Persuasive Essay 2 Pages Double Space
I am required to write two pages of persuasive essay about the following topics that were covered in ethnic studies class. These are the topics that were covered in the last 4 weeks:
1- The Indian Question
2- Blacks in the Urban North
3- A shtetl in America
4- Pacific crossing
The PowerPoint for these topics are provided
The main point of the exercise is two-fold: one, to demonstrate one’s understanding of the key points; two, to apply the lessons learned by integrating insights from personal experience or other venues. Please remember that these reflection papers should not be a summary of historical events, but they should be largely an analysis of an issue. A good persuasive essay offers the author’s perspective based on a body of reasonable evidence, well-constructed arguments and supporting statements, and personal style or creativity. Each reflection paper should be no more than 2-pages, double-spaced using 12-point font.
Blacks in the Urban North
From Jim Crow to the Land of Hope
Ghettoization: Racialized Space
Black Leaders: the Harlem Renaissance
Assimilation of African Americans
Black Population in Northern Cities
1910 1920
Detroit 5,000 40,800
Cleveland 8,400 34,400
Chicago 44,000 109,400
New York 91,700 152,400
The Great Migration
Similar to immigrants coming to the U.S., African Americans began migrating out of the Deep South to the urban centers in the north.
Why? What compelled them to leave? What pulled them into the northern cities?
Post-Emancipation Dilemma
Blacks in the South could not get out of the cycle of economic bondage despite their free status.
Public lynching, KKK and limited opportunities circumscribed their way of life; many saw this in biblical terms as the Babylonian captivity.
1871 – U. Grant signs Civil Rights Act of 1871, a.k.a. Ku Klux Klan Act – federal prosecution against hate group violence during the Reconstruction Era
Black Codes replaced the slave codes – Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896
Justice John Marshall Harlan
1833 b. – 1911 d.
1877-1911 Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the U.S.
Best known for his great dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which established the principle of “separate but equal”
Who was Plessy?
On June 7, 1892, a 30-year-old colored shoemaker named Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, but under Louisiana law, he was considered black and therefore required to sit in the “Colored” car.
Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
?
John Howard Ferguson
A lawyer from MA who had previously declared the Separate Car Act “unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states“
In Plessy’s case he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within LA
On appeal, the Supreme Court upheld the separate but equal doctrine
*
The judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act “unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states” [3] . In Plessy’s case, however, he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within Louisiana. He found Plessy guilty of refusing to leave the white car [4] .
Harlan’s Dissent:
Equal Protection
“In the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. . .”
Harlan on Separation of Races
“The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.”
Impact on Race Relations?
“What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments, which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens? That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation. . .”
What opportunities were present in the North?
Pull Forces of Black Migration
Land of Hope in the North
WWI: Stopped immigration from Europe and drained workers from industries
Niche in factories: blacks were recruited first as strikebreakers and later as permanent workers
Molding, warehouses, yard work, steel foundry, etc.
Social and psychological freedom of the North: transition from slavery to desegregation. A new generation of blacks emerged.
By 1930, some 2 million blacks migrated out of the South into the northern cities.
What were the challenges in the North?
Racialized Geography
The inability of Western cities to cope with the political and everyday encounters with difference has imported (post)colonialism into the cities and produced spatially segregated and racialized geographies. Imperialist and (post)colonial ideologies are embedded in the cities, not only in relation to social and cultural conditions but also in imaginative geographies of urban areas and social/discursive construction of places. (Simonsen, 2008)
Colonial ideologies of space
Unequal access to privileges, rewards, social capital
racialization of space and the spatialization of race: plantation, prison, sharecropper’s cabin, ghetto, reservation, tenements
Spatial control (confinement and containment) coincides with racial control: neighborhood improvement associations, restrictive covenants, redlining, and segregated schools and neighborhoods.
Neighborhood Improvement Associations
Prevented blacks and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods
They threatened boycotts of real estate agents who sold homes to blacks
What are the Restrictive Covenants?
The Restrictive Covenants
These documents were contractual agreements among property owners stating that they would not permit a black person to own, occupy, or lease the property.
In the event of the covenant’s violation, any party to the agreement could call upon the courts for enforcement and could sue the transgressor for damages.
These restrictive covenants were employed frequently and with considerable effectiveness to maintain the color line until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unenforceable.
Blacks in Industries: opportunities and challenges
Black labor became critical to auto, steel, meatpacking, mining, longshoring, and other basic industries.
Black exclusion: 24 national labor unions barred blacks completely.
Race riots in Chicago, Detroit, and New York demonstrated the resiliency of race in industries.
Violence as a Method of Maintaining a Color Barrier
Between 1900 and 1920 there were numerous incidents of racial violence to prevent blacks from moving into white neighborhoods.
In the four-year period between 1917 and 1921, some fifty-eight black homes were bombed, which comes out to one bombing in every twenty one days.
One black real estate agent, Jesse Binga, had his home and office bombed seven times in one year.
Black Ghettoization – racialized space
Not a natural phenomenon
History of exclusion and violence
North practiced a different form of racial accommodation than in the South.
In the 1950s, the suburbanization contributes to the on-going problem of racial segregation.
Responses to the Ghettoization?
Marcus Garvey
Starts the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Black nationalist: attempted to redefine blackness by creating an independent nation in Africa by African Americans and other dispersed Africans.
Garvey emphasized black capitalism and urged them invest in his own shipping company, the Black Star Line Corporation, as well as a chain of restaurants and grocery stores, laundries, a hotel, and a printing press.
Garvey sort of dies in obscurity after serving two years in prison for mail fraud related to his shipping company. He was exiled to Jamaica by Herbert Hoover and never returned to the U.S.
The Harlem Renaissance
Cultural explosion of African American artists, writers, poets, singers, philosophers, and dancers emerge out of the ghettos.
People like James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston greatly impacted American cultural and literary landscape.
What does it mean to be black in America?
Black Leadership Emerges
Ida B. Wells: outspoken Tennessean who spoke against lynching and for women’s rights (along with Susan B. Anthony)
Richard Wright: author of Black Boy and Native Son.
W.E.B. Dubois: founder of NAACP, the Crisis (magazine)
Phillip Randolph: Organizer of Chicago’s the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP)
On Double Consciousness
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self…
Excerpted from W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk.
A Dream Deferred
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load
Or does it explode?
What does assimilation mean for African Americans?
Pacific Crossings
Economic and Political Segregation of Japanese Americans
Push forces
1853 Matthew Perry opens Japan to the West
1868 Meiji Restoration – from Shogunate (feudalism) to Imperial rule – Westernization
Taxation for the military and industrialization
Pauperization: distressed agricultural class
Hawaii and the U.S.
1885-1924
200,000 to Hawaii (40% of the population)
180,000 to the U.S. mainland
Gender migration
Picture brides: contributed to gender balance
46% woman in 1920
First sons stayed in homeland
Presence of women helped ease life on the plantations
Strikes
Hawaiian Sugar Plantation
Pitted one ethnic group against another
Lower wages
Replace workers
Suppress discontent
Class hierarchy based on ethnicity: lunas vs. field workers
Inter-ethnic solidarity
Japanese and Filipino Labor Unions
Hawaii Laborers’ Association
Other groups joined: Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese
Pidgin English
The Mainland
2% of the pop. of CA
Anti-Japanese hostility
Followed the Chinese experience
Success in agriculture: from contract and sharecropping to leasing and ownership
CA’s fruit and vegetable:
70% of strawberries
67% of tomatoes
44% of onions
George Shima: dominated potato production
1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement
Why an agreement?
Stipulated “voluntary” prohibition of Japanese laborers to enter the U.S.
This applied to Hawaii because of its incorporation into the U.S. in 1900
Agreement reached between Japan and the U.S.
Women migration permitted because they were technically not “laborers”
Alien Land Law
(1913 Webb-Heney Act)
California passes alien land law prohibiting “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from buying or leasing it for longer than three years
Other states followed: AZ (1917); WA, MO, and AR (1921); UT and WY (WWII)
1920 Alien Land Act: amendment to the 1913 Act, in order to close loopholes
February 26, 1913
The New York Times
Ozawa v. U.S. (1922)
Justice Sutherland delivered the opinion:
The appellant is a person of the Japanese race born in Japan. He applied, on October 16, 1914, to the United States District Court for the Territory of Hawaii to be admitted as a citizen of the United States. His petition was opposed by the United States District Attorney for the District of Hawaii.
Including the period of his residence in Hawaii appellant had continuously resided in the United States for 20 years.
He was a graduate of the Berkeley, Cal., high school, had been nearly three years a student in the University of California, had educated his children in American schools, his family had attended American churches and he had maintained the use of the English language in his home.
That he was well qualified by character and education for citizenship is conceded.
Derivative Citizenship: Woman marrying a foreigner lost her U.S. citizenship
Marriage to an alien was a voluntary act of expatriation (MacKenzie v. Hare; 239 U.S. 299)
Expatriation through marriage: became aliens in their own country; potentially a woman without a country, if husband’s country did not recognize or adopt wives
Protecting the body politic: height of immigration
Marriages bet. Chinese and whites criminal and void
Immigration law tightened: deportation for infractions
Served as immigration restriction against American women married to foreigners
Exception: Divorce or death – foreign woman retained citizenship; American woman regained citizenship that was lost for marrying a foreigner
1907 Expatriation Act
Independent citizenship to women
Severed the tie between marriage and citizenship
Times have changed:
19th Amendment: Voting rights – equal rights between sexes brewing – property and contract rights
Changes in civil rights also put pressure on political rights
Exceptions:
1. Am. citizen marrying an ineligible woman, he retains citizenship. The converse, however, is not true.
2. Five year waiting period for alien man; but only one year for woman.
3. Living abroad after marriage differentiates man and woman.
1922 Cable Act
American-born, married a Chinese citizen in 1924
Husband dies; widower attempts to return to the U.S. and resume her citizenship privileges
Denied re-entry: she is considered a foreigner who now needs to be naturalized
Naturalization law prohibits Asian woman: “an immigrant born in the U.S. who has lost his U.S. citizenship shall be considered as having been born in the country of which he is a citizen or subject”
Ng Fung Sing, 1925
1924 National Origins Act
Established an immigration quota of 2% based on nationality
Intended to target the Southern and Eastern Europeans (Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, etc.)
Closed the loophole in the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement – voluntary restriction of laborers
Denied entry to “aliens ineligible for naturalized citizenship”
Ended Asian immigration to the U.S. (limited to about 100 per anum)
Historical Contexts
Rise of Eugenics
Identification
Segregation
Separation
Sterilization
U.S. Supreme Court: Buck v. Bell (1927)
Comparisons
Compare and contrast the experiences of two ethnic or racial groups. Be sure to highlight:
Voluntary immigration/forced migration
Contributions and struggles: social, economic, political, cultural
Major defining issues for the development of communities
How could we enrich the American history based on our knowledge of ethnic and racial histories?
Land of Hope in the North
WWI: Stopped immigration from Europe and drained workers from industries
Niche in factories: blacks were recruited first as strikebreakers and later as permanent workers
Molding, warehouses, yard work, steel foundry, etc.
Social and psychological freedom of the North: transition from slavery to desegregation. A new generation of blacks emerged.
By 1930, some 2 million blacks migrated out of the South into the northern cities.
What were the challenges in the North?
Racialized Geography
The inability of Western cities to cope with the political and everyday encounters with difference has imported (post)colonialism into the cities and produced spatially segregated and racialized geographies.
Imperialist and (post)colonial ideologies are embedded in the cities, not only in relation to social and cultural conditions but also in imaginative geographies of urban areas and social/discursive construction of places. (Simonsen, 2008)
Colonial ideologies of space
racialization of space and the spatialization of race: plantations, prisons, schools, ghetto, reservations, tenements
Unequal access to privileges, rewards, resources
Spatial control (confinement and containment) coincides with racial control: neighborhood improvement associations, restrictive covenants, redlining, and segregated schools and neighborhoods.
A Shtetl in America
The Jewish American Experience
Yiddish – “little town”; German – Stadt – “city, town”
5
Factors of analysis
Immigration: push-pull
Occupation: niches
Assimilation: becoming Americans
Challenges: overcoming differences
Pale of Settlement
Shtetl: ghetto in Russia, ruled by czars
Physically circumscribed and maintained by force
Czar Alexander III, 1881: 5 million lived inside; 200,000 lived outside
Life inside the Pale
Poverty-stricken
Social welfare: mutual aid
Clothes
Food
Medicine
Students: meals and rabbi
Prohibited from living in agricultural areas – ghettos
Violence and persecution
Pogroms
Religious intolerance
Labeled as “Christ killers”:
Destruction of shops and synagogues
Street massacres
Kiev, Ukraine, 1905
Hep Hep riot, Frankfurt, 1819
Mary Antin (1881-1949)
Authored an autobiography, The Promised Land
Born in the Pale of Settlement, Poland/Russia
Came to the US in 1894 at age 13
Antin begins with a portrayal of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia. The environment is one characterized by both external and internal restrictions. The external restrictions began with the geographic confinement of Jews to a certain area, “the Pale” (Antin, 7). Even within this geographic area, Jews were subject to persecution and prejudice, forcing the Jewish population to engage in “humiliating dissimulation” when dealing with officials and Gentiles in general. Jews lived in constant fear of bloody pogroms (often tacitly encouraged by the Government), and were continually required to pay fees to avoid brutalization or to enjoy rights readily available to Gentiles (Antin 10-17). Internal restrictions centered on the rigidity of Jewish religious customs which limited the horizons of people such as Antin’s father (Antin,53). The lot of women was even more restricted since education (which was entirely religious, secular education being effectively denied to Jews) was largely a male prerogative. Even marriages were arranged by families with little input from the bride (Antin,32). Antin compares the lot of women to that of a “treadmill horse” (Antin, 78).
In America, the external restrictions of Russia vanish. Antin notes that in America the immigrant is free to reside, travel and work wherever he pleases (Antin, 160). Above all, education is free, and Antin is free to “fashion my own life” (Antin, 156), as equal under law as any other person and a “fellow citizen” as worthy as the most notable (e.g. George Washington)(Antin, 177). Internal restrictions (immigrant customs) give way too. Antin’s father, who even in Russia was a man aspiring to a new way of life/thinking, permits his wife to pursue Jewish customs so long as orthodoxy does not interfere with American progress (Antin, 195). The collapse of traditional customs as the normative standard for behavior is bewildering to the first generation and leads to a certain disintegration within the family (Antin, 213).
Coming to America
Fled religious persecution
Economic and educational opportunities
Gender balance: 50/50 male/female ratio
Family: 1 out of 4, children
1860s – 200,000 German Jews
1882-1914 – 2 million from Eastern Europe
New Settlement
1914: 1.5 million Jews in New York
Jewish congregations:
1890: 530
1900: 1,769
Tenements in the Lower Eastside, Manhattan, NY
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_1-3.html
Occupation
Two-thirds worked in textile industry
1880-1890: men’s clothing factories doubled, from 736 to 1,554; women’s cloak factories tripled from 236 to 740.
1890s: 50,000 Jewish women worked in the sewing trades, constituting 70% of artisans
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
Membership grew to 100,000 by 1920 in 20 years
Attributed to:
industrial labor movement
Increased demand due to WWI
Radicalization of unions due to Jewish class consciousness
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_3-2.html
Becoming American
Jewish Daily Forward
Forum on life in America: Assimilation
Empowering working people
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_2-2.html
Blending in… losing foreignness (cultural symbols)
Clothing: crucial symbol of civility
Language: lose accent, acquire proper slang
Names: anglicized names
Bochlowitz – Buckley ; Jacobson – Jackson
Stepinsky – Stevens ; Hyman – Howard
Consumerism: seized entrepreneurial opportunities
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_3-3.html
2nd generation dilemma
Opportunities in higher education
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Harvard Professor, Nathan Glazer, reflect on the quota system for Jews
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_4-2.html
Anti-Semitism
Henry Ford, capitalism, and anti-Semitism:
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_5-2.html
Symbolic anti-Semitism:
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_5-3.html
Derivative Citizenship: Woman marrying a foreigner lost her U.S. citizenship
Marriage to an alien was a voluntary act of expatriation (MacKenzie v. Hare; 239 U.S. 299)
Expatriation through marriage: became aliens in their own country; potentially a woman without a country, if husband’s country did not recognize or adopt wives
Protecting the body politic: height of immigration
Marriages bet. Chinese and whites criminal and void
Immigration law tightened: deportation for infractions
Served as immigration restriction against American women married to foreigners
Exception: Divorce or death – foreign woman retained citizenship; American woman regained citizenship that was lost for marrying a foreigner
1907 Expatriation Act
Independent citizenship to women
Severed the tie between marriage and citizenship
Times have changed:
19th Amendment: Voting rights – equal rights between sexes brewing – property and contract rights
Changes in civil rights also put pressure on political rights
Exceptions:
1. Am. citizen marrying an ineligible woman, he retains citizenship. The converse, however, is not true.
2. Five year waiting period for alien man; but only one year for woman.
3. Living abroad after marriage differentiates man and woman.
1922 Cable Act
American-born, married a Chinese citizen in 1924
Husband dies; widower attempts to return to the U.S. and resume her citizenship privileges
Denied re-entry: she is considered a foreigner who now needs to be naturalized
Naturalization law prohibits Asian woman: “an immigrant born in the U.S. who has lost his U.S. citizenship shall be considered as having been born in the country of which he is a citizen or subject”
Ng Fung Sing, 1925
1924 National Origins Act
Established an immigration quota of 3% based on nationality
Intended to target the Southern and Eastern Europeans (Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, etc.)
Closed the loophole in the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement – voluntary restriction of laborers
Denied entry to “aliens ineligible for naturalized citizenship”
Ended Asian immigration to the U.S. (limited to about 100 per anum)
Questions
Consider the similarities and differences between the experience of the early Jewish immigrants and African Americans in northern cities prior to WWII.
Land of Hope in the North
WWI: Stopped immigration from Europe and drained workers from industries
Niche in factories: blacks were recruited first as strikebreakers and later as permanent workers
Molding, warehouses, yard work, steel foundry, etc.
Social and psychological freedom of the North: transition from slavery to desegregation. A new generation of blacks emerged.
By 1930, some 2 million blacks migrated out of the South into the northern cities.
What were the challenges in the North?
Racialized Geography
The inability of Western cities to cope with the political and everyday encounters with difference has imported (post)colonialism into the cities and produced spatially segregated and racialized geographies.
Imperialist and (post)colonial ideologies are embedded in the cities, not only in relation to social and cultural conditions but also in imaginative geographies of urban areas and social/discursive construction of places. (Simonsen, 2008)
Colonial ideologies of space
racialization of space and the spatialization of race: plantations, prisons, schools, ghetto, reservations, tenements
Unequal access to privileges, rewards, resources
Spatial control (confinement and containment) coincides with racial control: neighborhood improvement associations, restrictive covenants, redlining, and segregated schools and neighborhoods.
A Shtetl in America
The Jewish American Experience
Yiddish – “little town”; German – Stadt – “city, town”
5
Factors of analysis
Immigration: push-pull
Occupation: niches
Assimilation: becoming Americans
Challenges: overcoming differences
Pale of Settlement
Shtetl: ghetto in Russia, ruled by czars
Physically circumscribed and maintained by force
Czar Alexander III, 1881: 5 million lived inside; 200,000 lived outside
Life inside the Pale
Poverty-stricken
Social welfare: mutual aid
Clothes
Food
Medicine
Students: meals and rabbi
Prohibited from living in agricultural areas – ghettos
Violence and persecution
Pogroms
Religious intolerance
Labeled as “Christ killers”:
Destruction of shops and synagogues
Street massacres
Kiev, Ukraine, 1905
Hep Hep riot, Frankfurt, 1819
Mary Antin (1881-1949)
Authored an autobiography, The Promised Land
Born in the Pale of Settlement, Poland/Russia
Came to the US in 1894 at age 13
Antin begins with a portrayal of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia. The environment is one characterized by both external and internal restrictions. The external restrictions began with the geographic confinement of Jews to a certain area, “the Pale” (Antin, 7). Even within this geographic area, Jews were subject to persecution and prejudice, forcing the Jewish population to engage in “humiliating dissimulation” when dealing with officials and Gentiles in general. Jews lived in constant fear of bloody pogroms (often tacitly encouraged by the Government), and were continually required to pay fees to avoid brutalization or to enjoy rights readily available to Gentiles (Antin 10-17). Internal restrictions centered on the rigidity of Jewish religious customs which limited the horizons of people such as Antin’s father (Antin,53). The lot of women was even more restricted since education (which was entirely religious, secular education being effectively denied to Jews) was largely a male prerogative. Even marriages were arranged by families with little input from the bride (Antin,32). Antin compares the lot of women to that of a “treadmill horse” (Antin, 78).
In America, the external restrictions of Russia vanish. Antin notes that in America the immigrant is free to reside, travel and work wherever he pleases (Antin, 160). Above all, education is free, and Antin is free to “fashion my own life” (Antin, 156), as equal under law as any other person and a “fellow citizen” as worthy as the most notable (e.g. George Washington)(Antin, 177). Internal restrictions (immigrant customs) give way too. Antin’s father, who even in Russia was a man aspiring to a new way of life/thinking, permits his wife to pursue Jewish customs so long as orthodoxy does not interfere with American progress (Antin, 195). The collapse of traditional customs as the normative standard for behavior is bewildering to the first generation and leads to a certain disintegration within the family (Antin, 213).
Coming to America
Fled religious persecution
Economic and educational opportunities
Gender balance: 50/50 male/female ratio
Family: 1 out of 4, children
1860s – 200,000 German Jews
1882-1914 – 2 million from Eastern Europe
New Settlement
1914: 1.5 million Jews in New York
Jewish congregations:
1890: 530
1900: 1,769
Tenements in the Lower Eastside, Manhattan, NY
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_1-3.html
Occupation
Two-thirds worked in textile industry
1880-1890: men’s clothing factories doubled, from 736 to 1,554; women’s cloak factories tripled from 236 to 740.
1890s: 50,000 Jewish women worked in the sewing trades, constituting 70% of artisans
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
Membership grew to 100,000 by 1920 in 20 years
Attributed to:
industrial labor movement
Increased demand due to WWI
Radicalization of unions due to Jewish class consciousness
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_3-2.html
Becoming American
Jewish Daily Forward
Forum on life in America: Assimilation
Empowering working people
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_2-2.html
Blending in… losing foreignness (cultural symbols)
Clothing: crucial symbol of civility
Language: lose accent, acquire proper slang
Names: anglicized names
Bochlowitz – Buckley ; Jacobson – Jackson
Stepinsky – Stevens ; Hyman – Howard
Consumerism: seized entrepreneurial opportunities
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_3-3.html
2nd generation dilemma
Opportunities in higher education
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Harvard Professor, Nathan Glazer, reflect on the quota system for Jews
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_4-2.html
Anti-Semitism
Henry Ford, capitalism, and anti-Semitism:
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_5-2.html
Symbolic anti-Semitism:
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/watch/clip_5-3.html
Derivative Citizenship: Woman marrying a foreigner lost her U.S. citizenship
Marriage to an alien was a voluntary act of expatriation (MacKenzie v. Hare; 239 U.S. 299)
Expatriation through marriage: became aliens in their own country; potentially a woman without a country, if husband’s country did not recognize or adopt wives
Protecting the body politic: height of immigration
Marriages bet. Chinese and whites criminal and void
Immigration law tightened: deportation for infractions
Served as immigration restriction against American women married to foreigners
Exception: Divorce or death – foreign woman retained citizenship; American woman regained citizenship that was lost for marrying a foreigner
1907 Expatriation Act
Independent citizenship to women
Severed the tie between marriage and citizenship
Times have changed:
19th Amendment: Voting rights – equal rights between sexes brewing – property and contract rights
Changes in civil rights also put pressure on political rights
Exceptions:
1. Am. citizen marrying an ineligible woman, he retains citizenship. The converse, however, is not true.
2. Five year waiting period for alien man; but only one year for woman.
3. Living abroad after marriage differentiates man and woman.
1922 Cable Act
American-born, married a Chinese citizen in 1924
Husband dies; widower attempts to return to the U.S. and resume her citizenship privileges
Denied re-entry: she is considered a foreigner who now needs to be naturalized
Naturalization law prohibits Asian woman: “an immigrant born in the U.S. who has lost his U.S. citizenship shall be considered as having been born in the country of which he is a citizen or subject”
Ng Fung Sing, 1925
1924 National Origins Act
Established an immigration quota of 3% based on nationality
Intended to target the Southern and Eastern Europeans (Italians, Greeks, Russian Jews, etc.)
Closed the loophole in the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement – voluntary restriction of laborers
Denied entry to “aliens ineligible for naturalized citizenship”
Ended Asian immigration to the U.S. (limited to about 100 per anum)
Questions
Consider the similarities and differences between the experience of the early Jewish immigrants and African Americans in northern cities prior to WWII.
The “Indian Question”
From Reservation to Reorganization
The Spirit of Crazy Horse
Struggle to defend the Black Hills
End of Frontier
Market Revolution
Aided by the Transcontinental RR
Incessant immigrant labor supply
Technological advances
Immigrant settlement in the Great Plains
Progress signaled the end of the Indian way of life?
Policies toward Indians? Conflict? Peace?
The Bozeman Trail
The Bozeman Trail enabled settlers and pioneers to reach the West Coast via the Oregon Trail. The trail connected Virginia City (MT) to Wyoming (near Fort Laramie), however it went through the Indian territory. Shoshone, Arapaho, and Lakota Indians resisted the encroachment by the settlers and led to a series of Indian Wars, culminating in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.
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The Oregon Trail
The oldest overland route to the Pacific Northwest; allowed fur trappers and traders to travel by horse and later by wagons.
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Transcontinental RR
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General George A. Custer
West Point graduate
Civil War general
Ordered to fight the Indian Wars
1868 – Custer attacks Cheyennes
Fort Laramie Treaty
1874: Custer’s Black Hills (Lakota – Paha Sapa) Expedition (gold)
1876: Little Big Horn where Custer dies
Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868
Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, General O. O. Augur, J. B. Henderson, Nathaniel G. Taylor, John G. Sanborn, and Samuel F. Tappan, duly appointed commissioners on the part of the United States, and the different bands of the Sioux Nation of Indians, by their chiefs and headmen, whose names are hereto subscribed, they being duly authorized to act in the premises.
http
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www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/four/ftlaram.htm
Red Cloud
Resisted against the incursion by the US Army and gold prospectors along the Bozeman Trail (WY to MT) – 1866
Successful attacks against forts in Wyoming led to the Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868
Lakota possession of Western South Dakota (including Black Hills), MT and WY
Crazy Horse
Fearless warrior, fought alongside Red Cloud during the 1865-68 war (later splintered)
Following the Fort Laramie Treaty, he resisted against the surveying party led by Gen. Custer
Joins forces with Sitting Bull at the battle of Little Big Horn
Sitting Bull
Medicine Man, last to surrender to the US government
Led Sioux and Cheyenne warriors against Custer’s 7th Cavalry (Little Big Horn)
Sioux Territory, 1868-
Peace Policies
Francis Amasa Walker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, raised the “Indian Question,” “what should be done to ensure the survival of the Plains Indians?”
Social Engineering: government management through “grand reservations”
Assimilation
Discipline: boarding school
Self-improvement
Kill the Indian, save the Man
Dawes Act, 1887
Land allotment
Each individual head of family was granted 160 acres – property owners
These lands were ineligible for sale for 25 years – secured entitlement
Citizenship was conferred upon grantees who gave up tribal affiliation
Purpose
Sever the ties with the tribes: tribalism=idleness
independent farmers: independence, self-reliance
Impact
Industrial economy and railroads conflicted with Indian land ownership
Congress passed 23 laws giving right of way to railroad corporations
Loss of land: 17.4 million acres
U.S. Supreme Court (1902 Lone Wolf decision) abrogated a provision of Indian treaty (i.e. the right of Indian tribes to monitor the transfer of lands)
1906 – Burke Act – nullified the 25 year trust provision in the Dawes Act
By 1933, Indians had lost 60% of the 138 million acre land they had owned at the time of the Dawes Act.
Indian New Deal
1934 Indian Reorganization Act:
Cultural pluralism: right to self-government recognized, preservation of Indian culture (arts, crafts, and traditions), Abolished the allotment program and authorized funding for tribal land acquisition.
The following year the votes were counted and 172 tribes (132,426) voted in favor of the law, while 73 tribes (63,467) chose to be excluded.
Navajo tribe resistance: what’s best for Indians should be determined by Indians, not the bureaucrats from Washington, irrespective of their good intentions.