THE POPULIST CHALLENGE ★^651government from what they saw as control
by powerful corporate interests. The 1890s
witnessed the imposition of a new racial
system in the South that locked African-
Americans into the status of second- class citi-
zenship, denying them many of the freedoms
white Americans took for granted. Increasing
immigration produced heated debates over
whether the country should reconsider its
traditional self- definition as a refuge for for-
eigners seeking greater freedom on American
shores. At the end of the 1890s, in the Spanish-
American War, the United States for the first
time acquired overseas possessions and found
itself ruling over subject peoples from Puerto
Rico to the Philippines. Was the democratic
republic, many Americans wondered, becom-
ing an empire like those of Europe? Rarely
has the country experienced at one time so
many debates over both the meaning of free-
dom and freedom’s boundaries.
THE POPULIST CHALLENGE
The Farmers’ Revolt
Even as labor unrest crested, a different kind
of uprising was ripening in the South and the
trans- Mississippi West, a response to falling
agricultural prices and growing economic
dependency in rural areas. Like industrial
workers, small farmers faced increasing eco-
nomic insecurity. In the South, the share-
cropping system, discussed in Chapter 15,
locked millions of tenant farmers, white and
black, into perpetual poverty. The interrup-
tion of cotton exports during the Civil War
had led to the rapid expansion of production
in India, Egypt, and Brazil. The glut of cotton
on the world market led to declining prices
(from 11 cents a pound in 1881 to 4.6 cents
- CHRONOLOGY •
1867 Alaska purchased
1874 Women’s Christian
Temperance Union founded
1879– Kansas Exodus
1880
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
1883 Civil Rights Cases
1885 Josiah Strong’s Our Country
1886 AFL established
1890 National American Woman
Suffrage Association
organized
1891 Populist Party organized
1892 Homestead strike
1893 Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani
overthrown
Economic depression begins
1894 Coxey’s Army marches to
Washington
Pullman Strike
Immigration Restriction
League established
1895 Booker T. Washington’s
Atlanta speech
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson
The National Associa-
tion of Colored Women
established
1897 William McKinley inaugu-
rated president
1898 Spanish- American War
Anti- Imperialist League
1899– Philippine War
1903
1900 Gold Standard Act
1901– Insular Cases
1904- •
What were the origins and the significance of Populism?