1900 was a bit of mixed bag, it seems to me, on the one hand, because this is
the year when this country becomes the premiere producer of manufactured goods.
Clearly, a lot of people were making a lot of money, but it's also a time that
reflects the savaging of one of the deepest depressions, or I think we used to
call them "panics", this country had ever experienced, a long, deep shock to
the economy which began in 1893 and was just abating, I guess, 1897-1898. And
those people who were adversely affected by that experience are not quite
seeing the benefits of this robust prosperity that came, from one perspective,
roaring on after the Republicans won a smashing victory in 1896. In many ways
you could even say that the century, the new century, begins in 1896 rather
than 1900, which is so often true of how centuries they don't begin neatly.
It's a time of controversy, too, because the country has just become embarked
upon its great imperial adventure. We've acquired the Philippines or we are
trying to acquire the Philippines, because, of course, in 1900 some 120,000 US
troops, many of them African American, are trying to suppress the Filipino
uprising, "insurgency", as we called it. I think Teddy Roosevelt said that
these people were really being very obstreperous in behaving as though they had
a responsibility for the country in which they happened to live the
Philippines. The ratification of the Treaty of Paris the year before and the
Filipino uprising had created a great divide amongst Americans people like
Andrew Carnegie and David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford and Mark
Twain and others deplored what we were doing as a traducing of our American
exceptionalism. The city on the hill was in fact going down into the mire, and
doing it rather bloodily, and others who said echoing Kipling, who had, of
course, enjoined us in that famous poem, "The White Man's Burden" we were
simply behaving as a responsible civilized power should. So there are those
aspects, but I suppose for ordinary citizens it was truly a great time to be an
American because a degree of prosperity was beginning to percolate throughout
the society that seemed to be unprecedented historically.
Technology plays its part, and it's the democratization of technology. It
isn't just the inventions of the telephone and the various other means of
communication. It's that more and more people sign onto their use and their
access and that seemed to be peculiarly American. We don't have Henry Ford but
he's in the wings ready to come along and further transform the national
experience.
The prosperity masks and unevenness that, depending on where you were, could
make you feel that this was not your America. On the one hand, this is the
time when the cottages are going up in Newport, when the Chicago Gold Coast
materializes, when Fifth Avenue comes on line, but if you didn't live in those
places and if you were a common laborer, if you belonged to the great union,
the International Workers of the World, the wobblies, you would have thought
that you had every reason to be militant in order to get your just deserts and
that your chances of getting them were not very promising. After all, it was
clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of
the early 1890s when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of
the steel workers, that that was a watershed and so increasingly even though we
think of American labor as being blessed some more than others. The American
Federation of Labor, for example, was an exclusivist phenomenon racially and
because it was limited to skilled workers, it excluded the great mass of
workers and as people pour into this country from slavic Europe and southern
Europe and, indeed, the migration out of the South of African Americans begins,
you're going to have these populations who have not yet been able to make
their political or economic resonance in the economic republic.
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