History Us Essay

The Dawes make out, also known as the General Allotment Act of 1887, was in theory meant to protect the property rights of original peoples during an anticipated body politic rush when Unassigned Lands in present-day Oklahoma were opened for settlement. Its sponsor, Senator Henry Dawes (R-Massachusetts), was a believer in the power of land ownership to civilize Native peoples, defining the term as the wearing of civilized (i. e., manufactured and/or Euro-American type) clothing, the practice of agriculture, residing in homes made of wood and/or brick, the use of horse-drawn vehicles, formal schooling for children, consumption of alcohol and the ownership of property (Oates, 2000). While Dawes intentions may have been sincere, the genius of the Act and its results demonstrate that, unlike his detractor, Senator Henry Moore (R-Colorado) who had actually lived in the West and had a better comprehension of Western land issues Dawes had myopic belowstanding of indigenous cultur e and traditions. In fact, the U. S.government had spent the better composition of a century in attempts to register native peoples and individuals. The Dawes Act was an attempt to bribe Indians with promises of land allotments prior to the land rush, partly in compensation for treatment of the previous 100 years. Not surprisingly, umteen Indians were not particularly trusting. Wars against, and subsequent relocation of the Nez Perce, Sioux, Yakama and opposite western tribes were not far in the past even the painful forced relocation of the Cherokee and other Southeastern peoples a half-century before was within support memory of some.Fearing reprisals, many Indians who had ref utilize to submit relocations in the past would not sign the Dawes Rolls. Either (Oates, 2000). another(prenominal) provision of the Dawes Act required Indians to give up their addicted names and take on a more English-sounding name in that locationfore, some unmatched whose name might translate as Run ning Bear would wind up having to register as Richard Bill, for example. This made it all too easy for government agents to slip in the names of friends and family members, resulting in the transfer of Indian lands to semipolitical cronies (Oates, 2000).The Dawes Act appears to contain an interesting conflict whereas Section Six refers to Land Patents which according to the law, grants the landholder unconditional rights to said property in perpetuity, Section Ten asserts sexual relation right of Eminent Domain, allowing the government to confiscate the land for any public use upon making just compensation (USC, 1887), creating a large loophole that was taken value of often in the ensuing four decades.The record is clear nearly half of the treaty land passed into the possession of non-native settlers, and the Meriam Report of 1928 clearly showed how government agents had used provisions of the Dawes Act illegally to deprive indigenous peoples of their property people who had ve ry little concept of land ownership in the Euro-American sense on the first place. Most Native societies were build on communal living within the context of an extended clan- human relationship grouping, which more often was matrilineal.This is significant, because of gender roles traditionally, males were the hunters, while females garner or among the few Native peoples that practiced agriculture at all engaged in the cultivation of food plants. The imposition of Industrial-Age and hyper-patriarchal Victorian values in which the man was the head of a small nuclear family dependent upon a capitalist system led to the disintegration and ultimate destruction of their traditional kinship support system (Norton, 2003). Ultimately, this was yet some other divide and conquer strategy that allowed more Indian lands to pass into the control of Euro-American settlers.II. Reconstruction was an attempt on the part of the U. S. federal government to gradually bring the states of the former Confederacy stomach into the union and resolve social issues of the conflict. The initial phase of Reconstruction began in 1863 under Abraham Lincoln and his successor, Andrew buttocksson. Lincolns intentions were to restore the Southern states as quickly and with as little rancor as possible his moderate program mandated that as soon as 10% of a former Confederate states electorate signed a loyalty oath, that state could then form a government body and send representatives to Washington D.C. During the mid-term elections of 1866 however, Congress fell under the control of hard-liners of Johnsons own party. These Radical Republicans most likely out of vindictiveness to struggled ex-Confederates quite than any genuine concern for African-Americans attempted to enforce instant equality onto Southern society. This Radical phase of Reconstruction lasted from 1866 to 1873, and emphasized civil rights and customary suffrage for freed blacks, many of whom were appointed to offices for which many were not necessarily qualified.Numerous well(p)-meaning Northerners moved to the South as well with the intentions of educating blacks and providing relief for blacks and whites displaced by the war however, they were accompanied by a large number of fortune seekers, who became known as Carpetbaggers. Along with free blacks and native white southern Republicans known as Scalawags, the Carpetbaggers formed a Republican coalition that managed to gain control of every southern state except for Virginia (Norton, 2003).The third phase of Reconstruction started when conservative participatory coalitions of white supremacists known as Redeemers began taking back state legislatures, a process that was complete by 1877. (The former Confederacy would not elect another Republican president for 103 years). It would appear at least from the perspective of a Southern landowner or former landowner that such a happen was inevitable. Many southern slaveholders operated under a sincere belief (misguided as it was) that their Negroes were better off under the care of their masters.When slaves went on strike, and even deserted plantations, surrendering themselves to moving Union troops, there were genuine feelings of betrayal. Meanwhile, Northerners often had little love for blacks for example, an 1863 law that allowed rich whites to buy their way out of the draft led to perceptions among working-class whites that they were creation expected to die for the benefit of blacks this resulted in major riots in New York and Detroit in which many blacks were attacked and killed (Zinn, 2003).Once the white supremacists were back in control, they wasted little time in excluding Afro-Americans from mainstream society, banning them from restaurants, schools, and other establishments as well as suppressing the vote in a number of ways. When challenged in 1883 under the Fourteenth Amendment, the independent Court interpreted it in a way that made it useless as a guar antor of civil rights, essentially nullifying the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The volume ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to states only, and not private citizens therefore, discrimination by private individuals was completely within the law.In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Harlan himself a former slave owner wrote that discrimination was a badge of slavery, and therefore illegal under the Thirteenth Amendment banning the peculiar institution, as well as Article 4, Section 2 of the Fourteenth the citizens atomic number 53 born in the U. S. of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States (Zinn, 2003). Nonetheless, the woo then as now was swinging toward interpretations that favored Big Business and corporate capitalism, which has never had any use for equality of any kind.This eventually paved the way for Plessy v. Fergusson and the subsequent decades of Jim Crow apartheid in the south. III. On the eve of the F irst World War, class struggle between the workers and corporate capitalism was intensifying. On one side were socialist movements whose members clearly saw what the war was about the struggle between capitalist power-brokers, through their bought-and-paid-for national governments, over land, colonies, resources, power and wealth no(prenominal) of which in the working class, who nonetheless wound up fighting an dying in the trenches for these concepts, had any stake whatsoever.On the other side then as now were the corporate capitalists, who had a great deal at stake over the outcome of the war. American corporations had substantial investments in British companies and vice-versa meanwhile, Britain was draining its treasury as well as its people for a war that historians today has never been shown to bring any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life (Zinn, 2003). The German announcement in April of 1917 that they would sink any ship carrying supplies to their enemi es (i. e. , Britain) has long been cited as a reason that Wilson eventually sought a declaration of war from Congress.However, German-Americans had for some time been sending aid to the ancestral homeland, while the British had been interfering with the rights of U. S. citizens on the high seas during the same period. Because of economic earthly concern however, Wilson had to find other reasons to enter the war on the side of the Allies (Zinn, 2003). According to historian Richard Hofstader, there were a number of economic reasons that shaped Wilsons policy on the war a recession that had begun in 1914 had begun to ease starting the following year because of orders by the Allies that totaled over $2 billion by 1917.By the time the war had begun, foreign investment in the U. S. totaled $3 ? billion. Foreign markets were considered vital to the U. S. economy. Since the outbreak of hostilities, Britain was buying not only durable goods and war materiel from U. S. companies, but since the lift on a ban on private bank loans to the Allies, were taking out many interest-bearing loans as well. The result is that the U. S. economy became closely tied to British victory. African-American author and activist W. E. B. DuBois clearly saw that the wealth of the U. S.and Europe was built on the backs of people in the lands which they had colonized chiefly Africa and Asia, control over which were at the heart of the conflict. War, he said was a safety valve for the tensions of class conflict. warfare created an artificial community of interest between the corporatist/investor class and that of the workers (Zinn, 2003). This was not lost on the workers of the nation. Only 73,000 men volunteered in during the first six weeks following the declaration, and there was little indication of public support.Socialist anti-war rallies throughout the country were attended by thousands of working people protesting the war and corporate profiteering. A conservative newspaper publisher in Akron, Ohio admitted that the nation had never embarked upon a more unpopular war (Zinn, 2003). The federal government at the behest of the corporate interests who then (as now) had the legislature in its back pocket had little choice but institute legal and punitive measures which included both military conscription and the Espionage Act a law of ambiguous constitutionality passed for the purpose of silencing dissent (Oates, 2000).While ostensibly the law was to protect the nation from spies, a clause provided for a penalty of up to twenty years chains for anyone found guilty of causing insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty, although another clause stated that nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or suppressany discussion, comment, or criticism of the acts or policies of the Government. Nonetheless, Socialist leader Charles Schenk was arrested in September 1917 for the distribution of leaflets arguing that conscription was a violation of th e Thirteenth Amendment.Another Socialist, Eugene V. Debs, was arrested the following June for making a public speech against the war. Eventually, nine hundred people were incarcerated under the Espionage Act and dissenters buried under an intense propaganda campaign by the government and their corporate lapdogs in the media. IV. Prohibition the perhaps well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to outlaw the consumption of alcohol and spirituous liquors dates back to the beginning of the republic. During compound times, moderate alcohol consumption was tolerated, but over-indulgence was not.Alcohol was a gift of God, while drunkenness was seen as an abuse of that gift, but alcohol itself was not seen as a problem only the behaviors associated with its excessive consumption. By the time of the revolution however, this had changed significantly. The shift from an agrarian to an urban society brought with it the usual consequences of poverty and unemployment, which in strain resulted in crime. With a strongly Puritan-influenced mindset, most devout Americans were unable to make the connection between poverty and crime, so alcohol became the scapegoat.The complete prohibition of intoxicant beverages was promulgated by religious Protestant groups on the grounds that it was the cause of crime and domestic violence. Prohibition movements met with limited success in the years rill up to the Civil War. After a twenty-year hiatus, the concept was revived by the Womans Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party, which gained significant political power in the forty-year period on either side of 1900.Prohibition laws were enacted locally throughout the nation, even to the point of becoming state law in Kansas. A number of southern states as well as individual counties within those states, with their streak of religious conservatism and intolerance, followed suit (Norton, 2003). (This patchwork of laws had some rather odd results that persist to the present da y for example, Jack Daniels Whiskey is still manufactured in Lynchburg, Tennessee, but local ordinance makes it illegal to sell or purchase it there. )