The Story of American Freedom

Free Labor was an ideology of the Antebellum and Civil War Eras that sought to distinguish paid work in the North from slave production in the South. In Chapter 3, Foner argues, “The contrast between the slave bound to an owner and the free worker able to leave his job was more than mere rhetoric: it defined a central reality of social life” (67).

The Gilded Age was the name given to the era of American history at the end of the 19th century, in the years extending roughly from the end of the Civil War to 1900. Coined by the writer Mark Twain, the term refers to the fact that serious societal problems were hidden beneath a gold gilding. The primary characteristic of the era was rapid economic growth and the transition of the American economy from agricultural and artisanal production to one based on coal, iron, and steam. Economic concentration of industry and wealth was another major characteristic.

The Great Migration refers to the period of the 20th century surrounding World War I in which millions of African Americans migrated out of the South to the North. According to Foner, “Many motives sustained the Great Migration” (173). These included higher wages, better educational opportunities, an escape from sharecropping, a diminished threat of violence, and fewer obstacles to voting.

The Great Society was the name given to the wide array of domestic social and economic programs implemented by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s. Foner describes it as “the most far-reaching domestic agenda since the New Deal” (284). Focused on eradicating poverty and promoting racial justice, the programs and laws included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission.

Laissez-faire economics is an economic theory which rejects government regulation and intervention in favor of free market capitalism. Many of the government reforms of the Progressive Era, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, were attempts to rein in abuses that were taking place because of laissez-faire principles. To many, laissez-faire economics promotes Social Darwinism.

Liberty of Contract refers to the process in which individual laborers or labor groups form work contracts without government restrictions. Because businesses are free to avoid government regulations, liberty of contract has become a centerpiece of conservative economic thought. In describing labor/management relations in the Gilded Age in Chapter 6, Foner argues that “the effort of corporations to exert managerial prerogatives over this new industrial workforce produced bitter and often violent confrontations” (117).

Manifest Destiny refers to the 19th century ideology “suggesting that the United States had a divinely appointed mission to overspread the entire North American continent” (50). The term came into existence as a result of westward expansion by American settlers. Manifest Destiny led to the acquisition of vast land from Mexico and violent conflicts with Indigenous American tribes who inhabited the Great Plains, Midwest, and West for centuries.

The New Left was the term given to a mostly white student activist movement of the 1960s. Foner characterizes the New Left as a movement which “rejected the intellectual and political categories that had animated both radicalism and liberalism for most of the twentieth century” (287). He adds, “Instead of material deprivation, class conflict, and social citizenship, students spoke of loneliness, isolation, and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions, of a hunger for authenticity that affluence could not sate” (287-288). At the center of the New Left were organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The SDS’s manifesto was the Port Huron Statement, calling for participatory democracy rooted in non-violent civil disobedience.

Popular Front is a political science term referring to any left-wing coalition of working-class groups. In Chapter 9, Foner describes the era of the Popular Front as when “the Communist Party actively sought to ally itself with liberals, socialists, and independent radicals in broadly based movements for social change” (212).

The Progressive Era was the period in United States history just after the turn of the 20th century and lasting until World War I. The era was marked by widespread social and political reform, and its primary characteristic was the extreme concentration of wealth and industrial production, leading to severe economic inequality. In Chapter 7, Foner writes of the era that a broad coalition of reform-minded intellectuals, a resurgent women’s movement, unionists, and socialists “emerged to reinvigorate the idea of an activist national state, and bring to its support a large urban middle-class and labor constituency” (152).

Second Wave Feminism refers to the women’s rights and women’s liberation movement that grew out of other social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It was labeled as such because the stated goals of the movement were to build on the activities of the initial feminist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Social Darwinism refers to the theory of constant social change which applies the biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to economics and people. Social Darwinism rejects “all forms of state interference with the natural workings of society” (121).