Reform in the Gilded Age

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Trace the agrarian reform sequence from the Granger lodges of the late 1860s through the state Granger laws, the Munn and Wabash decisions, and the federal Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.
• Account for the Northern, Southern, and Colored Farmers' Alliances and explain how they consolidated into the People's Party at the Omaha convention of 1892.
• Identify the seven major planks of the 1892 Populist platform and account for which of them survived as constitutional or statutory law during Period 7.
• Explain the role of William Jennings Bryan, the Cross of Gold speech, and the election of 1896 in ending the Populist Party as a separate political force.
• Account for civil-service reform under the Pendleton Act of 1883 as a response to the assassination of President James A. Garfield, and identify the long-run consequences of replacing the spoils system with merit hiring.
• Describe the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the early settlement-house movement (Hull House and Henry Street) as middle-class reform projects that paralleled the agrarian and political-reform efforts of the period.

Reform in the Gilded Age did not begin in the cities. It began in the wheat country. By the late 1860s, Plains farmers who shipped grain on the Burlington and the Rock Island found themselves at the mercy of railroad rate schedules they did not set, grain elevator monopolies they did not own, and a national currency policy that contracted the money supply every harvest. Oliver Hudson Kelley, a Department of Agriculture clerk who had toured the post-war South in 1866, founded the Patrons of Husbandry in December 1867 as a fraternal lodge for farm families. Within five years, the order claimed more than half a million members, most of them concentrated in the wheat belt from Minnesota to Kansas. The Granger lodges, as the local chapters were called, started as cooperative buying clubs and reading rooms; by 1873 they had become the political base for the first wave of state regulation of private business in American history.

Between 1871 and 1874, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota passed the laws that would be remembered as the Granger laws. The statutes capped the rates that grain elevators and railroads could charge, established state railroad commissions, and made rate discrimination a misdemeanor. The railroads sued. In Munn v. Illinois, decided in March 1877, the United States Supreme Court upheld an Illinois statute that capped the rates Chicago grain elevators could charge. Chief Justice Morrison Waite ruled that businesses affected with a public interest were subject to state regulation under the police power. The decision was the constitutional foundation for the entire Granger statutory regime, and it became the precedent for state regulation of railroads, insurance, and utilities for the next half century. Nine years later, however, in Wabash v. Illinois, the same Court reversed course. Justice Samuel F. Miller ruled that only the federal government could regulate interstate commerce, and that an Illinois statute prohibiting long-haul/short-haul rate discrimination on a railroad that crossed state lines violated the Commerce Clause. The Granger laws survived for purely intrastate shipments, but the heart of the rate problem was interstate, and Wabash effectively killed the state regulatory regime.

Congress filled the vacuum within a year. The Interstate Commerce Act of February 1887 was the first piece of federal legislation to regulate a private industry directly. The statute prohibited rate discrimination, required that rates be reasonable and just, banned pooling agreements, and ordered that all rates be published and posted at every depot. Crucially, the act created the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first federal regulatory agency in United States history. The ICC became the model for the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and a generation of twentieth-century regulatory agencies. The early Commission was weak in practice, repeatedly rebuffed by a federal judiciary that read the statute narrowly, but the institutional precedent was established. Congress had decided that federal administrative agencies, not the federal courts and not Congress alone, were the appropriate instrument for regulating an industrial economy. The decision shaped American government for the next century.

While the legal architecture of railroad regulation was being built in Washington, the Granger movement itself was being absorbed into a larger and more ambitious organization. The Farmers' Alliance rose out of Texas in the late 1870s and spread through the cotton South and the wheat Plains across the 1880s. The Northern Alliance, the Southern Alliance, and the separate Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union (founded in 1886 in Houston County, Texas, and led by Richard Manning Humphrey) together claimed roughly three million members at peak. The Alliances built cooperative stores, cooperative cotton gins, and cooperative grain elevators, ran lecturer circuits that pulled fifty thousand people to summer encampments, and published a press that reached every county courthouse west of the Mississippi. By 1890, Alliance candidates had captured four state legislatures and elected forty-four representatives and three senators to the federal Congress. The political infrastructure was in place for a third party.

The convention met at Omaha, Nebraska, on July 4, 1892. The platform that emerged from the convention, drafted in part by Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, became the founding charter of the People's Party, conventionally remembered as the Populist Party. The seven major planks demanded the unlimited coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one with gold (the free silver demand), a graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads and the telegraph, the direct election of United States senators, the secret ballot, an eight-hour workday in industries under federal jurisdiction, and the postal savings system that would later be enacted under President Taft. The platform was the most ambitious set of structural demands any third party had advanced since the Civil War. James B. Weaver, the Populist nominee for president in 1892, polled more than a million votes, carried four states, and won twenty-two electoral votes. In 1894, Populist candidates polled forty percent of the vote in nine states. For two election cycles the People's Party looked like the future of American politics.

The Panic of 1893, the second worst depression in American history to that date, pushed the silver question to the center of national debate. By 1896, the Democratic Party was so divided between gold and silver that the silver wing captured the Chicago convention. William Jennings Bryan, a thirty-six-year-old former Nebraska congressman, took the stage on July 9 and delivered the speech that ended the convention. The peroration, which closed with the line, "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold," became the most famous American political address of the nineteenth century. Bryan was nominated for president on the fifth ballot. Two weeks later, the Populist convention at St. Louis nominated Bryan as well, accepting fusion in exchange for the vice-presidential slot. The fusion strategy was a tactical success and a strategic disaster. The Republican nominee, William McKinley, ran a front-porch campaign funded by the largest corporate fundraising apparatus assembled to that point in American history, organized by Mark Hanna of Cleveland. McKinley carried the urban Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and most of the upper Plains, and the Republican ticket beat Bryan by 271 electoral votes to 176. The election of 1896 ended the Populist Party as a separate political force; most of its agrarian base was absorbed into the Democratic Party, where it would surface again as part of the Wilsonian coalition of 1912.

The political-reform sequence ran on a parallel track. Civil-service reform had been a respectable middle-class cause since the late 1860s, but it lacked political traction until the assassination of President James A. Garfield in July 1881. Charles Guiteau, the assassin, was a disappointed office seeker who shot the president at a Washington train station because Guiteau had not been awarded the consul's post in Paris that he believed his stump speeches in 1880 had earned him. Garfield died eleven weeks later. Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in January 1883. The statute created the United States Civil Service Commission, established competitive examinations for classified federal positions, prohibited the firing of classified employees for political reasons, and barred federal employees from being assessed for political contributions. Roughly ten percent of federal jobs were initially classified. Subsequent presidents extended coverage by executive order: Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt each enlarged the classified service, and by the mid-twentieth century the merit system covered most of the federal civilian workforce. The Pendleton Act is the institutional foundation of the modern federal bureaucracy.

Temperance reform, the largest grassroots movement among American women in the nineteenth century, grew on a third track. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, founded in November 1874 at Cleveland after a wave of women's anti-saloon prayer crusades swept through Ohio and New York, became the largest organization of American women before the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. Under the presidency of Frances Willard, who took the office in 1879 and held it until her death in 1898, the WCTU adopted what Willard called the "Do Everything" policy. The organization endorsed women's suffrage, the eight-hour day, federal aid to education, kindergartens, prison reform, and the Prohibition Party, in addition to its founding cause of restricting alcohol. By 1890, the WCTU had roughly two hundred thousand members and chapters in every state. The organization is the proximate ancestor of the Anti-Saloon League and the Eighteenth Amendment of 1920 (Theme SOC).

The settlement-house movement is the fourth track of Gilded Age reform, and it overlaps directly with Lesson 9 on the cultural response to the new immigration. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Halsted Street in the Near West Side of Chicago in September 1889, modeled on Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, which Addams had visited the previous year. Hull House was a residential community of college-educated women who lived among Italian, Greek, Russian Jewish, Bohemian, and Polish immigrant neighbors. Within a decade Hull House operated a kindergarten, a labor museum, a public bath, a coffeehouse, an employment bureau, an art gallery, and a cooperative residence for working women. Lillian Wald opened the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of New York in 1893 with a focus on visiting nursing. By 1900, more than one hundred settlement houses operated in twenty-seven American cities. The settlement-house residents produced the empirical sociology that fed Progressive Era policy: the Hull-House Maps and Papers of 1895, the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907, and the National Child Labor Committee investigations of the 1900s all began in settlement-house parlors (Theme SOC).

Read together, the four reform tracks of Topic 6.11 share a single structural feature. Each one organized a constituency that the existing two-party system had not represented: rural producers under the Granger and Populist banner, civil servants and middle-class professionals under the civil-service banner, women under the WCTU and the settlement-house banner. Each one used statutory and administrative tools, not constitutional amendments, to attempt structural change. And each one transmitted demands forward to Period 7, where the Sixteenth Amendment (federal income tax, 1913), the Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of senators, 1913), the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition, 1920), and the Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage, 1920) wrote four of the Populist and women's reform demands into the Constitution itself. The Gilded Age reform movement did not win in 1896. It won in the decades that followed.

Three sources frame the four reform tracks. The Omaha Platform supplies the Populist program, the Cross of Gold address supplies its closing rhetorical performance, and the Hull House first-year report supplies the settlement-house counterpart.

1. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the founding of the Patrons of Husbandry in 1867 to the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. Identify the moment in the chain at which a different judicial outcome would have produced a different statutory result, and account for the consequences.
2. (Continuity and Change) Identify two planks of the 1892 Omaha Platform that became constitutional amendments in Period 7. Identify two planks that did not. Account for what the difference reveals about which Populist demands were politically possible in the long run and which were not.
3. (Comparison) Compare the Populist Party of 1892 with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of 1890. Both organizations operated outside the formal two-party system. What does the comparison reveal about the strengths and limits of late-century reform organizations whose members lacked some or all of the levers of formal political power?
4. (Causation) Account for the role of Garfield's assassination in 1881 in producing the Pendleton Act of 1883. Did the assassination cause civil-service reform, or did it accelerate a reform demand that was already present? Defend your answer with evidence from the lesson.
5. (Comparison) Compare Hull House in 1889 with the Granger lodges of 1872. Both projects were responses to the dislocations of industrial capitalism. What does the comparison reveal about the way urban middle-class reformers and rural producer reformers diagnosed the same underlying problem?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.