sent almost 15,000 soldiers marching into Mexico under the command of a general named "Black" Jack Pershing to scour the bandit out of his hiding places and punish him for daring to strike out at the United States. They didn't have much luck: Villa was better at hiding out in the mountains and riding for long distances without water than the US Army was, and some militarists, like Theodore Roosevelt, used the whole Mexican Expedition to point out just how unprepared the nation's armed forces had become. If we can't catch a single glorified bandit in a sombrero, they argued, how can we expect to field an army that can hold its own on the battlefields of France? The answer, of course, was that America was most emphatically not going to field an army in France at history Page 18 The answer, of course, was that America was most emphatically not going to field an army in France at all if most Americans had anything to say about it. A feeling known as isolationism had gripped the nation, a feeling that basically amounted to us minding our own business and letting the world do whatever it wanted just so long as it didn't bother us. Of course, when your friend's house is on fire, they kinda look askance at you when you refuse to get up off the couch so you can lend them your water-hose: isolationism might have sounded like a great idea, but the United Kingdom was growing increasingly bitter about our lack of interest. And, given how the First World War was turning out, who could really blame Americans for wanting no part of it? The Great War was starting to live up to its name: in August of 1914, Europeans had mustered to fight an old-school war, marching across open fields shoulder to shoulder with drums beating and flags waving, just as troops had a hundred years earlier in the armies of Napoleon and Wellington. Too bad the weapons had changed in the interval: rapid fire machine guns were becoming commonplace for the first time, and they meant that the best thing an army could do was dig a hole and stay in it, which is exactly what happened. The opening battles in August of 1914 screeched to a bloody halt as each side realized that the old ways of fighting were no longer effective, especially when faced with oncoming machine-gun fire that could put almost four hundred bullets in the air per minute per gun. Trenches were hastily dug, and the front lines became stagnant as each side pondered how to overcome the dreaded accuracy and rate of fire of the machine gun. The trenches meant to be entirely temporary instead became a permanent fixture of war on what became known as the Western Front, the long line from the shores of the English Channel to the foothills of the Alps where the armies of Germany and the Allies faced each other from their respective trenches. Imagine living for weeks in muddy trenches, your feet slowly rotting due to the damp and infection, your food spoiled, sharing sleeping space with rats that nibble at your clothing, and then, on the order of your officer and the shrill blast of a whistle, climbing out of the trench and running at the trench of your opponents, sometimes less than forty yards away. The area between trenches on the front became known as No-Man's Land, and no wonder: in that deadly space, bullets flew in an iron curtain, finding targets and shredding bodies, while big cannons tore giant holes out of the ground, making the whole area look more like the moon than any place on planet Earth. Barbed wire, invented in America to fence in cattle and sheep, was strewn in front of trenches to catch and snag at a soldier's clothing, holding them up until those lethal machine guns could swivel and burst, ending lives in a hail of bullets. For four years, the two sides faced each other from an elaborate trench system, occasionally trying to cross the No-Man's Land between trenches in bloody battles at places like Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun, names that burned into the imagination along with casualty lists that were grotesquely long. Each side desperately sought a new weapon, a new tactic, anything to break the stalemate. Poison gas was first introduced by the Germans, and then rapidly adopted by both sides. Prey to the prevailing winds, gas proved to be just as ineffective at capturing trenches as suicide charges. The most commonly used chemical weapon was Mustard Gas, a topical agent that raised painful blisters on the skin and in the lungs. Airplanes, a recent American invention of Orville and Wilbur Wright, were pressed into service. The first air attacks on trenches resembled gangland drive-by shootings as pilots leaned out of cockpits and fired with revolvers. Once mechanics bypassed the problem of foreword-mounted machine guns, timing the engine of the propeller to the guns to enable bullets to pass through the prop blades, air combat became more dangerous. Life expectancy of pilots: six weeks or less. One of the dead pilots would be Quentin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's youngest son, who had signed up to become a knight of the air and wound up dead in a French field. Of course, Quentin Roosevelt was an American, which meant that the United States had finally jumped into the war. You could say that decision to go to war all sprang from the one weapon that Germany had developed that was proving to give them an advantage: the submarines called U-Boats. Moving in silent "wolf- packs", the U-Boats were mercifully free from the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front, ranging throughout the Atlantic and sinking warships and supply ships both. In fact, a German U-Boat once surfaced on the American coast, pulled into port to the surprise of shocked onlookers, and asked to deliver a letter to the German ambassador in Washington, DC. Before pulling out to sea, the German captain offered tours of his boat, the U-58, to all American onlookers...then he promptly sailed, dove beneath the waves, and sank a British vessel just off the US Coast (which really made the British a bit history Page 19 beneath the waves, and sank a British vessel just off the US Coast (which really made the British a bit peeved about the eager American crowds touring the vessel earlier in the day)! With the British Royal Navy blockading Germany, preventing any food or supplies from reaching the starving people or soldiers of that country, Germany decided that it was past time that the gloves came off: they declared unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915, basically saying that any ship found anywhere even close to the war zone was goi