A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Employers regularly complained of such behavior in the nineteenth century. During Reconstruction, the complaints mounted, as workers from premodern cultures in Europe began to come in masses to the United States. Immigrant workers in New York City shipyards infuriated their bosses by taking breaks for cake, candy, trips to saloons for whiskey, and leisurely lunches. British-born workers in New Jersey pottery factories were known to work in “great bursts of activity” and then disappear for “several days at a time.” Immigrants also continued the early American tradition of informal three-day weekends. “Monday,” said one employer, “was given up to debauchery.” A cigar manufacturer complained in 1877 that his employees spent more time slacking than working: “The difficulty with many cigarmakers is this. They come down to the shop in the morning; roll a few cigars and then go to a beer saloon and play pinnocio or some other game, … working probably only two or three hours a day.”

  GOING OUT

  Abolitionists and the leaders of Reconstruction relaunched another of their projects after the Civil War, and as with the reformation of the slaves, achieved only mixed results. The temperance movement, stalled momentarily by the exigencies of the war, took flight again after the Confederate surrender. Leaders of the new movement coalesced as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1874. Activists in the campaign to purge America of “demon rum” not only continued to lobby for legal prohibition but also began invading saloons and demanding that the patrons put down their cups forever. Some barmen threw fruits, vegetables, eggs, and handfuls of sawdust from the floor at the reformers. Others cursed at them, threatened them with violence, loosed dogs on them, or “baptized” them with buckets of beer. In brew-loving Cincinnati, when the local WCTU threatened to protest against the existence of a beer garden, the owner “mounted an old cannon at the entrance to his place and threatened to blow the ladies to kingdom come.”

  American consumption of alcohol did decline after the Civil War from its previous stratospheric levels, but the nation remained very much an “alcoholic republic.” In the ten years between the founding of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865 and the founding of the WCTU in 1874, when citizens and those being trained for citizenship were told to avoid public places of sin and renounce personal pleasure, sixty-two million gallons of liquor were consumed in the United States. And in the first ten years of the WCTU’s existence, the figure rose to seventy-six million gallons.

  Another postwar moral reform institution with many former abolitionists and supporters of Reconstruction was the Young Men’s Christian Association, whose mission was to protect the new urban masses from the sins of the city. It had its work cut out for it. In 1866 the YMCA counted in New York City alone eight thousand saloons, seven hundred brothels, four thousand prostitutes, and numerous sellers of pornography. The American pleasure culture experienced a renaissance after the war. Rather than heed the demands of citizenship, millions of Americans instead supported with their cash a vast proliferation of beer halls, brothels, dance halls, billiard rooms, pleasure gardens, concert saloons, and variety theaters. The last two have been described by one historian as “barrooms with free or cheap entertainment offered in adjacent backrooms, halls, or theaters.” The major source of revenue in the concert saloons was the sale of alcohol, “with prostitution an important side line.” The typical establishment, with “the floor filled with peanut shells and spilt beer; the air saturated with tobacco smoke,” was correctly described by moral reformers as a gateway to sexual misbehavior. Not only were prostitutes staple attractions, but the staged performances nearly always included “bawdy” or “purple” acts featuring America’s first professional strippers. The historian Timothy J. Gilfoyle has called the years between 1836 and 1871 “the halcyon years of commercialized sex.”

  THE PROMISE

  The leaders of Reconstruction demonstrated that they were deadly serious about making the ex-slaves into citizens with a series of truly radical policies. Just before nullifying the Black Codes, the Republican-controlled Congress proposed a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution that defined American citizenship as belonging to anyone born in the United States or to anyone naturalized. The proposed amendment also stated that all citizens were entitled to all the “privileges and immunities” guaranteed by the Constitution, including, most importantly, equal protection of the laws by both the state and national governments. The Fourteenth Amendment moved four million people from slavery to full citizenship virtually overnight. In the winter and spring of 1867, Congress passed three breathtakingly aggressive “Reconstruction Acts” over Johnson’s vetoes. The bills divided the South (except for Tennessee, which was readmitted into the Union only because it had agreed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment) into five military districts and gave supreme authority over those districts to officers of the United States Army. Even more radical, the Reconstruction Acts limited suffrage to all black men and to white men who had not participated in the rebellion. At first, about one-fourth of all white men in the South were excluded from suffrage. This created black voting majorities in several states. Congress mandated that a state could be readmitted into the Union only if its constitution included provisions for black suffrage and if its legislature ratified not only the Fourteenth Amendment but also a new Fifteenth Amendment, which made illegal the denial of suffrage to any citizen on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” By 1870, all the states of the former Confederacy had submitted to the demands of Reconstruction. The immediate result was that in every former slave state, black men held public office during Reconstruction, including twenty in the U.S. House of Representatives, two in the U.S. Senate, and hundreds in state legislatures. This was a remarkable transformation in Southern politics.

  Other accomplishments were stunning in their scope and ambition. The Freedmen’s Bureau established nearly four thousand schools, in which approximately two hundred thousand ex-slaves received the first formal education of their lives. Spending by Republican-controlled state governments increased geometrically, as roads, hospitals, prisons, asylums for orphans and the insane, and public schools were built all over the South. Though most state governments distributed very little land to the ex-slaves, South Carolina gave land to fourteen thousand black families in an effort to fulfill Thaddeus Stevens’s hope that independent farming would “elevate the character of the freedman.” Republicans fiercely protected ex-slaves from vigilante violence. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered federal troops to arrest Klansmen and gave jurisdiction in such cases to federal courts, where juries were often predominantly black. The subsequent prosecution and imprisonment of hundreds of Klan members effectively destroyed the KKK as an organization.

  But support for the Reconstruction project began to fade in the 1870s. Many Republicans complained that the ex-slaves were not taking on the responsibilities of citizenship. The journalist and former abolitionist James S. Pike toured South Carolina and reported with dismay that, despite the injunctions of Freedmen’s Bureau teachers and agents to work at least six full days per week, ex-slaves in Charleston “average about four days labor in the week.” Other freedmen showed that they were “habitually guilty of thieving and of concubinage.” Granting the rights of citizenship to people who did not adopt the cultural restraints of citizenship had resulted in the “rule of ignorance, barbarism, and vice.” Pike’s report, which was widely read by Republican politicians, caused many to abandon hope of remaking the black renegades. Carl Schurz, a leading Republican senator and an early supporter of Reconstruction, stated in 1872 that “the inevitable consequence of the admission of so large an uneducated and inexperienced class to political power” was “the probable mismanagement of the material interests of the social body” as well as “political corruption and demoralization” and “financial ruin.”

  By 1872, there was so much frustration with making the ex-slaves into citizens that the Freedmen’s Bureau was abolished. Over the next five year
s, the Democrats steadily regained power as, one by one, the Republicans lost their will to transform the Southern states. By 1876, the demoralized Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for giving the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in an election that had gone to Congress because of a dispute over which party had won the most electoral votes. By the end of 1877, all of the military power that had kept the Reconstruction state governments in power were removed from the South.

  The turn against Reconstruction has been interpreted as the Republicans’ submerged racism coming to the surface and as evidence that they were never fully committed to making ex-slaves into citizens. This interpretation implies that the ex-slaves complied with the rules of citizenship and were therefore cheated of their place in American society. But even if they were motivated by racism—and some of them surely were—Schurz and the Republicans who complained of the freedmen’s behavior were correct: many and possibly most of the ex-slaves did not take on the responsibilities of citizenship, did not restrain their personal freedoms, did not devote their lives to work, monogamy, frugality, and discipline. Their attitudes and behaviors delayed the project begun by the Founding Fathers, continued by abolitionists, and made comprehensive by the leaders of Reconstruction: of making us into the enemies of our own freedom. And for this, I suggest, we should celebrate them.

  THE GIFT

  Something was let loose with the slaves, something described by W. E. B. DuBois in Black Reconstruction in America as a magical gift:

  A great song arose, the loveliest thing born this side the seas. It was a new song. It did not come from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of Days was in it and through it. It did not come from white America—never from so pale and hard and thin a thing, however deep these vulgar and surrounding tones had driven. Not the Indies nor the hot South, the cold East or heavy West made that music. It was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the world’s ears with a message seldom voiced by man… .

  They sneered at it—those white Southerners who heard it and never understood. They raped and defiled it—those white Northerners who listened without ears. Yet it lived and grew; always it grew and swelled and lived, and it sits today at the right hand of God, as America’s one real gift to beauty; as slavery’s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.

  To DuBois, slavery kept African Americans out of the culture of repression that whites had created, and because of this, slaves created a uniquely liberated culture that valued pleasure over work and freedom over conformity. DuBois argued that there were some ex-slaves who behaved like John Freeman. But many did not, and to DuBois, the culture of the slaves that was let loose by emancipation was a gift to America and the world. In fact, during Reconstruction many ex-slaves fled the fields for cities, where they found horns and formed “jubilee” bands. Many discovered pianos and invented a music called ragtime that set millions of white feet dancing. And others picked up guitars and began to play a music we call the blues. Out of that alchemy emerged a gift to all those who hated work, loved pleasure, and yearned to be as free as a child. The great tragedy of Reconstruction, according to DuBois, was that so many whites turned down the gift, “sneered” at black culture and mocked it, and chose to consider it inferior. But DuBois, like most historians today, nonetheless wished that the ex-slaves had been made into full American citizens. What he did not understand was that John Freeman and all the ex-slaves who chose citizenship turned down the gift as well. If Reconstruction had been fully realized, many of the freedoms and joys given to us by the slaves would have been taken away. If the freedmen had been made into citizens, there would be no jazz.

  4

  WHORES AND THE ORIGINS OF WOMEN’S LIBERATION

  In the nineteenth century, a woman who owned property, made high wages, had sex outside of marriage, performed or received oral sex, used birth control, consorted with men of other races, danced, drank, or walked alone in public, wore makeup, perfume, or stylish clothes—and was not ashamed—was probably a whore. In fact, prostitutes won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted.

  Prostitutes were especially successful in the wild, lawless, thoroughly renegade boomtowns of the West. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, madams in the West owned large tracts of land and prized real estate. Prostitutes made, by far, the highest wages of all American women. Several madams were so wealthy that they funded irrigation and road-building projects that laid the foundation for the New West. Decades before American employers offered health insurance to their workers, madams across the West provided their employees with free health care. While women were told that they could not and should not protect themselves from violence, and wives had no legal recourse against being raped by their husbands, police officers were employed by madams to protect the women who worked for them, and many madams owned and knew how to use guns.

  While feminists were seeking to free women from the “slavery” of patriarchal marriage, prostitutes married later in life and divorced more frequently than other American women. At a time when birth control was effectively banned, prostitutes provided a market for contraceptives that made possible their production and distribution. While women were taught that they belonged in the “private sphere,” prostitutes traveled extensively, often by themselves, and were brazenly “public women.” Long before social dancing in public was considered acceptable for women, prostitutes invented many of the steps that would become all the rage during the dance craze of the 1910s and 1920s. When gambling and public drinking were forbidden for most women, prostitutes were fixtures in western saloons, and they became some of the most successful gamblers in the nation. Most ironically, the makeup, clothing, and hairstyles of prostitutes, which were maligned for their overt sexuality (lipstick was “the scarlet shame of streetwalkers”), became widely fashionable among American women and are now so respectable that even First Ladies wear them.

  Women who wished to escape the restrictions of Victorian America had no better place to go than the so-called frontier, where a particular combination of economic and demographic forces gave renegade women many unusual advantages.

  BOOM

  Between 1870 and 1900, the number of farms in the United States doubled, and more land was brought under cultivation than in the previous two and half centuries. Most of this newly cultivated land was in the Great Plains and the Southwest. In addition to all of this farming, other industries developed rapidly in the West during the second half of the nineteenth century. The largest of these were metal and coal mining in California, the Rockies, and parts of the Southwest; cattle ranching on the Plains; lumber in the Pacific Northwest; large-scale fruit and vegetable agriculture in the inland valleys of California; and oil in Texas, Oklahoma, and Southern California. Connecting these industries to one another and to eastern U.S. and European markets were railroads, which crisscrossed the West by the end of the nineteenth century. The federal government contributed to this explosive growth with massive expenditures for the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, which ran from the Pacific Ocean to the Missouri River, but also to the building of roads, dams, and vast irrigation systems without which the West as we know it could never have been created.

  Towns were created virtually overnight in mountains where precious metal was discovered, in deserts near oil strikes, along cattle trails and around railroad stations, and in forests next to lumber mills and logging stands. Some boomtowns grew into the major urban hubs of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Seattle. The people who filled those towns were overwhelmingly male, since the labor that brought them there was brutal, physically onerous, and almost universally considered to be men’s work. The non-Indian population of California in 1850 was 93 percent male. In the mining towns along the Comstock Silver Lode in Nevada, a census taker in 1860 counted 2,306 men
and 30 women. These were men without families, without land, without property, and without a stake in any one community. They moved from town to town in search of money. And, since most of the towns they lived and worked in were brand new, the legal apparatus was usually very weak. These were exactly the conditions that bred bad people.

  THE WHOREARCHY

  With good reason, the keepers of American morality in the nineteenth century were terribly worried about all the single men in the West. One Protestant minister wrote, “Left by themselves, men degenerate rapidly and become rough, harsh, slovenly—almost brutish.” He was correct. Ironically, most of these men were white and full American citizens. But they cared little for the restrictions and responsibilities of citizenship. One moral reformer in Montana reported this about life in a mining town: “Men without the restraint of law, indifferent to public opinion, and unburdened by families, drink whenever they feel like it, whenever they have the money to pay for it, and whenever there is nothing else to do… . Bad manners follow, profanity becomes a matter of course… . Excitability and nervousness brought on by rum help these tendencies along, and then to correct this state of things the pistol comes into play.” In the silver mining boomtown of Leadville, Colorado, in 1879 there were 120 saloons, 19 beer halls, 188 gambling houses, and only 4 churches.