Course Final Study Guide

Winter History

This is the history final study guide. It goes over all the course lectures and content from the Gilded Age to Neoliberalism. This excludes the final week, “American History Now: Understanding Our Current Moment”. Each section contains one to two lectures grouped by relevancy. The relevant lecture and reading notes are linked (clicking any link opens it in a new tab). At the beginning of each section is a “Bottom Line”, or a summary of that section. All the summaries are compiled in the summary section below. Each section in this study guide contains key points from that section of the course. Lastly, take caution and keep in mind that these are my notes and based off my understanding, which may not always be correct.

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Table of contents

1. Summary
2. Gilded Age and Progressive Era
3. American Empire
4. World War I and New Deals
5. World War II and Cold War
6. Civil Rights and the New Critique
7. Neoliberalism

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Summary

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Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Relevant lectures: “Class Conflict in the Gilded Age” and “The Progressive Era: Race, Class, and Gender in the 20th Century”.

Bottom Line: Unregulated expansion following industrialization led to poor living and working conditions. These conditions fueled violent conflicts between corporations and workers, and the state positioned itself on the side of the corporations. Progressives of the Progressive Era emerged proposing the government to remedy these poor living conditions. Many Progressives still sought to operate within an industrial-capitalist framework, although others pushed further towards socialism.

• A rise in industrialization in the late 19th century lead to stateless expansion and poor living conditions among the working class. The working class had no protections as consumers nor as workers.
  • 1873 Great Depression - failures in the banking system exacerbated poverty.
• Radicalization was being driven by ethnic workers from Europe that had brought conceptions of socialist politics. Socialism and anarchist ideologies on the rise.
• Conflicts like Haymarket and the McCormick International Harvester Lockout and Strike demonstrated the state would be readily used to repress anarchists and labor activism more broadly.
• Liberty of Contract - states that the property of people, firms, and companies should not be disrupted by third parties of any type from making free contracts with anyone they should choose. Was used to justify the lack of regulation of laissez-faire capitalism.
• Early Progressive reformers were driven by attempts to reconcile labor and capital by addressing social inequality through voluntaristic and philanthropic means (Jane Addams and the Hull-House).
• The Women’s Movement is coming to the fore and becoming increasingly radicalized. The right to vote was won, but many demanded further access to birth control and economic equality.
• Progressive contradictions are an important theme; even as the general Progressive movement advocated for change, there were still both implicit and explicit traces of race and gender discrimination present.
• Rise of Jim Crow; black political rights are rolled back in the South and segregation is given a legal basis. A wave of violence rises in 1896 after the Plessy v. Ferguson Ruling.

Relevant readings:

• “I am an Anarchist” by Lucy Parsons
• Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920 by Melvyn Dubofsky
• Notes on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” by Jane Addams
• Notes on “Now We Can Begin” by Crystal Eastman
• Notes on Reinventing the People: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism by Shelton Stromquist

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American Empire

Relevant lecture: “Advent of Empire: Race and Conquest in 1900”

Bottom line: Near the end of the 19th century, the United States took advantage of collapsing empires around the world through the notion of the Empire of Liberty. Racial and commercial justifications were given for the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War.

• 1898 - turning point historians analyze to explain American imperialism and anticolonial struggles the U.S. intervened in.
• 1890s: Spanish empire is in free-fall and a series of nationalist revolutions occur throughout Central and South America. ** Spanish-American War** gives the U.S. an opportunity to think of itself as an expansionist nation.
• Empire of Liberty - a notion conceived by Jefferson in which America is not an empire like the British in that it is a beacon of freedom rather than one of tyranny and oppression.
• Battle of Wounded Knee - the “closing of the American frontier”. Hundreds of Sioux are forcibly removed from their land and many are killed as the U.S. pushes westward.
• Economic crises were used as justifications for expansion. Patterns of booms and busts were argued to address themselves if new markets were continually being expanded. American business also profited from exploiting revolutionary wars (e.g. owning Cuban sugar exports after Spanish-American War).
• The United States fought against the Philippines in the Philippine-American War, marking an ironic change in which the United States was positioned as suppressing a revolutionary movement. The U.S. was seeking not to allow the Philippines independence, but to have a more dominant, imperialist relationship.
• Racial constructions were exacerbated during wartime and used as a justification for imperial expansion.

Relevant readings:

• Notes on Documents on African-American Opposition to Empire (1898-1899)
• Notes on “On the War in the Philippines” by Albert J. Beveridge
• Notes on Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as a Race War by Paul A. Kramer

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World War I and New Deals

Relevant lecture: “New Deals: Ideas and Governance”

Bottom line: World War I led to a rise of the Red Scare, disrupting anticapitalist politics. Business-friendly policies dominated in the 1920s, and the number of high-risk investment mechanisms was increasing without government intervention; this exacerbated boom/bust cycles, leading to the Great Depression. Roosevelt was elected on the campaign of greater government intervention under Keynesian economics, and labor interests were significantly advanced.

• Continuing off from the Progressive Era, which attempted to remedy class violence and warfare of the late 1800s.
• During World War I, Progressive reforms are put into place politically. The U.S. government did not want labor disruptions during wartime production; thus, federal wages, hour limitations, women’s right to vote, the War Production Board, and other measures were instituted.
• New military technologies made WWI the most devastating European conflict at its time; it was ended by a series of revolts (peasant uprising in Russia, German military refusal to obey orders).
• A series of national strikes arose as WWI labor measures were repealed; most are put down with violence.
• Authoritarian communism rose in Europe and led to a Red Scare in the West. The Red Scare was highly successful in disrupting anticapitalists.
• The 1920s were great for business; laissez-faire capitalism of the Gilded Age returned under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Liberty of Contract was held as the Constitutional standard. The federal government released its responsibility to regulate railroads or financial markets. The wealth and income gap were widening.
• The Great Depression emerges as a result of high-risk investment mechanisms being made widely available, exacerbating boom/bust cycles. Many blamed Hoover’s lack of government intervention in financial markets. The impacts of the Great Depression on working people were devastating.
• The 1932 election of Roosevelt marks the advent of Keynesian Economics - in a financial crisis, spend more, not less; debt was said to operate differently for the government. Roosevelt institutes several mechanisms, like the AAA^1, FBA^2, WPA^3, Civilian Corps, and NIRA^4.
• Labor interests are greatly advanced in the 1930s under greater union protections.

Relevant readings:

• Notes on “Preamble to the Nationale Labors Relations Act, 1935
• Notes on Labor’s Untold Story - Chapter 10, “Victory” by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais

^1: Agricultural Adjustment Act. Created a system where the government paid farmers not to produce, such that the stability of markets could be more predictable. ^2: Federal Banking Act. Forces commercial and investment banks to separate. ^3: Worker’s Progress Administration. A series of federal infrastructure programs that created road construction, engineering projects, high schools, parks, etc. ^4: National Industrial Recovery Agency.

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World War II and Cold War

Relevant lectures: “World War II: Meanings of Freedom and Popular Ideas” and “World War II and the Cold War: Warfare and Statecraft”

Bottom line: During World War II, FDR’s policies of Keynesian economics continued to perform well and labor scarcity opened up the primary labor market to new population segments. Post-WWII, antifascism bolstered free-market intellectuals, and radicalism in this period (the early 1950s) was suppressed. The increasing power of the Soviet Union and the threat of communism spreading developed into a U.S. policy of containment that led to the Korean and Vietnamese Wars.

• Left off on the New Deal and Keynesian Economics: the Wagner Act and successes in strikes lead to advancements for labor. The New Deal allowed the state to act as a guarantee of political writes for employers and employees.
• The New Deals were limited on the racial and gendered front. The Wagner Act excluded majority-black workers, excluding them from legal, social, and democratic protections without doing so explicitly.
• Based on the failures of the WWI compromise, fascists come to power. Japan bombs the United States and the U.S. enters World War II. Anti-Japanese propaganda and Japanese internment resulted.
• A scarcity of labor during WWII opens up the primary labor market to other segments of the population: women and African Americans. War industries were desegregated.
  • Primary labor market - unionized, high-paying government contract jobs.
• The new level of deaths in WWII shows the development of even more destructive power in industrial societies.
• FDR’s legacy concludes with labor successes and an “Economic Bill of Rights”. FDR attempted to add economic “rights” (e.g. have a job, a steady income) to political ones. 1945-1946 massive strike wave.
• Post-WWII, free-market intellectuals re-emerge arguing for pre-Great Depression policies on the foundation that fascism begins with a restriction on economic freedoms and greater government intervention in the market. In the 1950s and beyond, radicalism is tempered and restricted again.
• The Cold War emerges as a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union on questions of ideological victory, power, and access to resources.
• The postwar period was a foreign policy loss for the United States. As Russia marched across Eastern Europe, it gained allies that subscribed to the communist ideology.
• The loss of China towards communism developed into a U.S. policy of forceful containment. The Korean War was fought to prevent Korea from “becoming the next China”, and demonstrates the extent of the containment strategy. Similarly, this is applied to Vietnam.

Relevant readings:

• Notes on Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity by Katherine Archibald
• Notes on Notes on American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy by Andrew Bacevich

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Civil Rights and the New Critique

Relevant lecture: “Freedom Now: Political Economy and Black Movements”

Bottom line: Black activism succeeds in establishing political rights, but a new, more radical critique for economic freedoms emerges.

• Civil Rights became the dominant domestic political issue in the post-war period amidst the U.S. growing economic growth through 1969.
• Racial exclusions written into the New Deal caused differential labor markets to emerge. Breadwinner Liberalism and white affirmative action, contributed to this.
• Economic exclusion and social segregation form tiered markets, in which different people have access to different levels of jobs. The racial wealth gap increases even as the class wealth gap from the Progressive era is decreasing.
• Through an aggressive political agenda, the NAACP and SCLC fight for political rights: Brown v. Board of Education, Little Rock Nine and School Desegregation, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Greensboro Sit-in.

• As political rights for blacks are achieved, new figures argue for economic rights. A new critique is pushed by figures like Malcolm X and Stokley Carmichael, which argue that political gains are worth little without advancements to an economic position in society.

• Notes on Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che by Max Elbaum
• Notes on Beyond Vietnam by Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Neoliberalism

Relevant lecture: “Neoliberalism: A Changing Political Economy”

Bottom line: Free market economics re-emerged as an answer to stagflation that Keynesian economics could not answer. Hence, free-market solutions were applied to emerging structural problems that resulted from deindustrialization. By the 1980s, a significant neoliberal shift had emerged, marked by the era of Reagan.

• Civil Rights organizations in the late 60s begin to address the New Critique - the economic question.
• Structural problems begin to emerge in the U.S.: white flight and capital flight due to deindustrialization. An urban crisis emerges in the 60s and 70s as urban centers are depopulated. 1967 and 1968 riots grip these cities.
  • The loss of manufacturing causes spillover effects.
• Stagflation complicates traditional Keynesian economics. Prices are inflating while people are facing unemployment in a stagnant economy.
• Free market economics is positioned as an answer to stagflation, arguing that Keynesian policies inflated prices, forcing profitability loss, and driving long-term recession. Thus, fiscal crises begin to be addressed via cutting social programs and other costs, rather than spending more money - as was the policy in the era of Roosevelt.
  • Keynesianism is on the decline.
  • Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, begins to influence Friedmanite ideas. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of FDR; the entire U.S. political establishment is gripped by free-market ideas.
• Reagan’s 1980 election marks a significant neoliberal turning point in national politics. Reagan decreased union protections (PATCO strike); his War on Drugs emphasized law and order and criminalized drug possession.

Relevant readings:

• Notes on the Powell Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System
• Notes on Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States by Julilly Johler-Hausmann

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