Cracking the AP U.S. History Exam 2018, Premium Edition by Princeton Review

Author:Princeton Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

National Politics

Mark Twain dubbed the era between Reconstruction and 1900 the Gilded Age of politics. Gilded metals have a shiny, gold-like surface, but beneath lies a cheap base. America looked to have entered a period of prosperity, with a handful of families having amassed unprecedented wealth, but the affluence of a few was built on the poverty of many. Similarly, American politics looked like a shining example of representative democracy, but just beneath the surface lay crass corruption and patronage. Political machines, not municipal governments, ran the cities. Big business bought votes in Congress and then turned around and fleeced consumers. Workers had little protection from the greed of their employers because the courts turned a deaf ear to worker complaints. In other words, Twain was right on the money.

The presidents of this era were generally not corrupt. They were, however, relatively weak. (The president is only as powerful as his support allows him to be; thus popular presidents, such as Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, were able to accomplish so much.) Don’t expect too many questions about the presidents of this period, but for the record, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester A. Arthur concerned themselves primarily with civil service reform (see the accompanying box), while Grover Cleveland believed that government governed best which governed least. Benjamin Harrison took the opposite tack, and he and his allies in the Capitol passed everything from the nation’s first meat inspection act to the banning of lotteries to the purchase of several battleships. Much of the legislation we have discussed, from the Sherman Antitrust Act to the second Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, was passed under Harrison’s watch. But the public’s discomfort with the activism of Harrison and the Billion-Dollar Congress of 1890 led to Grover Cleveland’s return to the White House.

In response to the outcry over widespread corruption, the government made its first stabs at regulating itself and business. Many states imposed railroad regulations because railroads were engaging in price gouging. In 1877, the Supreme Court upheld an Illinois state law regulating railroads and grain elevators in the case of Munn v. Illinois. This was a surprising decision, given that railroads crossed state lines and only Congress can regulate interstate commerce. The Court argued that states had the power to regulate private industry that served the “public interest.” Although the Supreme Court would reaffirm Congress’s authority nine years later in the Wabash case, when it ruled that states could not establish rates involving interstate commerce, an important precedent for regulating business in the public’s interest had been established.

In 1887, just one year after the Wabash decision, Congress passed the first federal regulatory law in U.S. history. The Interstate Commerce Act set up the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to supervise railroad activities and regulate unfair and unethical practices. (The ICC wasn’t disbanded until the 1980s under the Reagan administration, when, in attempts to save money, the federal government deregulated many forms of transportation.)

It was also during this period that women’s suffrage became an important political issue.

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