Monday, December 10, 2018

Causes of WW1 for the United States

The Great War, or World War I, officially began in Europe in 1914, the United States would remain neutral until joining the war effort in 1917(with the war ending in 1918). This post will examine and provide details into the factors that caused the United States to enter the war and why they chose to ally with the Triple Entente.

Summary -- War broke out in Europe in July 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Due to the alliance system that existed at the time, most European nations joined the conflict while the U.S., under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, remained neutral until 1917 when the country was drawn into the war due to a series of factors.

Cultural and Ethnic Links -- Despite the U.S. as a country remaining neutral for much of the war, few Americans remained truly neutral. Some people sympathized with the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) because of familial and/or ancestral ties to those nations or because of a hatred of one or more of the nations in the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia). The majority of Americans, however, favored the Triple Entente due to long-standing connections with Britain.

Economic Links -- The U.S. links to the Triple Entente/Allied Powers were economic as well as cultural. The British would blockade the North Sea which ended the U.S.'s export trade agreements with Germany which would drop in value from $345 million in 1914 to $29 million in 1916; however,  the U.S.'s trade agreements with the nations of the Triple Entente increased exponentially. American business and agriculture, particularly benefited from this trade as much of it was financed by U.S. government loans to the Allied nations, totalling more than $2 billion by 1917.

Most Americans did not believe that the trade agreements and lending of money with the Allied powers violated the nation's neutrality in the war. At this time, many of those in Wilson's cabinet were in favor of siding with the Triple Entente. Wilson's slogan for his second presidential campaign boasted this false neutrality: "He kept us out of war". Although many Americans still believed the country was neutral despite its economic ties with the Allies, the Triple Alliance (also known as the Central Powers) thought otherwise.

German Submarine Warfare -- In order to fight against the British blockade and to attempt to stop trade between the Allied Powers and the U.S., the German armed forces declared a war zone around Britain in 1915. German u-boats, or submarines, would sink enemy ships in the war zone. Germany announced that in order to avoid attack, neutral nations and their citizens should refrain from entering the war zone; this would supposedly prevent attacks done in error due to mistaken identity. At the time, the international rules for marine warfare required that a warship stop and identify itself before boarding a merchant/passenger ship, removing its crew and passengers, and finally sink it. However, Germany ignored these international laws.

Germany's indiscriminate sinking of ships in order to destroy the Britiah blockade and its sinking of ships from Allied nations was the primary reason for the U.S. entry into the Great War. President Wilson argued for the freedom of the seas, insisting that America, as a neutral nation, had the right to trade with nations at a time of war. Freedom of the seas also meant that in times of peace there should be unrestricted travel of civilians in international waters and that in times of war, citizens of neutral nations should be free to travel.

Germany's response to this would lead the U.S. into the war in 1917.

* On February 1, 1917, Germany released it's new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany warned that it would attack ships without warning the vessels that were headed for Allied ports. Germany believed, at this point, that the war was at a stalemate; they knew this policy could bring the U.S. into the war but had hoped that they could break the British blockade before the U.S. could get troops to the battlefield.

* Two days later, on February 3, the U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Germany. In March, tensions between the U.S. and Germany grew with the discovery of the Zimmermann Note. This note was a message from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German minister to Mexico urging a German military alliance with Mexico--if the Mexicans helped the Central Powera, Germany promised to support Mexico in regaining their lost territory in the southwestern  U.S.

* Five U.S. merchant ships were sunk by the Germans in March 1917.

* Also in March, the Russian Revolution overthrew Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty, Russia's ruling class for 500 years before its fall. At the time, it appeared that more democratic forces would take control; if the U.S. went to war, it would attempt to make Russia an ally as the U.S. would join an alliance with other democratic nations.

With the Great War a century in our past, it's important to look back on the causes for the war and the reasons why the various nations, including our own,  eca e involved in the conflict. Next time here on the blog, we're going to examine the various roles that the U.S. played in the war and in future posts we'll examine the key battles and why they were so devastating.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Causes of World War I in Europe

Hello readers. I know I've been absent from the blog for a while and I sincerely apologize. Since my last post I've been continuing to work on my manuscript for Arcadia Publishing/The History Press (my editor says I'm on the right track for what they want for the manuscript) and I've started at a full-time job as an assistant teacher in a pre-k program. Things have been going well all around.

This month, we celebrate Veterans Day on 11/11. Fighting in World War I ended at 11am on November 11, 1918. To look back on this day as a day of remembrance, The Half-Pint Historian is continuing to take a look at the causes of World War I in Europe. Let's do this!


Soldiers in WWI; photo from www.todayifoundout.com



As the early 1900s began, people in Europe had enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace; however, at this time, forces were pushing the continent towards the brink of war. Nationalistic feelings, a glorification of the military, imperial rivalries, and tangled alliances all led to unrest in Europe. The war was sparked in the Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire had once maintained control, and soon all of Europe was at war. This post will explore the causes of the Great War in Europe prior to the entrance of the United States.


Causes

Although the world seemed at peace in the early 1900s, a series of powerful forces were at play that would drive the world to the brink of war.

  • Nationalism--a feeling of pride in, and devotion to, one's country
Nationalism is a force that can bring people together but is also a dividing force. In the 1900s, aggressive nationalism was a source of tension.

Nationalism was strong in both Germany and France. In the early 1900s, Germany was unified and was extremely proud of its growing military and industrial complexes. France, in the meantime, wanted to regain its position as a leading European power, especially after its 1871 loss in the Franco-Prussian War. Due to this loss, France lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and had to pay money to Germany. This national rivalry between the two nations contributed to the growing tensions in Europe.

Nationalist movements in the diverse Ottoman Empire also led to unrest, especially in the Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe.

Russia had encouraged a form of nationalism in Eastern Europe called Pan-Slavism. The Pan-Slavism movement tried to draw together all Slavic peoples, with Russia being the largest Slavic country. The multinational empire of Austria-Hungary opposed Slavic national movements, particularly in Serbia and Russia.

  • Militarism--the glorification of military power
In the late 1800s, militarism arose in many European nations. This over-glorification of the military led to various nations engaging in arms races, particularly Britain and Germany, who created war goods such as tanks, U-boats (German submarines), machine guns, and more. The glorification of the military coupled with the arms race led to numerous European nations growing suspicious of one another and becoming increasingly willing to utilize military force against one another.

  • Imperialism (and Economic Rivalry)--when a country increases their power and wealth by bringing additional territories under control
Prior to the outbreak of World War I, European countries vied for control of Africa and Asia due to the richness of various raw materials these continents could provide. Needless to say, tensions ran high among the European nations as they struggled against one another to control the areas and gain the raw materials they needed/wanted.


  • Alliance systems--a network of agreements, treaty, and ententes
Over time, due to various reasons, various countries in Europe built up alliance systems, the point of which were to defend one another. If one country went to war, the allied country (or countries) would come to the defense of the attacked.

The alliance systems in place prior to the outbreak of the Great War were as follows: Russia and Serbia; Germany and Austria-Hungary; France and Russia; Britain and France and Belgium; and Japan and Britain.

The alliance systems are confusing, but they would play a major role in the war in Europe. Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia (for a reason that will be examined in the next, and final, cause); Russia would then become involved in order to defend Serbia. Seeing Russia mobilizing, Germany would declare war on Russia; France would then declare war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany would attack France through Belgium pulling Britain into the war, and because Britain was drawn into the war, Japan would enter into the war as well. Later, for reasons that will be examined in the next post, Italy and the United States would enter the war on the side of the Triple Entente (made up of Britain, Russia, and France).


  • Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
If there could be one singular cause for the outbreak of a war, then the immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the Austria-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist terrorist organization called the Black Hand sent assassins to kill the Archduke. Their initial attempts failed, but on June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke and his wife while they were in Sarajevo, Bosnia which was a part of Austria-Hungary at the time. The assassination was in protest to Austria-Hungary having control of the area when Serbia wanted control of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The assassination led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and the alliance system kicked in to full-force, leading to the outbreak of the Great War. 



The Great War in Europe would change the world and would change warfare. The war had an extremely high casualty rate--over 15 million deaths and 20 million injuries. Due to this war, modern warfare would never be the same and this war would lead to confusing alliances, economic difficulties for all of the countries involved, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. However, those all for a different post. 

Next time on the blog, we'll be examining the causes for the U.S. entry into World War I. Until next time!

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Conditions in Europe Which Led to World War I

Hello readers! I know it's been a while since I last published an actual history post, so I'm going to get right into it after this very brief introduction. The next few posts, including this one, will be about World War I. Before I begin informing you all about the outbreak of the war, it's imperative that I begin with what was going on in the U.S. and in Europe prior to the war's start; this will allow for understanding of why the war happened the way it did in future posts.

Getty Images--On the Franco-German front, British soldiers standing in trenches

Prior to the outbreak of the Great War, the U.S. was an economic powerhouse. The economic strength of the U.S. due to the rise of industrialization rivaled that of much of Europe; the rapid production of now-household items and the technological advances brought the U.S. financial wealth--more people were employed in various industries, urbanization caused cities to spring up almost out of nowhere, and the industrial growth in the country brought multiple waves of immigrants to its shores looking for opportunities to better themselves. Also important to note is that although the U.S. focused its military efforts on the Spanish-American War and extending its control over places like the Philippines, Cuba (for a small time), and Puerto Rico, the U.S. did, more or less, develop an isolationist foreign policy and remained outside of the political disputes happening over in Europe around the same time. However, the U.S. would later play a minor role in the Great War.

So, what was happening in Europe at the time? Although this blog focuses on American history, we cannot discuss the Great War without knowing what happened in Europe prior to its outbreak, and Professor David Stevenson of the London School of Economics & Political Science wrote a great article about it linked here. However, for those who do not want to click on to external links, here is the full article below, along with Stevenson's footnotes and the brief bio that appears at the bottom of his article:

"Considering factors such as globalization and military advancement, Professor David Stevenson examines the political and diplomatic landscape of Europe before the outbreak of World War One.


Europe in the early 20th century had known no great war, involving all the Continent’s major Powers, since the fall of Napoleon. Although European society had been transformed in the interim, the changes had made war more difficult rather than impossible, and the underpinnings of the long 19th-century peace had grown fragile.

Globalization

Characteristic of the pre-1914 decades was what we would now call globalization. Trade may have risen from one thirtieth to one third of world production between 1800 and 1913; between 1855 and 1914 investment flows grew 20 times. Europe accounted for nearly two thirds of global trade and even more of global investment, and from the 1890s Europe’s major currencies were fixed in value in relation to each other under the international gold standard. Hundreds of thousands of foreign-born labourers worked in the heavy industries of French Lorraine and Germany’s Ruhr. The British writer Norman Angell in his 1909 best-seller, Europe’s Optical Illusion, maintained that war between advanced modern economies was now irrational.[1] Yet British naval planners saw economic interdependence as making Germany more vulnerable, and the German General Staff considered war remained a viable option, at least if victory came quickly.

Democratization

A second 19th-century characteristic was democratization. By 1914 all the European Powers had elected lower houses of parliament, and a majority of the adult male population was enfranchised. The press was relatively free, and citizens could form parties and pressure groups. Nonetheless, in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia ministers answered to monarchs rather than to a parliamentary majority, and the military chiefs were not subordinate to civilian statesmen. Moreover, as international tension mounted, public opinion polarized, more moderate and progressive tendencies being offset by nationalism and militarism. Europe’s socialist parties opposed wars of conquest and aggression but were willing to endorse a war fought for just cause and in self-defence, which in 1914 all the governments would claim to be fighting.

Military revolutions

The 19th century had also witnessed a succession of military revolutions. At sea, steel had superseded wooden hulls and steam had superseded sail. HMS Dreadnought, launched by Britain in 1906 with turbine engines and 10 12-inch guns, made all existing battleships obsolete. On land, Prussia’s combination of universal liability to conscription, forward strategic planning by a General Staff, and railway-borne mobilization helped win the wars of German unification, and was widely emulated. Breech-loading cannon with rifled steel barrels replaced smooth-bore muzzle-loaders, and infantry rifles replaced muskets. Smokeless high explosive replaced powder in bullets and shells, and the modern field gun fired up to 20 rounds per minute. Yet although on balance these developments favoured defenders over attackers, military planners concluded from the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War that offensive tactics could still prevail, albeit at much higher cost than before.

International organization

War therefore remained possible, and the leading international political institution, the Concert of Europe, was too weak to prevent it. The Concert was not a permanent fixture but rather an understanding that at times of crisis the Powers would try to resolve their differences peacefully through a conference of ambassadors. It was a valuable face-saving device if governments wished to use it, but in 1914 when Britain proposed a conference, Germany encouraged Austria-Hungary to refuse.

A balance of power?

Peace therefore depended on more traditional devices such as the balance of power and deterrence. In the 1870s and 1880s the newly unified German Second Empire under the Chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck was not only the strongest Continental military power but also spun a web of alliances that left France – resentful of its defeat in 1870 – isolated. The Austro-German alliance of 1879 developed into the Triple Alliance (including Italy) in 1882, and Russia too concluded agreements with the German-led bloc. But after Wilhelm II became Emperor he allowed the connection with Russia to lapse, facilitating the formation in 1891-94 of a Franco-Russian alliance. Even so, for a time the two groupings balanced each other, and Russia and France were in rivalry not only with Germany but also (in Central Asia and in Africa) with Britain. So secure did Germany still feel that from 1898 it too challenged Britain through a major programme of North Sea battleship building.

The beginning of the 20th century

After 1904-07, the line-up became more ominous. Russia was weakened for several years after its defeat by Japan. Germany tried but failed to form a German-Franco-Russian bloc excluding Britain. Instead the British compromised over their extra-European disputes with the French in the ‘Entente cordiale’ of 1904 and over those with the Russians in 1907, and began co-operating diplomatically with their former adversaries. In 1902 Italy had reached a separate understanding with France. Germany’s leaders protested that the Triple Entente ‘encircled’ them, while their one remaining reliable ally, Austria-Hungary, was a multi-national empire that was hobbled by inter-ethnic disputes and menaced by a growing confrontation with its neighbour, Serbia, which with Russian encouragement fomented separatism among Austria-Hungary’s South Slavs. After 1905 Europe experienced a succession of diplomatic crises that heightened antagonism between the two blocs. From 1912 the Anglo-German naval race lost impetus, as a land arms race between the Austro-German and Franco-Russian alliances superseded it. In retrospect it is easy to discern the warning signs. But at the time they were less evident, and as late as spring 1914 tensions seemed to be easing. The French Socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, believed the peaceful resolution of so many crises had bred a dangerous complacency. Nonetheless, a general war was not inevitable until deliberate decisions created it." 

Footnotes

[1] Norman Angell, Europe’s Optical Illusion (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1909).
  • David Stevenson
  • Professor David Stevenson holds the Stevenson Chair in International History at the London School of Economics & Political Science. His publications include: Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); 1914-1918: the History of the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004); and With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2011). He is currently preparing a book on the international history of the year 1917.

This is a fantastic article by Professor Stevenson highlighting the conditions in Europe that primed it for war. In upcoming posts, we'll learn about the events that led to the outbreak of the war in Europe, why the various European nations became involved in the conflict, and why the U.S. would come to involve itself in the war, as well as specific key battles in the war and its eventual end and repercussions.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

A New Adventure



Hello readers. I know I've been away for a while but I have fantastic news--I've been diligently chipping away at a manuscript that will be published by Arcadia Publishing/The History Press in the spring of 2020! I submitted a revised version of my graduate school thesis back in April after I got my grade back on it and was contacted by the acquisitions editor for The History Press (a subsidiary of Arcadia Publishing) saying that my manuscript wasn't what they were looking for; however, he stated that my writing style is what they were looking for and had me pitch another idea. A few days later after giving it some thought and doing a whole lot of research, I pitched a new idea--a book about the wilderness frontier raids in Upstate New York during the American Revolution. I knew it was something they didn't already have a book about and I had already done some research on the topic for my graduate thesis and had written an article about it for the New York History Blog (check that blog out here) so I was confident in my abilities to write a full manuscript about it. This project did get approved and I was sent a publishing contract a few days ago. This is such an exciting time for me and I'm so excited to be sharing this amazing news with all of you! However, I know some of you may be concerned with the state of affairs here at the blog--I'm writing this post to tell you all not to worry because I'm still going to be devoting time to write posts for this blog as well. Each and every one of you, readers, have made me realize how much I enjoy writing for an audience that enjoys history and have pushed me to explore other avenues so I can continue to pursue my love of writing and history.

Be on the lookout for more posts in the near future as well as updates on how my manuscript is going. Remember to "like" the Facebook page for this blog at Marie Williams, The Half-Pint Historian and follow me on Twitter @MarieDAWilliams.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

The Spanish-American War

The late 19th century would see two wars--a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and a war between the United States and Spain. The Spanish-American War would result in the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas and the acquisition of new territories in the Pacific and Latin America by the United States.




In the early months of 1895, Cuba was struggling to gain independence from Spain. Spain was brutally repressive towards Cuba and this was played out in the American media. Newspaper editors, politicians, and regular American citizens wanted U.S. intervention on Cuba's behalf but there was not probable cause to enter the conflict at the time. William Randolph Hearst, the editor of the "New York Journal", sent a correspondent to Cuba in 1859 to draw pictures for the newspaper. The correspondent sent word to Hearst that there was no hint that war would break out; in his reply, Hearst famously replied, "You supply the pictures and I'll supply the war."

On February 15, 1898, an explosion occurred on the USS Maine, a U.S. naval ship sent to Cuba to monitor the rebellion. The explosion was completely unexpected and a large number of the crew, 260 men, were killed as a result. Although the cause of the explosion is still being debated by naval historians and naval archaeologists today (with the primary belief today being that the cause was an internal combustion issue after decades of research), the U.S. Navy believed through its investigations that the USS Maine was destroyed by a missile fired by the Spanish.

The phrase "Remember the Maine" became a rallying cry for the U.S. as civilian citizens, military members politicians, and even the president believed that the U.S. should enter into a war with Spain.

President Grover Cleveland wanted to avoid going to war with Spain during his term and was successful; however, President McKinley was not successful. After the incident with the USS Maine, President McKinley sent the Spanish a strongly worded letter demanding a truce and an end to the brutality against the Cubans. The Spanish refused and the U.S. Congress would declare war on April 25, 1898.

The events in Cuba would trigger the Spanish-American War but the first official events of the war would kick-off in the Philippines in Southeast Asia. In late February 1898 after the incident with the USS Maine, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had warned Commodore George Dewey to prepare for possible military action in the Philippines as these islands served as a base for part of the Spanish naval fleet. In the early morning hours of May 1, Commodore Dewey had launched a surprise attack on the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Most of the Spanish ships that were present would be destroyed. In July, American troops arrived in the Philippines and combined forces of the Americans and the Filipino rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, would capture the city of Manila; on their own, the rebels would capture the island of Luzon and declare independence from Spain.

Back in the Caribbean, a Spanish fleet entered the Cuban harbor at Santiago on May 19. The American Navy soon blockaded the Spanish fleet, trapping them inside the harbor. About 17,000 American troops then came ashore while forces under Cuban general Calixto Garcia drove off the Spanish soldiers. As the Cuban and American forces advanced, heavy fighting followed.

As the war advanced, Theodore Roosevelt would resign from his position as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy and would join the war efforts as a commanding officer of the First Regiment of U.S. Cavalry Volunteers--known famously as the Rough Riders. On July 1, the Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill, capturing the hill after intense fighting. Two days later, the Spanish fleet in Santiago Harbor was destroyed, bringing an end to Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. In late July, the U.S. then turned its sights on Puerto Rico and quickly took control of the island.

The Spanish-American War led to the acquisition of new territories to the United States, which included Puerto Rico and the Philippines; the U.S. also became a protectorate of Cuba via the Platt Amendment (1901) which granted Cuba its independence under the conditions that the U.S. could control the naval base at Guantanamo Bay and also intervene in Cuban affairs if the country's independence was threatened. In 1907 under the Jones Act, Puerto Rico became an official U.S. territory and all Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship; at that time, Puerto Rico wanted independence and to be its own sovereign nation whereas today many Puerto Ricans want the territory to be granted statehood.

The Philippines, however, would continue to fight for independence and would have support from anti-imperialist backers such as Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and others. Imperialists Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, and others argued what they believed to be the benefits of American imperialism and in securing the islands--that the Philippines could be home to (another) Pacific naval base, that they could use the location as a trade hub with China, and that the U.S. had a duty to help "less civilized" peoples. The imperialists would win the argument and the Treaty of Paris would be ratified on February 6, 1899.

Rebellion in the Philippines would continue as the islands struggled for independence not from Spain but from the U.S. More than 4,000 Americans died in the conflict, but the Filipinos suffered much greater casualties with a death toll of 200,000 civilians and soldiers. In the summer of 1901, the U.S. transferred authority from a military government to a civilian government with William H. Taft at its head. In 1946, the Philippines would finally be granted independence.

Although the Spanish-American War was one of the shorter conflicts the U.S. was involved in, it has lasting impacts on the country today as far as international and national relations are concerned with the acquisition of lands. In 2017, Puerto Rico was ravaged by Hurricane Maria, leaving over one million people without electricity, communications technology, and their homes. Relief aid was slow to come, and many in the U.S. commonwealth are still left without homes and electricity. Today, many people don't realize that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory rather than a sovereign nation and believe that they should be left alone to deal with the fallout and the cleanup of the hurricane on their own, which arrived in the midst of an economic downturn for the territory, further straining relationships with our own people.


The next post on the blog will examine U.S. international relations and the construction of the Panama Canal.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

The Progressive Era's Reform Movements: A Summary

The Progressive Era was a period of widespread social activism and political reform in the U.S. from the 1890s to the 1920s. The main objective of the Progressive Era was to eliminate the social ills caused by industrialization, urbanization, mass immigration, and government corruption. The top ten reforms of the Progressive Era were:

1. Civil Rights-- W.E.B. Du Bois published "The Souls of Black Folk" in 1903 which called for a more proactive approach to civil rights; in 1909, the NAACP was founded by a group of black and white activists.

2. Conservationism-- Millions of acres of land and mineral sites were set aside as national property during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt for conservation and reclamation; in 1906, the National Park Service was founded by the Organic Act.

3. Government Reform-- Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette implemented the "Wisconsin Idea" which reformed taxes, elections, railroad rates, and more; he also allowed voters to have a more direct control of their government, and other states would see his actions and would follow suit.

4. Health & Medicine-- After the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", which examined the horrors of the meatpacking industry, reformers worked to create national food and drug regulations; today, we have the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to ensure our food and medicine is safe for consumption.

5. Labor Reform-- Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to support workers by intervening in the coal strike of 1902 on behalf of the miners. Reformers also advocated for legislation regulating child labor and workplace safety. Labor reform would lead to the rise of OSHA safety standards, workers compensation, and other measures.

6. Radical Trade Unionism-- Trade unions were established for the benefit of the workers; tools such as strikes and collective bargaining were used to receive things like worker safety measures and higher pay...including the fight for a minimum living wage.

7. Socialism-- Socialism is a dirty word in this country, but it would come to the U.S. in the 1900s. Socialist candidate Eugene Debs won 800,000 votes in 1912 for the presidential election, showing how popular Socialism was at the time. Some socialist measures continue to exist in this country--such as public schools, public libraries, public emergency forces such as police, firefighters, and EMS, and more.

8. Temperance-- Temperance groups blamed violence, poverty, and other social problems on alcohol. As a result of the work carried out by temperance groups, the Eighteenth Amendment forbidding the manufacturing, sale, transportation, and consumption of alcohol was ratified to the Constitution; later, this amendment would be stricken.

9. Trust Busting-- Theodore Roosevelt used the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act to "bust" up powerful monopolies and corporate trusts like the Northern Securities railroad trust and the Standard Oil trust.

10. Women's Rights-- Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. Birth control would allow women to space out their births and to limit the number of children they had. The infamous Comstock Laws would be passed, which severely censored information and materials considered "indecent" such as information on birth control; women of all social classes rallied against these laws, and would also rally for suffrage (which I described in a post in March for Women's History Month). The Nineteenth Amendment would be ratified in 1920 and women would be granted the right to vote.

This post was a summary of the many reform movements of the Progressive Era. These reforms by no means eliminated the social ills of the day, but the goal to set out to make a better country in the wake of industrialization was fought head-on by people of all social classes who saw that moving forward technologically was not positive for everyone.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Educating America

Before 1870, fewer than half of American children went to school. One-room schoolhouses with all age levels being taught together by one teacher was the norm. As industry grew, people realized that the nation would benefit from having an educated workforce; as a result, states would push to improve education at all levels. This post will examine how education reform swept the nation.




In 1852, Massachusetts would pave the way for compulsory education by law. Compulsory education is what we in the U.S. continue to have--children up to a certain age are required by law to attend school. Other states followed suit and most states would require children up to age 16 to remain in school, changing from no age requirement and no compulsory attendance. The public school would become popularized at this time. Due to the rise of public schools and compulsory education, more youths would stay in school and graduate. Higher education would expand as a result of increased availability to education; both state-funded universities and privately-funded colleges for both men and women would increase in number.

One major proponent of compulsory education was Horace Mann, who was the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Mann believed that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that it should aim to educate the child as a whole person--to teach them the reading, writing, and math skills they would need for everyday life but to also teach them civic virtue and character so they would be well-rounded, functioning members of society.

Education for adults would also rise during this time, usually in the form of libraries and religious education. Teachers also taught immigrants how to speak English and how to read, write, and perform necessary mathematic functions.

As education became more widespread, so too did literacy rates increase. As more people learned to read and write, they began to do these for pleasure. Low-priced paperbacks about the "Wild West" and "rags-to-riches" stories became popular; realistic fiction would become popular as well, propelling authors such as Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, and others to fame.

Newspapers and their readership began to take off at this time as a direct result of higher literacy rates. However, newspapers were not always informational pieces; this time period saw one of the greatest feuds between editors--William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Hearst was the editor-in-chief of the "New York Journal" and Pulitzer was the editor-in-chief of the "New York World"; both competed to be the best-selling newspaper of the later 19th century, and they did this via yellow journalism--sensationalizing and embellishing the stories (or making them up altogether). This will be covered in-depth in a future post, but I wanted to set up the information here first.

The growth of an educated populace would propel the U.S. and further push it to become the global superpower of the 19th and early 20th century.

Sunday, May 27, 2018

The Art of Doing Business: Captains of Industry, Robber Barons, and the Formation of Unions in the Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution and the Progressive Era brought about new ways of doing business, and due to these new ways of doing business changes had to occur for the safety and betterment of the workers. These eras would lead to the rise of entrepreneurs in the forms of captains of industry and robber barons and would also bring about the rise of unions and health and safety standards.



The later 1800s and early 1900s saw the rise of corporations, or businesses owned by multiple investors. Corporations operated by raising large amounts of capital by selling stock in the business. Stockholders, in turn, would receive a share in the company's profits and could pick the directors to run the company. The corporations were seen as a benefit for a time because they limited the risk for investors; owners of non-incorporated businesses risked losing their homes, property, and livelihood if the business folded but investors of corporations only risked the amount of money they had invested. At this time, banks were loaning huge amounts of capital to corporations, which allowed for the growth of industry; bankers made major profits off of these loans as well. One such banker was J.P. Morgan, a name that readers should be familiar with if they have one (or more) Chase credit card. Morgan gained control of key industries such as railroads and steel via issuing loans to corporations; he and his colleagues would also buy stock in troubled corporations, run them in a way that eliminated competition, and made those corporations profitable again.

 The United States took a laissez-faire (hands-off) approach to business in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Congress rarely made laws to regulate business practices, which led to a feeling of freedom and growth of industry at the time. This growth of industry and big business would lead to the rise of trusts and monopolies (more on these later in this post). The growth of industries also led to the rise of captains of industry and of robber barons.

Some famous captains of industry were: John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, the previously mentioned J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. These men expanded their industries, gave people jobs, and literally built America.

John D. Rockefeller came from humble beginnings as the son of a peddler in New York City. At age 23, Rockefeller invested in an oil refinery and he used the profits earned from his investment to purchase other oil companies. Rockefeller competed in industry by lowering his prices to drive out competition; this resulted in Rockefeller forming the Standard Oil Trust in 1882.

Andrew Carnegie came from humble beginnings as well; as a poor Scottish immigrant, he worked his way up in the railroad business then entered the growing steel industry. Carnegie slowly gained control of every step of the steel making process; Carnegie would come to own iron mills, steel mills, railroads, and shipping lines. In 1892, Carnegie would combine his businesses into the Carnegie Steel Company, which would produce more steel than all of the mills of England. Although Carnegie was a ruthless businessman he was also a philanthropist and believed that the rich had a duty to improve society, so he donated hundreds of millions of dollars to build and fund libraries and concert halls and other charities.

One final captain of industry this post will discuss is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built his wealth in shipping and railroads. he cut his teeth in the shipping industry working with his father as a ferryman between Staten Island and Manhattan. Vanderbilt turned to the railroad business as some of the railroads of his day were built to connect with steamboats that ran to New York. Vanderbilt dominated the steamboat business on the Long Island Sound and successfully launched a campaign in the 1840s to take over the New York/Providence/Boston Railroad, also known as the Stonington. Over time, Vanderbilt would take over numerous railroad lines, most notably the Hudson River Railroad and the New York Central Railroad. In 1869, Vanderbilt had directed the construction of the Grand Central Depot on 42nd Street in Manhattan for the terminus of his lines. The Grand Central Depot was finished and operational in 1871 and was renamed the Grand Central Terminal in 1913. Vanderbilt, who had also grown up poor, put his wealth to use by establishing Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

I used the term "captains of industry" while describing these men because the term generally has positive connotations--captains of industry often: served their nation in a positive way; raised productivity and expanded markets; created jobs that raised the nation's standards of living; boosted the supply of goods by building factories; and created museums, libraries, universities, concert halls, and more, many of which still exist today. The term "robber baron" that I used earlier in this post had and has negative connotations--robber barons were people who became rich through ruthless business practices. Robber barons often: drained the country of its natural resources; persuaded public officials to interpret the law in their favor; ruthlessly destroyed their competitors; made their workers toil under dangerous and unhealthy conditions; paid their workers meager wages; and built their fortunes by stealing from the public.

Before moving on to the experiences of workers and the rise of labor unions, here are some important definitions:

Corporations--businesses owned by multiple investors

Monopoly--a company that controls most of all business in a particular industry

Trust--a group of corporations run by a single board of directors


Changes in the Workplace

Prior to the Civil War, most factories were fairly small; however, as industries grew due in part to immigration, the workplace had to change as well. Most of the factory workers were immigrants, poor native-born whites, and African-Americans who left Southern farms. In some industries, the majority of workers were even women and children. For example, women outnumbered men in the textile mills of New England, the garment sweatshops of New York and the tobacco factories of the South. Children worked in bottle factories, in textile mills, tobacco factories, coal mines, and garment factories.

Factory life was by no means ideal at this time--employers were not required to pay compensation for injuries that happened on the job or even to pay employees a living wage. Robber baron factory owners often cut costs at the expense of their workers; children were often injured or killed in the factories and coal mines, and one of the deadliest fires occurred in New York City on March 25, 1911 due to unsafe work practices. On March 25, 1911, fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; the workers, most of whom were young women, rushed to the exits but found they had been barred to prevent the workers from walking off the job. Workers tried to escape the flames by jumping out the windows to their deaths. Nearly 150 workers lost their lives in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. As a result, New York workers pushed for safer conditions in a number of ways.

One such way was through organizing and forming labor unions so the voices of workers could be heard as a collective. One of the oldest of these labor unions was the Knights of Labor. The Knights of Labor was established in 1869 by a group of Philadelphia clothing workers. The Knights admitted women, African-Americans, immigrants, and unskilled laborers. The Knights was one of the largest labor unions of its day. However, whatever success the Knights had was undercut by the Haymarket Riot. On May 4, 1886, in Chicago, striking workers rallied in Haymarket Square. Suddenly, a bomb exploded killing seven policemen; police sprayed the crowd with bullets. As a result of the Haymarket Riot the Knights of Labor, present at the riot, lost much of their influence. In its place, Samuel Gompers formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in Columbus, Ohio in 1886. Unlike the Knights, the AFL only admitted skilled workers because Gompers argued that their skills made it costly and difficult to train replacements; he also believed that the most effective way to achieve improvements was through collective bargaining where the union would negotiate with management for workers as a group. By 1904 the AFL had grown to more than a million members.

Women also participated in the labor movement. One woman who rose to prominence at this time was "Mother" Mary Harris Jones. Mother Jones tirelessly traveled the country campaigning for unions, giving support to striking unions, and calling attention to the hard lives of children who worked in factories.

Today, unions don't play as major of a role for workers as they did in the past. However, from the labor movements of the 19th and 20th centuries we continue to maintain child labor laws (which vary from state to state), OSHA standards, HAZ MAT standards, and more meant to benefit the workers.

The Second Industrial Revolution would bring about the rise of urbanization and factory work, and would lead to the rise of workers standing up for their rights needs. The next posts on this blog will be about the rise in education in the United States and the reforms of the Progressive Era. 

Monday, May 21, 2018

Inventions and Innovations in the Second Industrial Revolution

Hello readers. The previous blog post was about immigration in the Second Industrial Revolution; now, we're moving into the inventions, innovations, and advancements made during the era.


In the late 1800s, numerous enterprising Americans created a flood of new inventions meant to make life easier for others. In 1897, the U.S. government issued more patents than in the decade before the Civil War and would become known the world over as the land of inventions and innovations.

This wouldn't be a post about inventions and innovations without mentioning Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Nikola Tesla was an inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and physicist best known for his contributions to the knowledge of alternating current (AC) electrical supply system. Tesla emigrated to the U.S. in 1884 from Austria. He worked at Edison Machine Works in New York City for a time before going his own way; he would establish laboratories and companies where he would develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices such as his famed alternating current induction motor. Tesla was also famous for his experiments with wireless technology--from wireless lighting and wireless electrical power to wireless communication. Without Tesla's experiments, there would be no basis for cell phones or WiFi today. In 1876, Thomas Edison set up a research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey where numerous scientists worked to produce products such as the electric light bulb, phonograph motion picture camera, and more. With most of the inventions produced by Edison's crew requiring electricity, Edison would open the first electrical power plant in New York City in 1882; soon, power plants would spring up in other cities all over the country, providing electricity to homes businesses, and schools. Today, the electrical inventions of Tesla and Edison, and the availability of electricity in the home are often taken for granted.

The period of the Second Industrial Revolution/Technological Revolution would lead to a rise in communications technology just as the Market Revolution had. In 1866, Cyrus Field had laid an underwater telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean between the U.S. and Europe. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell further improved communication with the successful invention of the telephone; by 1885 more than 300,000 telephones had been sold, mostly to businesses, and Bell would go on to organize the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (or AT&T today). Other devices would go on to make the work life and home life simplified. In 1868, Christopher Sholes invented the typewriter; George Eastman's Kodak Camera was introduced in 1888 and its light weight replaced the use of huge cameras and hundreds of pounds of chemicals; and the costs of the typewriter and the Kodak Camera were low enough that ordinary people could buy them and use them in their daily lives.

The time period also brought about a change in how people traveled. In the late 1800s, Europeans invented the automobile and it would make its way to the U.S. In 1902, only 8,000 Americans owned an automobile; in 1913, Henry Ford developed the assembly line, which allowed him to churn out vehicles at a quickened pace making the automobile more widely available to the American public in both quantity and price. Ford even began churning out his own automobiles such as the Ford Model A and the Ford Model T--both available in every color you could want...as long as that color was black. Roadways were built and expanded upon and today the name Ford continues to live on.

One final mode of transportation that came about because of the Second Industrial Revolution was the aeroplane, or airplane as we say now. In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright tested a gas-powered airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On its first flight, the plane stayed in the air for 12 seconds and flew 120 feet. at the time, no one could see a practical use for these flying machines, and it wasn't until World war I broke out when their potential military use was realized. By the 1920s, travel by airplane began to "take off" and Boeing would begin the move from manufacturing military aircraft to commercial fleets.

Many of these inventions and innovations remain in use today while others have not stood the test of time and our modern technological revolution, but these inventions and innovations would propel America forward and make us known the world over as a technological powerhouse.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Immigration in the Second Industrial Revolution

The Second Industrial Revolution was well-known for the influx of immigrants who came from Europe to the United States. Between 1865 and 1915, some 25 million immigrants entered the U.S. There were many reasons for this increase in immigration--some European immigrants were escaping pogroms and political turmoil, others were seeking religious freedom, others were facing famine in their own countries, others were seeking spouses, and others were seeking employment and economic gain. The decision to leave one's country may have been difficult for some, and not all immigrants chose to stay in the United States for a variety of reasons. Many Americans were not pleased with the arrival of these Europeans coming to their country and made their opinions known. This post will examine the impact of immigration and nativism on the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution.

In the later 1800s and the early 1900s, immigrants arrived in the U.S. on ships. Ocean travel was very popular at the time, but it was a luxury for many people as it was expensive. The immigrants were crammed into large compartments below decks known as steerage, typically where cattle would be stored on a transatlantic voyage. To deal with the influx of immigrants into the U.S. there were multiple receiving centers in various parts of the country--in 1892 the most famous of these receiving centers, Ellis Island in New York, opened and took in European immigrants and at the same time Angel Bay, a receiving center in San Fransisco, California took in Asian immigrants.

The path to becoming an American citizen back then was much different than it is today. In order to become an American citizen in the 1880s, immigrants had to say they wanted to become citizens, study American history and the laws, pass a naturalization exam, and promise loyalty only to the United States. Finally, if everything was sufficient, the individual was given naturalization papers. This was not the case for many of the immigrants--many arrived in the U.S. as temporary workers, where they would work in the U.S. for a time to earn money and return to their home country to buy property and get married. For others, coming to the U.S. was a permanent move to escape political turmoil or famine. However, one-third of immigrants who had initially arrived in the U.S. had determined after a time that their situation in their home country was not as bad as what they experienced in the U.S. and would return to their home country.

Not everyone was pleased with the wave of immigrants coming into the country. Nativist, those who wanted to preserve the U.S. for native-born Americans citizens. They attempted to do this by creating "scientific" tests based on a series of measurements and physical exams to prove intelligence, strength, and other "worthy" characteristics. Nativists would also spread the beliefs that these newcomers would not assimilate to the culture of the U.S., that they would take jobs from "real" citizens, that they would bring rampant crime and violence, and that they would bring undesirable beliefs into the country such as anarchy, communism, and socialism to the country. Despite the exams and the spread of these xenophobic beliefs, millions of people were allowed entrance into the United States.

Immigrants would cause numerous changes in the country as they lived and worked their daily lives. Cities such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco grew in population and immigrants took jobs in factories, as street vendors, as farmers, brewers, and as various skilled laborers such as masons and seamstresses/tailors who wanted to try their hand at their own businesses. While some immigrants would become extremely successful and their names are still known today--such as Frederick Pabst, Frederick Miller, Adolphus Busch, Eberhard Anheuser, Levi Straus, Andrew Carnegie, and others--many others would live a life of poverty that they were unable to escape. In the 1900s, the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair described what life was like for many immigrants who lived in the meatpacking districts and were just trying to make a living for themselves and their families.

Immigration in the U.S. has always had a vexed history, and it is a history that cannot be stated in just one blog post as it played such a major role in the Second Industrial Revolution and the Progressive Era. Upcoming posts will be about the Second Industrial Revolution will include inventions and innovations; captains of industry, robber barons, and the rise of unions; and yellow journalism and muckracking.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Second Industrial Revolution/Technological Revolution

Hello readers! In recent days (and weeks...and months) this blog has seen some special posts to commemorate events like Women's History Month and the sinking of the RMS Titanic; however, we're going to be getting back on track with posts going in chronological order. Before I begin this post, the first of a series of posts about the Second Industrial Revolution, I would like to point out that I'm looking for guest bloggers. You can read the call for submissions here. I'll also be posting videos on The Half-Point Historian Facebook page again soon, so make sure to "like" the page to see content that doesn't make its way here on the blog. Okay, enough shameless plugging, let's get to it.


Over the course of the Reconstruction Era, technology began to change the way Americans lived and worked. The period of time from around 1830 to the end of the Reconstruction Era would lay the groundwork for the Second Industrial Revolution, which would span from around 1850 until the end of the First World War.

As the nation expanded westward in the mid-1800s, government policy began to favor industrial growth over an agrarian society; Congress gave generous land grants and other subsidies to railroads and other businesses and the government kept high tariffs on imported goods which made foreign goods more expensive to boost American manufacturing. Also at this time, vast deposits of coal, iron, copper, and lead were being mined and forests were being leveled for lumber; these raw materials would propel the United States into the Second Industrial Revolution, which would also be known as the Technological Revolution for its rapid growth and expansion of different forms of technology.

One of the most important factors that spurred the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States was the Bessemer process. Developed sometime in the 1850s, the Bessemer process allowed steel to be manufactured so it would be stronger, in larger quantities, and at a low cost to manufacturers. Steel would come to replace iron as a basic building material and is still used today. In 1859, workers near Titusville, Pennsylvania discovered oil; this oil would initially be refined into crude oil and used to lubricate machinery in various industrial plants. Later, this oil would be used to power automobiles much like today. Steel and gasoline would launch the Technological Revolution forward.

Due to the boom in steel manufacturing, the use of railroads began to increase over time. Trains were used to ship people and goods around the country and helped to fuel industrial growth. The railroad system allowed for raw materials to be shipped from the mid-west and the west to the northern east coast where those raw materials would be manufactured into various products; the railroad system would allow people to traverse the ever-expanding nation, which would, in turn, lead to the growth of towns and cities.

The manufacturing of steel, and the continued manufacturing of textiles from the era of the Market Revolution, would lead to the rise of urbanization, particularly on the east coast.

The rate of urbanization was astonishing during this era; in 1860 only one in five Americans lived in cities but by 1890 one in three Americans lived in cities. The reason for this rapid rate of urbanization was due to farmers, immigrants, and African-Americans from the South would migrate to cities like New York and Chicago for economic opportunities--cities attracted manufacturing plants and other industries, and industry attracted potential workers. The rise of urbanization and the growth of cities would also lead to the rise of public transportation and the suburbs; so if you really think about it, we have the Second Industrial Revolution/Technological Revolution to blame for reality T.V. shows like "The Real Housewives of"...wherever. In any case, the new suburban areas meant that people could commute to work in the cities and were not forced to live in the cities and suffer through tenement housing and other ills. In the 880s, such public transportation as elevated trains, electric streetcars, electric subway trains, and steel bridges were appearing in many of the cities of the era, with the most famous of these being the Brooklyn Bridge which opened in 1883 and linked Manhattan to Brooklyn.

The growth of urbanization would also mean cities had to find new ways to utilize the space they had available to them, so the skyscraper was created. In 1885, Chicago architects constructed the 10-story building and by 1900 steel-framed skyscrapers towering at 30-stories loomed over cities.

Rapid urbanization would bring countless problems. Fire was a huge threat to city life and to the tightly packed neighborhoods within. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire leveled three square miles of the downtown area, killed 300 people, and left 18,000 people homeless. Rapid urbanization would also lead to the rise of slums and tenement housing, where people who were poor lived in small apartments without heat, windows, or indoor plumbing and were at great risk of contracting cholera and other diseases. As a result, settlement houses like Jane Addams's Hull House and organizations like the Salvation Army were established to help the urban poor.


The topic of the Second Industrial Revolution is a long one and would be better explained if broken up into multiple posts. This post was largely about the rise of the Technological Revolution and of urbanization; other posts in this series will include inventions and innovations, the transportation boom, the rise of businesses and unions, immigration, and education reform. So, make sure you follow along here at the blog or "like" the Facebook page for notifications of when new content gets posted for more information on American history!



Saturday, April 14, 2018

The Sinking of the Titanic

Hello readers! Tomorrow, April 15, 2018, marks 106 years since the sinking of the ocean liner the RMS Titanic, so I thought I would take the time to write a special post about the history of the Titanic.


Photo by Bill Cannon, www.fineartamerica.com
On April 10, 1912, the ocean liner the RMS Titanic, one of the largest in its class, left Southampton, England on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. The Titanic was designed by Irish shipbuilder William Pirrie and was considered unsinkable due to having 16 watertight compartments, four of which could fill with water without the ship losing buoyancy. On its maiden voyage, the ship carried 2,200 passengers and crew.

Apart from England, the RMS Titanic also picked up passengers from Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland before heading full-speed towards its destination of New York City.

Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the Titanic was unable to be steered away from a sizeable iceberg and scrapped its side, which caused five of the 16 watertight compartments in the ship's hull to take on water. Distress signals sent from the Titanic were not picked up by other ships because other ships in its vicinity did not have a telegraph operator on duty at the time. As the compartments filled with water they pulled down the bow (front) of the ship; other compartments began to fill with water because they were not capped at the top, which caused the bow to sink and the stern (back) to be raised vertically out of the water. Around 2:20am on April 15th, the Titanic broke in half and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada.

Of the 2,200 passengers and crew of the ship only about 700 people, mostly women and children, survived. The 1,500 who passed did so due to a lack of lifeboats necessary for the number of people on the ship, a lack of proper emergency procedures, and due to freezing/hypothermia from the icy waters of the Northern Atlantic. A number of notable individuals died during the sinking of the Titanic, including the heirs of the Astor, Guggenheim, and Straus fortunes.

More than an hour after the sinking, the liner Carpathia arrived and would rescue the people in the lifeboats and would pull several survivors out of the water.

As a result of the sinking, rules were adopted requiring every ship have enough lifeboat space for everyone aboard, that lifeboat drills be held so everyone aboard would know what to do in the case of an emergency, that ships maintain a 24-hour security watch, and the establishment of an Internation Ice Patrol to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic shipping lines. 




Thursday, April 12, 2018

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Half-Pint Historian is looking for guest bloggers to share their love of history! The Half-Pint Historian blog was founded in 2011 to highlight the importance of American history; the blog garners an average of 2,000 unique views per month with an all-time readership of 97,000 individuals worldwide.

All topics will be considered for publication, with preference given to posts within a time period of 1870 to the present. Post length is at the discretion of the author, with a minimum length of 300 words. Posts should be submitted via email to the following address: williamsmda91@gmail.com as a .doc or .docx file; posts can also be submitted via a shareable, edit-able link as a Google Doc to the same email address. Posts do not have to be original to this blog and are allowed to have appeared elsewhere, but if your post has been published elsewhere you must hold the rights to your piece. Authors who submit guest posts to The Half-Pint Historian will maintain the rights to their work(s).

Each submission must include:

  1. Author name and a short bio
  2. Headshot of author
  3. Links to any social media accounts you would like the public to know about (blog, website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) as well as previously published works you would like readers to know about
  4. Any relevant images to accompany your post, if you plan to include images, and proper citations for the images if you don't own the image(s) yourself.
If your post is chosen for publication you will be notified via email with a date your post will be available for viewing; you'll be emailed a shareable link to the post once it goes live to share on your personal social media accounts and will be shared on The Half-Pint Historian Facebook page linked here: https://www.facebook.com/Marie-Williams-The-Half-Pint-Historian-273091876034394/ 

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Backtracking: Back to the Revolution in New York

Hello readers! For the past 15 weeks, I've been engaged in researching and writing my graduate thesis. My thesis is about the social changes that the general public had to endure during the throws of the Revolution in New York State. During my time spent researching and writing, I've uncovered some little-known pieces of my local history, and I'm going to take the time here to share it with you. I hope you all enjoy this post about the murder of Jane McCrea.


John Vanderlyn's "Death of Jane McCrea", 1804

In Upstate New York, few tragedies have the cache that the Jane McCrea murder has obtained. This infamous tragedy would have a major effect on the American Revolution as it happened in New York and would also have an impact on the war in general.

New York would declare independence from Britain in 1776, but Upstate New York would not truly feel the effects of the war until 1777 when the British and the Continental armies found themselves heading towards Saratoga. For this reason, the people in Upstate New York were content to live their lives as if there was no war. The revolutionary fervor that was present in Manhattan was not present in the frontier lands of Upstate New York; however, in the summer of 1777, the armies of General Burgoyne and his Iroquois mercenaries were pressing southward from Canada through New York with the goal to divide the American colonies.

On July 27, 1777, a young woman named Jane McCrea was scalped in the vicinity of Fort Edward, New York. There are different stories about what happened that day. The first story is that Burgoyne’s Iroquois mercenaries were ravaging towns in the area and stopped near the garrison town of Fort Edward; upon seeing the mercenaries, Jane and her friend Sara McNeil hid in a closet or the basement of their house but the mercenaries found them and scalped them both. The second story and the most well-known was that Jane and Sara were making a journey north to a British camp to meet Jane’s fiancé David Jones so the pair could wed. Burgoyne heard about this and sent a pair of scouts to escort the women to the camp; however, as the scouts were escorting the women to the camp another set of mercenaries appeared and the Iroquois argued over who should bring the women to the camp. In the fighting, Sara was taken to the camp alone and Jane was scalped; when the mercenaries returned to the camp with the scalps, Sara recognized Jane’s distinctive hair and told Burgoyne what had happened. Burgoyne ordered an inquest and that Jane’s killer be brought to him; Wyandot Panther was brought to Burgoyne and told a different story than these: that Americans had ambushed the group and Jane had been killed by an American musket ball. David Jones recovered Jane’s body and she was buried near Fort Edward; however, her body would be moved a few times and examined by archaeologists before finally resting in the Union Cemetery in the Village of Fort Edward.

          The murder of the young Loyalist bride Jane McCrea would cause controversies between both sides of the Revolutionary conflict and on both sides of the Atlantic, changing the public perceptions of the home front war. The American leader General Gates would write Burgoyne a scathing letter, blaming him for the tragedy that befell Jane McCrea. Even Sir Edmund Burke, a Whig member of British Parliament, would use the tragedy to rail against the policies of the Crown, particularly when it came to allowing their generals and Native mercenaries run amuck. The Iroquois were seen as being indiscriminate killers and struck fear into everyone as it was unsure where their true loyalties lie if they were killing those who sided with the British cause, an act that would be repeated at the Cherry Valley Massacre in November 1778. The murder of Jane McCrea was used as propaganda against the British who had claimed that they would protect Loyalists from violence.

          Jane McCrea's murder would inspire New Yorkers to take up the Patriot cause and would grow the ranks of the Continental Army at a time when desertion was otherwise high; the death of this young Loyalist woman was highly sensationalized in the media that existed at the time, and the outrage surrounding her death grew so strong that many people in Upstate New York would choose sides when they were known for not having chosen sides earlier in the conflict—going from Loyalist or neutral parties to Patriots; to them, the Loyalist cause was no longer a cause worth supporting. This rush of enlistments would lead, in part, to the many Continental victories within the Saratoga Campaign.

Friday, March 2, 2018

A Post for Women's History Month: Women's Suffrage, Racism, and Nativism in the Progressive Era

Hello readers! I know it's been a while since I last posted. I'm hard at work finishing up work for graduate school, but with March being Women's History Month I wanted to make sure I could post something. Here is a paper I wrote as an undergrad, which was used as part of my admissions to graduate school. It's about women's suffrage, racism, and nativism in the Progressive Era--looking at the women's suffrage movement not from the perspective of the well-known feminist leaders but of little-known and unknown women who were considered racial minorities in the Progressive Era and the struggles they faced in fighting for suffrage.


The Progressive Era was a time period in American history that lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s. This period is associated with the Progressives wanting to reform New York City by eliminating corruption and vice, undercutting political machines such as Tammany Hall and the bosses who ran those machines, and prohibition as well as the continued rise of urbanization and industrialization and the second half of the women’s suffrage movement. On February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified to the Constitution. This amendment granted African-American males the right to vote by stating that “the rights of citizens of the United States, or any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. From then on, what would be known as the women’s suffrage movement (and will be known as the First Wave Feminist Movement later) would get its start. Many women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Smith Miller would rise to prominence as leaders during the first half of the movement and speak out about women’s roles in society and how their voices were not being heard or how their desires were not being reflected in government actions. However, after their deaths, the movement slowed. In 1902, Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wanted to rejuvenate the suffrage movement and would later go on to form the Women’s Political Union and recruit working class women into the suffrage movement. In the 1910s, other women such as Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt joined the movement to enfranchise women.


These women and others were not just working towards enfranchisement; these women were also working on issues related to sexuality, marriage, and childbirth. This was another movement within the larger movement and was to ensure that women could access birth control information and devices, to raise the consent age in the state, to censor pornography, to abolish prostitution and human trafficking, promoted sexual education, asserted the rights of women to refuse sex within the marriage, and worked to hold men to the same sexual standards as women. An important figure to step out of this movement was Margaret Sanger, a nurse who would go on to open the first birth control clinic in New York City in 1916, which would eventually become Planned Parenthood.


The Progressive Era also saw many important changes in the lives of African-American women. Thousands had migrated from the South to the North and from rural settings to urban settings. These women went from being employed in agricultural jobs to working in the factories and as domestic servants. Slavery had been over for quite some time, but these women continued to feel its effects in New York City during this era. In addition to “peaceful” racism, where segregation and other Jim Crow laws were in effect but no physical harm came to these people, these women faced violent acts such as lynching. From race based issues such as segregation and lynching, and others, sprung another movement, one in which African-Americans such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other men and women founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to not just help the African-American men but to help the women as well.
During the Progressive Era, a lot of changes were occurring, but there was no change that was quite as controversial as the women’s suffrage movement. This movement encompassed more than just the right for women to vote, it also encompassed a sexual revolution in an era where women were supposed to be pure and many other reform movements such as education reform, health reform, housing reform, and labor reform. This was the movement that started it all; this was the movement that propelled women to finally be considered as citizens and showed everyone what women can do when they come together as an unrelenting force. However, this movement also showed that although minorities wanted the same things, many were not included or allowed to take part in the larger movements and had to develop their own clubs and organizations and create their own movement. This paper will highlight the different movements within the larger movement and will show that African-American women, as well as immigrants fighting to have the same rights as those born in the United States, succeeded in their fight for rights despite hardships they faced along the way and without help from those involved in the larger suffragette movement. This paper will also show the different forms of racism, such as segregation and discrimination, within the larger movement and what whiteness and citizenship meant in the early twentieth century.


At the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, immigration was increasing the number of inhabitants in the city (and the country as a whole). One question, though, is who was considered a citizen? Naturalization laws were different in the early twentieth century compared to what they are today in the twenty-first century. In the early 1900s, there were three steps in the naturalization process. The first step was to file a declaration of intent, these were either filed immediately upon arrival or two years after the person had been in the country. Certain groups like women, children under the age of 21, and men who served and were honorably discharged from the United States military after 1862 were exempt from this first step. The second step was to file a naturalization petition, which was a set of formal applications submitted to the court by individuals who had met residency requirements and who declared their intent to become citizens The final step was to receive the certificate of naturalization, which contained the name of the individual, the name of the court, and the date of the issue. What is interesting to note is that “derivative” citizenship was granted to wives and children as long as the children were under 21 years of age, of naturalized men. This meant that they became citizens, but also meant that if an alien woman married a U.S. citizen then she would be granted citizenship, and if an American woman married an alien that her citizenship would be revoked. The status of citizenship was truly through the man, and this fact will be looked at in detail throughout this paper.
What did this mean in terms of whiteness? Many people who we consider to be white today were not considered white during this era because of where they came from, not strictly based on the color of their skin. According to the Bureau of the Census, “in 1900 about one out of eight Americans was of a race other than white”. Who was white in the 1900s and why does it matter? Anyone who fit the standard of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) was white, and those who didn’t fit the description were not white. This includes, among others, those of African descent, those of Italian descent, and those of Jewish descent. This matters because many people know what white women have done in regards to suffrage and other rights we take for granted but not many know what the “minorities” have done, and that is what I want to show in this paper.


During the Victorian Era, which was roughly between 1837 and 1901, coverture was the law of the land. Coverture was the practice of treating women as property, and many of the laws that were encompassed into coverture are still traditions that we continue to have in our society today, such as taking the husband’s name in marriage. Others include the wife’s property becoming her husband’s property, including the money she earned if she had a job during their marriage, and even property that the woman into the marriage with her became the property of her husband. In his work Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone described the laws that were in place in England’s common law, as well as the common law here in the United States when it was in place. Blackwell states, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called into our law--French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture”. These laws lasted well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and affected the lives of the women in the United States.


The women of the early suffrage movement undoubtedly felt the effects of coverture, however, many of these women did have amicable unions with men who fought for women’s suffrage alongside their wives, such as Henry Brewster Stanton, the husband of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the father of Harriot Stanton Blatch. However, many more women were not so lucky, and even many women were against the right to vote because they believed that their place was to be subservient to their husbands and to be in the home, as they were raised to believe. 


According to a March 1896 article by Henry B. Blackwell titled “Objections to Women’s Suffrage Answered” which was published in a women’s suffrage leaflet from Massachusetts, many men sided alongside the women who were fighting for the right to vote. Some of those men included: “Among others, Abraham Lincoln, Chief Justice Chase, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel G. Howe, John G. Whittler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, President Hayes, Governors Banks, Boutwell, Clatlin, Washburn, Talbot, Long, Butler, Brackett, and Greenhalge, U.S. Senators Geo. F. Hoar and Henry L. Dawes; John M. Forbes, Robert Collyer, Bishops Haven, Bowman and Simpson, Neal Dow, George William Curtis, the Republicans of Massachusetts in successive platforms since 1870. The national Republican conventions of 1872, 1876, and 1896”. Even W.E.B. Du Bois was a proponent of women’s suffrage, as is mentioned at the beginning of this paper. However, there were many anti-suffrage women and they proved to be more of an adversary than the men. If women couldn’t unite over this one cause, would they be able to unite at all? Let’s look at the evidence.


As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, there was a racial separation when it came to the women’s suffrage movement and larger First Wave Feminist movement. To prove this point, I will be highlighting the experiences of African-American women, Italian immigrants and their American-born daughters, and Jewish immigrants and their daughters.


In Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935, Cheryl D. Hicks describes the struggle of black working-class women in regards to racism and sexism in the twentieth century. She describes the reform programs of middle class white and black activists, the labor and housing markets, poverty, maternity, domestic violence, and police violence. In this book, Hicks brings to life the voices and the viewpoints of these working class women and how these women challenged views about black women and morality in the country.
African-Americans made their way from the South to the North in an event known as the Great Migration, which began during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and swelled during the years of World War I. Many migrant women felt that the move to New York City was beneficial and although they had to make sacrifices some women were able to make a better life for themselves that they would not have experienced if they had remained in the South. Eager to leave the South and its racial and economic limitations behind, these migrant women soon found out that the urban North had its own problems with race relations.


Blacks had always had a strong presence in New York City. They arrived as indentured servants and slaves when New York was under control of the Dutch in the 1600s and their labor and constant numbers contributed to the growth of the region. With this in mind, it should not be a surprise that these men and women would be at the forefront of several movements, such as the anti-lynching movements and early civil rights movements like eliminating voting restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests. However, many of the new migrants were not welcomed to New York City with opened arms and many of the black activists and community leaders “were concerned that the influx of working class and poor southerners would impair their own social, political, and economic standing”.


As mentioned, white middle class and wealthy women were fighting for the right to vote during the era of the Great Migration, and it is possible that African American women would hear the rhetoric these women were shouting and wanted to join their movements. The white suffragettes were handing out pamphlets and other literature, organized marches, and even picketed the White House. Through these grassroots campaigns, these women were able to get the right to vote, but what did the African American women do?


In Black Women and Politics in New York City, Julie A. Gallagher wrote about sixty years of politically active black women in New york City who dealt with struggles for rights, equality, and justice through formal politics rather than grassroots activism. Gallagher tells about black women activists who formed women’s clubs and organizations in New York City and broke out into national politics and how they dealt with race, gender, and the state itself as well as how those black women influenced the Democratic Party and its policies over time.
Many activists in New York City, like Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders, spent their lives pursuing for themselves and others the rights they believed they were entitled to as citizens of the state and country as a whole. Hedgeman, who was a migrant to New York City from the South, witnessed first-hand what black women could do because she was a part of the movement. Black women of different backgrounds and social status in New York stepped into the public sphere to fight for civil, economic, and political rights. Many of these women were middle class and college educated and they were sensitive to the struggles faced by poor and working class women. There were tensions between the middle class and the poor and working class women, as we saw with the white suffragettes, however the native New Yorkers had allies with the migrants. There was a myriad of challenges but they did not keep black women from trying to help create a more just society, in fact, those challenges increased the number of women who wanted to take part in the movement towards becoming enfranchised. Black women were involved in the suffrage movement with the white women at first but due to racial tensions they broke away and had to form their own movements. This movement started out through grassroots campaign but black women, and men, began to become more politically active and used their knowledge of the political system of the early twentieth century to get their points across, to mobilize women and men to their cause, and would eventually gain the right to vote alongside white women.  


White middle and upper class women and African-American women were not the only ones who fought for the right to vote and who would eventually be called feminists, Italian immigrant women and their daughters also fought for the right to vote.


More Italians have immigrated to the United States during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century than any other ethnic group. Italians were known for their close-knit families and were very community-oriented, and the rules of the family were law. Many Italians, men and women alike, worked in the garment industry when they arrived in New York City because that was what they did when they were in Italy, and it was no surprise when that the men and women would unionize, joining unions such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and would bring their radical ideas to fruition. Radical ideas, it is important to note, amounted to stricter fire safety codes, better and stronger fire escapes, and all around safer factories. However, these Italian men and women were also known for their social activism.


In “Transnational Feminism’s Radical Past: Lessons from Italian Immigrant Women Anarchists in Industrializing America”, author Jennifer Guglielmo examines the activism of working class Italian immigrant women in the United States with a focus on New York City.
“Italian immigrant women’s activism differed markedly from traditional models of “first wave” feminism, including forms of labor activism”. Some women involved in the movement used the word feminismo to describe themselves and what they were doing while others used the word emancipazione because it distinguished themselves from the “bourgeois feminism”. Italian women, although they did join movements later on as stated above, they were not quick to join the feminist movement or labor movement at first for a multitude of reasons, one of which was discrimination. Northern Italians tended to be lighter-skinned, and the Northern Italian elites would justify their treatment and exploitation of the Southern Italian women by racializing these women as “sexual and political deviants, pathetic beasts of burden” and as “dark, swarthy, and kinky-haired” and seeing the treatment of people who were dark-skinned in the United States, Southern Italians, men and women alike, came to learn that to be dark-skinned “was to be despised and degraded”. However, many more people believed that Italians were white, and Southern Italian immigrant women managed to rise up from the bottom of racial hierarchy in Italy to surpassing African-Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and others on the racial hierarchy here in the United States, mainly those who were seen as agents of social disorder rather than victims of it. Racialization, and nativism, play a major role in the treatment of others in this era. Due to the negative connotations connected to the Southern Italians, such as anarchism and the mafia, the women were looked down on as well. The Southern Italian women, already having been treated as lesser beings due to their darker skin, were thought of as terrorists, loose women, and “unruly subversives who threatened the fiber of the nation”.


During the Red Scare of World War I, and the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, nativism and criminalization of dissent crippled Italian immigrant radicalism. As a result of this, Italians began to move away from anarchist and socialist movements and moved towards nationalism and whiteness. Later, the generation of Italian-Americans would embrace the ideas for economic justice, anarchism, socialism, and communism.


At the dawn of the twentieth century, Italian immigrant women entered into political activism through labor militancy. Italian immigrant women rarely held leadership positions in unions or strike committees but they were exceptional at mobilizing co-workers to win labor struggles. Since the majority of Italian immigrant women were unskilled workers who were concentrated in low-wage jobs they were not initially recruited by most United States labor and political organizations. Due to this, they formed mutual aid societies as a way of self-help and survival, and these groups would also create schools, libraries, churches, food cooperatives, theater troupes, and presses. It was through these mutual aid societies where immigrant women created spaces for feminist activism, especially in the years before World War I. “Between the 1880s and World War I, hundreds of these radical circles formed across the New York metro area. By 1914, there were over a dozen in the Lower East Side and Mulberry districts alone, and at least one in virtually every other Italian neighborhood. They flourished in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, as well as across the Hudson River throughout New Jersey”. One such radical circle was formed by Sicilian anarchists and was called Club Avanti. Club Avanti “supported education, sponsored lectures on peace, religion, and sexual and family questions, on women’s emancipation, nationalism, imperialism, major immigrant strikes, the Mexican Revolution, the problems of political prisoners in Italy, and, more generally, current events”.


Women were very active in clubs but there were men who relied on masculine rhetoric to get what they wanted and who would put themselves in positions of power, thus not being what a real socialist was supposed to be.The men would also belittle the women, claim that they were weak and uneducated and did not have the drive to emancipate themselves. Women expressed their opinions in writing about how men reacted to them within the movement, but the women usually remained anonymous, used pen names, or just went by their first names in their writings.
These radical Italian women were not fighting for the right to vote, they were fighting for the changing of laws and to be free in an America that they did not see as a place for freedom, despite what the branding of the country was. These women declared: “We are not feminists in the manner of the bourgeoisie, who claim the equality or supremacy of our sex, and would be satisfied with the realization of these dreams...We want to tear down all the false prejudices that infest the world. It is not with changing certain laws that we can call ourselves free...You see, my sister workers, these laws are made by the bourgeoisie for their interests”. As anarchists, these women believed that the government, the church, and private property were harmful because they forced people to live within a set of rules which placed people on different levels of a social hierarchy which in turn put them on unequal terms with one another. Anarchists believed that no one was free until everyone was free, and these women, through their clubs, labor organizations, and through the literature they produced tried to make everyone equal. They were not fighting for the right to vote as others were, as previously stated, but despite this they managed to rally a large number of people to their causes and their abilities to mobilize people to a cause were used by other women who had the urge to mobilize others to causes they were fighting for, whether those causes were for voting rights or a host of other causes people were fighting for or against during the Progressive Era.


There are several historians who have written about the lives of the immigrant Jewish women and the first generation of American-born Jewish women and what they have accomplished during the early years of the twentieth century. This section will explore the lives of these women and their reform movements.


In “Assimilation in the United States: Twentieth Century” by Deborah Dash Moore, the author discusses the lengths that Jewish women went to in order to assimilate into the American culture. Just like with the Italians and other groups, assimilation began with immigration. Most of the immigrant Jewish women did not resist adapting to the language and the way of life in America, and those who had difficulty adjusting often returned to Europe. However, over 90% stayed in the United States and in their choice of paid employment, household labor, attitudes towards love and marriage, and their methods of child rearing all worked to establish the first models of American Jewish womanhood for their daughters.


American Jewish women grew up well integrated into their Jewish families, and many enjoyed the luxuries of middle-class families where mothers managed the household and the children went to school. Many families in the beginning of the Progressive Era did not feel the need to educate their daughters as they did with their sons. However, American Jewish women benefitted from the expanding education opportunities for American women, due to the many education reforms in New York City, and the country as a whole, in this era, and these American Jewish women were going to high schools and normal schools and even attending colleges. The advent of the women’s suffrage movement and the larger women’s rights movement undoubtedly opened many opportunities for white middle-class women, and this included the Jewish women as well. Even if these Jewish women were not radical enough to support the women’s suffrage movement, these women came to realize that they did not necessarily need to be married and/or have children. “Social feminism, the idea that women’s particular strengths in caring for the vulnerable required that she leave her home and enter public life, attracted many women and provided rationale for organizational activity”.


During the Progressive Era, many Jewish immigrants and American Jewish girls and women worked in the textile factories in New York City. Like the Italians who had always been involved in the textile trades, the Jewish women were often skilled in this particular trade as well, and Jewish women impacted this industry in a powerful way.


On November 23, 1909 more than 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants, mostly young women who were in their early teens and twenties, began an 11-week general strike in New York’s shirtwaist industry. Known to historians as the Uprising of the 20,000, this was the largest strike by women to date in American history and began with the inability of women to organize, along with the grievances about wages, hours, workplace safety, and incidents such as sexual harassment and unwanted sexual advances, threats, and invasions of privacy. The strikers only won a small portion of their demands, and many women did not win anything, but this uprising would spark a five year long revolt in which the garment industry would be transformed into one of the best-organized trades in the United States.


The shirtwaist, what we call a blouse today, was designed in the early 1890s and came at a time when the production of women’s clothing went from piecework being done in the home by the entire family to factories. By 1909, there were 600 shops operating in New York City and they employed 30,000 workers and produced $50 million in merchandise annually. New York City was the center of garment manufacturing in the United States during the Progressive Era, and would later become one of the fashion capitals of the world.


In the shops, there was definitely a hierarchy. On the bottom tier were the “learners”--the women who were unskilled and had the lowest paying jobs--even when they had mastered their tasks, they were still called “learners” and would earn three to four dollars per week. In the middle were the semiskilled “operators” who comprised about half of the workforce and earned seven to twelve dollars per week. On the top of the worker pyramid were the highly skilled sample makers, cutters, and pattern makers who earned fifteen to twenty-three dollars per week; they were almost exclusively male and they were most likely unionized before the uprising.


“The movement that culminated in the uprising of the 20,000 began with spontaneous strikes against the Leiserson Company, the Rosen Brothers, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Company--New York’s largest manufacturer of shirtwaists during the summer/fall busy season of 1909...The Rosen Brothers settled with their employees after five weeks, but Leiserson and Triangle remained intransigent”. Right from the start, the strikers faced opposition from the manufacturers, police, and the court system. Harris and Blanck, the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, hired thugs and prostitutes to abuse the strikers, either by beating them or by having them falsely arrested by being associated with street walkers, and with the aid of policemen, the strikers would often be arrested on over-exaggerated charges of assault. The Local 25 of the ILGWU, which represented shirtwaist makers, asked the Women’s Trade Union League to monitor the picket lines, but after police arrested Mary Dreier, the head of the WTUL for allegedly harassing a scab worker, the strikers won the sympathy of an indifferent public. By early November, the Local 25 was running out of money in its strike fund and many strikers chose to return to work instead of facing arrest, harassment and personal injury, but things were about to change later that month. “On November 22, thousands of young women packed into Cooper union to discuss Local 25’s recommendations. Samuel Gompers and Mary Dreier spoke, along with a number of luminaries of the Jewish labor movement...Frustrated after two hours, Clara lemlich Shavelson...In words now legendary, the impassioned twenty-three-year-old declared, “I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared--now.” Lemlich ignited the audience. In unison, the crowd pledged support for the general strike by reciting a secularly adapted Hebrew oath chanted by [Benjamin] Feigenbaum [the meeting’s chair]. In one month of the general strike, 723 were arrested and 19 were sentenced to the workhouse; in a response to this, the WTUL organized mass rallies at places like Carnegie Hall and City Hall in which the plight of the strikers was connected to the suffragist cause--this alliance produced a new perspective that merged class consciousness with feminism and would later be called industrial feminism. “Though not a complete victory, the uprising achieved significant, concrete gains. Out of the Associated Waist and Dress Manufacturers’ 353 firms, 339 signed contracts granting most demands: a fifty-two-hour week, at least four holidays with pay per year, no discrimination against union loyalists, provision of tools and materials without fee, equal division of work during slack seasons, and negotiation of wages with employees. By the end of the strike, 85 percent of all shirtwaist makers in New York had joined the ILGWU. Local 25, which began the strike with a hundred member, now counted ten thousand”.


However, not everyone benefitted from the Uprising of the 20,000 and what happened on March 25, 1911 was proof of that.


On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory erupted into flames in the late afternoon. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City history at that time, and this could have been prevented had Harris and Blanck agreed to some of the demands of the Local 25, such as stricter fire codes and more fire escapes. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers who died from being burned alive, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women in their teens and early twenties. This fire, documented in many newspapers from across the country, led to legislation which would improve factory safety standards.


According to a March 26, 1911 New York Tribune article, Harris and Blanck were warned that something like this would happen and that they were told a couple of weeks before that they were not up to code and had to do several things to get their factory up to code. Fire Chief Cocker was stated in the article as saying: “This calamity is just what I have been predicting. There were no outside fire escapes on this building. I have been advocating and agitating that fire escapes be put on buildings just such as this. This large loss of life is due to this neglect”.


On June 30, 1911, Governor John Dix signed legislation which created the Factory Investigation Commission (FIC). The FIC was established to investigate the various factories in New York City and would later pass laws through the state legislature ensuring safer conditions in factories, including stricter safety codes and child labor laws. Later, as a result of this, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, was established in 1971 to ensure that these Progressive Era laws would remain intact and that men, women, and young adults would remain safety in the workplace.


In 1958, Leon Stein interviewed survivors of the fire, and on September 4, 1958, he interviewed Rose Hauser, who was on the ninth floor of the building that housed the factory. Rose is quoted as saying: “When I began to go down to the 8th floor, I was choking. The fire was in the hall on the 8th floor. I put my muff around my head tightly and I ran right through the fire. The fur caught on fire. When we got down stairs they kept us in the hall and they wouldn’t let us go into the street because the bodies were falling down. The firemen finally came and took us out across the street and we stood numb in the doorway of a Chinese import store. I saw one woman jump and get caught on a hook on the 6th floor and watched how a fireman saved her”.


Women came together to fight for what they wanted, but unfortunately not everyone got what they were fighting for. While many women were fighting for various rights, primarily the right to vote, there were others who were working against them.


The Anti-Suffrage Movement was alive and well in New York City during the Progressive Era. The Anti-Suffrage Movement was a primarily female movement against women’s suffrage. One of the main arguments for not granting women the right to vote was that women belonged in their own private sphere, in the home, married, and taking care of the children; this was called “domestic feminism” and was used to argue that women had dominion over the home.The anti-suffragettes believed that the behavior of the suffragettes was becoming and chastised the suffragettes for their unfemininity, violence, sexual deviance, hysteria, unnaturalness, and threat to other women represented as exposing women to ridicule and insult.


“By 1916 almost all of the major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Woodrow Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift in favor of the vote for women”. Despite this, there was still a strong opposition to the women’s suffrage movement. In 1917, the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage Party of New York sent a petition to the United States Senate. This document declares that the fight for women’s suffrage was harassing the public men and was distracting the people from doing work for the war effort; this document urged the United States Senate to “pass no measure involving such a radical change in our government while the attention of the patriotic portion of the American people is concentrated on the all-important task of winning the war, and during the absence of the over a million men abroad”.
Even with the opposition, women were granted suffrage on May 18, 1919 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”. With the passing and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women were finally having their voices heard, but throughout this era it was not just the middle-class white women reformers who were fighting for their rights and making strides in different reform movements which would change the course of history and would lead to this ultimate goal; immigrant women and African-American women had their own movements so they could experience the full benefits of citizenship. When studying about women’s suffrage, it is imperative to recognize that more women, those whose names may be forever lost in history and those who were not native to New York City or the country as a whole, were involved in many of the reform movements of the Progressive Era and even influenced the suffrage movement. Despite the hardships that many of these women have faced, we can now enjoy a right that so many people take for granted.

















Bibliography


Primary Sources

Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; ARC Identifier 596314/MLR Number A-1 5A (National Archives: Archival Research Catalog).


Petition from Carrie Chapman Catt of the National American Woman Suffrage Association Asking that a Committee on Woman Suffrage be appointed in the House of Representatives as in the Senate; ARC Identifier 306662 (National Archives: Archival Research Catalog).


Henry Blackwell, “Objections to Woman Suffrage Answered” (Boston, MA: Office of the Woman’s Journal, March 1896); ARC Identifier 306657.


Petition from the Women Voters Anti-Suffrage party of New York to the United States Senate (http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage/ny-petition.html).


Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution


William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (published 1765).


New York Tribune, March 26, 1911;


Leon Stein, “Interview with Rose Hauser, September 4, 1958”.


Secondary Sources

Julie Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York City (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012).


Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Lie a Woman: African-American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).


Susan Goodier, No Votes for Women: New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013).


Fran Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century (U.S. Government Printing Office: Washington, DC, 2002).


Jennifer Guglielmo, “Transnational Feminism’s Radical Past: Lessons from Italian Immigrant Women Anarchists in Industrialized America” (Journal of Women’s History, spring 2010).


Deborah Dash Moore, “Assimilation in the United States: Twentieth Century” from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (Jewish Women’s Archive, 2005).


Tony Michels, “Uprising of the 20,000 (1909)” from Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (Jewish Women’s Archive, 2005).





Global Concerns in the Cold War Part II

Hello readers! It's been a while since I last posted an update here on the blog. Since my last post, I submitted my second manuscript to...