ABSTRACT
The story that unfolded after the American Civil War was essentially the same, though the stakes in terms of the number of lives and livelihoods that hinged on monetary policy had risen dramatically. The story that unfolded after the American Civil War was essentially the same, though the stakes in terms of the number of lives and livelihoods that hinged on monetary policy had risen dramatically. To the Social Darwinists of the turn of the century, American society was an organism, not a machine, and from all the evidence available during the 1890s—urban ghettos, pollution, corruption, populism, socialism, strikes, violence, depression, and unemployment—the organism was in sad shape. Handing the fate of American society over to experts required that neighborhood school boards be collapsed into citywide centralized boards of six or seven individuals. By 1920, countless county and state farm bureaus had formed a national organization called the American Farm Bureau Federation.
