Why is that so many people emphasize their differences rather than their shared experiences? Americans as a whole have absorbed a skewed cultural legacy. This book is meant to promote dialogue between those with nostalgia for the good old days of white Protestant supremacy and those who view those days less fondly or have only hazy ideas about what America was like in past generations.
Many who pine for the time when they believed America was greater than now apparently mean the 1950s and early 1960s – when white men still held near monopoly power in government and industry. Those who view that era with fondness recall it as a time when the middle class was developing with greater opportunities than their parents – the product of heavy federal investment improving the lives of average Americans with historic educational opportunities through the G.I. Bill, suburban housing developments and massive investment in interstate highways. For others, the 1950s were a time of suppression and fear, including political witch hunts, persecution of gays, back alley abortions, impenetrable glass ceilings, and brazen lynching in the South. As the new TV sitcom “Leave It to Beaver” enchanted viewers across the country with the wholesome values of white suburbia, widespread publication of gruesome photos of the mutilated corpse of fourteen-year-old Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, had already launched the Civil Rights Era.
The socioeconomic gains for the average American in the 1950s were only made possible by dramatic gains in two prior eras of the 20th century. That earlier history is particularly relevant now. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in his 2013 book, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divide Endangers Our Future, compared the record-setting disparity between the richest one percent and the overwhelming majority of Americans in the first years of the 21st century to both the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the Roaring Twenties. “In both of these instances, the country pulled back from the brink. Our democratic processes worked. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, which curbed monopoly power. The Roaring Twenties was followed by the important social and economic legislation of the New Deal, which strengthened the rights of workers, provided greater social protection for all Americans, and introduced Social Security, which almost completely eliminated poverty among the elderly.”20
Both eras of reform were triggered by widespread revulsion at the misery endured by so many have-nots as the wealthy few wielded increased power and privilege. Yet throughout these early eras, those with inordinate clout masked their almost insatiable greed and undue influence with misdirected blame against racial and religious minorities, workers striking for decent pay and living conditions, the influx of immigrant labor, and Americans with unorthodox political views. While often living dissolute, amoral lives themselves, key players wrapped themselves in piety and patriotism, making scapegoats to draw the ire of those in the white majority who felt threatened by changing times and expanded rights for women and minorities.
Professor Stiglitz sees the nation today at a perilous crossroads with a crying need for bipartisan action. “Traditionally, persons in both parties have understood that a nation divided cannot stand – and the divisions today are greater than they have been in generations, threatening basic values, including our conception of ourselves as a land of opportunity. Will we once again pull back from the brink?”21
It might help all of us who wish to address that question to look back at America as the Gilded Age grudgingly gave way to the Progressive Era and, two decades later, as the Roaring Twenties laid the groundwork for the New Deal: when the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in the 20th century, unions gained clout, women got the vote and major reforms were enacted. And what better window into society at those pivotal times than to have ringside seats at headline trials that riveted Americans and shaped their reactions? Before television and the Internet, folks got their news from traveling lecturers, newspapers and radio programs wielding similar power to influence and manipulate public opinion. Taking this journey back in time with fresh eyes, perhaps we can achieve far greater insight into the tenor of American society in those earlier decades, how far we have come in this democratic republic founded by immigrants, and how far we still have to go to achieve “one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” Progress has never been linear.
1. A BITTER TEACHING MOMENT
The Assassination of President McKinley
That’s all a man can hope for during his lifetime – to set an example – and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history.
– WILLIAM MCKINLEY1
Like Rupert Murdoch today, publishing giant William Randolph Hearst wielded enormous power shaping public perception of newsworthy events in the first several decades of the 20th century. One tactic that backfired was his editorial attacks on President McKinley early in the formation of Hearst’s publishing empire.
Before moving to Manhattan in 1896 to pursue his political ambitions, Hearst had developed a winning formula transforming his father’s San Francisco Examiner into the top-selling local newspaper. Hearst filled its pages with wildly entertaining stories, comics, and pictures – the print world equivalent of a P. T. Barnum circus. On political issues, Hearst courted the working class: he railed against vested interests like the powerful railroads and utilities, and championed the eight-hour day and the income tax. Hearst could count on the popularity of taking such stances. Over 30,000 strikes had taken place in the past three decades throughout the nation, with the eight-hour day as the primary objective.
Flushed with success in the Bay Area, in 1895 Hearst bought the New York Journal to start a cut-throat readership battle with his role model and mentor, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Neither publisher viewed truth as an essential ingredient so long as attention-grabbing stories sped from the hands of corner newsies. Staid competing papers invented the put-down “yellow journalism” to describe how the two-penny tabloids hawked colored cartoon supplements and ran oversized banner headlines to vie for the loyalty of the city’s teeming numbers of immigrant workers, many of whom learned English reading the tabloids.
In the hotly-contested 1896 presidential election Hearst was the only publisher in the financial heart of the nation to support populist William Jennings Bryan against Republican William McKinley. This was the campaign in which Bryan made his famous “cross of gold” speech. The debate centered on how best to recover from the nation’s then worst-ever depression, which had hit three years before. Like the subprime mortgage bubble that burst into an economic crisis in 2008, overbuilding of railroads on shaky financing precipitated large-scale bankruptcies and job loss in the panic of 1893.
The question in 1896 was whether the United States would remain on the gold standard – as favored by banks, investors and industrialists – or whether the nation would return to coining silver as well. Farmers, workers and small business owners favored the silver standard, which would lower the value of the dollar, but pump far more money into the economy. Bryan’s “cross of gold” speech fired his audiences up to a fever pitch: “If they dare to . . . defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”2