Quotes from Richard White

Unwilling to accept the idea of a class struggle, he was nonetheless aware of the deteriorating condition of labor, and so he embraced a protective tariff, anathema to the liberals, as a way to protect wages.

Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.

The numbers are unclear, but contemporaries estimated abortions at one to every five or six live births in the 1850s. A Michigan Board of Health estimate in the 1880s claimed that one-third of all pregnancies ended in an abortion.

This was Whiggish free labor dependent on government subsidies, tariffs, and other interventions; it was far from liberal laissez-faire. It created a society that Southern Radical governments sought to emulate, but they lacked the resources and advantages that the federal government bestowed outside the South.

The corporations failed, but very often the people behind them succeeded. The celebrated creative destruction of capitalism is, it seems, gentle with the rich.

Collectivizing risk and considering the community as a whole rather than the individual was a form of "communism," but the practice paradoxically allowed people to maintain their belief in individualism. Probability could compensate for the limits of human knowledge.

Keeping the money supply in balance and avoiding panics depended on the intervention of Treasury officials, which was one of the things liberals hated about it. It also meant that men like Cooke and Gould cultivated those officials as well as congressmen and the president. Their fortunes depended up on it.

Unemployment was a relatively new phenomenon, an artifact of the rise of industrial America where large gains in productivity often came at the expense of economic security. The word unemployment took on its modern meaning of being without work and seeking a wage-paying job only within a dominant wage-labor system where the wageworkers lacked the opportunity to retreat to the countryside to engage in independent agricultural production during downturns.

Important New York banks realized that because bankers had hypothecated the Central Pacific's securities repeatedly, they were effectively worthless as collateral. It was better to strike a deal with the Central Pacific; otherwise the chain of debt would choke even more banks. Jay Gould scavenged the Union Pacific, saving it from bankruptcy and setting up what would eventually become one of his biggest financial killings.43

But since Clark's triumphs were those of a war leader, that is, the products of fear, pain, and opportunity, they were not stable. Clark's mistake was to think them the larger triumphs of alliance.

Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation's debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good.

When industrial work crippled and epidemic diseases killed, and where chance—freaks of fortune—produced what John Maynard Keynes, the economist, would later call "the radical uncertainties of capitalism," luck as much as effort seemed to dictate outcomes.

As the mayor of Chicago told a labor rally on May Day in 1867, eight hours of work had become more exhausting than ten or twelve hours had been earlier.

It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.

Liberalism and Radical Republicanism were ideologies—simplified and idealized versions of how society should operate—and not descriptions of the far more complicated ways the North did operate. Northerners, in general, were both decidedly less liberal than doctrinaire liberals desired and less Radical than ardent Radicals wished.

In 1870 in response to the Fifteenth Amendment, the citizens of Michigan made a simple but far-reaching alteration to their 1850 constitution. They struck out the word "white.

Republicans had reintroduced a bill that he had originally sponsored that moved beyond political equality toward a fuller social equality by prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations.

The absolute number of workers in agriculture continued to rise until the twentieth century, but agriculture's share of the national workforce fell. By 1900 it had declined to 40 percent, from a majority in 1860. Those workers, however, still produced more than the country could consume.11