That Used to be True (part 2) Gilded Age and Age of Imperialism
This 4-part series discusses elements of the high school curriculum that were true enough when I taught (2005-2015) but aren’t true any longer.
This continues the discussion about how our perception – and the reality – of US history continues to change and not for the better. This series narrates the many ways that things that once were focal points of our story often have been negated by the increasing inequality in our system. This section discussses the late 19th century.
Jim Crow and the civil rights era. As taught in a US/VA history class, the Jim Crow era was characterized by segregation in schools, public accommodations, and everyday life; denial of voting rights and other civic rights; and enforcement of these practices both through legal means (poll taxes, literacy tests, etc.) and terror. Several months later in the school year, we would teach that these evils were ended – as a matter of law, at least – by Brown vs. Board of Education and related Supreme Court decisions as well as the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s. This topic was a centerpiece of the year and served as a prime example of the expanding coverage of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
In the 1950s and 1960s, for the first time since Reconstruction, blacks in America made real gains in their political and economic status. In a 12 year period starting in 1954, the Supreme Court banned segregated public schools and ordered them to integrate with “all deliberate speed,” most universities were desegregated, and Congress passed legislation banning segregated public facilities and ensuring voting rights for black Americans. Further, discriminatory practices like redlining were banned and affirmative action programs were created to ensure that qualified minority candidates weren’t ignored in a system that perpetuated the “whites only” practices.
Many of these advances have been eroded or are being wiped out by the three branches of government. The Supreme Court has had affirmative action under assault for several decades and seems likely to eliminate it in 2023.
The Court accepted a lawsuit from Republican state attorneys general claiming that voter discrimination was a thing of the past and for all practical purposes eliminated the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The same states promptly started to adopt measures to reduce access to voting that would have been forbidden by the VRA: stripping voter rolls with no notification, closing polling places or relocating them to inconvenient locations, creating long lines by reducing the number of machines, requiring voter IDs that must be obtained from the Motor Vehicles department and then closing Motor Vehicle offices in predominantly black areas.
Legislatures and governors in states controlled by Republicans have gerrymandered districts to reduce the influence of black voters. And the original target of desegregation efforts, public schools, are undergoing a new round of segregation.
In Trump’s second term, the government has gone to even greater extremes, eliminating all references to “DEI,” firing anyone perceived to have been a “DEI supporter,” and scrubbing “DEI” references from federal web pages, including a photograph of the “Enola Gay,” the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.
Robber Barons. The Gilded Age robber barons (Vanderbilt, Morgan, Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.) were given mixed treatment in Virginia history classes. They are credited with creating successful, modern business enterprises, but they are also blamed for oppressing workers, for stock manipulations, and for restraint of trade and other antitrust violations. Progressive era reforms were seen as a direct response to their perceived abuses. But whoever they were, the robber barons were also treated as relics of the past. The larger than life corporate titan had been made obsolete by the rise of the modern corporation, run by professional management; by antitrust rules; and by government regulation of industry behavior and stock markets.
Most of these reforms (notably antitrust regulations) have been eliminated and a new generation of robber barons (Bezos, Musk, Bloomberg, Koch, Buffett, Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton, etc.) is again concentrating wealth, demanding lower taxes and less regulation, creating substandard jobs, monopolizing industries, and crushing competitors
And, like their 19th century predecessors, they are exercising an outsized influence on our politics and culture. Many of the modern day robber barons deal with technology and information and their control of what we know is if anything more powerful than the earlier generation’s control of steel and railroads and petroleum. Their wealth gives them more influence over our national priorities in some cases than the government: space exploration, education, medical treatment, etc. And, like Rockefeller and Carnegie and some of the other 19th century robber barons, the new robber barons are also purchasing some measure of respectability – and influence – by taking a miniscule share of their wealth they’ve been able to accumulate through friendly tax rules and spending it on highly visible “good works”: symphony orchestras, art museums, etc.
Civil service. Starting with the presidency of Andrew Jackson, our students learned about the “spoils system,” the system that staffed the entire government with political appointees. Getting a job was determined by who you knew (or paid). In 1881, the country experienced its second presidential assassination in less than 20 years and the assassin was found to be a disappointed office-seeker. Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur, signed the Pendleton Act, which determined that the government would have a professional, career workforce.
Eventually, this transformed the federal workforce and the federal government’s approach to its citizens. The government hired some of the top experts and developed technical capabilities to understand weather (NOAA) and the development and scope of the economy (BLS, Census, Fed, etc.); to control infectious disease (CDC) and find cures (FDA, NIH); to manage millions of acres of parkland and other Federal property (NPS, Fish and Wildlife, Forest Service, BLM, etc.)
The Civil Service functioned reasonably well for 140 years; career civil service workers cured polio and other infectious diseases, created accurate weather forecasts, cleaned up after natural disasters, dispensed Social Security checks, ran national parks, and processed student loans
But after the civil rights decisions, they became victim of the “pointy headed Washington bureaucrat” myth created by racist southern politicians who objected to civil rights legislation, to Ronald Reagan’s “government is always the problem” buffoonery, and the paranoid right’s “Deep State” ravings. Donald Trump cared about none of this but held a grudge against anyone who didn’t show complete loyalty to him; he destroyed this structure that took 140+ years to build in his first two months in office, with mass layoffs, efforts to shutter entire agencies, hiring freezes, suspensions of contracts and grants, and other steps to disrupt how agencies functioned. Wholesale layoffs, most found by courts to be illegal, still crippled the ability of many agencies to perform basic functions.
The war on expertise is even evident at the top with the appointment of anti-science charlatans (RFK, Jr. at HHS) and loyal little Quislings who care nothing for what their agencies do and are more than happy to destroy them (Social Security, FEMA, Education).
Imperialism. The curriculum reflected the U.S. periodically asserting dominance in the Western Hemisphere or the Pacific Ocean: the Monroe Doctrine; filibustering in Latin America; the Open Door policy; the Roosevelt Corollary; Dollar Diplomacy; construction of the Panama Canal; war with Spain; annexation of Puerto Rico, Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, and other possessions; support of Latin American dictators; etc. One of the major positive steps the U.S. made was the decision in the late 1970s to turn the Panama Canal over to Panama. This breach of sovereignty had been a major concern throughout Latin America. By all reports, Panama did a fine job of managing the Canal, even building a second canal to accommodate modern supertankers. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump has brought territorial expansion back into play, with threats that he is going to annex, and perhaps forcibly take, Canada, Greenland, and, perhaps worst, the Panama Canal.
“Your Wretched Refuse” Immigration was treated as a complicated issue in a U.S./VA History class. But on the whole, the curriculum stressed the benefits of immigration and treated periods of anti-immigrant fervor (“No Irish Need Apply” and the Know-Nothing movement, the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigration restrictions of the early 20th century, Japanese concentration camps in WWII) as unfortunate experiences of the past.
It's not in the past any more. Riding a decade’s demagoguery about “open borders,” “migrant crime waves,” and similar lies and half truths, the Trump administration was seemingly elected by a public that savors cruelty and photo ops. Planeloads of people were rounded up seemingly for no crime other than having a tattoo, branded “gang members” and whisked off without due process to a Salvadoran hellhole from which there is no escape. Students, professors, and tourists, some with green cards, have been whisked off the streets by masked lawmen (or whatever) and taken away to a gulag for no apparent reason other than making anti-Trump remarks. And the Administration has refused to comply with court orders. The era of welcoming immigrants appears to be over.
Part 3 will deal with aspects of the Great Depression, and New Deal that “used to be true” but have been nullified in recent years.