T2 Social Cultural Flashcards by Alannah .

African Americans, Migration and Work

Emancipation did give African Americans the freedom to move to another plantation or another
region.
Between 1870 and 1900, the USA’s black population almost doubled from 4.4 million to 7.9
million.
The majority of African Americans remained in the South, with substantial numbers moving within
the region.
Primarily seeking higher income jobs, African Americans generally went south and west from the
border states, with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas
registering the main gains.
They found employment in farming, building railroads, making turpentine and lumbering.
Most African Americans in the South were tied to farming.
Sharecroppers received artificially low prices for their produce and their ‘masters’ insisted that
they continue to grow cotton or tobacco.
It was an advantage to have cheap workers for such labour-intensive crops.
This gave many freedmen a living, but also meant that they suffered more than most when the
boll weevil reached the southern states in 1892 and damaged the cotton crop.
However, there was a slow movement towards more landownership among African Americans
although the vast majority were still sharecroppers.
By 1910, 25 per cent of black farmers owned their land and their standard of living was rising.

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African American Migration North (1877 - 1890)

At the same time, the black population in the North and West practically doubled from about
460,000 to over 910,000, with migration accounting for half the increase.
The flow of African Americans northwards during the Gilded Age had the effect of intensifying
Northern white American awareness of and negative reactions to African Americans.
A small group of African Americans moved into the New York district of Harlem in the 1880s and
the first black ghetto began to develop.
African Americans were frequently barred from trade unions and returned from work to poor
quality housing.
In the North, African Americans did not find legally determined segregation, but they frequently
experienced discrimination and their range of employment opportunities, quality of housing, low
level of education and effective confinement to specific areas meant that their quality of life did
not significantly improve.
However, there was the greater possibility of the franchise in the North and a strong black culture
was developing.

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Formal Segregation in the South (De Jure Segregation)

Segregation in the South was developing even before the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and was
especially noticeable in the states most heavily populated with African Americans.
Jim Crow laws developed rapidly between 1887 and 1891, when eight states introduced formal
segregation, three of them extending this to waiting room facilities.
The movement of African Americans to southern towns increased the fear of white Americans
that African Americans would demand equality.
The perception at the time was that African Americans were the underclass and there they must
stay.
This instinct was re-enforced by the increasingly popular theories of racism in the later nineteenth
century.
Theories of Social Darwinism asserted a hierarchy of races and provided some apparent
justification for discrimination and segregation.
The popular press often portrayed African Americans as lazy, intellectually weak and easily
provoked to violence.
White Southerners were persuaded that separation would reduce the clear racial tension of the
time and avoid bloodshed.
Separate facilities for the different races were provided and were supposed to be of the same
standard.
The justices of the US Supreme Court in the 1880s ‘shared with other whites a fundamental
perception of Negroes as different’.
For example, in 1883 the Court denied in The Civil Rights Cases that individuals’ access to places
of public accommodation such as hotels and theatres deserved statutory protection against racial
discrimination.
The North While in the South the Jim Crow laws became constitutionally justified, Northern states
tried to rectify the situation. Massachusetts (1865), New York and Kansas (1874) already had civil
rights statutes on their books.
In 1884, Ohio and New Jersey passed civil rights laws and seven more states followed suit in 1885.
By 1895, seventeen states had civil rights legislation on their books. Unfortunately, the statutes
were weak, with few penalties and often lax enforcement.

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African American loss of the Franchise (Right to Vote)

National politics after Reconstruction showed a rapidly declining interest in African Americans on
the part of the Republican Party.
President Garfield believed that education would close the chasm between the races but did not
live long enough to test this theory.
His successor, Arthur, had little interest in African Americans. The 1884 election victory of
Cleveland, a Democrat, disinclined to offend the white South, contributed to the diminishing
enthusiasm for black equality.
White Americans in the South were determined to limit the political rights of African Americans.
Many were furious that African Americans had gained the right to vote during the period of
Reconstruction and some had even achieved political office.
The Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 had outlawed voting discrimination on grounds of race.
However, it had not outlawed discrimination because of gender or property ownership.
Therefore, Southern states devised complex rules and imposed additional voting requirements.
By 1910, the near elimination of the African American vote was all but complete in the South.

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African American Oppression (1877 - 1890)

Lynching had become commonplace during Reconstruction, often being encouraged and carried
out by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
The Gilded Age also saw the height of the lynching campaign against African Americans.
The Chicago Tribune began to publish statistics about lynching in the early 1880s.
Between 1882 and 1899 over 2,500 men and women were lynched.
Accusations of rape, attacks on white women, and occasionally murder, were the usual excuses
for a lynching, along with a host of lesser allegations.

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Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)

Born to slave parents in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells’ campaign against discrimination began in 1884
when she refused to give up her seat on a train to a white man. She was removed by force but
then sued the railroad company.
Ida B. Wells, a black newspaperwoman in Memphis, attacked the lynching fever in 1892 in a black
newspaper, defending black males against a rape charge and exposing the lawlessness of lynching.
She was run out of town for her article, and a mob destroyed the newspaper’s office.
Lynching was often regarded as a public event, which even children occasionally attended.
Southern governments and police forces did little to stop it. Cases were rarely brought to court
and, if they were, the all-white juries would not convict.
She showed great courage in publicly opposing lynching after some friends were lynched for so
called ‘rape’.
Wells also strongly supported women’s rights and especially votes for women.
Given the reforming atmosphere of the Progressive era she was frequently received
sympathetically.
However, she failed to gain any commitment from Congress or the President for a federal anti
lynching law so that the problem could be tackled in federal courts.
The defence in the South, that a federal anti-lynching law would interfere with states’ rights,
always won the day.

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African American Education (1877 - 1890)

The education of African Americans was an issue that would not disappear during the Gilded Age.
In 1882, Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire first introduced an education bill that would
have provided millions of dollars to southern black and white schools.
The bill was rejected by Congress. For whites in the South, the danger was the extent to which an
educated black community would upset the caste structure and destroy its labour system.
‘We must have colored servants’, an Alabama minister complained in 1891, ‘for there is no other
laboring class.’
The number of black students in school throughout the USA had doubled between 1877 and 1887,
but still only two-fifths of eligible black children were enrolled.
Schools, especially in rural areas, were often dirt-floored log houses without the bare essentials
of desks and blackboards.
When schools existed, they might stay open for a month or two then close so the children could
pick cotton.
White schools had much longer terms and better financing.
State subsidies for African American schools were small and parents often had to make up the
difference.
In the North, the pattern varied with mostly integrated schools in the Northeast and both separate
and integrated schools in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.
By the 1890s, segregated schools were slowly disappearing, most high schools accepted black
applicants and colleges and universities admitted small numbers of African Americans.

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Gilded Age Immigration (1877 – 1890)

Prior to the Gilded Age, the time commonly referred to as the old immigration saw the first real
boom of new arrivals to the United States.
During the Gilded Age, approximately 10 million immigrants came to the United States in what is
known as the new immigration.
Some of them were prosperous farmers who had the cash to buy land and tools in the Plains
states especially.
Many were poor peasants looking for the American Dream in unskilled manual labour in mills,
mines and factories.
Few immigrants went to the poverty-stricken South.
Of the 10 million who crossed the Atlantic between 1860 and 1890, the majority came from Britain
and Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia, Switzerland and Holland.

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Reasons for immigration

Historians analyse the causes of immigration in terms of push factors (pushing people out of their
homeland) and pull factors (pulling them to America).
The push factors included economic dislocation, shortages of land, and anti-Semitism.
The pull factors were the economic opportunity of good inexpensive farmland or jobs in factories,
mills and mines, particularly the rapid growth of American industry during these years and the
need for cheap labour.

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Immigration Pull Factors

Prospective immigrants saw advertisements in guidebooks, pamphlets and newspapers.
For example, the guidebook Where to Emigrate and Why was published by ‘Americus’ in 1869.
It described journeys by land and sea, calculated the cost, and reported on wages in the United
States.
It was one of a series of advertisements that described the advantages of life in America such as
the economic opportunity as well as political equality and religious tolerance.
Steamship was the main form of travel across the Atlantic and steamship companies also did much
to advertise and promote the benefits of immigration to the USA.
However, states and railroads bore an even greater role for stimulating immigration.
State bureaus concentrated their efforts on Britain, Germany and Scandinavia.
Their pamphlets and newspaper advertisements emphasised future prospects.
In Minnesota, The Empire State of the North-West published in 1878, Minnesota claimed it could
support five million people.
Some historians suggest that railroads were the most significant promotional agencies. They had
vast tracts of land to dispose of and were able to offer transport to reach it.
The Kansas Pacific, Santa Fe and Wisconsin Central all distributed pamphlets.
The Santa Fe even appointed a European agent, C. B. Schmidt who, in 1875, visited Russia to
promote immigration.
The railroads’ lavish inducements to immigrants included reduced fares by sea and land, loans at
low rates of interest, classes in farming and the building of churches and schools.

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Immigration Push Factors

It was political, economic and religious discontent in Europe that stirred immigrants to leave.
Throughout the nineteenth century, industrial and agricultural revolutions transformed European
society.
The additional pressure of increasing population provided the impetus for emigration.
Such changes began in Western Europe and, as the century progressed, they spread to the east.
The causes and sources of American immigration moved with them.
More German immigrants arrived than any other ethnic group in all but three years from 1854 to
1894.
Agricultural depression as well as industrial depression were strong push factors for immigrants
from Britain, Norway and Sweden.
In Ireland, the root cause of unemployment and poverty was agricultural mismanagement by
absentee landlords.
The impulse for migration from Russia was as much political and religious as it was economic.
The greatest exodus was of Russian Jews fleeing new persecution.
The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 set off anti-Semitic riots in the south and west.
The number of Jewish immigrants to America rose from 5,000 in 1880 to 90,000 in 1900.
In 1885, a Japanese exodus began after the emperor revoked a ban on emigration.
Japan’s population growth was greater than that of any Western country.
In the 1880s and 1890s most immigrants went to Hawaii to work on American sugar plantations
as contract labourers.
Like Europeans, the primary motive of Chinese immigrants was economic.
The Taiping Rebellion that began in 1848 devastated south-east China.
The lure of high wages on the railroads enticed men from the province of Guangdong.
The Chinese comprised an overwhelming majority of the labourers who laid the track of the
Central Pacific through Sierra Nevada in the 1860s.
In the 1870 census, there were 63,000 Chinese men (with a few women) in the entire US
population. This number grew to 106,000 in the 1880s.

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he Rise of US ‘Nativism’

Indeed, immigration during these years increasingly divided US society.
A great gulf was opening between a predominantly native plutocracy and a predominantly foreign
working class.
The USA was becoming two nations separated by language and religion, residence and
occupation.
Not only was the new tide of immigration depressing wages but also the closure of the frontier
and settlement of available land in the West, sealed off the traditional escape route for
discontented easterners.
Thus, Americans began to lose confidence in the process of immigration and integration.
The outcome was ‘nativism’. Nativist agitation was the work of three groups: unions that regarded
unskilled immigrants as a threat to organised labour; social reformers who believed the influx of
immigrants exacerbated the problems of the cities; and Protestant conservatives who dreaded
the supposed threat to Nordic supremacy.
Skilled workers had most to fear from immigration.
After skilled Belgian and British glass workers were brought under contract to work for lower
wages in Baltimore and in Kent, Ohio, the two unions of glass workers amalgamated.
The new union, Local Assembly 300, set up in 1882, pledged to oppose contract labour.
In 1885, a bill was passed by Congress which put a ban on foreign contract labour although this
did not extend to skilled workers needed for new industries.
Moreover, Protestant extremists joined secret societies pledged to defend the school system
against the enrolment of increasing numbers of Catholic school children, many of whom were
from immigrant families.
The most powerful was the American Protective Association set up in Clinton, Iowa, in 1887 by a
lawyer, Henry F. Bowers.

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Nativist Reactions to Immigration

Without massive immigration the USA would not have developed industrially at anything like the
rate it did.
In 1890, 56 per cent of the labour force in manufacturing and mechanical industries was of foreign
birth or foreign parentage.
Immigrants themselves chose as a symbol of welcome and promise the Statue of Liberty on Staten
Island in New York harbour.
The gigantic statue, unveiled before President Cleveland on 28 October 1886, was a gift from
France.
However, economic fear bred ethnic intolerance. Immigrants came to be regarded not as a source
of strength but as a drain on American resources.
This was especially true in the East, where most immigrants arrived and where the social system
was hard and fast.
Labour unions, led by Samuel Gompers strongly opposed the presence of Chinese labour because
of competition for jobs.
Congress banned further Chinese immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882; the Act
prohibited Chinese labourers from entering the United States, but some students and
businessmen were allowed in on a temporary basis.
Even English immigrants did not escape criticism. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in 1879 that
English workmen ‘must change their habits if they are to make good in the United States’.
In the 1880s, magazines such as Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly included a great number of ethnic
jokes, all prejudiced against newcomers. The Scots were depicted as mean and the Irish as ugly,
brawling drunkards. All Italians, it was assumed, were involved in organised crime.
However, no group received as much abuse as the Jews. Anti-Semitism was not new to the USA
as Jews had been barred from voting until the mid-nineteenth century. Social ostracism continued
with the most famous example being the exclusion of the Jewish banker, Joseph Seligman, from
the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, in 1877. Hotels, clubs and colleges then began to
turn Jews away. Some even displayed signs such as ‘No Jews or dogs admitted here’.

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The Impact of the Railways on Gilded Age Westward Expansion

The opening of the Pacific Railway had an important impact on the movement west. However, by
the 1890s, there were four other transcontinental lines.
(1) The Northern Pacific, completed in 1883, stretched from Duluth, Minnesota to Portland,
Oregon.
(2) The Southern Pacific, linking New Orleans with San Francisco, was also completed in 1883.
(3) The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, linking Kansas City with Los Angeles and San Diego, was
completed in 1884.
(4) The Great Northern, extending westwards from St Paul, Minnesota reached the Pacific coast
at Seattle, in 1893.
All these transcontinental railroads built numerous branch lines and by 1900 the West accounted
for nearly half the national total.
All these railways were partly financed by generous land grants from the federal government –
70 million hectares of land in total. In addition, the states helped financially by advancing $200
million as well as land grants totalling 19 million hectares.
There was corruption involved with most railroad companies bribing state and federal politicians.
It was the price that had to be paid for opening up the West.

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Benefits railways brought nationally and to the West

(1) The alternate sections of land it retained along the railroad tracks fetched twice the normal
price of $1.25 an acre and government traffic on the land-grant lines enjoyed a 50 per cent
discount.
(2) They revolutionised the West, ensuring that a flood of people (and goods) moved in and an
abundance of raw materials moved out.
(3) The railroads greatly stimulated the growth of the iron, steel, lumber and other capital goods
industries.
(4) The new West of cattlemen and farmers was largely the product of the railroads.

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Life on the Plains

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Most settlers who went westwards earned their living from the land.
A few were ranchers, cowboys and shepherds. But most depended on crops for their livelihood.
The nearest neighbours were often miles away, a problem for women who were about to give
birth.
While the soil was rich, pioneer families fought a constant battle with the elements – tornadoes,
hailstorms, droughts, prairie fires, blizzards and pests. Swarms of locusts would sometimes cover
the ground 15cm deep, consuming everything in their path.
If land was relatively cheap, horses, livestock, wagons, wells, fencing and seed-sand fertilisers
were not. Freight charges and interest rates on loans were often cripplingly high.

Great Plains Agriculture

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Most of the problems of Plain’s agriculture were overcome sufficiently to make farming possible
and even, occasionally, profitable.
This was helped by important new inventions and processes.
Dry farming methods enabled farmers to grow particular types of corn and wheat even when
there was scant rainfall.
American factories turned out an ever-increasing quantity of farm machinery including reapers,
threshing machines, binders and combine harvesters – making possible wheat and maize farming
on a colossal scale.
In 1873, Joseph Glidden produced the first effective barbed wire, making it possible to fence land
cheaply. Deep-drilled wells and steel windmills provided much-needed water.
The results of this newly expanded agriculture were truly phenomenal. American production of
wheat increased from 211 million bushels in 1867 to 599 million bushels in 1900.
The Department of Labor calculated that whereas it took 35 hours of labour in 1840 to produce
fifteen bushels of wheat, it took only fifteen hours in 1900.
American wheat exports rose from 6 million bushels in 1867 to 102 million in 1900.
However, this soon became boom and bust agriculture, very heavily dependent on exports and
the fluctuating price of wheat.
Western farmers were thus unable to determine the price of things they bought and sold, and
most suffered in the 1870s as cereal prices tumbled as a result of a glut on the American and
world markets.
Corn, which sold for 78 cents a bushel in 1867, fell to 31 cents a bushel by 1873.
Farmers who had borrowed heavily to finance their homestead and to purchase machinery went
bankrupt.
The situation for farmers improved in the late 1870s as cereal prices rose. But over the next two
decades economic boom and bust was the norm on the Plains.
In the bust years of the late 1880s and early 1890s many hard-hit Plains’ farmers were almost in
open revolt against big business and state and federal governments.
Most supported the Populist – or People’s – Party who called for government control of transport
and communications, a graduated income tax, regulation of monopolies and utilities and more
silver in the currency, ensuring there was more money in circulation.
Populist presidential candidate James B. Weaver won a million votes in 1892.

The Chisholm Trail

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The Chisholm Trail was a trail used in the post-American Civil War era to drive cattle overland
from ranches in Texas to Kansas railheads.
The portion of the trail marked by Jesse Chisholm went from his southern trading post near the
Red River, to his northern trading post near Kansas City, Kansas.
Texas ranchers using the Chisholm Trail started on that route from either the Rio Grande or San
Antonio, Texas, and went to the railhead of the Kansas Pacific Railway in Abilene, Kansas, where
the cattle would be sold and shipped eastward.

Cattle and ranching

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At the end of the Civil War the ranching frontier was based in Texas.
Its climatic conditions were ideal for raising cattle and its new land use policies drafted during the
administration of Governor John Ireland enabled individuals to accumulate land.
It allowed its ranchers to acquire grazing land at 50 cents an acre.
In 1867, Joseph McCoy devised a route whereby cattle could be driven north from southern Texas
to Abilene, Kansas, along the Chisholm Trail to the west of any settlement.
The journey was known as the Long Drive. From Abilene, the Kansas and Pacific Railroad
transported cattle to the slaughterhouses of Chicago.
Between 1866 and 1885 a total of 5.71 million cattle went north by this route.
In 1868, Philip D. Armour established a meatpacking business in Chicago, and he was followed by
Gustavus Swift and Nelson Morris.
Meatpacking made use of the assembly-line process long before it was adopted in industry. Each
worker had a particular task on the line.
The Jungle, a novel written in 1906 by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair, vividly
portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the meatpacking business of
Chicago.
As the railroads and farming frontiers extended further westwards, new trails came into being,
new railheads eclipsed Abilene, and new cattle towns – Ellsworth, Wichita, and Dodge City –
developed.
Other herds were driven on a second long drive to be fattened or to stock the ranches of Colorado,
Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas.

Cowboys

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During the heyday of the long drive and open range, cowboys were the kings of the road.
In the twenty years after the Civil War 40,000 cowboys roamed the Plains.
Most cowboys were in their teens or early twenties coming from diverse backgrounds.
Some cowboys were ex-Confederate soldiers seeking adventure.
Perhaps a third of cowboys were Mexican, African Americans, Asian or Native American.
Almost all cowboys were expert horsemen, an essential skill given that cowboys virtually lived on
horseback for the two months that most cattle drives took.
Cowboy life was rarely as glamorous as the dime novel of the time or cinema and television since
has depicted it.
For a wage of only $25–30 a month, the average cowboy worked an eighteen-hour day, mostly in
the saddle, trying to coax forward a sprawling mass of cattle, coping with a continuous cloud of
dust.
Cowboys faced a variety of other potential hazards – floods, poisonous snakes and scorpions,
blizzards, stampedes, rustlers and occasionally Native Americans.

Cattle-ranching

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The cattle drives were relatively short lived. As railroad lines spread across the West, cattlemen
realised that they could best function by establishing cattle ranches on the Plains.
By 1880, ranching had spread northwards from Texas as far as Canada.
Huge tracts of grazing land were quickly appropriated by ranchers who rarely bothered (initially)
to acquire legal title to what was still almost wholly the public domain.
They then maintained their position by force, fraud, and perjury.
Water rights were usually more important than land rights: whoever controlled the water
effectively controlled the land.
Disputes over land and water rights and rustling of livestock were endemic, often leading to
violence between ranchers. Vigilante systems quickly sprang up, providing a measure of order.
Leading ranchers also banded together to form livestock associations which developed a code of
rules defining land and water rights and the recording of cattle brands.
The associations operated reasonably effectively in most cases, but they were by no means
universally popular.
Some associations behaved arbitrarily and sometimes unjustly, often favouring big ranchers at
the expense of small.
The greatest boom in the open range cattle trade came in the early 1880s when Eastern and
European investors poured money into the ‘Beef Bonanza’.
By 1883, British companies owned or controlled nearly 8 million hectares of western grazing land.
By the mid-1880s the open range cattle business thus resembled the kind of large-scale corporate
enterprise characteristic of US industry in the late nineteenth century.
The Swan Land & Cattle Company of Wyoming, for example, owned a huge area of land on which
roamed 100,000 head of cattle.
Cowboys, in effect, became farmhands, riding only that part of the range that was owned (or
controlled) by their employer.

The End of the Open Range (1890)

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Two exceptionally severe winters between 1885 and 1887, straddling a summer drought, resulted
in the deaths of millions of western cattle (possibly 90 per cent of the total).
Thousands of cattlemen (including the Swan Land & Cattle Company) were ruined.
Most of those who survived retreated into the security of smaller, fenced-in ranches (using barbed
wire to enclose land actually owned), equipped with shelter for their animals against the
elements.
Such methods ensured that cattle could be more scientifically bred. By 1890, the days of the open
range and the cowboy were effectively over.
But the rise of the open range cattle industry, aided by the extension of the railroads and the
development of the refrigerator carriage (introduced in 1875), had changed the nation’s eating
habits: Americans became a primarily beef-eating rather than a pork-eating people.

The US Reservation policy

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The Native Americans presented a real problem to the US government.
Their independent existence gave them a degree of self-determination which was deemed
unacceptable.
A significant number were hostile and dangerous and therefore the US government turned to its
reservation policy in order to bring an end to their traditional nomadic lifestyle.
This policy entailed locating Native Americans on government-controlled reservations. These
would enable the government to ‘Americanise’ the Native Americans, who were considered to be
savages.
Separated from their dependence on hunting the buffalo, their tribal way of life would be
destroyed.
This would be achieved by a process of education, by conversion to Christianity and by training
Native Americans to become farmers.
Reservation life was extremely harsh as dependent on the food supplied by the government, the
people starved.
Worse still, the total dependence on white Americans for food, clothing and shelter proved very
humiliating.
Some Native American agents on the reservations were corrupt and used government resources
for their own ends.

The ‘Americanisation’ of Native Americans (1877 - 1890)

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The US government did attempt to reduce the problems of Native American mistreatment.
For example, under Hayes renewed efforts were made to reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs and
prevent corruption.
However, even organisations sympathetic to the Native Americans, such as the Indian Rights
Association, did not support the continuation of the Native American way of life.
Instead, they encouraged the idea of ‘Americanisation’ and the end of the tribal culture.
This would be achieved by getting Native Americans to learn English, become Christians and learn farming.
Education was seen as essential to this process, with Congress providing funds to set up boarding
schools where Native American children could be taught American skills and attitudes away from
the influence of their parents.
By 1899, $2.5 million was being spent each year on 148 boarding and 225-day schools for 20,000
children.

The Dawes Act (1887)

* The climax of this integrationist policy came with the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. * This was named after Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts and gave legal form to a piecemeal practice of many years’ standing. * It broke up reservation land into small units held by individuals or families. * Each head of family could receive 160 acres (65 hectares) of farmland (or 320 acres of grazing land), each single male adult, 80 acres. * Native Americans who accepted the allotments and ‘adopted the habits of civilised life’ were to be granted US citizenship after 25 years. * At the time it was praised by many reformers as a significant achievement as it would end tribal relationships. However, it has subsequently come in for heavy criticism. * The Dawes Act assumed that Native Americans could be turned into farmers, but it was doomed to failure at a time of agricultural depression. * Besides, no care was taken to provide Native Americans with arable land and after the awards were made, the surplus land was sold commercially. * Most Indians had little understanding of what the Act entailed, since the idea of private property was alien to their culture. * Within a very short time, most had sold or lost their land to whites and fallen into poverty. * In 1891, an amendment to the Dawes Act ended the policy of awarding 160 acres to heads of families. In the future, individual Native Americans were to be awarded 80 acres each, regardless of status. * After the Dawes Act conditions on Native American reservations deteriorated rapidly and became nothing short of scandalous.

The Battle of Wounded Knee (1890)

* The final tragedy for the Indians and triumph for the army came in 1890 when despairing Sioux in South Dakota rallied to the teachings of Wovoka who promised that if they took up a ceremonial dance their lands and power would be restored. * The Ghost Dance craze spread rapidly and with such fervour that it soon alarmed white authorities. * An effort to arrest Sitting Bull, one of the chiefs encouraging the Ghost Dance, led to his death. * Bands of Lakota Sioux fled their reservations with the army in pursuit. * In December 1890, nervous Seventh Cavalry fired into a group of Sioux at Wounded Knee. * Some 200 Sioux – many of them women and children – died. So did 31 soldiers. * The ‘battle’ was an accident: neither side had really wanted to fight. * The whole affair, an accident born of mutual distrust, misunderstanding and fear, epitomised relations between Plains Indians and Americans in the late nineteenth century.

The Closure of the Western Frontier (1890)

* In 1890, the US Census Bureau declared: * ‘Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier or settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it cannot, therefore, any longer have a place in census reports.’ * So officially there was no longer a frontier. For the first time in American history there was no large tract of unsettled land.

The Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893)

* One individual to have a strong impact on American history and philosophy, illustrating the key issue of the significance of individuals in this period, was Frederick Jackson Turner. * In 1893, Turner, a young historian, presented a conference paper entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. * Turner had grown up in Wisconsin, where the pioneering life was still remembered, but in contrast, had been educated in the East at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where the influences of European manners and expectations were still strong.

Turner’s key points

* At the deepest root of America’s past had been ‘the existence of an area of free land’ * That accessible land, as in the West, acted as a safety valve against social discord and violence * The harshness of the frontier created self-reliant individuals, who were invaluable in a nation like the USA * That America’s development had been different from that of Europe as it had no hierarchy or aristocracy relying on privileges of birth to create social class * That the USA had a unique form of democracy. It was the abundance of nature and its resources, so visible in the West, that made America free.

T2 Social Cultural Flashcards

(29 cards)