552 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
1872 Ulysses Grant is reelected president
1873 Congress suspends the coining of silver (“Crime
of ‘73”)
1876 Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president
1877 Farmers’ Alliance movement is founded
1878 Bland-Allison Act authorizes government
silver purchases
1879 Specie payments resume
1880 James Garfield is elected president
1881 Garfield is assassinated; Grover Cleveland
becomes president
1881 Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Institute
for blacks
1883 Pendleton Act creates Civil Service Commission
Supreme Court Overturns Civil Rights Act of
1875 in the civil rights cases
1884 Republicans support Democrats during
Mugwump Movement
Grover Cleveland is elected president
1887 Interstate Commerce Act regulates railroad rates
Cleveland delivers tariff message
1888 Benjamin Harrison is elected president
Englishman James Bryce analyzes American
politics in The American Commonwealth
1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act requires government
silver purchase
1890– Blacks are deprived of the vote in the South
1900
1892 People’s (Populist) party is founded
Cleveland is elected president a second time
1893 Sherman Silver Purchase Act is repealed
1893 Panic of 1893 causes industrial depression
1894 Coxey’s Army marches to Washington to
demand relief
1895 Supreme Court declares federal income tax
unconstitutional (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and
Trust Company)
Booker T. Washington urges self-improvement in
Atlanta Compromise Speech
J. P. Morgan raises $62 million in gold for the
U.S. Treasury
1896 William Jennings Bryan delivers “Cross of
Gold” speech
William McKinley is elected president
Supreme Court upholds “separate but equal” in
Plessy v. FergusonMilestones
Chapter Review
Key Terms
Atlanta Compromise A social policy, propounded
by black leader Booker T. Washington in 1895,
advocating that blacks concentrate on learning use-
ful skills rather than agitate over segregation, dis-
franchisement, and discrimination. In Washington’s
view, black self-help and self-improvement was the
surest way to economic advancement, 539
Bland-Allison Silver Purchase Act An 1878 com-
promise law that that provided for the limited
coinage of silver, 545
civil rights cases A group of cases in 1883 in which
the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional
the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had prohibited
racial discrimination in hotels, theaters, and other
privately owned facilities. The Court ruled that the
Fourteenth Amendmentbarred state govern-
ments from discriminating on the basis of race but
did not prevent private individuals, businesses, or
organizations from doing so, 537
mugwumps A group of eastern Republicans, dis-
gusted with corruption in the party, who cam-
paigned for the Democrats in the 1884 elections.
These anticorruption reformers were conservative on
the money question and government regulation, 536
Pendleton Act An 1883 law bringing civil service
reform to federal employment; it classified many
government jobs and required competitive exams
for these positions, 535
People’s (Populist) party The People’s party of
America was an important “third party,”
founded in 1891, that sought to unite various
disaffected groups, especially farmers. The party
nominated James B. Weaver for president in
1892 and in 1896 joined with the Democratic
party in support of William Jennings Bryan for
president, 542
Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling (1896)
that held that racial segregation of public accom-
modations did not infringe on the “equal protec-
tion” clause of the Constitution; this “separate but
equal” doctrine was overturned by Brown v. Board
of Educationin 1954, 537
Sherman Silver Purchase Act An 1890 law that
obliged the federal government to buy and coin
silver, thereby counteracting the deflationary ten-
dencies of the economy at the time; its repeal in
1894, following the Depression of 1893, caused a
political uproar, 545