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Antagonism and bitterness grew, resulting in two separate systems in the South: one for Negroes and one for whites.

In 1865, Congress set up the Freedman’s Bureau to provide rations, schooling and hospital care to blacks in the South. The Fifteen Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ensured black men the right to vote. By 1870, Southern states were governed by groups of blacks, cooperative whites and transplanted Northerners called “carpetbaggers.” Many blacks were elected to state legislatures and to the Congress. Although some corruption existed in these “reconstructed” state governments, they did much to improve education, develop social services and protect civil rights. Reconstruction was bitterly resented by most Southern whites. They formed a common front against blacks, and total and complete disfranchisement of the freed blacks became the universal aim of the South. There were many whites who did not like the idea of Negroes being registered for voting, thinking that Negro voting will be the first step in a dangerous attempt to Africanize the South. In 1865, in Tennessee, the Southern whites formed the

Ku Klux Klan - Invisible Empire of the South headed by Grand Wizard-a violent secret society aimed to not let blacks to use their rights as citizens. Klan members rode around in white ghostlike costumes with hoods which hid their faces. The burning cross – the symbol of that racist organization – filled blacks with mystical terror. The blacks were harmed, sometimes killed, lynched.

By 1872, the federal government had suppressed the Klan, but white Democrats continued to use violence and fear to regain control of their state governments. The governments in many southern states passed laws against blacks to keep them from taking part in southern society life. The South achieved this goal by pressuring the federal government not to enforce civil rights. The next step was a series of laws passed by the states called the Black Code or “Jim Crow” Laws (Jim Crow was a Nickname for black people) which were supposed to define the rights of the blacks but in practice limited them. The purpose of the Jim Crow laws was to separate blacks from whites. This policy of separation people on the basis of race is called segregation. Public accommodations were strictly segregated; blacks were barred from white hotels, restaurants and theaters. Trains, depots wharves were also segregated. Free access to the market - place was denied to blacks. Most important of all, in many Southern states the greatest liberty was denied to blacks - the right to vote. Most blacks and many poor whites lost the right to vote because they were unable to pay the poll taxes and failed to pass literacy test. Blacks, in fact, were legally segregated from whites in a manner very similar to South Africa’s apartheid system. Moreover, blacks continued to be the victims of strong racial prejudice in both the North and the South. Conditions seemed

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almost hopeless, and blacks were indeed a downtrodden people. Legally, blacks were free, but in fact they were treated very much like slaves. Toward the end of the 19th century, this system of segregation and oppression of blacks grew far more rigid.

Questions for Discussion

1. What was Lincoln’s plan for the Reconstruction? 2. Why didn’t the Reconstruction go quickly? 3. What measures were taken by Congress to enforce civil rights? 4. Who were “carpetbaggers”? 5. Where blacks elected to state legislature and Congress? 6.

Why were many southerners against Negro voting? 7. What was the Ku Klux Klan formed for? Was it a legal organization? 8. Who initiated “Jim Crow Laws”? 9. Were blacks legally segregated from whites? 10. Who else lost the right o vote? Why?

LABOR & IMMIGRATION

So in this continent, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes and all the European tribes, of the Africans, and of the Polynesians – will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The opening of the territory in the West and the development of industry created new opportunities for millions of people. Many factories and mills were built in or near cities. Cities provided factory owners with local markets for their goods and with transportation to distant markets. Cities attracted immigrants to the United States. By1860, the population totaled 31 million. Between 1840 and 1860, the Irish, Germans and British came in great numbers to the U.S.A. A few of them came to escape religious or political persecution, but most sought greater economic opportunity. Most of these immigrants landed at one of the five major American ports: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans. Except for the port city of New Orleans, South attracted few settlers, since it provided little industrial development to create jobs.

New York was the nation’s largest city and led all the others as a center of commerce and industry, a place of great motion and constant activity. The city was considered to be the showcase of American modernism. At the same time, New York experienced archaic sanitation, dysentery and typhoid epidemics, contaminated water, severe poverty, in-sufficient housing and schools, and an overwhelming influx of immigrants. Juvenile crime was so widespread. Garbage filled the streets and, until the 1860s, bands of pigs were typically let loose to roam as scavengers in all the larger cities. However, immigrants crowded into the cities, often living together in distinct communities, or ethnic neighborhoods demarcated by language, religious and cultural differences.

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This was also the period of western migration, which settled the territory from Chicago to California. Immigrants and their children were a majority of the population in Chicago and New Orleans.

Jobs were created as fast as boats could bring people to fill them. Immigrants needed places to live. Most of them were unable to speak English. They were huddling together in ghettoes with earlier newcomers who spoke their native tongue and working in improvised home factories. The new arrivals faced serious social problems. Builders put up tenementscrowded apartment houses - poorly built, with no sewerage, no heating system. Most of the people who lived in the tenements were poor newcomers, who had nowhere else to live but in the slums - a crowded area in the city with poor housing. By the turn of the 19th century, the population density of lower Manhattan made up nearly one thousand people per acre. Another problem of crowded cities was fires. In 18711872, huge fires destroyed most of Chicago and Boston. To prevent fires, some cities and states forbade the construction of wooden buildings.

The new arrivals were coming at the rate of almost a million a year. Between 1860 and 1890, America had received more than 14 million immigrants, more than total population of some European countries. Now many of those who came to the U.S.A. to make it their home were from Eastern and Southern Europe. In increasing numbers they came from Italy, Greece, Poland and from Russia where the Jews were fleeing the persecution of Tsarist Russia. In 1880s, these new immigrants made up only 18% of the total immigration. By the ‘90s, they were more than 50%. In the first decade of the20th century, they made up about 72% of the more than 8 million newcomers.

By the time these new immigrants arrived in the United States, much of the good farmland had been claimed; so these immigrants settled in or near cities and had to work in factories, mines and mills. For many Asian immigrants, America was a place and a chance to quickly make money and grow rich. From 1852 to 1880, the number of Chinese immigrants in California had increased four times. Thousands stayed and opened their own business. Thousands worked on the transcontinental railroad (in 1862, Congress commissioned two railway companies to build a transcontinental railroad, which would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts. The Transcontinental was completed in 1869). Half of California’s agricultural workers were Chinese. At the insistence of laborers who feared Asian immigrants because of their willingness to accept low wages for unskilled work, federal legislation barred the entry of Chinese in 1882. Hawaii was a stepping stone to the United States for many Japanese. They were invited there by American sugar and pineapple planters. By 1910 more than 70,000 Japanese had moved on to California to work in agriculture. Many of them bought or

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rented land in California. Thanks to hard work and scientific methods, Japanese farmers turned the land into rich farms.

The Germans were the largest 19th century immigrant group. They settled in a wide range of locations. By the end of the century, they made up the largest single foreign element in 26 states. They worked as farmers, craftsmen and professionals, and came from all classes of citizens in their native land. In America they tried to retain their language and their traditional ways of life. They created communities with old-world institutions such as concert and lecture halls, schools and theaters, beer gardens, and social and athletic societies. They were both Protestants and Catholics.

In contrast, the three million Irish, who came to these shores in the 1840s and 1850s were almost all poor peasants. They were also Catholics, which aroused anxiety among poor native Protestants, who felt threatened by the willingness of the Irish to work for low wages. The Irish were crowded into the eastern port and industrial cities where they formed a readily available unskilled labor market for the growing industrial enterprises. For decades this combination of poverty, Catholicism and economic rivalry led to the isolation of the Irish. Their lowest economic position made them feel most threatened by competition from the waves of black job seekers.

As foreigners, in many cases not speaking the English language, they occupied inferior positions in social, economic and political life receiving meager wages. Deficient language was the main obstacle to find a job. To solve this problem, many immigrants took special classes to learn English, they learned to be Americans adopting many

“American” customs. Many of those who arrived had lived on farms in their native land, so they found it hard to get used to crowded cities and different way of life. Immigrants often, in one form or another, bumped up against racial or general antiimmigrant prejudice from native-born Americans - who, of course, were themselves descended from immigrants. How will New Americans affect older Anglo-Saxon stock and the development of American civilization and culture, of racial types on the continent? The majority of the new Americans were oppressed by feeling of inferiority in relation to their fellow citizen of older stock; to the mainstream of American life, to the country so drastically different from their native land.

Still, America offered the immigrants more religions, liberty, more political freedom and greater economic opportunities than they had in their native lands. The firstgeneration immigrants usually had to struggle with poverty, but their children and grandchildren could achieve affluence and professional success. Learning to live as Americans they did not give up their native traditions and customs. Little by little, these traditions and customs became part of American culture, too.

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But with the passage of time there was not enough place for all to work. The opposition to immigration was growing. There were created some anti-foreign groups, immigration restricting leagues; quota systems were established, acts and laws passed to limit, restrict and even stop the immigration influx. More and more prominent Americans began to raise their voices calling for limiting immigration. In 1921 Congress passed a law which said that only 350,000 immigrants could enter the United States each year. Since the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent European settlement in North America, in 1607, the US has accepted two-thirds of all the world’s immigrants - a total of 50 million people.

TIME TO SOLVE IMMIGRATION?

The American public wants tighter enforcement of the laws. Consistent two-thirds majorities favor tighter enforcement but also guest-worker visas and a path to citizenship for illegal workers already in the country. The evidence is overwhelming that the US benefits hugely from immigration – and that it needs all the immigrants it’s now receiving, legal and illegal. Alone in the industrialized world, America has a rising population – and is unlikely to have a shortage of productive citizens in the decades ahead - which means a faster-growing economy and new supplies of young workers who can sustain the needs of the economy and of retirees. Without immigration,

America’s growth rate has not been much different than France’s over the past 20 years.

If America has a core comprehensive advantage, it is this: every year it takes in more immigrants than the rest of the world put together.

The only point on which there has been serious academic debate is whether immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans. Recent research by the University of California, Berkley, proves that the net effect of immigration is positive for all workers and that taking into account other side effects of immigration, the boost to wages may be even higher. Anyway, comprehensive reform is the only way forward. Enforcement only or first will not work. Laws that pay no heed to the forces of supply and demand end up as costly failures. (Think of Prohibition.) The good news is that this is a rare case where good policy and good politics could come together. (Fareed Zakaria ,Newsweek, 2007)

Agree or disagree

1.Most of the immigrants came to the USA to escape religious or political persecution.

2.The after-war South provided better economic opportunities.

3.Immigrants crowded into the big cities living together in distinct communities.

4.The blacks were huddling together in ghettoes.

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5.Tenements were what now is known as penthouses.

6.To prevent fires some cities and states forbade the construction of wooden buildings.

7.New immigrants claimed for good farmland.

8.With the passage of time, the opposition to immigration was growing.

9.Federal legislation barred the entry of Chinese in 1882 because they came to the US illegally.

10.German Catholics aroused anxiety among native Protestants.

11.Economic rivalry led to the isolation of the Irish workers.

12.Japanese formed a readily available unskilled labor market for the growing industrial enterprises.

13.Learning to live as Americans, immigrants didn’t give up their native traditions and customs, but their traditions did not become part of American culture.

14.Immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans.

Talk It Over

1. Why do immigrants often encounter prejudice from native citizens. 2. What is your country’s policy on immigration? Is immigration encouraged or discouraged? 3. Does your country permit “guest” workers? 4. Does immigration threaten native-born Russian workers? 5. What challenges do immigrants have to meet? 6. Does language separate groups in your country in any way? 7. Are there language classes or government programs and policies to help new immigrants assimilate? 8. Do immigrants usually intermarry with natives of your country? 9. Are there any groups in your country that experience discrimination because of their family/national origin? Their race/religion? 10. Are there any laws that either permit or forbid discrimination?

Ask Yourself

1.Would I emigrate to another country if I could have better life there for myself and my family?

2.Should my country encourage refugees from other countries to settle in my country?

3.Would my family object if I chose to marry someone of another race?

4.Should minorities be given preferential treatment in being admitted to college, in being hired on their jobs, and in other ways?

Chapter 10 Growth and Change

WESTERN FRONTIER

Americans settled the western half of the United States. More and more people were needed in the mines, mills, factories. Railroads were expanding and improving.

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In 1862, Congress passed a law called the Homestead Act, under which any citizen 21 years or older could become the owner of the 64 hectares of government land in the plains by living on it and farming it for five years. Many inspired homesteaders went west to settle this free land. They were former soldiers, former slaves and immigrants to the United States eager to get land of their own. The government had given the railway companies millions of hectares of land along the railway tracks. Now the companies sold these lands – which were much better than homestead land because they were near markets and transportation – to settlers. American contractors sent agents from the railway companies went to Europe and convinced Scandinavians, Germans and British to buy the chip land. Posters in different languages advertised: “American land for sale to immigrants on easy terms.” The immigrants traveled in box-like immigrant Zulu cars to settle and farm in Western prairies, now the Upper Midwest - Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakota. By 1880, 70% of the settlers were immigrants or the children of the immigrants.

Thousands of those from the East moved to the frontier to settle on the lands of the Plain Indians. They changed the West and the way the Indians lived.

On the Plains, the proud Indians, the Sioux, roamed on horseback, hunting the buffalo that ranged there. Buffalo gave them everything they needed for life: meat, skin and fur to make clothing, hides to make the tepees, or tents they lived in. They carved buffalo bones into knives and tools. At first, the Sioux allowed the wagon trains heading west to pass through their lands. But then whites began to settle the Plains. The treaties they made with the U.S. government, which solemnly declared “the vast lands between the

Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains to be Sioux territory on which whites were prohibited from passing or settling,” were ignored. At the same time, the buffalo that the

Sioux depended on had begun to disappear. The land they roamed was becoming fenced by farmers and ranchers. And whites began to hunt buffalo for sport and for its hide. In 1850, there were still 50 million buffalo on the Plains. By 1885, there were almost none.

Without the buffalo, the Indians’ way of life would end. As European civilization spread rapidly across the continent, the native population declined.

By 1871, the U.S. government had determined that no Indian nation or tribe should be recognized as an independent nation or power. The American government pressured the Indians to give up their traditional way of life and to live only on reservations. Many resisted and fought back in defense of their country. But without the buffalo to feed them, halfstarved, they eventually surrendered and came to live on the reservations. In 1890, unrest developed, resulting from the rapid advance of settlers, the suffering and dependence of the Indians caused by the disappearance of game and crop failures, the

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spread of diseases and the resentment among some Indians of an agreement which reduced the size of the Sioux reservations. Some Indians left their reservations and banded together to be killed in bloody fights with an American cavalry regiment. In South Dakota, visitors are attracted by the mountain carving of Crazy Horse. At almost

650 ft, it is the world’s tallest statue of a Sioux Indian chief who handed a crushing defeat to the troops sent to bring him in the reservation. In the struggle to lock him up, Crazy Horse was stabbed by a soldier. Whether his death was planned by the army or not, it remains a symbol of the white man’s campaign to crush the Indian spirit. A total of perhaps, 7,000 whites and 5,000 Indians were killed in the course of the 19th century. Many more Indians died of hunger and disease caused by the west-ward movement of settlers who forced the Indians from their land and nearly destroyed all the buffalo, the main source of food and hides for the tribes of the Great Plains.

When it was announced that almost two million acres of good land in Oklahoma would be opened for settlement in April 1889, thousands of settlers gathered on the border, waiting for the exact time to be announced. When it was, they literally raced into the territory in wagons and on horseback to claim the best land they could find for themselves. By 1890, almost all of the West, from the prairies to the Pacific, had been settled by townspeople, farmers and cattlemen or ranchers, people who bred cattle and called so because they lived in ranches - small one-floor houses with flat roofs.

Cattlemen needed large areas for their cattle to graze before being sent to market. Cowboys

– men with Stetson hats on their heads, high-heeled boots to protect their legs from thorns and snake-bites, and long lassos in their hands – worked for the cattlemen. People think that all cowboys are white Americans. Actually, the first cowboys were Mexican. The cowboys’ heyday came after the Civil War, when thousands of young war veterans were drawn westward, along with Indians, blacks, who were given freedom and made up a quarter of all cowboys.

People think of the cowboys as of romantic and even rather fairy-tale creatures. It is not so in reality. The cowboys’ life was hard and often boring. They would spend most of the day riding around on horse-back and roping. It required skill and grit to look after the cattle and take them on long drives to market from Texas to Kansas where the cattle-ranchers could get ten times as much money for their cattle. This is how cattle drives began. On the cattle drive, when 10 drovers would trail some 2,000 steers, cowboys had to work from dawn to dusk; at night, they took turns guarding the cattle. They would cover up to 15 miles a day – or less if rustlers or angry farmers set off deadly stampedes. A few years on the range, wrote Theodore Roosevelt, “leaves printed on their faces certain lines which tell of dangers quietly fronted and hardships uncomplainingly endured.” When cowboys got bored during

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long cattle drives, they sometimes organized fun competitions in which they showed their skills in calf roping, bull riding and bulldogging – a way of stopping oxen that were running wild. Cowboys would ride alongside on ox, then jump on its back, grab its horns, somersault across it, and pull the ox on the ground. That is how rodeos were born.

There were no mountains beyond which the Indians could live undisturbed. The government had promised to protect the remaining Indian lands; it had also promised supplies and food. But poor management, inadequate supplies and incompetent or dishonest government agents led to great suffering. Many Indians had no desire to farm, there was no magic in owning private property. So the government sold the remaining lands to white settlers.

Other people moved to the West to look for gold, silver and copper. In 1849, the gold rush struck in California. In1859, a silver rush started in Nevada, Colorado and Montana. With a little luck, a miner could find 25 dollar-worth of silver in a river each day. With a lot of luck, a miner could become a millionaire. Deep mines had to be dug in order to get silver lying far bellow the ground. Large mills were built to process the silver. The silver mines and mills provided jobs for western workers. Later, copper was as important as silverit was used to make electric wire. Further discoveries of gold, silver and copper continued to attract people to the West until the end of the 19th century. Western miners built many cities and towns. Some of them, such as Denver, Colorado and Boise, became important industrial and population centers.

There was no more frontier. The frontier became known as “the Wild West.”

Questions for Discussion

1. Who were homesteaders? 2. Why do you think people leave the places they used to live and become homesteaders? 3. In what ways did the railroads help to settle the West? 4. What made the railroad companies land better than homestead land? 5. Who bought the land? 6. What changed the life of the Indians? 7. Who ignored the frontier treaties: whites or Indians? 8. How did the buffalo disappear off the Great Plains? 9? Did the Indians resist and fight back? 10. Did the government protect the remaining Indian lands? 11. What are reservations? 12. Was the land in the Plains used only for farming? 13.Who were the cowboys? What sort of life did they live? 14. Why were the remaining lands sold to white settlers? 15. What were some Western states rich in? 16. How did industries emerge in the West?

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Consider the Issue

1.From the point of view of the Indians, consider their belief in living in harmony with nature, and their reaction to the “Whites invasion” of their native lands and their having to give up traditional way of life and live in reservations.

2.The government determined that no Indian nation or tribe should be recognized as an independent nation or power. What could justify such determination?

3.God had ordered the White Men to take the land. Is colonization always coupled by physical violence and suppression?

Chapter 11 Frontier Heritage

SURVIVOR AND CONQUEROR

In an essay written in 1893,”The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” historian

Frederick Jackson Turner attributed American characteristics of toughness, inventiveness, and self-reliance to the formative experience of overcoming the vast frontier.

Americans were different from Europeans, and it was the frontier that had molded their character. Most contemporary American historians claim that Turner was wrong, sometimes reinterpreting some aspects of his thesis. The appeal of the Turner hypothesis lies in suggesting that the vast frontier formed American character, made the Americans themselves larger than life and integrated American character, mystically perhaps, with the development of the nation’s history. “This ever retreating frontier of free land is the key to American development,” he wrote in his essay.

The first settlers survived because they managed to impose their will upon nature and learned how to control their environment rather than to live in harmony with it. It is true that the frontier determined American history, even if it did not form American character. Hard work and resourcefulness began to pay off. In 1783, America was a narrow strip of a nation on the Eastern seaboard; but 70 years later, the nation had taken the western lands from Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. White men imposed their immense will upon the land, developed it, and turned that development into a giant fortune and a small empire. Westerners control nature and bleached it white, even if this literally involved the destruction of colored races.

Americans justified their conquest of the continent with the self-serving idea of

Manifest Destiny: Civilize the world and Rule it afterward. God had ordained them to take the land and control and subsume what is wild in nature in the name of their own authority and as monument to self. In taking the land, populating it, and dominating it, Americans took on the historic task of overcoming time and space. In this way, the