The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. The demand to change the Constitution to grant women the vote (raised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as early as 1878) was contentious enough; but the pressure for woman suffrage advocates to address other issues often gave the debate over the vote for women a particularly divisive tone. In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman's proper place was at home, not the ballot box.

Americans keenly followed the events of the French Revolution. Reactions to the growing violence and social upheaval split along emerging party lines--Federalists expressed horror while Democratic Republicans were more sympathetic. Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a journalist, the founder of the Philadelphia General Advertiser, and supporter of Jefferson's Republican party. In these two pieces he sympathetically summarized the situation in France during the period when Louis XVI was put on trial and executed. He defended the actions of the revolutionaries on the grounds that they were merely responding to the provocations of nobles and other "traitors." Newspapers in the 1790s quickly became party organs and contributors to the fierce polemics of this factious era. Bache was no exception. He attacked the Federalists mercilessly and was arrested under the Sedition Act, an act of Congress passed by Federalists to prosecute government critics for seditious speech or writings.

The anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--made critics hesitate before challenging him. His purported lists of Communist conspirators multiplied in subsequent years to include employees in government agencies, the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the United Nations, and the military. Most of those accused were helpless to defend their ruined reputations and faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. In protest, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith composed the following "Declaration of Conscience," condemning the atmosphere of suspicion and blaming leaders of both parties for their "lack of effective leadership." Although Smith convinced six additional Republican Senators to join her in the Declaration, the seven refused to support a Senate report prepared by Democrats that called McCarthy's charges against State Department personnel fraudulent.

Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman's foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored "traitorous" Communists. McCarthy's apocalyptic rhetoric--he portrayed the Cold War conflict as "a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity"--made critics hesitate before challenging him, as his purported lists of Communist conspirators multiplied to include employees in government agencies, the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, the United Nations, and the military. Most of those accused by McCarthy were helpless to defend their ruined reputations and faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. The following editorial from the popular magazine Collier's sharply criticized McCarthy's tactic of trying to scare away advertisers from a magazine that had publicly criticized him. Collier's made sure, however, to announce to its readers--some of whom responded in letters included below--their own solemn concern about "Communist infiltration in government."

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" that promised a more friendly and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. The policy was prompted as much by Latin American resistance to U.S. intervention as by the U.S. government's benevolence. In 1937, the policy was put to the test when Bolivia charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey had defrauded the Bolivian government; Bolivia canceled the company's oil drilling rights and confiscated its facilities. True to its new policy, the United States avoided military intervention and instead pressured Bolivia by withholding loans and technical assistance. The following year, a war of words erupted between the government of Mexico and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over who owned the rights to exploit a portion of Mexico's oil reserves. After U.S. oil companies refused to accept the arbitration terms of the Mexican labor board, Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated oil company properties worth an estimated half billion dollars. In The True Facts about the Expropriation of the Oil Companies' Properties in Mexico, the Mexican government clarified its position to the American public and justified expropriation of Standard Oil's property.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part as he tried to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In 1932, Edward Angly published a short book filled with optimistic forecasts about the economy offered by Hoover and his associates. The sarcastic title, Oh Yeah?, reflected his contempt for political leaders who did not seem to know what was happening to the country. These 17 quotations from or about Herbert Hoover proved that he was a poor prophet of the hard times ahead.

Although historians often speak of a "Populist movement" in the 1880s, it wasn't until 1892 that the People's or Populist Party was formally organized. The Omaha Platform, adopted by the founding convention of the party on July 4, 1892, set out the basic tenets of the Populist movement. The movement had emerged out of the cooperative crusade organized by the Farmer's Alliance in the 1880s. The preamble was written by Minnesota lawyer, farmer, politician, and novelist Ignatius Donnelly. Delegates to the convention embraced the platform with great enthusiasm. Many of the specific proposals urged by the Omaha Platform--the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the direct election of Senators, the eight-hour day--won enactment in the progressive and New Deal eras of the next century. Yet at least one historian has argued that the fundamental cooperative and democratic spirit of the agrarian radicals was lost along the way.

In the decades following the Civil War, many white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and journalists campaigned for the creation of a "New South" economy that would emphasize modern industrial development. With the plantation system no longer dominating the southern economy, the South could build its own factories to turn raw materials into finished products: cotton into cloth, tobacco into cigarettes, coal and iron ore into steel. White southern leaders were not the only ones who argued that industrialization was the key to future Southern progress. A small group of black businessmen and landowners, who had taken advantage of the opportunities open to African Americans during Reconstruction, also supported the ideal of a New South based on industrial growth. In the following 1896 statement, Warren C. Coleman, a black North Carolina businessman, called on his fellow black Southerners to support his plan to build a cotton mill that would be operated by black workers.

While experimental television broadcasts were first transmitted in the 1920s, mass production of television sets did not occur until after World War II. By 1960 the number of sets in the U.S. had surpassed the number of homes. With this relatively swift introduction of television into domestic American life, concern was voiced over the harmful influence that watching television might have on the nation's children. Although Congress held its first hearing on the subject in 1952, they chose not to take any action to interfere with the industry, in part because that year the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters adopted a code to regulate broadcast content. In 1954 and 1955, Congress conducted additional hearings to investigate whether television--along with other mass media products that appealed to children, such as comic books and motion pictures--had anything to do with the documented rise in incidents of juvenile crime. As the renowned media researcher Paul Lazarsfeld testified, studies showed that the hearings, which themselves were televised, only led to worry among viewers rather than to practical measures to correct any perceived problem. In the following testimony from the 1955 hearings, child psychologist Eleanor E. Maccoby discussed her research findings, while Lazarsfeld advocated the funding of long-term projects. Both stressed the limitations of research for providing reliable evidence that would definitively link juvenile delinquency to television viewing.

Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt neither came from the working and lower classes nor always acted in their interests, he did, at significant moments, speak for and to the "forgotten man." One of those key moments came in January 1937 when he was inaugurated for his second term--the first time that the presidential inauguration was held on January 20 rather than March 4 (a change brought about by the twentieth amendment). Roosevelt's stirring words help explain why that one-third of the nation went to the polls in November 1936 and reelected him in one of the great landslides in American political history.

In 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California, taking their identifying symbol from an earlier all-black voting rights group in Alabama, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Two years later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States." Created, in Newton's words, "to serve the needs of the oppressed people in our communities and defend them against their oppressors," the Panthers patrolled black areas of Oakland with visible, loaded firearms--at the time in accordance with the law--to monitor police actions involving blacks. The organization spread throughout Northern California in the form of small neighborhood groups. They came to national prominence in May 1967 when they arrived armed at the California State legislature in Sacramento to protest a bill banning loaded guns in public places. In October 1967, Newton was wounded in a gun battle with police and charged with killing an officer. His three-year incarceration became a cause célèbre for many young African Americans and chapters of the Party rapidly opened throughout the country. The Panthers initiated community social programs, such as free breakfasts for children, issued a newspaper, and trained recruits with guns, lawbooks, and texts advocating world revolution. In the following years, police and FBI agents arrested more than 2,000 members in raids on Panther offices that resulted in a number of deaths. Although the Panthers became involved in electoral politics in the 1970s, the Party died out by the end of the decade due to repression and internal strife. In the following testimony before Congress, a former managing editor of the Party's newspaper discussed the group and debated the meaning of a slogan and a gruesome cartoon.

In campaign speeches, he favored a buoyant, optimistic, gently paternal tone spiced with humor. But his first inaugural address took on an unusually solemn, religious quality. And for good reason--by 1933 the depression had reached its depth. Roosevelt's first inaugural address outlined in broad terms how he hoped to govern and reminded Americans that the nation's "common difficulties" concerned "only material things." Please note that the audio is an excerpt from the full address.

With the annexation of Texas in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War, Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent--lost property rights and political power in a society dominated by Anglos. Through discriminatory practices and violent force, Tejanos were kept at the bottom of the new political and socio-cultural order. From 1900-1930, as an influx of immigrants from Mexico came north to meet a growing demand for cheap labor in the developing commercial agriculture industries, Tejanos experienced continued discrimination in employment, housing, public facilities, the judicial system, and educational institutions. In addition, Texas joined the other former Confederate states in 1902, legislating a poll tax requirement that, with the implementation of all-white primaries in 1904, effectively disenfranchised African Americans and many Tejano citizens. The struggle of Mexican Americans to end discriminatory practices accelerated following World War II. In 1948, the American G.I. Forum was formed as an advocacy group by Mexican American veterans. In 1949 and 1950, they began local "pay your poll tax" drives to register Tejano voters. Although they failed in repeated efforts to repeal the tax, a 1955-56 drive in the Rio Grande Valley resulted in the first majority Mexican American electorate in the area. In 1960, Viva Kennedy Clubs, administered by the Forum and others, contributed to the future president's narrow victory in Texas that helped win the national election. Ratification of the 24th Amendment finally abolished the poll tax requirement for Federal elections in 1964. In 1966, the tax was eliminated in all state and local elections by a Supreme Court ruling. In the following interview, Ed Idar, of the Forum, related incidents in the persistent drive by the organization and its leader, Dr. Hector P. Garcia, to increase the number of registered Mexican American voters.

Founded in 1948 as an advocacy group for Mexican American veterans of World War II, the American G.I. Forum evolved into one of the leading civil rights organizations of the postwar era. Led by a medical doctor from Corpus Christi, Texas, Dr. Hector P. Garcia (1914-1996), the group attained national recognition in 1949 when they organized protests against a funeral home that would not allow chapel services for a Mexican American soldier, Felix Longoria, who was killed in combat four years earlier in the Philippines. With the intervention of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Longoria was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Patriotic in intent and constituted of locally-run units, the Forum sought to work from the "bottom up" to involve ordinary citizens in public life and to put an end to discriminatory practices that affected veterans and their families. Working in the communities and the courts, the Forum led poll tax drives and campaigned against segregated schools, for adequate health care, and to improve the lot of migrant workers. In 1958, the Forum became a national organization. With an earlier civil rights group that also originated in Texas, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Forum campaigned in 1960 in Viva Kennedy clubs, contributing to the future president's narrow victory in Texas that helped win the national election. Forum members worked with the Johnson administration to implement Great Society programs in Mexican American communities, and in 1967, Vicente Ximenes, a former national chairman, became the head of the Inter-Agency Cabinet Committee on Mexican American Affairs and EEOC commissioner. In the following interview, Ed Idar, a long-time colleague of Dr. Garcia, related the dedicated efforts of group leaders to organize throughout the state.

Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, by 1957 only 20 percent of eligible African Americans voted, due in part to intimidation and discriminatory state requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such Act since 1875, ostensibly sought to remedy the situation, but in its final weakened form, the legislation served more as a symbol. For example, an amendment allowed officials charged with denying voting rights to be tried by juries, service on which was restricted in the South to whites only. The law, however, also created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an independent government agency of six commissioners formed to investigate charges of civil rights deprivations, collect information on discrimination, and advise the President and Congress on the topic. In the following 1958 hearing, a taxpaying African American related roadblocks he encountered when trying to register to vote.

The New York Herald, more than any other of the penny newspapers, published topical pictures. Most of the time, the pictures were simple maps or crude portraits of people in the news. Occasionally, special events received greater pictorial coverage. But when the Herald published five detailed pictures on its cover showing New York's 1845 funeral procession honoring Andrew Jacksonthe first full-page cover devoted to pictures ever to appear in a U.S. daily newspaperrival newspapers charged that the same engravings had been used to illustrate Queen Victoria's coronation, William Henry Harrison's funeral, and the celebration of the opening of the Croton reservoir. The Herald discontinued illustrating the news after 1850, leaving that task to the weekly illustrated press.

Press photographers are shown here taking pictures of President Ronald Reagan during a photo-opportunity." These formal photography sessions scheduled by the White House staff dated back to the 1930s

The most famous speech in American political history was delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, but it was preceded by two other significant speeches. The subject under debate was currency, a central issue in the 1896 presidential election. The issue was whether to endorse the free coinage of silver at a ratio of silver to gold of 16 to 1. (This inflationary measure would have increased the amount of money in circulation and aided cash-poor and debt-burdened farmers.) Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina supported the measure, but misjudged his audience by framing the silver issue as a sectional one. Tillman's fiery and strange appearance only reinforced the belief of some delegates that he was a madman. His disastrous performance dashed his hopes to be the silverite candidate for the U.S. presidency.

When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperatives, and, angered by hard times, tight money, and high railroad shipping rates, moved into politics. Members elected sympathetic state legislators who passed laws (most of them later declared unconstitutional) regulating railroad and grain elevator charges. In 1868, the newly created Grange issued the following circular to explain the objectives and services of the infant organization and its local societies.

When the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry was first organized in Minnesota in December 1867, its goals were primarily social and educational. The organization spread rapidly throughout the agricultural Midwest, attracting more than 850,000 members by 1875. The Grange's purpose also expanded--it experimented (unsuccessfully) with cooperatives, and, angered by hard times, tight money, and high railroad shipping rates, moved into politics. Members elected sympathetic state legislators who passed laws (most of them later declared unconstitutional) regulating railroad and grain elevator charges. When agricultural conditions in the Midwest improved in the 1880s, the Grange's membership dropped to 150,000. The Farmers Alliance (or Populists) soon replaced the Grange as the primary voice of radical agrarianism. Still, the Grange continued as a nationwide social organization. Like other fraternal organizations, its members took part in elaborate rituals and ceremonies, as reflected in the following excerpt from the 1895 Grange Manual.