Walter LaFeber - The American Century: A History of the United States Since the 1890s

THE
AMERICAN
CENTURY

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The American Century
A History of the United States Since the 1890s, 7e

By Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, and Nancy Woloch

Also available in two separate volumes:

The American Century
A History of the United States from 1890 to 1941, 7e

The American Century
A History of the United States Since 1941, 7e

A History of the United States Since the 1890s

Seventh Edition

Walter LaFeber , Richard Polenberg , and Nancy Woloch

First published 2013 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LaFeber, Walter.
The American century : a history of the United States since the 1890s / by Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, and Nancy Woloch. Seventh Edition.
volumes cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7656-3483-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-7656-3484-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. United StatesHistory20th century. 2. United StatesHistory21st century. 3. United StatesForeign relations20th century. 4. United StatesForeign relations21st century. I. Polenberg, Richard. II. Woloch, Nancy, 1940 III. Title.

E741.L45 2013
973.9dc23

2013004357

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN 13: 9780765634849 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9780765634832 (hbk)

We are most grateful for the response to the first six editions of The American Century. That response has confirmed the need for a concise text that is both highly factual and, at appropriate points, interpretive. In this seventh edition, we have adopted suggestions and corrections given to us by instructors and students. We particularly appreciate Sal Barbera's help in the revision of material in .

Necessarily believing that the past does shape the future, and noting how some historians have compared the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century to the high-tech age of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (both, for example, suffering far-reaching, highly painful economic downturns), we have devoted about as much space to pre-1945 America as to the Cold War years and after. The volume stresses the importance of economic and urban growth, social and political change, civil rights and liberties, and the evolution of the United States into a global superpower; but also, we devote feature sections to art, architecture, baseball, music, dance, theater, football, poetry, photography, sculpture, basketball, computer technology, recreation, and evolving secondary education. Since its inception, this book has given equal attention to U.S. foreign and domestic policies, at points noting how the two are necessarily related. To help students understand that foreign (and often domestic) policy, we include brief analyses of developments elsewhere in the world.

We are especially indebted to the staff of M.E. Sharpe, above all to Steven Drummond, Executive Editor for History, for his encouragement, friendship, unfailing good advice, and awesome patience; and Kimberly Giambattisto and Henrietta Toth for their care and professionalism in handling editorial and other issues that invariably and unexpectedly arise.

Henry Ford in his first model car, completed in 1896. (AP Photo/Ford Motor Company)

Modern America emerged during a forty-year crisis that began with the Civil War (1861-1865) and ended with the war against Spain in 1898. The crisis, which recast every part of the nation's life, climaxed in the 1890s. At the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Americans celebrated their triumphs in industry and technology while, ironically, enduring the nation's worst economic depression, A young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin, delivered a speech at this world's fair that helped explain the irony. The vast open lands of the West, Turner asserted, had shaped American social and political institutions. According to the 1890 census, however, these lands had finally been settled. Turner concluded: "And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Scholars later agreed that Turner overemphasized the importance of the frontier in the shaping of American character, but few, then or since, would deny that a different America was indeed born in the last years of the century. The birth pains were promisingand terrifying.

Between 1860 and 1900 no birth was more notable than that of the modern industrial corporation. Barely conceived of before the Civil War, it quickly came to dominate Americans' lives by determining what they possessed and where they worked and, in general, by producing everything they needed from their baby food to their tombstones.

Before the Civil War, state and national governments had created corporations largely to operate public highways and banks. But shrewd business executives soon realized that merely by obtaining a charter of incorporation from a state government, they suddenly had the right to acquire great sums of capital through sales of stock. At the same time, the liability of each investor was limited to the amount he or she invested. It was like magic. The new creature first appeared to build railroads during the 1850s boom. It was the Civil War, however, that shaped the industrial corporation.

The mammoth armies of the North and South created an immense market that demanded rapid production of goods. Through privately owned corporations, such men as Gustavus F. Swift (meat), Gail Borden (dairy and groceries), and Andrew Carnegie (railways and later steel) got their start by supplying the sinews of war. Equally important, when Southerners deserted Washington in 1861, unopposed Northern politicians were able to whip legislation through Congress to aid their section's factories. Between 1862 and 1865 members of Congress consequently built a tariff wall insulating American producers against foreign competition, passed bank laws to standardize and liberalize the monetary system, and allowed owners to import cheap labor from Europe. Most striking, Congress simply gave away tremendous amounts of land and mineral resources to corporations that were building the transcontinental railway (completed in 1869) and other transportation systems. By the early twentieth century, the government had given private railway builders free land equivalent to the areas of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and much of New York. Some of this acreage held rich deposits of coal, lead, and iron ores.