Although the growing U.S. economy needed large numbers of immigrant workers for its factories and mills and corporations supported immigration to keep wages low, many Americans resented the arrival of so many immigrants.

Presidents Taft and Wilson continued the practice during their own administrations. Lenders took advantage of the region’s need for cash and exacted punishing interest rates on massive loans, which were then sold off in pieces on the secondary bond market.

sixteen all-white battleships

Roosevelt resigned his naval office in order to fight in Cuba. After winning headlines in the war, Roosevelt was rewarded by being selected to replace McKinley’s first vice president, Garret Hobart, who had died in office, in the 1900 election. When McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president, he acted immediately to expand naval power. This included commissioning eleven battleships between 1904 and 1907.

Debs ran for president again while in prison and again received nearly a million votes.

Black farmers responded by establishing the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union in 1886. Their organization spread quickly and grew to 1.2 million members by 1891.

At its peak, the Farmers’ Alliance claimed 1,500,000 members meeting in 40,000 local sub-alliances.

Farmers met in Lampasas, Texas in 1877 and organized the first Farmers’ Alliance to try to regain some economic power as they negotiated with railroads, merchants, and bankers. Farmers reasoned that if they banded together, they might gain economic leverage similar to that of big business. They could share machinery, bargain collectively with both suppliers and wholesalers, to negotiate higher prices for their crops.

An 1886 advertisement for Magic Washer detergent declared “The Chinese Must Go”. Many Chinese people ran laundries that competed with the company’s detergent and washing machines.

The wealthy president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Thomas Andrew Scott, who had been Assistant Secretary of War for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, is often named as one of the first Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Scott suggested that if striking workers complained they were hungry, they should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”

When local police forces would not or could not suppress the strikes, governors called on state militias or even the US Army to break them and restore rail service.

The Lincoln administration’s Pacific Railway Act created a new transcontinental rail industry. Its elimination of state banking in favor of a system of national banks consolidated credit in eastern financial centers, primarily in New York City.