José Marti, Cuban Revolutionary Party, January 5, 1892

¡CUBA LIBRE!

José Martí, born in 1853 in La Habana, Cuba, was a poet, a revolutionary and is known as Cuba's National Hero. He was sentenced to 6 years of hard labor at the age of 16 for his political activity and later was exiled to Spain. He also lived in the United States where he was able to mobilize support for the Cuban revolution among Cuban exiles. He was a founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and spoke out against U.S. imperialism in Latin America. In 1895, he was shot and killed during an invasion of Cuba, giving his life to help make Cuba free. His dream was realized, but not until after his death. In 1898, Spain gave up control of Cuba as a provision of the Treaty of Peace of Paris between the United States and Spain, ending the Spanish-American War. The Cuban Republic was instituted in 1902, but did not return to home rule until 1909.
The day before he died, Martí said in a letter that it was his duty “to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter, is to that end… I have lived inside the monster and know its insides.”
As a student of Spanish literature, I have read Martí's poetry and see him as more than just another revolutionary fighting for his country. He, like Cuban exiles today, longed to see a "Cuba Libre" - a free Cuba. His longing for his homeland is seen and felt in his poem "Dos patrias" (Two Homelands) from his collection of poems, "Flores de destierro" (Flowers of Exile), written during his exile, and his identity as a son of Cuba is clear in the poem "Soy un hombre sincero" from the collection, "Versos sencillos".
Interesting note: an adaptation of this poem was set to music in 1929, called "Guantanamera", and due to Martí's status as National Hero, became an unofficial Cuban anthem. It was made popular in the United States later in the 20th century by The Sandpipers.

T.R.'s New Nationalism, 1910

"The object of government is the welfare of the people."
"This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare." - Teddy Roosevelt

On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt delivered his famous speech, known as the "New Nationalism" speech. The main issue of the speech was human welfare. He believed that it the government's chief responsibility was to protect people and property, but if there had to be a choice, the welfare of the people should come first. His agenda for public welfare included these goals: 1) a federal child labor law; 2) regulation of labor relations; 3) a national minimum wage for women.
Roosevelt gave this speech about a year and a half after he had left office as President of the United States and and about a year and half before he tried to win his party's nomination in 1912 (in which he was defeated by Taft).
This speech is important in that it shows Roosevelt's progressive philosophy of the need for reform, as we read in "America" on page 621: "This formulation unleashed Roosevelt's reformist bent."

Panic of 1893

"By the time of Cleveland's inauguration, farm foreclosures and railroad bankruptcy signaled economic trouble. On May 3rd, 1893, the stock market crashed." (America, pg. 588) This crash led to a depression, which in effect left the country with an unemployment rate of over 20 percent. The democrats, who had gained power in the House of Representatives and governorships, "bore the brunt of the responsibility for the economic crisis." (America, pg. 592) From this crisis arose the hard focus on the silver question, and the bimetal standard became a critical issue as many were calling for more money to be put in circulation. The depression and dwindling money supply also led to the gold purchase by J.P. Morgan and other private bankers to replenish the country's gold supplies. Other events spurred by the Panic of 1893 include the Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army marching on Wasbington.

Tammany Hall

"These favors came via a system of boss control that, although present at every level of party politics, flourished most luxuriantly in the big cities. Urban political machines like Tammany Hall in New York depended on a loyal grassroots constituency, so each ward was divided into a precinct of a few blocks" (America, p. 556).

In the days of the ultra-powerful and corrupt political machines, perhaps the most powerful in all of the United States was Tammany Hall, located on 14th Street in Manhattan. Associated with the Democratic party, Tammany Hall was founded in 1786, but did not gain it's real political power until after Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828.

Tammany hall was known for its influence in the vast immigrant community in New York City. Among other nationalities, Tammany Hall helped many Irish Americans rise to power in politics. The "spoils system" of the times allowed Tammany Hall to control much of New York City through patronage, political support and other corrupt practices. Fernando Wood was the first Tammany Democrat mayor, elected in 1854. In 1860, the infamous William "Boss" Tweed became chairman of the New York county Democratic Party and the leader--known as "the Grand Sachem"--of Tammany.

Tammany Hall remained powerful in New York City all the way through the early twentieth-century, up until the 1930's. The Great Depression took a heavy toll on Tammany, and in 1932 friend of Tammany Hall, and Mayor of New York City, James Walker was forced from office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president and under his famous "New Deal," he removed most all of Tammany's power, including their mayor, helping Republican Fiorello LaGuardia become Mayor in 1934.

University of Albany: "Boss Tweed" and the Tammany Hall Machine
Elanor Roosevelt National Historic Site

Industrial Education

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION ~

The name most closely associated with Industrial Education is that of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Washington espoused the philosophy that black people needed not only to learn academics, but to become skill in industrial labor, such as farming, carpentry, brickmaking, etc. to assure them a job when they returned to their communities. When he founded the Tuskegee Institute, he had his students do all the manual labor of building the buildings for the school, from digging the foundation to making and laying the bricks to installing the electrical fixtures. His critics, among them W.E.B. DuBois, claimed that he was contributing to keeping African-Americans subordinate to whites in the social order by training them to be manual laborers. Booker T. Washington felt that he was teaching his students not only self-reliance but "how to lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, ...to love work for it's own sake. ....how to make the forces of nature - air, water, steam, electricity, horse-power - assist them in their labour." (Up from Slavery, Ch. X)

Jim Crow Laws

"The enforcing legislation, known as Jim Crow laws, soon applied to every type of public facility--restaurants, hotels, streetcars, even cemeteries. In the 1890s, the South became a region fully segregated by law for the first time" (America, pg. 586).

The "Jim Crow Laws" were a series of legislation, mostly passed in the south, at the local and state level. These laws made segregation of blacks and whites not only legal, but in certain instances--such as public schools and transportation--required. They began in the late nineteenth-century and continued all the way through until the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. The laws mandated that blacks and whites have "separate but equal" facilities. However, the reality was that the black facilities were almost never "equal" to the white facilities and Jim Crow laws were simply a legal way to promote the perceived "inferiority" of blacks.

The term "Jim Crow" is derived from a popular minstrel show in the early-mid nineteenth-century, which featured a white performer with charcoal or burnt cork applied to his face, singing and dancing to the song "Jump Jim Crow," and in essence, portraying a ridiculous caricature of a black person. The character became a staple of minstrel theater and was a derogatory stereotype of blacks, which was beginning to become common in the period.

The famous Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 validated the South's Jim Crow laws, ruling that segregation was not discriminatory, and therefore did not violate any civil rights in the fourteenth amendment, as long as the segregation provided equal treatment to blacks--hence the term "separate but equal." Racism and discrimination was becoming more prevalent and more intense during the late nineteenth-century, and thus the Jim Crow Laws reflected the zeitgeist.



The History of Jim Crow: Creating Jim Crow
What was Jim Crow?
PBS: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

Mechanization

Mechanization is the term used to describe the new form of manufacturing in the late 19th century. Due to this process, called "Mass Production" by Henry Ford, "workers increasingly lost the proud independence characteristic of the nineteenth-century craft work." (America, Pg. 523) This was because machines such as the typewriter or bicycle, were made using standardized parts created by machine tools. These machine tools were operated by machinists. What mechanization led to was the creation of "dedicated machines--machines set up to the same job over and over without the need for skilled operatives." (America, pg. 523) Instead of creating machines, machinists were made to create a single part many times over. "With each advance the quest for efficiency eroded their cherished autonomy, diminishing them and cutting them down to fit the industrial system." (America, pg. 524) Mechanization inspired Frederick W. Taylor, and was a basis for scientific management.

Pullman Strike, 1894

The Pullman Strike of 1894
In May 11, 1894, workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company, which manufactured the famous Pullman sleeping railroad cars, staged a walkout. The basis of this walkout was the fact that George Pullman was cutting wages but not the rent on the company-owned housing. The workers were members of the American Railway Union (ARU), headed by Eugene V. Debs (see post on Debs). Debs directed all ARU members not to handle any of the Pullman cars, an action that not only hurt the Pullman company, but had a secondary and even bigger effect of crippling the railroad industry. The strike continued until mid-July when both the boycott and the union were broken, but not without violence and vandalism. Government soldiers were brought in to get the trains running again. Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to prison for his part in the strike. Although the new ARU had strength and a lot of members, they were not successful in their strike due to the government's intervention on the side of the railroad companies.

"No one could doubt why the great Pullman boycott had failed: it had been crushed by the naked use of government power on behalf of the railroad companies." (America, p. 531)

Eugene V. Debs

Eugene V. Debs
1855-1926

"A spellbinding campaigner, Debs talked socialism in an American idiom, making Marxism understandable and persuasive to many ordinary citizens." (America, p. 532)

Eugene V. Debs is known for his role in making Marxist socialism appealing to the American people. His union involvement began in 1880 when he worked for a craft union for skilled workers in the railroad industry. He then moved on to work with the American Railway Union, an industrial union (industrial unions organized all workers, not just skilled workers). After a 6- month stay in prison for his involvement in the Pullman strike (see post entitled "Pullman Strike"), Debs became a radical and a Socialist.
In 1901, Debs helped start the Socialist Party of America and devoted the rest of his life to the propagation of socialism in the United States. He was the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party five times. As is stated in the quote above, Debs was a convincing speaker and knew how to take Marx's ideas of a revolution to abolish private ownership and the establishment of a classless society and make them easy for the people of the U.S. to understand and accept. His intense devotion to socialism and his tireless efforts to propagate it in this country strengthened the influence of socialism in the U.S.

Henry George - Progress and Poverty

Henry George saw first-hand the plight of the American worker at the end of the ninetieth-century. He grew up in Philadelphia in 1839, in a poor family, and like many working-class Americans at the time, he was forced to end his formal education early in order to survive--he was just fourteen years old. When George when out into the world of work, he began to see the ever-growing gap between the wealthy and the working class poor. He wondered why there was such a discrepancy in a society that was supposed to democratic and humanitarian.

In 1857, George moved west to California, and after having difficulty holding down work, he eventually became a newspaper reporter in San Francisco. He decided he would educate himself in economics, in an attempt to understand the situation he saw in America. George came up with the "single tax" concept, which would be published in his 1879 book, Progress and Poverty. The book sought to explain why poverty rates were growing as progress was being made in leaps and bounds.

George theorized that much of the disparity between the wealthy and the poor had to do with land speculation, which made the already wealthy land owners even more rich, while the poor working-class worker received the same meager wages and had to pay more and more in rent. George's "single tax" idea proposed that the unearned appreciation of land value be taxed and taken from the owner, and given back to the community, for the greater good of the people.

The book was a big success, with over one hundred editions and an estimated six million Americans having read it by1906. Progress and Poverty also spawned "single tax clubs" and movements all over the country. One important aspect of the book was that it broke down the economics very simply, so that the average American could understand. While George and his book never directly caused any change in the legislation, it served to help make Americans aware of the increasing problems that the growing Industrialism in the country was causing. Average citizens could see, simply, how the country's economy was working and why they were having such a hard time earning a wage that could support a family.