860,000 in the period from 1860 to 1880, but the Southern states east of the Mississippi actually showed a decrease of 6369 in the foreign-born population in the same score of years. In 1880 these states contained less than 1 per cent of foreign-born inhabitants. Again, even if the exploitation of the resources necessary for industrial development had been neglected for the exclusive devotion to cotton-growing in the lower South, those resources were nevertheless there in rich abundance. Coal, iron, and phosphates which had lain untouched beneath the soil began now to be brought to the surface. Mills and factories were built on the numerous sites of cheap water power, and began to collect the rural population of the Piedmont region into towns.

The census of 1880 shows the beginning of the transformation of the South into an industrial community. Cotton goods, flour, foundry products, sawed lumber, cotton seed and cake, agricultural implements, brick and tile, leather goods, woolens, saddlery, boots and shoes, drugs and chemicals, began to appear in the lists of Southern manufactures. The lists were not yet long, to be sure, when compared with those of the Northern states, nor was the total value of the manufactured products of the South ($338,000,000) imposing beside the more than tenfold value ($3,661,645,971) of the output of the mills and factories of the North; but still a beginning had been made. The number of persons engaged in manufacturing had increased from 360,000 in 1870 to 593,000 in 1880, and the number engaged in trade and transportation from 229,000 to 414,000. Already the output of coal in the South had reached 6,000,000 tons (to which every state but South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas contributed), and the output of pig iron 400,000 tons. The 300,000 cotton spindles of 1860 had doubled, and were to double again in the years 1880-1885. The railroad

1 An International Cotton Exposition at Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881, impressed on its three hundred thousand visitors the ability of the South-with its advantages of cheap land and labor, low taxes, lack of pressure from the unions, and ready-to-hand supplies of fuel and raw material-to compete with the New England mills in the production of the coarser grades of cotton goods.

mileage, after the close of the reconstruction period, began to expand rapidly, keeping pace with the rate in the country at large. The old South had passed away in humiliation and pain. The census of 1880 heralded the birth of another order, which Henry W. Grady, of the Atlanta Constitution, in a speech before the New England Society of New York in 1886, proudly called "the New South."

The figures of the tenth census are an eloquent witness to the divergent interests of the various sections of our country in 1880, but their significance is rather social and economic than political. Sectional interests cut across the old party lines. There were many high-tariff and hard-money Democrats in the industrial East, while the agricultural and mining interests of the West drew thousands of Republicans from their allegiance to the party founded on the principles of free soil and the preservation of the Union. The long and undisputed control of Congress by the Republicans had come to an end in the middle seventies, and for the next twenty years there were but two congresses in which a majority of both Houses was of the same political faith as the president.' This seesawing of party fortune prevented either Republicans or Democrats from carrying through any positive political program, and fixed their attention on the edifying task of keeping in power when they were in and getting back into power when they were out. Under the necessity of becoming all things to all men, that they might win a majority, they made their platforms "paragons of ambiguity" (see the clauses on the tariff and the currency, for example), and their legislation chapters of compromise. It was not until the radical movement of the West became strong enough, first, to frighten both the great parties, and then to capture one of them, that the economic and social sectionalism revealed in the tenth census found its full political expression.

An exception to this generalization must be made in the case of the South, though the comparative lack of influence of that

1 Namely, the Fifty-first under Harrison in 1889, and the Fifty-third under Cleveland in 1893. During the entire period from Hayes to McKinley there was only once (1889) as large a majority as ten for either party in the Senate.

section on national politics for many years after the close of the reconstruction era makes the exception of less significance. The "New South" was also the "Solid South." No problem of political expediency, no shift of economic interest, could win the vote of the South to the party which had put through the reconstruction program. The Republicans still bore the hated name of Radicals in the South, and were the party of the negro and the scalawag. The white citizens generally,-whether of Whig or Democratic antecedents, whether of the social class of the planters or the "crackers,”—under the name of Conservatives (which was officially maintained in Alabama until 1906), steadily supported the Democratic party. In 1880 only four of the one hundred and six congressional districts of the South were represented by Republicans in the House. A great majority of the Southern members of both Houses of Congress had served in the Confederate armies, while solid delegations of ex-Confederate officers sat in some of the Southern state legislatures. Here and there, under the pressure of some conspicuous economic interest (sugar in Louisiana or iron in Alabama) a few Southern congressmen voted for protection after 1880; but when it came to the election of a president, the solid electoral vote of the South was to be found in the Democratic column.1

An adequate account of the bases of our new nationalism in the generation following the Civil War would have to deal with a number of inventions and discoveries, bold business enterprises and industrial exploitations, which it has been impossible

1 From 1896 on, one or more of the border states (Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri) began to be carried by Republican candidates; but it was not till 1920 that a Republican carried one of the states of the secession (Tennessee)—a state, be it noted, to which the congressional reconstruction of 1867 had not been applied. In the overwhelming election of Harding in 1920 the Republicans claimed that the solid South was broken for good. Contributions aggregating $350,000 were made by the Southern states to the Republican campaign fund in that year. Harding carried Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. Kentucky elected a Republican to the United States Senate. Democratic pluralities of 21,000 in Maryland, 50,000 in Oklahoma, 37,000 in Tennessee, and 28,000 in Missouri, in 1916, were converted into Republican pluralities of 62,000, 12,000, 12,000, and 120,000 respectively, in 1920. These figures are an interesting commentary on the economic transformation of the "New South."

even to mention in the limits of this chapter. The telephone (1877), the electric light (1879), and the trolley car (1882); the pipe line to carry the mounting tide of oil from the Pennsylvania and Ohio fields to the Atlantic seaboard (1881); the improved and cheapened methods of refining iron, which resulted in the increase of our steel production from 9000 tons in 1863 to 1,400,000 tons in 1880; the reorganization of our railroads after the depressing years of the middle seventies,—were some of the economic factors in the transformation of a people accustomed to ride in ambling horse-cars heated by rickety stoves, through roughly paved streets dimly lighted by flickering gas jets, or to travel at twenty miles an hour over light rails and quivering timber bridges in wooden cars drawn by wheezy locomotives. The new age brought in the names of Bell and Brush and Edison, of Carnegie and Rockefeller and Hill, the men of inventive genius and driving energy. It also brought its congenial philosophy of the dominance of private interest, ruthless, selfish, efficient, and sometimes lawless and corrupt -a philosophy which, in the forceful words of Professor Beard, "held that all the natural resources of the country should be transferred to private hands as speedily as possible, at a nominal charge or no charge at all, and developed with dashing rapidity"; which "believed that the great intangible social property created by community life, such as franchises for street railways, gas, and electricity, should be transformed into private property"; and which "looked upon state interference, except to preserve order and aid railways and manufactures in their enterprises, as an intrinsic evil to be resisted at every point.' Out of the new age, with its glory of achievement for the few and its frustration of ambition for the many, came the conflict of two opposing interpretations of American freedom which has been waged in the last generation: freedom to be protected in the appropriation and development of the boundless resources of our country, and freedom to be protected by a democratic government in the enjoyment of equal economic opportunity and a fair share of the fruits of the labor of one's hands.

1 Charles A. Beard, "Contemporary American History," p. 53.

CHAPTER III

A DECADE OF POLITICAL DEADLOCK

Neither party has any clear-cut principles, any distinctive tenets. Both claim to have tendencies. Both certainly have war-cries, organization, interests enlisted in their support. But those interests are in the main the interests of getting and keeping the patronage of the government.— JAMES BRYCE

THE PASSING OF THE STALWARTS

There are points of "dead center" in the history of nations as in the lives of individuals-periods of transition, when action wears thin, revealing the painful process of adjustment from a set of occupations or preoccupations of diminishing stimulus to new interests and problems. The decade of the eighties marked such a period in our history. New problems there were in abundance. Should the government deal with them, and, if so, how? Should it enter the field of economic legislation to attempt to adjust the growing conflict between capital and labor, or control the rapidly expanding transportation system? Should it restrict the enormous immigration which the return of prosperity was bringing to our shores ? Should it grapple with the problem of a mounting surplus in the Treasury by a courageous reduction of taxes or a deliberate increase of public expenditures? Should it adopt a consistent currency policy, reform the tariff, purify the civil service? Neither of the parties was ready with a clear and unequivocal answer to these questions. Each seemed chiefly concerned, by the denunciation of its rival's evasion of ambiguous promises, to bring enough suspicion on the other party to oust it from power when it was in, and to keep it out of power when it was out. The pot called the kettle black, while the dinner waited. It took the murder of a president by a disappointed office-seeker to spur Congress to a belated reform of the civil service. It was not