Chapter in Perspective

This chapter deals with the failures of traditional two-party politics in the late nineteenth century and the evolution of the United States into a world power. Industrialization, urbanization, a sharply increased immigration in the North and Midwest, and growing economic dependency in the agrarian South and West all worked to fracture conventional politics. Cities gained in political and cultural strength, while farmers, despite an outburst of political activity, began an irreversible decline in numbers. The chapter stresses the importance of the period as a precursor to the twentieth-century politics of organization, professionalism, and national vision, features that would not be evident until after the wrenching effects of social change disrupted the politics of the 1890s.

As economic growth began to incorporate overseas markets as well, those economic forces that so much altered the United States internally also reshaped its international position. So, too, did the ideals, dreams, and prejudices that accompanied the late-nineteenth-century transformations of American society and politics.