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The Emergence of a National Politics of Disaster, 1865–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2014

Gareth Davies
Gareth Davies*
Affiliation:
Oxford University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 26 , Issue 3: American Disaster Politics Gareth Davies, Editor , July 2014 , pp. 305 - 326
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Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1. For the quote, see Murrin, John, “The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),” in Pocock, J. G. A., ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), 425Google Scholar; for challenges to Murrin, see John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar; Feller, Daniel, The Public Lands in Jacksonian America (Madison, 1984)Google Scholar; Rockwell, John, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larson, John Lauritz , Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Paskoff, Paul, Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 1821–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2007)Google Scholar; Shallatt, Todd, Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Corps of Engineers (Austin, 1994)Google Scholar; Novak, William, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996)Google Scholar; Dauber, Michele Landis, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Balogh, Brian, Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other overviews, see Novak, William, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review (June 2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and esp. Wilson, Mark, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. 2, ed. Grossberg, Michael and Tomlins, Christopher (New York, 2008), 1–35.Google Scholar

3. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carpenter, Daniel, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar. For exceptions, see Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brock, William, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (New York, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoffer, Williamjames, To Enlarge the Machinery of Government: Congressional Debates and the Growth of the American State, 1858–1891 (Baltimore, 2007).Google Scholar

4. Davies, Gareth, “Dealing with Disaster: The Politics of Catastrophe in the United States, 1789–1861,” American Nineteenth-Century History 14, no. 1 (February 2013): 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. O. O. Howard, The Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard, vol. 2 (New York, 1907), 226.

6. The narrative that follows is drawn primarily from the annual reports of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s various state assistant commissioners for the years 1866, 1867, and 1868. They are located in Box 2, Annual Reports of the Assistant Commissioners, Washington Headquarters Records, Freedmen’s Bureau, Record Group 105, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See also Bremner, Robert, The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York, 1980), 116–26Google Scholar, White, Howard A., The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1970), 64–85Google Scholar, and Dauber, Michele Landis, “The Sympathetic State,” Law and History Review 23 (Summer 2005): 387–442CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 407–421.

7. Congress seems to have been motivated both by humanitarian instincts and by a desire to improve the standing of the deeply unpopular Freedmen’s Bureau within the South.

8. Bremner, The Public Good, 122.

9. Congressional Globe, 19 July 1866, 3920.

10. Ibid., 3917.

11. Ibid., 19 July 1866, 3917. See also the remarks of Senator John Conness (R-Calif.), in ibid., 3921.

12. Ibid., 9 March 1867, 40.

13. Quotes from Senator William Stewart (R-Nev.), in ibid., 42.

14. This was Senator James Nye (R-Nev.), in ibid., 46.

15. Ibid., 21 March 257. See also the remarks of John Logan (R-Ill.), another former Union General, in ibid, 13 March 1867, 86–87.

16. Ibid., 21 March 1867, 258.

17. For the use of Reconstruction-era aid to the South as a rationale for subsequent aid to the North, see the House debate over flood relief for the Ohio River Valley in 1884: Congressional Record, 11 February 1884, 1032–41. See also letter, William Belknap to Ulysses S. Grant, 29 January 1875, reproduced with Message from the President of the United States to the House of Representatives, Relative to Supplies Furnished for the Suffering People of Kansas and Nebraska, 2 February 1875.

18. For general accounts of the disaster, see Dick, Everett, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890: A Social History of the Great Plains from the Creation of Kansas and Nebraska to the Admission of the Dakotas (New York, 1937), 202–31Google Scholar, and Stratton, Joanna, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York, 1981), 101–6Google Scholar. For a vivid fictional account, based on a family diary, see Wilder, Laura Ingalls, On the Banks of Plum Creek (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

19. Letter, Major James Brisbee to Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Platte, 5 October 1874, in Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, 1871–80, File #4467, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (All subsequent citations from RG 94 are from this same file.)

20. New York Times, 7 December 1874.

21. Undated petition from Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce to Secretary William Belknap, RG 94. Endorsement of the Quartermaster General is dated 6 November 1874.

22. Letter, [illeg.] to Phil Sheridan, 30 November 1874; letter, Captain A. J. Kimball (Fort Riley, Kans.) to Adjutant General, 1 March 1875, RG 94.

23. Ibid.

24. Letter, Ord to [Adjutant General?], 11 November 1874, RG 94.

25. For White House approval, see Letter, William Belknap to U.S. Senate, 21 December 1874, following introduction of a relief bill by Senator Hitchcock.

26. J. H. Gilman to Acting Commissioners at Forts Riley, Hays, Larned, and Dodge, 25 February 1875, RG 94.

27. Letter, Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan to Adjutant General, 14 November 1874, RG 94.

28. See Prucha, Francis Paul, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman, Okla., 1976), 50Google Scholar, 99.

29. For the role of the federal government in the late nineteenth-century West, see White, Richard, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991).Google Scholar

30. Johnson, “Army Engineer Disaster Recovery Missions,” 31–32.

31. For an influential statement of this view, see Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. See New York Times, 30 December 1874, 1. Such was the mood of Congress, reported the Times, that even the indefatigable “railroad lobby” had given up trying to win new subsidies.

33. See Taylor, George Rogers, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, and Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007), 1–7Google Scholar. For the impact of the railroad on the antebellum mail system, see John, Spreading the News.

34. McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War (New York, 1988), 450–52.Google Scholar

35. See John, Richard R., Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 116–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. See Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition Online, Table Dg8-21. Total railroad mileage increased from 30,626 in 1860 to 98,262 in 1880, and 166,703 in 1890. See ibid., Table Df874-881.

37. Johnson, “Army Engineer Disaster Recovery Missions,” 27.

38. New York Times, 2 March 1882.

39. Ibid., 10 March 1882.

40. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 16 March 1882.

41. The New York Times reported in early March that “appeals for aid . . . continue to pour in upon the Secretary of War,” 8 March 1882. The archival record amply substantiates the claim: for telegrams reporting on conditions in particular locales, and requesting relief, see File #1031, Letters Received, 1881–89, Records of Adjutant General’s Office, RG 92, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

42. Letter from the Secretary of War to Congress, 30 March 1882.

43. See Nelson, Otto M., “The Chicago Aid and Relief Society, 1850–1874,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 59 (1966), 61.Google Scholar

44. The best account of the early history of the American Red Cross is Marian Moser Jones, The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal (Baltimore, 2013).

45. The $10,000 figure comes from the Atlanta Constitution, 5 June 1889. For the massive efforts coordinated by Johnstown- and Pittsburgh-based relief committees (the latter chaired by James B. Scott, chairman of the Pennsylvania Railroad), see Johnstown Flood: Report of the Citizens’ Relief Committee of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1890), and Report of the Johnstown Flood Finance Committee (Johnstown, Pa., 1890).

46. At Galveston, there was a significant U.S. military presence before the storm, but it was absolutely decimated by the storm: three army bases were destroyed, many servicemen were killed, and the survivors had to be sent away for rehabilitation.

47. Reflecting this close attention, disaster-relief reports to Congress during this period provided extraordinarily precise information about disbursals. See Relief of Grasshopper Sufferers, Letter from the Secretary of War Transmitting Reports of the Quartermaster-General and the Commissary-General of Subsistence, made in compliance with the act of 10 February 1875. For congressional control over spending during this period more generally, see Leonard D. White, The Republican Era (New York, 1958), 54–57.

48. Also, the state of Texas had a $2 million surplus. Lester, Great Galveston Disaster, 123, 330, 31.

49. I base this on coverage of the 1811 Richmond theater fire. For one representative story, see Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 1 June 1812, 71, accessed from American Periodicals Online.

50. See Chicago Tribune, 3 June 1889 (subhead: “Swift Justice of Six Inhuman Wretches Caught Robbing the Dead”), and New York World, 12 September 1900 (subhead: “Thieves Were Robbing Dead Bodies and Deserted Homes—Four Negroes Shot by Enraged Citizens”).

51. McCullough, David, The Johnstown Flood (New York, 1968), 220.Google Scholar

52. Bixel, Patricia Bellis and Turner, Elizabeth Hayes, Galveston and the 1900 Storm: Catastrophe and Catalyst (Austin, 2000), 67.Google Scholar

53. This is based on consultation of New York World, 11–22 September 1900.

54. See Gess, Denise and Lutz, William, Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. On the internationalization of disaster, see Tyrrell, Ian R., Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 118–19 (dealing with the American reaction to a 1897 famine in India). For the international reaction to the Chicago blaze, see Bremner, The Public Good, 191, and Nelson, “Chicago Aid,” 61. A book donation by Queen Victoria helped to establish the Chicago Public Library.

55. A Harper’s editorial contrasted the limited reaction to the hurricane with the exhaustive coverage accorded to a recent industrial fire in Chicago: “That fire was intensely dramatic. Thousands of people watched it, and newspapers printed reports of it that fairly shrivel on their readers’ scalps.” By contrast, the Sea Island storm lacked immediacy and human drama. See “The Public Interest in Disasters,” Harper’s Weekly, 16 September 1893, 879. Tellingly, the accompanying images of South Carolinian devastation focus on the city of Charleston and on damage to ports.

56. I rely here on Bremner, The Public Good, and George Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965).

57. See McCarthy, Kathleen, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1800–1865 (Chicago, 2005), 201.Google Scholar

58. The Women’s National Relief Association—Its Present Work and Ultimate Scope (Washington, D.C., 1881).

59. Barton, Clara, A Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (New York, 1927), 3.Google Scholar

60. The Supreme Courts of Massachusetts and South Carolina each overturned laws granting relief to fire victims, on the grounds that they did not serve a sufficiently public purpose, and the Supreme Court of Kansas did likewise in the case of a drought-relief law. See Jacobs, Clyde, Law Writers and the Courts (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1954), 134–40Google Scholar. For the effort by judges to introduce a sharp distinction between public and private spheres more generally, see Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 322–29.

61. Grover Cleveland, 16 February 1887, in Richardson, James D., ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 11 (New York, 1897), 5142.Google Scholar

62. Letter, Clara Barton to Governor Benjamin Butler (Mass.), 26 March 1883, Barton Papers, Reel 53.

63. Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar, xii, 15. On support for state action among women reformers, see also Baker, Paula C., “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bordin, Ruth, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981)Google Scholar; Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill, 1987), esp. 175–89; and Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia, 2004).

64. George Evans (Mount Vernon, Ill.) to Barton, 9 June 1989, in Barton Papers, Reel 80. In the late 1880s, Bryce repeatedly stressed the degree to which a broad humanitarianism softened American individualism. “[E]ven while an unsettled, they are nevertheless an associative, because a sympathetic people,” he observes at one point. At another, he detects “a quickened moral sensibility and philanthropic sympathy,” and “a warmer recognition of the responsibility of each man for his neighbor.” And a little further on he contends that “in networks of active beneficence no country has surpassed, perhaps none has equaled, the United States.” Bryce, American Commonwealth, vol. 2, pt. 5, chap. 2, 400; pt. 5, chap. 5, 441; pt. 6, chap. 4, 494. See also pt. 4, chap. 10, 371.

65. FDR was speaking at the signing ceremony for the Social Security Act.

66. Josephson, Matthew, Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York, 1934)Google Scholar. For old books presenting a more complex view, see Hays, Samuel, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago, 1957)Google Scholar; Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1957)Google Scholar; and Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar. For excellent recent critiques, see Summers, Mark, The Gilded Age, or The Hazard of New Functions (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997)Google Scholar; Edwards, Rebecca, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905, 2nd ed. (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; and John, Network Nation. For new versions of the old line, see Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York, 2007); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011); and Preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 2007).

67. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1964), 12.Google Scholar

68. Fine, Sidney, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State: A Study in Political Conflict (Ann Arbor, 1956).Google Scholar