Historical Image of the Day

Cattle dying on Great Plains in Blizzard of 1886

Historical Image of the Day

Aftermath of the Johnstown Flood, Pennsylvania, 1889

Arguably America's greatest environmental disaster, the failure of the South Fork Dam 14 miles upstream of Johnstown, Pennsylvania led to the deaths of approximately 2200 people. Typically, the industrial tycoons behind the dam claimed it was an act of God. While it came after heavy rains, human fault caused the dam collapse and ensuing flood.

Historical Image of the Day

"Great Railway Station at Chicago-Departure of a Train." Engraving, circa 1880

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A bicycle built for two, in front of the White House, 1886

I Wish I Lived in 1880!!!!

Eric at Edge of the West points us to this piece of primordial idiocy. James Hornberger argues that America's golden year was 1880 (!)

I don’t think so. I believe that it is impossible to overstate the significance of what our American ancestors accomplished in terms of a free society.


Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

Fantastic. I mean, when I think of 1880, I'm thinking of things like children dying from malnutrition, anti-Chinese riots, the rise of Jim Crow and the violent suppression of black rights, widespread anti-Semitism, a suffrage restricted (by law or by custom) to white males, the inability of women to own their own property, .....

Oh hell, why bother. And what do I know? I'm only a late 19th century U.S. historian after all.

I always tell my students that anyone who thinks the past was better than the present has no idea what they are talking about. 1880 was a terrible place.  You know what the best and most accurate representation of this period we have in American popular culture--Deadwood. The TV show. It's not drop dead accurate and certainly the language was different. But the filth, the violence, the drug use, the callous disregard for human life, the treatment of Native Americans, African-Americans, the Chinese, and other ethnic groups, rampant prostitution, etc.

1880 as a paradise. The closest we can get to that now is Somalia. And I wish Hornberger would move there.

Historical Image of the Day

As I now have enough time again to find and blog about historical images, the series begins again. Since we are mid-week, I am going to run a series of images of American cities for the next week and a half. These all come from the National Archives website.

Cincinnati, 1883. Like London apparently!

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Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, a morphine-based product for teething children. It seems that it may have soothed Mom as well. Advertisement from 1887.

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Cocaine Toothache Drops, circa 1885

I'd be more open to becoming a parent if narcotics and opiates were legal to give children at any time.

Bad Days in American History: February 8, 1887

On this date in 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Act, breaking up Native American lands.

By 1887, the white assault on indigenous people was nearly complete. By the Civil War, Native peoples east of the Mississippi has either been subjugated or driven west. On the West Coast, the rise of European-American settlement was causing havoc on indigenous peoples and the relatively decentralized tribes west of the Cascades and Sierra were precipitiously declining. Beginning during the war, the U.S. army and average civilians engaged in an all-out assault against the last holdout of indigenous peoples, the Great Plains, a process that would continue well into the twentieth century.

The 1870s saw most of the Plains Indians capitulate to white domination. Whites hunted the bison out, undermining food sources. Smallpox and other diseases continued ripping through the population. Alcoholism and suicide were on the rise. Whites took children from their homes and sent them to Indian schools in the east. There they faced physical punishment for speaking their own language. Racist whites commonly murdered random Indians. And despite the occasional victory such as at the Little Bighorn in 1876, superior white numbers and military force completely overwhelmed indigenous people.

Whites originally chose Oklahoma as Indian Territory because the government figured no whites would want to live there. They saw the Plains as the Great American Desert. But by the 1860s, these attitudes had changed. Whites wanted the Plains to build new cities, farms, ranches, and railroads. How to deal with the remnant Indian populations was the first question. First was to assume they would go away over time. Most Americans in the late 19th century believed Indians would be extinct in a century or so. A big boost to the new field of anthropology was the necessary to collect languages, art, and cultural artifacts from the Indians before they went extinction. We could keep them in museum collections like the passenger pigeon. 

The other way to deal with the Indians was to find ways to expropriate their land. This process had already begun. The post-Civil War strategy to isolate Indians on worthless land known as reservations always came with the unwritten assumption that these borders could change at whites' discretion. The various Sioux peoples were given the Black Hills during the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but the subsequent discovery of gold forced them into much more marginal land east of the Hills.

Still, whites were constantly looking for new ways to take Indian lands. Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes came upon a plan in the 1880s. Whites always talked a big game about assimiliating Indians into white culture. They never really cared about this much, but it made a good excuse to destroy Indian cultures. So Dawes introduced a bill into the Senate requiring Indians to take up 160 acre plots on their own reservations. Since their populations were dwlinding and since they used much of their land for hunting anyway, this created millions of acres Indians wouldn't farm. The government could then sell this land to whites.

And so they did. This process, known as allotment, opened up Oklahoma for white settlement and allowed whites to buy cheap lands across the Plains. It helped destroy traditional hunting cultures on the Plains, as this now private property couldn't be used for hunting. The Dawes Act was another important step on the road to forcing indigenous people under white domination. The act remained in effect until 1934, during which period oil was being discovered on Oklahoma lands still owned by indigenous peoples. Whites then developed new ways to steal the oil money, declaring most Indians unable to manage such resources and giving the money to white agents to oversee. Of course, most Indians never saw a dime of it.

In the 47 years the Dawes Act was in effect, 90 million acres were stolen from Indians, approximately 2/3 of their land in 1887. Around 90,000 people were left with no land at all.

Historical Image of the Day

Rock Springs Massacre, 1885. Even after the Exclusion Act, anti-Chinese ideology drove politics in the West. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, racism combined with labor activism, as the railroad was paying Chinese less than whites. White labor responding by destroying the Chinese community, killing at least 28 Chinese miners.

Historical Image of the Day

One of my favorite images of anti-Asian racism, this less than subtle image from either the late 1870s or early 1880s lays it out there for all of us to see. The Workingman's Party was the dominate force in California politics during the years leading up to Chinese exclusion. Their entire platform consisted of saving California for the white man by ending Chinese immigration. That they became such a political threat to both parties helped lead to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

In this get out the vote image, you see the white man kicking the Chinese guy in the butt, with his queue extending all the way over the Pacific back to China, where he is fleeing.

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will look at anti-Asian propaganda in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Handbill celebrating the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, becoming the first law to ban an entire nation's immigrants from our shores. However, I'm not convinced that this image dates from that year, despite its celebratory tone. That's because it proclaims a Democratic president signed it. But Chester Arthur, a Republican if there was one, was president in 1882. So I'm assuming this handbill celebrates some kind of extension or modification signed by Grover Cleveland during one on his two terms.

However, one great thing about this handbill is the celebration of the Democratic party as protecting the white man, a key element of white supremacist ideology during the Gilded Age.

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Sung Lung Washing and Ironing House, Salem, Oregon, 1889.

The Garfield Assassination

Never one to pass on a chance to talk about the Gilded Age, I wanted to link to M.J. Rosenberg's comparison of the assassination of James Garfield by angry Republicans in 1881 to the possibility of angry Republicans assassinating Barack Obama or other leading Democrats today or in the near future.

I'm skeptical. For one thing, while the corrupt wing of the Republicans were pissed that Garfield won the nomination instead of Grant or some other acceptable option, he was a Republican after all. He was a respected member of their party. It wasn't hate they spewed at him, it was contempt. If the Grant people had truly refused to support Garfield, as Rosenberg states, Garfield wouldn't have won the election. It's not as if they went and voted for Winfield Scott Hancock. The election of 1880 was very close, but that had a lot to do with enough disgust for Republican economic policies and corruption that the Republican policy of waving the bloody shirt at the Democrats in post-Civil War America didn't have its usual effect. Moreover, Rosenberg kind of underplays why Charles Guiteau assassinated Garfield. Other than he was crazy, he was a disgruntled office seeker. He expected to get an office under Grant and shot Garfield when that didn't happen, but it's an awful long way to go to blame anger from one faction of Republicans over an anti-Grant candidate defeating them for Garfield's demise.

Of course, he's trying to make a comparison between Republican hate mongering over time. I think this has some value, but I think it's also a fairly significant stretch in this particular case.

I do most especially agree with Rosenberg on this statement:

Thank God Obama has one thing Garfield didn't: the Secret Service.

Historical Image of the Day

Halibut fishermen, Tacoma, Washington, 1888

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Apache prisoners at rest stop beside Southern Pacific Railroad, near Nueces River, Texas, 1886. Geronimo is one of the men on the right.

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Editorial cartoon of Terence Powderly, head of the Knights of Labor, holding back the twin enemies of scab labor and the employer. Puck Magazine, 1886

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Human anatomy class, University of Pennsylvania, 1888.

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"Atlanta, Georgia - Manufacture of Cotton-Seed Oil; Atlanta, Georgia - The Commercial Center"

Harper's Weekly, February 12, 1887

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The Jewish settlement of Cotopaxi, Colorado, 1882.