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American History
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CHAPTER 8: Discontent and Reform
An Outline of American History
"A great democracy will be neither great nor a democracy if it is not progressive."
-- Former President Theodore Roosevelt, circa 1910
AGRARIAN DISTRESS AND THE RISE OF POPULISM
In spite of their remarkable progress, 19th-century American farmers
experienced recurring periods of hardship. Several basic factors were
involved -- soil exhaustion, the vagaries of nature, a decline in
self-sufficiency, and the lack of adequate legislative protection and aid.
Perhaps most important, however, was over-production.
Along with the mechanical improvements which greatly increased yield per
hectare, the amount of land under cultivation grew rapidly throughout the
second half of the century, as the railroads and the gradual displacement of
the Plains Indians opened up new areas for western settlement. A similar
expansion of agricultural lands in countries such as Canada, Argentina and
Australia compounded these problems in the international market, where much
of U.S. agricultural production was now sold.
The farther west the settlers went, the more dependent they became on the
railroads to move their goods to market. At the same time, farmers paid high
costs for manufactured goods as a result of the protective tariffs that
Congress, backed by Eastern industrial interests, had long supported. Over
time, the Midwestern and Western farmer fell ever more deeply in debt to the
banks that held their mortgages.
In the South, the fall of the Confederacy brought major changes in
agricultural practices. The most significant of these was sharecropping,
where tenant farmers "shared" up to half of their crop with the landowners
in exchange for seed and essential supplies. An estimated 80 percent of the
South's black farmers and 40 percent of its white ones lived under this
debilitating system following the Civil War.
Most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt, from which the only hope
of escape was increased planting. This led to the over-production of cotton
and tobacco, and thus to declining prices and the further exhaustion of the
soil.
The first organized effort to address general agricultural problems was the
Granger movement. Launched in 1867 by employees of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, the Granges focused initially on social activities to counter
the isolation most farm families encountered. Women's participation was
actively encouraged. Spurred by the Panic of 1873, the Grange soon grew to
20,000 chapters and one-and-a-half million members.
Although most of them ultimately failed, the Granges set up their own
marketing systems, stores, processing plants, factories and cooperatives.
The movement also enjoyed some political success during the 1870s. A few
states passed "Granger laws," limiting railroad and warehouse fees.
By 1880 the movement began to decline, replaced by the Farmers' Alliances.
By 1890 the Alliance movements had members from New York to California
totaling about 1.5 million. A parallel African-American organization, the
Colored Farmers National Alliance, numbered over a million members.
From the beginning, the Farmers' Alliances were political organizations with
elaborate economic programs. According to one early platform, its purpose
was to "unite the farmers of America for their protection against class
legislation and the encroachments of concentrated capital." Their program
also called for the regulation -- if not the outright nationalization -- of
the railroads; currency inflation to provide debt relief; the lowering of
the tariff; and the establishment of government-owned storehouses and
low-interest lending facilities.
During the late 1880s a series of droughts devastated the western Great
Plains. Western Kansas lost half its population during a four-year span. To
make matters worse, the McKinley Tariff of 1890 was one of the highest the
country had ever seen.
By 1890 the level of agrarian distress was at an all-time high. Working with
sympathetic Democrats in the South or small third parties in the West, the
Farmer's Alliance made a push for political power. From these elements, a
third political party, known as the Populist Party, emerged. Never before in
American politics had there been anything like the Populist fervor that
swept the prairies and cotton lands. The elections of 1890 brought the new
party into power in a dozen Southern and Western states, and sent a score of
Populist senators and representatives to Congress.
Its first convention was in 1892, when delegates from farm, labor and reform
organizations met in Omaha, Nebraska, determined at last to make their mark
on a U.S. political system they viewed as hopelessly corrupted by the monied
interests of the industrial and commercial trusts. Their platform stated:
We are met, in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral,
political and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the
legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench
[courts].... From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed
the two great classes -- tramps and millionaires.
The pragmatic portion of their platform focused on issues of land,
transportation and finance, including the unlimited coinage of silver.
The Populists showed impressive strength in the West and South in the 1892
elections, and their candidate for president polled more than a million
votes. Yet it was the currency question, pitting advocates of silver,
against those who favored gold, which soon overshadowed all other issues.
Agrarian spokesmen in the West and South -- supported by labor groups in the
Eastern industrial centers -- demanded a return to the unlimited coinage of
silver. Convinced that their troubles stemmed from a shortage of money in
circulation, they argued that increasing the volume of money would
indirectly raise prices for farm products and drive up industrial wages,
thus allowing debts to be paid with inflated currency. Conservative groups
and the financial classes, on the other hand, believed that such a policy
would be disastrous, and insisted that inflation, once begun, could not be
stopped. Only the gold standard, they said, offered stability.
The financial panic of 1893 heightened the tension of this debate. Bank
failures abounded in the South and Midwest; unemployment soared and crop
prices fell badly. The crisis, and President Grover Cleveland's inability to
solve it, nearly broke the Democratic Party. Democrats who were silver
supporters went over to the Populists as the presidential elections of 1896
neared.
The Democratic convention that year was witness to one of the most famous
speeches in U.S. political history. Pleading with the convention not to
"crucify mankind on a cross of gold," William Jennings Bryan, the young
Nebraskan champion of silver, won the Democrats' presidential nomination.
The Populists also endorsed Bryan. The moment was to prove their high-water
mark. Despite carrying the South and all of the West except California and
Oregon, Bryan lost the more populated, industrial North and East -- and the
election -- to the Republican's William McKinley.
The following year the country's finances began to improve, in part due to
the discovery of gold in Alaska and the Yukon. In 1898 the Spanish-American
War drew the nation's attention further from Populist issues. If the
movement was dead, however, its ideas were not. Many of them passed into law
within the next two decades.
THE STRUGGLES OF LABOR
The life of a 19th-century American industrial worker was far from easy.
Even in good times wages were low, hours long and working conditions
hazardous. Little of the wealth which the growth of the nation had generated
went to its workers. The situation was worse for women and children, who
made up a high percentage of the work force in some industries and often
received but a fraction of the wages a man could earn. Periodic economic
crises swept the nation, further eroding industrial wages and producing high
levels of unemployment.
At the same time, the technological improvements, which added so much to the
nation's productivity, continually reduced the demand for skilled labor. Yet
the unskilled labor pool was constantly growing, as unprecedented numbers of
immigrants -- 18 million between 1880 and 1910 -- entered the country, eager
for work.
Before 1874, when Massachusetts passed the nation's first legislation
limiting the number of hours women and child factory workers could perform
to 10 hours a day, virtually no labor legislation existed in the country.
Indeed, it was not until the 1930s that the federal government would become
actively involved. Until then, the field was left to the state and local
authorities, few of whom were as responsive to the workers as they were to
wealthy industrialists.
The laissez-faire capitalism, which dominated the second half of the 19th
century and fostered huge concentrations of wealth and power, was backed by
a judiciary which time and again ruled against those who challenged the
system. In this, they were merely following the prevailing philosophy of the
times. As John D. Rockefeller is reported to have said: "the growth of a
large business is merely a survival of the fittest." This "Social
Darwinism," as it was known, had many proponents who argued that any attempt
to regulate business was tantamount to impeding the natural evolution of the
species.
Yet the costs of this indifference to the victims of capital were high. For
millions, living and working conditions were poor, and the hope of escaping
from a lifetime of poverty slight. As late as the year 1900, the United
States had the highest job-related fatality rate of any industrialized
nation in the world. Most industrial workers still worked a 10-hour day (12
hours in the steel industry), yet earned from 20 to 40 percent less than the
minimum deemed necessary for a decent life. The situation was only worse for
children, whose numbers in the work force doubled between 1870 and 1900.
The first major effort to organize workers' groups on a nationwide basis
appeared with The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor in 1869. Originally a
secret, ritualistic society organized by Philadelphia garment workers, it
was open to all workers, including blacks, women and farmers. The Knights
grew slowly until they succeeded in facing down the great railroad baron,
Jay Gould, in an 1885 strike. Within a year they added 500,000 workers to
their rolls.
The Knights of Labor soon fell into decline, however, and their place in the
labor movement was gradually taken by the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). Rather than open its membership to all, the AFL, under former cigar
union official Samuel Gompers, focused on skilled workers. His objectives
were "pure and simple" and apolitical: increasing wages, reducing hours and
improving working conditions. As such, Gompers helped turn the labor
movement away from the socialist views earlier labor leaders had espoused.
Still, labor's goals -- and the unwillingness of capital to grant them --
resulted in the most violent labor conflicts in the nation's history. The
first of these occurred with the Great Rail Strike of 1877, when rail
workers across the nation went out on strike in response to a 10-percent pay
cut. Attempts to break the strike led to rioting and wide-scale destruction
in several cities: Baltimore, Maryland; Chicago, Illinois; Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and San Francisco, California. Federal
troops had to be sent in at several locations before the strike was ended.
The Haymarket Square incident took place nine years later, when someone
threw a bomb into a meeting called to discuss an ongoing strike at the
McCormick Harvester Company in Chicago. In the ensuing melee, nine people
were killed and some 60 injured.
Next came the riots of 1892 at Carnegie's steel works in Homestead,
Pennsylvania. A group of 300 Pinkerton detectives the company had hired to
break a bitter strike by the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin
Workers were fired upon and 10 were killed. The National Guard was called in
as a result, non-union workers hired and the strike broken. Unions were not
let back into the plant until 1937.
Two years later, wage cuts at the Pullman Palace Car Company just outside
Chicago, led to a strike, which, with the support of the American Railway
Union, soon tied up much of the country's rail system. As the situation
deteriorated, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney, himself a former railroad
lawyer, deputized over 3,000 men in an attempt to keep the rails open. This
was followed by a federal court injunction against union interference with
the trains. When rioting ensued, President Cleveland sent in federal troops,
and the strike was eventually broken.
The most militant of the strike-prone unions was the International Workers
of the World (IWW). Formed from an amalgam of unions fighting for better
conditions in the West's mining industry, the IWW, or "Wobblies" as they
were commonly known, gained particular prominence from the Colorado mine
clashes of 1903 and the singularly brutal fashion in which they were put
down. Openly calling for class warfare, the Wobblies gained many adherents
after they won a difficult strike battle in the textile mills of Lawrence,
Massachusetts, in 1912. Their call for work stoppages in the midst of World
War I, however, led to a government crackdown in 1917, which virtually
destroyed them.
THE REFORM IMPULSE
The presidential election of 1900 gave the American people a chance to pass
judgment on the McKinley administration, especially its foreign policy.
Meeting at Philadelphia, the Republicans expressed jubilation over the
successful outcome of the war with Spain, the restoration of prosperity and
the effort to obtain new markets through the Open Door policy. McKinley's
election was a foregone conclusion. But the president did not live long
enough to enjoy his victory. In September 1901, while attending an
exposition in Buffalo, New York, McKinley was shot down by an assassin. (He
was the third president to be assassinated since the Civil War.)
Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's vice president, assumed the presidency. In
domestic as well as international affairs, Roosevelt's accession coincided
with a new epoch in American political life. The continent was peopled; the
frontier was disappearing. A small, former struggling republic had become a
world power. The country's political foundations had endured the
vicissitudes of foreign and civil war, the tides of prosperity and
depression. Immense strides had been made in agriculture and industry. Free
public education had been largely realized and a free press maintained. The
ideal of religious freedom had been sustained. The influence of big business
was now more firmly entrenched than ever, however, and local and municipal
government often was in the hands of corrupt politicians.
In response to the excesses of 19th-century capitalism and political
corruption, a reform movement arose called "progressivism," which gave
American politics and thought its special character from approximately 1890
until the American entry into World War I in 1917. The Progressives saw
their work as a democratic crusade against the abuses of urban political
bosses and corrupt robber barons. Their goals were greater democracy and
social justice, honest government, more effective regulation of business and
a revived commitment to public service. In general, they believed that
expanding the scope of government would ensure the progress of U.S. society
and the welfare of its citizens. Almost all the notable figures of the
period, whether in politics, philosophy, scholarship or literature, were
connected, at least in part, with the reform movement.
The years 1902 to 1908 marked the era of greatest reform activity, as
writers and journalists, strongly protested practices and principles
inherited from the 18th-century rural republic that were proving inadequate
for a 20th-century urban state. Years before, in 1873, the celebrated author
Mark Twain had exposed American society to critical scrutiny in The Gilded
Age. Now, trenchant articles dealing with trusts, high finance, impure foods
and abusive railroad practices began to appear in the daily newspapers and
in such popular magazines as McClure's and Collier's. Their authors, such as
the journalist Ida May Tarbell, who crusaded against the Standard Oil Trust,
became known as "muckrakers."
In his sensational novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair exposed unsanitary
conditions in the great Chicago meat packing houses and the grip of the beef
trust on the nation's meat supply. Theodore Dreiser in The Financier and The
Titan made it easy for laymen to understand the machinations of big
business. Frank Norris' The Pit encouraged agrarian protest by revealing how
secret manipulations affected the grain market in Chicago. Lincoln Steffens'
The Shame of the Cities bared political corruption. This "literature of
exposure" had a vital effect in rousing the people to action.
The hammering impact of uncompromising writers and an increasingly aroused
public spurred political leaders to take practical measures. Many states
enacted laws to improve the conditions under which people lived and worked.
At the urging of such prominent social critics as Jane Addams, child labor
laws, were strengthened and new ones adopted, raising age limits, shortening
work hours, restricting night work and requiring school attendance.
ROOSEVELT'S REFORMS
By the early 20th century, most of the larger cities and more than half the
states had established an eight-hour day on public works. Equally important
were the workmen's compensation laws, which made employers legally
responsible for injuries sustained by employees at work. New revenue laws
were also enacted, which, by taxing inheritances, incomes and the property
or earnings of corporations, sought to place the burden of government on
those best able to pay.
It was clear to many people -- notably President Theodore Roosevelt and
Progressive leaders in the Congress such as Wisconsin Senator Robert
LaFollette -- that most of the problems reformers were concerned about could
be solved only if dealt with on a national scale. Roosevelt, who was
passionately interested in reform and determined to give the people what he
called a "Square Deal," initiated a policy of increased government
supervision in the enforcement of antitrust laws. Later, extension of
government supervision over the railroads prompted the passage of major
regulatory bills. One of the bills made published rates the lawful standard,
and shippers equally liable with railroads for rebates.
Roosevelt's striking personality and his "trust-busting" activities captured
the imagination of the ordinary individual, and approval of his progressive
measures cut across party lines. In addition, the abounding prosperity of
the country at this time led people to feel satisfied with the party in
office. His victory in the 1904 election was assured.
Emboldened by a sweeping electoral triumph, Roosevelt applied fresh
determination to the cause of reform. In his first annual message to
Congress after his reelection, he called for still more drastic railroad
regulation, and in June 1906 Congress passed the Hepburn Act. This gave the
Interstate Commerce Commission real authority in regulating rates, extended
the jurisdiction of the commission and forced the railroads to surrender
their interlocking interests in steamship lines and coal companies.
Other congressional measures carried the principle of federal control still
further. The pure-food law of 1906 prohibited the use of any "deleterious
drug, chemical or preservative" in prepared medicines and foods. This was
soon reinforced by an act requiring federal inspection of all concerns
selling meats in interstate commerce.
Meanwhile, Congress had created a new Department of Commerce and Labor, with
membership in the president's Cabinet. One bureau of the new department,
empowered to investigate the affairs of large business aggregations,
discovered in 1907 that the American Sugar Refining Company had defrauded
the government of a large sum in import duties. Subsequent legal actions
recovered more than $4 million and convicted several company officials. The
Standard Oil Company of Indiana was indicted for receiving secret rebates on
shipments over the Chicago and Alton Railroad. The fine imposed, amounting
to $29,240,000 on 1,462 separate contracts, reflected the spirit of the
time.
Conservation of the nation's natural resources, putting an end to wasteful
exploitation of raw materials and the reclamation of wide stretches of
neglected land were among the other major achievements of the Roosevelt era.
The president had called for a far-reaching and integrated program of
conservation, reclamation and irrigation as early as 1901 in his first
annual message to Congress. Whereas his predecessors had set aside
18,800,000 hectares of timberland for preservation and parks, Roosevelt
increased the area to 59,200,000 hectares and began systematic efforts to
prevent forest fires and to retimber denuded tracts.
TAFT AND WILSON
Roosevelt's popularity was at its peak as the campaign of 1908 neared, but
he was unwilling to break the tradition by which no president had held
office for more than two terms. Instead, he supported William Howard Taft,
who won the election and sought to continue his predecessor's programs of
reform. Taft, a former judge, governor of the Philippines and administrator
of the Panama Canal, made some progress. He continued the prosecution of
trusts, further strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission, established
a postal savings bank and a parcel post system, expanded the civil service
and sponsored the enactment of two amendments to the Constitution.
The 16th Amendment authorized a federal income tax; the 17th Amendment,
ratified in 1913, mandated the direct election of senators by the people,
replacing the system whereby they were selected by state legislatures. Yet
balanced against these achievements was Taft's acceptance of a tariff with
protective schedules that outraged liberal opinion; his opposition to the
entry of the state of Arizona into the Union because of its liberal
constitution; and his growing reliance on the conservative wing of his
party.
By 1910 Taft's party was divided, and an overwhelming vote swept the
Democrats back into control of Congress. Two years later, Woodrow Wilson,
the Democratic, progressive governor of the state of New Jersey, campaigned
against Taft, the Republican candidate, and against Roosevelt who, rejected
as a candidate by the Republican convention, had organized a third party,
the Progressives.
Wilson, in a spirited campaign, defeated both rivals. Under his leadership,
the new Congress enacted one of the most notable legislative programs in
American history. Its first task was tariff revision. "The tariff duties
must be altered," Wilson said. "We must abolish everything that bears any
semblance of privilege." The Underwood Tariff, signed on October 3, 1913,
provided substantial rate reductions on imported raw materials and
foodstuffs, cotton and woolen goods, iron and steel, and removed the duties
from more than a hundred other items. Although the act retained many
protective features, it was a genuine attempt to lower the cost of living.
The second item on the Democratic program was a long overdue, thorough
reorganization of the inflexible banking and currency system. "Control,"
said Wilson, "must be public, not private, must be vested in the government
itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of
business and of individual enterprise and initiative."
The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was one of Wilson's most
enduring legislative accomplishments. It imposed upon the existing banking
system a new organization that divided the country into 12 districts, with a
Federal Reserve Bank in each, all supervised by a Federal Reserve Board.
These banks were to serve as depositories for the cash reserves of those
banks that joined the system. Until the Federal Reserve Act, the U.S.
government had left control of its money supply largely to unregulated
private banks. While the official medium of exchange was gold coins, most
loans and payments were carried out with bank notes, backed by the promise
of redemption in gold. The trouble with this system was that the banks were
tempted to reach beyond their cash reserves, prompting periodic panics
during which fearful depositors raced to turn their bank paper into coin.
With the passage of the act, greater flexibility in the money supply was
assured, and provision was made for issuing federal reserve notes to meet
business demands.
The next important task was trust regulation and investigation of corporate
abuses. Congress authorized a Federal Trade Commission to issue orders
prohibiting "unfair methods of competition" by business concerns in
interstate trade. A second law, the Clayton Antitrust Act, forbade many
corporate practices that had thus far escaped specific condemnation --
interlocking directorates, price discrimination among purchasers, use of the
injunction in labor disputes and ownership by one corporation of stock in
similar enterprises.
Farmers and other workers were not forgotten. A federal loan act made credit
available to farmers at low rates of interest. The Seamen's Act of 1915,
improved living and working conditions on board ships. The Federal
Workingman's Compensation Act in 1916 authorized allowances to civil service
employees for disabilities incurred at work. The Adamson Act of the same
year established an eight-hour day for railroad labor.
The record of achievement won Wilson a firm place in American history as one
of the nation's foremost political reformers. However, his domestic
reputation would soon be overshadowed by his record as a wartime president
who led his country to victory but could not hold the support of his people
for the peace that followed.
SIDEBAR: A NATION OF NATIONS
No country's history has been more closely bound to immigration than that of
the United States. During the first 15 years of the 20th century alone, over
13 million people came to the United States, many passing through Ellis
Island, the federal immigration center that opened in New York harbor in
1892. Though no longer in service, Ellis Island reopened in 1992 as a
monument to the millions who crossed America's threshold there.
The first official census in 1790 numbered Americans at 3,929,214.
Approximately half of the population of the original 13 states were of
English origin; the rest were Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, French, Swedish,
Welsh and Finnish. These white Europeans were mostly Protestants. A fifth of
the population was enslaved Africans.
From early on, Americans viewed immigrants as a cheap source of labor. As a
result, few official restrictions were placed upon immigration into the
United States until the 1920s. As more and more immigrants arrived, however,
some Americans became fearful that their culture was threatened.
The Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, were ambivalent over
whether or not the United States ought to welcome arrivals from every corner
of the globe. The author of America's Declaration of Independence, Jefferson
wondered whether democracy could ever rest safely in the hands of men from
countries that revered monarchs or replaced royalty with mob rule. However,
few supported closing the gates to newcomers in a country desperate for
labor.
Immigration lagged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as wars
disrupted trans-Atlantic travel and European governments restricted
immigration to retain young men of military age. After 1750 European
mortality rates declined in response to improved medical care and
sanitation. Food supplies increased as crop rotation and systematic
fertilization became standard. Still, more people on the same land
constricted the size of farming lots to a point where families could barely
survive. Moreover, cottage industries were falling victim to an Industrial
Revolution that was mechanizing production. Thousands of artisans unwilling
or unable to find jobs in factories were out of work.
By the mid-1840s millions more immigrants made their way to America as a
result of a potato blight in Ireland and continual revolution in the German
homelands. Meanwhile, a trickle of Chinese immigrants, most from
impoverished Southeastern China, began to immigrate to the American West
Coast.
Almost 19 million people arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1921,
the year Congress first passed severe restrictions. Most of these immigrants
were from Italy, Russia, Poland, Greece and the Balkans. Non-Europeans came,
too: east from Japan, south from Canada and north from Mexico.
By the early 1920s, however, an alliance was forged between wage-conscious
organized labor and those who called for restricted immigration on racial or
religious grounds, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Immigration Restriction
League. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 permanently curtailed the
influx of newcomers with quotas calculated on nation of origin.
The Great Depression of the 1930s dramatically slowed immigration still
further. With public opinion generally opposed to immigration, even for
persecuted European minorities, relatively few refugees found sanctuary in
the United States after Adolf Hitler's ascent to power in 1933.
Throughout the postwar decades, the United States continued to cling to
nationally based quotas. Supporters of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952
argued that quota relaxation might inundate the United States with Marxist
subversives from Eastern Europe.
In 1965 Congress replaced national quotas with hemispheric ones. Relatives
of U.S. citizens received preference, as did immigrants with job skills in
short supply in the United States. In 1978 the hemispheric quotas were
replaced by a worldwide ceiling of 290,000, a limit reduced to 270,000 after
passage of the Refugee Act of 1980.
Since the mid-1970s, the United States has experienced a fresh wave of
immigration, with arrivals from Asia and Latin America, in particular,
transforming communities throughout the country. Current estimates suggest a
total annual arrival of approximately 600,000 legal newcomers to the United
States.
Because immigrant and refugee quotas remain well under demand, however,
illegal immigration is still a major problem. Mexicans and other Latin
Americans daily cross the southwestern U.S. borders to find work, higher
wages, and improved education and health care for their families. Likewise,
there is a substantial illegal migration from countries such as Ireland,
China and other Asian nations. Estimates vary, but some suggest that as many
as 600,000 illegals per year arrive in the United States.
An old immigrant saying is that "America beckons, but Americans repel." As
the current wave of immigration spills into the American mainstream
economically, politically and culturally, the debate over immigration has
sharpened. Deeply ingrained in most Americans, however, is the conviction
that the Statue of Liberty does, indeed, stand as a symbol for the United
States as she lifts her lamp before the "golden door," welcoming those
"yearning to breathe free." This belief, and the sure knowledge that their
forebears were once immigrants, has kept the United States a nation of
nations.
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The U. S. Constitution
