Lighting out for the West
In 1893, Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival. The celebration featured huge exhibition halls, a Ferris wheel and a White City of alabaster buildings illuminated at night by electric lights (Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse’s alternating current beat out Thomas Edison’s direct current for the contract). More than 25 million people visited the fair, which provided an economic boom to a city finally resurrected from the devastating fire of 1871.
For the exposition, Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist and the editor of the Youth’s Companion, composed a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and “the Republic for which it stands” (“under God” would be added in 1954). Bellamy’s phrase furnishes the title for Richard White’s comprehensive and masterful study of the period between 1865 and 1896.
A professor of history at Stanford, White offers a new perspective on the Gilded Age, a label coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their novel of that name published in 1873. Twain and Warner satirized a world of ostentatious wealth built upon corruption and speculation. Twenty years later, Twain would not have been surprised to learn that those dazzling white buildings at the Columbian Exposition were nothing but empty shells, gorgeous on the outside but hollow within.
The era brings to mind Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon and other industrialists and bankers who would be derided as robber barons. It also recalls labor leaders, such as cigar-chomping Samuel Gompers and finger-pointing Eugene Debs, who built unions and challenged the capitalists’ power. Thousands of strikes, many of them violent, punctuated the era as workers sought better wages and conditions.
These men and events make their appearance, as do reformers such as Jane Addams, but they are not the book’s central focus. Instead, White, who has written widely about the West, Indians and railroads, emphasizes westward expansion. This means the explosive growth of Chicago and the Middle Border, the small towns and frontier settlements of the Midwest, as well as the movement across the continent.
It was no accident, White notes, that Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison all hailed from Ohio, roughly the nation’s center of population. So too William Dean Howells, one of the bestknown writers of the day, who White uses as a one-man chorus to chart liberal ideals and the cultural meaning of the home in Gilded Age America.
White excels at providing telling statistics to illustrate his points. Between 1870 and 1900, the mean center of population moved 121 miles west from Ohio to central Indiana. Immigrants fueled much of that movement. By 1890, more than 9 million people, about 14.8 percent of the population, were born abroad, the highest percentage ever. (In 2010, it was 12.9 percent.)
We think of immigrants as massing in the East and contributing to the creation of a wage-earning urban poor. While that account is certainly true, in 1890, California’s population was 30.3 percent foreign born, South Dakota’s was 27.7 and Washington’s 25.8. Many of these immigrants were Mexicans and Chinese, but also Germans, Swedes and Czechs. Whether east or west, they settled in cities. In 1890, 25 percent of California’s population lived in San Francisco.
“Urban immigrants were creating the American future,” notes White.
The story of migration and the West connect at the railroad station. Railroad corporations, led by men such as Jay Cooke, Jay Gould, Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington, helped create modern American finance capitalism. Between 1871 and 1900, railroad mileage quadrupled, from 45,000 to 215,000 miles, and railroads served as the engine of mobility for people and goods. The railroads even rearranged the clock as local times became standardized so that schedules could be synchronized.
Railroad construction and the settlement of farmers on public land meant the subjugation of native tribes. William Tecumseh Sherman called the Pacific Railway “the solution of the Indian question.” Congress, White writes, “dispatched troops to conquer Indians and funded state efforts to slaughter them.” He labels this the “Greater Reconstruction of the West.”
Continental development, White argues, allowed commentators to shift the narrative of Reconstruction from the failure to subdue Southern Democrats and protect the freedmen from exploitation and oppression to a story of successful nation building and westward expansion. Indians would be exterminated or assimilated and forced to cede their lands.
White points out that in seizing Indian homelands, the United States acted as an imperial power. American imperialism in the era, however, is a theme left underdeveloped. Although questions of Pan-Americanism and relations with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hawaii would not detonate until 1898, two years after the end of this volume, the struggle over expansion and empire was also crucial in the decades before. The language of civilization versus savagery, of survival of the fittest, would be applied across the seas to people other than Indians, immigrants and workers.
Although no one at the time paid much attention, historian Frederick Jackson Turner helped make a case for imperialism and the acquisition of new land when he argued at the Columbian Exposition that the frontier was closed, that a demarcated line of settlement no longer existed. It wasn’t quite true, and his contention that individualism, rather than cooperation, shaped American character told only part of the story.
The ideal of the frontier has long captured the American imagination. At the end of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884), Huck decides to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” to leave behind the conflict and chaos of civilization for the freedom of the frontier. It’s a pleasing fantasy, but “The Republic for Which It Stands” makes it abundantly clear that Huck would find little respite there.
Louis P. Masur is Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and author of “Lincoln’s Last Speech” (2015) and “The Civil War: A Concise History” (2011). Email: books@sfchronicle.com