Contextual Essay

Once the Compromise of 1877 effectively ended the tumultuous period of Reconstruction, profound changes transformed the country into a new, post-war industrial nation. Many of these changes, which included the continued settlement of the West, the growth of cities, and a dramatic demographic rise from Asian, Mexican, and European immigration, merely continued trends that began prior to the Civil War. Each of them contributed to the enormous growth of the country in both population and land mass. As a result of this expansion, fifteen new states entered the union between 1850 and 1912.

Territorial Expansion and Westward Movement

Migration increased the population of the American West by almost 400 percent, but the population of cities, especially in the Northeast, grew at almost twice the rate of the rest of the country. Those centers with populations of over 100,000 increased by twenty percent between 1870 and 1900, with the cities of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia becoming home to more than one million people. The Civil War and Reconstruction encouraged significant movement throughout the country: from South to North, North to South, from East to West, and from rural to urban areas. The ease of travel made possible by the expanding rail system lowered the risks considerably as well. Native Americans often had little choice in their migration: for others, the decision to move was a voluntary one motivated predominantly by economic independence and opportunity.

In 1976, historian Nell Painter profiled one group of freedmen, known as the Exodusters, who moved from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas to seek land ownership in Kansas. Traditionally, historians have viewed the American West as an "escape valve," a place where people like the Exodusters could start a new life. For years, the theories of Frederick Jackson Turner dominated the interpretation of the region. Turner's thesis, which he propounded in 1893, described the frontier as a line that advanced across the country from east to west. With each move west, the yeoman farmer, the hero of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian republic, redefined the meaning and application of independence, innovation, and democracy. As long as "free land" remained available, America could retain its democratic, agrarian nature. Earl Pomeroy, Richard Etulain, Howard Lamar, and Gerald Nash challenged Turner in viewing the West not as something unique but as a colony of the East (similar to those of imperial nations throughout history). Pomeroy argued that Westerners were more imitators than innovators and encouraged research on internal migration, cultural and institutional replication, and adaptation. Whereas Turner viewed the West primarily as a rural place, Pomeroy saw the region as more urban, characterized not by wilderness but by cities, towns, communities, and institutions commonplace in the East.

Former slaves and many others, however, bought into the agrarian dream, believing that land ownership offered freedom and independence. The federal government had encouraged this belief, a mindset which dated back, at the very least, to the Northwest Ordinance of 1785. The 1862 Homestead Act, passed during the Civil War, hoped to encourage further movement and stimulate the economy by offering 160 acres of public land free to anyone who would settle on and develop it. Successful farming and land development proved more difficult than expected. In more arid areas, particularly the Southwest, water (taken for granted in the humid East) was a precious commodity; in the Plains, a series of "wet years" falsely convinced settlers that "rain follows the plow." An 1878 report issued by engineer and Western surveyor John Wesley Powell warned that a scarcity of water would eventually choke Western settlement, but few heeded his advice.

For many single families, the costs of irrigation were prohibitive without joining a district of some kind. Many entrepreneurs waived the family farm idea and created large corporate farms for profit rather than simply for sustenance, a practice known as agribusiness. Land speculators often undermined the idea of the yeoman farmer by buying or otherwise cheating individual landowners out of their property and creating vast agricultural empires. Western settlers also found business and economic opportunities in mining and ranching. Still, the government continued to pass laws to foster the agrarian dream through the Timber Culture Act (1873) and the Desert Land Act (1877). Each time, it offered larger and larger tracts of land, but insisted that farming was an individual-not a corporate-endeavor. In 1889, the government created the Committee of Irrigation and Arid Lands to investigate the practicability of storage reservoirs. In 1894, the Carey Act granted each state one million dollars to irrigate and sell-off public lands to individual landowners. Complicating matters even further, a whole group of people with different ideas about resources, land ownership, and settlement claimed the so-called "public lands" as their own. Inevitably, their claims led to conflicts.

Historians Richard White and Patricia Limerick have framed Western history around the concepts of conquest and cultural interaction. They argue that the mass migration westward had a devastating impact on Native American life by the end of the nineteenth century. As western migration increased, the U.S. government continued to deal with Indians as sovereign nations. Several conflicts ended in treaties and the establishment of the reservation system-the idea of reserving large parcels of land for Native American ownership and use. As the hunger for land grew, the government repeatedly undermined the treaties, causing more outrage and, at times, violent retaliation from some tribes. In the 1860s, treaties secured 150 million acres as Indian lands, but twenty years later two-thirds of those lands were filled with non-Indian settlers.

Sometimes, the treaties signed did not have the approval of the entire tribe or even the tribes' official leaders. In the case of the Cheyenne, the discovery of gold in their homeland led to their relocation elsewhere, but hunger and resentment spurred many to return to their old hunting grounds, resulting in the Sand Creek massacre. After being forcibly relocated and imprisoned in New Mexico, the Navajo struck a treaty in 1868 with the U.S. government that returned them to their homeland. The treaty also promised water rights and encouraged Navajos to become farmers and cultivate their lands on the model of the recently passed Homestead Act (1862). Irrigation on the reservation remains unfulfilled to this day. Also in 1868, a treaty with the Lakota Sioux granted them a reservation inclusive of their sacred hunting grounds in the Black Hills. Less than a decade later, thousands of prospectors flooded the Black Hills in pursuit of gold. The Lakotas resisted these incursions, which violated the treaty, and their resistance attracted military intervention. The climax of this conflict was the famous Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The Lakota's victory showed that even as America celebrated its Bicentennial, challenges to Western settlement from Indian people remained.

While the Indians won a decisive victory at Little Bighorn, the battle precipitated a tougher policy toward Indians. A new cultural conquest through the policy of assimilation would prevail over the next several decades. By the 1870s, the government recruited Indian children into boarding schools to encourage them to abandon their traditional cultures and embrace American ones. This policy also included the Dawes Allotment Act (1887) which carved up the land for individual Indian ownership in an effort to encourage widely held American values. It also destroyed the reservation system.

In addition to the Dawes Act, the government opened up more Indian lands to white settlement, sometimes through elaborate land claim "events" like the Oklahoma Land Rush (which allowed non-Indians to claim the Indian territory of the "Five Civilized Tribes" fifty years after their forced removal there). The government advertised its land program both at home and abroad, inviting immigrants to join in the post-war growth and recovery of the country by offering "free land" through one or more of its land distribution acts.

By the 1890s, government failures to provide the resources promised in treaties produced widespread poverty and hunger among Indian people. This unrest helped sparked an inter-tribal spiritual movement of resistance known as the Ghost Dance. The practice led to much suspicion and, eventually, to several conflicts ending with a massacre of Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. However, Indians continued to practice traditions and adjust to the demands of the changing nation. While armed conflict presumably ended, tribes continued to pursue their traditions, treaty rights, and eventually their rights as Americans.

New Immigration

Over 25 million people entered the United States between 1866 and 1915. The railroad encouraged migration out West, and the safer and speedier travel of the steamship encouraged migration from abroad as well. The lure of land also pulled immigrants to the expanding United States from the 1870s through World War I. By 1880, Europeans suffering under the effects of industrialization on rural economies or living in cramped cities had heard of the vast spaces in the West. The United States served as a convenient "escape-valve" for these peoples and societies, offering higher wages and more freedom.

Prior to the 1880s, the Chinese were the primary immigrant group in the Far West and, with their population reaching 50,000 by 1860, provided a ready pool of labor. Racism and competition for jobs led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (Japanese and Mexican immigrants eventually filled the labor needs in later years). With the exception of the restrictions against the Chinese, however immigration continued generally unimpeded until 1924. Informal employment networks recruited thousands of workers at a time when Mexico's own government reorganization and modernization forced peasants into debt peonage and displaced whole villages. Many of those who lost their land traveled a short distance to America with plans eventually to return, but the administration of Porfirio Diaz and the subsequent Mexican Revolution encouraged further immigration. Thus, financial pressures and continued hardship at home forced Mexican immigrants to remain in a country that did not welcome their naturalization or citizenship. Like the European immigrants in the East, Mexicans who largely lived in poverty and isolation, provided labor for "factories in the field," producing the raw materials of industrial capitalism.

Historical and sociological interpretations of immigration have changed dramatically over the years. In his work on Asian-Americans, Ronald Takaki emphasized the institutionalization of racism in California where "whiteness" emerged as criteria for citizenship, as evidenced by alien land laws which based ownership rights on citizen status. In spite of the free labor ideology, cheap labor and capitalism often succeeded in establishing a labor class based on race and immigration. While exclusion laws curbed Asian immigration, Mexican immigration continued to the point where newer American settlers viewed all Mexicans as foreigners, even those who lived in the territory at the time of the Mexican War.

Issues of assimilation, acculturation, and adjustment have dominated the historiography of American immigration, particularly with regard to European immigrants. While the West continued to be attractive for Western and Northern Europeans-particularly Germans-the largest group, Eastern Europeans, settled primarily in eastern cities. Before 1880, 200,000 Southern and Eastern Europeans had emigrated to America, but by 1910 their numbers had climbed to over 8.4 million. These immigrants were not always welcomed with open arms, but they filled the menial jobs of an industrializing country, providing a cheap and essential labor force where as much as 30 percent of the industrial workforce was foreign born. In his classic work The Uprooted, Oscar Handlin argued that the individual immigrant responded to the pressures and opportunities of his new environment and blended into a new culture. The stress of immigration, he explained, tore families and communities apart. Inevitably (and painfully), each person would melt, or assimilate, into American society.

Other scholars have challenged Handlin's theories. These historians have accused Handlin of not only homogenizing the experiences of diverse immigrants groups but also failing to recognize the tendency of immigrants to preserve their old political, economic, and cultural institutions. In The Transplanted, John Bodnar highlights these issues and examines the intersection of immigrants' experiences with capitalism. These newcomers confronted a "new world" economic order but adjusted to it through networks of immigrant families and the maintenance of ethnic, cultural, and community ties. In Round-Trip to America, Mark Wyman emphasizes the impact of temporary immigration to America whereby many people came to America not to stay but to advance their standing in their home country to which they would eventually return. These workers often refused to assimilate or adopt American customs and language, but they brought back new American skills. Most recently, scholars of immigration have determined that adjustment varied from group to group or individual to individual. Ultimately, support could come in the form of family, neighborhood enclaves, native language newspapers, and social organizations. Immigrants with immediate concerns of survival also looked to political bosses and the urban political machine for aid.

Urbanization

All of this immigration fueled the growth of cities across America, but particularly in the East and Midwest. Urbanization generated many unforeseen problems in areas of sanitation, disease, housing, overcrowding, crime and general "immorality." Many native citizens often blamed immigrants for aggravating such problems. Some of the most influential depictions of these conditions came from photographs taken by Jacob Riis and published in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives. However, immigrant settlement shaped the landscape of urban America, crowding in to inner-cities and creating distinctive neighborhoods.

While demographic growth certainly contributed to the rise of the cities, industrialization and technological innovation served as the driving forces behind urbanization. As both David Nye and David Noble argue, technology would provide a new urban aesthetic for American prosperity through skyscrapers, bridges, and the infrastructure of the day's inventions: electricity, transportation and communication.

America's growing demographic and economic power brought profound change to the country, but also to several more parts of the world. While the nation remained relatively isolationist when it came to world affairs, geographic expansion continued as Americans invoked manifest destiny in order to feed the growing economy with new markets and access to resources. Even after the admission of fifteen more states allowed America to claim land from coast to coast, the United States acquired several more territories up and down the western hemisphere, including Alaska and Hawaii. These actions set the stage for America's more global role in the twentieth century.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People 2nd Ed., Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973.

McWilliams, Carey. Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1939.

Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Nye, David. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990.

Painter, Nell Irwin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Wyman, Mark, Round Trip to America: Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.