Jane Addams and the Democracy Project

The initial idea behind the Hull House settlement was to assist those people in the neighborhood in leading better lives--by having an example of upstanding white Protestants in their midst, the immigrant Roman Catholic and Jews would be able to see how "real" Americans lived their lives, and then follow that example. What Addams and the residents of Hull House quickly found  out, however,  was that they had much to learn from their neighbors.

What else became readily apparent to  the residents of Hull House was that although many of their neighbors were very poor, they were not without intelligence and culture--indeed, these recent immigrants from Europe were much more cognizant with European culture than many wealthy native Americans.

Addams also discovered that many of the Hull House neighbors did not need to be "Americanized," but rather when given the opportunity they were more than willing to take classes about American government and a willingness to learn English. But Addams  also came to the realization that this rush to "Americanize" led many of the offspring of these immigrants to reject their parent's cultural practices.

TR--Part 3: The Elected Term in Office

Roosevelt was elected to his own term in office in 1904, when he overwhelmed the Democratic nominee. In his exuberance in being nominated at the 1904 Republican convention, Roosevelt had pledged to only serve one full term--a pledge he regretted even before that term was completed.

The early part of Roosevelt's term was quite successful. He returned to trust-busting, and some of the more "progressive" political stands that he had made during his first term. Roosevelt also scored a foreign policy success, helping to arbitrate the end to the Russo-Japanese war in 1905--a feat that won him the Nobel Prize for peace in 1905. Roosevelt achieved this breakthrough by secretly negotiating with the Japanese to allow them to invade Korea in return for assurances that the Japanese had no interest in the Philippines.

In 1907, however, the Panic (caused by the failed attempt on the part of some banks to "corner" the market in copper ) caused  a run on  banks nationwide, which was only stopped by J.P. Morgan and his willingness to use his own money to shore up a number of banks in New York City. This event, and the resultant recession, undermined Roosevelt's relationship with Congress, and he found it increasingly difficult to get legislation passed there. Despite Roosevelt's weakened political position, he did get to name his successor, William Howard Taft, who beat this Democratic challenger  nearly as handily as Roosevelt had four years before.

1902 Anthracite Coal Strike

I. Role of Coal

A. Stoking the Fires of Capitalism

1. Railroads--coal provided the fuel for locomotives--but it was also instrumental in the manufacture of most railroad-related material, including the manufacture of the locomotives it powered, the rolling stock these locomotives pulled, and the rails that the trains ran on.

2. Skyscrapers--coal was instrumental in making the structural steel that allowed for the transformation of architecture, and the creation of the urban landscape as we know it.

3. Automobiles--coal was also instrumental in producing the main product that was responsible for effecting the emergence of another fossil fuel that dominated American life during most of the 20th century.

B. Growth of Coal Mining in the  19th Century

1. 1840--7,000 men were employed in mining coal in the United  States,  who mined 2 million tons
2. 1870--186,000 coal miners mined 37 million tons.
3. 1900--677,000 coal miners mined 350 million tons

C. Transformation of American life--coal powered the technological  change the transformed American life in the second half of the 19th century  and the first two decades of the 20th.

D. Capitalist enterprise in coal

1.  Intensification of capital--at the beginning of the 20th, the coal industry began a period of consolidation. In Colorado, for example, two companies, Victor Coal Company and Colorado Fuel and Iron (owned by the Rockefellers) mined most of the coal in that state.

2. Early stage of consolidation--in 1900, no one company owned more than 3% of the national market; but of America's 100 largest companies, a dozen were mining companies.

II. Life of Mother Jones

A. Mary Harris

1. Discrepancies in her life story

a. Birth date--According to Autobiography of Mother Jones, she was born May 1, 1830. According to her baptismal certificate in Cork, she was baptized in August of 1837. Her parents were not married until 1835. What explains this discrepancy? Although she was not as old as she claimed, she was advanced in years at the time this book was written, which may have effected her memory. As May 1 became identified with the labor movement, what could be more appropriate than the mother of the labor movement claiming that day as the one of her birth, as well? Her advanced age rendered her activities more weight, and allowed her to transcend the limitations that most women had to operate under during this time period.

2. Immigration

a. Potato Famine – it is likely that Mother Jones’ father and older brother left during the Potato Famine (1845-1847); between 1845 and 1853, over 200,000 people a year left Ireland for another country.

b. Immigration to Canada – it is likely that her father immigrated directly to Canada from Ireland—passage was less expensive the year he most likely left; in the 1850 US Federal Census he is listed in Vermont, but the family resided in Toronto, Canada.

3. Education – she attended a normal (teaching) college, but did not finish.

4. Pre-marriage work--Teacher at convent school in Monroe, Michigan. She also worked as a seamstress in Chicago. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Jones moved and became a school teacher in Memphis, TN

B. Mary Harris Jones

1. Married George Jones – in 1861, shortly after moving to Memphis, Mother Jones met and married iron molder and union member George Jones.

2. Raising a family – the Jones’ shortly had four children in their brief marriage, three girls and a boy

3. 1867 Yellow Fever Epidemic--Mary Jones lost all four children and her husband to the epidemic

4. Move back to Chicago--and worked as seamstress

5. Great Chicago Fire 1871

6. Period between 1871-1894 – the mystery period in the life of Mother Jones

7. 1877 Great Upheaval – may have been in Chicago, put she was not a leading figure in the strikes in Chicago as she claimed (probably a part of her persona).

8. 1886 Haymarket Square – although she disdains the politics of the Chicago anarchists, she upholds them as men of ideals, to be emulated

9. 1894 Coxey’s Army – her first real appearance as Mother Jones; she is part of an advance party for a western band of unemployed who are marching east to join up with Jacob Coxey for his march on Washington.

C. The Emergence of Mother Jones-- Mother Jones is able to use her age and gender to her advantage; because of her age she is able to act in ways that other women are restricted from.

1. Appeal to Reason – socialist newspaper which Mother Jones helped get off the ground; eventually had 750,000 subscribers, and often reached many more readers.

2. Radical political ideas appealed to a great number of people during this time period.

III. United Mine Workers

A. Founded-- January 1890, struggled to remain in existence during that decade, having to overcome a disastrous strike in 1894.

B. 1897 Central Competitive Field Strike--the Central Competitive Field stretched from western Pennsylvania to central Illinois. The strike began July 4,  1897 in response to attempts to implement a wage cut. The strike lasted until January 1898, but ended  in a union victory--a pay raise,  8-hour day, dues check-off, and union recognition.  The settlement also benefited operators, because the settlement helped end the cutthroat competition.

C. 1897 Eastern Pennsylvania Anthracite  Strike--miners in the anthracite district, not members of the UMW, went on strike because of wage cuts.  A  group of 200 marched  to a mine in Lattimer,  Pennsylvania to call miners there to join the strike; mine guards shot into the group, killing 19 miners.

D. John Mitchell--the UMW president, believed that the National Civic Federation was key for settling labor disputes--which is why he accepted the deal brokered by President Roosevelt that ended the strike without the anthracite operators recognizing the union as sole bargaining agent for the miners. Jones, on the other hand, argued that workers could only rely upon themselves, and the power they could claim by withholding their labor.

Progressive Solutions for the Labor Problem

I. Labor's Response to Capitalism


A. Labor Productivity

1. Labor productivity-- relates output to the labor hours used in the production of that output.

a. Productivity is largely finding a way of getting workers to work harder and faster; workers, on the other hand--especially those being paid by the hour--found it more advantageous for them to less hard unless a way was found to incentivize them to work faster.

2. Frederick Winslow Taylor--the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor probably had what today we would recognize as  an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He spent much of his childhood counting steps between tasks in order to find the "one best way" of doing things

a. Scientific management--after leaving Harvard when a mental breakdown made him temporarily blind, Taylor went to work for a friend of his father's as a machinist. Disgusted with the work practices of his fellow employees--especially their efforts to restrict output--he resolved to find the "one best way" of completing a variety of jobs. Taylor's first success was with a steel manufacturer, who allowed Taylor to reorganize work in the pig iron yard.

3. What was scientific about scientific management?--not much, really. Taylor had no background in physiology, so he had very little insight into how the human body worked. His most famous experiment, with "Schmidt" in the pig iron yard, consisted of providing Schmidt with more pay than his fellow workers as long as he loaded more pig iron. Workers invariably found better ways than the "one best way" to complete their  assigned tasks.

B. Scientific Management and the Progressive Movement--the concept of scientific management attracted a lot of support within the Progressive Movement, since it seemed to offer a logical, neutral, "scientific" means of resolving conflicts between management and workers.

1. Louis Brandeis--later became the first Jewish Supreme  Court Justice, and the author of Other People's Money, and How Bankers Use It, but he was also one of the leading proponents of the application of scientific management.

II. National Civic Foundation

A. Civic Foundation of Chicago--in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, the Civic Foundation of Chicago sought to bring together management and labor to work  out their differences, and to seek common ground. Attracted not only large business and labor leaders, but also churchmen and social reformers. The organizations that followed in the wake of the Civic Foundation of Chicago followed this formula, which they argued presented to voice of "the public" and represented their interests.

B. National Civic Federation--established in 1903, it brought together business and labor leaders on a national stage. Membership was voluntary, and the organization had no means of carrying through with its suggestions. Like the Civic Foundation of Chicago, the National Civic Federation became a leading proponent of the "tri-partrite" system of addressing labor disputes, with "disinterested" citizens arbitrating these disputes between  labor and management.

C. National Association of Manufacturers--founded in 1895, but transformed in 1903 by David MacLean Parry into an effective anti-union vehicle, which led to the Open Shop movement of the early years of the 20th century.

III. Role of Government

A. Protection of "property rights"--through much of the development of capitalism, government had only seen fit to protect the property of capitalists; with TR assuming office, however, he saw that maintain the government's superiority over both capital and labor.

1. 1902 Anthracite Coal strike

Trust Busting

I. TR the Trust-Buster

A. Expansion of the role of President – Roosevelt had an activist bent that led him to try (largely successfully) to expand the role of the president.

1. Chief executives since Lincoln had been rather weak administrators who were inclined to follow the lead of Congress.

2. While TR was expanding the role of chief executive, however, he was expanding it for fundamentally conservative principles.

B. Trust busting – Roosevelt’s reputation as the “trust-buster” is largely undeserved—his successor, the lethargic William Howard Taft and his administration actually brought many more suits against trusts than did the Roosevelt administration.

1.  Definition of Monopoly--In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it (from Wikipedia)
2.. Roosevelt felt that monopolies were a logical consequence of capitalism; unlike many of his Progressive cohorts, he welcomed this development—as long as the government controlled these monopolies.

3. Response to Populist politics--Roosevelt's policy towards trust busting was largely a result of the growing popular distrust and dislike to the increased control that large corporations had over economic  life in the United States, rather than some deep aversion to the monopolies.

C. Busting the Trusts

1. Northern Securities Company – TR and his administration did pursue a case against the Northern Securities Company, which was a holding company for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads; railroads were largely unpopular still, and a strong case could be made that the railroads were in fact engaged in interstate commerce, a crucial factor when the case went to the Supreme Court.

2. Swift & Company v. United States – government contended that meatpackers combined together to restrict competitive bidding for livestock to slaughter; Supreme Court issued ruling using the “stream of commerce” doctrine, which held that some manufacturing processes did indeed take place in interstate means, and therefore were liable to federal regulation under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

a. Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act – Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in early 1906, a hard-hitting expose of working and living conditions in the packinghouses and their environs in Chicago. That part of the book received very little notice, however; as Sinclair himself described it, “I aimed for people’s hearts, and hit their stomachs.” His descriptions of sausage making (combining putrid meat, rat shit, the occasional part of an extremity from a worker, and a secret blend of herbs and spices) stirred TR and Congress into action.

3. Bureau of Corporations – most trust regulation was handled by the newly formed Bureau of Corporations. The Bureau was charged with gathering information about corporations, in order to help keep them from violating the law. Roosevelt was less interested in busting trusts than he was in regulating them. He divided trust into good trusts and bad trusts; the determination into which pigeonhole a trust fell into was completely arbitrary. The good trusts were those whose officers came to the White House and had dinner with the president, and who cooperated with the Bureau; bad trusts did not do these things.

a. The effect of the Bureau of Corporations was to tie the interests of the United States government more closely with business than they had been before.

4. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) – although TR’s advocacy of regulation was resented by some businessmen (particularly Henry Clay Frick, who complained that “the son of a bitch”[Roosevelt] wouldn't  stay bought after many businessmen contributed heavily to his 1904 campaign); however, because these regulatory commissions tended to be staffed with officials from the industry the commission was charged to regulate. The Hepburn Act gave the ICC the right to set maximum freight rates, and it outlawed the payments of kickbacks to large volume shippers. Essentially what the ICC did was to allow the railroads to collude and set rail rates—something they had been trying to do for approximately thirty years anyway, and something farmers and workers had been working to prohibit for the same length of time.

3rd Written Assignment

Through the discussions in class, I have attempted to point out how Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt share a number of traits--but still have vast differences in how they work to solve problems.  From the class lectures and  from your readings, I would like you to write a 3-5 page paper that examines these similarities and differences in some depth. You should also draw some  conclusions as to why the differences came about, despite their similarities. This paper is due on Monday, April 5.

Taking the Panama Canal

I. The Path Across the Isthmus

A. Spanish Exploration--from its "discovery" by early European explorers, the desire to build a means of traversing this short distance was sought to speed commercial shipping.

B. Panama Railroad--constructed across the Isthmus between 1850 and 1855. The line only ran 47 miles, but had to be constructed through a jungle, at the cost of somewhere between 6000 and 12,000 workers lives, due to exhaustion and disease. Although this rail line carried the heaviest volume of freight per unit length of any railway in the world, having to unload shipments, place them in railcars, and then reload them onto other ships greatly added to shipping costs. The presence of the railway was a deciding factor in choosing Panama for the route of the canal, however, since it could carry heavy equipment and men to the interior of the country.

C. Suez Canal (1869)--with the successful completion of the Suez Canal by the, the French then turned toward building the long-dreamed about Panama Canal. The Suez Canal was built over fairly level land,  and needed no locks--ocean water provides flotation for the ships. The French would find different conditions in Panama.

1. Financing the Suez project--was largely done by French stockholders; much of  the rest of the world was skeptical, and the British were openly hostile to the project. When the French finished the project, it became a great source of national pride, and led directly to those involved in the Suez project to seek something new

II. The French Canal Attempt

A. La Société internationale du Canal interocéanique--was the French company formed in 1876 to finance the construction of the French canal. Two years later, the French were able to persuade the Colombian government to grant them permission to construct the canal.

1. Ferdinand de Lessups--the man credited with constructing the Suez Canal was entrusted with the responsibility of building the Panama Canal, as well. Lessups was able to persuade investors to come up with some $400 million. Lessups was a fund-raiser, however,  and not an engineer. While it didn't take much engineering expertise to build a large ditch across level land, building a canal that could ascend more then 300 feet in just 47 miles required  more engineering expertise that Lessups had.

2. Chargres River--cut across the proposed canal route, but was too unpredictable to be included in the plans for the canal, so it needed to be diverted.

3. Diseases--the greatest enemy to constructing the canal. People had no idea how these two diseases were  contracted, so no idea of how to prevent them. They even put bed legs in tin cans of water, to prevent bugs from crawling up--and unknowingly providing the carrier of the two deadly diseases, mosquitoes, with the perfect breeding environment. When someone eventually  figured out what was causing people to become infected with these diseases, they named a hospital after him--Walter Reed.

a. Malaria

b. Yellow fever

B. French failure--the French lacked the financing, and the engineering expertise on the project, to successfully carry this project off. By the early 1890s, Lessups is looking for someone to dump this albatross on.

III. The American Canal

A. The Dream of World Power--Roosevelt's advocacy of increased naval power by the United States was the driving force behind his desire to also acquire the rights to build the Panama Canal.

B. Buys out the French--for $40 million

C. Offer to Colombia--for $15 million. Colombia tried to hold out for more, but instead Roosevelt let it by known that he would not be upset if Panamanian "rebels" took control of the region--and when that occurred, he gave these rebels (landowners and businessmen along the canal's proposed route) the $15 million instead.

D. The Imperial Presidency--Roosevelt's usurption of Congress's war powers in his dealing with Colombia displeased many in that body--but their desire to have the canal tempered their displeasure. This action does call into question Roosevelt's influence in obtaining for the Office of the President greater powers than those granted to the office by  the Constitution. By the second half of the 20th century, and the early years of the 21st century, similar actions by Roosevelt's successors led to the  US involvement in Vietnam, and the present "War on Terror."

E. Continuation of the "White Man's Burden"

1. "Gold Workers"--skilled white workers, largely drawn from the United States. were paid in gold, and  received other privileges while working in the canal zone like free housing and paid vacations.

2. "Silver Workers"--unskilled workers, drawn from the rest of the world--but largely from the Caribbean--did most of the actual work  of digging the canal; the also lived within a segregated system that the US exported.

Jane Adams, Garbage Inspector

I. Summer 1894

A. Pullman Strike--the ongoing railroad strike tied up rail traffic in the western part of the country.

B. Mary Addams Linn--Jane's eldest sister was gravely ill during this summer, and separated temporarily from her husband, who had just taken on a new pastorate. Because of the strike, he did not make it back to Mary before she passed on.

C.  Care of the "Linnettes"--in her will, sister Mary left the care of her minor children--Esther, age 14 and Stanley, age 11--to the care of her sister Jane, rather than to her husband. Stanley is a bit of a sickly child, so this gave Jane extra incentive to take care of the garbage problem that had been festering in the  neighborhood since Hull House was established.

II. The Garbage Problem

A. Population density--the fact that people were closely confined in poorer neighborhoods, combined with the fact that they received inadequate city services, and lived in neglected properties, contributed to this problem.

B. Chicago Politics--while the mayor was not without a great deal of power, most power lay in the hands of ward aldermen in Chicago.

1. John Powers--"Johnny da Pow" was alderman of the 19th Ward from 1888 to 1927.  Powers was a saloon keeper  in Bridgeport (the  home of the Dailey clan--Richard J. and  Richard  M, the current mayor of Chicago).

a. Each ward had two aldermen; the most infamous were the aldermen for the First Ward--"Hinky-Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse John" Coughlin, who got a cut from most all the vice that occurred in the First Ward  fiefdom.

2. Reformers--mayoral candidates regularly ran in Chicago promising to "clean-up" municipal politics--but their subordination to city council really prevented reform from taking place.

3. Appointment as Garbage Inspector--Addams did not place a great deal of  emphasis on the  cleanliness of the neighborhood until she took on the responsibility of raising here sister Mary's children.

a.  Rejected bid--Addams  and her Hull House team made a careful study of the situation,  and then submitted a bid to be given the position. Her bid was rejected on a technicality, but Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., gave her the position, anyway--despite the protest from the aldermen, who did not want to see the $1,000 the appointee received go outside their political machine.

C. On the job--Addams and another Hull House resident rode around the neighborhood to ensure the firm they contracted actually did the work they were being paid to do.

1. Animal carcasses--the two women also made sure that animal carcasses were disposed of.

2. Hull House incinerator--was installed, and neighbors were encouraged to bring some of their garbage to the incinerator; later in the 20th century, this became a major means of disposing of garbage

D.  Civil Service--The State of Illinois made these garbage inspector positions Civil Service protected; this later leads to  Addams losing her position, when an alderman proposed that the position become a city civil service position--which by law meant that women could not hold the position.

III. Conclusion

Machine Politics

Welcome back!



A. The Spoils System

1.Growth of government--as government began to do more, opportunities for awarding and procuring government jobs and contracts became a way to award political friends and punish political enemies.

2. Bipartisan Graft--political parties accuse each other of abusing political patronage constantly--it is the one means of regaining influence when out of power.

a. Recent example--in 2006, the Democratic Party regained control of the House of Representatives in part because of the Mark Foley incident, and the continuing ethical allegations lodged against majority whip Tom DeLay--just as the Republican Party had taken control of the same House in  1994 be accusing the Democratic Party of malfeasence (and the "Contract on With America").

B. Graft--George Washington Plunkitt was a proud practicioner of what he called "honest graft," in opposition to "dishonest graft." Plunkitt was a long-time state senator in New York, as rose through the ranks at Tammany Hall to a position of leadership within the organization. Plunkitt gained much of the considerable wealth he acquired through using his knowledge of ongoing transportation projects

1. Honest Graft--as Plunkitt defined it, honest graft was defined by the pursuit of those policies and plans that would simultaneously benefit the state, the party, and the individual politician.

2. Dishonest Graft--that which placed  personal gain above all else

C. Government services--as cities grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it became apparent that it was necessary to provide a whole host of services (garbage pick-up, sewers, potable water, transportation, police, fire protection, and eventually utility services) that had not been provided in cities to this point.

1. Garbage pick-up--before the 1890s, garbage was not picked-up on a regular basis in the most cities--it would simply be thrown in the  alleys  and streets, where pigs (and rats and other vermin) would dispose of it. Or it would rot. As populations in cities grew,  and the amount of garbage to be disposed of grew along with it, this situation became intolerable, and firms were contracted by cities to haul garbage to specific sites to dispose of it.

a. Horses--dead animals were another disposal headache in large cities. Before the advent of motorized transportation like trucks, deliveries in cities were accomplished by horse and wagon (actually, this continued to be the case for years after trucks were introduced,  as well). These animals often died on the job, and were left in the streets by their owners or drivers.

2. Sewers--in early cities, chamber pots containing "night soil" were simply thrown out of the nearest window the following morning. Privys (outhouses) also provided places to collect human waste. As tenement buildings were constructed in cities, they were built without running water--and therefore, many families would share these privys.

a. Open sewers--as it became apparent that this situation was quickly becoming intolerable, open sewers--nothing more than ditches--were constructed to carry away this waste. This accomplished little in alleviating the stench, however.

3. Potable Water--when people started to become aware that a number of diseases--dysentery and cholera were the two most prevalent and deadly--were carried by water-borne pathogens, securing a safe supply of drinking water became a worth-while  expenditure for municipalities.

4. Transportation--to  accommodate all of the people now living in cities at the turn of the 20th century, housing moved further from the center of cities, and necessitated the construction of light rail lines to move large numbers of people from their residence to their  place of work. Private companies largely provided this service--but their rates were regulated by the franchise they were granted,  and an area of contestation between these companies and their riders.

5.  Public Utilities--companies providing this electrical light rail service had to build power stations and  a power grid to provide the electricity to run these trains--providing power to people in cities was an after thought. Once it became a paying  proposition, however, rates for this service also came under regulation by the local government.

6. Police--police hiring became a way to reward party regulars. Police were also capable of using graft themselves, taking bribes and other favors in return for selectively enforcing the law

7. Fire--less lucrative than police work (although before fire companies became municipally-controlled,  more of graft-style opportunities existed).

D. The Irish and Urban Politics--in the popular imagination, urban political machines and urban political corruption arrived on American shores with Irish immigrants, but the reality was that Irish immigrants simply arrived in the United States, and settled in urban areas, at an opportune time.

1. White Male Suffrage--Irish arrived in US just as the right to vote was being extended to all white males; their ability to speak English gave them an advantage over Germans (who were more numerous, but did not settle almost exclusively in cities) and other later-arriving immigrant groups.

2. Patronage and Ethnic Group Identity--by giving patronage positions to "countrymen," Irish helped to cement a new identity for themselves (Irish, over Dubliner or Corkian or some other village in Ireland).

3. Machines not exclusively Irish--nor exclusive to the Democratic Party. Although the Irish rose to the top of the heap in New York and Chicago, they did not  control all urban machines; Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo (outside of the "Golden Rule" Jones era) all had machines run by native white Republicans in the late 19th century

Murdering McKinley, Part II

I. Immigrants and the American Dream

A. Immigrants as Transient Workers

1. Young Males--better than sixty percent of immigrants from the 1880-1920 were males between the ages of 15-35, most of whom came to better their economic circumstances. Of this cohort, many would move back and forth between their home country and the United States several times.

2. Wages--White Americans often complained that the "new immigrants" kept wages lower than they should be; there was some truth to that, because immigrants were willing to work for lower wages, largely because they saw that condition being only temporary--either they would take the money they made and head back home to Europe, or their lower wages would be supplemented by other family members (if they were in the country)

B. Immigrants as permanent settlers--not all immigrants in the era of greatest migration activity were transients, but came expecting to settle in the United States for a variety of reasons.

1. Urban settlers--most of the immigrants who settled permanently in the United States did so in urban areas--in cities. There are important exceptions to this, of course (and Garrison Keillor has made a career out of one of these exceptions--Norwegian farmers in Minnesota),  but most immigrant families put down roots in cities before getting together enough money to buy any farm land.

2. Rural settlements--although urban settlers made up the majority of immigrant population, there were important pockets of rural immigrant settlements, as well; northwest Ohio is home to numerous German-American farming communities, for instance, and there area also numerous settlements of the quintessential urban immigrant group--the Irish--in the Great Lakes region, as well

II. Leon Czolgosz

A. Early Life

1. Born in Detroit--Leon Czolgosz was the first in his family born in the United States. After only a couple of years, the family moved to rural northern Michigan (first Rogers City, then Alpena, the a little Polish-American community called Posen)

2. Education--Czolgosz,  because of his intelligence and aptitude for school, was allowed to attend classes until he was 16, an unheard of occurrence for someone of his background at the  time

B. Work Life

1. Glassmaking--at the age of 16, Czolgosz found work at a glass factory in Pittsburgh, where his family  was now living. The family makes enough from a variety of employments to put together a nest egg, move to Cleveland, were the patriarch of the family, Paul Czolgosz, bought a saloon. Paul Czolgosz then leased the saloon to the Findlay Brewing Company.

2. Wire-making--Czolgosz and his brother Waldeck found steady employment at a steel wire manufacture in Cleveland, until the Depression of 1893

a. Watered  stock--claiming more capitalization than actually exists (that is, more equipment than  actually on hand), derived from the cowboy practice of salting cattle feed after a long drive to encourage the consumption of copious amounts of water--hence "watering the stock."

b. Tariff--while offering protection for home goods, it also brought in less revenue, as foreign trade ground to a halt. At  the  same time, the government had to purchase large amounts of silver with gold (done to get the votes from  western states to pass the tariff by McKinley), causing gold reserves to be greatly diminished and then  a run on banks when word of this condition leaked out.

c. Manufacturing--Manufacturers attempted to weather the storm by first cutting prices (to get more business), and then by cutting costs (by cutting wages and employees)

d. Strikes--workers responded to this situation--which was not of their making--by going on strike. Many strikers, like Leon Czolgosz, were then "blacklisted" by their employers. Czolgosz remained unemployed because of this until a new foreman was hired, and he was re-hired as "Fred Neiman (Fred Nobody)"

C. Self-Education--Czolgosz while unemployed embarked on a program of self-education during his unemployed time. Since prayer did not work, he and his brother gave up Catholicism. Leon Czolgosz became especially enamored by a hugely popular book by Edward Bellamy called Looking Backward

D. Illness--about 1897, Czolgosz stopped working at the wire mill, and moved full-time to the family farm, where he spent his time hunting and tinkering, until he took his investment in the farm out and began his path toward his encounter with William McKinley

1. Self-treatment--although Czolgosz saw at least 4 different doctors that his family knew of, he never divulged what his illness was to his family.

2. Withdrawal--Czolgosz while living on the farm did not take his meals with the family, but in his room or sometimes in the barn.

3. Fear of syphillis--one of the main things doctors looked for when Czolgosz was autopsied was any evidence of syphillis, since this would indicate the possibility of mental illiness, especially after doctors noticed genital scarring. But doctors found no other evidence of syphillis--which says nothing about whether Czolgosz feared that he had the disease.

E. Nothing to loose--Czolgosz was an immigrant outsider, possibly ill with syphillis, when he decided to strike at the symbol of this life's difficulties.