[Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press.]

During the 35 years between the end of the Civil War and the start of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution exploded in innovation and transformed the world—or at least the Western world, including the US.

But there were some big problems with the effects of the Industrial Revolution. One problem was that much of the world suffered in the throes of colonialism, with the Western nations reaping unheard-of profits and the rest of the world laboring in poverty as their countries supplied the raw materials for productive enterprise. Another problem was that while the people in charge—the capitalists—became vastly more rich than anything ever seen before, the people who did the work in their factories worked at or even below starvation level. So an age of revolution also began.

In the US, the period became known as the Gilded Age. It was no accident that the monetary system itself continued its reliance on a gold-backed currency.

The next few selections from Our Country, Then and Now feature various dimensions of events taking place, including observations from one American president and the assassinations of two others.

By the end of the 19th century, while many believed that humanity stood on the verge of unparalleled enlightenment and prosperity, a century of world wars lurked around the corner that has not ended to this day.

Our Country, Then and Now may be ordered directly from the publisher here.

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End of Reconstruction 

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer lay dead on a hilltop in Montana Territory. With his New York Herald-sponsored candidacy not surviving until the start of the Democratic Party national convention in St. Louis in September 1876, the nomination for president went, as expected, to New York Governor Samuel Tilden. His opponent would be Republican Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes.

The two nominations demonstrated that New York City was the bastion of the Democratic Party, with the Midwest the Republican power center. This identification continues today, with New York also the location of the Wall Street banks that formerly had the Southern aristocracy in the grip of debt, while the Midwest was the political bastion of farming and manufacturing interests. By the late 19^th century, the Democrats were also gaining the support of immigrant urban voters from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe.

In the 1876 general election, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote with 50.9 percent, but disputed votes in three southern states caused the election to be thrown to an electoral commission which the Republicans controlled and which declared Rutherford B. Hayes the winner. Tilden’s percentage of the popular vote was the highest ever received by a loser in a US presidential election.

Some of Tilden’s supporters wanted to use street demonstrations to overturn the decision of the electoral commission, but Tilden disapproved. Instead, the two parties agreed on the Compromise of 1877, whereby the Democrats accepted Hayes as the winner, while the Republicans agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The federal government now abandoned further attempts to secure racial equity between whites and blacks.

Politically, this was the beginning of the “Solid South,” with southern whites exclusively electing Democratic Party candidates, and blacks and any remaining Republican Party supporters now shut out of public life.

With hope of political relief gone, black poverty remained endemic. Blacks began to migrate to regional and northern cities, while those staying in the rural South worked as sharecroppers on farms and as servants or laborers in the towns. There were also small black professional and artisan classes in segregated areas.

The KKK was formed to keep blacks suppressed, and the Democrats held sway until Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” caused the political parties to reverse roles in the election of 1968. By then, the federal government had begun to take an active role in the civil rights movement under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This didn’t keep US government-affiliated agents from assassinating black civil rights leaders Malcolm X in 1965 and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.

Neither presidential candidate in the 1876 election showed awareness of the causes of the Panic of 1873 that still held the nation in its grip. Tilden and Hayes were both hard-money advocates, with Tilden supporting the gold standard and blaming the Panic of 1873 on a corrupt do-nothing Grant administration. The Republicans under Hayes pledged to continue the limited-government policies of the post-war period, including the protective tariff.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Few people know much about Rutherford B. Hayes as president. I am familiar with him as lieutenant colonel of the 23^rd Ohio regiment of volunteers that charged up South Mountain on September 14, 1862, to dislodge the Confederates from their dug-in positions prior to the Battle of Antietam three days later.

I have walked the battlefield at South Mountain many times where the Appalachian Trail runs along the South Mountain ridge. There at Fox’s Gap, Union Major General Jesse Reno and Confederate Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr., were both shot dead on the same day a few hundred feet from each other. Reno is believed to have told an aide he’d been shot by his own troops.

Early in the battle, Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes was shot in the arm, the bone shattered, and was carried from the field. He recovered, served with distinction in the war and later received a field promotion as a brigadier-general. After the war, he became a lawyer, entered politics, and was elected to three terms as Ohio governor before winning the presidency. Once in the White House, he and his wife Lucy were noted as serving only lemonade at receptions in contrast to the usual drunkenness.

Hayes served only a single term but was faced with the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which began at the B&O Railroad terminal in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and spread to the New York Central, Erie, and Pennsylvania railroads. The main issue was wage cuts by the railroads to recoup financial losses from the Panic of 1873. Hayes sent federal troops to Martinsburg, Baltimore, and other locations, with riots spreading to Chicago and St. Louis.

The only loss of life was with clashes between strikers and state militias, but not with federal troops, which showed restraint. Public opinion forced the railroads to improve working conditions and cease cutting wages. Hayes tried to act as a peacemaker, later writing that:

“The strikes have been put down by force; but now for the real remedy. Can’t something [be] done by education of strikers, by judicious control of capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil? The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious.”[i]

On relations with the Indians, by the time Hayes became president, a national movement had formed to improve their treatment, even as the US Army continued to prosecute the war against the Sioux. The focus of reform was on assimilation of the Indians into white culture. This included education.

Indian schools were set up by religious groups on the reservations and by secular institutions sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These included the US Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in 1879. Many of the schools, including Carlisle, were boarding institutions that involved removal of Indian children from their families and immersion in white ways of dressing, reading and writing, and speaking English. Tribal languages were forbidden.

Also in the works was what would become the “allotment” system under the Dawes Act, signed by President Grover Cleveland in 1887, which aimed at replacing reservations with individual Indian properties of around 160 acres each. The Indians were expected to farm their allotments as a way of assimilation into white society. The Indians were supposed to be provided with farm implements, livestock, and seed, but often were not. If they did not wish to farm, they could allow the government to manage their land and lease it to white ranchers, miners, or lumber companies.

These properties would be held by the government “in trust,” since the Indians were not in fact trusted to manage them responsibly. Thus Indians remained wards of the US government. Over time, the tribes lost much of their reservation property through sale of what the government classified as “surplus lands,” often acquired by white speculators. The Flathead tribes of western Montana, for instance, were forced into opening their own “surplus” land to white homesteaders in 1910.

A scandal would develop almost a century later when the government was forced by court action to admit they had no records of the money which leases on the Indian allotments were supposedly earning.

Besides the Sioux, Hayes oversaw other conflicts with Indian tribes, including the Nez Perce war of 1877, when the Nez Perce refused to move to a reservation in Idaho. The Indians, one of whose leaders was Chief Joseph, commenced a 1,700-mile trek toward Canada. They held off the Army in a series of battles before surrendering while only forty miles from the Canadian border.[ii]

Hayes also called out the army against the Bannock Indians in Idaho and the Utes in Colorado. When the Ponca Indians from Nebraska attempted to return to their former homes from Indian Territory, Hayes set up a commission to offer them a choice of domiciles that awarded them compensation for their land rights. In a message to Congress in February 1881, Hayes said he would “give to these injured people that measure of redress which is required alike by justice and by humanity.”

Compared with many US politicians both before and after, Rutherford B. Hayes was a man capable of rational, compassionate action under the circumstances of the time. There is nothing of the fanatic, the cruel, the bombastic, or the cowardly in his attempt to do his duty. In an 1887 post-presidential diary entry, he tried to sum up what he had learned over his long political career:

“In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many.”[iii]

Hayes saw clearly the evils of big money and political power in combination. But the situation was destined to become much worse over the coming decades. Today it is a national catastrophe.

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This article was originally published on Three Sages.

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.

Notes

[i] Harry Barnard, Rutherford Hayes and His America, American Political Biography Press (1994), p.446-447.

[ii] One band of Nez Perce did in fact make it to Canada.

[iii] Charles Richard Williams (ed.), The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, (1922), p.354.

Featured image: Rutherford B. Hayes, former President of the United States. (Public Domain)

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