Epilogue

This epilogue discusses how closing America's proverbial gates to the influx of European and Asian laborers ended the decades-long era when industrialization and immigration had combined to transform the United States. Big business had come to dominate the American economy, and millions of working-class foreigners had extensively increased its ethnic diversity. Their nexus created numerous benefits, yet it also engendered a host of socioeconomic maladies. The tragedy of 1886, or 1892, or 1919–1920, was not necessarily the failure of socialism or anarchism to wage a successful revolution against American capitalism. Indeed, whether the doctrines advocated by working-class radicals would have made the United States a better nation invites speculation that exceeds the realm of historical analysis. Ultimately, industrial-era Americans betrayed their most fundamental values. While they welcomed the arrival of immigrant workers who would transform the United States into a commercial giant and produce unparalleled economic gain, they stifled those who demanded radical alterations to the capitalist system in which they toiled, dismissing their alternative doctrines as un-American. Instead of allowing debate and considering the legitimacy of the workers' grievances, they branded their beliefs and behaviors as subversive, and identified their origins as inherently foreign, as having no place in and being inimical to the essence of the United States.