U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present

A letter from Dayton, 7 August 1865

In the summer of 1865 a Tennessee farmer named Colonel P. H. Anderson had a problem. The Civil War was over, the harvest was coming, and the people who had done the work on his land were gone, because they were free. So the colonel wrote to one of them, a man he had once owned, and asked him to come back.

That man was Jourdon Anderson. He was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1825, sold at about seven or eight to the colonel's father, and later handed on to the colonel himself. (Enslaved people were often given the family name of the people who owned them, which is why the two men shared a surname.) Union soldiers camped on the farm in 1864 had set him free. By 1865 he was living in Dayton, Ohio, with his wife Mandy and their children.

On 7 August 1865 Jourdon answered. He spoke his reply aloud, and the man he now worked for, a Dayton lawyer and banker named Valentine Winters, wrote it down. Winters had it printed in a newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial, and about two weeks later the New York Daily Tribune printed it too. People have been passing it around ever since.

The letter is polite, even friendly. Jourdon sends his love to the colonel's children and says he is glad the colonel is still alive. Then he gets down to business. He has a job that pays $25 a month, a comfortable home, and children who go to school. Before he will even think about coming back, he wants to be paid for the work he has already done.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. ... Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows.

Who made this, and why: Jourdon Anderson, a freed man of thirty-nine, spoke these words to answer the man who had enslaved him. Valentine Winters wrote them down and had them published, so the letter had two audiences at once: the colonel in Tennessee, and newspaper readers in the North who were arguing about what freedom ought to mean.

Check Jourdon's arithmetic, because he clearly did. Thirty-two years is 384 months, and 384 times $25 is $9,600. Twenty years is 1,040 weeks, and 1,040 times $2 is $2,080. Add them and you get $11,680, exactly his figure. He even offered to subtract what the colonel had spent on their clothes, three doctor's visits, and "pulling a tooth for Mandy."

Key idea: in 1865 freedom was not only a word in the Constitution. For the Andersons it meant a wage paid every Saturday night, children in a classroom, and the right to say no to the man who used to own them.

Freedom meant finding your family

Under slavery a family could be broken up at any time by a sale. A husband could be sold to Georgia and a daughter to Louisiana, and nobody had to tell anyone where they went. When the war ended, thousands of freed people set out to look. One newspaper reporter met a man who had walked more than six hundred miles in search of the family taken from him.

Others used the newspapers. Black newspapers such as the Christian Recorder, published in Philadelphia by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, printed columns of short advertisements headed "Information Wanted." Each one named a lost husband, wife, child or parent and the place they had last been seen, and asked anyone who knew them to write. A project at Villanova University called Last Seen has collected more than 5,000 of these advertisements. In two of them, a father named Daniel Rouse of New Bern, North Carolina, asked for help finding his ten-year-old son, a boy named General. People kept placing advertisements like his for decades.

Couples who had been married under slavery, when the law refused to recognise their marriages, hurried to make them legal, often with the help of the Freedmen's Bureau. That was the federal agency Congress created in March 1865 to help people leaving slavery with food, work contracts and schools. A marriage certificate may not sound exciting. To a couple whose children could once have been sold away from them, it was a promise written down by the government that their family was a family.

Freedom meant school

Before the war, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi and several other southern states had passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved people to read. A boy named Booker T. Washington, who was nine when the war ended, knew what that felt like. He was born into slavery in Hale's Ford, Virginia, in 1856. Sometimes he carried the books of his owner's young daughter as far as the schoolhouse door. He was not allowed through it. Years later he described what he saw inside.

The picture of several dozen boys and girls in a schoolroom engaged in study made a deep impression upon me, and I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study in this way would be about the same as getting into paradise.

Who made this, and why: Washington wrote these words in his autobiography, Up from Slavery, published in 1901, when he was the famous head of a college in Alabama. He was remembering his childhood from more than thirty years away, for readers he hoped would give money to Black schools, so he chose his memories with care. A detail like the schoolhouse door is exactly what a child remembers, and it fits everything else we know about the time.

After freedom his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where his stepfather put him to work packing salt, sometimes starting at four in the morning. The boss marked each packer's barrels with a number. His stepfather's number was 18, and the first thing Booker ever learned to read was that number. His mother found him an old copy of Webster's blue-back spelling book, and he taught himself the alphabet from it. When schools opened in the valley, day school, night school and Sunday school were all crowded. Men and women of fifty and seventy-five, he wrote, came to the night school hoping to read the Bible before they died.

That hunger shows up in the numbers. Every ten years the census asked Americans whether they could read and write. The table shows what they answered, as the percentage of people aged fourteen and over who could not read or write in any language.

Who made this, and why: census takers collected the answers, and in 1993 the National Center for Education Statistics, a government office, gathered them into one table to show how American schooling had changed. Two cautions. People answered for themselves, so the numbers are only as good as the answers. And the second column also counts the small number of Americans of other races.

Read the right-hand column slowly. In 1870 about eight of every ten Black Americans over fourteen could not read, because most had grown up under laws that forbade it. By 1910 about three in ten could not. The same government report found that the share of Black children and teenagers enrolled in school jumped from 10 percent in 1870 to 34 percent in 1880. Behind each of those numbers is a child like Booker, or a grandmother in a night class.

What matters here: the numbers and the memoir tell the same story from two directions. The memoir tells you what one boy felt; the table tells you it happened to millions.

Freedom meant the vote

Three changes to the Constitution, called amendments, set new rules for the country. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) ended slavery. The Fourteenth (1868) made everyone born in the United States a citizen and promised every person "the equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth (1870) said no state could deny a man the vote because of his race or because he had once been enslaved. Women of every race were still left out, and a later lesson follows their fight.

In 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which put most of the South under army supervision until each state wrote a new constitution with Black men voting. Reconstruction is the name for this whole period, from 1865 to 1877, when the country tried to rebuild the South and settle what freedom would mean. Black men voted in huge numbers, and they won. In the 1870s fifteen Black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives and two in the Senate. Joseph Rainey, a barber from Georgetown, South Carolina, took his seat in the House on 12 December 1870, the first Black member in its history. In Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback served as governor for five weeks in the winter of 1872-1873. Historians have counted more than 1,500 Black officeholders in these years, from sheriffs and city councillors to state legislators. In South Carolina, Black members made up a majority of the state legislature, the only state where that happened.

The Black Codes: freedom with the doors locked

White southern lawmakers moved fast to limit what freedom could mean. In 1865 and 1866, before Black men could vote, several southern states passed laws known as Black Codes. The details differed from state to state, but the aim was the same: to keep freed people working on plantations for low pay and under white control.

Mississippi's codes show how. Every January a Black worker had to be able to show written proof of a job for the coming year. A man without that paper could be arrested as a vagrant, which means a person with no job or home, fined, and then hired out to whoever paid his fine. Another Mississippi law let courts take Black children whose parents were judged unable or unwilling to support them and bind them as "apprentices" to white employers, starting with their former owners. An apprentice was supposed to be a young person learning a trade. Under this law a child could be sent back to the same farm, to work for the same family, with no wages at all.

Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed over President Andrew Johnson's veto, and then with the Fourteenth Amendment, which wrote citizenship and equal protection into the Constitution itself, where an ordinary state law could not reach them.

Night riders, and a North that looked away

Laws were not the only weapon. The Ku Klux Klan, started by Confederate veterans in Tennessee in 1866, rode at night in masks to frighten and hurt Black voters, officeholders, and the white people who worked with them. Klansmen burned schoolhouses. In Mississippi fifty masked riders went to the home of a schoolteacher to tell her they disliked the school tax and that she should think about leaving. They attacked schools because the schools were working.

At first the federal government fought back. In 1871 a committee of Congress took testimony from freed people about the attacks and printed it in thirteen volumes. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 made it a federal crime to use terror to stop people voting, and President Ulysses S. Grant sent troops into nine counties of South Carolina. Hundreds of Klansmen were arrested, and by 1872 the first Klan had been broken up. But other armed groups took its place, and after 1872 many northerners grew tired of the South's troubles and more interested in their own. One by one the southern states fell back under the control of white Democrats who called themselves "Redeemers."

The end came with a deal. The presidential election of 1876 was so close, and so full of cheating, that nobody could say for certain who had won. In an unwritten bargain known as the Compromise of 1877, Democrats in Congress stopped blocking the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, from becoming president, and Hayes withdrew federal troops from the statehouses of South Carolina and Louisiana, the last places they were guarding. Reconstruction was over.

The skill: point of view

Historians use the words point of view for the place a person is standing when they speak: who they are, what they have lived through, whom they are talking to, and what they want. Two people can describe the same farm and tell completely different stories. You cannot fully understand a source until you know where its writer stood.

Try four questions on Jourdon's letter.

1. Who is speaking? A man of thirty-nine who spent more than thirty years enslaved and about a year free, with a job, a home and children in school. He has something the colonel needs, which is his work, and he knows it.
2. To whom? The man who owned him and who, the letter says, once shot at him twice. Read the last line: "Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me." Jourdon never raises his voice. The joke does the work.
3. Wanting what? His wages; proof that his grown daughters would be safe; and news of whether any school had opened for Black children near the farm. "The great desire of my life now," he says, "is to give my children an education."
4. Whose point of view is missing? The colonel's. His side reaches us only through Jourdon's answer, which tells us he promised to "do better for me than anybody else can." Whenever you read one side of a conversation, ask what the other side said, and how they would have told it.

One more question belongs here: could the letter be a fake? It is so sharp, and was published by a lawyer, that some readers wondered. In 2012 a historian at Johns Hopkins University, Michael Johnson, checked it against government records. The 1860 lists of enslaved people showed a Colonel P. H. Anderson in the right Tennessee county, holding people whose sexes and ages matched the family, and the 1870 census found Jourdon, Mandy and their children in Dayton. Winters may have helped with the wording, since he held the pen. The people, the places and the demands were real.

Remember: point of view is not the same as bias. Everyone has a point of view. The skill is to name it, so you know what a source can show you and what it cannot.

Common misconceptions

• "Freed people waited for the government to hand them a new life." The evidence runs the other way. They walked hundreds of miles to find their families, placed thousands of advertisements, filled night schools at the age of seventy-five, and demanded wages, as Jourdon Anderson did. The government helped for a while. The claiming was theirs.
• "Reconstruction means rebuilding burned cities and railroads." Some rebuilding happened, but historians use the word for the political fight from 1865 to 1877 over who would have rights in the South and who would protect them.
• "Once the Fifteenth Amendment passed, Black men could always vote." For about a decade many did, and they won office. Then terror, and later new state laws, took the vote from most Black southerners. The next lesson shows how.

What to carry forward

• In 1865 freedom meant concrete things: wages, reunited families, legal marriages, schools and, from 1867, the vote.
• Jourdon Anderson's letter asked for $11,680 in back wages, and his arithmetic was exact.
• Among Black Americans over fourteen, the share who could not read fell from about eight in ten in 1870 to three in ten in 1910.
• In the 1870s fifteen Black men served in the U.S. House and two in the Senate, beginning with Joseph Rainey in December 1870.
• Black Codes, Klan terror and a North that stopped paying attention took much of this back, and the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction.
• Point of view means asking who is speaking, to whom, from what experience, wanting what, and whose voice is missing.

Sources

1. Anderson, J. (1865). Letter from a freedman to his old master [Letter of 7 August 1865, first printed in the Cincinnati Commercial]. Wikisource. wikisource.org
2. Washington, B. T. (1901). Up from slavery: An autobiography (chaps. 1-2). Doubleday, Page. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. National Center for Education Statistics. (1993). Illiteracy and enrollment rates, 1870-1979. In T. Snyder (Ed.), 120 years of American education: A statistical portrait, excerpted as "120 Years of Literacy." U.S. Department of Education. nces.ed.gov
4. OpenStax. (2019). The era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (sections 16.2-16.4). In U.S. history. Rice University. openstax.org
5. Villanova University. (n.d.). Last Seen: Finding family after slavery [Database of Information Wanted advertisements]. informationwanted.org

A first-class ticket, 15 September 1883

Ida B. Wells was twenty-one, a schoolteacher, and she had paid for a first-class ticket. On 15 September 1883, on a Chesapeake and Ohio Railway train in Tennessee, she took her seat in the first-class ladies' car. The conductor told her to move to the smoking car, the car set aside for men who smoked, which was already crowded. She refused. The conductor and two other men dragged her out of her seat.

Ida B. Wells had been born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. When she was sixteen, both her parents died of yellow fever, and she started teaching so she could keep her younger brothers and sisters together. She was not a woman who gave up seats. She sued the railroad, and in December 1884 a local court awarded her $500. The railroad appealed. In 1887 the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out her victory, saying her "persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride." She had to pay the court's costs.

A month after Wells was pulled from her seat, on 15 October 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the law that had banned racial discrimination in inns, theatres and trains, in a set of decisions known as the Civil Rights Cases. The door was open for states to write separation into law, and over the next twenty years they did.

The point: segregation did not simply linger from slavery. It was built, law by law, in the years after Reconstruction, and people like Ida B. Wells fought it from the first day.

What "Jim Crow" meant

The name came from a character in minstrel shows, performances in which white actors blackened their faces to mock Black people. By the 1880s Jim Crow laws was the name for laws that forced the races apart. From the 1880s into the 1960s a majority of American states had some. The National Park Service keeps a list of real examples. Here are four, in their own words.

Who made these, and why: state lawmakers wrote them, over many decades; in the southern states after the 1890s, those lawmakers were chosen by voters who were almost all white, for reasons you will see below. The National Park Service gathered the examples for the education pages of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta.

Read a law like this as evidence of what its writers feared. The textbook rule means a schoolbook once used by a Black child could never be handed to a white child. The baseball rule reaches down to children's games on empty lots. The Virginia rule shows something odd: the law depended on knowing everyone's race, and when it could not tell, it let a train conductor decide.

The case that was planned

In 1890 Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act. Its first section said railways "shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races." A passenger who went into the wrong car could be fined $25 or jailed for up to twenty days. Black New Orleanians protested before it passed, and when it passed anyway, a group of them formed a Citizens' Committee to fight it in court. They raised money and hired a lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a white novelist and former judge who had fought for Reconstruction.

They needed a test case: someone who would break the law on purpose, get arrested, and so force a court to decide whether the law was allowed. On 7 June 1892 Homer Plessy, a shoemaker, bought a first-class ticket from New Orleans to Covington and sat in the car for white passengers. The railroad, which disliked paying for extra cars, had agreed in advance, and the committee had hired a private detective to make the arrest. The National Archives tells the whole story of how carefully it was set up.

Four years later, on 18 May 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. Seven justices ruled against Plessy. One, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, disagreed, and one did not take part. The phrase separate but equal became the rule of the land for fifty-eight years.

The wrong answer, and why it sounds right

Here is the argument the Court accepted. Try it on and see whether it fits before you take it apart.

The law treats both races the same. White passengers are kept out of the Black car exactly as Black passengers are kept out of the white car. Both cars must be equal. So nobody is treated unequally, and nobody's rights are broken.

It sounds tidy. Justice Henry Billings Brown of Michigan, writing for the majority, went one step further. Plessy's lawyers had said that forcing Black passengers into a separate car branded them as inferior. Brown answered:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

In plain words: if Black people feel insulted, that is their own interpretation, because the law itself says nothing insulting. A fallacy is a mistake in reasoning, so Brown was calling Plessy's argument a mistake. Now debug it. There are three places where the reasoning breaks, and you can find each one with evidence.

Where it breaks, step one: read the whole law

The Louisiana act had an exception in its third section: "nothing in this act shall be construed as applying to nurses attending children of the other race." A Black woman could ride in the white car, as long as she was there as a servant looking after a white child.

Ask yourself what that exception tells you. If the law's real purpose were to keep the races physically apart, the nurse would have to go too. She did not. So the law was not really about distance; it was about rank. A Black person could sit beside white passengers only as their servant, never as a fellow passenger with the same ticket. The "badge of inferiority" was written into the act after all, and a careful reader could find it. Harlan found it. His dissent ended:

The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

He also predicted that the decision would one day seem "quite as pernicious as" (that is, as harmful as) the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Harlan lost the vote seven to one. He did not lose the argument.

Where it breaks, step two: check whether "equal" was ever true

The Court said the accommodations had to be equal. Nobody checked. In 1917 the U.S. Bureau of Education published a study of Black schools led by a researcher named Thomas Jesse Jones. Using the state spending records nearest to 1910, he divided the money each southern state spent on teachers' salaries by the number of children aged six to fourteen.

Who made this, and why: Jones worked for the federal government and a charity that funded Black schools. He was no radical. His own report says Black schools should be run with "white management and white teachers" taking part. That makes his numbers harder to dismiss, because the man who counted had no wish to exaggerate the unfairness.

Look at the second row. The report explains that states handed money to each county according to its total population, Black children included, and then the all-white county school boards divided it. So a county with many Black children received more money, and spent it on the white children. The more Black children a county had, the more it spent on each white child.

In short: "separate" was enforced by police and fines. "Equal" was never enforced by anyone.

Where it breaks, step three: ask who made the law

Brown offered a thought experiment. Suppose, he wrote, a legislature with a Black majority passed the same law. Would white people then feel branded? "We imagine that the white race, at least, would not acquiesce in this assumption." (To acquiesce is to go along with something.) In other words, white people would just shrug, so Black people should too.

The debug question is: could that legislature exist? In 1896 it was being made impossible. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, southern states wrote new constitutions to take the vote away from Black men without ever mentioning race, which the Fifteenth Amendment forbade. They used poll taxes (a fee you had to pay to vote), literacy tests marked by white officials, and in Louisiana in 1898 a grandfather clause. That clause excused a man from the new tests if he, his father or his grandfather had been able to vote on 1 January 1867. No Black man in Louisiana could vote on that date, so the escape hatch was for white men only.

The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research centre, reports what happened next. About 130,000 Black men were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896. By 1904 the number was 1,342. The people with the most reason to repeal the Separate Car Act had been removed from the voting rolls. Brown's imaginary legislature could not be elected, because the law was making sure of it.

Worth holding on to: when an argument asks you to imagine the situation reversed, check whether the reversal was actually possible. Here it was not, and that is the whole point.

Some Black leaders chose a different road. In September 1895, in Atlanta, Booker T. Washington, the boy from the salt furnace, now head of the Tuskegee Institute, told a mostly white audience: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." He was betting that Black southerners could build schools and businesses first and win rights later. Wells, and many others, thought that bet gave away too much.

The skill: sourcing, as Ida B. Wells practised it

In March 1892 three friends of Wells, the owners and workers of a Memphis shop called the People's Grocery, were taken from jail by a mob and killed. That kind of murder by a mob, without a trial, is called lynching. Newspapers usually claimed that lynching victims had committed terrible crimes. Wells set out to test that claim. When a white mob wrecked the office and presses of her Memphis newspaper, she moved north to New York and kept counting.

Her method is the lesson. In The Red Record (1895) she explained where her numbers came from:

The purpose of the pages which follow shall be to give the record which has been made, not by colored men, but that which is the result of compilations made by white men, of reports sent over the civilized world by white men in the South. ... In order to be safe from the charge of exaggeration, the incidents hereinafter reported have been confined to those vouched for by the Tribune.

Who made this, and why: Wells, a Black journalist, wrote for readers in America and Britain who might not believe a Black writer about white violence. So she took her figures from the Chicago Tribune, a white-owned newspaper that published a count every year. Her headline number: in 1894, 132 people in the United States were executed after a trial, and 197 were killed by mobs.

Sourcing means asking four questions of any document before you trust it: Who made it? When? For whom? Why? Wells turned those questions into a strategy. She knew her readers would ask them about her, so she chose a source whose maker had no reason to help her side. Evidence from a witness who is not on your side is the hardest evidence to wave away. You saw the same thing with Thomas Jesse Jones and his school numbers.

Common misconceptions

• "Jim Crow was just the old southern way of life left over from slavery." Most Jim Crow laws were new, written from the 1880s onward, and some came after 1900. They had to be passed because the separation they demanded did not exist everywhere on its own.
• "Segregation laws existed only in the South." The National Park Service list includes school laws from Missouri and New Mexico, and a marriage law from Wyoming. Northern cities also kept people apart through housing rules and custom, even where no statute said so.
• "Separate but equal meant the facilities were equal, just apart." The government's own figures show southern states spending about $10 in teachers' pay on each white child for every $3 on a Black child, and far worse in the counties with the most Black children.

The short version

• Jim Crow laws, from the 1880s into the 1960s, forced the races apart in trains, schools, parks and even children's baseball.
• Homer Plessy's arrest on 7 June 1892 was a planned test case, and on 18 May 1896 the Supreme Court upheld separate but equal, seven to one.
• The Court's reasoning fails three checks: the law's own nurse exception, the unequal spending, and the removal of Black voters who might have changed the law.
• In Louisiana, Black registered voters fell from about 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904 after the 1898 constitution.
• Ida B. Wells documented lynching with a white newspaper's own figures: 197 people killed by mobs in 1894.
• Sourcing means asking who made a document, when, for whom and why, and giving extra weight to evidence from a witness with no reason to help your side.

Sources

1. Supreme Court of the United States. (1896). Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (opinion of the Court by Justice Brown; dissent by Justice Harlan). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
2. National Park Service. (2018). Jim Crow laws. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park. nps.gov
3. Jones, T. J. (1917). Negro education: A study of the private and higher schools for colored people in the United States (Vol. 1, Bulletin 1916, No. 38). U.S. Bureau of Education. ERIC. eric.ed.gov
4. Wells-Barnett, I. B. (1895). The red record: Tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynching in the United States. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
5. The Historic New Orleans Collection. (2025). Louisiana v. voting rights, then and now. First Draft. hnoc.org

A photograph at Promontory Summit, 10 May 1869

Picture a black-and-white photograph taken in the desert of Utah. Two steam locomotives stand nose to nose on a single track. One, the Jupiter, has come from California. The other, Number 119, has come from Nebraska. Men have climbed all over both engines, and a crowd fills the ground between them. In the middle two men lean in to shake hands, and a few people hold up bottles to celebrate. (Some later prints of the photograph had the bottles scratched out, because many Americans disapproved of drinking.)

The photographer was Andrew J. Russell, and the place was Promontory Summit. That morning the last spike of the first transcontinental railroad had been driven, and a telegraph operator sent one word to the whole country: "done." A journey across the continent that had taken months by wagon now took days, at a tenth of the cost.

Now look for who is missing. The Central Pacific, which built the line east from Sacramento, had been built mostly by workers from China. By early 1867 they made up about nine in every ten of its workers. Eight Chinese workers laid the last rail that day. Yet when researchers at Stanford University searched Russell's famous picture, they could find only two Chinese faces in the crowd.

Key idea: a photograph shows who was standing in front of the camera, which is not the same as who did the work. To find out who built the West, you have to compare the picture with other evidence.

The skill: comparison

To compare in history means to put two or more things side by side and ask what is the same and what is different. The trick is to ask each one the same questions. If you ask the railroad workers about pay and the homesteaders about scenery, you have not compared anything. So this lesson follows three groups who went west, and asks each of them five questions: Who were they? What pulled them west? What were they promised? What did they actually get? And whose land was it?

The railroad workers

The Central Pacific began hiring Chinese workers in 1864. Most came from the province of Guangdong in southern China, many first drawn to California by the gold rush. The company paid them $26 a month for a six-day week, and they had to buy their own food. White workers were fed at the company's expense. Chinese workers did much of the most dangerous work: blasting tunnels through the granite of the Sierra Nevada mountains, even through the winter of 1866-1867, when forty-four storms left the summit under an average of eighteen feet of snow. Avalanches swept away whole camps. One took twenty workers at once.

A reporter named Albert D. Richardson travelled past the works in 1867 and wrote down what he saw.

The cars now (1867) run nearly to the summit of the Sierras. ... four thousand laborers were at work, one-tenth Irish, the rest Chinese. ... Irish laborers received thirty dollars per month (gold) and board; Chinese, thirty-one dollars, boarding themselves.

Who made this, and why: Richardson was a New York newspaperman writing a travel book, Beyond the Mississippi, for readers in the East who wanted to hear about the wonders of the West. His numbers are useful because he was an eyewitness. His point of view shows too: in the parts of the passage left out here, he compares the Chinese workers to swarming ants and calls them by an insulting nickname. You can use a source's facts and still notice its prejudice.

Do the comparison his numbers invite. An Irish worker got $30 and his meals. A Chinese worker got $31 and bought his own meals. Food cost money, so the Chinese worker came out behind, for work that was often more dangerous.

The Chinese workers knew it. On 24 June 1867, after a tunnel explosion killed several men, about three thousand of them put down their tools along thirty miles of the line, all at once. They demanded $40 a month, a ten-hour day instead of eleven, and shorter shifts in the tunnels. Their food supplies were cut off, and the company's boss, Charles Crocker, later took the credit for it. After eight days, hungry and faced by the sheriff and a group of armed deputies, they went back to work. It was not a simple defeat. Stanford historians note that the company quietly raised pay for experienced Chinese workers in the months that followed. And no Chinese worker could become an American citizen, because a law of 1790 limited citizenship by naturalisation to white people. In 1882 Congress went further, with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which stopped almost all new Chinese immigration.

The homesteaders

On 20 May 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. It offered 160 acres of government land, a square about half a mile on each side, to any adult citizen, or anyone who had declared they intended to become one, who had never fought against the United States. The deal: live on the land for five years, build a home, farm it, and pay a small filing fee. Then it was yours. Immigrants, single women and formerly enslaved people all filed claims. The National Park Service counts 270 million acres claimed and settled this way, about 10 percent of the land of the United States.

One homesteader wrote about it better than almost anyone. Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a widow who had worked as a washerwoman in Denver. In 1909 she took a job as housekeeper for a rancher near Burnt Fork, Wyoming, filed a claim on the quarter-section next to his, and wrote letters about her new life to her old employer. In January 1913 she wrote:

This year Jerrine cut and dropped enough potatoes to raise a ton of fine potatoes. She wanted to try, so we let her, and you will remember that she is but six years old. ... any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed; will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.

Who made this, and why: Stewart wrote to Mrs. Coney, the woman she used to work for, and the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the letters in 1913 and 1914. The book's publisher admitted that some names were changed and some parts left out. Stewart was also an enthusiast who wanted other poor women to try homesteading, and she had married the rancher next door in 1909, so she did not face the work alone. Those facts do not make her letter false. They tell you what kind of evidence it is: one happy, capable woman's view, written to persuade.

Now set her letter beside a number. The National Archives reports that of about 500 million acres the government gave out between 1862 and 1904, only about 80 million went to homesteaders. Most of the rest went to speculators (people who buy land to sell it at a profit), cattle owners, miners, loggers, and the railroads, which Congress had paid in land for every mile of track they built. The act, the Archives adds, was no cure for poverty: comparatively few labourers and poor farmers could afford the tools, seed and livestock a new farm needed.

The Exodusters

In 1877, the year Reconstruction ended, six Black men and one white land speculator named W. R. Hill founded a town on the plains of western Kansas and called it Nicodemus. They printed a poster, called a broadside, and sent it across the South.

To The Colored Citizens of the United States. ... We, the Nicodemus Town Company of Graham County, Kan., are now in possession of our lands and the Town Site of Nicodemus, which is beautifully located ... in the great Solomon Valley, 240 miles west of Topeka, and we are proud to say it is the finest country we ever saw. ... Now is your time to secure your home on Government Land in the Great Solomon Valley of Western Kansas.

Who made this, and why: the Nicodemus Town Company printed it on 2 July 1877 to attract settlers, and the company made money from selling town lots and charging fees. It is an advertisement, so expect it to show only the good side.

Many of the first settlers came from Kentucky with little money, few tools and no horses. There was almost no timber, so they built homes out of blocks of prairie sod, the thick grass-rooted top layer of the soil. Some turned back. Others survived by collecting buffalo bones to sell and by working on the railroads, and they asked for help from charities and from the Osage nation. Nicodemus lasted, and it is a National Historic Site today. Two years later, in the Exodus of 1879, thousands more Black southerners, perhaps 26,000, left for Kansas to escape the violence you read about in the last two lessons. People called them Exodusters, after the Israelites' exodus from slavery in Egypt.

Three groups, one table

Read across the rows. Every group was drawn by a promise, and every group found a gap between the promise and the life. The differences matter just as much. Homesteaders could end up owning land and voting. Chinese workers could do neither. The Exodusters were not just seeking something; they were escaping something. And look at the last row, which is the same for everyone. The National Park Service puts it simply: "To settlers, immigrants, and homesteaders, the West was empty land. To American Indians, it was home." The next lesson looks at the West from that side.

The upshot: a comparison is only as good as its questions. Ask everyone the same ones, and patterns appear that no single story shows.

Common misconceptions

• "The West was empty land waiting for settlers." It was the home of dozens of Native nations. The land offered to homesteaders was land the United States had taken or was about to take from them.
• "Chinese workers were lowered over the cliffs at Cape Horn in baskets to set explosives." The story is often repeated, but Stanford's historians found no engineer's report, newspaper account or photograph from the 1860s that mentions it. It seems to have begun in a 1927 article by a railroad publicity agent. The real work was dangerous enough without a legend.
• "Homestead land was completely free." The land cost only a small fee, but a family still needed money for tools, seed, animals and food until the first harvest, which is exactly what many Nicodemus settlers lacked.
• "The golden spike was driven at Promontory Point." Reporters in 1869 got the name wrong, and the mistake stuck. The National Park Service explains that Promontory Point is thirty-five miles to the south; the ceremony was at Promontory Summit.

Putting it together

• The transcontinental railroad was finished at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869, and crossing the country fell from months to days.
• By 1867 about nine in ten Central Pacific workers were Chinese, paid less than white workers and made to buy their own food. About three thousand struck in June 1867.
• The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 160 acres for five years of living on and farming the land; about 270 million acres were claimed this way, but most western land went to speculators, ranchers, miners, loggers and railroads.
• Nicodemus, Kansas, founded in 1877, and the Exodus of 1879 show freed families seeking land and safety on the plains.
• To compare, ask every group the same questions, then read across for what is shared and what is different.

Sources

1. Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. (n.d.). Key questions. Stanford University. chineserailroadworkers.stanford.edu
2. Richardson, A. D. (1867). Beyond the Mississippi. American Publishing Company. Excerpt reprinted in OpenStax (2019), U.S. history, section 17.5, The impact of expansion on Chinese immigrants and Hispanic citizens. openstax.org
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Homestead Act (1862). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. Stewart, E. P. (1914). Letters of a woman homesteader. Houghton Mifflin. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
5. National Park Service. (n.d.). "Wake Nicodemus!" [Article reproducing the Nicodemus Town Company broadside of 2 July 1877]. nps.gov

A boy and the "spotted buffalo"

In the 1870s a Lakota boy rode with the men of his band to the government agency, the office where the United States handed out food and supplies. The government had sent something new. Years later, as an old man, he remembered the day.

One day we boys heard some of the men talking about going to the agency. They said the Government had sent some spotted buffalo for the Indians. This was the name the Indians gave to the cows, there being no word in the Sioux tongue for the white man's cattle. Our own wild buffalo had been disappearing very rapidly, as the white people had been killing them as fast as possible.

Who made this, and why: the boy was Luther Standing Bear, whose Lakota name was Ota Kte, Plenty Kill. He was born in 1868 and wrote this in My People the Sioux, published in 1928, when he was about sixty and living in California. His preface calls the book "a message to the white race; to bring my people before their eyes in a true and authentic manner." He thanks a white writer, E. A. Brininstool, for help preparing it, which is worth remembering when you weigh the exact wording. He goes on to say the cattle smelled so bad that the boys held their noses, and that his people still slipped away from the agency, without the permit they were now supposed to carry, to hunt the last buffalo.

Look at what the passage shows without saying it. A people who had fed, clothed and housed themselves from the buffalo now rode to a government office for cows. Something had changed the balance of power on the Plains, and it was not only a battle.

The buffalo, in numbers

Nobody counted the buffalo, more properly called bison, while they were plentiful. William T. Hornaday, a naturalist at the Smithsonian Institution, wrote that before 1870 "it would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes." After the railroads came, hunters killed them by the million for their hides, which were shipped east and turned into leather. In 1886 Hornaday went to Montana to collect specimens for the national museum before the animals disappeared. Then he tried to count what was left.

Who made this, and why: Hornaday published the count in 1889 in a report of the U.S. National Museum. He was not a neutral counter. He wanted Americans to be shocked into protecting the survivors, and later he helped found the American Bison Society to save them. His numbers for the far north are estimates. Even so, no one has seriously argued that the total was much larger.

For the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Comanche and the other Plains nations, the buffalo were food, clothing, tipi covers, tools and the centre of religious life. When the herds vanished, people who had been able to refuse the government's terms had to accept its rations, the weekly food supplies handed out at the agencies. Food became a lever the government could pull.

Key idea: the Plains nations were not beaten only on battlefields. The destruction of the buffalo took away their independence first, and that made everything after it possible.

The treaty of 1868

In the 1860s the Lakota were not losing. Under the leader Red Cloud, they fought the U.S. Army to a standstill along a trail to the Montana gold fields, and the army agreed to abandon its forts there. The peace was written down in the Fort Laramie Treaty, first signed on 29 April 1868. A treaty is a formal agreement between nations, and under the Constitution a treaty made by the United States is part of "the supreme Law of the Land."

The treaty created the Great Sioux Reservation, most of the western half of what is now South Dakota, including the Black Hills, which are sacred to the Lakota. Two articles matter most for this lesson.

Article II: ... shall be and the same is set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named ... and the United States now solemnly agrees that no persons, except those herein designated and authorized so to do ... shall ever be permitted to pass over, settle upon or reside in the territory described in this article.

Article XII: No treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described ... shall be of any validity or force as against the said Indians, unless executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians occupying or interested in the same.

Who made this, and why: U.S. peace commissioners wrote the treaty in English to end a war the army was not winning. Lakota leaders signed with an X mark after hearing it through interpreters; Red Cloud did not sign until November 1868, after the forts had actually been abandoned. In return for the reservation, the Lakota agreed not to attack the railroads being built on the Plains. A cession, in Article XII, means giving land up. The article made any future sale very hard on purpose: three of every four adult men would have to agree.

Gold, and a secret decision

In 1874 an army expedition led by George Armstrong Custer rode into the Black Hills and reported gold. By the middle of 1875 thousands of prospectors were digging there illegally. The treaty said the United States would keep them out. The government offered to lease the Hills or buy them for $6 million, and the Lakota refused.

Then, in early November 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant met with his secretaries of war and the interior and decided that the army would no longer try to keep the miners out. The order was to be carried out "quietly," and the decision kept "confidential." Grant's reason, as a general reported it, was his "belief that such resistance only increased their desire and complicated the troubles." Miners poured in.

War, and a paper signed by one man in ten

In 1876 the army marched against the Lakota and Cheyenne bands that refused to report to the agencies. On 25 June 1876, at the Little Bighorn River in Montana, Lakota and Cheyenne warriors from a great camp whose leaders included Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse destroyed Custer's command. Luther Standing Bear's father was there. "In all the years I was at home," Standing Bear wrote, "I never heard this battle spoken of in a bragging way." About 1877, he remembered, many families from the northern bands moved in near his family's agency, and "it seemed to me they were very poor. Their tipis were very small, and their clothes were not good." Crazy Horse himself visited his family's tipi; a few days later, on 5 September 1877, he was killed at Fort Robinson while soldiers tried to imprison him.

Meanwhile Congress used the lever. In August 1876 it voted that the Sioux would get no more rations until they gave up the Black Hills. That September a commission arrived with an agreement already written. The commissioners told the Lakota leaders that the United States no longer had any duty to feed them. In plain words, the choice was sell or starve. The treaty required three-fourths of the adult men to sign. Only about one in ten did. On 28 February 1877 Congress passed the agreement into law anyway, and the Black Hills were taken.

The dispute: two cases

For more than a century the Sioux nations argued in court that the Black Hills had been taken illegally. The United States argued that they had been fairly exchanged. Here are the two cases in their strongest form.

Notice that both sides use real evidence. The disagreement is partly about facts and partly about what the facts mean: was food for a starving people a fair price, or a weapon?

What settled it, and what did not

On 30 June 1980 the Supreme Court decided United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, eight votes to one. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that the 1877 Act was a taking of property the treaty had set apart for the Sioux, and that the United States owed the 1877 value of $17.1 million plus interest going back to 1877. That obligation, he wrote, "must now, at last, be paid." An earlier court had described the government's conduct in words that have been quoted ever since: "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."

So the legal question was settled. The dispute was not. The Sioux nations refused the money, because accepting it would mean agreeing that the Black Hills had been sold. The award has stayed in a government account ever since, earning interest; by one 2022 estimate it was worth more than $2 billion. What would settle the dispute, in the view of the Lakota, is not money but land.

The core of it: the Supreme Court decided that the taking was wrong and must be paid for. The people it was taken from decided that payment could not make it right.

The skill: cause and effect

A cause is something that helps make an event happen; an effect is what follows from it. Historians sort causes into two kinds. Long-term causes build up slowly and set the stage. A trigger is the short-term event that sets things off. Here is the Black Hills story as a chain.

1. Long-term: railroads and hide hunters destroy the buffalo, so the Plains nations come to depend on government rations.
2. Trigger: gold is reported in the Black Hills in 1874, and miners rush in.
3. Grant's secret decision in 1875 stops the army from removing them, which makes war more likely.
4. The war of 1876, including the Little Bighorn, turns Congress against the Sioux.
5. Congress uses rations as a lever, sell or starve, and then passes the 1877 Act.

Two warnings. First, an effect can become a cause: the Lakota victory at the Little Bighorn led directly to the harsher law of August 1876. Second, coming first does not prove causing. The buffalo were not killed in order to take the Black Hills; the two stories ran side by side and made each other worse. Good cause-and-effect reasoning shows how each link is connected by evidence, not just by date.

Common misconceptions

• "The Plains nations lost because they could not win battles." They won some of the biggest ones, including the fight over the Montana trail in the 1860s and the Little Bighorn. They lost their land through the destruction of the buffalo, broken treaties and food used as pressure.
• "A treaty with an Indian nation was just a promise, not a law." The Constitution calls treaties "the supreme Law of the Land." That is why the Sioux could take the United States to court over the Fort Laramie Treaty, and win.
• "The Supreme Court ended the Black Hills case in 1980." It settled the legal question of payment. The Sioux nations refused the money, and the dispute over the land continues.

Where this leaves us

• The buffalo fell from a number too big to count to 1,091 animals in 1889, and the Plains nations lost their independence with them.
• The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 set the Black Hills apart for the Sioux and required three-fourths of adult men to agree to any sale.
• Gold in 1874, Grant's secret decision in 1875, the war of 1876 and the threat to cut off food led to the Act of 28 February 1877, signed by only about one man in ten.
• In 1980 the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that the Black Hills had been taken and must be paid for; the Sioux refused the money and still seek the land.
• Cause and effect means linking events by evidence, separating long-term causes from triggers, and watching for effects that become causes.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) [Transcript and introduction]. Milestone Documents. archives.gov
2. Supreme Court of the United States. (1980). United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (opinion of the Court by Justice Blackmun; dissent by Justice Rehnquist). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
3. Standing Bear, L. (1928). My people the Sioux (chaps. 5 and 8). Houghton Mifflin. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. Hornaday, W. T. (1889). The extermination of the American bison. Report of the U.S. National Museum, 1886-87. Smithsonian Institution. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
5. OpenStax. (2019). 17.4 The assault on American Indian life and culture. In U.S. history. Rice University. openstax.org

Red apples, 1884

In 1884 two missionaries and an interpreter walked up the footpath to a cottage on the Yankton reservation in Dakota Territory. They had come to take children east to a school in Indiana. Inside, an eight-year-old Dakota girl was jumping up and down with excitement, because her friend Judewin had told her about the East, where there was a great tree covered in red apples and you could pick as many as you liked. She had never seen an apple tree. She had never seen a train.

"Mother, ask them if little girls may have all the red apples they want, when they go East," I whispered aloud, in my excitement. The interpreter heard me, and answered: "Yes, little girl, the nice red apples are for those who pick them; and you will have a ride on the iron horse if you go with these good people." I had never seen a train, and he knew it.

Who made this, and why: the girl was Zitkala-Sa, which means Red Bird, born in 1876. She wrote this memory in 1900, when she was about twenty-four, for the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine read by educated white Americans. By then she was a teacher at the most famous of these schools, and she was angry about what they did. Notice the short last sentence. She wants you to see that the interpreter knew exactly how to tempt a child.

Her mother did not want her to go. The girl cried and begged, and the next morning her mother gave her answer to Zitkala-Sa's older brother, in words her daughter never forgot: "She will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dakotas, and many more palefaces. ... But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment." So there was a third point of view in that cottage: a mother who saw what was coming and made a hard choice. The school was White's Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, run by Quaker missionaries.

The first day in the land of apples

It was winter when she arrived, so there were no apples on the trees. A bell rang for breakfast. Shoes clattered on bare floors. Everyone spoke a language she did not understand. At the table she sat down at the wrong moment, then stood up, then sat down again, while a woman watched her. She began to cry.

The worst was still to come. Her friend Judewin, who knew a little English, overheard that the girls' long hair was going to be cut. Zitkala-Sa explained why that was so frightening.

Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards! ... I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.

She had hidden under a bed, and she was dragged out and tied to a chair. Shingled hair means hair cut short and close. To the teachers, a haircut was hygiene and good order. To the girl, it was the sign of a captured coward or a person in mourning, done to her by strangers. She ended that chapter by saying she felt like "one of many little animals driven by a herder." Later she also found joy at school, in learning to read and write and to play the violin. Both things are true, and her writing holds them together.

What matters here: the same event can mean completely different things to the people doing it and the person it is done to. That difference is what historians call point of view.

Names on a blackboard, Carlisle, 1879

Five years earlier, in October 1879, a Lakota boy named Ota Kte, Plenty Kill, stepped through the gate of an old army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was ten, and he later realised that he had been the very first boy to walk into the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He had gone, he wrote, "merely to show my people that I was brave enough to leave the reservation and go East." You met him in the last lesson as Luther Standing Bear. This is how he got the name Luther.

One day when we came to school there was a lot of writing on one of the blackboards. We did not know what it meant, but our interpreter came into the room and said, "Do you see all these marks on the blackboard? Well, each word is a white man's name. They are going to give each one of you one of these names by which you will hereafter be known." None of the names were read or explained to us, so of course we did not know the sound or meaning of any of them.

Each boy was handed a long pointer and told to choose. The teacher wrote the chosen name on white tape and sewed it onto the back of his shirt. "When my turn came," Standing Bear wrote, "I took the pointer and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy." For a week, when the teacher called the roll, nobody answered, because nobody knew what his own new name sounded like; she had to walk around reading the backs of their shirts.

Then came the barbers. The older boys held a council, and one of them, Robert American Horse, made a speech: "If I am to learn the ways of the white people, I can do it just as well with my hair on." The boys agreed. A few days later the barbers came anyway, and called them out of class one at a time. When Standing Bear's hair was cut, he wrote, "it hurt my feelings to such an extent that the tears came into my eyes."

What the schools were for

Carlisle was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer. In 1892 he explained his idea to a national conference of charity workers in Denver.

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

Who made this, and why: Pratt was speaking to reformers who thought of themselves as friends of Native people, and he was arguing against those who wanted Native people killed. His alternative was to keep the person alive and destroy everything that made him Lakota or Dakota or Cheyenne: the language, the religion, the clothes, the hair, the name, the family's way of life. To assimilate means to absorb a group into another culture until it disappears as a separate people. That was the stated goal.

Carlisle was only one school. In 2024 the U.S. Department of the Interior finished a two-volume investigation, which produced the first official list of the schools. It found that between 1819 and 1969 there were 417 federal Indian boarding schools in 37 states or territories. It found that at least 973 Native children died while attending them, and it said the true number is higher, because many records are missing. Many children never came home.

Counting the land: the Dawes Act

While the schools worked on the children, a law worked on the land. On 8 February 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Act, named after Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts. Reservations had been owned in common by the whole nation. The Dawes Act split them into allotments, separate plots for individuals: a quarter-section, 160 acres, for each head of a family, and smaller plots for single people and children. Whatever was left over was declared "surplus" and could be sold to white settlers.

The idea, the National Archives explains, was that a person who farmed his own plot and wore white people's clothes would gradually stop being "Indian." In practice much of the allotted land was dry and poor for farming, many people could not afford tools, seed and animals, and plots were split smaller and smaller among heirs. When Zitkala-Sa went home to the Yankton reservation in 1901, she found white settlers moving onto land that had been allotted to her people.

Who made this, and why: the figures come from a 1969 report by a committee of the U.S. Senate, which said the law had cut the tribes' land "from 140 million acres to [approximately] 50 million acres"; the Interior Department quoted it in its 2022 investigation. The Senate committee added a finding that ties this lesson together: money from the sale of Native land was used to pay for taking Native children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools.

Bottom line: the land paid for the schools. The Senate committee called the two policies "directly related": they worked on the same families from two directions.

The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

By 1890 the Lakota had lost the buffalo, the Black Hills and much of their reservation, and their children were being sent away. That year many of them took up a new religion, the Ghost Dance, taught by a Northern Paiute holy man named Wovoka. Its followers believed that dancing it faithfully would reunite the living with their dead and bring an end to the settlers' advance. Government agents and settlers took the dancing as a sign of war, and the army was sent in.

On 15 December 1890 Sitting Bull was shot dead by Lakota police sent to arrest him. A band of Miniconjou Lakota led by Spotted Elk, also called Big Foot, set out for the Pine Ridge agency. Soldiers of the 7th Cavalry stopped them and camped them beside Wounded Knee Creek. On the morning of 29 December the soldiers began taking the Lakota men's guns. A shot was fired, and the soldiers opened fire on the camp. Between 250 and 300 Lakota were killed, many of them women and children. Twenty-five soldiers also died, some probably hit by their own side's fire. The army later awarded nineteen soldiers the Medal of Honor for that day.

Luther Standing Bear was teaching school at the Rosebud agency when the news came. He had done everything the schools asked of him. His brother Ellis, a scout for the army, had watched it happen from a hill.

According to the white man's history this was known as the 'battle' of Wounded Knee, but it was not a battle ... it was a slaughter, a massacre. ... There I was, doing my best to teach my people to follow in the white men's road ... and this was my reward for it all!

Historians today call it the Wounded Knee Massacre. It is often named as the end of the wars on the Plains. It was not the end of the Lakota, who are still there.

The skill: point of view

You have now read three people describing the same system: Pratt, who built it; Zitkala-Sa, who was sent into it at eight; and Standing Bear, who went through it and tried to live by its rules. To read them well, ask of each: where is this person standing, and what can they see from there?

• Pratt stood among reformers in 1892 and saw himself as a rescuer. From there, destroying a culture looked like mercy compared with destroying the people. What he could not see, or chose not to, was the child under the scissors.
• Zitkala-Sa wrote at twenty-four about being eight, as a teacher who had grown angry at the system. She saw the fear and the humiliation clearly, and she also admitted the joy of learning. Her anger is part of her evidence, not a reason to dismiss it.
• Standing Bear wrote at about sixty, after a long life in both worlds. He is proud of learning to write his name and fond of his first teacher, and he still remembers the tears. His account of Wounded Knee comes from his brother, who was an eyewitness, and from his own shock.

None of these people is simply lying. Each tells the truth from where they stand, and each leaves something out. The historian's job is to put them side by side.

Common misconceptions

• "Boarding schools were just ordinary schools far from home." Their stated goal, in their founder's words, was to "kill the Indian" in each child: to replace a child's language, religion, name and appearance. The government's own 2024 report counts at least 973 children who died while attending.
• "The Dawes Act gave Native families land." It gave some families plots, but it opened the rest to sale. Native-held land fell from about 140 million acres to about 50 million in less than fifty years.
• "Wounded Knee was the last battle of the Indian wars." The soldiers were disarming a camp that included many women and children, and most of the dead were not fighters. That is why historians, and the Lakota, call it a massacre.

What to remember

• Zitkala-Sa went east at eight in 1884, tempted by red apples, and wrote in 1900 about having her braids cut; Luther Standing Bear chose the name Luther from a blackboard at Carlisle in 1879.
• Carlisle's founder, Richard Henry Pratt, said in 1892: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
• There were 417 federal Indian boarding schools between 1819 and 1969, and at least 973 children died while attending them.
• The Dawes Act of 1887 split reservations into allotments and sold the rest; Native-held land fell from about 140 million acres to about 50 million by 1934.
• At Wounded Knee on 29 December 1890 soldiers killed between 250 and 300 Lakota, many of them women and children.
• Point of view: ask where each writer stands and what they can and cannot see from there, then set the accounts side by side.

Sources

1. Zitkala-Sa. (1921). American Indian stories (including "Impressions of an Indian childhood" and "The school days of an Indian girl," first published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1900). Hayworth. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Standing Bear, L. (1928). My people the Sioux (chaps. 13, 14 and 21). Houghton Mifflin. Internet Archive. archive.org
3. Pratt, R. H. (1892). The advantages of mingling Indians with whites. In Official report of the nineteenth annual Conference of Charities and Correction (pp. 46-59). Excerpt published by the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Dickinson College. carlisleindian.dickinson.edu
4. U.S. Department of the Interior. (2022, 2024). Federal Indian boarding school initiative investigative report (Vols. I and II). Bureau of Indian Affairs. bia.gov
5. National Archives. (n.d.). Dawes Act (1887). Milestone Documents. archives.gov

A bobbin boy, 1848

In 1848 a thirteen-year-old boy from Scotland went to work in a cotton mill in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, across the river from Pittsburgh. His family had just arrived from Scotland with very little money, and his father had given up hand-loom weaving for a factory job. The boy's job was bobbin boy: he changed the bobbins, the spools that held the thread, on the machines. Decades later he still remembered it.

In this factory he also obtained for me a position as bobbin boy, and my first work was done there at one dollar and twenty cents per week. It was a hard life. In the winter father and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness, reach the factory before it was daylight, and, with a short interval for lunch, work till after dark.

Who made this, and why: the boy was Andrew Carnegie, and he wrote these lines in his autobiography, published in 1920, a year after his death. By then he had been the richest man in America. A story that starts with $1.20 a week makes a very good beginning for a rich man's life story, and Carnegie knew it. The facts check out, but notice how neatly they serve the tale he wanted to tell: that anyone could rise as he had.

By the late 1880s that boy's company was the largest maker of steel rails in the world. In 1901, at sixty-five, he sold it. The question this lesson asks is the one Americans argued about while he was alive: was he a builder who made the country stronger, or a robber who got rich on other people's work?

Steel and oil

Carnegie climbed fast: telegraph messenger boy at $2.50 a week, then a railroad clerk, then an investor, then an ironmaker. From the 1870s he poured his money into steel mills around Pittsburgh. He was famous for saving his profits in good years and buying up rival companies cheaply in bad ones, during the business slumps of the 1870s and 1890s. Steel is stronger than iron, and cheap steel meant more railroad track, taller buildings and longer bridges. In 1901 Carnegie sold his company to the banker J. P. Morgan for $303,450,000, and it became the core of the giant U.S. Steel Corporation.

John D. Rockefeller made his fortune in oil. In the 1860s the most important product made from crude oil was kerosene, a fuel for lamps that was cleaner and cheaper than whale oil. In 1870 Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, Ohio. He bought out rival refineries or drove them out of business until, by 1879, Standard Oil controlled nearly 95 percent of the oil refining in the country. A company that controls almost all of a market like that is called a monopoly. When several companies were joined together under one group of managers to control a market, the arrangement was called a trust.

Both men ended up with more money than almost anyone in history. What people argued about was how they made it and what they did with it.

The case for the builders

Carnegie made the builders' case himself, in an essay of June 1889 that became known as The Gospel of Wealth. He argued that competition between businesses was hard on workers but made goods cheaper for everybody: "The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford." And he argued that a rich man had a duty to give his fortune away while he was alive.

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. ... The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.

Who made this, and why: Carnegie wrote it for the North American Review, a serious magazine read by educated and wealthy Americans. He was trying to persuade other millionaires, and to answer critics who said great fortunes were a danger to the country.

He did what he said. In the last eighteen years of his life he gave away about $350 million, almost 90 percent of his fortune. Between 1883 and 1929 his money built 2,509 public libraries, 1,689 of them in the United States. Rockefeller gave away huge sums too: he founded the University of Chicago, and his foundations helped nearly wipe out hookworm, a parasite that made many children in the South sick and weak. Steel and oil also changed daily life: kerosene lamps lit homes at night, and steel rails carried food and goods across the country.

The point: the builders' case rests on real evidence: cheaper goods, new industries, and gifts that still stand in thousands of towns.

The case for the robber barons

The other side has real evidence too. The term robber baron was first used against railroad owners, whom farmers accused of cheating them on shipping rates. It compared the new millionaires to medieval lords who robbed travellers passing their castles. The label spread to anyone suspected of getting rich by crushing workers and bending laws.

Start with the workers. In 1910 the U.S. Bureau of Labor investigated the iron and steel industry, the industry Carnegie had done more than anyone to build. Here is what it found.

Who made this, and why: government investigators produced these figures for the U.S. Senate, which printed a summary in 1912. They were not neutral. Their report calls seven-day work an "evil" and points out that when day and night crews switched, men stayed on duty for 18 or even 24 hours straight, a shift workers called the long turn. For a man working twelve hours a day, the report noted, more than three-fourths of his waking hours were spent in the mill.

Now reread Carnegie with those hours in mind. In the same essay he said the rich man should act as "trustee for his poorer brethren," doing "for them better than they would or could do for themselves," and that wealth passing through the hands of the few could do more good "than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves." In other words, a library built with his money did more good, he believed, than the same money paid to his workers as higher wages. His workers could fairly ask who had made him the judge of that.

Then look at Rockefeller. In 1880 the editors of the New York World called Standard Oil "the most gigantic, the most cruel, impudent, pitiless and grasping monopoly that ever fastened itself upon a country." In 1904 the cartoonist Udo Keppler drew it for Puck magazine as a giant octopus. Picture it: an oil tank for a head, tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper and shipping industries, a state capitol and the Capitol in Washington, and one long tentacle reaching for the White House. The cartoon's title was a single word: "Next!" That year Standard Oil controlled about 91 percent of the country's oil refining. Congress had passed the Sherman Antitrust Act against monopolies in 1890, and on 15 May 1911 the Supreme Court used it to order Standard Oil broken up.

The skill: point of view

Every source in this lesson has a point of view, and so does each of the two labels. Captain of industry makes a businessman sound like a brave leader steering a ship. Robber baron makes him sound like a thief in a castle. Neither label is a neutral description; each one is a judgement packed into two words. When you meet a label in history, ask who used it, and what they wanted you to feel.

Try the four main sources in this lesson:

• Carnegie's essay is the view from the top. He had been poor, so he believed his own life proved the system worked, and he wrote to persuade other rich men.
• The 1910 report is the view of government investigators looking at the mill floor. Its numbers are careful, and its authors plainly thought the hours were wrong.
• The cartoon is the view of an artist who feared that one company could buy the government. It exaggerates on purpose; that is what cartoons do.
• The newspaper is the view of editors in 1880, writing for readers who were angry about monopolies.

Notice that the sources do not really disagree about the facts. Carnegie did give away most of his fortune. His industry did work men twelve hours a day. Standard Oil did make kerosene cheap and did crush its rivals. The disagreement is about what matters most.

What would settle it?

Part of this dispute is about values, and evidence alone cannot settle it: how much hardship for some people is worth how much progress for others? But part of it can be tested. Carnegie's defenders said the long hours were necessary to make steel cheaply. After years of public pressure, the steel companies gave up the twelve-hour day in the 1920s and went on making steel. That does not decide whether Carnegie was a good man. It does show that one of the arguments for the long hours was weaker than it sounded.

In short: builders and robber barons may be two descriptions of the same men. The better question for a historian is not "hero or villain?" but "better for whom, and at whose cost?"

Common misconceptions

• "Carnegie and Rockefeller got rich by inventing things." Neither was mainly an inventor. They made their fortunes by organising, buying out rivals, cutting costs and controlling whole industries.
• "Rags-to-riches stories like Carnegie's were typical." They were rare. Most bobbin boys stayed poor. Carnegie's story was repeated so often precisely because it was so unusual, and because it suited people who wanted to believe anyone could make it.
• "Monopolies were illegal, so the government stopped them at once." The Sherman Act passed in 1890, but the government did not break up Standard Oil until 1911, twenty-one years later.

Summing up

• Carnegie began as a thirteen-year-old bobbin boy at $1.20 a week in 1848 and sold his steel company in 1901 for $303,450,000.
• Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870; by 1879 it refined nearly 95 percent of the country's oil, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it broken up.
• The builders' case: cheaper goods, new industries, and gifts such as 1,689 American libraries from Carnegie's roughly $350 million in giving.
• The robber barons' case: in 1910 nearly 43 percent of steelworkers worked at least 72 hours a week, and Standard Oil drove out its rivals.
• Labels such as robber baron and captain of industry carry a point of view; ask who used them and why, and then ask "better for whom?"

Sources

1. Carnegie, A. (1920). Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (J. C. Van Dyke, Ed.; chap. 3). Houghton Mifflin. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Carnegie, A. (1889, June). Wealth [later known as The gospel of wealth]. North American Review, 148. Wikisource. wikisource.org
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor. (1912). Summary of the wages and hours of labor, from the Report on conditions of employment in the iron and steel industry in the United States (S. Doc. No. 301, 62d Cong., 2d sess.). Internet Archive. archive.org
4. OpenStax. (2019). 18.2 From invention to industrial growth. In U.S. history. Rice University. openstax.org
5. Keppler, U. J. (1904, September 7). Next! [Cartoon]. Puck, 56(1436), centrefold. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LCCN 2001695241).

Forty-eight inches high, November 1908

In November 1908 a man carrying a heavy camera walked into the spinning room of the Lancaster Cotton Mills in Lancaster, South Carolina. A spinning room was full of spinning frames, long machines that twist cotton into thread and wind it onto hundreds of spools at once. At one of them stood a girl in a long dress, her hands up at the thread. The photograph he took shows her beside the frame, with its long row of spools running away behind her into the distance. She looks very small, and the machine looks as if it goes on for ever.

On the back of his record, the photographer wrote a caption.

Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high. Has worked half a year. One of the many small children at work in Lancaster Cotton Mills. Lancaster, S.C., November 1908

Who made this, and why: the photographer was Lewis Hine, a former schoolteacher from New York who had just gone to work for the National Child Labor Committee. The committee, founded in 1904, wanted laws to keep children out of mills, mines and factories. It used Hine's pictures and captions in pamphlets, exhibitions and lectures, to show voters and lawmakers what was happening. The photograph and its caption are now kept by the National Archives, the government's own record office.

Forty-eight inches is four feet. Mark four feet on a door frame and stand beside it: for most people your age, the mark comes to about the shoulder. The caption does not say how old Sadie was. It gives her height instead, and a height is much harder to argue with than an age.

The photograph raises two questions, and this lesson works through both. First, why was a child that small working at a machine that big? Second, and harder: how could anyone in 1908 prove that she was, when the people who ran the mills had every reason to hide it? The first is a question about causes. The second is a question about sourcing, the skill this lesson teaches: asking who made a piece of evidence, when, for whom and why, and what else can confirm it.

How many children were working?

Sadie was not unusual. Every ten years the census counted Americans who worked for pay or for a business, whom it called gainful workers. The census counted children from the age of ten. Here is what it found for children aged ten to fourteen.

Who made this, and why: census takers went from house to house and wrote down what each family told them. Much later the U.S. Census Bureau gathered the answers into a book called Historical Statistics of the United States, and its schools programme printed this table for classrooms. Three cautions come with it. Families answered for themselves, and a family whose child was working illegally had a reason to leave that child out. Children under ten were not counted at all. And children who worked for their own family, on the family farm or in a family shop, were often not counted as workers. So the real number of working children was higher than the table shows.

Read the table in two directions. Down the second column, the number of working children more than doubled between 1870 and 1900, to about 1,750,000. That was more than one child in every five. Down the last column, child labour moved off the farm: in 1870 more than half of these children worked on farms, but by 1900 almost two-thirds worked somewhere else, in mills, mines, canneries, shops and city streets. Then look at the bottom rows. Between 1910 and 1930 the share of children at work fell from about 18 percent to under 6 percent. Something changed. Part of this lesson, and part of Lesson 9, explains what.

Why would a family send a child to the mill?

It is easy to imagine that parents who sent a ten-year-old to a mill did not care about their children. The evidence points somewhere else: to money, to danger, and to employers who wanted children.

Wages were low. In 1900 the average factory worker earned about twenty cents an hour, which came to barely $600 a year. A family with several children could not easily live on one wage like that. If the father was hurt or killed at work, there might be no adult wage at all, and there was no government insurance to replace it.

Laws were weak. There was no national law against child labour. Some states set a lowest age for factory work, but few sent inspectors to check. In 1903 a union organiser named Mary Harris Jones, whom everyone called Mother Jones, went to the textile district of Kensington in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania law said children could not work in the mills before the age of twelve. Here is what she found.

The law was poorly enforced and the mothers of these children often swore falsely as to their children's age. In a single block in Kensington, fourteen women, mothers of twenty-two children all under twelve, explained it was a question of starvation or perjury. That the fathers had been killed or maimed at the mines.

Who made this, and why: Mother Jones wrote these lines in her autobiography, published in 1925, more than twenty years after the events. She was a labour organiser, a person whose job is to get workers to join a union, and she was trying to win readers to her side. Perjury means lying after swearing an oath to tell the truth. The mothers were choosing between breaking the law and watching their children go hungry.

Employers wanted children. A child could be paid far less than a grown man, and factory owners argued that children's work was simple enough to deserve very low wages. Some jobs were built around small bodies and quick fingers. In a cotton mill, a doffer climbed onto the spinning frame to pull off full bobbins, the spools of thread, and put on empty ones, and a spinner walked the rows mending broken threads. In a coal region, boys too young to go down the mine sat in the breaker, sorting coal. Every one of those jobs could have been done by an adult for adult pay. Children were cheaper.

Inside the breaker and the cannery

Hine photographed children in more than a dozen industries. Two of his captions show what the work was like better than any summary can.

A coal breaker was a tall wooden building beside a coal mine, where coal was crushed into pieces and sent sliding down long chutes. Breaker boys sat on planks over the chutes, bent forward, picking out slate, the grey rock that would not burn, with their bare hands as the coal streamed past. In January 1911 Hine photographed the Ewen Breaker at South Pittston, Pennsylvania. The picture shows rows of boys in caps, bent over the chutes, with a haze of dust hanging over them. His caption reads:

View of the Ewen Breaker of the Pa. Coal Co. The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrated the utmost recesses of the boy's lungs. A kind of slave-driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding or kicking them into obedience. S. Pittston, Pa, January 1911

Notice that the caption is not only a description. "Slave-driver" is a judgement, and a strong one, written by a man who wanted his readers to be angry. Keep that in mind; you will come back to it.

Far to the south, in Biloxi, Mississippi, families peeled shrimp and shucked oysters in canneries, factories that pack food into cans. Hine photographed a small boy standing in front of a huge heap of empty oyster shells, taller than any grown-up. The caption:

Manuel the young shrimp picker, 5 years old and a mountain of child labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year. Understands not a word of English. Biloxi, Miss.

Manuel was five, and the census would not have counted him at all. Children also lost fingers and hands to machines. Mother Jones wrote that in Kensington "every day little children came into Union Headquarters, some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle."

Grown-ups organise: unions and strikes

Adult workers had their own grievances: long hours, low pay and dangerous machines. An average factory week was sixty hours, ten hours a day for six days, and in the steel mills men worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, as you saw in the last lesson. One worker alone could do little. If he complained, he could be fired and replaced by the next man at the gate. So workers joined together.

A labour union is a group of workers who bargain with an employer as one body, so that the employer cannot simply replace them one at a time. Its strongest weapon is the strike: all the workers stop work together until the employer agrees to their demands. The employer's answer to a strike could be a lockout, shutting the workers out of the plant, and hiring new workers, whom strikers called scabs.

Two national unions tell the story of these years. The Knights of Labor welcomed women, African Americans, Native Americans and immigrants, of every trade and skill. By 1886 it had more than 700,000 members. That May, at a workers' meeting in Chicago's Haymarket Square, someone threw a bomb that killed police officers, and in the Haymarket affair that followed, much of the public blamed unions for the violence. By the end of 1886 the Knights had fallen to barely 100,000 members. The American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers from its start in 1886 until his death in 1924, took the opposite path: it organised mainly skilled craftsmen, such as carpenters and cigar makers, and asked for practical things, higher wages and shorter hours. It had 500,000 members by 1900 and a million by 1914.

Strikes were frequent, and many were lost. Here are three.

Homestead deserves a closer look, because it belonged to Andrew Carnegie, the man who had written that "the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." Carnegie was away in Scotland that summer. His partner Henry Clay Frick locked the workers out and brought in three hundred armed guards from the Pinkerton detective agency on river barges. On 6 July 1892 strikers and guards fought on the riverbank, and at least nine men were killed. Six days later the Pennsylvania militia marched in. The mill reopened with new workers. On 20 November only 192 of the more than 3,800 strikers turned up to vote, and they voted 101 to 91 to go back to work.

Why this matters: a union was only as strong as its members' ability to hold out. When owners could call on guards, troops and a line of hungry men waiting for jobs, most strikes of this period failed. Workers who could not win at the mill gate began to look for help from the law instead.

A march of mill children, July 1903

Mother Jones knew that strikes alone would not free the children, so she tried something else: publicity. In Kensington, where she said 75,000 textile workers were on strike, at least 10,000 of them children, she stood children who had lost fingers on a platform in front of Philadelphia's city hall and held up their hands for the crowd.

Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children.

Then, in July 1903, she took a group of the striking children on a march of more than a hundred miles, from Philadelphia through New Jersey and New York to Oyster Bay on Long Island, where President Theodore Roosevelt spent his summers. The newspapers called it the Children's Crusade. Each child carried a knapsack holding a knife and fork, a tin cup and a plate; one had a drum and another a fife. Their banners said "We want more schools and less hospitals," "We want time to play," and "Prosperity is here. Where is ours?"

She wanted the president to ask Congress for a law against child labour. "We marched down to Oyster Bay," she wrote, "but the president refused to see us and he would not answer my letters." The Kensington strike was lost. Mother Jones claimed that the march still did its work, and that not long afterwards Pennsylvania passed a law keeping thousands of children out of the factories until they were fourteen.

The skill: sourcing a photograph

Now to the harder question. How could anyone prove what was happening inside a mill whose owners wanted it hidden? Hine's answer was the camera and the notebook. But a photograph is not a window. It is a piece of evidence someone made, and sourcing it means asking five questions.

1. Who made it? Lewis Hine, born in 1874, a teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York before he became the National Child Labor Committee's photographer in 1908.
2. For whom, and why? For the committee, to win laws. Hine was not neutral, and said so. "There is work that profits children," he wrote in 1908, "and there is work that brings profit only to employers."
3. How? Mill managers did not want him inside, so he talked his way in, sometimes posing as a fire inspector, a postcard seller, a Bible salesman or an industrial photographer. The National Archives explains that to get facts for his captions he interviewed the children on some excuse and wrote his notes with his hand hidden inside his pocket.
4. When? Usually on the day, which is a strength: a caption written on the spot is more reliable than a memory written years later. But dates can still go astray. The Library of Congress dates its print of Manuel's photograph to February 1911; the National Archives' record says "ca. 1912-1913". Archives sometimes date a whole box of pictures at once, so a date in a catalogue may be a cataloguer's estimate. A careful historian notes both until something settles it.
5. What else confirms it? Checking one source against others is called corroboration. The census numbers, counted by government workers who were not trying to win a campaign, show more than a million and a half working children. Mother Jones, who never worked with Hine, describes the same false ages and the same injuries. When sources made by different people for different reasons agree, you can trust the point they agree on much more.

Sourcing also tells you what a picture cannot do. Hine insisted his photographs had "no retouching or fakery of any kind," and there is no evidence he faked one. But he chose where to stand. Photographing Sadie beside a spinning frame that runs out of the picture makes her look as small as possible, and the caption's "one of the many small children" is an argument, not a count. Hine himself called his work "photo-interpretation." The picture is honest about what was in front of the lens, and it is still making a case.

The same questions work on Mother Jones's book. It was written in 1925 by an organiser in her eighties, more than twenty years after the march. She says openly what she wanted in 1903: "Public attention on the subject of child labor." That makes her a very good witness to what she saw and what she was trying to do, and a weaker one for exact numbers, which she never explains how she counted.

Back to the two questions

Why was Sadie at the spinning frame? Because her family most likely needed her wages, because the laws were weak and hardly enforced, and because the mill could pay her less than an adult for work her small hands could do. How could anyone prove it? By going in, taking the picture, writing down names, heights, places and dates, and then checking those records against numbers gathered by people with no stake in the fight.

So what?: every source was made by someone for a reason. Knowing the reason does not make a source worthless. Hine's pictures were made to persuade, and they are also some of the best evidence we have. Sourcing tells you which parts of a source to lean on and which parts to check.

Common misconceptions

• "Parents who sent their children to work did not care about them." The mothers Mother Jones met in Kensington called it "a question of starvation or perjury," and their husbands had been killed or hurt in the mines. Most families put children to work because they could not survive without the wages.
• "Child labour happened only in factories." In 1870 more than half of working children aged ten to fourteen worked on farms, and children also worked in canneries, mines, shops and on city streets selling newspapers. Factories were where the numbers grew fastest.
• "Hine's photographs ended child labour." They helped change minds, but the census shows about 1,622,000 working children in 1910, two years after he started. It took state laws, more schools and, finally, national laws passed and fought over for decades. Lesson 9 follows that fight.
• "Strikes usually won." The railroad strike of 1877, Homestead in 1892 and Kensington in 1903 were all lost. Unions grew anyway, and the AFL reached a million members by 1914.

Pulling it together

• Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high, had worked half a year at the Lancaster Cotton Mills when Lewis Hine photographed her in November 1908.
• By 1900 about 1,750,000 children aged ten to fourteen, more than one in five, were counted as workers, and the true number was higher.
• Children worked because family wages were low, laws were weak, and employers could pay children less.
• Unions such as the Knights of Labor and the AFL organised workers, but strikes like Homestead in 1892 were often broken by guards and troops.
• In July 1903 Mother Jones marched striking mill children to Oyster Bay; President Roosevelt refused to see them.
• Sourcing asks who made a source, for whom, why, how and when, and what else confirms it.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of child labor [Teaching with documents]. archives.gov
2. Hine, L. W. (1908-1911). Photographs for the National Child Labor Committee, including Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high (102-LH-362), View of the Ewen Breaker of the Pa. Coal Co. (102-LH-1938) and Manuel the young shrimp picker (102-LH-1984) [Photographs]. Records of the Children's Bureau, Record Group 102, National Archives at College Park. DocsTeach. docsteach.org
3. U.S. Census Bureau. (n.d.). Exploring 19th-century child labor in the United States (Item 1: Gainful workers, aged 10-14, in the United States, 1870-1930, from Historical statistics of the United States, series A119-134 and D75-84) [Statistics in Schools activity]. census.gov
4. OpenStax. (2019). 18.3 Building industrial America on the backs of labor. In U.S. history. Rice University. openstax.org
5. Jones, M. H. (1925). Autobiography of Mother Jones (M. F. Parton, Ed.; chap. 10, "The march of the mill children"). Charles H. Kerr. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org

New Year's Day, 1892

On 1 January 1892 a seventeen-year-old from County Cork in Ireland named Annie Moore was brought across the water to a small island in New York Harbor. She had crossed the Atlantic on the steamship Nevada with her two younger brothers, Anthony and Philip, who were fifteen and twelve, to join their parents in New York. She was the first person processed at the brand-new immigration station on Ellis Island, and an official gave her a ten-dollar gold coin to mark the day. By evening, the National Park Service records, the station had processed nearly 700 people. Annie and her brothers were soon at their parents' home at 32 Monroe Street, on Manhattan's crowded Lower East Side.

1 September 1916, San Francisco

Twenty-four years later and three thousand miles to the west, a twenty-year-old woman named Quok Shee arrived in San Francisco on the steamship Nippon Maru from Hong Kong. She said she was the wife of Chew Hoy Quong, a fifty-five-year-old merchant who lived in the city, and that they had married in Hong Kong that February. She was not allowed to walk off the dock into the city. She was taken by ferry to Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, and held in the women's barracks. She stayed there for nearly two years.

Both women were young. Both came to join family. Both were inspected by officers of the same government. Why did one reach her family's door within days while the other waited almost two years? To answer that fairly, you need the skill this lesson practises: comparison.

How to compare fairly

Comparison means setting two cases side by side and asking the same questions of both. Three rules keep it honest.

1. Ask the same questions of each case. If you ask how long people waited at one island, ask it at the other too.
2. Look for what is alike as well as what is different. Similarities matter, because they tell you which differences need explaining.
3. Ask what caused each difference. This is the step where a list of facts turns into history.

Ellis Island: through in an afternoon

From 1892 to 1924 Ellis Island was the country's busiest immigration station. More than twelve million people passed through it. Most were Europeans who had crossed the Atlantic in steerage, the cheapest, most crowded part of a ship.

Inspection began before the newcomers knew it. As they climbed the stairs to the huge Registry Room, doctors watched them. The Park Service describes what they looked for: signs of contagious diseases such as trachoma, an eye infection that can cause blindness, tuberculosis and diphtheria, and also "poor physique, pregnancy and mental disability." Anyone who looked doubtful got a letter chalked on their coat: "B" for back problems, "F" for face, "H" for heart. A chalk mark meant a second, closer examination. People who were truly ill went to the island's hospital.

Next came the legal inspection. An inspector, with an interpreter if needed, asked each person's name, home town, occupation, destination and how much money they carried. The Registry Room rang with so many languages that immigrants called it a "Tower of Babel." Two rules made the questions tricky. Anyone "liable to become a public charge", meaning likely to need public money to live, could be refused. But the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 also shut out anyone who came with a job already promised under contract. So a newcomer had to show that they could support themselves without admitting that a job was waiting. Single women were not allowed to leave with a man who was not related to them.

For most people, the whole process took three to seven hours. The Park Service says that about one person in a hundred was refused at the legal inspection, and a few more were sent back because doctors found a contagious disease. For the great majority, in the Park Service's words, Ellis Island was "an 'Island of Hope'"; for the rest, "the 'Island of Tears.'"

A law aimed at one people

Quok Shee's journey was shaped by a law passed thirty-four years before she sailed. On 6 May 1882 President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It opens with its reason.

Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof ...

Who made this, and why: Congress wrote these words, under pressure from politicians and white workers in California and the West who blamed Chinese workers for low wages. Remember the Chinese crews who blasted the Central Pacific railroad through the Sierra Nevada in Lesson 3. Thirteen years after the golden spike, Congress shut the door on men like them. The National Archives calls it "the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States," and the first time federal law barred "an ethnic working group."

The act did two main things. It stopped Chinese labourers from coming for ten years, and it forbade any court to make a Chinese immigrant a citizen. In 1892 Congress extended it for another ten years, and in 1902 it made exclusion permanent. It was not repealed until 1943, when China was America's ally in the Second World War, and even then only 105 Chinese immigrants a year were allowed in.

A few kinds of Chinese people could still come. The exclusion laws allowed in merchants, teachers, officials, tourists, and the wives and children of such people, as long as they could prove who they were. That is why it mattered so much that Chew Hoy Quong was a merchant. It is also why officials were so suspicious. Some men claimed sons who did not exist and sold those places to other young men, who arrived as "paper sons." The inspectors' answer was to question everyone as if they might be lying.

Angel Island: waiting in the wooden barracks

The Angel Island station opened on 21 January 1910. The National Park Service estimates that up to a million people passed through it before a fire destroyed its main building in August 1940, among them about 250,000 Chinese and 150,000 Japanese. Newcomers whose papers raised questions were ferried there. Robert Barde, a historian who studied its records, estimates that perhaps three-quarters of the Chinese entering through San Francisco were held on the island for some time.

The heart of the process was the interrogation. Officers questioned the newcomer and then the relatives already in America, separately, often about small details of family life, and compared the answers. Here is one pair of answers from Quok Shee's case file, from a question about the couple's apartment in San Francisco.

Who made this, and why: immigration inspectors typed these answers in 1916 as evidence for deciding whether to let her in. The file, more than an inch thick, is kept by the National Archives at San Francisco. Inspectors read a mismatch like this one as a sign that the marriage might be invented. Ask yourself how well you could describe every clock in your own home, and whether you and the person you live with would describe it the same way.

The inspectors ruled against her. Early in 1917 smallpox broke out in the women's quarters, and she was among those who fell ill. Her lawyers took the case to court, arguing that she had been refused a fair hearing; among other things, the Immigration Service had refused to let her own lawyers interview her. On 1 April 1918 a federal appeals court agreed that the hearing was "unfair," and in May 1918 she was released on a $250 bond. Barde points out that her case was not ordinary. Many detainees stayed weeks rather than years. But the process that held her was the ordinary one.

Detainees left their own record. Within ten months of the men's barracks opening, poems began to appear on the wooden walls, carved in Chinese with the ends of ink brushes. In 1970 a state park ranger named Alexander Weiss noticed them, and hundreds have since been found and translated. One, carved by an unknown man on a wall of what is now Room 205, begins, in the translation of the historians Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung:

Imprisoned in the wooden building day after day,

The poem goes on about empty days, cold nights and loneliness, and ends with the poet wondering whether he should simply go home and farm. Who made this, and why: a detainee with no power over his case, writing for no audience except the men who would sleep in the same bunks after him. That is exactly why it is precious. It is one of the few sources from Angel Island that was not written by the government.

The two stations side by side

Now apply the three rules. Here are the same questions asked of both stations.

Start with what is alike. Both were run by the same federal immigration service. Both examined people's health, used interpreters, asked about money and family, and could send people back. Both were on islands, where newcomers could be held apart from the city until they were cleared.

Then the differences: speed, and suspicion. At Ellis Island a European had to show that they were healthy and could support themselves. At Angel Island a Chinese newcomer had to prove that they belonged to one of the few groups allowed in at all, and then prove it again, answer by answer, against the memories of their relatives.

Key idea: the biggest difference between the two islands was not the buildings or the officers. It was the law. The Chinese Exclusion Act turned an inspection into an interrogation for one people only.

Orchard Street: where the newcomers lived

Most people who came through Ellis Island did not travel far. Many stayed in New York City, and many of them, like Annie Moore, found rooms on the Lower East Side. There they lived in tenements, which a New York law of the time defined as a house "occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises."

One of them still stands at 97 Orchard Street. A Prussian-born immigrant named Lukas Glockner put it up in 1863, with 22 apartments and a saloon in the basement. Between 1863 and 1935 thousands of people from more than twenty countries lived there. Over the years its owners had to add cold running water, two toilets on each floor, an air shaft, gas lighting and then electricity, as new laws required. In 1935, rather than make any more changes, the landlord evicted the tenants and sealed the upper floors. Today the building is the Tenement Museum, and its apartments are set up as they were when real families lived in them.

The man who made middle-class Americans look inside buildings like this was Jacob Riis. In his 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, he counted 37,316 tenements in New York, home to more than 1,250,000 people, and wrote that three-fourths of the city's people now lived in them. Then he took his readers inside one, on Cherry Street.

Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. ... All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming ... The sinks are in the hallway, that all the tenants may have access ...

Who made this, and why: Riis was himself an immigrant, a Danish carpenter who arrived in 1870, went hungry, and became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. He wrote for comfortable readers who had never climbed a tenement stair, and he wanted them to demand change. He also carried a camera into rooms so dark that he had to light them with a blinding flash of magnesium powder, and his book printed pictures made from his photographs. His reporting helped push New York toward the Tenement House Act of 1901, which required new buildings to have a window facing the open air in every room, an open courtyard, indoor toilets and protection against fire.

Riis loved the crowded, mixed-up city. "A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities," he wrote, "would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow." But compare how he wrote about different groups, and his point of view shows. He described whole nationalities with sweeping stereotypes, and his chapter on the Chinese residents of Mott Street is full of contempt. The reformer who helped the Irish, Italian and Jewish poor shared the prejudice that had written the Chinese Exclusion Act. A source can be brave and biased at the same time.

Worth holding on to: comparing how one writer treats different groups is one of the fastest ways to find that writer's point of view.

Common misconceptions

• "Most immigrants at Ellis Island were turned away." About one in a hundred was refused at the legal inspection, and a few more for disease. Most people were through in three to seven hours.
• "The Chinese Exclusion Act kept every Chinese person out." It barred labourers and citizenship. Merchants, teachers, officials, tourists and their wives and children could still enter if they could prove who they were, which is what the interrogations were for.
• "Angel Island was simply the West Coast's Ellis Island." Both were inspection stations, but for Chinese newcomers Angel Island worked as a detention centre, with interrogations and waits that could last months or, for Quok Shee, nearly two years.
• "A reformer like Riis must have been fair to everyone." His book shows real sympathy for the poor and open prejudice against some groups, side by side.

What you now know

• Annie Moore, seventeen, was the first person processed at Ellis Island, on 1 January 1892; more than twelve million followed her by 1924, most in three to seven hours.
• The Chinese Exclusion Act of 6 May 1882 stopped Chinese labourers from coming and barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship; it lasted until 1943.
• Angel Island opened in 1910; Quok Shee, arriving in 1916, was held there for nearly two years because her answers did not match her husband's.
• Detainees carved hundreds of poems into the barracks walls, one of the few Angel Island sources not written by the government.
• Jacob Riis counted 37,316 New York tenements in 1890 and took readers inside them, with sympathy and prejudice side by side.
• A fair comparison asks the same questions of each case, notes what is alike, and then explains the differences; here the biggest cause was the law.

Sources

1. National Park Service. (n.d.). History and culture, Doctor, Historic legal inspection, 2nd floor and This month in history: January [Web pages]. Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty National Monument. nps.gov
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island. The wall poem is quoted from H. M. Lai, G. Lim and J. Yung (Eds. and Trans.), Island: Poetry and history of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (2nd ed., 2014), University of Washington Press. nps.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). Milestone Documents. archives.gov
4. Barde, R. (2004). An alleged wife: One immigrant in the Chinese exclusion era. Prologue, 36(1). National Archives. archives.gov
5. Riis, J. A. (1890). How the other half lives: Studies among the tenements of New York (Introduction and chaps. 2-4, 9 and 24). Charles Scribner's Sons. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org

Saturday afternoon, 25 March 1911

The Asch Building stood ten storeys high near Washington Square in New York City. Its top three floors belonged to the Triangle Waist Company, which made shirtwaists, the high-collared cotton blouses that working women wore. About 600 people worked there, most of them young women and girls, many of them immigrants from Russia and Italy. They sat in long rows at sewing machines, surrounded by bins of cotton scraps.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 25 March 1911, a fire broke out. Workers on the eighth and tenth floors mostly escaped. On the ninth floor they did not. There, the Department of Labor's history records, workers "jammed up at illegally locked exits, at doors blocked by machinery and at the elevator shaft with its single car." The fire department came quickly, but its ladders did not reach the fire: one government history says they reached the seventh floor, another the sixth. Dozens of workers jumped from the windows to escape the flames, and none of them survived.

The Triangle fire killed 146 people, 123 of them women and girls. The Census Bureau's history office has counted where the victims were born: 73 had come from Russia, 40 from Italy, 16 from Austria and 5 from Romania. Catherine Maltese, 39, died with her daughters Lucia, 20, and Rosaria, 14.

A fire like this raises two questions. How does a disaster turn into a law that stops the next one? And why do some laws last while others are thrown out? This lesson answers them by walking through the same steps three times.

Who the Progressives were

Between about 1890 and 1920 a wide movement of Americans came to believe that government, city, state and national, should fix the problems that factories and fast-growing cities had created. Historians call them Progressives. They were not one party or one kind of person. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican president, was a Progressive; so were Democrats such as Woodrow Wilson and the New York politician Al Smith, socialists such as the novelist Upton Sinclair, union organisers, church groups and thousands of women in clubs and reform societies, most of whom could not yet vote.

Their tools included a new kind of reporting. Writers dug into dirty secrets and published them in popular magazines: Ida Tarbell exposed how Standard Oil crushed its rivals, in a series that ran in McClure's Magazine from 1902 to 1904; Jacob Riis, whom you met in the last lesson, showed readers the tenements. In a speech in April 1906 President Roosevelt compared such writers to a character in an old story who raked up filth and never looked up, and the name stuck: muckrakers. They took it as a badge of honour.

Seven steps from a problem to a law

Progressive reforms usually passed through the same steps. Learn them once and you can follow almost any reform in this course, and many in today's news.

1. A problem hurts people. Unsafe factories, spoiled food, children in mills.
2. Someone makes it visible. A disaster, a reporter, a photographer or a novelist puts the problem in front of the public.
3. People organise and demand action. Unions, reform groups, newspapers and voters put pressure on officials.
4. Government investigates. A commission or a committee gathers evidence in hearings and inspections.
5. Lawmakers pass a law. A city council, a state legislature or Congress writes new rules.
6. Courts decide whether the law is allowed. Someone who dislikes the law can sue, and judges decide whether it fits the Constitution.
7. Officials enforce it. Inspectors check that the rules are followed, or the law is only words on paper.

Worked example one: from the Triangle fire to twenty laws

Steps 1 and 2. The problem was old. New York had crowded factories full of flammable cloth long before 1911. What changed was visibility: the fire happened on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of the city, in front of crowds, and every newspaper printed the story.

Step 3. On 2 April 1911, a week after the fire, a memorial meeting filled the Metropolitan Opera House. One speaker was Rose Schneiderman, a union organiser who had left school at thirteen to work, first in a department store and then in a cap factory. She did not ask for sympathy.

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. ... The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

Who made this, and why: Schneiderman was an organiser for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the Women's Trade Union League, speaking to an audience that included wealthy New Yorkers who had come to mourn. A magazine called The Survey printed her words six days later. She wanted her listeners to see that charity after a fire was not enough, and that workers would have to protect themselves through strong unions. "Wanting" here means falling short.

Step 4. On 30 June 1911 New York created a Factory Investigating Commission, led by two New York City lawmakers, Robert Wagner and Al Smith. In 1911 and 1912 it held 59 public hearings, heard 472 witnesses, filled more than 7,000 pages with testimony, and sent its staff into 3,385 workplaces, from bakeries to chemical plants. A young reformer named Frances Perkins testified and led the commissioners on visits to factories, so that they saw the conditions for themselves.

Step 5. Between 1912 and 1914, 13 of the 17 bills the commission sent to the legislature became law, and in all it helped pass 20 laws on factory safety and health. They required better fire protection, fresh air, clean washrooms, guards on dangerous machines and safe elevators. A separate fire-prevention law required sprinklers in many buildings and set up a Fire Prevention Bureau.

Step 6. The courts played a part here too, and it shows why the new laws mattered. The Triangle's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried for manslaughter and acquitted on 27 December 1911. Three years later they settled the families' lawsuits for about $75 for each life lost. Under the old rules, almost nobody was held responsible. The new laws were meant to prevent the next fire rather than to punish anyone for the last one.

Step 7. A rule is only as good as the checking. The fire-prevention law created a bureau whose job was inspection. And the investigators carried their experience with them: Wagner became a United States senator, Smith became governor of New York, and Frances Perkins, the Department of Labor notes, later "applied some of its lessons on a national scale while Secretary of Labor." You will meet her again in the New Deal.

Worked example two: a novel and the food on your plate

The same steps can move faster. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about a family of Lithuanian immigrants working in the meat-packing plants of Chicago. Sinclair wanted readers to be outraged by how the workers were treated. But the passages readers remembered were about the meat.

There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. ... This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one.

Who made this, and why: Sinclair was a socialist writer who had gone to Chicago to research the stockyards. The Jungle is a novel, so its characters are invented, but he based scenes like this on what he saw and was told there. That makes it strong evidence of what reformers believed was happening, and a reason to check its details against other sources, which President Roosevelt did by sending his own investigators to Chicago.

Readers were horrified, but mostly for their own stomachs. Later that year Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan magazine: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." On 30 June 1906 Roosevelt signed two laws, the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which banned unsafe and falsely labelled food and medicines from being sold across state lines. The workers Sinclair cared about gained much less.

Worked example three: the same steps, a different ending

Now run the steps a third time, on child labour, and watch one step change the result.

Steps 1 to 4 you already know from Lesson 7: about 1,750,000 working children counted in 1900, Lewis Hine's photographs, the National Child Labor Committee's campaign, Mother Jones's march. Step 5 came on 1 September 1916, when President Wilson signed the Keating-Owen Act. Congress cannot simply make rules for every factory; the Constitution gives it power to regulate commerce "among the several States," meaning trade that crosses state lines. So the act used that power. It banned the shipping across state lines of goods from any mine that had employed children under sixteen, or from any mill, cannery or factory that had employed children under fourteen, or had worked children aged fourteen to sixteen more than eight hours a day, more than six days a week, or at night.

Step 6 is where this story turns. Roland Dagenhart worked in a cotton mill in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his two sons, one under fourteen and one between fourteen and sixteen. The new law would have taken the younger boy out of the mill and cut the older boy's hours, and their wages with them. Dagenhart sued, and on 3 June 1918 the Supreme Court decided Hammer v. Dagenhart, five justices to four. Justice William Day wrote for the majority.

In our view, the necessary effect of this act is, by means of a prohibition against the movement in interstate commerce of ordinary commercial commodities, to regulate the hours of labor of children in factories and mines within the States, a purely state authority.

In plain words: the cloth and the coal were harmless in themselves, so this was not really a law about trade. It was a law about work inside factories, and under the Constitution that belonged to the states. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the dissent, the opinion of the judges who disagreed.

But if there is any matter upon which civilized countries have agreed ... it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor.

Who made this, and why: both are official opinions of the Supreme Court, written in 1918 to explain a decision to the country and to later judges. Day was defending the line between the powers of the nation and of the states, which Americans call federalism. Holmes argued that Congress's power over trade was broad enough, and that the Court should not second-guess why Congress used it. Neither judge defended child labour itself; they disagreed about who had the power to stop it.

The law was dead, so step 7 never happened. Children went back to longer hours in the states that allowed them. It took another twenty years. In 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which banned most child labour in factories, and in 1941, in United States v. Darby, the Court upheld that law and overruled Hammer v. Dagenhart.

The upshot: a law is not finished when it is passed. Every reform had to survive the courts, and a single vote on the Supreme Court could undo years of campaigning.

The skill: cause and effect

Three habits make cause-and-effect thinking sharper, and this lesson has examples of each.

• Separate underlying causes from triggers. The underlying causes of the Triangle deaths were crowded factories, locked doors and weak laws, all there for years. The trigger was one fire on one afternoon. Without the underlying causes, a fire might have killed nobody; without the trigger, the laws might not have changed when they did.
• Watch for unintended effects. Sinclair meant to help packinghouse workers. His book's biggest effect was on food inspection.
• Expect effects to be undone. The Keating-Owen Act was an effect of a long campaign, and a court case wiped it out in under two years.

One more habit: be suspicious of single causes. Child labour fell sharply between 1910 and 1930, as the census table in Lesson 7 showed, even though the national law had been struck down. State laws, compulsory schooling and changing jobs all played a part.

Common misconceptions

• "Once Congress passes a law, the matter is settled." The Keating-Owen Act lasted less than two years before the Supreme Court struck it down in 1918.
• "The Triangle owners went to prison." They were acquitted in December 1911 and later paid about $75 for each life lost. The lasting change came from new laws, not punishment.
• "Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to make food safer." He wrote it to win sympathy for workers. The food laws were an effect he did not aim at.
• "The Progressives were one political party." There was a Progressive Party in 1912, but the movement was far wider: Republicans, Democrats, socialists, unions and women's groups all took part.

The takeaway

• The Triangle fire of 25 March 1911 killed 146 people, 123 of them women and girls, many trapped behind locked exits on the ninth floor.
• New York's Factory Investigating Commission inspected 3,385 workplaces and helped pass 20 safety and health laws; Frances Perkins learned there what she later did nationally.
• The Jungle (1906) aimed at readers' hearts and hit their stomachs: on 30 June 1906 Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
• The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 used Congress's power over trade between states to fight child labour; in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) the Court struck it down, five to four.
• A problem becomes a law through seven steps: harm, visibility, demand, investigation, law, courts, enforcement.
• Cause and effect: separate underlying causes from triggers, watch for unintended effects, and expect effects to be undone.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2016, March). History and the Census: The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. census.gov
2. U.S. Department of Labor. (n.d.). 7. The New York Factory Investigating Commission [Historical monograph on safety and health regulation]. dol.gov
3. Schneiderman, R. (1911, April 8). We have found you wanting [Speech at the Metropolitan Opera House, 2 April 1911]. The Survey. Reprinted in L. Stein (Ed.), Out of the sweatshop (1977), pp. 196-197. Kheel Center, Cornell University ILR School. trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu
4. Sinclair, U. (1906). The jungle (chap. 14). Doubleday, Page. Project Gutenberg. Sinclair's comment on its effect is from his essay "What life means to me," Cosmopolitan, October 1906. gutenberg.org
5. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918) (Day, J., opinion of the Court; Holmes, J., dissenting). Wikisource. wikisource.org

A ballot in Rochester, 5 November 1872

On 5 November 1872, election day, a fifty-two-year-old woman walked into a polling place in Rochester, New York, and voted for a member of Congress. Her name was Susan B. Anthony, and she had spent more than twenty years arguing that women should vote. Now she argued something new: that she already had the right. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which you met in Lesson 1, made everyone born in the United States a citizen. Citizens vote. Therefore, she reasoned, she was entitled to a ballot.

The election inspectors, three men who ran the polling place, argued about it and then, by two votes to one, accepted her ballot and those of other women. Two weeks later she was arrested. According to the printed record of her case, fourteen women were arrested for voting, and so were the three inspectors who had let them.

Anthony was tried in June 1873 in the town of Canandaigua, before a federal judge named Ward Hunt. The judge decided that there was nothing for the jury to decide. He told the jurors to find her guilty, refused to let her lawyer ask them any questions, and would not even let the clerk ask each juror whether he agreed. Then he asked whether she had anything to say. She had a great deal.

Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women ...
May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.

Who made this, and why: these words come from a record of the trial printed in Rochester in 1874. The first line was her answer when the judge insisted she had been tried "according to the established forms of law"; the second was her reply when he fined her $100 and the costs of the case. Printed accounts of speeches were sometimes tidied up afterwards, so treat the wording as very close to, rather than certainly identical with, what she said aloud. Notice who could not be on that jury: women. Anthony pointed out that every person in the courtroom who held power over her, the judge, the jurors, even her own lawyer, was a man.

She never paid the fine, and the government never made her. But it did not give her the vote either. Two years later, in Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court ruled that being a citizen did not by itself give a woman the right to vote. The Constitution would have to be changed.

The core of it: in 1872 the question was not whether women were citizens, since the Fourteenth Amendment settled that, but whether citizens had a right to vote. The courts said no, so the movement set out to amend the Constitution itself.

A slow start and a western surprise

In 1878 a senator from California introduced a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage. Congress ignored it, year after year. The movement was also divided. When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 protected the vote from being denied because of race but said nothing about sex, suffragists split over whether to support it, and for twenty years they worked in two rival organisations. They joined together in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Meanwhile change came from an unexpected direction: the West. In 1869 the territory of Wyoming let women vote, and other western territories and states followed. By 1912, the National Archives notes, nine western states had adopted woman suffrage. Picture a map of the country in 1912: most of the West shaded for women voting, and the whole of the East and South blank. Historians give several reasons: women worked alongside men on western farms and ranches, and some territories hoped the vote would attract women settlers. Whatever the reasons, by 1912 millions of women in the West were voting while their sisters in New York and Virginia could not.

Two marches, 1912 and 1913

On 4 May 1912 thousands of suffragists paraded up Fifth Avenue in New York City. Near the front, on horseback, rode a sixteen-year-old girl named Mabel Ping-Hua Lee. She had been born in Guangzhou, China, in 1896 and had come to New York's Chinatown with her family in 1905. The National Park Service records that she "helped lead the parade from its starting point in Greenwich Village." Remember the Chinese Exclusion Act from Lesson 8: it barred Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. Mabel Lee was marching for a right that the law would not let her use.

The next year the movement took its case to the capital. On 3 March 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson became president, about eight thousand women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Woman Suffrage Procession, organised by a young New Jersey Quaker named Alice Paul and her ally Lucy Burns. There were bands, women on horseback and more than twenty floats. The first large float carried the movement's demand.

We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States enfranchising the women of this country.

Who made this, and why: the organisers wrote this slogan for the crowds who had come to Washington for the inauguration, and for the newspapers. Enfranchising means giving the vote to. They chose the day before the new president took office so that he, and the country, could not miss them.

At least 250,000 people watched, and many were hostile. According to the Park Service, crowds of men spilled into the street and blocked the marchers, who "were manhandled and spat upon," while police officers did little to help. The attacks backfired. Congress held hearings into the failure of the police, and the newspaper coverage won the movement new supporters.

The procession also showed a division inside the movement. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Chicago journalist you met in Lesson 2, came with the Illinois delegation. Alice Paul, who did not want Black and white women marching side by side, told her, "You'll have to go to the back of the parade." Wells-Barnett refused. She waited in the crowd along the route, and when the Illinois women passed, she stepped out and marched with them. More than forty Black women marched in their state groups, including twenty-five students of Delta Sigma Theta from Howard University and the educator Mary Church Terrell.

Pickets at the White House, 1917

President Wilson did not support a constitutional amendment. So in January 1917 Alice Paul's new organisation, the National Woman's Party, did something no one had done before: it put women with banners at the White House gates, six days a week. The newspapers called them the Silent Sentinels. One banner asked: "Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?"

In April 1917 the United States entered the First World War, and many Americans thought picketing the president in wartime was disloyal. From that summer the police arrested picketers for "obstructing traffic." When the women refused to pay fines, judges sent them to jail, many of them to the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. On the night of 14 November 1917, on the orders of the workhouse superintendent, guards attacked the prisoners: they shoved women into cells, and handcuffed Lucy Burns in her cell with her hands above her head, so that she had to stand all night. When Paul, Burns and others refused food in protest, they were held down and fed by force through tubes. Two weeks later a judge ordered them released, and their convictions were later thrown out.

News of the treatment spread. In January 1918 Wilson announced that he supported the amendment. Historians still argue how much the pickets caused this change and how much was due to the quieter lobbying of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and its leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, and to the war work women were doing. Most likely all three mattered.

A letter in a young man's pocket, 18 August 1920

Congress finally passed the amendment in 1919: the House of Representatives on 21 May and the Senate two weeks later. But an amendment must then be ratified, or approved, by three-quarters of the states, which in 1920 meant 36 of the 48. By August 1920, 35 had done so. Everything came down to Tennessee.

In the Tennessee House of Representatives, members showed their side with a flower: a yellow rose for the amendment, a red rose against. One of the youngest members was Harry Burn, elected from McMinn County at twenty-two. He wore a red rose. When opponents moved to set the amendment aside, he voted with them, and the vote was a tie. But in his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb Burn. Part of it read:

Hurrah and vote for suffrage and don't keep them in doubt. ... Don't forget to be a good boy

When the House voted on ratification itself, Harry Burn voted aye, and the amendment passed. Soon afterwards he explained himself in a statement to the House.

I believe in full suffrage as a right. I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.

Who made this, and why: Burn wrote the statement for the House and the public, to answer opponents who were furious at his switch. His mother's letter was a private note, written before the vote, with no audience to impress. Two very different sources, one public and one private, point to the same cause for his change of vote.

On 26 August 1920 the Secretary of State certified the Nineteenth Amendment. Its central sentence is short.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Susan B. Anthony did not live to see it. She died in 1906.

The skill: change over time

Seventy-two years passed between the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 and the Nineteenth Amendment. Historians studying a stretch of time like that ask four questions: what changed, what stayed the same, how fast, and for whom. A timeline helps.

How fast? For forty years, from 1872 to 1912, change crawled, and most of it happened in the West. Then in eight years, from 1912 to 1920, it raced. Something about those years sped things up: bigger and bolder protests, New York's vote in 1917, and a war in which women's work became impossible to ignore.

Turning points? A turning point is a moment after which things move in a new direction. Minor v. Happersett in 1875 was one, because it closed the courtroom route and pushed the movement toward an amendment. Wilson's change of mind in January 1918 was another.

For whom? This is the question most often forgotten. The National Archives points out that after 1920 many women "remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory state voting laws." In the South, the same poll taxes, literacy tests and threats that had taken the vote from Black men, as you saw in Lesson 2, were used against Black women. Mabel Lee, who had ridden at the head of a parade at sixteen, could not vote until the Chinese Exclusion Act ended in 1943. Many Native American women were not counted as citizens at all until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. For them, 1920 was not the end of the story.

Remember: a date on a timeline marks a change for some people. Always ask who was included, and who had to keep waiting.

Common misconceptions

• "The Nineteenth Amendment gave every American woman the vote in 1920." It banned denying the vote because of sex. It did nothing about race laws in the South, and it could not help women who were barred from citizenship, such as Chinese immigrants before 1943.
• "No woman in America voted before 1920." Women in Wyoming voted from 1869, nine western states had woman suffrage by 1912, and New York women won it in 1917.
• "Susan B. Anthony won women the vote." She did more than almost anyone to build the movement, but she died in 1906, fourteen years before the amendment. It took another generation, and a young legislator's vote, to finish the job.
• "The suffragists all agreed with each other." They split in 1869, argued over marching and picketing, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett had to defy the organiser of the 1913 procession to march with her own state.

Looking back

• Susan B. Anthony voted in Rochester on 5 November 1872, was arrested, and was convicted in 1873 when a judge ordered the jury to find her guilty; she refused to pay the $100 fine.
• In 1875 the Supreme Court ruled that citizenship did not include the vote, so the movement worked for a constitutional amendment, first introduced in 1878.
• Wyoming let women vote in 1869; nine western states had woman suffrage by 1912.
• The 1913 procession, attacked by crowds, won new support; Ida B. Wells-Barnett refused to march at the back. Mabel Lee helped lead a 1912 parade but could not vote until 1943.
• White House pickets were jailed and mistreated in 1917; Wilson backed the amendment in 1918; Congress passed it in 1919.
• Harry Burn, with his mother's letter in his pocket, voted aye on 18 August 1920, and Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify.
• Change over time asks what changed, what stayed the same, how fast, at which turning points, and for whom.

Sources

1. An account of the proceedings on the trial of Susan B. Anthony, on the charge of illegal voting, at the presidential election in Nov., 1872. (1874). Daily Democrat and Chronicle Book Print. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession. nps.gov
3. National Park Service. (n.d.). Occoquan Workhouse. nps.gov
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Harry T. Burn and Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee [People pages]. nps.gov
5. National Archives. (n.d.). 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's right to vote (1920). Milestone Documents. archives.gov

A secret message on the front page, 1 March 1917

On 1 March 1917, Americans opened their newspapers and read a message that had never been meant for them. It had been sent in code that January by Arthur Zimmermann, the foreign secretary of Germany, to the German minister in Mexico. British codebreakers had caught it on its way and cracked the code. The Zimmermann Telegram began like this.

We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal or alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Who made this, and why: Zimmermann wrote it as a secret order for German diplomats. His plan was simple: if the United States came into the war, Mexico would attack it from the south and win back land it had lost to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. The copy printed here is the decoded English version kept by the National Archives, and it even contains a slip: "a proposal or alliance" should read "a proposal of alliance," the kind of small mistake people make when they decode a message in a hurry. The National Archives explains that the British waited weeks before handing the telegram to President Woodrow Wilson, partly so that Germany would not discover that its codes had been broken. They gave it to him on 24 February, and Wilson released it to the press.

Two words in the telegram need explaining. Neutral means taking neither side in a war. Unrestricted submarine warfare meant that German submarines, called U-boats, would sink ships without warning in the waters around Britain, France and Italy, whatever flag the ships flew, including the flag of a neutral country such as the United States.

Five weeks after the telegram appeared, on 6 April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and entered the First World War. The war had been raging in Europe since 1914. On one side stood the Allies, chiefly Britain, France and Russia; on the other the Central Powers, chiefly Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Millions of soldiers had already died in the trenches of France and Belgium. So why did the United States, which had stayed out for almost three years, go in when it did?

The answer almost everyone gives

Ask that question in a classroom and someone will say: "Because a German submarine sank the Lusitania." It is a reasonable answer. The Lusitania was a huge British passenger liner. On 7 May 1915 a U-boat torpedoed it off the south coast of Ireland, and it sank in about eighteen minutes. Nearly 1,200 people died, and 128 of them were Americans. Germany defended the attack by pointing to the ship's cargo, and the National Archives confirms that besides its passengers it was carrying several thousand cases of ammunition bound for Britain. Even so, the sinking turned many Americans against Germany.

The answer sounds right for three good reasons: the attack was real, it killed Americans, and it changed how Americans felt. But a historian does not stop at "sounds right." Put the answer through four tests and watch where it breaks.

Test one: check the calendar

The Lusitania sank in May 1915. The United States declared war in April 1917. That is a gap of almost two years. A cause always comes before its effect, but when the gap is that long, something else must be going on.

What followed the sinking was not a war but a promise. Wilson sent Germany stern protests, and after more sinkings Germany agreed to hold its submarines back. Wilson himself described that promise in April 1917: Germany had pledged "that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels." In November 1916 Americans re-elected Wilson, and the slogan that helped him win was "He kept us out of war."

So the first test fails. The Lusitania made many Americans angry with Germany, but it did not take the country to war. It led instead to a German promise that kept the peace for almost two more years.

Test two: what changed in early 1917?

If the war did not come in 1915, look closely at the weeks just before it did come. Four things happened, one after another.

1. 1 February 1917. Germany broke its promise and started unrestricted submarine warfare again. Its leaders were gambling. As the last line of the telegram says, they hoped that sinking every ship in the zone would force Britain "in a few months to make peace," before American help could count.
2. February. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, which means it stopped all official dealings between the two governments. It was one step short of war.
3. 1 March. The Zimmermann Telegram appeared in the newspapers. Germany, it now seemed, was not only sinking ships but offering American land to Mexico.
4. March. U-boats sank American merchant ships. "American ships have been sunk, American lives taken," Wilson told Congress a few weeks later.

Key idea: the Lusitania belongs to the background of the story. The events of February and March 1917 were the trigger, the spark that set off the change, just as one fire on one afternoon was the trigger for New York's factory laws in Lesson 9.

Test three: listen to the President

On 2 April 1917 Wilson went before a joint session of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives meeting together, and asked for war.

The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of ...

Later in the same speech came the sentence everyone remembers: "The world must be made safe for democracy."

Who made this, and why: this is the official text of the speech, kept with the records of the Senate. Wilson was speaking to persuade two audiences at once: the members of Congress, who had to vote, and the millions of Americans who would read his words in the next day's newspapers. Notice what he chose to stress: the lives of "noncombatants, men, women, and children," meaning people who were not fighting, lost at sea; the rights of all nations; and democracy. Notice also what he did not mention, which is the subject of the next test.

Congress agreed. The Senate voted 82 to 6 for war, and the House of Representatives 373 to 50. One of the fifty was Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman ever elected to Congress. The declaration of war became official on 6 April 1917.

Test four: follow the money

The National Archives adds facts that were not in Wilson's speech. American sales of munitions, meaning weapons and ammunition, to Britain and France grew from around $6 million in 1914 to almost $500 million in 1917, and American bankers had lent the Allies more than $2 billion. Britain's navy was blockading Germany, which made trade with the Central Powers very hard. So the United States was neutral by law, but its factories, farms and banks were tied to one side.

Does that mean bankers dragged the country into war? Historians still argue about how much the money mattered, and Wilson never gave it as a reason. But a speech is not the only place to look for causes. When you test a possible cause, ask whether it was present and whether it pushed in the same direction as the others. Trade and loans were present, and they pushed toward the Allies.

The repaired answer

Put the four tests together and the one-line answer turns into three layers.

So a better answer to "Why did the United States go to war in 1917?" goes like this. Years of trade, loans and friendship with Britain and France, and anger at Germany since the Lusitania, made war with Germany possible. Germany's return to unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann Telegram and the sinking of American ships in early 1917 set it off. And Wilson explained it to the country as a fight for the rights of all nations and for democracy.

Twenty-four million cards: raising an army

In April 1917 the United States Army was small: about 200,000 enlisted men, seventh in size in the world, while Germany had begun the war in 1914 with 4.5 million. To find millions of soldiers quickly, Congress passed the Selective Service Act on 18 May 1917. It set up a draft, a system in which men must register and some of them are then chosen by law to serve.

On 5 June 1917 every man aged 21 to 31 had to go to his local draft board and fill in a card, and more than ten million men registered on that single day. Two more registrations followed, the last in September 1918 for men aged 18 to 45. The National Archives keeps about 24 million of these cards, one for every man who registered, a number equal to about 23 percent of the whole population in 1918. Each card gives a man's name, date and place of birth, race, citizenship, job, a short description and his signature, which is why families still search them today for their great-great-grandfathers.

191 days: the Harlem Hellfighters

The army that formed was segregated: Black and white soldiers served in separate units. According to the National Archives, 380,000 African Americans served in the wartime Army and about 200,000 were sent to Europe. More than half of those were put into labour and stevedore battalions, building roads, bridges and trenches and loading ships (a stevedore is a dock worker). Roughly 42,000 saw combat.

The most famous of the combat units was the 369th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard regiment from the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City. When it left New York in December 1917, it was not allowed to march in the farewell parade of New York's National Guard division, which was nicknamed the Rainbow Division. The reason its colonel, William Hayward, was given, the National Archives records, was that "black is not a color in the Rainbow."

In France, General John J. Pershing, the American commander, assigned the 369th to the 16th Division of the French Army. The New Yorkers wore French helmets, carried French rifles, and spent 191 days in combat, longer than any other American unit in the war. "My men never retire, they go forward or they die," Colonel Hayward said; in army language, to retire means to retreat.

On the night of 14 May 1918, two of its soldiers, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, were guarding a lonely lookout post when a German raiding party attacked. Both men were wounded, Johnson 21 times, but they refused to surrender and fought on with whatever weapons they had. France gave them the Croix de Guerre, its medal for bravery in war, and they were the first Americans to receive it. Johnson's own country was slower. He died poor in 1929, and only on 2 June 2015 did President Barack Obama award him the Medal of Honor, the highest American award for bravery.

When the 369th came home in February 1919, crowds packed Fifth Avenue as the regiment marched to the music of its famous band, led by James Reese Europe. What kind of country had they come home to? Black leaders had argued about that all through the war. In July 1918 W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote an editorial that is reprinted in full by Teaching American History.

Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.

Who made this, and why: an editorial is a published statement of opinion. Du Bois wrote this one for the readers of The Crisis, most of them Black Americans, at the height of the war. Grievances are complaints about unfair treatment. He hoped that loyal service would be repaid with equal rights at home. The labour leader A. Philip Randolph was doubtful. After the war, the National Archives notes, he liked to tell audiences: "I want to congratulate you for doing your bit to make the world safe for democracy ... and unsafe for hypocrisy." Hypocrisy means saying one thing and doing another. Randolph's joke turned Wilson's own words around: a country fighting to make the world safe for democracy was denying democracy to its own Black citizens. Lesson 12 shows what happened when the soldiers came back.

The home front: liberty cabbage and a ten-year-old's German lesson

A war needs more than soldiers. It needs money, food, factory workers and, the government believed, the right opinions. Days after war was declared, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, run by a former journalist, George Creel. It hired artists, speakers, writers and filmmakers to make propaganda: information, often one-sided, designed to make people think and feel a certain way. The goal, OpenStax's history says, was to get Americans to make sacrifices and "to hate all things German."

Many did. Some restaurants stopped serving sauerkraut and hamburgers and offered "liberty cabbage" and "liberty sandwiches" instead. Orchestras refused to play music by German composers. Some schools banned the teaching of German, and German American families stopped speaking their own language in public for fear of reprisal, meaning revenge or punishment.

Nebraska went further. A state law approved on 9 April 1919, five months after the fighting stopped, banned teaching any subject in any language but English, and banned teaching foreign languages at all to children who had not passed the eighth grade. On 25 May 1920 a county attorney walked into Zion Parochial School, a one-room school in Hampton, Nebraska, and found ten-year-old Raymond Parpart reading Bible stories in German. His teacher, Robert Meyer, was convicted and fined $25. In 1923, in Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction. "Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful," Justice James McReynolds wrote in the Court's opinion.

The government also punished words. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime to aid the enemy or to speak against the war effort, and the Sedition Act of 1918 banned disloyal words about the government, the Constitution, the flag or the army's uniform. More than two thousand people were charged under these laws. The Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for a speech that the government said encouraged men to resist the draft.

The war opened doors, too. With millions of men in uniform, more than a million women went out to work for wages for the first time, and many took jobs once kept for men: on the railroads, the number of women workers tripled. When the soldiers came home, many of these women were fired. And because the war had cut off immigration from Europe, northern factories ran short of workers, and African Americans in the South, the National Archives notes, "seized the opportunity." That is the beginning of the movement you will follow in Lesson 12.

An enemy no army could stop: the influenza of 1918

In the spring of 1918 a new kind of influenza, or flu, appeared. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) explains, it was first identified among military personnel. That first wave was mild, and people called it the "three-day fever." In the autumn the virus came back far deadlier, and it became a pandemic, an outbreak of disease that spreads across many countries at once. The war helped it travel. As the National Archives puts it, the flu "spread rapidly in institutional settings, including military barracks where men shared close quarters," and the war had packed millions of young men into camps and troop ships.

The numbers are hard to take in, so set them side by side.

Read the table carefully. The army figures come from the record of the American Expeditionary Forces, and the rows overlap a little, because soldiers who died of flu are counted both among the army's deaths from disease and among the 675,000. Even so, the flu killed several times more Americans than the war did, and more American soldiers died of disease, accidents and other causes than were killed by the enemy.

This flu was strange in another way. Most flu is deadliest for babies and the very old, and those groups did suffer. But the CDC notes that deaths were also high among people aged 20 to 40, "a unique feature of this pandemic." In one year, the National Archives says, the average American life expectancy dropped by 12 years.

The National Archives keeps the paper trail of that autumn in its exhibit The Deadly Virus. A photograph from Seattle shows a streetcar conductor refusing to let a passenger aboard without a gauze mask. A report from an army supply depot in Philadelphia, dated 8 October 1918, lists 1,489 employees "absent today." And there are telegrams like one sent on 17 October 1918 to the Pima Agency in Arizona, telling a family that their child, a student at a government boarding school for Native children like the ones in Lesson 5, had pneumonia after the flu. The exhibit notes that it is "one of thousands" sent from Indian schools to families.

Eleven o'clock on the eleventh day: the peace

On 8 January 1918, ten months before the fighting ended, Wilson told Congress what kind of peace he wanted. His Fourteen Points called for agreements between nations made in the open, freedom of the seas, fewer weapons, and borders drawn to fit the peoples who lived inside them. The last point became the most famous.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Who made this, and why: Wilson wrote it as a speech to Congress, but his real audience was the whole world, including the people of the enemy countries, whom he wanted to believe that a fair peace was possible. In plain words, point fourteen says that the countries of the world should form a permanent organisation whose members promise to protect each other's independence and borders. Covenants are solemn promises.

The fighting stopped with an armistice, an agreement by both sides to stop fighting, at eleven o'clock in the morning on 11 November 1918: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The winners then met in Paris, and on 28 June 1919 Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles. It created Wilson's association of nations, the League of Nations.

Under the Constitution, a treaty needs the approval of two-thirds of the Senate. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Senate's Republican leader, led the opposition. According to the State Department's historians, Lodge and his supporters feared that the League would drag the United States into "Europe's tangled politics" and weaken its ability to defend its own interests, and Wilson and Lodge disliked each other so much that a compromise never came. In March 1920 the treaty fell short, 49 votes for and 35 against, well under two-thirds. The United States never joined the League of Nations.

Bottom line: the United States fought for nineteen months and helped win the war, but it turned down the peace its own president had designed.

The skill: cause and effect

This lesson used three habits of cause-and-effect thinking. You can use them on any "why" question in history.

• Check the calendar. A cause must come before its effect, and a long gap between them needs explaining. The two years between the Lusitania and the declaration of war told us to look for something else.
• Sort causes into layers. Long-term causes make an event possible; triggers set it off; stated reasons are what people say in public. A speech gives you the stated reasons, so check it against other evidence, as the money test did.
• Follow the chain. An effect often becomes the cause of something else. The war filled crowded camps, and the camps spread the flu. The war cut off immigration, and the shortage of workers pulled Black southerners north. The war made Americans fear all things German, and that fear produced a Nebraska law, which produced a Supreme Court case about a ten-year-old's reading lesson.

Notice one more thing about that last chain: the Nebraska law was passed after the armistice. Effects can outlast their causes, and fear can keep working after the fighting is over.

Common misconceptions

• "The sinking of the Lusitania brought the United States into the war." It sank in May 1915, almost two years before the declaration of war. The triggers came in early 1917: renewed submarine warfare, the Zimmermann Telegram and the sinking of American ships.
• "Until 1917 the United States favoured neither side." It was neutral by law, but munitions sales to Britain and France reached almost $500 million in 1917, and American bankers had lent the Allies more than $2 billion.
• "Black Americans did not fight in the First World War." 380,000 served in the Army, about 42,000 saw combat, and the 369th Infantry spent 191 days in combat, longer than any other American unit.
• "The 1918 flu, like ordinary flu, killed mainly the very old." It also killed large numbers of healthy adults aged 20 to 40, which the CDC calls a unique feature of this pandemic.

Recap

• The Zimmermann Telegram, published on 1 March 1917, offered Mexico an alliance and the return of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if the United States entered the war.
• The Lusitania (May 1915) turned many Americans against Germany, but Germany then promised to restrain its submarines, and Wilson was re-elected in 1916 as the man who "kept us out of war."
• The triggers came in February and March 1917; trade and loans were long-term causes; Wilson's stated reasons were the rights of all nations and a world "made safe for democracy." Congress declared war on 6 April 1917.
• The draft registered about 24 million men. 380,000 African Americans served, and the 369th Infantry fought 191 days under French command; Henry Johnson received the Medal of Honor only in 2015.
• At home, propaganda, the Espionage and Sedition Acts and laws like Nebraska's turned fear into punishment, while more than a million women started paid work.
• The 1918 flu killed about 675,000 Americans, far more than the war did. The war ended on 11 November 1918, and in March 1920 the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Zimmermann Telegram (1917) [Milestone Documents, with the decoded text]. archives.gov
2. National Archives. (n.d.). Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917) [Milestone Documents, with transcript]. archives.gov
3. National Archives. (n.d.). Photographs of the 369th Infantry and African Americans during World War I [Educator resources]. archives.gov
4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019, March 20). 1918 pandemic (H1N1 virus) [Archived web page]. archive.cdc.gov
5. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history (sections 23.2, The United States prepares for war, and 23.3, A new home front). OpenStax. openstax.org

A letter to Mr. Abbott, 24 April 1917

In the spring of 1917 a woman in the South sat down to write to a newspaper editor in Chicago. We do not know her name, because it was left out when her letter was printed. We do know exactly what she wanted.

SIR: I have been reading the Defender for one year or more and last February I read about the Great Northern Drive to take place May 15th on Thursday and now I can hear so many people speaking of an excursion to the North on the 15th of May for $3.00. My husband is in the North already working, and he wants us to come up in May, so I want to know if it is true about the excursion. I am getting ready and oh so many others also, and we want to know is that true so we can be in the Drive. So please answer at once. We are getting ready.

Who made this, and why: the letter is addressed to "Mr. R. S. Abbot," her spelling of Robert S. Abbott, who owned the Chicago Defender. She wrote privately, to get facts she needed for a family decision. An excursion was a cheap group trip by train. Her letter survived because investigators studying Chicago after the riot of 1919 printed it in their report, The Negro in Chicago (1922), as an example of how the Defender's call spread. ("Negro" was the polite word for Black Americans in those years; today it is out of date.) One small detail shows how news travelled from mouth to mouth: 15 May 1917 was a Tuesday, not a Thursday.

Her family was part of the Great Migration, the movement of Black Americans out of the South to the cities of the North and West. The Census Bureau estimates that about 6 million people made that move between 1910 and 1970. This lesson compares the two worlds that families like hers moved between, and then uses the census to measure how the country changed.

The newspaper that said "come"

Robert Abbott, born in Georgia to parents who had been enslaved before the Civil War, founded the Chicago Defender in 1905, and it grew to have the largest circulation of any Black-owned newspaper in the country. Emmett J. Scott, who published a study of the migration in 1920, estimated that about 50,000 copies were sold each week when the movement began and 125,000 by 1918, and that copies were passed around "until worn out." One man Scott quoted said that people would "grab the Defender like a hungry mule grabs fodder." In Laurel, Mississippi, it was said, old men who could not read bought it anyway, because it was regarded as precious.

Getting the paper south was not simple. Several southern cities tried to stop it and seized copies from shops and newsstands as fast as they arrived, so readers took out subscriptions by mail, and there were reports of copies hidden in bundles of other goods. Abbott also relied on Pullman porters, the Black men who worked as attendants on railroad sleeping cars, to carry copies south on their trains.

The Defender did not just report on the South. It told readers to leave. It named the movement the "Great Northern Drive" and set the date, 15 May 1917. It answered the fear of northern winters with a headline, FROZEN DEATH BETTER, and a line that was hard to forget: "To die from the bite of frost is far more glorious than that of the mob." It printed poems with titles like "Bound for the Promise Land," and one Defender news story, reprinted in the commission's report, tells of a man in Georgia named Tom Amaca who was arrested for having that poem.

Pushed and pulled

Historians sort the reasons people move into two kinds. Push factors are conditions that drive people away from a place. Pull factors are attractions that draw them to a new one. Most decisions to move involve both.

The pushes in the South were strong. Scott found that in 1915 farm labourers in the South were paid on average around 75 cents a day. In the summers of 1915 and 1916 the boll weevil, a beetle that eats cotton plants, badly damaged the crop across much of the Deep South, and unusual floods in the summer of 1915 made things worse. Black southerners lived under the Jim Crow laws and the lost vote you studied in Lesson 2, with the constant threat of lynching. Their children's schools were open only a few months a year.

The pulls came from the war. With immigration from Europe cut off and millions of men in uniform, northern factories, stockyards and steel mills needed workers. "Wages offered in the North were double and treble those received in the South," Scott wrote. Men who earned $1.10 or $1.25 a day in the South could earn $2.50 to $3.75 a day in northern industry, and women who earned $2.50 a week as servants could earn $2.10 to $2.50 a day. Railroads offered cheap "club rates" to groups of ten to fifty people from the same community travelling together, so neighbours often moved north side by side.

The migrants also spoke for themselves. After the riot, investigators asked migrants in Chicago, "Why did you come to Chicago?" Here are some of the twenty answers they printed.

Looking for better wages. ... So I could support my family. ... Tired of being a flunky. ... Some of my people were here. ... Wife persuaded me. ... To get away from the South, and to earn more money.

A flunky is someone who must take orders and serve others. Asked whether they felt more freedom in Chicago, one person answered: "Yes. Can vote; no lynching; no fear of mobs; can express my opinion and defend myself." Another remembered what home had been like: "If you went to an ice cream parlor for anything you came outside to eat it. Got off sidewalk for white people."

The point: the migrants' own reasons were not only about money. Wages came first in many answers, but so did the vote, safety, respect and the chance to raise children differently.

Two places side by side

To compare fairly, ask the same questions of both places. Here is what the sources in this lesson say about six parts of everyday life, for a Black family in the rural South and in Chicago, around 1915 to 1920.

Reading the table

Read across the rows and three patterns appear. In some rows Chicago was plainly better: pay, voting, streetcars. In some it was mixed: the school year was longer, but children paid a price for the short terms they had left behind. And in some rows the North fell short of its promise: housing, and, in the summer of 1919, safety.

The commission's report follows one family closely, the Joneses, to show how the rows fit together in a real life. Back home Mr. Jones was a boiler-maker earning about $50 a week, and the family owned their home and two other properties; in Chicago he earned about the same. They came, the report says, "to escape from the undesirable practices and customs of the South." They had been told that in Chicago they could go where they pleased, but they were refused service in a number of restaurants and at the counters of some drugstores. Their rented house was so run-down that Mr. Jones had to cover the holes in the floor with tin to keep out the rats. Their six-year-old son was bullied so badly by older boys at his new school that the family sent him back south to live with his grandmother.

The schools tell the same mixed story through children's own voices. A girl in the study had attended a southern school that met only three months a year, with 100 to 125 children and one teacher; she arrived in Chicago four years behind. A fifteen-year-old boy, six years behind, explained why he had stopped going at home.

He didn't come to school until he was through totin' ice around. Then if anyone wanted ice they comed after him. He wasn't learning me anything so I quit.

Who made this, and why: the boy was describing his teacher in a small southern town, who was also the town's iceman. An investigator for the commission wrote his words down in Chicago around 1920, keeping the way he spoke. The commission included the story to explain why children from the South were behind, not to make fun of them, and it adds that the boy was "ambitious" and attending school regularly in Chicago despite being much older than his classmates.

A hot Sunday at the beach, 27 July 1919

The worst failure in the table began at the edge of Lake Michigan. No law divided the beach near Twenty-ninth Street, but an unspoken agreement did: Black swimmers used the part near Twenty-seventh Street, white swimmers the part near Twenty-ninth, with an imaginary line running out into the water.

At four o'clock on Sunday, 27 July 1919, a seventeen-year-old Black swimmer named Eugene Williams drifted across that line. On the shore, white and Black bathers were already fighting and throwing stones. Williams clung to a railroad tie, a heavy wooden beam, while stones splashed around him. When he let go, he went under and drowned. Black witnesses pointed out a white man they said had thrown stones and asked a white policeman to arrest him. The policeman refused. Within two hours the riot was spreading across the South Side.

The commission set down the toll: 38 people killed, 23 Black and 15 white; 537 injured; and about 1,000 left homeless. The state militia had to be called in to help the police. Of the nine deaths that led to murder charges, only four ended in a conviction.

Notice how carefully the report handles Eugene Williams's death. Many people on the beach believed a stone had struck and killed him. But the coroner's jury, the official inquiry into the death, found that he "had drowned because fear of stone-throwing kept him from shore," and his body showed no stone bruises. The report gives both the rumour and the official finding and tells you which is which. That is good sourcing, and it did not make his death any less the result of the stones.

Who wrote the report matters, too. On 20 August 1919 the governor of Illinois, Frank Lowden, appointed a Commission on Race Relations of twelve members, six Black and six white. One of the six Black members was Robert S. Abbott, the Defender's owner. Their report, published in 1922, ran to more than 600 pages.

Chicago was not alone. The writer James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP called that year the Red Summer, because white mobs attacked Black Americans in more than three dozen cities, from Washington, D.C., to Omaha, and in a rural county around Elaine, Arkansas, where the most people were killed. In many places, including Chicago and Washington, Black Americans fought back. In May 1919, as the troops returned, W. E. B. Du Bois had written in The Crisis:

We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

Who made this, and why: Du Bois had travelled to France after the armistice to gather material on Black soldiers, and he came home angry at the discrimination they described. Ten months earlier he had urged readers to "close ranks" during the war, as you read in Lesson 11. This editorial announced that the time for waiting was over. Notice how the three short sentences at the start turn on one word: "from fighting" becomes "fighting."

Counting the migration

Letters and reports tell you how the move felt. The census tells you how big it was. These figures come from the Census Bureau's own historical tables, built from the census taken every ten years.

The share column is worked out by dividing the second column by the first: in 1910, 8,749,427 divided by 9,827,763 is about 0.89, or 89 percent. Now read the table the way a historian does.

• What changed? In 1910 almost nine in ten Black Americans lived in the South. By 1970 only about half did. Chicago's Black population grew from 44,103 to more than 1.1 million, twenty-five times as large.
• How fast? Look at Chicago decade by decade. From 1910 to 1920 its Black population more than doubled, and from 1920 to 1930 it doubled again. From 1930 to 1940 it grew by less than a fifth: the jobs had vanished in the Great Depression, which you will meet in Lesson 14. From 1940 to 1950, with factories busy for the Second World War, it grew by more than three-quarters. The Census Bureau calls the years 1910-1940 the First Great Migration and 1940-1970 the Second.
• Number or share? Here is a puzzle. The number of Black southerners actually rose, from about 8.7 million to about 12 million. How can the South have more Black residents and a smaller share at the same time? Because the total grew faster outside the South than inside it. Always check whether a table is giving you numbers or shares.

What matters here: the Great Migration was not one rush north in 1917. It was a sixty-year change that sped up in war, slowed in hard times, and redrew the map of where Black Americans lived.

The skill: change over time

Lesson 10 asked four questions about change over time: what changed, what stayed the same, how fast, and for whom. This lesson adds two tools.

• Tell a trend from an event. The riot of 1919 was an event: it happened in one place over about a week. The Great Migration was a trend: a change built from millions of separate decisions, like one woman's letter, over sixty years. Events can speed up or slow down a trend, but they are not the same thing.
• Watch the rate of change. A trend can move at different speeds in different decades. Chicago's numbers show fast growth in the 1910s and 1940s and slow growth in the 1930s, and each speed has its own causes.

And do not forget continuity. For the families in this lesson, segregation did not stay behind in the South. It met them in Chicago's restaurants, in its housing and on its beaches.

Common misconceptions

• "The Great Migration happened during the First World War." The war started the first big wave, but the Census Bureau counts about 6 million people leaving the South between 1910 and 1970, and Chicago's Black population grew more in the 1940s than in any earlier decade.
• "In the North there was no segregation." There were no Jim Crow streetcars, but restaurants refused Black customers, housing was limited to a few neighbourhoods, and the 1919 riot began at a beach divided by an unwritten line.
• "Labour agents shipped the migrants north." Some companies paid fares, but the commission found that "by far the greater numbers paid their own fare."
• "People left the South only because they were poor." Pay mattered, but the Jones family earned the same in Chicago and moved anyway; migrants also named the vote, safety, respect and their children's schooling.

What to carry forward

• About 6 million Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970, in a first wave (1910-1940) and a larger second wave (1940-1970).
• The Chicago Defender, carried south by mail and by Pullman porters, urged readers to come north and named a "Great Northern Drive" for 15 May 1917.
• Push factors included low pay, the boll weevil, Jim Crow, lynching, the lost vote and short school terms; pull factors included wartime jobs paying "double and treble."
• Chicago was better on pay, voting and streetcars, but families like the Joneses met refused service, bad housing and bullying, and children from the South were often put back in school.
• On 27 July 1919 Eugene Williams drowned at Twenty-ninth Street, and the riot that followed killed 38 people. It was one of the attacks of the Red Summer.
• The share of Black Americans living in the South fell from 89 percent in 1910 to 53 percent in 1970; Chicago's Black population grew twenty-five times. A trend is not an event, and a share is not a number.

Sources

1. Chicago Commission on Race Relations. (1922). The Negro in Chicago: A study of race relations and a race riot. University of Chicago Press. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Scott, E. J. (1920). Negro migration during the war. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. U.S. Census Bureau. (2012, September 13). The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970 [Infographic]. census.gov
4. Gibson, C., and Jung, K. (2002, 2005). Historical census statistics on population totals by race, 1790 to 1990 (Population Division Working Paper No. 56, Tables 1 and 4, and No. 76, Table 14). U.S. Census Bureau. census.gov; census.gov
5. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1919, May). Returning soldiers. The Crisis, 18, 13. Reprinted by Teaching American History. teachingamericanhistory.org

Election night on the radio, 2 November 1920

On the evening of 2 November 1920, a small number of radio enthusiasts around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, tuned their wireless sets and heard something new: the results of a presidential election, read aloud as they came in. Warren Harding had beaten James Cox. The voice came from a new station owned by the Westinghouse company, soon known by its call letters, KDKA, and it is often called the first commercial radio station in the country. Just weeks earlier, a Pittsburgh department store had advertised "Amateur Wireless Sets" for $10 and up, so that people could listen.

Ten years later the government counted how far the idea had spread. In April 1930, for the first time, the census asked about a machine in the home. The census takers' instructions were simple.

If the family, or any member of the family, has a radio set, write "R" opposite the name of the head of the family. If the family has no radio set, leave this column blank.

Who made this, and why: the Census Bureau wrote these instructions for the thousands of people who went door to door in 1930, so that every one of them would record the answer the same way. The government asked because radio had become, in a single decade, a new industry and a new part of family life. When the R's were added up, about 40 percent of all households had a radio.

From radio sets to cars to jazz, the 1920s have a famous nickname: the Roaring Twenties. But a nickname is a claim, and claims need evidence. Did the decade roar? And if it did, who heard it?

The case for a roaring decade

Start with things people could touch. Henry Ford's assembly line, the moving line on which each worker adds one part, cut the price of a new Model T from $850 in 1908 to $300 in 1924. Used ones sold for as little as five dollars, so even students could own a car. By 1929, the OpenStax history counts more than twenty-three million automobiles on American roads. New roads, motels and roadside restaurants followed them.

The same factories turned out vacuum cleaners, washing machines, phonographs and refrigerators. Most families could not pay for them all at once, so stores offered credit: you took the machine home and paid for it on an installment plan, a little each month, with interest added. Buying on credit put a car in the driveway of families who could never have saved up its whole price.

Radio changed how a family spent its evenings. Hundreds of stations broadcast news, serial stories, political speeches and variety shows, and the same programmes reached living rooms from coast to coast. Children listened too. A photograph from 1924, now in the Library of Congress, carries the caption "Master Harold Shaver of Jersey City learns to draw by listening in to lessons broadcast by WOR." Sport came over the air too, and sports stars became national heroes: Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927, and in 1926 Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.

For many Americans the twenties also meant new freedoms. Women had won the vote in 1920, as you saw in Lesson 10, and in the cities many young women, nicknamed flappers, wore shorter skirts and shorter hair and went out dancing to jazz. And in New York City, whose Black population doubled during the decade, the Harlem neighbourhood became the centre of the Harlem Renaissance, a "rebirth" of Black writing, art and music that you will read from below.

The case for a decade of fear and closed doors

Go back to the R's in the census. Behind the 40 percent were very different numbers. According to a National Archives census specialist who studied the 1930 figures, half of all city families had a radio, but only 20.8 percent of farm families did, and only 7.5 percent of African American families. A decade can roar in one living room and stay quiet in another.

Farm families had reasons to be quiet. During the war, Europe had bought American wheat and cotton at high prices. When the war ended, demand fell, and prices fell with it. The OpenStax history puts it bluntly: "Farmers largely did not experience the widespread prosperity of the 1920s." Many could barely pay what they owed on their land and machines.

The decade also closed a door that had stood open for most of American history. In 1921 Congress set the first limits, called quotas, on how many immigrants could come from each country. In 1924 it made them much tighter. The Immigration Act of 1924 allowed each nationality 2 percent of the number of its people living in the United States in 1890. Choosing 1890, before most Italians, Poles, Greeks and eastern European Jews had arrived, was deliberate. The law also shut out immigrants from Asia completely. The State Department's historians conclude that the act's "most basic purpose" was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity," meaning a population that was all alike. Six months before it passed, President Calvin Coolidge had told Congress, in his first annual message of 6 December 1923:

New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American.

On 30 June 1924 Coolidge signed the proclamation that set each country's yearly number. Here are some of them.

Read the table slowly. The countries that had sent most immigrants before 1890 received large quotas. The countries whose people had come mostly after 1890 received small ones. Canada, as the proclamation notes, had no quota at all, and neither did the other countries of the Americas.

Fear had an uglier face, too. In 1915 a new Ku Klux Klan was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, borrowing the name of the group that had terrorised freed people during Reconstruction. This Klan attacked not only Black Americans but also Catholics, Jews and immigrants, and it marched in public, women as well as men. It was strongest not in the South but in the Midwest, especially Indiana. By 1924, according to OpenStax, it had about six million members, more than all the country's labour unions together. Its numbers fell fast after 1925, when the leader of the Indiana Klan was convicted of murdering a young schoolteacher, and the Great Depression finished it as a national force.

Why this matters: the same years that brought radios and cars also brought laws and movements that defined some Americans as less welcome than others. Both cases rest on real evidence.

Prohibition: one law, two stories

One great experiment of the decade appears in both cases. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" from January 1920. This was Prohibition. Its supporters, led by temperance groups and the Anti-Saloon League and joined by many Progressive reformers like those of Lesson 9, saw it as progress: an end to drunkenness and the saloon.

What happened was messier. Liquor was smuggled in from Canada and the Caribbean; people in the country brewed "moonshine" at home; and hidden bars called speakeasies opened in the cities. Gangs fought over the trade. In Chicago, the OpenStax history reports, Al Capone's organisation was earning more than $100 million a year by 1927, with many local police on its payroll. Notice something about the law's wording: it banned making, selling and moving alcohol, not drinking it. Prohibition ended in 1933, when the Twenty-first Amendment repealed it, the only time an amendment has been undone.

Harlem: a poet's point of view

In 1920 a teenager named Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, crossed the Mississippi River on his way to visit his father in Mexico, and wrote a poem about it. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" was printed in The Crisis in June 1921, and one of its first lines is: "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins." Its speaker is every Black person in history, from the Euphrates and the Nile to the Mississippi.

A few years later Hughes was working as a busboy, clearing tables, at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. There he met a well-known white poet, Vachel Lindsay, and shared some of his poems, and Lindsay publicised his discovery of a new Black poet. In 1926 Hughes's first book, The Weary Blues, came out. Its last poem, called "Epilogue" and later known by its first line, begins like this.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll sit at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

In the last lines the speaker adds that "they" will see how beautiful he is and be ashamed, and the poem ends: "I, too, am America."

Who made this, and why: Hughes was a young Black man who had cleared tables in a hotel dining room. His poem takes the custom of sending a Black servant to eat in the kitchen and turns it into a picture of the whole country. America is a house; white Americans are the family at the table; Black Americans are the "darker brother," part of the same family but sent out of sight when company comes. The poem was printed by a big New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for readers of every colour. Its point of view is the view from the kitchen door, and its claim is that the brother belongs at the table.

That June, in the magazine The Nation, Hughes explained what he and the other young artists of Harlem were trying to do.

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter.

He was writing alongside others: the writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote about the lives and speech of rural Black people in Florida; the poet Claude McKay, whose poem "If We Must Die" called on Black Americans to fight back after the Red Summer you read about in Lesson 12; and the musicians whose jazz filled Harlem's nightclubs.

What would settle it?

So which is right, the roaring decade or the fearful one? Look at what kind of evidence each case used. The roaring case used totals and averages: twenty-three million cars, 40 percent of homes with radios. The fearful case used the same kinds of numbers broken into groups: farm families against city families, Italy's quota against Germany's. That is the clue. A question like "Did the decade roar?" cannot be settled with one national average, because the average hides the groups inside it.

What would settle it is evidence divided the same way for everyone: incomes for farm and city families, for Black and white families, for immigrants and the native-born, year by year. The divided evidence in this lesson already points one way: the gains of the 1920s were real but uneven, larger in the cities than on the farms, and out of reach for many who wanted to come at all. So the better question is not "Did it roar?" but "For whom did it roar, and for whom was the door closing?"

In short: both cases are true of different people. A good answer about the twenties names which Americans it is talking about.

The skill: point of view

A point of view is the place a person sees from: their home, their work, their group, their age, their hopes and fears. It shapes what they notice and what they miss. Point of view is not the same as being wrong. Every source has one, including the census. Four questions help.

1. Where is the speaker standing? Coolidge spoke as president, to Congress, about who should be allowed in. Hughes wrote as a young Black man who had cleared tables in hotels, about who belonged at the table.
2. What can they see from there? Coolidge could see the worries of many native-born voters about change. Hughes could see the kitchen door.
3. Who are they speaking to? Coolidge addressed lawmakers who would vote on quotas. Hughes addressed readers of every colour, and in The Nation he told them that their approval "doesn't matter."
4. Whose view is missing? No source in this lesson speaks for an Italian family that could not get a quota visa, or for a farm family with no radio and falling prices. When a view is missing, say so, and look for it.

Notice that the two writers use the same word in different ways. For Coolidge, America must be "kept American," as if the word described people who were already here. For Hughes, "I, too, am America": the word includes the darker brother. Point of view is often hidden inside one word that two people use differently.

Common misconceptions

• "Everyone was well off in the twenties." Farm prices fell after the war, and in 1930 only 20.8 percent of farm families had a radio, compared with half of city families.
• "Prohibition made it a crime to drink alcohol." The Eighteenth Amendment banned making, selling and transporting it. People kept drinking in speakeasies, and the trade fed organised crime.
• "The Klan of the 1920s was a small southern group." It claimed millions of members, marched openly, and was strongest in the Midwest, especially Indiana.
• "The 1924 law cut immigration from every country equally." Germany's quota was 51,227 and Italy's 3,845; Greece got 100, and immigrants from Asia were shut out entirely.

The short version

• KDKA broadcast the election results on 2 November 1920; by April 1930 about 40 percent of households had a radio, but only 20.8 percent of farm families and 7.5 percent of African American families.
• Mass production cut the Model T from $850 in 1908 to $300 in 1924, credit and installment plans spread, and more than twenty-three million cars were on the road by 1929.
• Farmers missed most of the prosperity; Prohibition (1920-1933) banned the making and selling of alcohol and fed organised crime.
• The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas of 2 percent of each nationality in 1890 and shut out Asian immigrants; Coolidge had said "America must be kept American."
• A new Klan, strongest in the Midwest, attacked Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants, and collapsed after 1925.
• In Harlem, Langston Hughes and others claimed their place: "I, too, am America." Point of view asks where a speaker stands, what they can see, whom they address, and whose view is missing.

Sources

1. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history (sections 24.1, Prosperity and the production of popular entertainment; 24.2, Transformation and backlash; and 24.3, A new generation). OpenStax. openstax.org
2. Kluskens, C. (2020, October 22). Census fun fact #3: Do you own a radio set? [Blog post by a National Archives census specialist, citing the 1930 census volume on families]. Open History Hub. openhistoryhub.com
3. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act). history.state.gov
4. Coolidge, C. (1924, June 30). Proclamation 1703: Establishing nationality quota of aliens allowed entry during fiscal year 1924-1925. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu
5. Hughes, L. (1926). The weary blues. Alfred A. Knopf. Project Gutenberg. Hughes's essay "The Negro artist and the racial mountain" appeared in The Nation, 23 June 1926. gutenberg.org

A letter from Kansas City, 23 January 1936

In January 1936 a twelve-year-old in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote a letter to the wife of the President of the United States. The writer, who signed with the initials A.S., explained that they were in the sixth grade at the Allen School and had a sister of eleven. Both children loved the radio, but the family did not have one; they could listen only when they visited their aunt. A.S. knew where to buy a radio for $14.00, but had no money, and asked whether Eleanor Roosevelt might send one. Under the signature came one more line.

P.S. Please do not put me in jail.

Who made this, and why: this was a private letter from a child, never meant to be read by anyone except Mrs. Roosevelt and her staff. That is what makes it valuable. It shows what a twelve-year-old wanted, and what a twelve-year-old feared: that simply asking a powerful person for help might be a crime. Eleanor Roosevelt had invited Americans to write to her, in her newspaper column and on the radio, and they did. In 1933 alone, according to a documentary history of her mail, she received some 300,000 letters and cards. Some, like this one, came from children.

Six years earlier, a family like this one might well have owned a radio: in April 1930, as Lesson 13 showed, about 40 percent of households did. What happened in between is the Great Depression, the longest and deepest economic collapse in the country's history. A depression is a time when businesses sell less, hire fewer workers and pay less, so families have less to spend, which makes businesses sell less again. This lesson follows that collapse year by year, from the crash of 1929 to the dust of 1935, and keeps one number in view the whole way: how many Americans could not find work.

1929: a plateau that was not

In the twenties, more and more ordinary Americans bought stock, small shares in the ownership of companies. Many bought "on margin": they paid about 10 percent of the price and borrowed the rest, betting that prices would keep climbing. For a while they did. The Federal Reserve's historians note that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a number that tracks the share prices of a group of large companies, rose six-fold, from 63 in August 1921 to 381 in September 1929. The economist Irving Fisher announced that stock prices had reached "what looks like a permanently high plateau."

Within weeks the plateau gave way. On Black Monday, 28 October 1929, the Dow fell nearly 13 percent; on Black Tuesday, the next day, it fell nearly 12 percent more. By mid-November it had lost almost half its value. People who had bought on margin owed money on shares now worth far less than they had paid. And the slide did not stop. It went on until 8 July 1932, when the Dow closed at 41.22, 89 percent below its peak. It did not climb back to its 1929 high until November 1954.

President Herbert Hoover tried to calm the country. In 1929 he said, "Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the strength of business in the United States is foolish." In 1930 he said, "The worst is behind us." Keep those words in mind; in a moment you will test them against the numbers.

1930-1933: when the banks fell

The crash hurt people who owned stock. What reached nearly every family was the collapse of the banks. A bank keeps only part of its customers' money in its vault; it lends the rest out. If every customer wants their money back on the same day, the bank cannot pay. In those days the national government did not insure deposits, the money people kept in banks. So when a rumour spread that a bank was in trouble, customers raced to withdraw their savings before the cash ran out. That race is called a bank run, and it could topple a bank that had been healthy the day before.

In November 1930 a large banking company in Nashville, Tennessee, Caldwell and Company, collapsed. Panic spread from town to town, and within a few weeks hundreds of banks had closed their doors. On 11 December 1930 the fourth-largest bank in New York City, the Bank of United States, shut down. A news photograph from 5 February 1931 captures the mood: John Poole, president of the Federal American National Bank in Washington, D.C., stands on a narrow ledge outside his bank, telling the crowd below that the bank is sound.

The FDIC, the government agency that insures bank deposits today, counts the damage: from the crash in the fall of 1929 to the end of 1933, about 9,000 banks suspended business, and their depositors lost about $1.3 billion. Four thousand of those banks closed in the first few months of 1933 alone. As banks failed, there was less money to lend and to spend. The Federal Reserve's historians calculate that between the fall of 1930 and the winter of 1933 the country's money supply fell by nearly 30 percent, and prices fell with it. Businesses that could not sell their goods laid off their workers.

Counting the jobless

How many lost their jobs? The surprising answer is that nobody counted at the time, not year by year. The national census counted the unemployed in 1930 and 1940, but for the years in between, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) later had to estimate. In a report published in 1948, it explained its method: estimate how many people were in the labor force, meaning everyone working or looking for work, estimate how many had jobs, and subtract. Here are its figures. The rate is the number unemployed divided by the labor force.

Who made this, and why: government economists built this table years after the events, to fill a gap in the official record and to link the 1930s to the monthly counts that began in 1940. Their report also printed five other estimates made outside the government, and they did not agree: for 1933 they ran from about 11.8 million to 14.4 million unemployed. So treat each figure as a careful estimate, not an exact count. All the estimates agree on the shape, though: a steep climb to a peak in 1932 or 1933.

Now test Hoover's words. In 1930, when he said "the worst is behind us," 8.7 percent of workers were jobless. Three years later the figure was 24.9 percent, about one worker in four. And averages hide the hardest cases. The OpenStax history reports that by 1932 unemployment among African Americans reached nearly 50 percent.

So what?: one worker in four without a job meant many more than one person in four in trouble, because each worker's pay fed a family. Behind every row of the table are children like A.S.

What hard times looked like

Families who lost their homes built shacks from whatever scraps they could find, on empty land at the edges of cities. People called these shantytowns "Hoovervilles," and the newspapers that homeless people slept under "Hoover blankets." Children, the OpenStax history records, searched city docks for spoiled vegetables to bring home and begged at the doors of better-off neighbours for stale bread or potato peelings.

In the spring of 1932 about fifteen thousand veterans of the First World War, the soldiers of Lesson 11, came to Washington to ask for early payment of a bonus that Congress had promised them, but not until 1945. They camped in empty buildings and on the Anacostia Flats near the Capitol. The Senate refused, and Hoover ordered the camps cleared; the clearing turned violent. The scenes helped seal Hoover's defeat, and in November 1932 he lost the election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

14 April 1935: Black Sunday

On the Great Plains, from western Kansas to the Texas Panhandle, hard times came out of the sky. A drought began in 1931 and lasted eight years. In the boom years before, farmers had ploughed up huge stretches of prairie grass, whose deep roots held the soil in place, to plant wheat, and they had worked the land without rest. Now, with no rain and no grass, the wind lifted the dry topsoil and carried it away. OpenStax counts more than 850 million tons of topsoil blown away in 1935 alone. People wore goggles and tied rags over their mouths, and doctors described a new illness, "dust pneumonia."

The worst storm came on a warm Sunday afternoon, 14 April 1935. The National Weather Service's account describes a wall of blowing dust, with winds above 60 miles an hour, that struck Beaver, Oklahoma, at about 4 p.m., Boise City at about 5:15 and Amarillo, Texas, at 7:20. For a time the darkness was so complete that people could not see their own hands in front of their faces. Across the plains, volunteer weather observers recorded that month on their official forms. Two of their notes:

Beaver: "Worst dust storm ever known in this country on 14 of April"

Chattanooga: "You will note I put in 3 days of dust. Honest I could not tell if it was cloudy or not, dust was all I could see so I put it down."

Who made this, and why: these observers were local volunteers who recorded the weather every day for the government's Weather Bureau. They wrote for officials who wanted plain facts, not for newspapers that wanted a story. That makes their forms good evidence. Notice the second writer's honesty: the observer explains a guess rather than hiding it.

The next day an Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, who had been caught in the storm near Boise City, wrote that "residents of the southwestern dust bowl" had suffered "another black duster." The name stuck: the Dust Bowl. Thousands of farm families, many from Oklahoma, packed what they could carry and drove west toward California, where they were called "Okies." One farm woman who stayed, Caroline Henderson of Shelton, Oklahoma, wrote that year of watching her family's work blow away: "Impossible it seems not to grieve that the work of hands should prove so perishable."

In March 1936 the photographer Dorothea Lange, working for a government agency, stopped at a camp of pea pickers in Nipomo, California, and photographed a mother gazing into the distance, with a baby in her lap and two older children huddled close beside her. The picture, now called Migrant Mother, became the best-known image of the Depression. For more than forty years almost no one knew the woman's name. She was identified in 1978 as Florence Owens Thompson.

Back to Kansas City

Now return to A.S. By January 1936 the worst year was over: the table shows unemployment down from 24.9 percent in 1933 to 20.1 percent in 1935, and it would be 16.9 percent for 1936. But "better" is not "good." Nearly one worker in six still had no job, and a family that could not find $14.00 for a radio was a family counting every coin. The letter shows the Depression the way a child met it: not as a line on a chart but as a thing other families had and yours did not, and as a fear of asking.

The letter also shows something new. A.S. wrote to the President's wife as if she might really help. By 1936 many Americans had begun to expect the national government to do something about hard times. Lesson 15 asks what it did.

The skill: change over time

A table like the one above is a picture of change. Historians read it in three ways.

• Divide it into phases. Breaking a long stretch of time into named periods is called periodization. The jobless figures fall into four phases: the slide (1929-1933), when unemployment rose every year to almost 25 percent; the slow climb out (1933-1937); the relapse (1937-1938), when it jumped back to 19 percent; and the recovery (1939-1941), as war orders began to fill the factories. Each phase needs its own explanation.
• Test words against numbers. Irving Fisher's "permanently high plateau" and Hoover's "the worst is behind us" were spoken in good faith by experts. The numbers proved them wrong. People living through a change rarely see its shape.
• Use hindsight fairly. Hindsight is knowing how things turned out. We have it; Hoover did not. It is unfair to blame people for not knowing the future. It is fair to ask whether they ignored evidence they already had, such as closing banks and rising lines of jobless men.

Worth holding on to: the Depression was not one event on one day. It was a slide that lasted four years, a climb that took four more, and a setback in the middle of the climb.

Common misconceptions

• "The stock market crash caused the Depression all by itself." The Federal Reserve's historians date the downturn from August 1929, before the crash, and stress the bank panics that began in November 1930 and the fall in the money supply that followed.
• "If a bank failed, the government paid the savers back." Not until 1934. From 1929 to the end of 1933 about 9,000 banks suspended business, and depositors lost about $1.3 billion.
• "Nearly everyone lost their job." At the worst, in 1933, about one worker in four was unemployed. That was a disaster, and far worse for some groups, but most workers still had some kind of job.
• "The Dust Bowl was caused by the weather alone." Drought and wind did the damage, but the soil could blow away because the grass that had held it was ploughed up during the boom.

Putting it together

• The Dow rose six-fold in the twenties, crashed on 28 and 29 October 1929, and kept falling until July 1932, 89 percent below its peak.
• Bank runs and panics, beginning in November 1930, closed about 9,000 banks by the end of 1933; with no deposit insurance, savers lost about $1.3 billion.
• BLS estimates show unemployment rising from 3.2 percent in 1929 to 24.9 percent in 1933, falling to 14.3 percent in 1937, and jumping to 19.0 percent in 1938. African American unemployment neared 50 percent by 1932.
• Hoovervilles, hungry children and the Bonus Army of 1932 turned voters against Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt won the election of 1932.
• Drought and ploughed-up grassland produced the Dust Bowl; Black Sunday, 14 April 1935, gave it its name, and thousands of families left for California.
• Change over time: divide a long stretch into phases, test words against numbers, and use hindsight fairly.

Sources

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (1948). Labor force, employment, and unemployment, 1929-39: Estimating methods [Technical note, Tables 1 and 2]. Monthly Labor Review, pp. 50-53. bls.gov
2. Richardson, G., Komai, A., Gou, M., and Park, D. (2013, November 22). Stock market crash of 1929; and Richardson, G. (2013, November 22). Banking panics of 1930-31. Federal Reserve History. federalreservehistory.org; federalreservehistory.org
3. National Weather Service, Norman, Oklahoma. (n.d.). The Black Sunday dust storm of April 14, 1935 [Including cooperative observers' comments and contemporary news reports]. weather.gov
4. APM Reports. (2014, November 10). Letters to (and from) Eleanor Roosevelt. American Public Media. apmreports.org
5. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history (sections 25.1-25.3). OpenStax. openstax.org

Saturday, 4 March 1933: a country with its banks closing

On Saturday, 4 March 1933, in Washington, D.C., Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath as president. The country he took charge of was broken in ways you could see from the inaugural platform. Almost 13 million workers, about one in four, had no job. Some 4,000 banks had closed since January. That very morning, the Federal Reserve's historians record, all twelve Federal Reserve Banks kept their doors locked, and banks in thirty-seven states were either closed or allowed customers to take out only part of their money. Farm prices had collapsed, and on the plains the topsoil was starting to blow. Roosevelt's first words as president described the problem plainly.

This Nation is asking for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war ...

Who made this, and why: this is Roosevelt's first inaugural address, spoken to the crowd in front of the Capitol and to millions listening on the radio. Earlier in the same speech came its most famous line, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He had two jobs that day: to calm a frightened country, and to warn Congress that he meant to use the national government in ways no peacetime president had. Notice his comparison. He talked about unemployment as if it were an enemy army.

So here is this lesson's problem, and it is a real one, still argued about today. What can a government do when a quarter of its workers are idle and its banks are falling? Roosevelt and his advisers did not have a master plan. They tried many things fast, kept what seemed to work and dropped what did not. They called their programmes the New Deal, after the new hand of cards a player is dealt in a game. The OpenStax history describes their approach like an emergency doctor's: first save the patient, then look for a long-term cure. Historians often sort the results into three kinds.

• Relief: help for people in trouble right now, such as jobs, food and cash.
• Recovery: getting businesses, farms and banks working again.
• Reform: new rules to stop the same disaster from happening again.

Work through the problem in three parts, the way Roosevelt's government did.

Part one: the banks

At one o'clock in the morning on Monday, 6 March 1933, two days after taking office, Roosevelt ordered every bank in the country closed for a "bank holiday." On 9 March Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, and government examiners sorted the banks into those sound enough to reopen, those that needed time, and those that would never open again. On Sunday evening, 12 March, Roosevelt spoke to the country on the radio, in the first of the talks that came to be called fireside chats. He explained in everyday words how banks work, and why the reopened ones could be trusted.

I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.

Who made this, and why: the President wrote this talk for ordinary listeners, not bankers; he said at the start that he wanted to speak to "the overwhelming majority who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks." Radio, the new machine of Lesson 13, let him speak into millions of kitchens at once. His goal was to stop the next run before it started, because a bank run is driven by fear.

Talk was relief for the moment. Reform came in June: the Banking Act of 1933, signed on 16 June, created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC. From 1 January 1934 the government insured each depositor's money, at first up to $2,500, and from July 1934 up to $5,000. If an insured bank failed, savers would be paid back. On 5 July 1934 the FDIC made its first payments, to depositors of the failed Fon Du Lac State Bank in East Peoria, Illinois. The first of them, Lydia Lobsiger, got back her life savings of $1,250.

Now look at the effect. From the crash of 1929 to the end of 1933, about 9,000 banks had failed. From 1934 through 1941, the FDIC handled 370 bank failures, most of them small banks. When savers knew their money was safe, they stopped running, and banks stopped falling.

The upshot: this was the New Deal's clearest success, and it has lasted. Every time you see "Member FDIC" on a bank door, you are looking at a reform of 1933.

Part two: twelve million without work

Roosevelt's answer to unemployment was the one he promised in his inaugural address: the government would hire people itself. Here are three of the programmes, with what they did and whom they reached.

The National Park Service, whose parks the CCC helped to build, explains how it worked: the young men signed up for six months at a time, could serve up to two years, and had to send most of their pay home. A CCC job was relief twice over: for the young man, and for the family that received his $25. The WPA also paid people for work, not for waiting: the schools, hospitals and roads in the table were built by people on its payroll.

The plains had their own programme. In March 1935, the National Weather Service recounts, Hugh Hammond Bennett was telling Congress that the country needed to protect its soil, just as dust from the Great Plains reached Washington and darkened the sky; Bennett pointed out the window and said, "This, gentlemen, is what I've been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act before the year was out, making soil protection a permanent job of the national government.

Did all this hiring work? Go back to the unemployment table in Lesson 14. The rate fell from 24.9 percent in 1933 to 14.3 percent in 1937. Then it jumped to 19.0 percent in 1938. The Federal Reserve's historians point to two likely causes of that relapse: the Federal Reserve and the Treasury shrank the supply of money in 1936 and 1937, and the government cut back its spending. The economy slid back, and industrial production fell by nearly a third. Unemployment did not fall below 10 percent until 1941, when factories were filling orders for war.

Part three: old age and hard luck

The third part of the problem was the oldest. What happens to a worker who is too old to work, or who loses a job through no fault of their own, or to children whose father has died? Before the 1930s, the answer was family, charity or the poorhouse. On 14 August 1935 Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It created old-age insurance paid for by taxes on workers and employers, unemployment insurance run with the states, and help for needy children. He described its limits honestly.

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.

Who made this, and why: this was the President's official statement at the signing, written for the newspapers and for history. Vicissitudes means the ups and downs of life. Notice the careful words "some measure": Roosevelt was promising less than everything, partly so that no one could say he had promised too much.

The first monthly Social Security check, number 00-000-001, went to Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary from Vermont who as a girl had been a classmate of Calvin Coolidge. It was dated 31 January 1940 and was worth $22.54. She had stopped in at her local office on an errand. "It wasn't that I expected anything, mind you," she said later, "but I knew I'd been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it."

Who was left out

A programme can help millions and still leave millions out. The OpenStax history lists several gaps.

• Sharecroppers and tenant farmers. To raise crop prices, the Agricultural Adjustment Act paid farmers to grow less, an idea, OpenStax notes, that was unheard of before. Big landowners often took the money and then laid off sharecroppers or evicted tenant farmers, many of them Black, leaving them worse off than before.
• Black workers in the job programmes. Local officials often discriminated in hiring, and the CCC's camps were segregated by 1935. Things improved in some programmes: the WPA came to employ about 350,000 African Americans a year, and Mary McLeod Bethune, a leading Black educator, ran the NYA's Division of Negro Affairs.
• Farm and domestic workers. Social Security's old-age insurance at first covered only workers in commerce and industry, about half the jobs in the economy. Among those left out were farm workers and domestic workers, the cooks, maids and nannies who worked in other people's homes.

That last gap shows how unequal an effect could be. Using the 1930 census, the Social Security Administration's historian Larry DeWitt calculated that the exclusion left out about 65 percent of African American workers and about 27 percent of white workers. Most farm and domestic workers were brought into Social Security by 1950, and the rest by 1954.

The skill: cause and effect

The New Deal raises two cause-and-effect questions that historians still argue about. Here is how to think through each.

First: did the New Deal end the Depression? List the effects you can measure. Bank failures fell from thousands a year to a few dozen. Unemployment fell by ten points between 1933 and 1937. Millions of people were fed, paid and kept in school. Those effects were real. But unemployment rose again in 1938 when the government pulled back, and it stayed above 9 percent until 1941. The Federal Reserve's historians conclude that full output and full employment returned only during the Second World War. A careful answer is that the New Deal gave relief and helped recovery, but did not by itself end the Depression. When an outcome has several causes, say which cause did what.

Second: why were farm and domestic workers left out of Social Security? Here the effect is clear and the cause is disputed. Some historians argue that southern members of Congress demanded the exclusion to keep Black workers dependent on low-paid farm and household jobs. Larry DeWitt, after studying the records of how the law was written, argues that the exclusion began with the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who told Congress that collecting the new tax from millions of farm hands and household servants would be too hard to manage, and that Congress was glad to avoid taxing those voters. He points out that of everyone the rule excluded, 74 percent were white.

You do not have to settle that dispute today. What you do need is the rule it teaches. Key idea: an unequal effect does not, by itself, prove an unequal intent, because different causes can produce the same effect. To show intent you need evidence of what people wanted, such as their letters, speeches and votes. And the effect matters whatever the intent: for a Black family in Mississippi in 1937, the result was the same.

Common misconceptions

• "The New Deal ended the Great Depression." It brought unemployment down from 24.9 percent to 14.3 percent by 1937, but the rate climbed back to 19 percent in 1938 and did not fall below 10 percent until 1941, as war orders arrived.
• "Social Security covered every worker from the start." It covered about half the jobs in the economy. Most farm and domestic workers were added by 1950, and the rest by 1954.
• "New Deal jobs paid people for doing nothing." CCC workers planted forests and built trails; the WPA built more than 5,900 schools and 2,500 hospitals.
• "Deposit insurance protected any amount of money." It began at $2,500 for each depositor in January 1934 and was raised to $5,000 that July.

Where this leaves us

• On 4 March 1933 Roosevelt took office with about one worker in four jobless and the banks closing; he called for "action, and action now."
• The bank holiday, the first fireside chat and the FDIC stopped the runs: about 9,000 banks failed in 1929-1933, but only 370 in 1934-1941.
• The CCC, WPA and NYA hired millions, from young men planting forests to four million high school students in part-time jobs; the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 answered the Dust Bowl.
• The Social Security Act of 14 August 1935 created old-age and unemployment insurance; Ida May Fuller received the first monthly check, for $22.54, in 1940.
• Sharecroppers, many Black workers, and farm and domestic workers were left out or treated unequally; the exclusion from Social Security left out about 65 percent of African American workers.
• Cause and effect: the New Deal brought relief and recovery but did not by itself end the Depression, and an unequal effect does not by itself prove intent.

Sources

1. Roosevelt, F. D. (1933, March 4). Inaugural address; and (1933, March 12). Fireside chat on banking. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu
2. Social Security Administration. (n.d.). Presidential statement signing the Social Security Act, August 14, 1935 and The first Social Security beneficiary [Historical documents]. ssa.gov; ssa.gov
3. DeWitt, L. (2010). The decision to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from the 1935 Social Security Act. Social Security Bulletin, 70(4). ssa.gov
4. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (1984). The first fifty years: A history of the FDIC, 1933-1983 (chapter 1); and FDIC: 90 years [Timeline]. fdic.gov; fdic.gov
5. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history (sections 26.2, The first New Deal, and 26.3, The second New Deal). OpenStax. openstax.org

Sunday, 7 December 1941, five o'clock in the afternoon

In a room in the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt dictated a short speech to his secretary, Grace Tully. Hours earlier he had been told that Japanese planes had attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. When Tully brought back the typed draft, he began marking it up by hand. The most important change came in the first line. The draft said that 7 December would be "a date which will live in world history." Roosevelt crossed out "world history" and wrote one word: "infamy." Infamy means lasting shame.

You can still see that change. The typed draft, with Roosevelt's corrections, is kept at his presidential library in Hyde Park, New York, and the National Archives shows it online for students. It is a small piece of paper, and it shows a big thing: a speech is not simply spoken; it is made, word by word, by someone choosing how listeners should feel.

This lesson follows the American war through four documents like that one, written by leaders at four turning points. For each, you will ask the questions of sourcing: who made it, when, for whom, why, and what kind of document it is. Those questions matter most when the events are terrible, as many of these were.

Document one: "a date which will live in infamy"

The attack had begun just before eight o'clock on Sunday morning, Hawaii time. Japan's leaders, already at war in China, meant to knock out the American Pacific Fleet so that the United States could not block their conquests in Asia and the Pacific. The National Park Service, which runs the memorial at Pearl Harbor, records that the attack permanently sank two battleships, the USS Arizona and the USS Utah, and destroyed 188 aircraft. On the Arizona alone, 1,177 men died.

How many Americans died in all? One Park Service page says 2,403 service members and civilians; another says 2,390. Both are official, and they do not match. Counts of the dead are often revised as records are checked, and different counters include different people. A careful reader does not pick one and hide the other. You can write "about 2,400" and say where your number comes from.

At 12:30 the next afternoon, Roosevelt spoke to a joint session of Congress and, by radio, to the nation. His speech began:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 ... a date which will live in infamy ... the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Who made this, and why: Roosevelt composed the speech himself, choosing, as the National Archives explains, "a brief, uncomplicated appeal" rather than a long list of Japan's broken promises. He was speaking to Congress, which had to vote, and to the whole country by radio. Every word was chosen to turn shock into anger and anger into unity. The Senate voted for war unanimously; in the House the only vote against came from Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the same woman who had voted against war in 1917, as you saw in Lesson 11. On 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The country was now fighting on two sides of the world: against Japan in the Pacific, and against Germany and Italy in Europe and North Africa, alongside its allies Britain, the Soviet Union and China.

Document two: two messages in a general's pocket, 5 June 1944

By 1944 the Allies were ready to invade France, which Germany had occupied since 1940. The commander was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. On the eve of the invasion he had two messages ready. The first, his "Order of the Day," was printed and issued to the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the invasion force.

You are about to embark on the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. ... Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

The second he wrote by hand and kept to himself. It was what he would announce if the landings failed.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

Who made this, and why: one man wrote both, on the same day, for opposite purposes. The Order of the Day was public, written to give courage to the men about to land. The note was private, written for a disaster that never came; Eisenhower threw it away, and an aide saved it. Look closely and you will find what may be signs of a tired, worried writer: he dated the note "July 5" instead of June 5, and in the National Archives' transcription "Bravery" has a capital letter in the middle of a sentence. Notice also what he chose to say if he failed: not that the troops or the weather had let him down, but that the blame was "mine alone."

On 6 June 1944, D-Day, the landings did not fail. The Eisenhower Library counts 7,000 ships and landing craft, more than 195,000 sailors and almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth and their allies landing on five beaches in Normandy, with about 10,300 casualties that day. By 30 June more than 850,000 men had come ashore. With the Soviet army pressing from the east, Germany was squeezed from both sides, and on 7 May 1945 its generals surrendered.

Document three: what the soldiers found, April 1945

As Allied armies pushed into Germany in the spring of 1945, they came upon concentration camps, where the Nazi government had imprisoned, starved and murdered its prisoners. What they found is part of the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it in one sentence: "The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators." Systematic means carried out according to a plan, and state-sponsored means organised by the government itself. Nazi Germany and its allies killed nearly two out of every three Jews in Europe. They also persecuted and murdered other groups, including Roma people and people with disabilities.

Children were not spared. The museum estimates that as many as 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered or died at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. One of them was Anne Frank, born in Germany in 1929, whose family fled to Amsterdam and, in July 1942, went into hiding in a secret apartment behind her father's office. For two years she kept a diary there. On 4 August 1944 the family was discovered and deported. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen camp in February or March 1945, at fifteen. Her diary, saved by Miep Gies, one of the Dutch friends who had hidden the family, and published through the efforts of her father, the only member of the family to survive, is how millions of readers first meet this history.

The United States had a part in this story before the war, too. In May 1939 a German ship, the St. Louis, sailed for Cuba with 937 passengers, almost all of them Jewish refugees. Cuba refused to let them land, and so did the United States: the yearly quota for immigrants from Germany and Austria, set under the law of 1924 that you met in Lesson 13, was 27,370, and it was already full, with a waiting list years long. That same year a bill to admit 20,000 German refugee children outside the quota was allowed to die in Congress. The St. Louis sailed back to Europe. Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands took the passengers in, and some later reached the United States. But when Germany conquered western Europe in 1940, those still there were trapped again. The museum counts 254 of them killed in the Holocaust.

On 12 April 1945 General Eisenhower visited one of the first camps the Americans reached, at Ohrdruf in Germany. Afterwards he sent a cable, a message by telegraph, to General George C. Marshall in Washington. Here are two short parts of it.

The things I saw beggar description. ... I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

Who made this, and why: Eisenhower was writing to his superior, privately, days after the visit. "Beggar description" means the sights were too terrible to put into words. The second sentence tells you why he went: he expected that some people would one day claim the camps were invented, and he wanted to be a witness who could say he had seen them himself. He then asked for members of Congress and journalists to be brought to the camps to see for themselves. His prediction came true; people who deny the Holocaust exist even today. His cable is part of the evidence that answers them.

Remember: the Holocaust was not a side effect of the war. It was a deliberate plan to murder a whole people, and it was carried out by a government.

Document four: a statement read on the radio, 6 August 1945

In the Pacific the war went on after Germany's surrender, fought island by island toward Japan. In secret, American, British and other scientists of the Manhattan Project had built a new weapon. On 6 August 1945 an American bomber dropped it on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At eleven o'clock that morning, Washington time, radio stations began reading a statement from President Harry S. Truman, who had become president when Roosevelt died that April.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

Who made this, and why: this is an official press statement, written to announce the bomb to the American people and to warn Japan's government that more would follow unless it surrendered. Read its words carefully. It calls Hiroshima "an important Japanese Army base." The Department of Energy's history agrees that the city was an important military centre, with about 43,000 soldiers, but it also had a civilian population of almost 300,000, including children, and the statement does not mention them. A source can be accurate in what it says and still leave out what matters most to another reader.

How many died? The Department of Energy's history of the Manhattan Project begins its answer with a warning: "No one will ever know for certain." It estimates that some 70,000 people probably died from the blast, heat and radiation at first, including about twenty American airmen held as prisoners in the city, and that by the end of 1945 the toll was probably over 100,000. Many who seemed to survive fell ill with a new sickness caused by radiation. On 9 August a second bomb destroyed much of Nagasaki, where about 40,000 people probably died at first and nearly 70,000 by January 1946. Among the survivors of Hiroshima was a two-year-old girl named Sadako Sasaki. Ten years later, at twelve, she fell ill with leukemia, a cancer of the blood. Before she died in October 1955 she folded more than a thousand paper cranes, and paper cranes are still folded in her memory.

The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August. On 15 August Japan announced that it would surrender, and on 2 September 1945 its representatives signed the surrender on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Truman explained his decision to the country on 9 August: "We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." Americans have argued ever since about whether the bombs were necessary and whether they were right. Truman's words are evidence of his reasons, as he stated them. Other evidence, from Japan, from the Soviet declaration of war and from the debates of 1945, is part of that argument too.

Counting the cost

The National WWII Museum gathers estimates of the war's dead from many sources, and it warns that "worldwide casualty estimates vary widely." Here are some of its figures.

Read the table the way you read the Pearl Harbor numbers. These are estimates, not counts, and the museum adds that civilian deaths in China alone may have been more than 50 million, which would make even its world total too low. What the table shows clearly is shape, not precision: far more civilians died than soldiers, and the Soviet Union lost more people than any other country in the table.

The skill: sourcing

Sourcing means asking where a piece of evidence came from before deciding what it proves. Lay the four documents side by side and the questions do most of the work.

The core of it: the kind of document changes what it can tell you. Public statements show what leaders wanted people to think. Private notes and drafts often show what they really thought. You need both, and you need to know which one you are holding.

Common misconceptions

• "The United States joined the war when Germany invaded Poland in 1939." The war in Europe began then, but the United States did not enter it until December 1941, after Pearl Harbor.
• "D-Day was an American invasion." The troops came from the United States, the British Commonwealth and their allies, and the ships were crewed by sailors from eight countries.
• "The St. Louis refugees were sent back to Germany." They were taken in by Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. But 254 of them were later killed in the Holocaust after Germany conquered western Europe.
• "Everyone killed by the atomic bombs died at once." About 70,000 probably died at first in Hiroshima, but deaths from radiation sickness went on for weeks, and the toll was probably over 100,000 by the end of 1945.

What to remember

• Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; the Park Service gives tolls of 2,403 and 2,390, and 1,177 men died on the USS Arizona. Roosevelt changed "world history" to "infamy," and Congress declared war on 8 December.
• On D-Day, 6 June 1944, almost 133,000 Allied troops landed in Normandy. Eisenhower had a note ready taking the blame if they failed. Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945.
• The Holocaust was the state-sponsored murder of six million European Jews, including as many as 1.5 million Jewish children, among them Anne Frank. In 1939 the United States turned away the St. Louis.
• Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf on 12 April 1945 "deliberately," to be a witness against future denial.
• Atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945; Japan surrendered on 2 September. Death tolls are estimates: probably over 100,000 in Hiroshima by the end of 1945.
• Sourcing asks who made a document, when, for whom, why and what kind it is. Public statements and private notes tell different truths.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). "A date which will live in infamy": The first typed draft of Franklin D. Roosevelt's war address [Educator resources]; and Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan (1941) [Milestone Documents]. archives.gov; archives.gov
2. National Archives. (2004). Eisenhower's two D-Day messages. Prologue, 36(2); and Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library. (n.d.). World War II: D-Day, the invasion of Normandy. archives.gov; eisenhowerlibrary.gov
3. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). Introduction to the Holocaust; Children during the Holocaust; Voyage of the St. Louis; Ohrdruf; and Anne Frank biography [Holocaust Encyclopedia]. ushmm.org; ushmm.org; ushmm.org
4. U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. (n.d.). The Manhattan Project: An interactive history (The atomic bombing of Hiroshima; The atomic bombing of Nagasaki); and Truman, H. S. (1945, August 6). Statement by the President announcing the use of the A-bomb at Hiroshima. Harry S. Truman Library. osti.gov; trumanlibrary.gov
5. National Park Service. (2026). National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day and Remembrance Circle. Pearl Harbor National Memorial. nps.gov; nps.gov

Tuesday, 5 May 1942: a ration book for every child

On 5 May 1942 families all over the United States walked to their neighbourhood schools to collect a new kind of book. Each person, the National Park Service records, including every child, received a book of their own: War Ration Book One. Before a family could take its books home, it had to say how much sugar it already had in the cupboard, and a matching number of stamps was torn out. From then on each person could buy about half a pound of sugar a week, half of what Americans had used in 1941. If you were eleven in 1942, the government had just given you your own small part in the war.

Why sugar? When Japan invaded the Philippines in December 1941, the country lost its sugar from there, and German submarines were sinking ships that carried it from the Caribbean. A government agency, the Office of Price Administration, decided who could buy how much. Sugar was the first food rationed and the last to be freed: it stayed on the ration until June 1947.

In the very same weeks, thousands of other American children were not collecting ration books at their schools. They were being taken with their families, on a few days' notice, to racetracks and fairgrounds on the West Coast, because their parents or grandparents had come from Japan. Same war, same spring, very different home fronts.

This lesson compares four of those home fronts. Comparing fairly means asking the same questions of each, so here are the questions, and then the answers.

Four groups, five questions

Now look at each column more closely, and at the evidence behind each answer.

Making do: stamps, scrap and Victory Stamps

Rationing spread from sugar to coffee, meat, butter, canned goods, shoes and gasoline. Some 5,500 local ration boards, run mostly by volunteers, handed out the books. Red stamps bought meat and butter, and blue stamps bought canned and processed foods. Because metal was needed for weapons, the small tokens given as change for red and blue stamps were made of pressed wood fibre. Even candy went to war: a 1943 magazine advertisement for Life Savers told customers that the armed forces had first claim on them.

Children were drafted into the effort in their own ways. The OpenStax history records that they bought Victory Stamps and traded full booklets of stamps for war bonds; Americans of all ages bought more than $185 billion in bonds to pay for the war. Children collected scrap metal, paper, rubber and old rags, and some gave up their metal toys to be melted down. Families planted "victory gardens" in back yards and empty lots, as the government urged.

The point: for most American families, the home front meant less, and shared more fairly. It did not mean hunger: sugar was cut to half, but corn syrup, molasses and maple syrup were not rationed at all.

Women at work

With millions of men in uniform, factories needed workers, and women took the jobs. A historian writing for the National Park Service estimates that about 12 million women worked in defense industries and support services, in shipyards, steel mills, warehouses, offices and hospitals. By 1943, OpenStax notes, a majority of workers in the aircraft industry were women. In the shipyards of Richmond, California, where the National Park Service now runs the Rosie the Riveter home front park, women made up 27 percent of the workforce by the end of the war.

The work came with what that historian calls a "double burden." Most plants ran around the clock, and many women worked six days a week, then did the shopping, cooking and washing as well. Up to half of the women in the largest shipyards had children at home. Not enough childcare existed, OpenStax records, so many children looked after themselves after school, and some took care of younger brothers and sisters. And most working women, it adds, were not in war plants at all but in other factory jobs and offices.

Double V: a war on two fronts

For Black Americans, the war began with a fight at home. In early 1941, as defense plants hired thousands of white workers and turned Black workers away, the labour leader A. Philip Randolph, whom you met in Lesson 11, threatened to lead a huge march on Washington. Roosevelt answered on 25 June 1941 with Executive Order 8802. The National Archives calls it the first presidential order on race since Reconstruction.

There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries and in Government, because of race, creed, color, or national origin.

Who made this, and why: it is an executive order, a rule issued by the President, written under pressure: in exchange, Randolph called off the march. It created a committee to investigate complaints, though, the National Archives adds, most historians judge that committee to have had little power, especially in the South. The order opened doors. It did not open them all the way. In the Bay Area shipyards, the Park Service historian notes, Black workers "were usually stuck in lower-wage work." Still, one Black woman who left domestic service for a war job summed up what changed for her: "Hitler was the one that got us out of the kitchen."

In January 1942 James G. Thompson of Wichita, Kansas, wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper, under the title "Should I Sacrifice to Live 'Half American'?" He proposed a second V beside the V for victory: "the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within." The Courier turned his idea into the Double V campaign. About one million Black Americans served in the war, OpenStax records, in segregated units, including the pilots trained at Tuskegee, Alabama. The armed forces were not desegregated until President Truman ordered it in 1948.

Forty-eight hours: Japanese Americans

On 19 February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Read its central words carefully.

I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate ... to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded ...

Who made this, and why: the order was written to sound general. As the National Archives points out, it never names any group. But General John DeWitt, the army commander on the West Coast, used it against one group only. On 29 March 1942 his Public Proclamation No. 4 began the forced removal of Japanese American families from the coast, on 48 hours' notice. Families sold houses, farms and shops in days, or simply left them. They were held first in "assembly centers," often racetracks or fairgrounds, then moved to ten camps in remote parts of the West and Arkansas, such as Manzanar in California and Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Four or five families shared one tar-paper barrack. Children went to school in barracks too.

How many people were held? The National Archives gives about 122,000 on one page and about 112,000 sent to assembly centers on another, and OpenStax gives 120,000 and 127,000 in different paragraphs. Count what each figure counts, then say "about 120,000." The National Archives adds the fact that matters most: "Nearly 70,000 of the evacuees were American citizens." None was charged with a crime, and none could appeal. More than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the armed forces during the war, many while their families were behind fences, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became famous as the most highly decorated unit of the war.

One person held in a camp later asked the question that sums up the official explanation and its weakness. The government had said the camps were partly for Japanese Americans' own protection. "If we were put there for our protection," he asked, "why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?"

Three Japanese Americans challenged the orders in court. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court upheld the removal. Justice Frank Murphy dissented, and in a related case he called the detention of Japanese Americans regardless of their loyalty "another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program." Later evidence showed that a wartime naval intelligence report, finding no evidence that Japanese Americans were spying for Japan, had been kept from the Court. In 1983 a federal court threw out Fred Korematsu's conviction. In 1988 Congress and President Reagan apologised and paid $20,000 to each person who had been held. And in 2018 the Supreme Court declared that Korematsu "was gravely wrong the day it was decided."

The skill: comparison

Lesson 8 compared two immigration stations, and Lesson 12 compared two places. This lesson adds a harder use of comparison: testing a claim.

• Ask the same questions of each case. The table did that, and it made differences impossible to miss: one group was asked to give up sugar, another its freedom.
• Look for similarities as well as differences. Every group's daily life was reorganised by the government. Every group was asked to sacrifice. The question is what each was asked to give, and what each got back.
• Use a comparison to test a claim. The government said removing Japanese Americans was a military necessity. Compare. The National Archives notes that the FBI kept watch on individual German, Italian and Japanese immigrants it suspected, but only people of Japanese ancestry, citizens included, were removed as a whole group. And in Hawaii, closer to Japan and the place actually attacked, far fewer Japanese Americans were held. They made up over one-third of Hawaii's population, and their labour was needed. If the danger was real, why was the response weakest where the danger was greatest? The comparison does not prove the motive by itself, but it shows that "military necessity" cannot be the whole explanation. The National Archives names the others: fear, economic competition and "long-standing anti-Asian racism."

Bottom line: a comparison is fair only when you ask everyone the same questions. Asked fairly, these questions show that the war widened opportunity for some Americans while it took liberty from others.

Common misconceptions

• "Rationing meant Americans went hungry." It meant fair shares of scarce goods. Sugar was cut to about half a pound a week, but other sweeteners, such as corn syrup, molasses and maple syrup, were not rationed.
• "The Japanese Americans in the camps were enemy spies." None was charged with a crime, nearly 70,000 were American citizens, and a wartime naval intelligence report found no evidence of spying.
• "German and Italian Americans were rounded up in the same way." The FBI watched individual German and Italian immigrants it suspected, but only people of Japanese ancestry were removed as an entire group, citizens included.
• "Every woman who worked in the war built ships or planes." Millions did, but most women in the labour force worked in other factories and in offices.

Summing up

• On 5 May 1942 every person, children included, received War Ration Book One; sugar was cut to about half a pound a week and stayed rationed until June 1947.
• Children bought Victory Stamps, collected scrap and helped grow victory gardens; Americans bought more than $185 billion in war bonds.
• About 12 million women worked in defense industries and support services; women were 27 percent of Richmond's shipyard workforce by the war's end, carrying a "double burden" of work and home.
• Executive Order 8802 (1941) banned job discrimination in defense work; the Double V campaign of 1942 demanded victory abroad and at home; about a million Black Americans served in segregated units.
• Executive Order 9066 (1942) led to the removal of about 120,000 Japanese Americans, nearly 70,000 of them citizens, to ten camps; Korematsu (1944) upheld it, and in 2018 the Supreme Court called that decision "gravely wrong."
• Comparison: ask the same questions of each case, look for similarities and differences, and use comparisons to test claims.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese-American incarceration (1942) [Milestone Documents]; and Documents and photographs related to Japanese relocation during World War II [Educator resources]. archives.gov; archives.gov
2. National Archives. (n.d.). Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of discrimination in the defense industry (1941) [Milestone Documents]. archives.gov
3. National Park Service. (2023, November 16). Sugar: The first and last food rationed on the World War II home front; and Graves, D. (n.d.). Tending the homefront: The many roles of women in the San Francisco Bay Area during World War II. National Park Service. nps.gov; nps.gov
4. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). U.S. history (section 27.2, The home front). OpenStax. openstax.org

Thursday, 24 June 1948: a city cut off

Imagine you are President Harry Truman on the morning of 24 June 1948, and you have just received a problem with no good answer. Three years after the Second World War, Germany is still divided into zones run by the countries that defeated it: the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Berlin, its capital, lies deep inside the Soviet zone, and it is divided too. The western half of the city is run by the Americans, British and French. Today Soviet forces have closed every road, railway and canal into it.

West Berlin cannot feed itself or heat itself for long; its food and coal come in by land. The Soviets are angry that the Western powers have brought new money into their part of the city and are planning a separate West German state; within weeks they will offer to lift the blockade if the new money goes. Write down what you would do before you read on. Your choices look something like this.

1. Give up West Berlin. No one gets shot, but the city falls under Soviet control, and every ally in Europe learns that American promises can be broken by a roadblock.
2. Send an armed convoy of trucks down the highway. If Soviet soldiers stop it, someone may fire, and three years after one world war you might start another, this time with atomic bombs.
3. Find a third way. But what?

General Lucius Clay, who ran the American zone of Germany, had already warned Washington what was at stake. "We are convinced that our remaining in Berlin is essential to our prestige in Germany and in Europe," he reported. "Whether for good or bad, it has become a symbol of the American intent."

The third way: an airlift

The answer lay in the sky. Written agreements made with the Soviets in 1945 guaranteed the Western powers air corridors into Berlin. So the United States and Britain decided to fly in everything the city needed. The State Department's historians explain the reasoning: if the Soviets attacked an unarmed supply plane, they would be committing an act of aggression against a humanitarian mission and breaking a written agreement. Any war would be the Soviets' fault, and they knew it.

The United States launched "Operation Vittles" on 26 June 1948, and Britain joined two days later. Flying in food is hard; flying in coal for a whole city's stoves and power plants is harder. But the airlift grew more efficient month by month, until, at its height, a plane landed at Berlin's Tempelhof Airport every 45 seconds. In September 1948, when it seemed the Western powers might give up, some 300,000 West Berliners gathered in front of the old parliament building to show they wanted to stay free.

One pilot found a way to reach the city's children. Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen tied chocolate bars and gum to tiny parachutes made from handkerchiefs and dropped them to children waiting by the airfield fence. He rocked his plane's wings as he came in so they would know which plane was his, and the children named him "Uncle Wiggly Wings." His idea grew into "Operation Little Vittles": by the end of the airlift, the Air Force records, 25 plane crews had dropped 23 tons of chocolate, chewing gum and other sweets over Berlin. Years later Halvorsen wrote that it all began with "the silent gratitude of the children at a barbed wire fence."

In May 1949 the Soviets gave up and lifted the blockade. (The State Department's page gives the date once as 12 May and once as 11 May, a small reminder to check dates in more than one place.) Shortly before, the United States, Canada and ten European countries had formed NATO, an alliance whose members promised to defend one another. Within months Germany split into two countries, West Germany and East Germany.

What matters here: the airlift solved the problem without a shot fired between American and Soviet soldiers. That pattern, rivalry and danger without direct war, gave the whole contest its name.

Naming the problem: a "cold" war

The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies against Hitler. By 1946 they were rivals. They had opposite ideas about how a country should be run. The United States was a democracy with a free market, where people chose their leaders and owned businesses. The Soviet Union was a communist state run by one party, which owned the farms and factories and did not allow free elections. Soviet armies had freed eastern Europe from the Nazis, and now they stayed, putting communist governments in power.

On 5 March 1946, at a small college in Fulton, Missouri, Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill gave the division a name that stuck.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Who made this, and why: Churchill was no longer prime minister when he spoke; he led the opposition party in Parliament. But he was the most famous man in Britain, and in Fulton he was introduced by President Truman himself. He wanted Americans to see the Soviet Union as a danger and to stand with Britain against it. His "iron curtain" is a metaphor: there was no actual metal wall, but a line across Europe that people and ideas could hardly cross.

A year later, in March 1947, Truman announced what became the Truman Doctrine: "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Subjugation means being conquered and controlled. The idea of stopping communism from spreading, without attacking the Soviet Union itself, was called containment. The airlift was containment in action. So was the Marshall Plan, which sent American money to rebuild western Europe. The two superpowers never fought each other directly, so people called the contest the Cold War. But it produced real wars elsewhere, in which Americans fought and died, such as Korea in 1950-1953 and Vietnam, which you will study in Lesson 21.

A turtle named Bert: children and the bomb

In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. The American monopoly, the four years when only the United States had the bomb, was over, and both sides began building more and bigger weapons. The national government's Federal Civil Defense Administration paid for a short film for schools, Duck and Cover, released at the start of the 1950s. It opened with a cartoon turtle named Bert, who pulls into his shell when danger comes, and then showed real children practising what to do "when you see the flash" of an atomic bomb: drop to the ground or crawl under a desk, and cover their heads.

Schools across the country held drills. A child in 1952 might practise ducking under a desk the way an earlier generation practised fire drills. From that child's point of view, the Cold War was not a map of Europe; it was a classroom, a cartoon turtle and an alarm. From the government's point of view, the film was a way to prepare citizens and calm fear. Later, critics often called it propaganda, arguing that hiding under a desk could not have protected anyone close to a nuclear explosion.

Friday, 4 October 1957: a beep from space

That Friday evening the Soviet news agency announced that it had put the world's first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth. Sputnik 1, NASA's history explains, was an aluminium ball 22 inches across with four antennas, weighing 183 pounds. It circled the Earth every 96 minutes, and a small radio transmitter inside sent out a beep at regular intervals.

Americans were shocked. If the Soviets had rockets powerful enough to put a ball into orbit, they had rockets that could carry a bomb across the world. Many blamed President Eisenhower for falling behind. The governor of Michigan even wrote a joking poem about the "made-in-Moscow beep," which ended with Uncle Sam asleep. The United States answered fast. Its first satellite, Explorer 1, rose from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 31 January 1958, and on 29 July 1958 Eisenhower signed the law that created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Thirteen days in October 1962

The most dangerous moment came four years later, ninety miles off the coast of Florida, in Cuba. In 1959 a revolution had brought Fidel Castro to power there, and he became an ally of the Soviet Union. In 1962 the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, secretly agreed with Castro to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. On 14 October 1962 an American U-2 spy plane photographed the missile sites being built. This began the Cuban missile crisis.

Some of President John F. Kennedy's advisers, including all of the military chiefs, wanted to bomb the missiles and invade Cuba. Kennedy chose a middle course: a "quarantine," a ring of navy ships to stop any more weapons from reaching Cuba. On the evening of 22 October he told the nation on television:

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

In plain words: a missile from Cuba would be treated as a missile from Moscow, and the United States would strike back at the Soviet Union itself. For days the world waited. On 26 October Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long, private letter. Here is part of it, in the translation the American embassy in Moscow made that night.

... we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied.

Who made these, and why: Kennedy's words were a public speech, broadcast to Americans and meant to be heard in Moscow, so they had to sound firm. Khrushchev's were a secret letter to one man, so they could sound worried. Notice whose rope he says it is: "the rope in which you have tied the knot of war." From Khrushchev's point of view, the United States had started the danger. The next day he sent a second message adding a new demand: the United States must remove its own nuclear missiles from Turkey, a country on the Soviet Union's border. On that same day a U-2 was shot down over Cuba.

On 28 October the crisis ended. Khrushchev announced that the missiles in Cuba would be taken apart and sent home. Kennedy promised publicly that the United States would not invade Cuba. And in secret, the State Department's historians record, Robert Kennedy, the President's brother, told the Soviet ambassador that the American missiles in Turkey would soon be removed, though that could not be part of the public deal. They were removed in April 1963. Afterwards the two governments set up a direct link between the White House and the Kremlin, the "hotline," so that leaders could reach each other quickly in a crisis.

Sunday, 20 July 1969: the race ends on the Moon

In May 1961 Kennedy had asked Congress to commit the nation "to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." Kennedy did not live to see it; he was assassinated in November 1963. But on 20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module Eagle onto the Moon. NASA estimates that 650 million people watched on television as he described "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The space race was the Cold War's competition carried on by other means: rockets aimed at the sky instead of at cities.

The skill: point of view

Lesson 13 gave you four questions about point of view. The Cold War shows why they matter: almost every event looked completely different from the two sides.

Seeing the other side's point of view does not mean agreeing with it. It means understanding why the other side acted as it did, which is exactly what Kennedy and Khrushchev had to do in October 1962 to avoid a war neither wanted. And remember the views that are missing from this lesson: Cubans who had no say in the deal, East Berliners on the far side of the curtain, and children in classrooms on both sides practising for an attack.

In short: point of view asks where a person stands and what they can see from there. In the Cold War, each side's fear looked like aggression from the other side.

Common misconceptions

• "In the Cold War no one actually fought." The United States and Soviet Union never fought each other directly, but the Cold War included real wars, such as Korea and Vietnam, in which Americans and many others died.
• "The Berlin airlift was a military attack on the Soviets." It was an unarmed supply operation, designed so that any shooting would have to be started by the other side.
• "Kennedy forced Khrushchev to back down and gave nothing in return." Kennedy publicly promised not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed that American missiles would leave Turkey.
• "The space race was only about science." It began as a contest of national prestige and rocket power; a rocket that can reach orbit can also carry a bomb.

Pulling it together

• On 24 June 1948 the Soviets blockaded West Berlin; the Berlin airlift, with planes landing every 45 seconds at its height, fed the city until the blockade ended in May 1949. Gail Halvorsen's crews dropped 23 tons of sweets to Berlin's children.
• Churchill named the "iron curtain" in 1946; the Truman Doctrine of 1947 promised support to "free peoples," the policy known as containment.
• After the Soviet atomic bomb of 1949, American schoolchildren practised "duck and cover."
• Sputnik 1 (4 October 1957) shocked Americans; Explorer 1 followed on 31 January 1958, and NASA was created that July.
• In October 1962 Kennedy's quarantine and Khrushchev's letters ended the Cuban missile crisis: Soviet missiles left Cuba, the United States promised not to invade, and American missiles quietly left Turkey.
• On 20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, watched by an estimated 650 million people. Point of view explains why each side's fear looked like aggression to the other.

Sources

1. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). The Berlin airlift, 1948-1949; The Truman Doctrine, 1947; and The Cuban missile crisis, October 1962 [Milestones in the history of U.S. foreign relations]. history.state.gov; history.state.gov
2. Khrushchev, N. (1962, October 26). Letter to President Kennedy [Embassy translation]. In Foreign relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges, Document 65. Office of the Historian. history.state.gov
3. Kennedy, J. F. (1962, October 22). Radio and television report to the American people on the Soviet arms buildup in Cuba; and (1961, May 25). Special message to the Congress on urgent national needs. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu
4. Launius, R. D. (n.d.). Sputnik and the origins of the space age; and NASA. (n.d.). Apollo 11 mission overview. NASA History Office. nasa.gov; nasa.gov
5. U.S. Air Force. (2022, February). 'Candy Bomber' passes away at 101 [Air Force News Service]. af.mil

A walk to school, Topeka, Kansas, 1951

In 1951 Linda Brown was in the third grade in Topeka, Kansas. Sumner Elementary, a school for white children, stood about six blocks from her house. She could not go there. Instead she went to Monroe Elementary, a school for Black children more than a mile away; the National Park Service describes the trip as 24 blocks. Her father, Oliver Brown, was a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad and an assistant pastor at a church. Asked by the NAACP, through a childhood friend who was a lawyer, he tried to enrol Linda at Sumner. The school refused her.

That refusal is how the Brown family's name came to stand at the top of the most important school case in American history. Oliver Brown was one of 13 plaintiffs, all parents in Topeka, who sued the city's board of education, and cases from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C., were heard together with theirs. Here is a detail that surprises people. The Browns did not think Monroe was a bad school; Linda's mother had gone there herself, and its teachers were respected. What they objected to was the rule that said Linda could not choose the school down the street because of the colour of her skin.

This lesson follows three children through the first years of the civil rights movement: Linda Brown in Kansas, a fifteen-year-old named Claudette Colvin in Alabama, and a fifteen-year-old named Elizabeth Eckford in Arkansas. Each part of the story comes with a different kind of source, and your job is to ask what each kind can and cannot tell you.

Four dolls in South Carolina

To win, the NAACP's lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, had to show the Supreme Court something new. For 55 years, since Plessy v. Ferguson (Lesson 2), the Court had allowed segregation as long as the separate facilities were supposedly equal. Marshall wanted to prove that separate could never be equal, because separation itself did harm.

For one of the five cases, from Clarendon County, South Carolina, Marshall asked two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, to repeat an experiment with schoolchildren. The National Park Service tells what they did. They gave Black children four dolls, alike in every way except that two had dark skin and two had light skin, and asked questions such as which doll was "nice," which was "bad," and "which doll is most like you?" Most of the children preferred the white dolls and called the Black dolls "bad." To the Clarks, the answers showed that segregation was teaching Black children to think less of themselves. One of those dolls is now on display at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, in what was once Linda Brown's school, Monroe Elementary.

Monday, 17 May 1954: the Court speaks

Chief Justice Earl Warren read the decision himself, and every one of the nine justices agreed. Two sentences from his opinion are about children directly.

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. ... We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Who made this, and why: this is the official opinion of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, written to explain the decision to the country and to every court that would follow it. Because all nine justices signed it, no one could say the Court was divided. Inherently means by its very nature: no amount of new paint or new books could make a segregated school equal. Notice that the opinion draws on the kind of evidence the Clarks gathered, about how children feel, and not only on law.

What the opinion did not say was how fast schools must change. A year later, in a second decision, the Court told states to integrate "with all deliberate speed." Many southern officials read those words as permission to go slowly, or not at all. The National Archives notes that "there was considerable resistance" to the ruling.

Why this matters: Brown overturned the legal basis for segregated schools, but a court can only declare what the law is. Making it real would take people willing to risk a great deal, many of them very young.

Montgomery, 1955: a teenager first

In Montgomery, Alabama, city law kept Black passengers at the back of the bus and required them to give up their seats to white riders when the front filled up. Black women had been pushing against this for years. The Women's Political Council, a group of Black professional women founded in 1946 and led by Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, met the mayor in March 1954 to ask for changes, and warned him in writing that talk of a boycott was spreading.

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old high school student named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Seven months later, eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith was arrested for the same thing. Neither arrest, the King Institute at Stanford University notes, moved the whole Black community to act. Then, on 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress who had served for years as secretary of the local NAACP, refused to give up her seat and was arrested. That night Jo Ann Robinson wrote a leaflet. Here is how it began.

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down. It is the second time since the Claudette Colvin case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing. This has to be stopped. ... The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.

Who made this, and why: the leaflet was written in a hurry, with no name on it, to get thousands of people to do one thing: stay off the buses on Monday, 5 December. ("Negro" was the respectful word in 1955.) Notice that it names Claudette Colvin: the teenager's arrest was already part of the community's memory. We know how the leaflet was made from a second, very different source: Robinson's memoir, published in 1987, more than thirty years later. In it she describes running off copies in the middle of the night on a mimeograph machine at the college with a colleague and two of her students, three messages to a page, and then mapping delivery routes from 4 to 7 a.m. A memoir written decades later is the best evidence of what the writer remembers and why it mattered to her; check its details, such as dates and numbers, against records made at the time.

On 5 December, the King Institute records, about 90 percent of Montgomery's Black citizens stayed off the buses. That evening a new organisation, the Montgomery Improvement Association, chose a 26-year-old pastor as its president: Martin Luther King, Jr. The one-day protest became the Montgomery bus boycott, and it lasted thirteen months. People walked to work, sometimes for miles. When the city punished Black taxi drivers for giving boycotters cheap rides, the Association organised a carpool of about 300 cars. The homes of King and of another leader, E. D. Nixon, were bombed, and more than 80 leaders were charged under an old law against interfering with business. One of the organisers, Mary Fair Burks, later gave the credit to "the nameless cooks and maids who walked endless miles for a year."

The boycott was won in court as well as on the sidewalks. In June 1956 a federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle, a case brought for Claudette Colvin and three other women, that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November the Supreme Court agreed. On 21 December 1956 King and his colleagues rode an integrated bus in Montgomery.

Wednesday, 4 September 1957: Elizabeth Eckford walks alone

Three years after Brown, Little Rock, Arkansas, prepared to admit nine Black students to Central High School, which had about 2,000 white students. The night before, Daisy Bates of the state NAACP phoned the students' families: do not come alone; meet near the school, and ministers will walk you in. But Elizabeth Eckford's family had no telephone. The National Park Service's account of that morning continues the story.

Elizabeth, fifteen, rode a city bus to Central and walked toward the school just before eight. Soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard surrounded it. Governor Orval Faubus had called them out two days earlier, claiming he wanted to prevent "blood in the streets." The soldiers would not let her pass. As she tried again and again, a crowd of more than three hundred white people gathered behind her, chanting and shouting threats, and some spat at her. She walked to a bench at the bus stop at the end of the street and waited 35 minutes for a bus, while a New York Times reporter, Benjamin Fine, and a woman named Grace Lorch came to support her. The other students, who had come with the ministers, were turned away too.

A photographer for the Arkansas Democrat, Will Counts, took the picture that the world remembers. Described in words, it shows Elizabeth in a starched black-and-white dress and black sunglasses, holding a book, walking with her face set straight ahead, while just behind her a white girl her own age, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her with her face twisted in anger, and other white people follow and watch. The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it unanimously, though the prize went elsewhere.

For three weeks the Nine stayed out of school while the courts and the governor fought. On 23 September they slipped in through a side door while a mob of more than a thousand gathered outside; three and a half hours later the police had to take them out again. On 24 September President Eisenhower sent a thousand soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock and spoke to the nation that night.

Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Who made this, and why: Eisenhower spoke on radio and television from the White House to explain to the whole country, including angry white southerners, why he had sent troops into a state. He was careful to say that the troops were not there to take over the school but to make sure a federal court's order was obeyed. He chose to stand on the law, not on the rightness of integration itself. On 25 September, at 9:22 a.m., the Little Rock Nine walked through Central's front door surrounded by paratroopers. In May 1958 one of them, Ernest Green, became the first Black student to graduate from Central High.

The skill: sourcing different kinds of evidence

This lesson used five kinds of evidence. Each has its own strengths and its own blind spots.

Worth holding on to: no single kind of source tells the whole story. The court opinion tells you what changed in law; the photograph shows you what that change cost a fifteen-year-old on a September morning.

Common misconceptions

• "Rosa Parks was the first person to refuse to give up a bus seat in Montgomery." A fifteen-year-old, Claudette Colvin, and an eighteen-year-old, Mary Louise Smith, were arrested for the same thing earlier in 1955, and Colvin was a plaintiff in the case that ended bus segregation.
• "The boycott was organised in a moment by one famous man." The Women's Political Council had been preparing for years, Jo Ann Robinson wrote and copied the first leaflet overnight, and thousands of ordinary riders, many of them domestic workers, walked for thirteen months.
• "Brown v. Board ended school segregation right away." It ended its legal basis. Many states resisted for years; in 1957 it took federal troops to get nine students into one high school.
• "Linda Brown's case was about a bad school." Her family respected Monroe Elementary. They objected to being told she could not attend the school near her home because of her race.

What you now know

• Linda Brown, a third grader in Topeka, was refused at the white school near her home; her father was one of 13 Topeka plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education.
• The Clarks' doll tests suggested that segregation harmed Black children; on 17 May 1954 a unanimous Supreme Court declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," but its 1955 order to integrate "with all deliberate speed" invited delay.
• Claudette Colvin, fifteen, was arrested in Montgomery in March 1955; after Rosa Parks's arrest on 1 December 1955, Jo Ann Robinson's leaflet started a boycott that lasted thirteen months and ended with bus segregation ruled unconstitutional.
• On 4 September 1957 Elizabeth Eckford faced the Arkansas National Guard and a mob alone; on 24 September Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne, and the Little Rock Nine entered Central High the next day. Ernest Green graduated in May 1958.
• Sourcing: court opinions, leaflets, memoirs, photographs and speeches each answer different questions, and each has blind spots.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Brown v. Board of Education (1954) [Milestone Documents, with the Court's opinion]. archives.gov
2. National Park Service. (n.d.). Oliver Brown and Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll. Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. nps.gov; nps.gov
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Montgomery bus boycott [King Encyclopedia]; and Robinson, J. A. G. (1987). The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who started it (pp. 45-47), excerpted with the leaflet's text by Historical Thinking Matters, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. kinginstitute.stanford.edu; historicalthinkingmatters.org
4. National Park Service. (n.d.). Timeline [of the Little Rock Central High School crisis]. Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. nps.gov
5. Eisenhower, D. D. (1957, September 24). Radio and television address to the American people on the situation in Little Rock. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu

Thursday, 2 May 1963: the doors of a church open

Around noon on Thursday, 2 May 1963, children began walking out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in groups of ten to fifty, carrying picket signs. Most were between seven and eighteen years old, and every one of them should have been in school. They headed for City Hall and the downtown shops, where Birmingham's police were waiting. As the officers arrested them, the children went without a fight, and more groups kept coming out of the church behind them. More than a thousand students marched that day, the King Institute at Stanford University records, and hundreds were taken to jail.

Why were children marching? For a month, Black citizens of Birmingham had been protesting against the city's segregation laws in the Birmingham campaign, led by Fred Shuttlesworth of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It began on 3 April with sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, marches on City Hall and a boycott of the downtown shops in the busy Easter shopping season. On Good Friday, 12 April, King was arrested, and in his cell he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail, an answer to eight white clergymen who had condemned the protests in the city's newspaper.

By the end of April the campaign was failing. Arrests had used up its bail money, and fewer adults were volunteering. The city's commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had mostly made what the Encyclopedia of Alabama calls "polite arrests," and polite arrests are not news: the national newspapers found little to report. So an organiser named James Bevel proposed something the leaders had always refused to do. He would ask the city's schoolchildren to march. Young people, he argued, had no jobs to lose and no bills to pay, so they could go to jail when their parents could not. Many parents and school officials were against the idea, and so at first were most of the movement's leaders. King himself wavered. On the morning of 2 May his advisers told him to call the march off. He did not.

On Friday, 3 May, more children came out of the church. This time Connor ordered the firemen to turn their high-pressure hoses on the marchers and the police to use their dogs. Some Black onlookers threw bricks and bottles at the police, and the hoses and dogs were turned on them as well. The cameras were there now, among them Charles Moore's, for Life magazine. For days afterwards, the King Institute writes, pictures of children "blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, clubbed by police officers, and attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, triggering international outrage." This was the Children's Crusade.

A week later, on 10 May, negotiators for the movement and for the city's business leaders announced an agreement. The "Whites Only" and "Blacks Only" signs would come down from restrooms and drinking fountains, lunch counters would be desegregated, a programme would open better jobs to Black workers, a committee of Black and white citizens would watch over the deal, and the jailed protesters would be released on bond. That night a bomb went off near the motel room where King had stayed, and the next day his brother's house was bombed. President John F. Kennedy ordered 3,000 federal troops into position near the city.

Fourteen months after the children's march, on 2 July 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It made it illegal for hotels, restaurants, theatres and lunch counters to turn people away because of their race, and it banned discrimination in hiring. How do you get from a crowded jail in Alabama to a law signed in Washington? Not in one jump. There is a road with steps, and in this lesson you will walk it twice.

The road: six steps from a street to a law

In the United States a law begins as a bill, a proposal written down. It becomes a law only when a majority of the House of Representatives and a majority of the Senate vote for it and the President signs it. A protest cannot pass a bill. What a protest can do is start a chain of events that leads the people with votes to pass one. Here is that chain written as a procedure, a set of steps taken in order.

1. Make the wrong visible. Show the whole country something it cannot look away from.
2. Win the President. Persuade him to ask Congress for a law, in public.
3. Keep up the pressure while Congress argues.
4. Pass the House of Representatives.
5. Pass the Senate, which in the 1960s could mean breaking a filibuster.
6. Sign the law, then make it work in the places where the wrong was being done.

At every step, ask the question this lesson's skill is built on. What made this step happen? And what evidence, made at the time, ties it to the step before?

First walk: the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Step 1 happened in Birmingham. Here are the other five.

Step 2: the President, Tuesday, 11 June 1963. That afternoon Alabama National Guardsmen had been needed at the University of Alabama to carry out a federal court's order admitting "two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro." At eight o'clock that evening Kennedy spoke to the nation on radio and television from his office.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. ... The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.

Who made this, and why: until that spring, the Encyclopedia of Alabama notes, the Kennedy administration had been "noncommittal" about the movement. Now the President spoke to the whole country, white southerners included, to explain why he was changing course. Prudently means wisely, with an eye on what will happen next. Notice what he names as his reason: "the events in Birmingham." For a historian testing a cause, this is gold. The person who took the step tells you, at the time, what pushed him to take it.

In the same speech Kennedy read out numbers.

The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.

Read it as a table in your head: finishing high school, half the chance; college, a third; unemployment, twice the chance; a life seven years shorter. ("Negro" was the respectful word in 1963.) Kennedy did not say where his figures came from, so before repeating them a careful historian would check them against the government's own statistics from those years. Then came the promise: "Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act." Soon afterwards he sent Congress a bill dealing with voting, with public places such as hotels and restaurants, with school desegregation and more.

Step 3: the pressure, Wednesday, 28 August 1963. More than 200,000 people came to Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Its leaders included A. Philip Randolph, the labour leader whose threat of a march in 1941 had pushed President Franklin Roosevelt to act against discrimination in the defence industries, and its organiser was Bayard Rustin. The march's goals, as the New York Times printed them the next day, began with "a comprehensive civil rights bill" and "protection of the right to vote," and went on to jobs: a federal programme "to train and place unemployed workers" and a law "barring discrimination in all employment."

Not everyone on the platform thought Kennedy's bill went far enough. John Lewis, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had written a speech calling it "too little and too late." Older leaders persuaded him to cut those words, though he believed that what was left "was still a strong speech, very strong." King spoke at the close of the day. Most people remember his dream that his children would one day be judged by their character and not by their colour. Earlier in the same speech he used a picture from money, suggested by his adviser Clarence Jones. The nation's founding promises, he said, were like a promissory note, a written promise to pay, and "America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned." To default is to fail to pay what you owe. In King's picture, the bill was a debt the country owed, not a favour it was granting. After the march, King and the other leaders met Kennedy and Vice President Johnson at the White House to talk about winning votes for the bill from both parties.

Two shocks. Then came two events that no one had planned. At 10:22 on Sunday morning, 15 September 1963, a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the same church the children had marched from in May. It killed four girls who had just been to Sunday school and were talking about their first days back at school while they got ready for the eleven o'clock service: Denise McNair, who was eleven, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, who were fourteen. Twenty-three other people were hurt. Justice came slowly. The last of the men responsible for the bombing was convicted in 2002, thirty-nine years later.

Ten weeks after the bombing, on 22 November 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson became President. Five days later Johnson spoke to Congress.

... no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.

Who made this, and why: Johnson spoke to a joint session, the House and Senate meeting together, while the country was still grieving. A eulogy is a speech in praise of someone who has died. Johnson turned grief into a reason to vote: pass the bill, he said, as Kennedy's memorial. Fifty years later, in 2013, Congress itself wrote, in a law honouring the four girls, that their deaths had "helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964." Both are cause-and-effect claims. Notice that the second was made by people looking back half a century, which is a reason to test it rather than simply accept it.

Step 4: the House, 10 February 1964. The House of Representatives passed the bill. A team from both parties steered it through: Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York, and William McCulloch, a Republican from Ohio.

Step 5: the Senate and the filibuster. In the Senate the bill met a weapon the House does not have. The Senate's rules let senators keep talking for as long as they like, so a group of them taking turns can stop a bill from ever coming to a vote. This is a filibuster. In 1964 the way to end one was cloture, a vote by two-thirds of the senators: 67 votes, if all 100 voted. No civil rights bill had ever won a cloture vote.

On 9 March, when the Senate's majority leader, Mike Mansfield, moved to take up the bill, southern senators began a filibuster. It held the Senate for sixty working days, seven Saturdays among them. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia spoke for 14 hours and 13 minutes, finishing at 9:51 on the morning of 10 June. Then came the vote. The Republican leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, had worked with the bill's Democratic managers to rewrite parts of it so that more Republicans could support it, and he told the Senate that civil rights was "an idea whose time has come." Senator Clair Engle of California was so ill that he could not speak; when his name was called, he pointed to his eye, for "aye." The result was 71 to 29. Forty-four Democrats and 27 Republicans voted to end the debate. It was the first time the Senate had ever cut off a filibuster against a civil rights bill. Nine days later, on 19 June, the Senate passed the bill, 73 to 27.

Step 6: the signing, Thursday, 2 July 1964. The House accepted the Senate's version, 289 to 126, and a few hours later Johnson signed the act on national television. "Let us close the springs of racial poison," he said. The law made it illegal to refuse anyone service in a hotel, restaurant, theatre or lunch counter because of race, colour, religion or national origin. It banned discrimination in hiring and at work, on grounds that included sex as well as race, and it set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate complaints.

What matters here: no single step made the law. Birmingham moved Kennedy, the march kept up the pressure, grief and a new President gave the bill urgency, and in the end it took the votes of 71 senators from two parties.

The skill: cause and effect, link by link

Before you hang anything on a chain, you test each link. Historians test a cause-and-effect claim in three ways.

1. Order. A cause has to come before its effect. That is necessary but nowhere near enough: hundreds of things happened before July 1964 that had nothing to do with the law. "After" does not mean "because."
2. Evidence from the time. Look for a source made at the time in which someone connects the two events. Kennedy connected Birmingham to his bill; Johnson connected Kennedy's death to its passage. Those links are strong because the people who acted told us what moved them.
3. The "what if" test. Imagine the cause taken away. Would the effect still have happened? You cannot rerun history, but sometimes history runs something close to the experiment for you.

Here is one such experiment. In 1961 and 1962 the movement ran a long campaign of marches and mass arrests in Albany, Georgia. Albany's police chief, Laurie Pritchett, arrested hundreds of protesters but, the King Institute notes, "refrained from public brutality and thereby minimized negative publicity." The campaign "secured few concrete gains." Birmingham's first month looked much the same, and was failing in the same way, until the children marched and Connor turned to hoses and dogs. Same movement, many of the same leaders, a different result. That is good evidence that the violence, and the pictures of it, were a real link in the chain.

But be careful. Albany differed from Birmingham in more than one way. King himself later blamed the failure in Albany on its goals, which he thought had been too broad and too vague: a protest against segregation in general instead of against one clear part of it. So the comparison suggests that the pictures mattered, but it cannot prove they were the only thing that mattered. That is normal. Most big events have several causes working together.

King also made a cause-and-effect claim of his own, in his yearly report to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in August 1965: "Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and Selma produced the voting rights legislation of 1965." Look at the verbs. Inspired and produced are cause words. King had every reason to stress what the movement had achieved, so his word alone would not settle the question. But his claim about Birmingham matches what Kennedy said in 1963, and when two people with different reasons for speaking agree, a link grows stronger.

The point: a strong link passes all three tests. It comes first, a source from the time connects it, and taking it away would probably have changed the result.

Second walk, with one input changed: Selma and the Voting Rights Act

The 1964 act did have a section on voting. Read it closely and you find the gap. It still allowed literacy tests, tests that were supposed to show whether a person could read and write, as long as they were given in writing. It said that anyone who had finished the sixth grade should be presumed able to read, but only once a case had reached a court. And it left the decision about who passed with the same local officials, called registrars, who had been turning Black citizens away for decades. (Lesson 2 showed you how that began in the 1890s.)

In January 1965 King's organisation joined local activists in Selma, Alabama. There, in spite of repeated attempts to register, only two percent of the Black residents were on the voting rolls. In neighbouring Wilcox County, a federal judge found that March, every eligible white citizen was registered and not one Black citizen was. According to the King Institute, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference chose Selma because it "anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement under Sheriff Jim Clark would attract national attention." In other words, the organisers knew Step 1 and planned for it.

Step 1 came at a terrible price. On the night of 18 February, in the nearby town of Marion, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon, as he tried to protect his mother. He died eight days later. On Sunday, 7 March, about 600 marchers set out from Selma to walk 54 miles to the state capital, Montgomery. Hosea Williams and John Lewis led them over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On the far side, state troopers and the sheriff's men ordered them to break up, and when they did not, attacked them with clubs and tear gas. Lewis was badly beaten on the head. Television and newspaper cameras recorded it, and the country saw what came to be called Bloody Sunday.

Step 2 took eight days. On the evening of Monday, 15 March, President Johnson spoke to Congress and, on television, to the nation.

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. ... The Negro citizen may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application. And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether he passes this test. ... Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Who made this, and why: Johnson was a southerner from Texas, speaking to a Congress in which southern senators had fought his last civil rights bill for sixty working days. He wanted a new law, fast, with the country behind it. "We shall overcome" were the marchers' own words, which they had taken from a hymn, and the National Park Service points out that Johnson was echoing them. Notice the words sole judge. Johnson had put his finger on the exact gap in the 1964 law: the registrar still decided.

He said so directly, too: "No law that we now have on the books--and I have helped to put three of them there--can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it." This is the changed input. The first walk ended in a law that left the decision with local officials. The second walk aimed at a law that would take it away from them.

Step 3 kept up the pressure. On 21 March the march left Selma again, this time protected by FBI agents and by Alabama National Guardsmen placed under federal command. A judge's order limited it to 300 people along a stretch of two-lane road, but on the last day, 25 March, 25,000 people walked into Montgomery. That night a white volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, was shot and killed while driving marchers home to Selma.

Steps 4 to 6 went faster than in 1964. Johnson later said he sent the bill to Congress within 48 hours of his speech. Congress passed it by large majorities on 5 August, and on Friday, 6 August 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in the Rotunda of the Capitol, the great round hall under the dome, with King and other leaders present. Here is how he described the heart of the law that day.

Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down. If it is clear that State officials still intend to discriminate, then Federal examiners will be sent in to register all eligible voters.

So the new law changed who decided. It covered places picked out by a formula: states and counties that had used a test in 1964 and where fewer than half of the adults had registered or voted that year. There, literacy tests were set aside at once. Federal examiners, officials of the national government, could register voters themselves. And those places could not change their voting rules without first getting approval from the Attorney General or a federal court in Washington, a rule called preclearance. "By Tuesday morning," Johnson promised, "trained Federal examiners will be at work registering eligible men and women in 10 to 15 counties."

Reading the numbers: did the result flip?

In May 1968 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a government body created by Congress in 1957 to investigate and report on civil rights, published a study of what the new law had done in the South. Here are some of its figures for Black citizens of voting age who were registered to vote. (The Commission's table calls them "nonwhite.")

Who made this, and why: the Commission's job was to measure whether civil rights laws were working, and it warned its readers about its own numbers. Its "before" figures, it wrote, "represent estimates based on official and unofficial sources and vary widely in their accuracy." It also adjusted its 1967 figure for Mississippi to share out voters whose race had not been recorded. Without that adjustment, the Mississippi figure was 41.1 percent.

Now read the table the way a historian would. Every state rose, but not by the same amount. Mississippi, which started lowest, rose furthest: from fewer than one Black adult in fourteen to about six in ten. Even the cautious figure of 41.1 percent is six times the 1964 number. For comparison, about 70 percent of white Mississippians had been registered before the act. By the end of 1967, the Commission found, federal examiners had listed 158,094 people as eligible to vote in 58 southern counties, and 150,767 of them were nonwhite. Before the act, more than half of Black adults were registered in only three southern states, Florida, Tennessee and Texas. Afterwards the figure was above half in every southern state the Commission studied.

Why this matters: the same road with one input changed gave a different result. In 1964, seven years after the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and with registrars still deciding, fewer than 7 percent of Black Mississippians were registered. Three years after the Voting Rights Act took away the test and sent federal examiners, about six in ten were, by the Commission's main count. A change in the cause followed by a change in the effect is about the strongest evidence a historian ever gets.

Common misconceptions

• "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave Black Americans the right to vote." The Fifteenth Amendment had promised that right in 1870 (Lesson 1). The 1964 act was mostly about public places and jobs, and its voting section still allowed written literacy tests run by local registrars. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to change who decided.
• "A President can make a law." A President can ask for a law, sign it and enforce it. Both acts needed majorities in both houses of Congress, and in 1964 it took two-thirds of the Senate to break the filibuster.
• "One great speech changed the law." The speeches mattered, but each act followed months of organising, thousands of arrests, people killed, and votes counted one by one, many of them from senators of the other party.
• "Everyone in the movement agreed about the children's march." Many parents and school officials opposed it, most of the leaders argued against it at first, and King hesitated until the morning it began.

The takeaway

• On 2 May 1963 more than a thousand Birmingham students marched and hundreds were jailed; on 3 May Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on them, and the pictures caused outrage across the country and the world.
• On 11 June 1963 Kennedy named "the events in Birmingham" as the reason he was asking Congress for a civil rights law. More than 200,000 people marched on Washington on 28 August. After the church bombing that killed four girls and Kennedy's assassination, Johnson asked Congress to pass the bill as Kennedy's memorial.
• The House passed the bill on 10 February 1964; on 10 June the Senate broke a sixty-day filibuster by 71 votes to 29; Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964.
• Selma, where only two percent of Black residents were registered, led through Bloody Sunday (7 March 1965) and Johnson's "we shall overcome" speech to the Voting Rights Act of 6 August 1965, which set aside literacy tests and sent federal examiners.
• Cause and effect: test each link for order, for evidence from the time, and with the "what if" question. In Mississippi, Black registration rose from 6.7 percent in 1964 to 59.8 percent in 1967 once the law changed who decided.

Sources

1. Kennedy, J. F. (1963, June 11). Radio and television report to the American people on civil rights; Johnson, L. B. (1965, March 15). Special message to the Congress: The American promise; and Johnson, L. B. (1965, August 6). Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda at the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu
2. U.S. Senate Historical Office. (n.d.). Landmark legislation: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Civil rights filibuster ended. United States Senate; Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 [Historical highlights]; and Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives. (n.d.). President Lyndon B. Johnson's address to a joint session of Congress, November 27, 1963. senate.gov; senate.gov; history.house.gov; archives.gov
3. Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Birmingham campaign; Albany Movement; March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; and Selma to Montgomery march [King Encyclopedia]. Stanford University; and National Park Service. (n.d.). Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. kinginstitute.stanford.edu; kinginstitute.stanford.edu; kinginstitute.stanford.edu; kinginstitute.stanford.edu; nps.gov
4. Encyclopedia of Alabama. (n.d.). Children's Crusade and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church; and An act to award posthumously a Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, Pub. L. No. 113-11, 127 Stat. 446 (2013). encyclopediaofalabama.org; encyclopediaofalabama.org; govinfo.gov
5. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (1968). Political participation: A study of the participation by Negroes in the electoral and political processes in 10 Southern States since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (pp. 12-13, 20); and National Archives. (n.d.). Voting Rights Act (1965) [Milestone Documents, with the text of the act]. crmvet.org; archives.gov

Thursday, 16 December 1965: a strip of black cloth

That Thursday a thirteen-year-old in Des Moines, Iowa, went to junior high school with a band of black cloth around her arm. Her name was Mary Beth Tinker. Earlier that month a group of adults and students had met at the home of the Eckhardt family and agreed to show their objections to the war in Vietnam, and their support for a truce, by wearing black armbands through the holiday season. Black armbands are a sign of mourning. Mary Beth's brother John, who was fifteen, and their friend Christopher Eckhardt, who was sixteen, were part of the plan.

The principals of the city's schools heard about it. On 14 December they met and made a rule: any student wearing an armband would be asked to take it off, and anyone who refused would be suspended until they came back without it. Mary Beth and Christopher wore theirs on the 16th, and John wore his the next day. All three were sent home. They did not come back until after New Year's Day, when the planned period for the armbands was over. Their families went to court, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided it more than three years later.

Two sides, each sure it was right: that is the shape of the years from 1964 to 1974. In this lesson you will meet four arguments from the time of the Vietnam War and Watergate. For each one you will hear the strongest case on both sides, wherever possible in the words of the people who made it. Then you will see what, if anything, settled the argument: new evidence, a court, or nothing at all.

Argument one: what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin?

First, how did Americans come to be fighting in Vietnam? In 1954 the Vietnamese defeated their French rulers, and an international conference at Geneva divided Vietnam into two halves: a communist North led by Ho Chi Minh and a South with its own government. Elections were supposed to reunite the country. The State Department's historians explain that the communists seemed likely to win them, and that the United States, determined to contain communism (Lesson 18), backed the South's leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, when he refused to hold them. By 1959 communist guerrillas in the South, the Viet Cong, had begun a war against his government. President Kennedy increased the number of American military advisers in South Vietnam.

In early August 1964 two American destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, were in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of North Vietnam. The Maddox was listening in on North Vietnamese radio signals to help South Vietnamese commandos raiding the North's coast, though Americans did not know that at the time. On 2 August North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked it. On the night of Tuesday, 4 August, the destroyers reported a second attack, and that evening President Johnson spoke to the nation on television.

The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes. ... We believe at least two of the attacking boats were sunk. There were no U.S. losses. ... We still seek no wider war.

Three days later, on 7 August, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It said that Congress "approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The House passed it without a single vote against, and only two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted no. Congress never declared war on North Vietnam. This resolution became the legal basis on which Johnson, and later Nixon, fought the war, although, the State Department's historians add, Congress assumed the President would come back for its support before widening the war further.

Now the dispute. Johnson had the ships' reports. The doubters had something too. The captain of the Maddox first reported that he was "under continuous torpedo attack." Then he cabled again: "freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen may have accounted for many reports." According to the National Archives, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara did not pass the captain's doubts on to the President.

What settled it? Evidence, decades later. A history written inside the National Security Agency, the government's code-breaking agency, and made public more than forty years after the event, confirmed the attack of 2 August but concluded, the National Archives reports, that "the August 4 attack never happened." By then the resolution itself was long gone: Congress had repealed it in January 1971, as opposition to the war grew.

So what?: the first kind of argument is about facts, and facts can be checked. It took four decades, but documents settled what happened on 4 August 1964. By then the war that the resolution opened was long over.

Argument two: should Americans be fighting in Vietnam?

The resolution opened the door. On 13 February 1965 American planes began bombing North Vietnam in an operation called Rolling Thunder, and Johnson sent the first of many ground combat troops to fight the Viet Cong. For the next eight years Americans argued about the war at kitchen tables, in churches, on campuses and in Congress. Here is each side's case in its own words.

The case for the war. On 7 April 1965, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Johnson asked the question himself.

Why are we in South Viet-Nam? We are there because we have a promise to keep. Since 1954 every American President has offered support to the people of South Viet-Nam. ... Let no one think for a moment that retreat from Viet-Nam would bring an end to conflict. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another. The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied.

Who made this, and why: Johnson was speaking to students and, through television, to the world, two months after the bombing began. He compared Vietnam with Europe after the Second World War, where, he said, the United States had also taken on "continued responsibility for the defense of freedom." His argument was about promises and about where an aggressor would stop. Four years later President Richard Nixon, who was by then bringing troops home slowly, made a related case on 3 November 1969. A "precipitate withdrawal," he said, "would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before," and America's allies would lose confidence in its word. He asked "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" for their support. To the protesters he said: "I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do." That week, he told the nation, he would have to sign 83 letters to the families of men killed in Vietnam.

The case against the war. On 4 April 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, Martin Luther King, Jr., told an audience of more than 3,000 that "my conscience leaves me no other choice" but to speak against the war. As the King Institute summarises his speech, he described what the war was doing both to America's poor and to Vietnamese peasants, and he insisted that the United States had a moral duty to take radical steps to stop it by peaceful means. Other opponents pointed to the lives it cost, to a draft they said fell hardest on young men too poor for college, and to a government that had not told the whole truth: a Senate investigation, the National Archives notes, found that the Maddox had been on an intelligence mission, which Johnson had denied. The Tinkers' armbands made the case without a word: a silent sign of objection to the fighting and of support for a truce.

The argument divided families, churches and even the civil rights movement. The NAACP criticised King for tying civil rights to the war, and the Washington Post wrote that he had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people." Then, in late January 1968, came the Tet Offensive, when communist forces attacked cities across South Vietnam and even broke through the outer wall of the American embassy in Saigon. American and South Vietnamese forces drove them back, but, in the words of the State Department's historians, the news reports made clear to Americans "that an overall victory in Vietnam was not imminent." On 31 March 1968 Johnson announced that he would not run for President again.

Protest reached its most painful point in May 1970. On 30 April Nixon announced that American and South Vietnamese troops had crossed into Cambodia to attack North Vietnamese bases there, and protests broke out on campuses across the country. On Monday, 4 May, at Kent State University in Ohio, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine. A nationwide student strike followed, and hundreds of colleges and universities closed.

Here is a number to read. The National Archives holds the Defense Department's records of 58,220 American military deaths in the war. These are the deaths by year.

Who made this, and why: these counts come from the Defense Department's casualty records, which passed to the National Archives in 2008. The Archives itself warns that they are "provided for informational purposes only, not official statistics." Read the shape: a steep climb to a peak in 1968, then a fall as American troops came home. And notice what the table leaves out. It counts only Americans. Vietnamese deaths, of soldiers and civilians on both sides, were never counted the same way. One study in the medical journal BMJ in 2008, based on surveys of families, estimated about 3.8 million violent war deaths in Vietnam between 1955 and 2002, a span that includes later wars too, and its authors warn that "estimating mortality due to war is notoriously difficult."

What settled this argument? For American forces the war ended with a peace agreement signed on 27 January 1973, which let the United States withdraw and bring its prisoners of war home. The Vietnamese kept fighting, and on 30 April 1975 North Vietnamese tanks rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon. But the question at the heart of the argument, whether the war was right, was never settled the way a fact or a lawsuit can be. It is a question about values as well as facts. Evidence can inform it. It cannot end it.

Bottom line: some arguments are about facts, and evidence can settle them. Others are about what was right, and each generation weighs the evidence again.

The draft: a lottery by birthday

For young men the argument was not abstract. Under the draft, the government could order men into the armed forces. Until 1969 the oldest eligible men were called first, and men in college could put off their service until they graduated, a rule critics called unfair to men who could not afford college. On Monday, 1 December 1969, the Selective Service System held its first draft lottery since 1942, with radio, film and television cameras watching. There were 366 blue plastic capsules, one for every birthday including 29 February, drawn by hand from a large glass container. The first capsule, drawn by Congressman Alexander Pirnie of New York, held the date September 14. Every man born on 14 September in any year from 1944 to 1950 got lottery number 1. In 1970 the draft called every number up to 195.

Picture a nineteen-year-old watching that night. From where he sat, the question "should America be in Vietnam?" had become "what number did my birthday get?" A number near 1 meant he would very likely be called in 1970; a number above 195 meant he would not be drafted that year. The last draft call came on 7 December 1972, and the government's power to draft men ran out on 30 June 1973. Meanwhile, in 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment gave citizens of eighteen and older the right to vote. You will meet that change again in Lesson 24.

Argument three: can a school ban a silent protest?

Back to Des Moines. When the Tinkers' case reached the Supreme Court, both sides had serious arguments, and both were written down by justices of the Court.

The school's case. The principals said they had acted to prevent a disturbance. Justice Hugo Black agreed with them, in a dissent, the written opinion of judges who disagree with the majority. He pointed to the record of the trial. The armbands "caused comments, warnings by other students, the poking of fun at them," and "a teacher of mathematics had his lesson period practically 'wrecked' chiefly by disputes with Mary Beth Tinker." Schools, he argued, exist for learning:

It may be that the Nation has outworn the old-fashioned slogan that 'children are to be seen not heard,' but one may, I hope, be permitted to harbor the thought that taxpayers send children to school on the premise that at their age they need to learn, not teach.

The students' case. Justice Abe Fortas wrote for the majority, and his first point became famous.

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

The school, Fortas wrote, had punished "a silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners." Fear was not enough: "undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression." He also noticed something about the principals' point of view. Their meeting had been called after a student told a journalism teacher that he wanted to write an article on Vietnam for the school paper. That suggested, Fortas wrote, that the ban came from "an urgent wish to avoid the controversy" over the war.

What settled it? The Court, by seven votes to two, on 24 February 1969, in Tinker v. Des Moines. The rule it set out is this: a student may express opinions, even on a subject as heated as the war, as long as doing so does not "materially and substantially" interfere with the work and discipline of the school or collide with the rights of others. A school cannot ban an opinion simply to avoid "the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint."

Remember: a court settles a dispute by deciding which side the law favours, not by proving that the other side had no point. Justice Black's warning about classrooms is still part of the record, and so is the wrecked mathematics lesson.

Argument four: who gets the President's tapes?

Early on the morning of Saturday, 17 June 1972, a security guard at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., discovered burglars in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and called the police. Five men were arrested, carrying more than $3,500 in cash and expensive equipment for listening in on conversations. Two reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, kept asking questions, and their reporting suggested connections between the burglars and President Nixon's re-election campaign. The White House denied any connection, and in November 1972 Nixon was re-elected in a landslide.

In 1973 a Senate committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina held hearings that were shown live on television; a month after they began, the Senate Historical Office records, 97 percent of Americans had heard of Watergate. A former White House lawyer, John Dean, testified that the President had approved plans to cover up the White House's links to the break-in. Nixon said he knew nothing about it. Then, in July 1973, a former aide, Alexander Butterfield, revealed that Nixon kept a voice-activated tape recording system in rooms of the White House. Suddenly there was a way to check who was telling the truth.

The President's case. Nixon refused to hand over the tapes, citing executive privilege and the separation of powers. Executive privilege is the idea that a President must be able to talk privately with his advisers, or they will stop giving him honest advice. That is a real concern. Even the Supreme Court would agree that "the President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts."

The other side's case. A special prosecutor, a lawyer appointed to investigate the scandal, needed 64 recorded conversations as evidence for the trials of Nixon's former aides. Senator Ervin argued that executive privilege could not be stretched to cover criminal behaviour.

What settled it? On Wednesday, 24 July 1974, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon. Eight justices took part, and all eight agreed.

The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.

In plain words: a President's general wish for secrecy has to give way when a court needs particular evidence for a criminal trial. Then the tapes settled the rest. On Monday, 5 August, Nixon released transcripts of three conversations from 23 June 1972, six days after the break-in. In one of them, the Nixon Presidential Library explains, Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, discussed having the CIA ask the FBI to halt its investigation by claiming that the break-in was a national security operation. It became known as the "smoking gun." Nixon's own statement that day admitted that "portions of the tapes of these June 23 conversations are at variance with certain of my previous statements."

The House Judiciary Committee had already approved three articles of impeachment, formal charges against the President, on 27, 29 and 30 July. Before the full House could vote, Nixon gave up. On the evening of Thursday, 8 August 1974, he spoke to the nation.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interests of America first. ... Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Who made this, and why: this is a man explaining his own fall, and he chose his words with care. He gave as his reason that he no longer had "a strong enough political base in the Congress." He said that "some of my judgments were wrong," but that they had been made "in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation." He did not describe what the tapes showed. At noon on Friday, 9 August 1974, Vice President Gerald Ford became President.

The upshot: in Watergate a court settled the argument about the tapes, and then the tapes settled the argument about the President's honesty. Not even a President got the last word in his own case.

The skill: point of view

Lesson 1 gave you four questions for reading a source's point of view: who is speaking, to whom, from what experience, and wanting what. Every argument in this lesson looked different depending on where a person stood. Here are some of the people you have met.

Notice two things. First, point of view explains why people acted as they did; it does not decide who was right. Understanding the principals' fear of disorder does not tell you whether their rule was fair. Second, where someone stands decides what they can see. On 4 August 1964 Johnson could see the ships' first reports but not the captain's second thoughts. On the night of the lottery a nineteen-year-old could see one number, his own.

Common misconceptions

• "Congress declared war on North Vietnam." It never did. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 approved "all necessary measures," and two Presidents used it as the legal basis for the war until Congress repealed it in 1971.
• "Nixon was impeached and removed from office." The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment, but Nixon resigned before the full House voted, so he was never impeached or put on trial.
• "Students have no free-speech rights at school." Tinker v. Des Moines says students do not shed their rights "at the schoolhouse gate," though a school may limit speech that would substantially disrupt its work or invade the rights of others.
• "Reporters caught the Watergate burglars." A security guard found them and the police arrested them. Reporters later helped uncover the links to the President's campaign.

Recap

• On 4 August 1964 Johnson reported a second attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and on 7 August Congress approved "all necessary measures." A National Security Agency history made public decades later concluded that the second attack never happened.
• Johnson argued in 1965 that America had "a promise to keep" in Vietnam, and Nixon warned in 1969 that a hasty withdrawal would bring massacres; King argued in 1967 that the war harmed America's poor and Vietnam's peasants. The National Archives records 58,220 American military deaths, most of them in 1967-1969.
• The draft lottery of 1 December 1969 gave every birthday a number, and September 14 drew number 1. The last draft call came in December 1972.
• In Tinker v. Des Moines (24 February 1969) the Supreme Court ruled, 7 to 2, that the students' silent armbands were protected speech.
• In United States v. Nixon (24 July 1974) the Court ruled, 8 to 0, that Nixon must hand over the tapes. The tapes of 23 June 1972 showed Nixon and Haldeman planning to have the CIA ask the FBI to halt its investigation, and Nixon resigned on 9 August 1974.
• Point of view: ask who is speaking, to whom, from what experience and wanting what. And notice how each argument ended: by evidence, by a court, or not at all.

Sources

1. National Archives. (n.d.). Tonkin Gulf Resolution (1964) [Milestone Documents]; and National Archives. (2008). Vietnam War U.S. military fatal casualty statistics [Defense Casualty Analysis System extract, as of April 29, 2008]. archives.gov; archives.gov
2. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: The Gulf of Tonkin and escalation, 1964; The Tet Offensive, 1968; and Ending the Vietnam War, 1969-1973 [Milestones in the history of U.S. foreign relations]. history.state.gov; history.state.gov; history.state.gov
3. Johnson, L. B. (1964, August 4). Radio and television report to the American people following renewed aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin; Johnson, L. B. (1965, April 7). Address at Johns Hopkins University: "Peace without conquest"; Nixon, R. (1969, November 3). Address to the nation on the war in Vietnam; Nixon, R. (1974, August 5). Statement announcing availability of additional transcripts of presidential tape recordings; and Nixon, R. (1974, August 8). Address to the nation announcing decision to resign the office of President of the United States. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu
4. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969); and United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School; with U.S. Senate Historical Office. (n.d.). Watergate [Investigations]; and Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. (n.d.). Watergate trial tapes. law.cornell.edu; law.cornell.edu; senate.gov; nixonlibrary.gov
5. Selective Service System. (n.d.). Vietnam lotteries [archived 24 December 2024]; Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). Beyond Vietnam [King Encyclopedia]; Kent State University. (n.d.). The May 4 shootings at Kent State University: The search for historical accuracy; and Obermeyer, Z., Murray, C. J. L., and Gakidou, E. (2008). Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia. BMJ, 336, 1482-1486. web.archive.org; kinginstitute.stanford.edu; kent.edu; pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Wednesday, 9 May 1979: a line at the pump

Drivers in nine California counties woke up that morning to gasoline rationing. A news photograph from that first day, reprinted in the Federal Reserve's own history of the period, shows cars lined up outside a filling station, waiting their turn. All over the country that spring and summer, people spent hours in lines like it.

The price on the pump had changed too. In 1972 a gallon of regular gasoline cost an average of about 36 cents, according to the government's Energy Information Administration. In 1979 it averaged 86 cents, and by 1981 it was $1.31. Everything else seemed to cost more as well. Your grandparents may remember it.

Ask almost anyone why, and you will get an easy answer: America was running out of oil. It is a reasonable guess. It is also wrong, or at least badly incomplete. This lesson takes three easy answers about the 1970s and 1980s and debugs them, the way a programmer finds the faulty line in a program: you start with the answer, test it against the evidence, and find exactly where the reasoning breaks.

Easy answer one: "America was running out of oil"

Start with the first gas lines, in 1973. On 6 October Egypt and Syria attacked Israel's forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, starting the Yom Kippur War. On Friday, 19 October 1973, right after President Nixon asked Congress for $2.2 billion in emergency aid for Israel, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries stopped selling oil to the United States and began cutting production. The Federal Reserve's historians give the result in one number: the price of a barrel of oil nearly quadrupled, "from $2.90 a barrel before the embargo to $11.65 a barrel in January 1974." An embargo is an order to stop trade with a country. This one was lifted in March 1974, but the higher prices stayed. (This is the 1973 oil crisis.)

Then came 1979. In Iran, a revolution overthrew the Shah, the country's king, and by January 1979 Iran was producing 4.8 million fewer barrels of oil a day, about 7 percent of the world's supply. That sounds like a clear cause. But the Federal Reserve's historians add a twist: the cut in supply "may not have been the most important factor pushing oil prices higher. Rather, the Iranian disruption may have prompted a fear of further disruptions and spurred widespread speculative hoarding." Hoarding means buying and storing more than you need because you are afraid you will not be able to get it later. When everyone tops up the tank at once, the lines get longer.

On Sunday evening, 15 July 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave his own diagnosis on television.

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline.

Who made this, and why: Carter was a President asking Americans to change their habits. He wanted them to back his energy plan, to use less oil, to "park your car one extra day per week," and to accept that the country's problems went "deeper than gasoline lines." OPEC is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Notice that Carter names a cause, dependence, and calls it "direct." That is a cause-and-effect claim from someone with a programme to sell, so it deserves testing. Here, though, his figure helps you debug the easy answer: if almost half of America's oil came from abroad, then the other half was still being pumped at home.

So where does "running out of oil" break? It treats a shortage at the pump as if it were a shortage in the ground. The evidence points instead to a country that had come to rely on other nations for nearly half its oil, and to three shocks to that reliance: an embargo used as a political weapon in 1973, a revolution in 1979, and fear that made people hoard.

The point: the gas lines were not a sign that the wells had run dry. They came from dependence on foreign oil, sudden political shocks abroad, and the way people reacted at home.

Easy answer two: "Prices went up because of oil"

Here is a number to read. The table puts the price of gasoline beside the rate of inflation, the rise in prices in general. Inflation is measured with the consumer price index, which tracks the cost of a basket of everyday things such as food, rent, clothes and fuel.

Who made this, and why: the gasoline prices are annual averages for leaded regular from the Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Review 2011, a government record kept so that prices can be compared across decades. The "2005 dollars" column is the EIA's own adjustment for inflation: what each gallon would have cost in the money of 2005. The inflation figures come from a table of the consumer price index published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, built on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' data.

Read the table carefully and the easy answer starts to wobble. Inflation was already 5.8 percent in 1970, three years before the embargo. Over the decade the index itself rose from 38.8 in 1970 to 82.4 in 1980, which means that something costing a dollar in 1970 cost about $2.12 ten years later. Gasoline was only one of the things in that basket.

The people in charge said so themselves. Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1973, explained that the oil shock "came at a most inopportune time": by the middle of 1973, before the embargo, wholesale prices of industrial goods "were already rising at an annual rate of more than 10 per cent." In 1979 he listed many causes of the inflation, from "the loose financing of the war in Vietnam" to crop failures and the oil price increases. And the Federal Reserve's historians today add one more cause, the Fed itself. The embargo, they write, "was just one of many complicating factors" that led policymakers "to underestimate their own role" in the inflation of the 1970s. The Fed had let the supply of money grow too fast.

Taming inflation took medicine that hurt. In August 1979 Carter appointed Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve. Volcker squeezed the supply of money so hard that interest rates, the price of borrowing, shot up; the rate the Fed targets approached 20 percent in 1981. Borrowing to buy a house, a car or new factory machines became painfully expensive. The result was a deep recession from July 1981 to November 1982. Late in 1982 unemployment reached nearly 11 percent, the highest since the Second World War. But it worked: by 1983 inflation was down to 3.2 percent.

The core of it: oil made inflation worse, but it did not start it and it was not the only cause. Spending on the Vietnam War, crop failures, the falling dollar and the Fed's own loose money all played a part, and ending inflation required a recession.

Reagan: a president, a recovery and an argument

In the middle of all this, in November 1980, Americans chose Ronald Reagan over Carter. On Tuesday, 20 January 1981, Reagan took office with a famous diagnosis.

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. ... In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Who made this, and why: an inaugural address sets out what a new President believes and plans to do. Notice the words "in this present crisis": Reagan was talking about the crisis of high inflation and high taxes, and he wanted Americans to accept a smaller role for the national government. His programme, as the Miller Center at the University of Virginia describes it, was to cut taxes, curb government spending and balance the budget, while spending more on defence. He also stood by Volcker's painful policy when leading Republicans urged him to break with the Fed. "Stay the course," he told the country. In January 1983, with the recession at its worst, a Gallup poll gave him an approval rating of just 35 percent.

Then, in 1983, a boom began that was still going when Reagan left office in 1989. The economy grew by 6.8 percent in 1984, and unemployment fell from 9.5 percent in 1983 to 5.2 percent in 1989. What caused the boom? Here a cause-and-effect question has several answers, and they compete. The Miller Center sets them out: "Reagan's supporters point to the 1981 tax cuts. Other Reagan admirers trace the economic boom to the administration's 1982 tax increases to counter the growing budget deficits," and others credit the Federal Reserve for relaxing its grip on money in 1982. Defence spending added to the boom, as did wider changes in business and technology.

The argument extends to the costs. The top rate of income tax, 70 percent when Reagan took office, was 28 percent when he left. The budget was never balanced, and the national debt grew from $914 billion to $2.6 trillion, nearly three times as large. Critics argued that the richest Americans gained most from the boom while the gap between them and the middle class widened. Defenders answered that much of the debt came from the cost of winning the Cold War, the "wartime deficits" of an expensive contest with the Soviet Union, and that many poor families saw their incomes rise above the poverty line during the boom.

In short: when several causes could explain one effect, a good historian lists them, shows the evidence for each, and is honest that people still weigh them differently.

Easy answer three: "Reagan's speech knocked down the Wall"

On Friday, 12 June 1987, Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, beside the Berlin Wall that divided the city, and spoke to the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Who made this, and why: this is the "tear down this wall" speech. Reagan was speaking to West Berliners in front of him, to Americans at home, and to the leaders in Moscow, who would read every word. Gorbachev, who had led the Soviet Union since 1985, was trying to rescue a failing economy with reforms, and Reagan was testing how far those reforms would go. Two and a half years later the Wall was open. It is easy to join the two events with a "because." Now debug that "because" by checking the timeline.

Here is what happened on that last night, as the National Security Archive at George Washington University tells it from Soviet, German, American, Czechoslovak and Hungarian files. East Germany's leaders had drafted new travel rules, full of conditions, meant to let off pressure without really opening the border. At the very end of a press conference, between 6 and 7 p.m. on Thursday, 9 November, the official reading them out, Gunter Schabowski, did not know the background. Rattled by shouted questions, he was asked when the rules took effect, and he read the words "immediately, without delay" from his papers. Television and news agencies reported that the border was open. Crowds of East Berliners massed at the checkpoints and finally persuaded the senior officer at the largest checkpoint inside the city, Bornholmer Strasse, to open the gates. Within hours people were chipping souvenirs off the concrete.

Now debug. The easy answer fails in three places. First, the timeline: 29 months separate the speech from the opening, and a great deal happened in between, most of it decided by people other than Reagan. Second, the trigger: on the night itself, the gates opened because of a mistake at a press conference and crowds who acted on it. Third, the long-term causes: the State Department's historians conclude that "Gorbachev's decision to loosen the Soviet yoke on the countries of Eastern Europe created an independent, democratic momentum that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989." The National Security Archive's editors put it this way: "East German crowds led the way, with help from Communist fumbles, self-fulfilling TV coverage, Hungarian reformers, Czechoslovak pressure, and Gorbachev's non-violence."

But do not throw Reagan out of the story. The Miller Center's historian of his presidency, the journalist Lou Cannon, argues that Reagan believed his military buildup would bring the Soviets to the negotiating table, that the INF Treaty was the first agreement of the Cold War to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and that while "many people contributed" to ending the Cold War, "Reagan and Gorbachev deserve the principal credit." Notice that the two accounts are answering different questions. Cannon is explaining why the Cold War wound down, a long process in which leaders mattered a great deal. The National Security Archive is explaining why the Wall opened on that particular night. Both can be right at once. The Soviet Union itself lasted two more years: on Wednesday, 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

The skill: cause and effect, debugged

Each easy answer in this lesson broke in a slightly different place. Put together, they give you a checklist for testing any "because."

1. Check the timeline. A cause must come first, but coming first does not make something a cause.
2. Separate the fuel from the spark. Long-term causes build up the pressure; a trigger is the event that sets it off. Schabowski's mistake was a spark; Hungary's open border and the protests were fuel.
3. Count the causes. Big events almost never have one cause. List them and weigh the evidence for each.
4. Ask who is giving the answer. A President defending his energy plan, a supporter of a policy, or an admirer of a leader may each have a reason to prefer one cause.

Worth holding on to: an easy answer usually contains a real cause. The bug is that it stops looking after finding one.

Common misconceptions

• "The gas lines happened because the United States had run out of oil." Americans were still pumping about half the oil they used. The lines came from dependence on imports, an embargo in 1973, a revolution in Iran in 1979 and hoarding.
• "Inflation means one thing, like gasoline, getting more expensive." Inflation is a rise in prices in general. Between 1970 and 1980 the consumer price index more than doubled.
• "The West tore down the Berlin Wall." East German crowds, acting on a botched announcement, persuaded East German border guards to open the gates; the State Department's historians describe American policy in 1989 as "reactive."
• "Cutting taxes in the 1980s shrank the national debt." The national debt grew from $914 billion to $2.6 trillion during Reagan's two terms, as tax cuts and higher defence spending outran spending cuts.

The short version

• In October 1973 Arab oil producers stopped selling oil to the United States, and the price of a barrel rose from $2.90 to $11.65 by January 1974. In 1979 the Iranian revolution, and the fear and hoarding it set off, brought gas lines back.
• Carter blamed the lines on dependence on foreign oil, which by 1979 supplied almost half of what Americans used.
• Inflation was already 5.8 percent in 1970 and reached 13.5 percent in 1980. Volcker's Federal Reserve ended it with high interest rates and a deep recession; unemployment reached nearly 11 percent late in 1982, and inflation fell to 3.2 percent in 1983.
• Reagan cut taxes, raised defence spending and stood by Volcker. A boom began in 1983; people still argue about how much to credit the tax cuts, the 1982 tax increases or the Fed. The national debt nearly tripled.
• Reagan told Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in June 1987; the Wall opened on 9 November 1989 after Hungary opened its border, East Germans protested and fled, and an official announced new travel rules "immediately, without delay." The Soviet Union ended on 25 December 1991.

Sources

1. Federal Reserve History. (n.d.). Oil shock of 1973-74; Oil shock of 1978-79; and Recession of 1981-82; and Bryan, M. (n.d.). The Great Inflation. Federal Reserve. federalreservehistory.org; federalreservehistory.org; federalreservehistory.org; federalreservehistory.org
2. U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2012). Annual energy review 2011, Table 5.24: Retail motor gasoline and on-highway diesel fuel prices, 1949-2011; and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. (n.d.). Consumer price index, 1913-. eia.gov; minneapolisfed.org
3. Carter, J. (1979, July 15). Address to the nation on energy and national goals; Reagan, R. (1981, January 20). Inaugural address; and Reagan, R. (1987, June 12). Remarks on East-West relations at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu
4. Cannon, L. (n.d.). Ronald Reagan: Domestic affairs and Ronald Reagan: Foreign affairs. Miller Center, University of Virginia. millercenter.org; millercenter.org
5. National Security Archive. (2014, November 9). The fall of the Berlin Wall, 25th anniversary [Electronic Briefing Book No. 490]. George Washington University; and Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). The collapse of the Soviet Union and The 1973 Arab-Israeli War [Milestones]. nsarchive2.gwu.edu; history.state.gov; history.state.gov

The end of 1990: a label in red ink

At the end of 1990, in an office at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, a computer sat on a desk with a handwritten label stuck to it in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" The label was there to stop anyone switching it off by accident. The computer belonged to a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, and it was the world's first web server. It held the world's first website.

Berners-Lee had written his first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989, as a way for scientists in universities and laboratories around the world to share information automatically. You are reading this lesson on a descendant of that idea.

The years since have brought many changes. This lesson picks four turning points and puts them side by side: the spread of the web, the attacks of 11 September 2001, the crash and the election of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020. A turning point is a moment after which things went differently. The four were very different kinds of event, and comparing them with the same questions is the best way to see how change over time works. The last of them happened in your own lifetime, when you were about five, six or seven years old.

Turning point one: a web of pages, 1989 onwards

The web did not arrive in a day. By the end of 1990 Berners-Lee had the first server and browser running at CERN. In 1991 he released the software and announced it on internet discussion groups, and in December 1991 the first web server in the United States came online, at a physics laboratory in California. Early in 1993 the University of Illinois released a browser called Mosaic that ordinary people found easy to use, first for one kind of computer and then for PCs and Macintoshes. And on Friday, 30 April 1993, CERN made the web's software available to anyone, free, so that no company could lock it up.

Notice something about that last step. The internet is the network that links computers together; it already existed, which is why Berners-Lee could announce his software on internet newsgroups in 1991. The web is a system of linked pages that runs on that network. They are not the same thing, though most people use the words as if they were.

Here is a number to read: the share of American adults who said they used the internet, from the Pew Research Center's surveys.

Who made this, and why: the Pew Research Center is a research organisation that surveys large samples of Americans about their lives and publishes the results. Notice two things it tells you about its own method. Its surveys were done by telephone through 2021, and after that by web and mail and later by web, mail and telephone, a change it marks on its chart, because a new method can shift the results a little. And the numbers come from people's own answers about themselves. Pew also counts smartphones: in its first survey of smartphone ownership, in 2011, 35 percent of adults had one; in 2025, 91 percent did.

Worth holding on to: the web changed American life slowly and then completely. It took about twenty-five years to go from half of adults online to almost all of them, and no single day marks the turn.

Turning point two: Tuesday, 11 September 2001

The second turning point came in a single morning. The official report on it begins like this.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work.

That morning nineteen terrorists from al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist group, hijacked four passenger planes. They flew two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the armed forces, outside Washington, D.C. On the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, passengers who had learned of the other attacks fought back, and the plane came down in an empty field in western Pennsylvania, about twenty minutes' flying time from Washington. The towers collapsed. The attacks killed 2,977 people from 90 nations: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 on Flight 93.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum adds a fact that people often do not know. When the planes struck, between 16,400 and 18,000 people were in the World Trade Center complex, and the vast majority of them got out safely. As they came out, firefighters, police officers and other first responders went in to help those who were still inside. In the months that followed, thousands of volunteers came to help with the rescue, recovery and clean-up.

Who made this, and why: the opening sentences come from the 9/11 Commission's report, published in 2004 by a national commission whose job was to explain how the attacks had happened and how to prevent others. It begins with an ordinary morning on purpose: everything that follows is measured against it. The same report found that by 8:00 that morning the hijackers "had defeated all the security layers that America's civil aviation security system then had in place to prevent a hijacking."

Much changed afterwards, and some of it has lasted. Al-Qaeda had been based in Afghanistan, protected by the Taliban, the group then ruling the country; when the Taliban refused American demands to hand over the terrorists, the United States began a war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, on Sunday, 7 October 2001. In November 2002 Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, and the new Department of Homeland Security, made by joining all or part of 22 federal agencies, opened on 1 March 2003. Al-Qaeda's founder, Osama bin Laden, was killed in an American military operation in May 2011.

Remember: some turning points are sudden. One morning changed how the country thought about safety, and the changes made in response, from a new department of government to a war that began within a month, lasted for years.

Turning point three: 2008, a crash and an election

The third turning point began quietly, in people's houses. Between 1998 and 2006, the Federal Reserve's historians record, average home prices in the United States more than doubled, "the sharpest increase recorded in US history." Families borrowed to buy homes: the money Americans owed on mortgages, the loans used to buy houses, rose from 61 percent of the country's yearly output in 1998 to 97 percent in 2006. A rise in prices that runs far ahead of what things are really worth is called a bubble. When home prices began to fall in 2007, those loans suddenly looked far riskier, and banks and other financial firms that had lent the money, or bought the loans, ran into deep trouble. In the autumn of 2008 the strain on the financial system reached its peak.

The Great Recession that followed lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, the longest since the Second World War. Unemployment, 5 percent in December 2007, peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. Home prices across the nation fell by more than a fifth between early 2007 and the middle of 2011. And the recovery was slow: in 2013, four years after the recession ended, the Federal Reserve's historian noted that unemployment was still 7.3 percent.

Why did the bubble grow? Even experts disagree, and the Federal Reserve's own history sets out both sides. The economist John Taylor argued in 2007 that the Federal Reserve, by keeping interest rates low for a "prolonged period" after 2001, helped to fuel the housing boom. Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve during the crisis, argued in 2010 that such factors could account for only a small part of the rise in housing. When a question is still open, the honest thing is to say so and name who holds which view.

That same autumn, on Tuesday, 4 November 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama as the first Black President of the United States. He won 365 electoral votes to 173 for John McCain, and four years later he was re-elected. On 20 January 2009, in the middle of the recession, he spoke from the steps of the Capitol.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed; why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

Who made this, and why: an inaugural address speaks to the whole country and to history. In one sentence Obama reached back across this course: to the lunch counters of the 1960s, which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened to everyone (Lesson 20), and to a time, within his father's lifetime, when a man like him could be turned away from a restaurant. The sentence is itself a statement about change over time.

The upshot: 2008 was two turning points at once. One, the crash, came on suddenly and took years to undo; the other, the election, was the result of changes that had been building for more than half a century.

Turning point four: March 2020, a pandemic

On Wednesday, 11 March 2020, after more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths, the World Health Organization declared that the new disease called COVID-19 was a pandemic, a disease spreading across the whole world. Within days, states began shutting down to slow the spread. On 15 March the New York City public schools, the largest school system in the country with 1.1 million students, closed their doors, and schools across the country followed. You may remember lessons on a screen at a kitchen table.

Vaccines came quickly. On 11 December 2020, nine months after the pandemic was declared, the Food and Drug Administration authorised the first vaccine for emergency use, for people aged sixteen and older, and on 10 May 2021 it extended that authorisation to adolescents aged twelve to fifteen. But the cost was enormous. According to the death certificates analysed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 was the underlying cause of 350,831 American deaths in 2020 and 415,399 in 2021, the third leading cause of death in both years after heart disease and cancer. The CDC also found that death rates from the disease were lowest among children aged five to fourteen.

The pandemic also changed learning. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national test given to a sample of students, tested 8,700 thirteen-year-olds in each subject in the autumn of 2022. Their average scores were 4 points lower in reading and 9 points lower in mathematics than those of thirteen-year-olds tested in 2019-20, just before the pandemic. But read the next number too: compared with a decade earlier, scores were down 7 points in reading and 14 in mathematics. Part of the fall had begun before the pandemic. The test shows that scores fell; it does not, by itself, tell you all the reasons why.

Americans disagreed sharply about the rules the pandemic brought, such as how long schools should stay closed and when masks should be required. Each side could point to real harms. Those who wanted stronger measures pointed to the hundreds of thousands of deaths. Those who wanted schools and businesses open sooner pointed to lost learning, and to costs such as the estimated 5.1 million women, recorded in the CDC's own timeline, who left the workforce when schools and child-care centres closed in 2020.

Four turning points side by side

Now put the four next to each other and ask each of them the same questions. This is the heart of a comparison: the table is only useful if you read it row by row.

Read across the first row and you find two kinds of change. The web was gradual: no one woke up one morning to find it there. The other three were sudden. Now read the last two rows together. Speed does not tell you how long a change will last. The sudden shock of 11 September left lasting changes in government, while the sudden shock of the pandemic closed schools that later reopened. And the slowest change of the four, the web, is the one that changed the most.

Why this matters: how fast a change comes and how long it lasts are two different questions. Asking both keeps you from assuming that the loudest event was always the most important one.

The skill: change over time

Change over time is the skill of describing what changed, how quickly, for whom, and what stayed the same. Four questions do most of the work.

1. How fast? Was the change sudden, like a morning in September, or gradual, like the web? Numbers across many years, like Pew's, show gradual change best.
2. How long did it last? Did things go back, as schools reopened after the pandemic, or did the change stick, as the Department of Homeland Security has?
3. For whom? The same event can be different for different people. The pandemic was deadliest for the old, while children lost months of ordinary school.
4. What stayed the same? Historians call this continuity. Through all four turning points, Americans went on voting, arguing and holding elections every two and four years.

Use the questions on the long view too. In November 1964, the Commission on Civil Rights counted fewer than 7 percent of Black Mississippians as registered voters (Lesson 20). Forty-four years later Americans elected a Black President. That is change over time on the scale of a lifetime, and Obama's sentence about his father measures it in one generation.

Common misconceptions

• "The internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing." The internet is the network that links computers; it existed before the web. The web is a system of linked pages that Tim Berners-Lee invented to run on it, beginning in 1989.
• "Hardly anyone in the World Trade Center escaped." Of the 16,400 to 18,000 people in the complex when the planes struck, the vast majority got out safely, helped by first responders who went in.
• "The 2008 crisis began and ended in 2008." The recession ran from December 2007 to June 2009, unemployment peaked in October 2009, and it was still 7.3 percent in 2013.
• "Test scores fell only because of the pandemic." Thirteen-year-olds' scores were lower in 2023 than in 2020, but they had already been slipping in the decade before.

Where this leaves us

• Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in March 1989, and CERN made its software free to all on 30 April 1993. American adults online rose from 52 percent in 2000 to 96 percent in 2024.
• On 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes; 2,977 people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93, whose passengers fought back. A war in Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001, and the Department of Homeland Security opened in 2003.
• A housing bubble burst in 2007-2008, causing the Great Recession of December 2007 to June 2009; unemployment reached 10 percent. Economists still disagree about why the bubble grew.
• On 4 November 2008 Barack Obama was elected the first Black President, and he was re-elected in 2012.
• The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March 2020; schools closed, vaccines were authorised in December 2020, and the disease was the third leading cause of American deaths in 2020 and 2021.
• Change over time: ask how fast, how long it lasted, for whom, and what stayed the same.

Sources

1. CERN. (n.d.). A short history of the Web; and Pew Research Center. (2025). Internet, broadband fact sheet and Mobile fact sheet. home.cern; pewresearch.org; pewresearch.org
2. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. (2004). The 9/11 Commission report, chapter 1; 9/11 Memorial and Museum. (n.d.). FAQs about 9/11; and U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (n.d.). Creation of the Department of Homeland Security. govinfo.library.unt.edu; 911memorial.org; dhs.gov
3. Rich, R. (2013). The Great Recession; and Federal Reserve History. (n.d.). The Great Recession and its aftermath. Federal Reserve. federalreservehistory.org; federalreservehistory.org
4. Obama, B. (2009, January 20). Inaugural address; and Peters, G., and Woolley, J. T. (n.d.). Election of 2008 and Election of 2012 [Statistics]. The American Presidency Project. presidency.ucsb.edu; presidency.ucsb.edu
5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). CDC Museum COVID-19 timeline; Ahmad, F. B., Cisewski, J. A., and Anderson, R. N. (2022). Provisional mortality data, United States, 2021. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 71(17); and National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). NAEP long-term trend assessment results: Reading and mathematics, age 13. cdc.gov; cdc.gov; nationsreportcard.gov

Wednesday, 30 April 2025: a table about the last election

That Wednesday the U.S. Census Bureau published a set of tables about the presidential election of November 2024. Of American citizens old enough to vote, 73.6 percent, about 174 million people, were registered, and 65.3 percent, about 154 million, voted. Women voted at a higher rate than men, 66.9 percent against 63.7 percent. And 29.0 percent of voters did not go to a polling place at all: they voted by mail.

Every number in that table has a history, and you have spent this course learning it. Women's votes go back to Harry Burn's "aye" in 1920 (Lesson 10). Votes for Black Americans go back to 1870, and to the long struggle that followed (Lessons 1, 2 and 20). The age of the youngest voters goes back to the Vietnam War (Lesson 21).

Historians call a line of events like this a thread: something you can pick up in the present and follow back through the past, lesson by lesson, to where it began. This final lesson gives you a procedure for following a thread on your own. You will walk it once, end to end, on the right to vote. Then you will walk it again on a second question, change one input, and watch the answer flip.

The procedure: six steps for following a thread

1. Ask a question about today that you actually care about, and write it down. "Who gets to vote?" is a good question. "Was the past bad?" is not; it is too big to answer.
2. Find today's evidence: a number or a document from the present, and ask who made it and how.
3. Pull the thread: go back through the course, list every point where your question appears, with dates, and go back far enough to find where it starts.
4. Mark the turns: the moments when the thread changed direction.
5. Use the five skills: sourcing, cause and effect, change over time, comparison and point of view.
6. Write a claim, an answer you can back with evidence, and say honestly what you still do not know.

Worked example one: who gets to vote?

Step 1, the question: who gets to vote in the United States, and how did it get this way?

Step 2, today's evidence: the Census Bureau's tables for 2024. Who made this, and why: the Census Bureau is the government agency that counts the American people. These figures come from a survey, the Current Population Survey's Voting and Registration Supplement, in which people were asked whether they had registered and voted. So they rest on what people said about themselves, which is worth knowing before you build on them.

Step 3, pull the thread: here is everything this course has taught you about who could vote, in order.

Step 4, mark the turns: the thread does not run in a straight line. It turns up in 1870, turns sharply down in the South between 1890 and 1904, turns up for women in 1920, and turns up again, fast, between 1964 and 1971. In 2013 it reaches a turn that Americans still argue about.

Step 5, the five skills. Now work the thread with each skill in turn.

• Sourcing. Who made each piece of evidence? The 2024 figures come from people's answers to a survey. The figures for 1964 and 1967 come from the Commission on Civil Rights, which warned that its own numbers were estimates that "vary widely in their accuracy" (Lesson 20). Good evidence comes with its weaknesses written on it.
• Cause and effect. The clearest link on the thread is the Voting Rights Act. When the law took away the test and sent federal examiners, Mississippi's figure rose about ninefold in three years. The timing fits, and President Johnson said beforehand that this was exactly the change the law was meant to make.
• Change over time. The right to vote grew, but in surges and reversals: a promise in 1870, a collapse by 1904, and recovery only after 1965. Even rights written into the Constitution could be emptied out in practice for generations.
• Comparison. In 2024, women voted at a higher rate than men. A little over a century earlier, before the Nineteenth Amendment, women in many states could not vote at all. Comparing two groups at two dates shows how far the thread has moved.
• Point of view. The turn of 2013 looks different depending on where a judge stood, and both sides wrote down their reasons.

In Shelby County v. Holder, decided on Tuesday, 25 June 2013, five justices held that the formula of the Voting Rights Act, which decided which states and counties needed preclearance, rested on facts from the 1960s and early 1970s. Writing for them, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to the change: Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three men were murdered in 1964 while working to register Black voters, and Selma, Alabama, the town of Bloody Sunday, were "today" both "governed by African-American mayors."

Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.

Four justices disagreed. Writing for them, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accepted that "conditions in the South have impressively improved since passage of the Voting Rights Act," but argued that Congress had found evidence of newer, subtler barriers, and that preclearance was the reason for the improvement.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

Who made these, and why: both are opinions of the Supreme Court, written to explain a decision to the country and to the judges who will follow it. Notice what the two sides agree about: the South had changed, and the Voting Rights Act had a great deal to do with it. They disagree about what that change means. Roberts saw a law that no longer matched the country; Ginsburg saw an umbrella that was keeping people dry. The Court ruled only on the formula. The section of the law that bans racial discrimination in voting everywhere, Roberts noted, was not affected, and Congress could write a new formula based on current conditions.

Step 6, the claim: the right to vote in the United States has grown enormously since 1870, but not steadily. A promise written into the Constitution in 1870 was broken in practice across the South by 1904 and kept only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965; women gained the vote in 1920 and eighteen-year-olds in 1971; and since 2013 Americans have disagreed about how best to protect what was won. What I still do not know: how registration and voting differ from state to state today, and how closely people's answers to the Census survey match what they actually did.

Key idea: a thread followed far enough back almost never runs in a straight line. The turns are where the history is.

Worked example two: change one input, and the answer flips

Now walk the same procedure on a second question: has the number of Black Americans in Congress grown? This time you will change one input, the year you start from, and see what happens.

Today's evidence: the Office of the Historian of the House of Representatives keeps a table of every Black member of Congress, drawn from the official biographical directory. For the Congress that began in 2025, it lists 71: 66 in the House and 5 in the Senate. (Its count includes delegates from places such as the Virgin Islands.) Here is the thread, Congress by Congress.

Now give the same table to two students and change one input. The first student starts in 1875 and stops in 1929. She writes: "Black membership of Congress fell from 8 to 1, with 28 years of none at all. It shrank." The second student starts in 1929 and stops in 2025. He writes: "Black membership of Congress rose from 1 to 71. It grew enormously." Every number either of them uses is correct. Their conclusions are opposite.

The changed input, the starting year, flipped the result. This is why Step 3 says to go back far enough to find where the thread starts, and why an honest claim says where it starts and stops and why. Followed all the way, the thread says something neither student said alone: Black representation rose during Reconstruction, was wiped out for a generation as the vote was taken away, came back slowly from 1929, and climbed fast after 1965.

The skills you have practised help you read the turns. Cause and effect: the empty years from 1901 to 1929 line up with the laws that took the vote away (Lesson 2), and the steep climb from 6 members in 1965-1967 to 17 in 1973-1975 lines up with the Voting Rights Act (Lesson 20). The timing fits, but to prove the link you would want to know where those new members came from and who elected them. Comparison: Oscar De Priest was elected not in the South but in Illinois, which suggests that moving north was another road to representation. Point of view: whose voices are missing from a table of names? Every voter who could not cast a ballot in those twenty-eight years.

Bottom line: correct numbers can still lead to a wrong conclusion if you choose where to start and stop without saying why. Following the whole thread is what protects you.

The five skills, together

You will rarely need only one. In this lesson's first thread, sourcing told you how far to trust the numbers, cause and effect explained the jump after 1965, change over time gave the thread its shape, comparison measured how far it had moved, and point of view explained why two justices looked at the same improvement and reached different conclusions.

Common misconceptions

• "History moves in a straight line and always gets better." Both threads in this lesson went up, then down, then up again. In Louisiana, registered Black voters fell from about 130,000 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904.
• "If my numbers are right, my conclusion must be right." Two students using the same correct table reached opposite conclusions because they started in different years.
• "Once a right is written in the Constitution, the story is over." The Fifteenth Amendment promised the vote in 1870, but poll taxes and literacy tests emptied the promise across the South for most of a century.
• "A question about today has nothing to do with history." The Census table of 2024 has a history in nearly every row: women voters, Black voters, eighteen-year-old voters and voting by mail.

Looking back

• To follow a thread: ask a question about today, find today's evidence, pull the thread back through the past, mark the turns, use the five skills, and write a claim that says what you still do not know.
• In 2024, 73.6 percent of voting-age citizens were registered and 65.3 percent voted. The right to vote behind those numbers was promised in 1870, taken away in the South by 1904, extended to women in 1920, protected by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), and extended to eighteen-year-olds in 1971.
• In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Ginsburg agreed that the South had changed but disagreed about what that meant for preclearance.
• Black membership of Congress rose to 8 in 1875-1877, fell to none from 1901 to 1929, and rose to 71 in 2025. Changing the starting year flips the conclusion, so follow the whole thread.
• This course began with a letter written in 1865 and ends with a table published in 2025. Everything between them is a thread you can now follow yourself.

Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2025, April 30). 2024 presidential election voting and registration tables now available [Press release]. census.gov
2. National Archives. (n.d.). The Constitution: Amendments 11-27 [Transcription, with dates of passage and ratification]. archives.gov
3. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. law.cornell.edu
4. Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. (n.d.). Black-American members by Congress [Black Americans in Congress]. history.house.gov
5. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. (n.d.). Fact sheet #43: Child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for nonagricultural occupations [used in the activity]. dol.gov