53. Inequality of Opportunity
“As the economy continued its recovery throughout 1894, investors regained their confidence and businesses across the country began to grow once more. The industrial sector had the fastest recovery as a combination of high tariffs, falling unemployment, and heavy investment increased demand and enabled greater production. However, while small manufacturers enjoyed a massive boom, farmers and rural businessmen struggled to secure the same investment opportunities. In order to ensure that its funds were readily available to the Treasury, the National Bank frequently called on local banks to settle the amounts of the checks and notes that local banks deposited in the National Bank. Since these checks and notes were settled in specie (gold and silver coins), banks could not lend out too much money or they wouldn’t have enough specie left to pay back the National Bank [1].
The National Bank came under increased criticism from farmers for its restrictions on the capacity of local banks to lend money. Larger eastern banks had more funds to loan out safely, while smaller western and rural banks were more constrained under the National Bank’s regulations. When Alonzo B. Hepburn [2], the President of the Bank, refused a petition signed by 3,000 farmers in Hidatsa and Lakota to ease the restraints on local banks, state politicians appealed to Congress. However, a bill to compel the bank to change its lending regulations introduced by Hidatsa congressman Niels Johnson was defeated in committee due to a longstanding precedent that Congress shouldn’t pass any laws to compel the National Bank to follow one policy or another. Angered by the refusal of the Whigs to act, Johnson became an independent in August 1894. Shortly after, he founded the People’s Party with Senator Alvin Wright, a fellow Hidatsan. They were joined soon after by six other western congressmen and four Senators, expanded to 10 congressmen and 5 Senators after the 1894-1895 elections.
The Populist movement had begun, and whichever party managed to win over these disaffected farmers would have a chokehold on the west for a generation…”
-From PARADIGM SHIFT: THE AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE ERA by Olivia DiMarco, published 2015
“The end of slavery in the south created a large population of unemployed, destitute freedmen. While many found a semblance of “employment” as tenant farmers on the plantation of their former master, many others sought new opportunities. The growing cities of both the south and the north seemed to promise boundless opportunity, shining beacons of freedom from servitude. While northern cities like Cincinnati and Philadelphia were more welcoming of black migration, most cities both north and south disliked the newcomers. Northern cities like Boston and Chicago mostly reacted to black migration by instituting segregated residential zoning, cramming black newcomers into tenement housing, even as white immigrants were moved into safer apartments. Richmond and Saint Louis enacted similar policies [3].
As racist as housing policy in the north was, it was a hundred times worse in the south. Elyton and Atlanta are two prime examples of the new southern system of white supremacy. Elyton, Alabama, was undergoing extraordinary growth at the close of the 19th century due to the city’s booming steel industry. This naturally attracted many rural migrants to seek employment at the mines, mills, and foundries, and many of them were black freedmen. Under the pass system implemented by the Alabama legislature, however, it was difficult for freedmen to move around. To get around this and also obtain cheap labor, Sloss Industries, the main steel company in Elyton, built several corporate dormitories (of dubious safety, and indeed one northern journalist declared it “worse than a tenement house”) where the employees would reside, and they could send their wages home to their families.
While white workers at the steel mills could move their families to Elyton and get housing, black workers lived apart from their families and could only return home on certain occasions, because their passbooks were held by their employers [4]. Worse, black employees were given the most menial jobs available, and paid substantially less than what a white worker earned doing a comparable task (sometimes as low as 15% of a white man’s wages). What limited safety regulations existed were ignored for black workers, and unionization efforts by black workers were met with threats to charge organizers and strikers with vagrancy and sentence them into the convict labor gangs. Along with terrible working conditions, the dormitories these workers lived in were of shoddy quality and often burned down or collapsed. As Elyton grew, white residents complained that their homes were too close to the dormitories and demanded they be moved. The city council established a zoning board headed by the notoriously segregationist attorney Garrett Nash. Nash and the zoning board left the white residential areas where they were, but moved the dormitories downwind of the industrial sector, essentially dividing Elyton in three: the white area, the industrial area, and the black area [5].
The black employees of the steel mills were unceremoniously evicted almost immediately after the new zoning ordinances were drawn and moved to the empty fields downwind of the steel mills. “The air was laden with smoke and ash,” explained The Advocate, “and the land was laden with tents and lean-tos.” Sloss Industries was loath to pay for even the construction of cheap dormitories and instead sought to create a different form of the company towns that were popular with northern corporations. The land was parceled out and rented to the workers, many of whom could not afford the fees. The workers would then build their own housing. Sloss knew this and offered to loan the money to the workers and even provide discounted building materials. The workers were also bound to remain employed at Sloss until they paid off their debt. Of course, most of them were unable to save enough money to escape the contract. What resulted was a confused sea of wooden shanties with no streetlights and unpaved roads. There was only one rudimentary school run by the local church, which had only four bibles and no other books. Law enforcement was negligible, and fires were frequent.
Elyton imposed its own local form of passbooks, where workers were forbidden from entering the white section of the city and could only travel from what passed for their home to the factory and back [6]. Instead, they were consigned to inhabit shacks with no electricity (which was becoming commonplace in cities across the country) and no running water, forcing them to rely on wells of dubious quality. Other steel and mining companies in Elyton followed similar plans, and these slums grew ever denser and more unhygienic as time wore on. Worse, other growing southern cities like Nashville, Atlanta, and Louisville adopted similar zoning codes that effectively consigned every black person in the city to a life little better than that of a slave.”
-From DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN: THE BUILDING OF AMERICA'S BLACK SLUMS by Evan Summers, published 2013
“It seems Texas just can’t escape controversy. First, the city of Dallas tried to run a highway through a Black neighborhood and were thwarted by the Supreme Court. Then Governor Henry Armistead (Dem-Tex) went on a rant and called for Dallas to ignore the ruling.
First, some background. The Supreme Court recently ruled in Dallas v. Morris that the Dallas zoning board had illegally approved a highway to run through the Black-majority neighborhood of West Trinity. The court battle had dragged on for the past five years as a stay on the highway persisted. Last week, in a 7-2 ruling authored by Chief Justice Scott, the Court ordered the zoning board to re-route the highway in a way that didn’t disrupt the neighborhood.
As Justice Scott explained, “the Constitution enshrines the right to life, liberty, and property. The fifth amendment prohibits any individual from being deprived of their property rights by the government, and the seventeenth amendment [7] guarantees all Americans regardless of race to equal treatment under the law… West Trinity is 65% Black and the Dallas Zoning Board elected to circuitously route Interstate 20 through West Trinity rather than a more direct route through the White-majority Oak Hill neighborhood.” According to Scott and the six justices who joined her on the opinion, while it is not illegal for governments to seize property via eminent domain, the construction of the proposed highway would “needlessly disrupt” West Trinity and “serve to isolate West Trinity from other areas of Dallas, chiefly the central business district.” The Court ultimately held that the detrimental effects of the highway’s proposed location were racially motivated and ordered the zoning board to find a less disruptive path for Interstate 20.
Howard Morris, the attorney and West Trinity homeowner who led the suit, celebrated the ruling. “It’s a great victory, it means my neighbors, my family, and I won’t have to live with the noise and pollution of heavy, 24/7 traffic,” he told reporters on the steps of the Supreme Court building. “And it means, above all, that America is a place of opportunity and freedom, and that Black people are just as entitled to that opportunity and freedom as anyone else here.” President Claire Huntington called Morris to congratulate him and said at a later press conference that “I welcome this ruling, it’s a tremendous step forward for equal rights in this country. There were many other ways that the city of Dallas could have routed that highway without disrupting any neighborhood, white or Black. Instead, they tried to destroy a prosperous Black neighborhood. I thank the Justices of the Supreme Court, and I thank Mr. Morris and his hard work for putting a stop to this injustice.”
The Dallas Zoning Board’s chairman, Jacob Orman, criticize the court’s ruling as “discrimination against the White families that’ll have an interstate running through their front yards,” but acknowledged that “the court’s ruling may be erroneous, but its authority is final, and we have to respect it.” Meanwhile, Texas Governor Henry Armistead used a press conference at the unveiling of a renovated Nicaraguan War memorial to furiously denounce the court. “This is judicial activism of the worst kind,” Armistead fumed. “What do seven out-of-touch Whigs know about Dallas zoning? What do they know about our highway system or electrical grid or port authorities? They’re legislating from the bench and I’m sick of it. If you ask me, Jake Orman and Mayor Daniels should just ignore the court. Like Jackson said, ‘the court’s made its ruling, let ‘em enforce it.’ Can a bunch of old Harvard hacks in robes stop a fleet of bulldozers? I don’t think so.”
Armistead’s comments were immediately met with outrage. Texas Attorney General Phil Lambert, a Whig, called the incident “shameful and disturbing.” He went on to say that “the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, and they have made a ruling. Unlike a banana republic, in the United States we obey court rulings. If Governor Armistead tries to ignore the ruling in Dallas v. Morris, I will fight him every step of the way. What the Governor is proposing is un-American.” When reached for comment, Howard Morris simply said “yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. Hank Armistead always seems to wish that Texas was still an independent republic.” President Huntington issued a brief statement read by her Press Secretary, Mike Vanderburg that said “I am disappointed in the rhetoric of Governor Armistead. The United States is a nation of laws, not men and his comments fly in the face of what the United States of America was founded upon.”
It's sadly not surprising that Governor Armistead made these comments – he has a history of defending segregationist actions during his three terms in office. During his first campaign in 1998, he called William Weldon, a Texan who served as President from 1901-1905, “a hero for states-rights.” Weldon was a notorious white supremacist who helped design the state’s convict leasing system and Black Codes that kept Blacks trapped in poverty and illiteracy. Then in 2002, Armistead referred to his opponent, Tom Davis, who is Black, as “macaca” during a debate [8]. Macaca is a racial slur derived from the Portuguese for “monkey.” He won anyway. And a series of statements during his 2006 reelection campaign in which he seemed to advocate for Texan secession, called President Huntington a “real bitch” and cited the 1972 election, in which the pro-civil rights Warren Burke was elected, as “when America started to lose its greatness.” He nearly lost his primary that time, defeating Congressman Weldon Samuels in a runoff by less than 5,000 votes.
In all of his controversies, Governor Armistead has refused to apologize, instead insisting he was either misquoted or taken out of context. In none of these controversies have his excuses ever made sense. He is a disgrace to our state, and we all deserve better than a racist, sexist caricature of W. Carlyle Sale.”
-From OPINION: TEXAS DESERVES BETTER by Hannah Wheeler, published in The Chicago Tribune, June 24th, 2009
“The discovery of vast oil reserves in the north and east of the country spurred a scramble to exploit this natural bounty. While many Mexican entrepreneurs were able to set up oil companies in the oil fields of Veracruz, American companies snapped up thousands of acres of land in the western Permian Basin and Alta California. The dominant cientifico [9] faction of the ruling Liberal Party was all too willing to allow American concerns to exploit the oil deposits in the northern provinces. The cientificos were ardent modernizers and saw the tax revenue from oil companies, regardless of whether they were foreign or domestic, as an excellent source of revenue. Mexico, despite its strong economy, suffered from significant income inequality and the technocratic policies of the Liberals had thus far failed to provide the remedy.
By 1895, 75% of Mexico’s northern oil fields were owned by American companies, primarily the Hearst Corporation and Ezra Archbold’s Columbia Oil Company. Meanwhile, British and American companies together owned 50% of the Veracruz oil fields. The American and British companies negotiated steeply discounted taxes for their Mexican operations. The system worked for several years, but by 1895 food prices in Mexico were rising sharply and the people chafed under the authoritarian, oligarchic, and elitist attitudes held by the Liberals. Under President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the Liberals had established a tight grip on power, using bribery and patronage to ensure continued control of the government. After Lerdo’s National faction had been eclipsed by the cientificos, Manuel Romero Rubio had used the nationwide patronage network to maintain the Liberal’s reign while “preparing” the country for proper democracy.
Oil tax revenues were used to fund public education programs and new railroads, but by the 1895 inauguration of Rubio’s fellow cientifico Jose M. Y. Limantour, public discontent with the American oil companies was growing. Despite the rising cost of food, the foreign oil companies paid low wages and demanded long hours. Oil workers complained of their poor conditions and demanded that Limantour implement workplace safety laws and force the foreign oil companies to obey them. Meanwhile, domestic oil producers complained that they paid substantially more in taxes than the much larger foreign operations, and nationalists fumed that foreign companies were stealing oil revenue from the Mexican people. However, the government ignored these complaints. The situation became more serious in 1896, however, when a group of Mexican oil workers in the Permian Basin went on strike to protest low wages and Columbia Oil’s refusal to address unsafe conditions that had led to five fatalities over a three-month span. The strike quickly spread to nearby American-owned oil fields, and within two weeks much of the Permian Basin oil industry was shut down by the strikes. Representatives from Hearst and Columbia, as well as the Eagle and Acme oil companies, met hastily in an El Paso hotel room. The “Big Four” oil companies agreed to coordinate their response, and within a week, private security forces from the American Detective Service had arrived to disperse the strikers. While many workers agreed to return to work without concessions, at a number of oil wells, the workers were armed and resisted the security forces.
After several weeks of skirmishing, the security forces pulled back from the resistant wells after one was set on fire during a gunfight. Instead, the Big Four called on President Limantour to send the Mexican army in to restore order. President Coleman B. Elkins of the United States also pressured Mexico to intervene on behalf of the oil companies. Worried about angering the Americans and about allowing the violence to spread, Limantour ordered the strikes suppressed. After a month and 175 dead, the Permian oil fields were pacified, although five further wells and one storage tank had been set on fire in the fighting. Although the American companies were placated, workers and nationalists were enraged. Here was the President of Mexico obeying every command of the foreign businesses!
It was in this atmosphere of worker unrest and nationalist fervor that Victoriano Madero, one of the few Mexican oilmen of the north [10], and wealthy landowner Jose Carranza founded the Popular Reform Party with the intention of returning all the oilfields and their revenues, as well as control of the government, to Mexican hands.”
-From A CONCISE HISTORY OF MEXICO by Herman Wheeler, published 2002
[1] What the 2nd Bank did OTL, which I can imagine would have been unpopular with farmers.
[2] A real guy, of Hepburn Commission fame. He helped kick the railroad regulation movement into gear.
[3] Which is, comparatively, better than what the rest of the south is doing TTL.
[4] Worse (and this is rather important to put in a footnote) the employers knew where these guys’ families lived and if there was any union stuff or the like, the company could have the families harassed.
[5] And God knows what kinds of health problems will pop up from that…
[6] Any violators were charged with vagrancy and sent off to the chain gangs. The shantytowns had their own businesses and shops, though of dubious standards.
[7] Has many of the same provisions as the OTL 14th and 15th amendments.
[8] Based off of what George Allen said during the 2006 Virginia Senate election.
[9] OTL, the cientificos were allies of Porfirio Diaz. TTL, they’re a ruling faction in their own right.
[10] Fictional son of Evarista Madero Elizondo, OTL grandfather of Francisco I. Madero, of Mexican Revolution fame. OTL, Francisco Madero was a northern landowner. TTL, Victoriano Madero (based off of Francisco) is also a northern landowner but gets in early on the oil game.