10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America

John Augustus Sutter was born in Germany in 1803 to Swiss parents and immigrated to the United States in 1834. He traveled to California in 1839 and established a 50,000-acre ranch and settlement east of San Francisco. The settlement housed shops, a doctor’s office, and living quarters for his employees that became known as Sutter’s Fort. James Marshall, a carpenter whom Sutter put in charge of building a sawmill, discovered gold at the mill site on January 24, 1848. The discovery sparked a gold rush that brought fortune seekers from all over the world to the Sierra Nevada foothills—“perhaps the largest mass movement of people in world history (64). This influx of miners reinvigorated the American economy, led directly to California’s admittance into the Union, and led to the construction of the transcontinental railroad. Ironically, the discovery did not benefit Sutter financially as the miners ended up destroying his settlement.

George B. McClellan was born in Philadelphia in 1826 and graduated from West Point. He was “a hero of the Mexican-American War and the author of manuals on military tactics” (82). McClellan was appointed a major general during the Civil War and rose to become the Commanding General of the Union Army. In September 1862, McClellan led the Union Army during the important Battle of Antietam. Although the battle was considered a much-needed Union victory and ultimately led to President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation address, the victory was not as decisive for the North as it should have been: “McClellan could have crushed Lee’s battered army,” but he failed to deploy the 30,000 fresh troops that he had in reserve because of his overly cautious approach to battle (93). McClellan’s dithering on the field made Lincoln replace him with Ulysses S. Grant.

Robert E. Lee was born in Virginia in 1807 and graduated from West Point in 1829. Like McClellan, Lee was a hero of the Mexican-American War. When the Civil War broke out, Lee had to make a decision: “in April 1861, Lincoln offered Lee command of the Union Army, forcing him to choose between the nation and his native state of Virginia” (81). Lee chose the South and was appointed as overall commander of the Confederate States Army. Since the North had far greater resources and would win a longer war, Lee’s risky strategy was to win a few decisive battles early to try and discourage Lincoln from continuing the fighting. At first, this was effective: “by the fall of 1862 it appeared that the South was on the verge of victory” (80). However, the Union victory over Lee at the Battle of Antietam changed the tide of the war and ultimately led to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Born in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie immigrated to the United States in 1848 and ultimately became one of the richest industrialists in American history, amassing a steel empire. Gillon argues that “no one epitomized the concentration of corporate wealth and power better than Andrew Carnegie” (105). While Carnegie at first expressed sympathy for workers and indicated a willingness to cooperate with organized labor, he came to oppose unions. In 1892, when members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin workers went on strike at Carnegie’s Homestead steel plant just outside of Pittsburgh, Carnegie hired a private security force to stop the strike by force, resulting in a battle that left 10 dead. The Pennsylvania governor intervened on Carnegie’s behalf, signaling that the government was now willing to act in favor of business over workers.

Born in Ohio in 1843, William McKinley served as the 25th President of the United States, from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. According to Gillon, “McKinley was a product of America’s rural, small-town past who embodied the social and political conservatism of the Republican Party in the late nineteenth century” (129). At the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, a disgruntled out-of-work anarchist shot McKinley, who died from his wounds two weeks later. McKinley was a transformational figure in American history, not because of his presidency, but rather because of the drastic changes that took place after his assassination. While McKinley was a staunch conservative who favored industry and did not see the need for social reforms, his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency after McKinley’s death, became a change agent for progressive causes.

Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1858 and eventually became the 26th President of the United States in 1901. Earlier in his career, while serving as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt resigned to fight in the Spanish-American War, where he commanded the “Rough Riders” regiment in Cuba. He was then elected governor of New York and nominated to be William McKinley’s running mate in the presidential election of 1896. McKinley, a staunch conservative, was assassinated in 1901, leading to Roosevelt becoming president and instituting a sweeping progressive agenda that fundamentally transformed America. Believing in using the power of the federal government to reform social and fiscal policy, Roosevelt ushered in an era of big government. He strongly opposed corporate consolidation and repeatedly employed the Sherman Antitrust Act to regulate monopolies. He placed regulations on industries from railroads, to commerce, to medicine and food processing, and he protected 150 million acres of national forest land. Gillon argues that Roosevelt’s “accidental presidency, made possible by an assassin’s bullet, profoundly changed the course of the century” (137).

Born in Illinois in 1860, William Jennings Bryan was a congressman, United States Secretary of State, and a three-time presidential candidate. Bryan won the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908, but lost all three elections. He was a famed political orator who held progressive and populist economic beliefs and conservative social views, using “his oratorical skills and boundless energy as a leading evangelical Christian and anti-evolution advocate” (157). When the ACLU mounted a legal challenge in 1925 to Tennessee’s new Butler Act, which barred the teaching of evolution, Bryan offered his legal services to the prosecution. Bryan’s involvement turned the trial into a media spectacle and revealed a deep fault line in American culture “between doubter and devout, between elite opinion and common belief, and between city and country” (150).

Clarence Darrow was born in Ohio in 1857. He rose to prominence as a defense attorney after defending Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy Chicago teens accused of murdering a classmate in 1924. Gillon argues that “Darrow personified the skeptical modernist who relied on science and reason, not religion and superstition” (159). A freethinker who openly challenged fundamentalist Christianity, Darrow volunteered his services for the defense in the infamous Scopes trial in 1925 after learning that famed evangelical William Jennings Bryan had volunteered for the prosecution. The Scopes trial turned into a media spectacle; Darrow and Bryan both used the trial “as an opportunity to promote their own strongly held beliefs” (159).

Born in Hungary in 1898, physicist and inventor Leo Szilard was instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons. Szilard served in World War I and later studied physics in Berlin, but he fled Germany when the Nazis rose to power in the 1920s and began persecuting Jewish scientists like him. In 1933, he theorized nuclear fission, but was unable to prove it through experiments. In 1939, when German scientists successfully completed the experiment, Szilard knew immediately that Hitler would pursue the creation of an atomic bomb. He recruited his former teacher, Albert Einstein, to use his fame in order to warn American President Franklin Roosevelt of the danger. Gillon argues that “it was the combination of Szilard’s persistence and Einstein’s fame that focused Roosevelt’s attention” (195) on the necessity of atomic weapons and the formation of the Manhattan Project.

Albert Einstein was born in Germany in 1879. While working as a patent clerk in Switzerland in 1905, he published his theory of special relativity; a few years later he published his theory of general relativity. Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and gained worldwide fame. Like other Jewish scientists, Einstein was targeted in Germany when the Nazis rose to power in the 1920s. Although he was a pacifist, Einstein supported military intervention when Hitler rose to power. In 1939, fellow physicist Leo Szilard recruited Einstein to pen a letter warning President Roosevelt that Hitler likely was building an atomic bomb and to recommend that the United States begin similar nuclear research. This led directly to the creation of the Manhattan Project and the world’s first atomic bomb.