Comedian Mike Donovan

                  The USA in the Time of Benjamin Harrison
                                                  1889-1893

                                        By Mike Donovan



   Most New States - “Big Ben” - Chile today, hot Samoan tamale – VP Levi Morton of NY – “The Human Iceberg” - Grandson of President William Henry Harrison – Five feet six inches tall - True minority president - Harrison won the Electoral College 233-168 but lost the popular vote - Cleveland the Democrat was ‘Sackvilled’ in 88, only to return in 92 - Young Tippecanoe – Married his wife’s niece – His great grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence

                 “I am nobody’s grandson.”
                                                          WHH

   People thought of Harrison as cold and snobby, but I’m sure if you really got to know him he was a really good guy. The Republicans tried to sell William H. as a chip off the old block of his grandfather, President William Henry Harrison (1841.) But the Democrats mocked the Harrison comparison and drew cartoons of William Henry Harrison’s hat being so big for Ben Harrison that it completely covers him.
   William Henry bashing is a traditional sport for pro-Democratic historians. One calls William H “a meek and unobtrusive nonentity.” Most historians see Benjamin Harrison as a man who was dominated by the behind the scenes leaders of the Republican Party.
   Yet no one ever accused this Republican of corruption, either in office or in his personal life, proving that not every Republican is corrupt. You can cite the list of 20,000 corrupt Republicans from Babcock to Abrimoff, and I can return with, “oh yeah, but what about Ben Harrison?” All of his contemporaries respected him as a great orator with a sharp intellect, and unknown historians call him a weak mediocrity. You can collect pages of insulting descriptions of Harrison by historians who if they went back in time and met him would feel humbled and foolish.

Harrison’s cabinet

   Sec. of State ----Jim Blaine from Maine-----1889-1892
                              John W. Foster---------------1892-1893

   Secretary of War---Redfield Ira Proctor---------1889-1891
                                  Stephen B. Elkins---------1889-1893

   Secretary of Treasury—William Windom—1889-1891
                                          Charles Foster-------1891-1893

   Att. General-------------William H. H. Miller-1889-1893

CABNOTES/ Treasury Secretary Windom of Minnesota died while making a speech in New York City.
   John W. Foster of Indiana wrote a fine Diplomatic History of the United States in 1900 that I have used often as a source. JWF was ambassador to Spain, Mexico and Russia before replacing Blaine at State. Foster nobly stopped the story short in his book just before he came onto the stage at the Secretary of State job. In this classy era, he would not turn the last chapter into a self-serving polemic, not even by accident. Good taste wouldn't even allow him the chance. The history was published in 1900 so he had the opportunity to include his own service. Who would do that today? Today they only write about their own time in power. Imagine Rahm Emmanuel writing a two-volume scholarly book, “Presidential Chiefs of Staffs and Their Work, 1933 to 2008.”

   Popular vote 1888
                                   Harrison R) 5,477,000 48%
                                  Cleveland D) 5,537,000 48%
                                        Fisk PR) 249,000
                                    Streeter UL) 146,000

    Harrison was a genuine “minority president.” History plays flexibly with this term. If Cleveland had won in 88 he too would have been a called, like Lincoln, a “minority president.”
   If you win the most votes you win. Whether this technically constitutes a majority is not the real bottom line in a democracy.
History books tend to think it’s important to emphasize the “minority” business whenever a president wins with less than 50% of the vote, as if that makes the presidency tainted somehow. I don’t think it does. Clinton only won 43% of the popular vote, but he won the most votes, period, so he was the legitimate elected president. Minority president is a negative term for sour-grapers who lose elections.
   Harrison, however, was a true minority president, winning with less of the popular votes and more of the electoral.

     The most important event in the Harrison Administration was probably the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was the first move by the US Government to put a legal curb on the abuses of big business. The law proved difficult to enforce at first. In fact there were very few successful prosecutions of big business misdeeds under Harrison, nor under Cleveland who succeeded him. The anti-trust law was born but it had not yet grown teeth. It did however establish key legal precedents and principles upon which future lawyers could build on, improve, and invoke. Unfortunately for Ben Harrison’s place in history, the results came under the watch of future presidents. But the foundation for legal action was laid with Sherman’s legal march under ‘Big Ben’ Harrison.



BIO
   On a farm in North Bend Ohio Elizabeth Ramsey Irwin Harrison delivered a baby boy named Ben on August 20, 1833, a Jackson baby. John Scott and Elizabeth were the parents. John Scott Harrison was a unique figure in American history. The only man who was both the son of a president and the father of a president. Prez 23 was born in the farmhouse of Prez 9. John Scott lived on the farm of the tenth President who died in office on 1941 after only two months.
     The family farm was too far from the nearest elementary school so his determined father built a log schoolhouse on the farm and hired a private tutor.
    Ben Harrison attended Miami University in Ohio (near Cincinnati) where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, fourth highest in a class of 16 males.
   Although he was born and raised in Ohio, Harrison spent his adult life as an Indiana man. He began a law practice in Indianapolis in ’54.
    On October 20, 1857 Benjamin married Caroline Lavina Scott, the daughter of the dean of a women's college. In 1859 he was elected to the Indiana Supreme Court as a reporter. It was the only time he ever won a popular vote in his political career.
   During the War of the Rebellion he raised and then commanded a regiment of 1,000 men, the 70th Indiana. He was with Sherman’s Army for much of the Atlanta campaign and won praise for his valor at the battles of Resaca and Peachtree Creek. The man now called a mediocrity by pipe-puffing four-eyed tweed-jacketed historians led several infantry charges into the heat of battle.
   After returning home to Indiana in November 1864 to help campaign for Lincoln (and for himself as a court reporter) he was back to the war, where he commanded forces heavily engaged in the battle of Nashville against the Reb General Hood. In March of 1865 Harrison won promotion to the rank of brigadier general.
    In 1876 Benny lost a bid for the governorship of the Hoosier state to Jimmy ‘blue jeans’ Williams by 5,000 votes.
    Harrison led the Indiana delegation to the RNC in 1880 and supported Jimmy Blaine for 30 ballots. Harrison switched over to Garfield at a crucial moment and helped to decide the nomination for him. President-elect Garfield offered a spoils system cabinet post to Harrison in gratitude but Benjamin declined. The Indiana state legislature had voted him U.S. Senator. Harrison served one full term from 1881 until 1887, supporting civil service reform and always voting in favor of a stronger U.S. Navy.
   Harrison’s wife died a few days before he was elected President. He remarried after he had left the White House. His second wife was named Mary Scott Lord Dimmick before she became Mrs. Harrison. Mary was the niece of his first wife, Caroline.


EVENTS
ELECTION OF 1888
OKLAHOMA LAND RUSH
TROUBLE WITH CHILE
BIMETALLISM VS MONOMETALLISM
MCKINLEY TARIFF OF 1890
SHERMAN SILVER AND ANTI-TRUST ACTS
CITY SLUMS EXPOSED BY RIIS 1890
CONGRESSIONAL VOTING RIGHTS ACT DEFEATED
POPULISTS GAIN IN MID TERM ELECTIONS
REED RULES
COTTON PICKERS STRIKE 1891
HOMESTEAD STRIKE 1892
WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE
ALOHA ALOHA
SAMOAN CRISIS
DEATH OF HAYES AND BLAINE 1893

ELECTION OF 1888
   It was not a given that Cleveland would be chosen to stand for re-election by his Democratic Party. Today it is a lock that the incumbent will be re-nominated by their party. But in 1888 it was not. The Eastern hi-tariff business people would have been happy if the Dems had nominated someone else to succeed Cleveland. But the Democrats had no talented superstars for an alternative. So it would have to be Cleveland for re-election in spite of his tariff stance.
   The Republican Party’s first choice was Jim Blaine, but he let it be known that he would decline if nominated. To emphasize the point he went off on a trip to Europe. At the RNC there was deadlock after eight ballots. Then Blaine sent a telegram from Scotland that read, “Pick Harrison.”
   Blaine’s influence was all that was needed. The GOP quickly chose the incorruptible Civil War officer and Indiana politician, Benjamin Harrison. Harrison had no enemies but he also had very little charisma. Worse, he wasn’t even in favor of sky-high tariffs. Harrison was a moderate on both of the exiting issues of the time; gold versus silver currency, and the tariff rates.
   The Republican strategy was to have their man stay put in Indianapolis and just let the reporters, money men and office seekers come visit him n his front porch. This was a Republican gamble that Cleveland had become so unpopular that Harrison could win because he was not Cleveland. The strategy almost failed when you consider that Harrison lost the popular vote. Cleveland evidently wasn’t so unpopular after all, and to punctuate the point Grover would become the comeback sheriff in 1892, beating Harrison in the rematch.
   Big business bucks backed both boys, but the Republicans had a slight edge in this game. Department store millionaire Wannamaker donated enormous sums to the Rep coffers and was later rewarded for his ‘loyalty’ with the cabinet post of Postmaster General.
    The big issue in the 88 campaign, just as it had been in 1884, was the tariffs. That sounds boring to most people today but the country was very involved in this endless argument that had been going on since about 1820 over high versus low. Cleveland was a low tariff man, which meant he favored rates as low as 20%. That low figure (for the time) constituted a “revenue tariff.” A Revenue tariff was designed to make money for the government but was supposed to allow a comfortable flow of imports to produce it. The Republicans were for a protectionist tariff, a high tariff to protect American workers, around 40% or even slightly more. This was designed to curb the flow of imports by making them unprofitable for foreign deliverers.
   The Republicans painted Cleveland as a free trader who would virtually do away with all protective tariffs. The R’s told Irish voters that a Cleveland free trade policy would bolster the economy of England, not the USA. They knew what buttons to push.
   The veteran vote hurt Cleveland. It was bad enough that he had hired a substitute during the Civil War and that Harrison was a battle tested officer. On top of that, Cleveland had vetoed their pension grabs. The vets probably cost Grover the election.

       Harrison 88 – Not the Most Popular But the Most President

   The Empire State was the margin of error. Harrison carried Cleveland’s home state of New York by only 6,000 votes. Tammany Hall refused to support Grover with any enthusiasm. Both as governor and as President, Grover had never groveled before Tammany and it came back to haunt him in 88. Grover Cleveland lost because he couldn’t carry his home state. Even traditionally liberal-Democratic Steuben County voted three to one for Harrison.
   As for the distant also-rans;
Just say no to alcohol. Clinton B. “Pudge” Fisk, a Bible-thumping ex-Civil War General (Fisk University in Tennessee is named after him) ran on the Prohibition ticket.
   Anson J. Streeter headed the Union Labor ticket with Arkansas sawmill operator Charlie Cunningham as his VP. The Union Labor was a party of the left. It advocated popular election of senators and the end of usury. The UL Party wanted government ownership of all means of transportation, citing the post office as a legal precedent. It also wanted a graduated income tax so the rich would pay more and the poor less of a percentage of their income.
   Large-scale voter fraud went on in Indiana, where there was no voter registration. The Republicans were by far the worst offenders and many historians really pour it on about R corruption. They rail about how the Republicans bought the Election of 1888. Fine, but the South was overwhelmingly racist and mass voter fraud depriving the blacks the vote down there, and that was more than equal to Republican offenses elsewhere. The “Solid South” was solidly fraudulent as a matter of course in these decades. So the Republicans stuffed the ballot boxes in Indiana and helped swing that important state to Harrison. Big deal. The Democrats employed Nazi techniques to deprive the Republican Party of millions of black votes in the South. If every black were allowed to vote in the South in 1888 and both Parties spent the same amount of money in each state, then Harrison would have won more than half the Southern states, would have won the Electoral College in a landslide, and would have won the popular vote too.
    John Wannamaker had so much money to contribute to the Republican Party for 1888 that the boys ran out of things to spend it on. Near the end of the race Wanamaker took the surplus and wagered it on Harrison to win. It was a self-fulfilled gamble. He knew where the rest of his money was going so he liked the odds. “Wannamaka bet” took his winnings and paid back most of the other private citizens who had donated money to Harrison’s election campaign.

Because the NY Governor’s race, in a contradictory tally, went to the Democrat by 13,000 there were charges that the Democrats traded votes illegally to Harrison for Prez in exchange for votes to Hill, the Democrat for governor.
The 1884 contest was the first in which the entire nation voted for state offices and President on the same day. Previously there had been several “October states” which held state elections in the month before the Presidential vote. Ohio in 1884 was the last holdout of the October voters. Obviously the holding of important state elections just before the Presidential had political consequences for the national contest.

INAUGURAL
In his inaugural speech on a rainy day Harrison said that the country needed to move forward again and that he was glad to have beaten ‘that scoundrel Grover Cleveland’ in the election. Harrison then had an easy time selecting a cabinet. Party leaders before the November election had already chosen it for him.
James Blaine returned to the office of Secretary of State. Some historians say this as part of a corrupt deal where Blaine agreed to support Harrison in exchange for the job as Secretary of State. This rip is shaky for two reasons. If Blaine was power hungry he had every chance in the world to win the Presidency. He wouldn’t have had to settle for Secretary of State. Secondly, Blaine had already been Secretary of State. Simple common sense would suggest that the Blaine name would have been at the top of any Republican President-elect’s list, deal or no deal.
   Bill Windom of Minnesota became Secretary of the Treasury, which angered Stalwart Tom Platt of New York who was under the impression that it had been promised to him.
   Harrison named a vigorous fighter named Teddy Roosevelt to head the Civil Service Commission, giving that body some sharp claws. Young TR warned the country in Century magazine that opposition to Civil Service reform took both overt and subtle forms and that this resistance must be resisted, “We have not only to make every advance in the teeth of the fiercest opposition but we have to fight every hour to keep the ground we have gained.”
   The Congressional elections of 1888 returned a majority of Republicans to both houses. 1889 would be the first year since 1874 that a Chief Executive had a Congress of his own party to work with.
   Thomas ‘Republican’ Reed of Maine was chosen Speaker of the House, and Ben named William McKinley Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Reed and McKinley played important parts in the Harrison era, one on rules, the other on tariff.

OK SETTLER STAMPEDE OF ‘89
The Oklahoma Indians had by and large supported the Rebs during the Civil War and for this they had to be punished. Other Indians tribes were therefore forcibly settled on Oklahoma Indian lands. The Oklahoma area was considered useless for agriculture anyway, so no one was worried about it anyway, at least no white one. The western panhandle was so useless that even the Indians had never settled there.
In time however the value of the central Oklahoma lands became revised upward and so it was time to resume the punishment. Suddenly two million additional acres in the center of the state were designated for white settlement.

The eager pioneers lined up on the Oklahoma border on April 23, 1889. It was like the beginning of the Boston marathon. A train was loaded and ready to rumble, hundreds of people holding places on the roofs of the cars.
    A starter’s gun was fired at noon, and on cue thousands of horses and wagons went racing westward across OK territory yelling ‘yiii-haaa!’ No less than 50,000 crackers stampeded over the Indian lands on the first day alone. Soon instant Oklahoma cities made of tents sprang up with names like Guthrie, Norman, Lashua, and Kingfisher. Many would grow into permanent cities that are still bustling today.
   There was, however, one downer surprise waiting for the new stampeders. Thousands of white settlers had cheated. They had beat the rush by sneaking out ahead of schedule and staking out their claims illegally. They were already squatting on much of the best land available. These white sleaze-bags had arrived ‘sooner’ than the legal starting April 23, 1889. From this is derived the nickname the Oklahoma ‘Sooner.’ Every time an Oklahoma football defensive lineman is called for an off-sides penalty he is living up to his team nickname.
    4.23.89 marked a key milestone in the relentless slap-around of the American Indian.

STATE OF THE UNION 12 3 1889
    Harrison’s First Annual Message to Congress (called today the State of the Union speech) was delivered in writing from the White House on December 3, 1889. Things in general were pretty darned good.
   First he stressed that all information trickles up to the White House. There is nothing he could tell the people that was not already publicly known and debated by smart people long before it even reached his desk for consideration. So don’t look for any exiting news from any proclamations from 1600 Pennsylvania. That might be less true today than it was then.
   US relations with foreign states were in markedly good shape also. Especially pleasing was the recent conference in Washington with representatives of all the other nations of Central and South America. Better commerce with these neighbors was a major goal, but peace among them and between them and us was an even higher mission, and one which seemed to be making excellent strides (he didn’t know there would be big trouble with Chile later.) Harrison expressed concern that while all the states of the Western Hemisphere except one sent the highest diplomatic minister to represent them in Washington, the United States still had lesser level representatives assigned to Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia. He recommended fully accredited US ministers to these states, and full ministerial representation to Hawaii and Haiti as well.
   China had a new young Emperor and he hoped that relations could be improved between America and the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had banned Chinese immigration and called for the expulsion of those Chinese already here. Harrison had no problem with part one but thought that maybe part two was a bit much,

     “While our supreme interests demand the exclusion of a
       laboring element which experience has shown to be
       incompatible with our social life … this imperative
       need should be accompanied with a recognition of the
       claim of those strangers now lawfully among us to
       humane and just treatment.”

SILVER AND GOLD
The monometallists believed that since gold was the standard of Europe so it should be solid gold for the United States, at least if America wanted to maintain a stable banking and trade relationship with the old mother continent.
   The states in the west with all the silver mines promoted increased federal coinage of silver for obvious selfish reasons. What was a little more surprising was how the silver interests sold their case so well to the rest of the country. This they did by appealing to the debtor class. If more money was introduced into the economy, the dollar would devalue and the creditor class would be paid a less valuable dollar for every dollar owed. The debtors would thus get a discount on their debt if silver exploded on the scene. By the terms of the Bland-Allison Act of 1878 (an appropriate name, what can be more bland than the silver controversy?) the US Government was still buying the silver stuff at a predetermined rate. The gold buggers tolerated this just to keep the loud-mouthed silverites in line, but agitation for unlimited coinage of silver knew no limits. I know its all a bit confusing but let’s try to hang in there.
So the west wanted the unlimited government purchase of silver. The east, and with it the Republican old guard, wanted none of the silver. The east wanted maintenance of the gold standard only. Yet when the Sherman silver Act was passed in July of 1890, which increased government purchases of silver to 4.5 million ounces a month and authorized its incorporation into the currency backed by paper certificates, it was the Republican Party that voted for it more unanimously than the silverites.
   There were a few good reasons for this anomaly. First of all there was a national log-roll involved. The east needed western support on the tariff, while the west needed eastern support on silver. The mutual cross-over voting was made behind the scenes to exchange support for opposite goals, not a first time for that procedure. Another reason the Republicans voted for a silver bill they didn’t want was a fear that blocking silver now would only lead to more of it, like a stick stopping a flow of water in a gutter but only inviting an even bigger overflow soon enough. If they defeated the silver bill for increased purchase of the gray loot, they might soon be face a bill for the unlimited federal purchase of silver, an unlimited eastern nightmare. Better to take your deal and hang on at a slight loss than risk a larger loss later. What’s more, if their Republican President Harrison vetoed an unlimited silver bill later it might severely disunite the Party and cost the Republicans in the next elections.
The gold supply had grown to a healthy 190 million dollars in value by 1890. But by the election on 1892 the gold reserve had shrunk to just over 100 million dollars. The public perceived the 100 million dollar reserve in gold as the minimum requirement for national financial security. It looked like a recipe for trouble.
   On April 21, 1893, just over one month after Harrison left office the gold supply dipped below the 100 million mark and this triggered a crisis in confidence. Even at three dollars in paper to one in hard reserve coin the public could not accept 99.9 million in gold reserves. The drop below the magic 100 number triggered the Panic of 1893 and Cleveland was its victim, not Harrison.
   The economic free fall of the next administration was easily predictable. In fact, Harrison may have been secretly happy to lose the election of 1892. He may have seen what was coming as the gold supply continued to dwindle. The business community was losing faith in the greenback, no longer entirely goldbacked, dollar, and thus the dollar. If you think this is boring to read about, just be grateful you haven’t read as many chapters on it as I have.

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM
There wasn’t a great deal of difference between Harrison and Cleveland (and their parties) in the matter of Civil Service reform.
Harrison continued to expand the list of classified jobs in the federal service. But his administration often placed these jobs on the classified list only after having first supplanting a Democrat worker with a Republican.
Benjamin Harrison obeyed and enforced both the letter and spirit of the civil service reform movement only in areas where the new laws applied. In other areas he used the old spoils system as much as possible.
   Harrison had one unique addition to the spoils system. He gave out many fine federal jobs to newspapermen in order to insure support from the press. To the writers go the spoils! Grover Cleveland’s earlier record had been the reverse; Grover had not shown as much vigor as Harrison in expanding and enforcing reform where it applied, but on the other hand had not been so party loyal with appointments outside of reform controlled areas.
   Both Harrison and Cleveland were clever opportunists. They both made the majority of their appointments only after they had lost their try at re-election and were lame ducks.

REED RULES
In December of 1889 Congress convened and chose Thomas Reed of Maine as the new Speaker of the House. It was a delicate choice. Many Republicans opposed the choice because Maine was too insignificant a state to represent the whole country and because Reed was a feisty short-tempered man. Reed’s manner was a liability in some ways, but in other ways it might be what was needed at the time to get some things done against a tough obstructionist opposition.
   Reed and his Rep. Reps decided the country had had enough of Congressional filibustering to prevent a quorum. The new ruler of the House decided it was time for some housecleaning.
Most of us are familiar with the term filibustering as in speaking endlessly for hours if not days at a time in order to delay a bill into non-passage. It is a terrible thing to do, it’s still done today and I will never understand why it is still allowed. But back in the late 1800’s there was another form of filibustering, just as nasty and counterproductive and commonly used in the Capitol Building.
A quorum present being necessary for legislation to pass, those Congresspersons against a bill would simply sit with their arms folded when the vote was called. Even though they were present they would choose not to vote at all and as a result a quorum was declared short, and the bill could not be passed.
   TR and his Republican colleagues prepared a Constitutional challenge to the procedure. They proposed that this be declared illegal in the Congress. From now on anyone present at a vote would have to vote. The mute and invisible form of filibustering would no longer be allowed.
The chance to challenge the silent obstructionist minority came on January 29 1890 during a full session of Congress. A disputed election in West Virginia was under discussion. It had been awarded to the Republican candidate there. The Democrats moved that it be submitted to a vote for validation. They did this knowing full well that they would all sit there silently and not vote at all. Then a quorum could not be declared present, the Republican yea votes (they held a slight majority in the House) would not win the issue and the award of the disputed West Virginia office to a Republican would be invalidated. It would be just another ho-hum day at the office for the House with it’s famous mime filibuster.
    Reed was ready for battle and he was planning to resign that very evening if he didn’t win. He would make a great show of resigning to create a national spotlight on this bad thing going on in Congress. Reed was confident that he was in the right. The Constitution included a provision that compelled members of Congress to attend its sessions. What kind of anti-American hair-splitting was with to abide by the rule of attendance while not voting once there. Clearly it was the Constitution itself that was being obstructed, not the party in power or this or that specific matter up for consideration. That was Reed’s thinking.
As the vote was tallied for the WV disputed election, Reed began to read out loud for the record, “the names of the following members present and refusing to vote.” As he read the names the Democrats started screaming at him and banging their fists on their desks, while the Republicans clapped, whistled and cheered in support.
A Kentucky Democrat shrieked, “You have no right to count me here as present!.”
“The Chair is stating the fact that you are present,” responded Reed. “Are you denying that you are here?” This touché quieted the crowd and Reed then calmly and eloquently gave his Constitutional argument for what was going down.
   It was a grudge match and for three days neither side would give in. There were scenes of unforgettable disorderly conduct. Reed was called every name in the book including a “Cracker Czar” and a “Tyrant squid!” Repeatedly a vote was called for and the Democrats would not vote while the Republicans tried to count them present and declare a quorum. At one point the Dems tried to physically leave the room so they could not be counted as present in the most literal sense. Reed ordered the doors to the chamber locked so they could not leave. The quorum was being kidnapped in the name of the Constitution. More chaos and yelling. Democrats began to hide under their desks and behind corners walls as Reed called out their names as present. “No I am NOT here!” they’d shout from behind a curtain, like a small child hiding from an angry parent.
   The Republicans were just two or three votes short of a quorum even without the rebellious Democrats. The situation was finally solved when a few Republicans who were in the hospital decided they were more sick of the Democrats than they were from their illness and were wheeled into the House on their sick beds and they voted aye from their stretchers.
   Now that the test case had been won, the new rules themselves could be presented for a vote. On February 2, 1890 Congress passed the Reed rules. Everyone that was present had to vote on whether or not from now on everyone who was present had to vote. They voted yes 161 to 144
With 23 abstentions. Even those who voted in favor of the new rules openly admitted that they had often engaged in this petulant obstructionism. It probably helped for passage to know that both sides admitted that everybody did it; therefore no one had to completely play the bad guy when the old system was condemned and discontinued.
   The new rules gave the Speaker and the party in the majority a great deal of power, but arguably, that was supposed to be the whole idea behind winning national majorities in the first place. Previously, the minority had a whole array of obstructionist weapons to employ in Congress to negate the result of fair election results. The Speaker, for example, could not deny a vote to any motion he considered mean spirited minority sabotage designed to deny the fair democratic process to the House and the American people.
   There is an interesting epilogue to the Reed Rule row. The next Congressional election installed a Democratic majority and they celebrated their victory by immediately overturning all the work described above and reinstating the old system silent filibustering. But the very next Congress, still with a Democratic majority (though smaller) that Congress voted the Reed Rules back in. Historians give the Democrats credit for seeing the wisdom of the Reed rules and choosing to do the right thing, even if it was a Republican idea from a guy they hated. But if you look at it logically, the Dems changed their mind because they had the majority now and realized that overturning the Reed Rules had deprived them of power. They had tied one of their own hands behind their back just to get back at a past Congress and now it was time to use the Republican Reed reform to block the Republican minority so it couldn’t hurt the Democrats with the old school obstructions.
The Reed Rules changed American politics for the better and with some modifications are still in use today in the US Congress.

THE CITY SLUMS – HOW THE OTHER HALF HALF-LIVED
With today’s mass yet diversified culture, it is pretty much impossible for a book to have the kind of political and social impact that hard-bound print could attain in the 19th century. There were no movies, TV shows, computers or radios. But there was the natural inexplicable hunger for show biz, and back then it was the latest blockbuster book that satisfied it. 19 was the century when books were king.
One such influential book was published in 1890. It was called “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis. Other Half was an emotional and graphic depiction of the life of the masses of poor people living in the largest American cities. Jacob’s book focused on New York City conditions but obviously its implications reached to Chicago, Boston and New Orleans as well. As depicted in the book, things were very bad in the cities for the poor. The cities were dangerously overcrowded, unsafe and unsanitary. In one dwelling on Hester Street, for example, 17 people with rickets were living in one closet.
   The book didn’t exactly “expose” poverty in the cities so much as it spotlighted it.. Poverty in the slums was not a national secret. The average rural or rich American had a vague idea of how the other half lived. But Riis was such a fine writer and a caring crusader, that his intimate descriptions brought the point home to millions of hearts.
   Riis had no illusions that each of these poor people had ‘only themselves to blame’ for their problems, a popular snobbism of the time. He was no socialist nor even a populist. Riis did not offer fantastic utopian solutions. His job was simply to be great reporter and tell the world the story of the way it was.
   Other Half opened many eyes. No longer could the rich barons fool the middle class. Of course the rich always knew the raw deal they were giving the poor. But they didn’t have to do anything about it as long as the Congress, as representing the consent of the governed, was not cracking down. But when the middle class allied with the poor they jelled into an unstoppable voting block, even more powerful than baron bribery money. Jacob’s book was one of many forces helping to turn the Congress more serious about the regulation of the evils of big business.

PAN AMERICAN CONGRESS PANNED 1889-1890
   In November of 1889 delegates from most of the nations south of the Rio Grande met in Washington D.C. for the Pan American Congress. Former Secretary of State Blaine was the President of this assemblage. Blaine had been active in trying to create such a conference when he was in power but it was only now after he had left office that he oversaw the realization of his formerly frustrated goal.
   The PA Congress lasted until April of 1890 and achieved much in spirit but little in concrete. The goal of free trade between all American states was proposed with unanimous consent. But the U.S. Congress was not about to go along with this idealist command. American big business (and the U. S. Congress in its pocket) was not about to go along with this, and with the high tariffs in place on Europe, such a proposal would create an unneeded row with our European trading partners.
   It was agreed unanimously that in the future, all disputes between
Southern American nations would be settled by arbitration amongst all these states. The agreement was ridiculed in no time when it proved ineffective in the Chilean crisis that followed it, but like the Sherman anti-trust act, the principle admittedly ran faster than the application in practice, but the latter could catch up in time. The Pan Am Congress was a victory for progress with or without a trophy of success to immediately prove it.
   One achievement of the Congress was subtle yet spectacular in its actual effects. The new spirit of respect and co-operation it symbolized between “the Big Brother” of the North and the nations to the south put a wet blanket on the jingo mentality of Manifest Destiny.
   The dream of Pax Americana of the mid 1800’s was over. We weren’t going to conquer the hemisphere after all, and it was time to treat with these states diplomatically. The American people became trained in thinking of these nations as real people with real Constitutions, futures and aspirations. Jefferson’s dream of an empire for liberty and Yancey’s dream of an empire for slavery became at long last, just that, a dream.

SHERMAN WE DON’T TRUST THE TRUSTS ACT 1890
   At long last it was recognized that immorality, arrogance, and big business abuses had reached a point where something had to be done about it. The US Government, even under the famously pro-business Republican leadership had had enough.
Senator Jack Sherman of Ohio sponsored a bill to make it a misdemeanor for businesses to conspire in order to restrain free trade.
   The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed by both Houses but proved difficult if not impossible to enforce. In practice it did virtually nothing but in principle it kicked up a lot of dust. The manner in which the Act was successfully defied by big business provided a blueprint for countermeasures in the next phase of progressive reform. Real gains in curbing business fascism would have to wait a few years, but the very idea that the Federal government had decided to act against business abuses through legislative action was more than a small step in the right direction, even if the results showed nothing in concrete for now. Genuine ‘trust-busting’ was still in the future.


FOREIGN POLICY- THREAT OF WAR WITH CHILE
Few Americans today are aware that the United States once almost went to war with Chile. But that actually almost happened in 1891.
There was a revolution in Chile. The Chilean rebs were called the Congressionalists. The British supported the Congressionalists.
Our own minister in Chile, Pat Egan did not agree with the British. Egan was more Irish than my uncle Sean so he had a prejudice in favor of whomever the English were against. He was more sympathetic to the established Chilean government than an American minister should have been. Instead of maintaining proper neutrality, Patrick sided openly with the established government of President Balmaceda against the Congressionalist insurgents. The Congressionalists knew this and resented Egan and the horse he rode in on. So there were some simmering bad feelings towards America in the middle of this insurgency.
The Congressionalist rebs sent a ship to San Diego, California harbor to load up with guns and bombs for its revolution. The United States was not sure if this ship the Itata was violating any neutrality laws so the USA decided to hold the ship in San Diego until the issue was settled. A US Marshall was placed on board Itata.
The Itata rebels took the Marshall hostage and on May 6 1881 bolted San Diego! Itata fitted out with war materials in Catalina and then steamed south towards Chile. The US Navy started up its engines and American warships began chasing Itata.
   Itata finally docked in Chile with US warships hot on its keel. Itata’s crew was persuaded by threat of armed force to give up the ship peacefully to the United States for judicial decision. The Southern California District Court decided that the seizure of the ship by the US Navy was illegal. The decision was relayed to Chile by telegraph. No Chilean was prosecuted for kidnapping the Marshall from San Diego to Chile, and Itata was left free to do its rebellious work in Chile.
The revolution against Balmaceda went well. The Congressionalists took the capital city of Santiago. The United States recognized the new government and Balmaceda took his own life. Egan was humiliated but at least things were calming down, or so it seemed.
But then a bunch of drunken sailors from the USS Baltimore got into a brawl while on leave in Valparaiso. Someone supposedly had spat in one of the sailor’s faces and a Pier Six brawl broke out. The Americans were outnumbered. More than a hundred gringos were beaten up by unruly Chilean mobs, supported by local police. It took a heroic battle for the men to make it back to the ship. One US sailor was killed in the melee.
   President Harrison demanded reparations for the incident and an apology. But his demands received a Chile reception. The Chilean minister in Washington made a public declaration that the US was lying about what happened during the Baltimore brawl. It was anything but an apology. Harrison was more steamed than the stacks of the Baltimore. Benjamin prepared a War message to Congress, dictated the severance of diplomatic relations with Chile, and drafted an ultimatum on January 21, 1882 that was tantamount to an impending war.
   What Harrison and the State Department did not seem to grasp was that most of the hostility from Chile was the work of a foreign minister that had been replaced on January 1, 1882. The new foreign minister was a much kinder and gentler Chilean,, was more than willing to apologize for the injuries, and was even willing to grant reparations for the wrong. But miscommunication prevailed and President Harrison sent a formal War Message to Congress on January 25 at the very hour that messages of reconciliation and apology were being read from Chile back at the White House.
The United States Congress took Harrison’s cue to heart and proceeded to make a blustery threat of going to war to against smaller country if it did not apologize, and did it while that country was in fact apologizing.
   Cooler head’s prevailed. Since the offense had taken place under the earlier government, it was easy enough for Chile to apologize for crimes of the predecessors. $75,000 was paid to the injured sailors and their families. There would be no war with Chile and our two states would get along well for at least another 90 years.
But the USA was made to look like an international bully at a time when it was trying to play down that image in South America.
Chile was not as powerful as the USA, but wasn’t a helpless little country either. Chile had a powerful navy. One significant outcome of the trouble with Chile in 91 was the new appreciation of the second-class status of our navy. Chile had exactly one full sized battleship. This would not impress the Royal Navy but it was one more than the United States possessed. One Chilean battleship, theoretically could have wiped out the entire US Navy if it could fight Sam’s ships one at a time, and this one strategic ship could even take on a flotilla. Chilean naval superiority might seem a facetious concept today but in this crisis of 1891 it hampered Harrison’s freedom of action. With that one battleship in its way, the US could not even consider a punitive expedition to Chile unless it wanted to risk a counterattack against the cities on the West Coast of California. The one battleship explains why Chile had the steel to maintain such a defiant attitude against the big bad United States in the first place.
   Congress soon after the affair authorized the construction of three full sized battleships. They had to be given the euphemistic title “coast defense battleships” to appease the isolationist block. The three war-wagons hit the waves in 1893, the USA’s first real battleships.

THE ECONOMY/MCKINLEY TARIFF
The spirit of laissez faire ruled the US economy in the Harrison years. Leave big business alone. Let them make their own rules and live in their own little world, and besides, the 14th Amendment protects them as ‘persons’ from obtrusive federal regulation. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The Panic of 1893 and the labor unrest were still in the future.
   Andrew Carnegie the multi millionaire steel king wrote an influential article in the North American Review in 1889 in which he introduced the theory of trickle down economics (before that term was used of course). Andy felt that if the millionaires built libraries, asylums, prisons, orphanages, and schools for the poor, it would help them much more than sharing wealth with them off the top. He believed that the capitalists did far more for the poor in creating jobs and capitol, than they could by having their millions confiscated by socialism.
   It was certainly the era of the filthy rich. Charles Lingley of Dartmouth estimates that in the year Harrison left office, 1893, .03% of the population owned 20% of the wealth.
   Harrison was an anomaly in that he was a staunch Republican but was willing to compromise on the tariff. Traditionally for some time the Republicans had been totally and enthusiastically high tariff. But Benny Harrison had never claimed (like Blaine) to be a complete high tariff man, yet he was nominated anyway. Some history books claim that Harrison actually reduced the tariff but not really. He tried a little bit but the Republican Congress dominated Harrison on the tariff anyway and reductions began small and then retreated to real increases with the McKinley Tariff if 1890.
    Ohio’s William McKinley was a powerful Republican figure who sincerely believed in the high tariff, not merely as an expedient for the times but as a political principle. While campaigning for Congress he denounced the virtues of completely free trade thusly,

                  “ They say ‘everything would be so cheap’
                   if we only had free trade. Well everything
                   would be cheap and everybody would be
                   cheap. It is not a word of hope; it is not a
                   word of comfort; it is not a word of cheer;
                   it is not a word of inspiration! It is a badge
                   of poverty: it is the signal of distress.   ”


Harrison did nothing to stop the very high rates of the McKinley tariff, passed in 1890. Import tax on foreigners increased by an average of four per cent over the already outrageous rates. The bill from Bill however did put the very important sugar imports on the free list. Home sugar growers were compensated with a federal bounty of two cents a pound for US grown sweets.
   The western farmers were traditionally opposed to high tariffs. They felt that it was the evil work of the rich merchants and bankers of the east coast, that high tariffs were wrong per se. But when the McKinley tariff enumerated many important agricultural products for protection for the first time, a great many western farmers came to realize that the Republican Party wasn’t so bad after all.
   Harrison solved the surplus problem inherited from the Dems. He spent it all on increases in Civil War pensions and internal improvements, while cutting off the number one source of revenue, the tariff on sugar. The Congress spent a lot and reached a new and spectacular fiscal figure of one billion. The people called it the “Billion Dollar Congress,” for surpassing that figure.

PENSION GRAB
   The Civil War vets were a constant lobby for themselves in Washington. They marched in the form of what was known as the Grand Army of the Republic. By Harrison’s time the GAR had succeeded in expanding the bloody shirt dole to an absurd degree. People who caught a severe flu 20 years after retiring from the Army in perfect health could claim a Civil War disability payout, and usually get it.

KAMIKAZE PREVENTS WAR WITH GERMANY OVER SAMOA
   A conference was scheduled to take place in Berlin in the spring of 1899 to help settle the tensions in Samoa between Germany and the USA, with the UK not helping us one bit.
   The United States already had a preponderant influence over the eastern Samoan Island of Tutuila with its fine harbor of Pago Pago. But Germany was threatening to annex the western islands outright.
   Germany had gained a decided amount of commercial and political dominance over Samoa. The UK was willing to go along with this in exchange for a blind German eye to English colonialism in the Near East, but the United States was against German control over Samoa. American protests were creating a stalemate because the only alternative the other two nations were even willing to consider was a triple colonial alliance over Samoa. President Harrison was no more amenable to this than Cleveland had been. The United States sent warships to hang out in Apia harbor as a threat top the German warships already there. The British had a couple of modern naval ships there too. It was a stand off between the American and German warships with the British as an interested third presence trying to remain neutral.

   The US naval ships by the way were mostly made of wood. Only one ship in the three fleets was of modern steel construction, that one of British flag.
   Tension were near the breaking point when the Divine Wind settled things. On the night of March 15-16 1889 a breathtaking typhoon struck Apia harbor. All the warships except the one British steeler Calliope were destroyed or run aground. More than 53 US sailors died in the storm and more than 90 Germans perished. It was weather making history and politics. With no naval pawns to do their bidding, the three antagonists were forced to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Samoan stand-off. Harrison and the Congress were suddenly willing to accept the triple overseer role of the three big powers in Samoa.
   The USA saw the Samoan Kamikaze as a divine message to modernize its fighting Navy. New appropriations were immediately authorized for the construction of some steel battleships. Combined with the affair in Chile, it was high time that the era of wooden warships closed up shop at Annapolis.

The Samoan issue was finally settled by negotiation, but Germany was greatly offended by the US attitude towards her. The crisis in Samoa helped to draw the battle lines for the USA later on in WWII.
   The USA did obtain one of the Samoan Islands in the final treaty, while England agreed to drop out of the Samoan sweepstakes in exchanges for concessions in other spheres of interest.
   Today the eastern half of the Samoan Islands is still part of the United States of America.
   Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame has wrote a fine history of the Samoan Island controversy of the later 19th Century.

AROND THE WORLD IN 72 DAYS - 1-25-90
    Jules Verne wrote a famous novel in 1873 titled Around the World in 80 Days. A rich snob jerk named Phinneas Fogg makes a 20,000 pound wager with the rest of his Rich Men’s Club that he can travel around the world in 80 days. The plot line says what we are interested inhere about the state of travel in 1873. The very idea that anyone could circle the globe in a mere 80 days was scoffed at as preposterous and many men took him up on the wager. Of course, he made it back with about 11 seconds to spare. I say “jerk” because his valet went with him at risk of life and limb, and when Fogg learned that Passepartout had left the gaslight on in the valet bedroom, he told him the cost will come out of his salary. So Passepartout is going to circle the globe in dangerous situations and come home 900 pounds in the red because Fogg is a fastidious jerk. That part always made me angry. I used to root for Fogg to die in a fiery train crash in India and for Passepartout to inherit the Fogg fortune. It’s possible this was just Verne’s idea of comic relief but I took it at face value. They did a lot of travel by balloon. Maybe Passepartout could have told Fogg that there was a herd of rare animals below, but Phinneas has to lean way way over to see it. One kick and Fogg falls out of the story.
    The novel was a sensation and people became curious as to whether anyone really could go all around the world in 80 days. In 1879 a reporter for the New York World proposed to her editor that she try it under a fake name. She could wire back reports for the paper and when its all doen they could put all the articles into a book. Both editor and reporter agreed that it was important that she indeed get back before 80 days or else the book deal might fall through.
    Neelie Bly (real name Nellay Blay) left New York on a steamer on November 14 1879 and made it back to Manhattan on January 25 1890. The nation enjoyed every leg of her journey vicariously. The NY World published a book, Around the World in 72 Days, but Nellie didn’t see any of the money. She had left the gaslight on in her typing room.
    Anotherwoman was doing the same thing at the same time for a different paper, and she made it back to NYC in 63 days, breaking the Nellie record. But she had started out two months after Bly so no one cared. The public was already exhausted celebrating the Nellie Bly feat and to have it topped no longer mattered. And the NY World had a bigger publicity machine. Publicity is a hot air balloon and if you are left holding the bag when the helium is gone, then God help you because publicity won’t, no matter what you do. Hype can travel the globe 80 times in a day, while genuine greatness without the Barnum and Bailey posters takes a week to crawl to the corner store.
   This reminds me of the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. Everyone thinks to this day that Charles Lindbergh was the first person to fly the Atlantic. A few people say, no, he was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Both are wrong.
   Lindy was merely the first person to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic to Europe. The Atlantic ocean was first crossed in 1919 by two men in a naval reconnaissance plane. They island-hopped the last links of the trip. Then a solo pilot island-hopped it a couple of years later. Then two men flew non-stop to France. Lindy was just at the head of a fantastic publicity machine when he did it. He stole the place in history that rightfully belonged to Alcock and Brown in 1919, and the others later. The two who flew non-stop to France are even less famous than I am, and that isn’t right.
     When a second rate event is hyped up in a first-rate way, the second-rate event becomes the first-rate event. If a first-rate achievement is not hyped up much at all, it devolves into a sixth-rate event. The woman who topped Nellie Bly by ten full days is ignored. Her name was.... I forget.

WOUNDED KNEE 12 1890
The last major battle between the whites and the Indians was not really a battle but a massacre. The Teton Sioux of the northwestern plains began to wander off the reservation a little too often and the US Government decided to act.
   A rebellious cult had grown up around the camp of the legendary Sitting Bull. There was a new dance of the ghosts that was supposed to help Indians kill whites and the disco headquarters was at the tepee of Sitting Bull.
   The Feds arrived to arrest the leaders. Little Bear, the guard of Sitting Bull saw his duty and he done it. He shot one of the arresting officers, who then shot and killed Sitting Bull! A free for all broke out. The horse of Sitting Bull began to go into strange movements, all part of a mystical dance that surely was the work of the Indian gods. In reality, the horse had been trained in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Sitting Bull and horse had toured as an attraction in the famous show business enterprise. Gunshots were the cue the horse recognized.
The whites went back to regroup and showed up in force at Wounded Knee, South Dakota to arrest the stray sheep. One of the Indians revealed a concealed weapon and shot one of the Army men. This time the fight was one sided. More than 300 Indians were killed by the troops in the cold and the snow. Many of the victims were women, children, and old men. It was an unthinkable atrocity and the name of Wounded Knee is a legendary mark of shame in White-Indian relations; it was the My Lai of its time.

FEDERAL ELECTION REJECTION BILL 1890
The Democrats to this day still moan about the rip-off of 1876 when Tilden ‘wuz robbed.’ But any Republican advocate can point to the pro-Democrat voter fraud in the South for which the word ‘widespread’ would be comical minimization. In these times Blacks were deprived of the vote throughout the South by all sorts of tricks and devices, some with a thin legal veneer, others reeking of simple violent fascist intimidation. The few times a Black person managed to legally get to the polls, the vote would be handily destroyed in the vote count process. There were more opportunities to cancel out a Black vote than could be counted in a short book. In some southern Congressional districts with a large number of Blacks, the vote count was so small as to invite deserved notice and criticism from Northern liberal newspapers. The Philadelphia Press wrote that one Congressional district in sparsely populated Oregon counted more legal votes than ten combined districts in Georgia.
Southern racism, most of it Democrat backed, was depriving the Republicans illegally of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives and at least 30 votes in the Electoral College by 1886.
In 1890 a few progressive and humane Congressmen decided to try and put a stop to the hate crime of voting deprivation in the South. A Federal Election Bill was put to the House, which would at long last dictate actual enforcement of the so-far-only-paper 15th Amendment. Congressman William McKinley, one of the Bill’s sponsors warned the Southern ballot-bullies that their time was coming to an end. He was wrong. It would last another 75 years.
   In a close fight the Bill barely passed the House of Representatives. Hoo-ray! The Senate was another story. The Democrat Senators served notice to the Black-loving Republicans on the Bill. If the Federal Election Bill were insisted upon, the Democratic Senators would discus the tariff for days on end until the Congress ended. In other words they would filibust the balloon of Black voting hopes and kill the hotly desired Republican tariff goals.
   The bill never made it to the Senate floor. Some Senators wanted voting rights for the Blacks but also believed that starting a controversy in the South would create such a backlash that it would do more harm than good to Black people there. They had more faith in a gradual solution to the problem, allowing a step back now in order to take two steps foreword later. Yes, I know, it’s a lame argument. But some of them sincerely believed it at the time.

1890 ELECTIONS
The Congressional elections of 1890 set the Republican Party back on it’s heels. 1980 was one of the most decisive reversals of political power from a mid-term election in American history. They took control of the House of Representatives and made gains in the Senate. When the dust had cleared and the last votes were counted, the House of Representatives for the coming spring showed 235 for the Democrats and only 88 for the Republicans. In the Senate the Republican majority was reduced to only eight, and if all Senators were chosen by popular vote instead of state legislatures, it is questionable whether they would have retained their lead their as well.
   John Q. Public was in a bad mood and when that happens the party in power becomes like the manager of a sports team. Someone has to take the blame. Much of the groundswell of negativity was over the recently passed McKinley tariff. It was clearly arrogant. William McKinley was one of the men who was voted out of office in 1890 after just writing, sponsoring and helping to pass one of the most powerful pieces of legislation of the 19th century.
   But the Party that led the torchlight parade of irascible voters in the earthquake election of 1890 was the Populist Party. Although it existed under many different names in 90, it was all part of the same counter-conservative group. The “Alliance-Populist Party” as it was often titled in national voting, was a coalition of the grouchy. After too many years of little to choose between the platforms of the two establishment parties it was time for the masses of disgruntled iconoclasts to find a voice.
   There were now two classes in American, people griped, “tramps and millionaires.” The Populist Party was the loudspeaker for all varieties of have-nots, but it’s power base was definitely based on the fuming farmers. The PP pitchforked for the pitchfork.
The Populist platform strongly favored a federal income tax as a way to punish the rich and make them fund the economy.
The Pop party sent three senators and nine Congressmen to Washington but obviously couldn’t gain control of much at that national level. But the Populists scored big in state elections. Out of nowhere this leftist agrarian coalition took control of 12 (agrarian) state legislatures.
   One of the most colorful members of the Populist Party (and they had many) was Kansas Congressman Jeremiah Simpson. Simpson was a hick farmer who whittled wood in the halls of Congress with a sharp knife from 1891 to 1895. Simpson was no simple Simon however. He played up the dumb hick image to the detriment of anyone who underestimated his sharp mind.
The Populist Congressman had a famous nickname. “Sockless Jerry” Simpson they called him. How did he get the nickname? There are contradictory accounts. One says that he spoke critically of a rich politician for wearing silk stockings. For this he was playfully nicknamed “Sockless Jerry.” A more plausible story explains that an eastern writer heard of this legendary new Congressman from Kansas who was reputed to be such a hayseed that he attended sessions of Congress without socks on. The story turned out to be a fable, but in telling it, the writer created a nickname for Simpson that stuck. The nickname of the great baseball player “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was a spin-off from the already famous nickname of the “Sockless Jerry” Simpson.

RISE OF BASEBALL
   The national pastime of baseball had grown by 1890 to the point where there were three major leagues all thriving and loaded with talent. The city of Boston was the champion in all three leagues in that year. If anyone wonders how the craze for sports today compares with that of yesterday, a perusal of the newspapers back then during the baseball season will be educational. The USA was even crazier about baseball in 1890 than we are today. What a complete waste of national energy that could go to generating food for the poor in distant lands.
   The small town and small city newspapers are clear on one point; the people cared about the fortunes of their local teams even more than the major league teams some miles away. The major league teams were awesome but they were imaginary. The local teams were real, in the flesh, accessible and carried the pride of their communities on their bats. Factory teams were serious business also, and the equivalent in many cases of a minor league team today in relative playing quality, and far beyond in local loyalty.

LABOR
The union movement in the United States lagged behind such progressivism in Europe. There were many reasons.
For one thing, many US labor leaders embraced too many left wing crusades that distracted from the main goals and dissipated strength and unity. A person would go to a union meeting over a wage cut and hear speeches about 20 different issues, then walk out disgusted with the ones he didn't agree with.
Left wing socialist extremists committed acts of violence which set the movement back every time it seemed to be moving forward. Plus the American mind-set was basically more conservative than the European to begin with. Americans may have been wild barbarians in some ways compared to European standards, but when it came to left wing labor ideas, the Americans were the tux and gown group and the Europeans the wild westerners. In Paris lefty nut writers and agitators were socially accepted even in high society, not so in New York.
   The cyclical Depressions of 1873 and 1893 put millions of Americans out of work completely, and thus out of the labor pool from which Union movements are drawn.
   The constant flood of new Immigrants from Europe undercut any sophisticated development of an educated (in the ways of the left) working class. No sooner did a second generation American get hip to how 'the man' was mistreating him and resolve to fight back, then ten new scabs got off the boat from Europe ready to replace him for less pay at a moments notice. So much for going on strike.
   Some historians have suggested that the open west siphoned off much of the overcrowded and discontented city dwellers, thus slowing down socialist agitation in the east. Other historians say that this theory has been “completely disproved.”
   Probably the most important reason that unionism developed more slowly than in Europe was general prosperity. In spite of city slums, and some bad economic spells, the purchasing power of the Average working class America rose steadily all the way from the Civil War to the end of the century.

AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE
The Knights of Labor was the first big Union in the USA, but it wasn't narrow-minded enough to succeed. It wanted a nation-wide union of all sorts of workers reaching for broad-based and idealistic goals.
   The American Federation of Labor allowed for smaller Unions to exist for narrow local goals, devoid of philosophic baggage. The individual unions of skilled labor could then federate for the sake of power and organization. But the real goal was the short term goals of the individual unions, not some evangelical labor mission. The Knights could therefore allow socialists who were going to change the world, and the AFL cold therefore try to keep them out.
The AFL under Samuel Gompers had reached the one million-person mark in membership in 1890, and it was anti-socialist. The AFL did not want to lose the mainstream of public opinion in its struggle for its goals. They made it clear that they weren't Haymarket bomb-tossers. They weren't recruiting ignorant unskilled immigrant radicals. Gompers had this to say about them in writing,

   “Socialist publications, Socialist organizers and propagandists spread the poison of hatred and discontent, thus weakening confidence in the integrity of the officers of the union. According to my experience professional Socialism accompanies instability of judgment or intellectual undependability caused by an inability to recognize facts.”

    Thank you, Sam.

VIGILANTE INJUSTICE IN NEW ORLEANS 1891
   American history has a large file of disgraceful and infamous incidents, bet few rival the extra-legal hanging of 11 Italians in New Orleans by an unthinking racist lynch mob in 1891.
It started when the chief of the New Orleans Police Department, David Hennessey was murdered in 1890. On his death bed he looked at his friends, declared “The Dagos did it,” and then expired. The story is probably apocryphal but it spread across New Orleans and roused the nativists to action.
The rise of immigration from southeastern Europe had been making racist Americans mad for years now and this incident was a chance for some ventilation.
   Several Italian immigrants were unjustly arrested for the assassination of Hennessey and put on trial early in 1891. The charge was conspiracy. The Italians were accused of setting up a criminal organization called the ‘mafia’ in the United States to look out for the interests of Italians here and to commit various crimes for profit and fun.
    When the Italian defendants were acquitted the nativists flipped their lids. They organized a vigilante mob and busted into the New Orleans courthouse. The mob attacked the Mob. The nativist vigilantes hanged 11 Italians, none of whom had killed Dave Hennessey.

BENNINGTON MONUMENT 7 91
   President Harrison attended the dedication of one of the tallest monuments in the world in July of 1891. A famous battle of the Revolution was being remembered at Bennington VT. The impressive monolith was 378 feet tall, a bit shorter than the Washington Monument but impressive for its day in any case.
   One of the young men in attendance that day was future president Calvin Coolidge, a teen-ager about to begin his sophomore year of college in the fall.

       “I looked on President Harrison and realized that he represented
        the glory and dignity of the United States. I wondered how it
        felt to bear so much responsibility.”

   Boy Coolidge had campaigned for Harrison in 1888 in very Republican Vermont. When Harrison won, Coolidge and his young friends participated in a torchlight parade of celebration around the streets of Plymouth, Vermont.

COTTON PICKERS STRIKE IN ARKANSAS, 1891
   The Farmer’s Alliance, the great agricultural union of the South, excluded blacks from membership. In response the CFA was formed, the Colored Farmers of America. These were the black cotton pickers of the South and when they called for a Southern-wide strike in September of 1891, the effort failed for lack of unity (mostly of course because of lack of communications). One area of Arkansas went on strike but was left out in the cold by the rest of the South and the strike there was suppressed with violence. 15 blacks were killed. And that’s the story of the cotton pickers strike of 1891. It was a defeat that cost the CFA prestige and popularity and contributed heavily to its decline and fall as an organization.

HOMESTEAD STRIKE JULY 1892
   In 1890 the American Federation of Labor was euphoric over a major settlement it had achieved with the Carnegie Steel Corporation. But the victory was short lived. Carnegie was progressive in thought but not in practice. He played good cop while those running his factories played bad cop.
   The President of the enormous Homestead Plant Henry Frick announced in June of 1892 that soon the place was going to go non-union, and an 18% wage cut was on the way for good measure. A barbed wire fence three miles long was built around the plant anticipating a struggle between labor and capital. The AAISW (Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers) branch of the AFL began agitation for a strike. The Steel powerhouse beat them to the punch. On July 1, 1892 the steel plant at Homestead, PA was locked up. The workers were locked out. The strikers were barred from entering the plant in order to strike.
The Homestead strike, a lockout actually, of 92 was national headlines on a daily basis. 300 Pinkerton Detectives, (more a rent-an-army than the police power the name implies) were hired to enforce the lockout. Mobs of labor were waiting at the train station to battle the Pink, so the Detective army tried to sneak around with a water landing. When they arrived at Homestead in barges on July 6 they were attacked by Zinn mobs (labor hating capitol). It was a military conflagration in the streets. Three Pinkertons and seven strikers were killed in the fighting and the Pinkerton barges were set to the flame. The Pinkertons surrendered as if it were a formal military clash. The guards were allowed to come on to the shore and in an act of bad faith many of the strikers beat them up anyway.
    Henry Frick asked Pennsylvania Governor Bill Pattison to send in the militia. On the 12th of July 12,000 Pennsylvania militia were in place at the Homestead factory. Carnegie backed every move by Frick during the crisis. Later Carnegie blamed Frick publicly for the Homestead violence as though Frick had always acted independently of his boss’s wishes.
Public sympathy was running two to one in favor of the workers until an assassination attempt was made on Frick. The perp was a 22-year-old man named Alexander ‘Lance’ Berkman. He shot Frick three times and stabbed him with a poison pen. With all the figurative uses of that term, Al Berkman made the phrase ‘poison pen’ a reality. But Frick survived. Berkman was given 21 years in prison. Berkman’s deed backfired on the movement on whose behalf it was committed.
   The violence of labor turned the public against it. Berkman’s deed backfired. Some labor leaders tried to disown the anarchists as not representative of the labor protest movement. The public didn’t buy it then. However a lot of historians buy it now. They stress that the public, the press and the government was paranoid about anarchism, and they smugly portray anyone who favored getting tough with these rads as brutish reactionaries. Berkman, by the way, served only 14 years and upon his release from jail became a successful author. His two famous books were Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, and The ABC of Anarchism. But any historian who calls him an anarchist is supposedly a reactionary to be pitied for ignorance.
The H strike was settled with some compromise, but the event overall did not augur well for labor-capitol relations. The depression following the Panic of 1893 would increase strife between labor and capitol. Cleveland would have it even worse when he came back.
   Capitol won most of the strife. Steel wouldn’t see union workers until the late 1920’s.

FARM PROBLEMS/ FARMER’S ALLIANCE
‘Farm problems’ might be redundant. When were the farmers ever prosperous and content in American History?
   In Harrison’s time there was the grasshopper epidemic that had ruined half the nations wheat crop several years in a row. Farmers were usually heavily in debt to the eastern bankers. These greenback bugs made things worse.
The railroads were a double edged-sword for farmer Brown too. They increased the number of markets available for the farmer’s product, but they increased the number of farmer competitors. The farmers exported product but imported farmers. Also, the longer the distance, the more the farmer had to share the cash with the hated middlemen.
   In these years the Farmer’s Alliance reached its apex. FA candidates were elected to local office in scores of Southern counties, especially in 1890.

FORGET PEARL HARBOR 1892-3
   An American sponsored revolution took place in Hawaii in early January 1893, overthrowing the queen and declaring a republic favorable to the United States. Queen Liliukalani, ‘The Big Fox,’ declared the alleged new republic to be a big lie. She did not take this lying lying down. Liliukalani organized a counter-revolution on January 14, 1893 that took her country back to the genuine independence it had earlier known. Two days later an American warship, the USS Boston landed a contingent of US Marines on Oahu and convinced the Queen to abdicate and accept the counter-counter-revolution. On January 17th the Republic of Hawaii was pronounced. Its plan was to remain independent for now until the formal terms of annexation to the United States could be worked out.
On February 14, 1893 the US State Department signed the treaty of annexation so long desired. Harrison mailed a solid gold surfboard to the Queen as compensation. The next day the treaty of annexation was sent up to the Senate. But before the Senate could make a call on this, Grover Cleveland came into the White House and this liberal Democrat (at least on foreign policy) rejected the treaty of annexation and the entire procedure under which Hawaii had been acquired (seized.) Hawaii would have to wait until the arrival of President McKinley to be forcibly annexed to the expansionist United States.

PASSING OF FIRST LADY HARRISON OCTOBER 1892
   The nation was saddened by the news of the death of First Lady Caroline Harrison in October of 92. She had been sick with tuberculosis for many weeks. Near the end Benjamin didn’t feel much like campaigning for re-election for many days. His opponent Grover Cleveland declined an invitation to Chicago to attend a festival because he did not want to seem like he was campaigning actively for president while his opponent was at his dying wife’s side. The campaign of 1892 took a break while the First Lady tried in vain to defeat death, the invincible.

JANUARY 1893 DEATH OF RUTHERFRAUD
   Former President Rutherford B Hayes lost his fight with the grim reaper (always the heavy favorite in these so called “battles” with disease) in January of 1893. President-elect Cleveland traveled to Fremont NY to attend the funeral. Many Democrats were critical. They were still steamed over the ‘stolen election’ of 1876 and thought it inappropriate that a Democratic President should validate the rip-off by paying respects at Rutherford’s funeral. Cleveland, being the fine gentleman he certainly was, rejected the criticism as the absurdity it certainly was.

CONCLUSION
Poor Harrison takes a non-stop drubbing from the historians. One pen pusher calls him “a politician of drab and plodding mediocrity.” I can’t remember that writer’s name. Others say that he was completely dominated as President by Congress and by his Republican backers.
   Benny is supposed to represent a negative contrast to the ‘honest’ Cleveland. Yet Harrison had an undeniable reputation for personal integrity. It was why the party chose him in the first place. The historians certainly concede that there was little to choose between the political positions of the two major parties in these decades between the Civil War and the Spanish American War. So why was Cleveland so much better than Harrison? You tell me. I don’t get it. I attribute it partly to the Democratic bias in the academic community. That is why they ‘concede’ the point that both parties were of the same basic platform in these years. They bash the Republicans for the most part, but once in a while concede that there was little to choose between the two Parties. Hmmm.
   This not to put Cleveland down. It is a mild defense of the often-demeaned Harrison and his record. For my money the true story of these presidencies, both Democrat and Republican is that these guys were the stewards for the good times for the country. These administrations rarely get the credit they deserve. Yes, there was class conflict and racial injustices, and there was fighting on the Indian frontier. But there were no full-scale wars or impending wars, foreign or civil. The economy had its bad times, true, but the depressions of 1873 and 1893 were manageable aberrations compared to the cyclonic devastation rendered by the 20th century Great Depression of 1929-1940. By contrast the depressions of the later 19th century were short and were only interruptions in a general upswing of the US economy.
This was the run of peace. The 32 years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Spanish American was in fact the longest peace streak in the history of the USA.
   We are fighting a violent insurrection in Iraq at this writing so the record is safe for at least 32 years.
   The history profession magnifies the secondary stories to fill the news void left by a lack of spectacular events. They turn to social history to make up for missing action. But in doing so they miss the big story entirely. The lack of a story is the story. The real headline story is continued peace and prosperity, not the coal strike or an isolated massacre. Slavery was gone, the new technology was making life easier, and there were no wars. People in this age thought of themselves of very lucky and all you have to do is go to the microfilm department of a major city library and read some newspapers from a few cities. They knew full well that these were exiting and prosperous times. It took historians who didn’t live through these times to later write books explaining that these were actually bad times full of terrible problems.
There are 20 years of history in every single year of war. There are a thousand times more books about the Civil War than there are about the Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland and Harrison years combined. Deservedly so. But there is your story. You don’t compensate by writing 56 pages about the tariff, or life on the cattle range. You recognize that compared to World War II or the Civil War the nation was on vacation in the years from Johnson to McKinley. New states were being added every other year. Transportation and medicine were being reinvented for the better every ten years. The two oceans still protected us. Britain did our dirty work for us on the high seas, and there were no Nazis, Soviets, terrorists, or nuclear missiles to sweat.
I think its time we celebrate these boring years instead of defining them by defaming their presidents as weak uninspired mediocrities.

AFTER OFFICE
   Benjamin Harrison married again after leaving the presidency. He married his late wife’s niece.
   Ex-President Harrison was concerned about the hatred of the rich by the poor. He was saddened by and feared a revolution from below. In his later years he wrote,

        “The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is
          mischievous. It perverts the mind, poisons the
          heart and furnishes an excuse to crime. … It is
          quite as illogical to despise a man because he
          is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man
          has, but what he is, settles his class.”

   After he left the White House ‘Harry’ became a Law Professor at Stanford U in California, and did plenty of freelance writing.
   One Saturday Benjamin Harrison attended a Stanford football game where admission was 25 cents but enforcement was loose in the sense that there were no gates or turnstiles. People had to be approached individually for the quarter. The Stanford team manager was a young gentleman by the name of Herbert Hoover. No one thought it appropriate to tap a former President of the United States for the ticket price of a sporting event. No one that is, except the punctilious Hoover who with complete aplomb approached the God and told him matter-of-factly that admission was 25 cents. Harrison smiled and gave Hoover fifty cents and told him to keep the change. Hoover would not take the tip, so Harrison cheerfully gave Hoover a dollar and asked for four tickets. The story tells a lot about both presidents.
   President Ben Harrison passed away on March 13, 1901. His second wife lived on for another 47 years. Her husband could never have imagined the world she saw in her final days.

SOURCES

America and its Peoples

The American Experience, A Study of Themes and Issue in American History, by Robert F. Madgic, Stanley S. Seaberg (Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto Ca), Fred H. Stopsky, (Webster College), and Robin W. Winks (Yale) – c)1961 – This is a good lively history textbook for the era, but somehow they manage to avoid any mention of the War of 1812. I know I have another book by Winks somewhere in the house.

The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey – c)1961 D.C. Heath
   I have read several of Tommy's books and enjoyed every single page, but he is very biased in favor of the Democratic Party and uses general history as a vehicle to promote his opinions as facts.
   This may not be the best general history I have ever read, but it is probably the most fun one. The opinionated part helps to make it so. He's a real teacher to look up to, but its fun to rip him in the marginal scribbles.

The American People, A History, by Pauline Maier –c)1986 – This is a general history for the Junior High student. Useful maps and a quiz at the end of every two or three paragraphs. Doesn’t have a lot of say about Ben.

The American Presidents, by Grolier – c) 1992 Authors uncredited

The American Spirit, A History of the United States, by Clarence L. Ver Steeg – c)1985 – Modern High School textbook with lots of pictures and sidebars, but little sense of one great story. Great for browsing.

A Century of American Diplomacy, by John W. Foster, - c)1901 – Its not often that a US Secretary of State writes a general diplomatic history.

The Compact History of the United States Navy, by Fletcher Pratt, c) 1957.
   Sorry, but he did not give the name of that Chilean battleship.

The Complete Book of US Presidents, by William A DeGregorio – c) 2002 Billy D is a wizard on the Presidents and this is one of the all-time top reference books on the subject.

This Country of Ours, by Benjamin Harrison – I haven’t consulted this book but it deserved mention as existing. One company wanted money to download a copy of it but the copyright laws don’t reach back that far and I don’t feel that I should have to pay for it. I want to set up a free web site with the text of his and a hundred other old books by the real participants. I’d title it “They Speak For Themselves.” It’s so easy to find many books about great old leaders, but their own books are scarce. Video documentaries are equally unfair. They let their subjects speak six or eight times in sound bytes of 10-15 seconds, but the writer and the narrator get 54 minutes. That’s a real head-shaker.

A Diplomatic History of the American People, by Thomas A. Bailey – c)1955 – This guy is one of my idols although I often disagree with him. What a writer! What a scholar! What a pain in the neck with his annoying biased opinions! One of the few books I have ever read twice.

A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis (Yale) – c) 1936 – One of the giants of diplomatic history. Not always a pleasure to read but always worth the effort scholastically.

The Forging of the American Empire, A History of American Imperialism From the Revolution to Vietnam, by Sidney Lens, - c)1974 – I heard that Howard Zinn found this book a little too anti-America for his taste.

Growth of the American Republic, Vol II 1865-1937, by Samuel Eliot Morison (Harvard) and Henry Steele Commager, - c) 1940 Oxford Press
   Somehow in collaboration they are a more mean-spirited soul than they are when they write their own history books solo. This is an excellent yet very disappointing work.

Hats in the Ring, by Evan Cornog and Richard Whelan – c) 2000
   They write of the Electoral College that “it is the electoral equivalent of the human appendix – it serves no known purpose and is of interest only when something goes wrong.” Clever, but not true. The Electoral College protects geographical interests, small states, and is a replica of the Congressional structure of the two houses. Delaware and Wyoming get a little more representation that a purely population division would produce. The EC is a nod to the concept of the U.S. state as a state and not merely a province.
   To Evans and Whelan the EC reminds us that the Founding Fathers “were not perfect.” Neither are historians.

History of a Free People, by Henry W. Bragdon “Instructor of History” at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Samuel P. McChutchen Chairman of Social Studies, School of Education, New York University - c) 1954
MacMillan
   When I read this (and I'm almost done with the entire book) I feel like if I don't memorize every fact correctly these guys will show up at my house and slap me around.


A History of the United States, by Boorstin and Kelly c)1986 provided the “Sooner” word origin story.
The quizzes at the end of the chapters make me feel sorry for all high school students - ‘stand in front of the class and give a ten minute lecture on the difference between the pioneer farmers and pioneer rancher – show two old photographs to support your work’ – just shoot me. These poor kids are insecure enough talking about the food at lunch. It brings back a lot of bad memories. Let the students keep plowing forward in their stimulating reading and stop and making them lunge backwards to satisfy report card think.
   All these downer quiz pages aren’t bad enough, but now they add insult to injury by force feeding left agendas through the manipulative tactic of the test. The liberal bias is loaded into the muzzle of the question. Then the student, under pressure to get a good grade, has to give a liberal answer in order to even answer the question. The one in a thousand who might challenge the question itself can’t pass the test. Plus the very idea of questioning the authority of a textbook question would occur to very few students. Even adults would rarely do that. Teen-agers clearly aren’t going to go that way very often. Independent thinking is nipped in the bud.
At the end of the chapter The Passing of the Frontier we get a harmless anti-fun question six asking the student to imagine they are traveling from the east coast to the west coast in the 1880’s and to describe the difference in the towns.
    The next question is,

            “Brazilian settlers and businesses are encroaching on
            the homelands of the Amazon Indians to get at the
            rich resources of the tropical rain forest. Suggest
            alternative policies for the government of Brazil to
            deal with the problem. What groups in Brazil – and
            elsewhere – would you expect to support each
            policy you name?”

   The book is deciding the issues and then asking the student what we should do about it. It’s push-poll propaganda along the lines of ‘Our President is no good, give three reasons.’
   I have a quiz question. Why is this question about Brazil in a textbook history of the United States of America? Maybe the next question should be “Who was the President of Togo in 1968? Why did he fail in his bid for re-election? Name three non-agricultural products that Togo exports to the Ivory Coast”

History of the United States of America, by Henry William Elson – c)1960 – This wonderful narrative was revised and reprinted seven times between 1904 and 1943. It is so fine that the 1943 text was reprinted in 1960.

A History of United States Foreign Policy, by Julius W. Pratt – c) 1965 – Fabulous book.

The History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley 1877-1896, by James Ford Rhodes, c) 1919 Macmillan Co. Priceless takes on everything from an historian who had lived through the times he is writing about.

Labor in America, A History, by Foster Rhea Dulles – c)1949 – Author is the brother of John Foster Dulles, the arch-conservative from the 1950’s Ike Administration. FR tries to be a conservative liberal if there is such a thing.

The March of Democracy: Vol II, From Civil War to World Power, by James Truslow Adams – c) 1933 Scribner
   The title of volume two is excellent. From Civil War to world power. I like it. Too bad the author is a vicious racist partisan white supremacist. He also loves the Democratic Party in an un-objective way. This general history is highly recommended reading. Its important to know the filth that was being taught in 1933. This guy is a rat!

The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, vol. 1, by Herbert C. Hoover – For the story about the Stanford football game.

Messages and Papers of the Presidents – For the State of the Union Speech by Harrison in 1889

The National Experience, Part II – The United States Since 1865 - by Blum, Morgan, Rose, Stampp, Woodward and Schlesinger –c) 1981 HBJ NY
   Not the same Woodward as mentioned scathingly above.

A New American History, by W. E. Woodward – The always-miserable Woodward has this condescending analysis of the life of Benny Harrison,

     “It is difficult to discover any reason for choosing
       him in the first place … He was … a person who,
       by instinct leads an entirely meaningless life.”

Any president of the United States has a meaningful life, certainly at least more meaningful than Woodward’s.

New American History by Albert Bushnell Hart (Harvard) – c)1934 – This high school history book is a masterpiece of writing and workmanship. I love this book and this guy. Everyone should have read this book in 1934, not just schoolchildren.

On the Hill, A History of the American Congress, From 1789 to the Present – c)1975 by Alvin M. Josephy – Valuable account of the Reed rebellion.

The Oxford History of the American People, by Samuel Eliot Morison – c) 1965 Oxford University Press
   Fat general history by a lifetime scholar who looks down his nose at Teddy Roosevelt an an “amateur historian.” Harrison put TR in charge of civil service reform.
   If he thought Harvard grad Teddy Roosevelt was an 'amateur,' what would Morison think of a comedian writing a history book?
   What would he think of a comedian who accused him of being a racist?
   SEM says that Benjamin Harrison “was a dignified but ineffective president.” That's a coincidence; Morison is a dignified but ineffective historian. But what a pro!

Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994 – This is the Bible of PC outrageous liberal pseudo-history, although they don’t really turn up the lefty heat until the chapters covering the 20th century.

A Patriots History of the United States, From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terrorism, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen – c)2002 – A conservative polemic for the new century, but with a true attempt at a general history as well.

A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
    In this ubiquitous book (the only general history of the United States I have ever seen someone else reading in public outside of a college in my entire life) the emphasis is on the negative aspects of the tale of the United States. The whole story is about the sufferings of those in the lower classes. The work is superb but the title is bogus. This is no more a general history of the United States than Jaws was an analysis of the economic conditions in the antebellum South. It’s a 600 page tirade from the left centered on whatever labor vs. capitol issues pleased his fancy at the moment.
   Some of the information is new (at least to me which is why I love the book) but all of the arguments are old. Both the left and right have been firing the same basic dozen or so arguments at each other for a few hundred years. Zinn is great but he isn’t groundbreaking. The evil rich are giving an unfair shake to the hard working people.
    It’s never clear exactly what system Zinn is advocating to take the current system’s place, nor how to implement it smoothly. Merely citing the problem is no earthquake, no matter how thorough and well done. Zinn never tells any dirty lies. He just omits all the good stuff from the history of the United States.
I always enjoy listening to Zinn interviewed on TV. He is energetic, articulate, courageous and learned, unlike most of the show business college drop-outs representing the left in the US media today. Nevertheless my copy of his book is laced with handwritten notes of unseemly disagreement.
I knew I had to read this book and I was sure I was in for an endless groaner. But I found it to be a most pleasurable experience and I no longer resent that it is placed in so many of our schools as required reading. What is bothersome though, is that to feign balance, the universities and high schools assign textbooks that also have a left bias. Left wing books represent the conservative alternative! So they’re more conservative than Zinn. Big deal. Che Guevara was more conservative than Howard Zinn. The choice in our schools is between left and extreme left.

Presidential Campaigns, by Paul F. Boller, Jr. - c) 1984 – Oxford University Press
   I thought this guy had a core decency, and then I learn that he still teaches at Texas Christian.

Since the Civil War, a gorgeous little textbook by Charles Ramsdell Lingley, c) 1926) The Century Co.
     Lingley is Ivy League excellent, but shockingly redneck at times.

A Short History of America Democracy, by Professor John D. Hicks of University of California at Berkeley c) 1943 provided the point that Harrison may have been happy to lose.
   Hicks is one of the good guys in my book. Although he gets borderline racist when writing about the Jim Crow era, John D. overall is more than fair when covering the slavery controversy pre-Civil War, and the first phases of Reconstruction. At a time when most historians were plantation-rightists (by today’s standards), Hicks gets high grades for liberalism on the bell curve of 1943. JD is a great writer and historian. “Choose an author as you would choose a friend.” I choose Hicks!

The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller co-author of the Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith College   - c) 1957
   They call President Harrison “pious, chilly and honest.” That's cold.

A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia – c) 1966 – c) 1977 Harper & Row
   Garraty is famous for his 24 volume work The Dictionary of American Biography. He lamented to an interviewer that, “I have to include all the dumb presidents too, no matter how short their term.” That's pretty snobby. Like my man Ben Harrison was a dummy.

U.S.A. The History of a Nation, Volume 2, by Richard B. Morris and Greenleaf, c) 1969 – It’s a fine book but political history is a footnote to the overviews of trends in American life and thought, which is exactly the opposite of what I want in a general history. 1145 pages for volume 2

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