TCC midterm spring

TCC Midterm

• Essay Topics
• Reconstruction
• Progressives
• The New West

Progressives

• Bottom up movement
• Reform starts in big cities
• Social gospel (love thy neighbor) begins
• By 1900 there were 100 settlement houses in the USA
• Settlement houses originated in England
• Jane Addams and Ellen Staar started the most famous settlement house, the Hull House in Chicago.
• Jane and Ellen were middle class women who were college educated
• College for women was just meant to keep them well rounded and prepare them to marry into the upper class.
• The female sphere was expanded through settlement houses
• Women are still cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their children, just not their own.
• Settlement houses teach practical needs
• Politics were taught to immigrants
• settlement houses provide child care for working parents.
• They also offered bathing facilities
• For some children, this was there first bath ever
• Progressive women would go around the city and tenants inviting women to these settlement houses
• The progressive era was estimated to last from 1900-1917
• Society begins to change and people are changing the way they think.
• Anthracite Coal Strike 1902
• Miners want -labor union recognition -9 hour work day -Pay raise
• Roosevelt refuses to side with the business leaders and instead claims that if the miners are suffering, there must be negotiation
• But the business leaders claim that "miners don't suffer, they don't even know how to speak English."
• Teddy fears that a shortage of coal will heavily impact the nation negatively.
• He threatens the business leaders by saying that he will militarize the coal mines meaning that the military will mine while the workers strike
• This is illegal because the mines are private property, but in response to this, Teddy says "to hell with the constitution when the people want coal".

Progressives

• Progressives of society
• Progressives trusted the government, they believed that the cure to society's illnesses was more government involved in schools, roads, and public health.
• A derogatory term for journalists surfaced at this time, "muckrakers".
• These muckrakers believe that awareness will lead to action.
• They think that if Americans actually knew what was going on, they would care and do something about it.
• These columns were posted in inexpensive magazines, which help gather support.
• They published weekly, known as serial publishing.
• Muckrakers were known to complain in order to ensue action.
• Jacob Riis was a famous Danish Journalist who published "how the other half lives" book/photography
• Riis and Roosevelt used to be friends and investigated cops together.
• Muckrakers believed that documentation that could be presented would be much better in the future in comparison to words.
• Lewis W. Hine was a famous photgrapher
• In the industrial world, there were many avoidable accidents
• One of the worst was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
• 146 died in this fire.
• The exit doors were locked, some were chained to their work stations, no one alerted the employees that there was a fire
• People ran for the elevator and many died in the elevator shaft, while others fell off the fire escape, and worse still- people jumped off the building and some even fell through the pavement below due to the poor infrastructure.
• Roosevelt assumes more power by taking responsibility for this

Progressives

• Roosevelt is reelected in 1904
• Soon dirt about the food and drug administrations is dug up
• Meats were being dipped in formaldehyde to preserve the look of them
• Dairy producers take 50% milk and 50% formaldehyde then they add chalk to cover up the formaldehyde
• This is another reason infant mortality is so high at the time- people are feeding their infants this
• Upton Sinclair a socialist and up and coming journalist decides that in order to get the full scoop of whats going on he must go into the factories. He gets a job at a meat packing plant and then writes the book "The Jungle" highlighting in detail the disgusting things taking place at this factory.
• Roosevelt gets word of this while he is eating breakfast and actually spits his food out.
• Drugs are also a problem at this time
• Cough medicine was a combination of opium and alcohol
• Coca-cola was actually cocaine
• Many people were just prescribed cocaine as a remedy to their illnesses!
• Roosevelt passes the Food and Drug Act
• Roosevelt also starts a conservation movement
• He claims it will have long term public benefits
• Sports hunters were in favor of this
• However this impacts Natives and Rural Whites who rely on game to support their families- they start hunting small unprotected animals like rabbits and squirrels
• Roosevelt doesn't run for a 3rd term, but he handpicks William Howard Taft as the republican candidate.
• Taft doesn't really want to be president, but Roosevelt plans on being the puppet master
• Taft's wife is the only one looking forward to the presidency, but she dies shortly before.
• Taft begins to do good things under the direction of Roosevelt, so newspapers start publishing "the successes of William Taft", so Roosevelt get jealous.
• Roosevelt decides he will run in the next election under a new party called, the progressive party.

Progressives

• Election of 1912
• Wilson = Democrat
• Taft = Republican
• Eugene Debs = Socialist
• Roosevelt = progressive
• Roosevelt almost dies on his way to Milwaukee when Michael Shink shoots him
• Shink believes that any person for more than 2 terms must be a dictator.
• Luckily, Roosevelt is wearing an ungodly amount of layers and he is not severely injured.
• He even gives his speech while he is still bleeding.
• "It takes more than a bullet to kill a bull moose"
• Bull moose becomes the mascot for any third party
• Roosevelt who believes in "new nationalism" and Wilson who believes in "new freedom" are the front runners
• Republican Schism - Because the republican vote gets split between Taft and Roosevelt, Wilson ends up winning.
• Wilson wants America to believe that he is progressive, but he is not
• Wilson had no record of social justice
• Wilson does not support women's suffrage
• He does not support child labor legislation
• He is extremely racist
• Writes back and forth with active KKK members
• Refuses to take photos with blacks
• Under Wilson, all federal buildings are re-segregated.

Reconstruction

• 1865 Civil war ends (south loses)
• Big questions after the war;
• What are we going to do with confederate generals? They technically committed treason.
• How do we rebuild the southern economy? Railroads, buildings, harbors, levees, etc.
• Who pays for all of this, because southerners don't have any money.
• Freed slaves in the south?
• Freed slaves don't get land, don't have social equality, can't read or write, uneducated, don't have voting rights until 1865.
• Southern Party = Democrat
• Northern Party = Republican
• Before the Civil War, wealthy planters and elite farmers were the most powerful and wealthy politicians, however after the war, this is not the case.
• Confederate money is useless
• Grant and Sherman have destroyed much of the south.
• Northern Republic Capitalists become the most powerful and rich
• Societal Shift takes place
• The Southern labor system is struggling
• they must find a new way to make money
• South will not produce like they used to because there is no more slave population and the southern infrastructure has been destroyed
• Confederate Emigration begins to take place because they cannot stand to live among slaves
• They move to South America and Mexico
• South isn't really punished for the war
• Frederick Douglass was a literate runaway slave who believes that the federal government doesn't do enough to help freed slaves integrate into society,
• To help this situation, the Freedman's Bureau is created.
• They deal with freedman county to county
• Est. March 3, 1865
• They provided food, clothing, fuel and other basic provisions.
• Labor contracts become very common at this time as a latch ditch effort to preserve the institution of slavery
• Labor contracts were a legal agreement signed by slaves who agreed to 99 years of labor on a certain farm/plantation in exchange for the same provisions they had been offered as slaves + $1.00/month, this makes it a job by technical standards.
• Freedman's Bureau starts helping build schools that everyone from toddlers to the elderly may attend.

Reconstruction

• Lincoln does not want to punish the south, so he creates "Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction"
• Rebel states from a union government
• 10% of 1860 voters take an oath to the constitution and the union
• Receive presidential pardon unless you were an officer of the confederacy, An official who aided the rebellion or who neglected to treat captured black soldiers as prisoners of war, or radicals in opposition to Lincoln's plan
• The radical republican plan was the Wade-Davis Bill.
• Allegiance to the Union was very important, because they did not want the south back in the USA.
• Lincoln vetoes this bill
• Wade and Davis write a manifesto stating that Abe doesn't have the right to direct reconstruction, congress does.
• The assassination of Abraham Lincoln took place on April 14, 1865
• John Wilkes Booth was the man who assassinated A.L.
• He was a Virginian, famous actor, loved by many
• On this day, Lincoln and his wife attend Ford's Theater
• Booth shoots the president point blank in the back of the head and stabs Lincoln's aide
• Booth then jumps off of the balcony and screams the Virginian sate moto "Sic Semper Tyrannus" meaning "Thus always to tyrants"
• Georger Aderzot, lewis Powell are both conspirators who intended to kill Andrew Johnson (VP) and William Seward (secretary of state).
• 4 Lincoln conspirators are hanged
• The only person killed for war crimes was Henry Wirz who was the commander of Andersonville a war camp.
• Andrew Johnson Qualities
• Vindictive toward the south
• Grew up very poor
• Illiterate
• Prejudice
• Never owns slaves
• Wants to punish wealthy planters
• In 1865 Johnson goes to A.L. second inaugural address drunk
• Lincoln and Johnson don't get along
• Deeply racist
• His 1865 proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction exclusion excludes people who own $20,000 or more in property.
• Special applications for pardons from the president were required if you were a wealthy person
• Johnson pardon 13,000 people personally
• He just pardons people all day, which means that no one is taking care of reconstruction.
• Roosevelt blocks congress from doing anything about it
• The tenure of office act is created where congress has to approve the hiring and firing of anyone

Reconstruction

• March 1868, Johnson fires Edwin Staton the secretary of war
• Test constitutionality, it is not constitutional
• Johnson attends impeachment hearings and trials a lot
• People bought tickets to the trials
• May 1868 Johnson is 1 vote shy of being impeached
• This is a broken presidency
• After this hearing he has 10 months as president left
• Johnson lays low after this
• Johnson was an inactive president
• 1865-1868 there was a growth in white southerners who wanted to maintain slavery through terror and violence
• July 1866 in Clinch Georgia, an 82 year old black woman was arrested for absive language and was publicly lashed, stripped, and tied to a poll. 1 month later this same thing happened again to another woman.
• Though there was legal freedom, there was no equality
• Because freedmen have no money or training they settle into sharecropping where crops are divided between landowner and tenant.
• Landowner takes 50% of the harvest, Tenants never make a profit.
• African Americans began establishing schools and churches despite their lack of money because religion and education was important to them.
• These schools and churches are burned down frequently.
• 2 bad words in reconstruction were -carpetbagger (poor northerners, teachers, social workers who come to the south) and -Scalawags (Native white republicans who side with Lincoln and the civil war- this group is often abused)
• The election of 1868 was won by Ulysses s. Grant with Henry Wilson as the VP.
• Both men were previously low class men who held low class jobs
• Grant publicized that he was from a low class family
• He had little political experience, but he became very popular- even with the democratic south.
• His reconstruction slogan was "let us have peace"
• At 46 years old, he is the youngest president to this point.
• Known as the lion of Vicksburg
• Andrew Johnson does not attend Grant's inauguration
• Grant hates Jefferson Davis, so Johnson pardons him.
• The KKK are first heard of in 1866 in Pulaski Tennessee
• This starts out as pranks, but by 1870 it is a full blown terrorist organization
• There purpose was to intimidate African Americans and White republicans
• KKK wanted to make freedom worse than slavery for african americans

Reconstruction

• Grant takes office in 1869
• He is an abolitionist
• He hates the KKK, the confederacy, and Jefferson Davis
• In his first term, he passes the enforcement acts to protect the reconstruction acts (13,14,15 amendments)
• He later passes the KKK act which prohibits anyone from wearing disguises in public or intimidating officials
• KKK used intimidation to scare African Americans and republicans in general out of voting...the number of republican voters in South Carolina drops from 2,449 in 1873 to 7 in 1875.
• Panic of 1873
• This was an financial crisis that lasted from 1873-1879- the longest panic to this point.
• Racial tensions continued to build
• Many were blaming the new freedman for the poor economy.
• In the deep south, the Klan begins to feel comfortable, so they abandon their masks
• The north loses interest in reconstruction
• The election of 1877
• This election is known as the great compromise
• Rutherford B Hayes - Republican
• Samuel Tilden - Democrat
• This marks the end of reconstruction
• No real issues between the 2 candidates
• They both want to end reconstruction, save money, and relax federal authority
• The vote is too close to call, so it goes to the house
• Hayes wins the election
• Both democrats and republicans compromise, which is why this becomes known as the great compromise
• Republicans promise to withdrawal federal troops
• Democrats promise to support Hayes and put the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments into their state constitution.
• Hayes' presidency is a sham from the beginning and he is overall a bad president.

The New West

• Lots of unclaimed land
• Lack of law enforcement
• More diverse religions
• Less watched area
• There is freedom and opportunity in the west
• Individualism and the American dream
• Known as the great American Desert
• Natives live in the west
• Agriculture frequently fails here
• Interest in gold, silver, and minerals leads to the Gold Rush of 1849
• The transcontinental RR is expanding
• 3/4 of the migrants to the west are men (white and black)
• 1879 - 20,000 annually migrate
• African American men who migrated west called themselves "exodusters" in search of the promised land
• Exodusters came to the west to stay, 25% of all cowboys were black at this time.
• However, a lot of southern ideals such as racism are spreading west.
• White men were not traveling through native lands at this time and instead were traveling via clipper ships. They would buy a ticket and plan on returning home at some point.
• There was no environmental protection at this time
• We were destroying land at this time in order to build railroads, we were using dynamite to to blast areas out.
• There was lots of isolation, and no community infrastructure
• Saloons start to open and men spend their money primarily on women and alcohol
• Southern loss of labor when African Americans move west
• Because of this, in 1879 southern states threaten clipper ships
• They say that they will the sink any ship that books passage for an African American
• Was the west really the promised land?
• Many moved to Kansas for agriculture, but this was actually a propaganda stunt.
• The Garden Myth
• "Rain follows the white Christian plow" meaning it will start raining if white Christians go to Kansas.
• People living in Kansas were desperate for cash and they were offered $20 to write a letter claiming that Kansas was a garden of Eden and send it to their friends and family.

The New West

• 1860s-1870s Natives are fighting over supplies and resources and they do not want to fight with White men
• Native wars break out, tribe vs tribe
• 1864 Colorado Conference
• This was a peace conference at Fort Lyon
• Children who were native and white were known as half-breed children
• Native Americans are given white surrender flags because they were invited
• But this peace conference turns into the Sand Creek massacre
• Colonel John M. Chivington promised safety to the natives with the white flag, but he ended up killing 200 natives- mostly women and children.
• Natives never trust Americans again
• This was described as one of the "foulest and most unjustifiable crimes in America"
• There were lots of witnesses, and this massacre lead to unexpected consequences
• Great Sioux Wars
• Lasted 2 years
• American Military vs Natives
• Largest Anti-native campaign in American history
• George A. Custer was an insecure leader of a 210 man military.
• Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska all become combat zones
• Custer goes to the Little Bighorn Encampment
• There were supposedly no warrior men there, and when Custer finds this out, he wants to kill the women and children and lie about it saying that there were warrior men there.
• Custer and his men ride in in a straight line, but what they don't know is that 2400 native warrior men are back to check on their wives and children.
• Custer's men are slaughtered and this becomes known as "Custer's Last Stand"
• Natives were sent to reservations where the land was not valuable, there was no water on the land, and no agriculture.
• Disease and starvation were common within reservations
• Natives were fenced in a forced to decide whether they wanted to stay within the reservation and starve or jump the fence and risk getting shot.
• In 1888 there is a massive flu outbreak, resulting in a high death rate.
• One native who is sick claims to have died and visited the spirit world where his ancestors tell him that a native savoir is coming.
• Ghost Dance
• This is practiced on new moons and is inter-tribal in order to bring the native savoir.
• These dances give hope to the hopeless natives, but they frightened white authorities, so the American Army bans this dance
• This makes natives believe that the dance is working
• On December 29, 1890 a big party at the reservation, Wounded Knee in South Dakota.
• The Ghost Dance is taking place, so Americans show up and command natives to stop dancing.
• One of the soldiers guns "accidentally goes off" and kills 200 people.
• The decimation of the buffalo
• Whites target buffalo because natives outside of reservations are following them
• In 1750 - 30 mill buffalo
• In 1850 - 10 mill
• In 1900 - only a few hundred are left
• Colonel Richard Dodge said "Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone"

The New West

• "Americanization" of Natives
• Native children are primarily the ones being Americanized
• Native parents can't save their children or they will get killed
• Native children were taken into American families and treated like workers.
• Americans want the natives to mesh with society as adults, but they don't because they don't appear white.
• Dawes Severalty Act 1887
• Division of Native land, split into 160 acre plots
• There is a lot of drug abuse, no education, and no money
• In 25 years if you were a "good" Native, you got the deed to your land
• All land that was left over was sold
• 1887-1934 - Natives lost 86 million/130 million acres of land.
• Sodbusters - people making their homes out of sod
• Houses were heated with buffalo chips
• Homestead act of 1862
• Immigrants took advantage of this land offered
• You would live on the land for 5 years and as long as you improved it in some way, you could claim it as your own.
• The land was cheap, but farming was not
• Horse, livestock, wagons, wells, lumber, fencing, seed, and fertilizer are all needed to farm
• Crop prices continued to drop
• Everyone was in debt for their whole life
• Broken Plow is a big deal
• Locust storms provided food for desperate hungry people
• 1890 open revolt system of corruption
• First it is bankers vs farmers
• then north vs south and west
• The west is largely male, for every 1 woman there was 110 men.
• Rape becomes a problem
• There was safety in numbers
• 1890-loss of frontier line
• Nowhere can we find 5 square miles with less than 1 person
• This is a turning point for the USA
• Frederick Turner shaped national character with his frontier thesis stating that rugged individualism was gone and it was time to build cities
• Rural vs Urban lll