Politics and Reform

1
Chapter 11

• Politics and Reform
• 1877-1896

2
Pendleton Act

• Garfields assassination
• Spoils system or patronage
• Civil Service Commission
• Federal jobs given for merit and examination
• Appointees could not be removed for political
  reasons
• Supported by Pres. Chester A. Arthur

3
Interstate Commerce Commission

• Wabash v. Illinois Supreme Court ruling
• Only the federal government could regulate rail
  traffic between the states, not the states
  themselves
• Remember that many people thought that the
  government should not interfere.
• Rates must be reasonable and just
• Not very effective because the courts were
  responsible for enforcement

4
Farmers Alliance

• Cooperatives failed to be effective because
  
• too small to effect world prices
• loaned too much money that was not repaid
• railroads, bankers, and wholesalers
• discriminated against them

5
Populists (Peoples Party)

• New political party to help with money and farm
  prices
• Wanted to defeat Democrats by appealing to poor
  whites and African-Americans
• Free coinage of silver
• Sherman Silver Purchase Act Treasury could
  purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month
• Graduated income tax

6
Goldbugs/Silverites

• Goldbugs currency should be based only on gold
• Silverites coining silver in unlimited
  quantities would solve the economic crisis
• 1900 passed the Gold Standard Act

7
Elections

• 1876 1888 presidential candidates won the
  popular vote but still lost the election because
  the candidate won the electoral vote
• Electoral college created in a time when
  communication was bad and the voters were
  uneducated.
• Can this happen today?

8
Disfranchising African Americans

• 15th Amendment right to vote did not say
  anything about whether citizens had to be
  literate or own property
• Poll tax, grandfather clause (on voting rolls
  since 1867), literacy tests attempts to stop
  voting (hurt poor white voters as well)
• Supreme Court overturned Civil Rights Act of 1875
• 14th Amendment equal protection private
  organizations businesses were free to segregate

9
Plessy v. Ferguson

• 1892 Homer Plessy arrested in Louisiana for
  riding in a whites only railcar
• Supreme court upheld the judges decision
• Led the way to separate but equal facilities
• Established a legal basis for discrimination in
  the South for the next 50 years

10
Lynchings

• 187 lynchings per year
• 80 in the South
• 70 were African-Americans
• Ida B. Wells wrote a newspaper article about
  lynchings greed, not racially motivated
• 3 Black grocers were lynched because they
  competed with white grocers

11
Solutions to Discrimination

• Booker T. Washington Atlanta Compromise speech
  postpone the fight for civil rights until they
  prepared eduactionally and vocationally founded
  Tuskeegee Institute
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1903 book, The Souls of Black
  Folk demand rights protect and exercise
  voting rights