Taking Sides: American History, Volume II (Taking Sides : Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History)

This debate-style reader is designed to introduce students to controversies in American history through readings that reflect a variety of viewpoints. Each issue is framed with an issue summary, an issue introduction, and a postscript. The Taking Sides readers feature annotated listings of selected World Wide Web sites. Taking Sides is supported by our student website, Dushkin Online (www.dushkin.com/online/).

PART 1. Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution

ISSUE 1. Is History True?

YES: Oscar Handlin, from Truth in History (The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1979)

NO: William H. McNeill, from “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review (February 1986)

Oscar Handlin insists that historical truth is absolute and knowable by historians who adopt the scientific method of research to discover factual evidence that provides both a chronology and context for their findings. William McNeill argues that historical truth is general and evolutionary and is discerned by different groups at different times and in different places in a subjective manner that has little to do with a scientifically absolute methodology.

ISSUE 2. Was John D. Rockefeller a “Robber Baron”?

YES: Matthew Josephson, from The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962)

NO: Ron Chernow, from Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Random House, 1998)

Matthew Josephson depicts John D. Rockefeller as an unconscionable manipulator who employed a policy of deception, bribery, and outright conspiracy to restrain free trade in order to eliminate his competitors for control of the oil industry in the United States. Ron Chernow recognizes that Rockefeller was guilty of misdeeds that were endemic among both small and large corporate leaders of the industrial age, but he concludes that some of the most egregious claims attributed to Rockefeller were without merit and often represented actions taken by Standard Oil associates without Rockefeller’s knowledge.

ISSUE 3. Were American Workers in the Gilded Age Conservative Capitalists?

YES: Carl N. Degler, from Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, 3rd ed. (Harper & Row, 1984)

NO: Herbert G. Gutman, from Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976)

Professor of history Carl N. Degler maintains that the American labor movement accepted capitalism and reacted conservatively to the radical organizational changes brought about in the economic system by big business. Professor of history Herbert G. Gutman argues that from 1843 to 1893, American factory workers attempted to humanize the system through the maintenance of their traditional, artisian, preindustrial work habits.

ISSUE 4. Did the Industrial Revolution Disrupt the American Family?

YES: Elaine Tyler May, from “The Pressure to Provide: Class, Consumerism, and Divorce in Urban America, 1880–1920,” Journal of Social History (Winter 1978)

NO: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis, from “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 1880–1940,” The American Historical Review (April 1986)

Elaine Tyler May, a professor of American studies and history, argues that the Industrial Revolution in the United States, with its improved technology, increasing income, and emerging consumerism, led to higher rates of divorce because family wage earners failed to meet rising expectations for material accumulation. History professors Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Robert Korstad, and James Leloudis contend that the cotton mill villages of the New South, rather than destroying family work patterns, fostered a labor system that permitted parents and children to work together as a traditional family unit.

ISSUE 5. Was City Government in Late-Nineteenth-Century America a “Conspicuous Failure”?

YES: Ernest S. Griffith, from A History of American City Government: The Conspicuous Failure, 1870–1900 (National Civic League Press, 1974)

NO: Jon C. Teaford, from The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

Professor of political science and political economy Ernest S. Griffith (1896–1981) focuses upon illegal and unethical operations of the political machine and concludes that the governments controlled by the bosses represented a betrayal of the public trust. Professor of history Jon C. Teaford argues that scholars traditionally have overlooked the remarkable success that municipal governments in the late nineteenth century achieved in dealing with the challenges presented by rapid urbanization.

PART 2. The Response to Industrialism: Reform and War

ISSUE 6. Did Nineteenth-Century Women of the West Fail to Overcome the Hardships of Living on the Great Plains?

YES: Christine Stansell, from “Women on the Great Plains 1865-1890,” Women’s Studies (Volume 4, 1976)

NO: Glenda Riley, from A Place to Grow: Women in the American West (Harlan Davidson, 1992)

Professor of history Christine Stansell contends that women on the Great Plains are separated from friends and relatives and consequently endured lonely lives and loveless marriages. Professor of history Glenda Riley argues that women on the Great Plaines created rich and varied social lives through the development of strong support networks.

ISSUE 7. Did Yellow Journalism Cause the Spanish-American War?

YES: W. A. Swanberg, from Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961)

NO: David Nasaw, from The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

Journalist W. A. Swanberg argues that newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst used the sensational and exploitative stories in his widely circulated New York Journal to stir up public opinion and to force President William McKinley to wage a war against Spain to free Cuba. Historian David Nasaw maintains that even if Hearst had not gone into publishing, the United States would have entered the war for political, economic, and security reasons.

ISSUE 8. Did Racial Segregation Improve the Status of African Americans?

YES: Howard N. Rabinowitz, from “From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865–1890,” The Journal of American History (September 1976)

NO: Leon F. Litwack, from Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)

Professor of history Howard N. Rabinowitz suggests that racial segregation represented an improvement in the lives of African Americans in that it provided access to a variety of public services and accommodations from which they otherwise would have been excluded in the late-nineteenth-century South. Professor of American history Leon F. Litwack argues that “the age of Jim Crow,” wherein efforts by whites to deny African Americans equal protection of the laws or the privileges and immunities guaranteed other citizens seemingly knew no bounds, created a highly repressive environment for blacks.

ISSUE 9. Did the Progessives Fail?

YES: Richard M. Abrams, from “The Failure of Progressivism,” in Richard Abrams and Lawrence Levine, eds., The Shaping of the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Little, Brown, 1971)

NO: Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, from Progressivism (Harlan Davidson, 1983)

Professor of history Richard M. Abrams maintains that progressivism was a failure because it never seriously confronted the inequalities that still exist in American society. Professors of history Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick argue that the Progressives were a diverse group of reformers who confronted and ameliorated the worst abuses that emerged in urban industrial America during the early 1900s.

ISSUE 10. Was Prohibition a Failure?

YES: David E. Kyvig, from Repealing National Prohibition, 2 ed. (The University of Chicago, 1979, 2000)

NO: John C. Burnham, from “New Perspectives on the Prohibition ‘Experiment’ of the 1920s,” Journal of Social History 2 (Fall 1968)

David E. Kyvig admits that alcohol consumption declined sharply in the prohibition era but that federal actions failed to impose abstinence among an increasingly urban and heterogeneous populace that resented and resisted restraints on their individual behavior. John C. Burnham states that the prohibition experiment was more a success than a failure and contributed to a substantial decrease in liquor consumption, reduced arrests for alcoholism, fewer alcohol-related diseases and hospitalizations, and destroyed the old-fashioned saloon that was a major target of the law’s proponents.

ISSUE 11. Did the New Deal Prolong the Great Depression?

YES: Jim Powell, from FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003)

NO: Roger Biles, from A New Deal for the American People (Northern Illinois University Press, 1991)

Historian and editor of Laissez-Faire books Jim Powell argues that "the New Deal itself, with its short-sighted programs... deepened the Great Depression, swelled the federal government, and prevented the country from turning around quickly." Professor of history Roger Biles contends that, in spite of it minimal reforms and non-r evolutionary programs, the New Deal created a limited welfare state that implemented economic stabilizers to avert another depression.

ISSUE 12. Did President Roosevelt Deliberately Withhold Information About the Attack ...