America, 1898-1914, overview, part 3 - by Arnold Kling
In My Tribe
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America, 1898-1914, overview, part 3<br>third part of first lecture in series
Arnold Kling<br>Jun 08, 2026
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[reminder. paid subscribers can join a Zoom discussion at 8 PM New York time on Monday, June 8]<br># **Part Four: Five Americans — What the Statistics Cannot Tell**<br>We have looked at the country in numbers, and we have traced the structural fault lines running through it. Now we need to come down from that altitude to the actual texture of American life as it was lived by real people in 1898.<br>The most important thing about America in 1898 that the national statistics cannot capture is how radically different the experience of that country was depending on where you stood within it. The fault lines we have just traced did not press equally on everyone. Most Americans do not spend time thinking about race, large-scale business, and imperial opportunities in the abstract. But they will be affected in different ways by what America’s leaders do as they wrestle with these issues.<br>Let us meet five of them.<br>## **Isaiah, Black Sharecropper, Mississippi Delta, Age 38**<br>Isaiah farms another man’s land in the Mississippi Delta. He lives with his wife and four children in a two-room unpainted wooden cabin — roughly fifteen feet by twenty feet for six people, with a dirt floor, shuttered windows with no glass, and a single fireplace that serves for both heating and cooking. The outhouse is fifty yards away.<br>His food comes from what he grows and what he can acquire on credit. Salt pork. Cornmeal. Sweet potatoes. Whatever the small kitchen garden produces. He almost never sees cash. His account at the plantation furnishing store accumulates across the year as he takes goods on credit against the coming harvest. At settlement time in October or November, after the cotton is ginned and sold, the merchant calculates what Isaiah owes. In a good year, the debt shrinks. In a bad year, it grows. It is never retired.<br>He cannot vote. The Mississippi Plan has accomplished what it was designed to accomplish. He is almost certainly illiterate or barely literate — the plantation schools that briefly existed during Reconstruction have long since collapsed. His children attend a school that meets perhaps four months of the year, when they are not needed in the fields.<br>Isaiah is keenly aware of the threat of violence. He knows men who have been lynched. He navigates the elaborate etiquette of racial deference — the averted eyes, the “yes sir” and “no sir,” the careful avoidance of anything that could be construed as challenge — with the practiced precision of a man who understands that a mistake can be fatal. He is not cowed in his inner life. He is strategic in his outer behavior.<br>When the news of the Maine reaches him — eventually, through the church and through neighbors with access to a newspaper — it lands as a distant rumble. Cuba is not his concern. His concern is the price of cotton, the size of his debt, and the health of his children.<br>His church — a Baptist congregation meeting in a wooden building not much sturdier than his cabin — is the one institution in his life that belongs to him and not to the plantation. The preacher is the most educated man in the community, its connection to a wider Black world, its keeper of dignity and hope. Sunday is the one day of the week that belongs to Isaiah.<br>## **Rosa, Italian Immigrant, Lower East Side of Manhattan, Age 24**<br>Rosa arrived in New York three years ago from a village in Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, following a husband who had preceded her by two years. She lives with him, their infant son, and her husband’s brother in three rooms on the fourth floor of a Mulberry Street tenement. There is a shared toilet on each landing and cold running water in the apartment. The street below is permanent noise: vendors calling, children running, men arguing, horses and carts and the smell of food and garbage and coal smoke. It smells nothing like Calabria.<br>She speaks almost no English and does not need much. Mulberry Street is an Italian village transplanted to the lower end of Manhattan. She shops from Italian pushcart vendors for pasta, olive oil, vegetables, and occasional small cuts of meat. She has no icebox — a wooden cabinet, lined with tin, in which a block of ice kept meat and dairy from spoiling for a day or two — because the iceman’s delivery is an expense the household cannot reliably afford. She shops every day instead. Bread comes from the bakery on the corner.<br>She works. There is no choice. She takes in piecework — sewing garments at home, by the piece, fitting the work in between caring for the baby. Her husband earns eight or nine dollars a week as a laborer when work is steady. Steady is a word that does not always apply.<br>She is Catholic, devoutly, and attends mass at the Italian parish two blocks away. But she is beginning to notice that the Irish run the American...