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CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and
Abroad, 1890–1900
This chapter concentrates on the limitations of freedom, including those affecting farmers, immigrants, blacks,
women, and colonial subjects. The chapter opens with the Homestead Strike, which demonstrated that neither a
powerful union nor public opinion could influence the conduct of the largest corporations. Farmers also illustrated
that not everyone benefited from the prosperity of the industrial revolution. The chapter examines how farmers
mobilized into a political force culminating in the 1892 organization of the Populist Party. Attempting to build a
broad base, the Populists courted labor, women, and black farmers, but their party dissolved after the defeat of
William Jennings Bryan in 1896. The chapter then explores the New South. After Reconstruction, blacks faced
disenfranchisement, threat from the lynch rope, and Jim Crow laws sanctioned by the Supreme Court’s decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson. Booker T. Washington took a different approach in dealing with the limitations of freedom put
The chapter ends by examining America’s rise to world power. In the course of expanding abroad in search of
markets and new frontiers, America fought Spain in 1898 and won for itself several territorial possessions. With the
annexation of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, the United States took on an imperial role. With imperialism
came the formation of the Anti-Imperialist League, and many were fearful of the consequences of a new overseas
empire for the republic. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a portion of “Lynch Law in
all Its Phases” (1893), a speech by Ida B. Wells on the evils of lynching. Another Voices of Freedom section comes
from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which he calls for the recognition of blacks as full members of
American society. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) provides part of William Birney’s
“Deporting Mohammedans” (1897), a letter he wrote protesting the deportation of Muslims from New York City.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Homestead Strike
A. Andrew Carnegie owned steel mills at Homestead, Pennsylvania, and wanted to run them without union
contracts.
B. In July of 1892, a pitched battle took place between 300 private company policemen and armed strikers,
resulting in several lives lost and defeat for the union in the nation’s most famous labor strike.
II. The Populist Challenge
A. The Farmers’ Revolt
1. Farmers faced increasing economic insecurity.
2. Farmers sought to improve their condition through the Farmers’ Alliance.
B. The People’s Party
1. The People’s, or Populist, Party emerged from the Farmers’ Alliance in the 1890s.
a. Spoke for all the producing classes
C. The Populist Platform
1. The Populist platform of 1892 remains a classic document of American reform.
D. The Populist Coalition
1. The Populists made remarkable efforts to unite black and white small farmers on a common political
3. The Populist movement also engaged the energies of thousands of reform-minded women with farm and
4. In 1892, presidential candidate James Weaver won over 1 million votes.
E. The Government and Labor
2. The Pullman Strike of 1894 saw the labor leader Eugene Debs jailed.
F. Populism and Labor
2. Working-class voters in 1894 shifted en masse to the Republicans rather than the Populists.
G. Bryan and Free Silver
1. In 1896, Democrats and Populists joined to support William Jennings Bryan for the presidency.
c. Championed a government helping ordinary Americans
H. The Campaign of 1896
4. McKinley’s victory shattered the political stalemate that had persisted since 1876 and created one of the
most enduring political majorities in American history.
III. The Segregated South
A. The Redeemers in Power
2. New laws authorized the arrest of virtually any person without employment and greatly increased the
penalties for petty crimes.
B. The Failure of the New South Dream
1. The region as a whole sank deeper and deeper into poverty.
C. Black Life in the South
1. As the most disadvantaged rural southerners, black farmers suffered the most from the region’s
3. Blacks were barred from skilled and supervisory positions, and the labor market remained rigidly
segregated.
D. The Kansas Exodus
1. African-Americans migrated to Kansas, seeking political equality, freedom from violence, access to
education, and economic opportunity.
2. Most African-Americans had little alternative but to stay in the South.
a. Most northern employers refused to offer jobs to blacks.
E. The Transformation of Black Politics
a. The National Association of Colored Women
F. The Elimination of Black Voting
1. For nearly a generation after the end of Reconstruction, black southerners continued to cast ballots.
3. Numerous poor and illiterate whites also lost the right to vote.
5. Booker T. Washington, a former slave, emphasized vocational education over political equality.
a. In writings and speeches such as the “Atlanta Compromise” (1895), Washington urged blacks to
adjust to segregation and abandon agitation for civil and political rights.
G. The Law of Segregation
1. In 1896, in the landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court gave its approval to state
laws requiring separate facilities for blacks and whites.
2. John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter on the Court.
H. Segregation and White Domination
1. States reacted to the Plessy decision by passing laws mandating racial segregation in every aspect of
2. The point was not so much to keep the races apart as to ensure that when they came into contact with
each other, whites held the upper hand.
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a section from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The
Souls of Black Folk in which he calls for the recognition of blacks as full members of American society.
I. The Rise of Lynching
2. Many white southerners considered preserving the purity of white womanhood a justification of
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes a portion of “Lynch Law in all Its
Phases” (1893), a speech by Ida B. Wells on the evils of lynching.
J. Politics, Religion, and Memory
1. The Civil War came to be remembered as a tragic family quarrel among white Americans, in which
slavery played a minor role.
2. School history books emphasized happy slaves and the evils of Reconstruction.
IV. Redrawing the Boundaries
A. The New Immigration and the New Nativism
1. In the 1890s, 3.5 million immigrants, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, arrived.
a. They were viewed as inferior by native-born Americans and a danger to democracy.
B. Immigration Restriction
3. Exclusion was central to efforts to build political communities as older sources of unity splintered.
a. Founded in 1894 by a group of Boston professionals, the Immigration Restriction League
distinguished between “old” and “new” immigrants and blamed the latter for national problems.
b. The League called for reducing immigration by barring the illiterate from entering the United States.
4. Northern and western states experimented with ways to eliminate “undesirable” voters.
5. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) features part of William Birney’s “Deporting
Mohammedans” (1897), a letter he wrote protesting the deportation of Muslims from New York City.
C. Chinese Exclusion and Chinese Rights
1. The Page Act barred Chinese women from entering the country.
Amendment.
5. Fong Yue Ting (1893) authorized the federal government to expel Chinese aliens without due process of
law.
6. Exclusion profoundly shaped the experiences of Chinese-Americans.
D. The Rise of the AFL
1. The rise of the AFL reflected a shift away from a broadly reformist past to more limited goals.
3. During the 1890s, the labor movement became less and less inclusive.
E. The Women’s Era
2. Through a network of women’s clubs, temperance associations, and social reform organizations, women
3. The center of gravity of feminism shifted toward an outlook more in keeping with prevailing racial and
ethnic norms.
V. Becoming a World Power
A. The New Imperialism
1. America was a second-rate power in the 1880s.
2. After 1870, European powers, along with Japan, scrambled to dominate Africa, Asia, and the Middle
East, justifying their imperialism as bringing “civilization” to the supposedly backward peoples of the
non-European world.
B. American Expansionism
2. Most Americans who looked overseas were interested in expanded trade, not territorial possessions.
C. The Lure of Empire
2. A small group of late nineteenth-century thinkers actively promoted American expansionism.
3. Hawaii was long sought after by Americans and was annexed by the United States in 1898.
5. Unifying patriotism dates to the 1890s.
a. The cult of the flag
b. Yellow press
D. The “Splendid Little War”
1. Cuba had fought for independence since 1868.
3. Admiral George Dewey defeated a Spanish fleet at Manila Bay.
E. Roosevelt at San Juan Hill
2. National hero Teddy Roosevelt was elected governor of New York.
F. An American Empire
1. In the treaty with Spain ending the war, the United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the
3. In 1899, Secretary of State John Hay announced the Open-Door policy with China.
G. The Philippine War
1. Many believed that American participation in the destruction of Spanish rule would lead to social
reform and political self-government.
2. Emilio Aguinaldo led a fight against American colonialism.
3. The McKinley administration justified U.S. intervention in the Philippines on the grounds that its aim
was to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos.
H. Citizens or Subjects?
2. America’s triumphant entry into the ranks of imperial powers sparked an intense debate over the
relationship between political democracy, race, and American citizenship.
3. The Foraker Act of 1900 declared Puerto Rico an “insular territory,” different from previous territories
4. In the twentieth century, the territories acquired in 1898 would follow different paths.
a. Hawaii achieved statehood in 1959.
I. Drawing the Global Color Line
2. Chinese exclusion in the United States influenced anti-Chinese laws adopted in Canada.
3. American segregation and disenfranchisement became models for Australia and South Africa as they
formed new governments.
J. “Republic or Empire?”
1. The Anti-Imperialist League argued that empire was incompatible with democracy.
2. Without any sense of contradiction, proponents of an imperial foreign policy also adopted the language
3. Brooks Adams’s book The New Empire (1902) predicted that because of its economic power, the United
States would soon “outweigh any single empire, if not all empires combined.”
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• What caused workers to go on strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel plant?
• Describe the plan of the Farmers’ Alliance.
• What were the goals of the Populist Party? Why were they considered radical in their day?
• Who was Eugene Debs?
• Discuss Booker T. Washington’s background and his plan for blacks. How does understanding his background
help to explain the logic behind his message?
• Why is it important to note that slavery became a minor issue in the public’s memory of the Civil War? How
does this affect the progress, or lack thereof, that African-Americans can make in the future? How important is
memory in other historical events?
• What kind of empire did the United States create for itself? How would you describe it in comparison to other
imperial powers of the day? Why were some so concerned about the new role of empire for America?
• Why and how did the U.S. Congress and the states restrict immigration during the era?
• Compare the two Voices of Freedom documents. What problems did blacks face according to the two authors?
Explain the racial uplift strategies of Wells and Du Bois.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
African-American Perspectives
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html
Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection housed at the Library of Congress can be found at this site. Booker T.
Washington and Ida B. Wells are but two of the authors whose writings can be found there.
The Chinese Exclusion Act (PBS, American Experience, documentary, 2 hrs., 2018)
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chinese-exclusion-act/
This site provides supplementary information in the form of primary documents and articles that accompany the PBS
documentary on the Chinese Exclusion Act.
The Foreign Missionary Movement in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/fmmovement.htm
This National Humanities Center site includes primary sources, discussion questions, additional online sources, and talking
points, all related to the history of U.S. missionaries.
The People’s Party and the Election of 1896
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/populists.html
http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html
This Vassar College site is led by a professor but is mainly run by students. It has numerous political cartoons, pictures, and
information about the Populist Party and the 1896 campaigns.
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/
This is the homepage for the PBS series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. The site includes teacher resources, biographies,
primary documents, and time lines.
Hawaiian Annexation
www.archives.gov/education/lessons/hawaii-petition
This National Archives site provides the 1897 petition by native Hawaiians against U.S. annexation of the islands. It also
contains teacher resources and links to other documents.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Blum, Edward, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2007.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Daniels, Roger. Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890–1924. Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 1997.
Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.
Gilmore, Glenda. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Hoganson, Kristin L. Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1963.
Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge
of Racial Equality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
1. Group Debate
Have the students portray the U.S. Senate as it debates the annexation of the Philippines in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Divide
2. Mapping Exercise
Lynch Mobs in the United States: Mapping Extralegal Executions
1931.
1. Ask students to survey the PBS map and make a list of the southern states with the most and the least lynchings. Why
where lynchings more common in some places than others?
2. Ask students to look at the distribution of lynchings by counties on the Library of Congress site. Why might some
counties have been such centers for lynch mobs and others relatively peaceful?
