BOOK REVIEW: 1877: America's Year of Living Violently
By Michael A. Bellesiles, The New Press, 2010, Hardcover, 372 pages, $26.95
Sometimes the past is indeed prologue. The stupendous economic collapse known as the Panic of 1873 rocked the industrialized world of its day and shook the very foundations of the United States just as this nation was on the verge of celebrating the country's first 100 years. Nonetheless the 1876 Centennial Exhibition went forward in Philadelphia amidst the destitution and hard times that would last for decades. It was "an economic crisis second in duration and severity only to the Great Depression of the 1930s."
An extraordinary historical period of vertiginous tumult, America was seething with mayhem, xenophobia, violent racism and bloodletting. The defeat of various indigenous tribal peoples that were led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph was at hand. The controversial 1876 election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president -- where he lost the popular vote but won the electoral college by one vote -- nearly sparked a resumption of the horrific Civil War that had ended only 11 years earlier. The era of Reconstruction came to an abrupt end and the Ku Klux Klan and their white supremacist allies reversed democratic efforts throughout the American South, initiating the era of Jim Crow. And it was also a time when the new seeds of social reform and inchoate labor justice were planted.
Historian Michael A. Bellesiles has produced "1877," a panoramic look at a slice of 19th century America, a time with alarming relevance to our own. Consider this: "A significant proportion of the population literally did not have money. Wages collapsed, falling at least 15 percent during the depression, though such statistics are notoriously unreliable. The increase in the number of homeless was unmistakable, and there were numerous reports that many young women found no alternative but prostitution. The pressure on charitable organizations and public assistance increased dramatically, though what most worried the elite was the spread of radical ideas among the poor." Growing numbers of penniless tatterdemalions wandering the highways and byways caused considerable fear that was frequently stoked by outrageous and usually apocryphal stories in the press. These indigent and allegedly lawless vagrants became widely known as "tramps." "In this context, the tramp was not a vague social evil; he was a tangible threat to society itself."
Only two years prior to the 19th century global economic meltdown, France's Paris Commune -- when a working class city council controlled the government of Paris for two months in 1871 -- sent a jolt of fear worldwide through the ranks of patricians and capitalists. It stirred anxiety among the middle classes as well. Soon in America, anyone who suggested even a modestly progressive political and economic agenda risked being tarred a communist.
"The fear of an army of the unemployed emerged in a specific political context. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the people of Paris declared their city a commune. Briefly, until the government of France turned on the commune with military aid from the victorious Prussians, it looked as though communism would enjoy its first great triumph. The Paris Commune lasted just two months but loomed as large in middle-class imaginations as the embodiment of all that is violent and disruptive as the French Revolution once had. The Paris Commune was the most covered foreign story in the American press during the 1870s, becoming a byword for the dangers of the left and feeding a hysteria among the upper and middle classes."
Mass unemployment and the economic dislocation that it precipitated sent many desperate men on the road, thus the great "tramp scare," which has an unsettling echo in our own day. A Boston newspaper, the Advertiser, asserted: "Society owes no man a living, not a crumb, nor a shred." Providing basic assistance in the form of food or any other minimal humane intervention amounted to "downright communism." Sound familiar? "Some charities responded to this new sentiment by refusing services to unknown transient poor. One New York charity took advantage of the stated objection that handouts would be spent on alcohol by selling tickets that could be exchanged only for food and lodging."
While publicly supported intervention to alleviate the plight of the poor was frowned upon, author Bellesiles illustrates in graphic detail how the wealthy owners of capital and middle class businessmen had no qualms about employing local police, state militias and the U.S. military to protect and defend their own interests. "For the first time, a 'red scare' swept through the country as political leaders and journalists perceived a nationwide threat to capitalism, religion, and social order when workers pushed back against unfair distribution of the depression's burden, most of which seemed to fall on their shoulders. The middle class imagined the poor seizing New York and Philadelphia as they had Paris in 1871." Labor agitation by Irish miners like the Molly Maguires or the widespread and disruptive railroad strike -- the first countrywide strike in American history -- shocked the status quo. "The newspapers gave the impression that the country was in the grip of a war between order and anarchy in 1877, with the poor on the side of chaos."
Packed with a wealth of fascinating information, his book is a gripping work of American history. Bellesiles has written a lively survey of a most turbulent time.