C121 Task 3 - Task 3 WGU C121 PDF

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Task 3 WGU C121...

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Part A: There were several changes during the Reconstruction that effected race relations in America. One of those was the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 which abolished unwilling slavery in the United States while also giving Congress the right to enforce it by “appropriate legislation”. What this meant was that slaves would be permanently free and would not be considered property of their owners any longer. Thus, giving them the freedom to choose where and how they wanted to live. Although the votes to pass the 13th Amendment did not come to pass easily, it was the work of women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in conjunction with the Women’s Loyal National League advocation and petitioning for the abolishment of slavery that helped Congress be able to celebrate in the passing of the 13th Amendment with over a two-thirds vote by two votes than required. The addition of this amendment and the abolishment of slavery were great moments in the history of America (Norton, 2015). The passing of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were other changes to race relations during the Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 and granted citizenship to every person that was born or naturalized in the United States including former slaves while also guaranteeing every citizen “equal protections under the laws”. This amendment would become the basis for several of the landmark Supreme Court decisions made over the years after its adoption. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution adopted in 1870, granted but did not guarantee African American males with the right to vote. The amendment stated that ““The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Even with the amendment in place by the late 1870s Americans saw practices put into place to discriminate

against blacks and prevent them from exercising their right to vote. This was especially the case in the South, and it would be almost another 100 years before legislation was passed to protect the rights of African Americans and their right to vote (Norton, 2015). Finally, the Freedmen’s Bureau which was established by Congress on March 3, 1865 was created to assist the millions of black slaves and poor whites of the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. The responsibility of the agency was to provide the former slaves and whites with food, housing, and medical aid, and establish schools while also offering legal assistance. Facing resistance from the start from not only white Southerners, but President Andrew Johnson who assumed office in 1865 after President Lincoln’s assassination, the Freedmen’s Bureau created precedents while only supposed to having been a temporary agency during the war and for one year afterwards. In February 1866, Congress was presented with a bill to extend the time of the bureau and add new legal powers to it which President Johnson quickly vetoed saying it interfered with states rights. Congress overrode the president’s veto in July of the same year passing a revised version of the bill. With many white Southerners having a hatred for this bill caused a political divide over the bill’s constitutionality. Even with disagreements over how long and what type of assistance the government should provide, the Freedmen’s Bureau had many successes such as acting as social workers within Southern communities where blacks were subjected to ridicule and violence from whites, including from organizations like the Ku Klux Klan that saw the agents as interfering in local affairs because they were assisting blacks. During the years that the bureau was operating it provided food to millions of people and built hospitals and provided medical assistance. They also negotiated labor contracts ex-slaves and helped settle their labor disputes, assisted former slaves in legalizing their marriages, and locate their lost relatives. The agency helped black veterans as well. The bureau also assisted in the building of

thousands of schools and the founding of colleges. Finally, the bureau also tried to promote land distribution, but had little success in this as the confiscated or abandoned Confederate land was restored to the original owners which left did not leave much opportunity for black landownership (Norton, 2015). Part B: Before the Industrial Revolution, the was mainly agrarian and income was produced through the trade of tobacco and other resources. Reaching the United States in the 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution brought with it lasting transformations in business and economics as well as in the basic structures of society with industrial development remaking patterns of human settlement, labor, and family life. With the new business centered in cities urbanization saw a tremendous growth. Cities grew in leaps and bounds with the number of people moving into cities rising from 10 million to 54 million from 1870 to 1920. The lives of the people within the cities strongly differed with a small percentage enjoying enormous wealth and the life of luxury that came with it. The middle class on the economic ladder was able to live comfortably the underprivileged made up a large mass of city people that lived in extreme poverty. The boom in business created several opportunities for financial gain and allowed many people to start successful businesses, expand their existing ones, and profit from their investments with the economic activity allowing some business leaders and their investors to accumulate large fortunes and making up the wealthy class. Small business owners and workers like factory and office managers were able to generate enough profits to live comfortably if not become wealthy and making up the country’s middle class. The underprivileged often lived together in crowded slums and were the laborers from the factories, mills, and mines that did not reap the benefits of economic growth. Often working for low wages and no benefits. The housing was often cheap

apartment building called tenements in neighborhoods that bred crime. Being overworked, having poor sanitation and hygiene, and their inadequate diets often left the underprivileged vulnerable to disease and leaving their children to receive little to no education because they had to work in order to help contribute to their family’s welfare (Norton, 2015). The working conditions during the Industrial Revolution were horrible at best. Factories were being built and business needed workers that they had no problems finding. There were long lines of people willing to work allowed the employers to set wages as low as they wanted because they people were willing to work if they were paid. People were working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, six days a week with unskilled workers only receiving $8-$10 a week, or about $0.10 cents per hour while skilled workers earned a little but not much more than that. In an effort by factory owners whose only concern was with making profit, labor costs were cut by hiring women and children. Women were paid about one-third or sometimes one-half of what the men made or around $1.56 a week on average. With many families needing extra income, children were often sent to work at young ages. The families would often lie about their children’s ages once the Northeast started to pass laws that to limit the ages of children that could work as well as the number of hours they could work just to earn a little extra income. Children, however, often received less income than even the women did. They were often used for simpler, unskilled jobs but suffered greatly from the lack of exercise and sunlight that working in the factories offered. The factories and their use of child labor with little pay and long hours is what led to the formation of labor unions (Norton, 2015). Part C-1 As a response to the quick urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigrations of the late 1800s the Protestant church started taking on social reform during the late 19th century in a

movement that became known as the Social Gospel. Protestant clergymen started to show interest in securing social justice for the poor, in part to expand the appeal of the Protestant church in cities the Roman Catholic church was particularly popular among the large immigrant population. The Social Gospel typically focused on issues that ranged from poverty and unemployment to civil rights, pollution, drug addiction, political corruption, and gun control. Some of the leaders and founders of the movement were Protestant minister Washington Gladden, William Dwight Porter Bliss, and New York City Baptist minister, Walter Rauschenbusch. The ministers started tying salvation and good works together arguing that people need to follow in the footsteps of the life of Jesus Christ by putting away their own earthly desires in order to help other people, specifically the needy. Living by the motto “What would Jesus do?”, the followers of the movement put several reforms to assist other people into action. One of the biggest contributions made by the Social Gospel Movement was the creation and building of settlement houses. These houses were considered urban community centers that provided a variety of things for those who were less fortunate including access to education, free or low-cost health care, free or low-cost housing as well as an additional wealth of benefits. Progressives working within these faith traditions applied religious morality to the task of transforming American society during the industrial age away from the exploitation of workers and toward more cooperative forms of economic life. Insisting that society and the government uphold the essential belief that all people are equal in God’s eyes and deserve basic dignity, freedom, political rights, and economic opportunities in life the religious progressives also promoted the notion of community and solidarity over the ideas of individualism and materialism while also working to end needless wars and military aggression across the globe.

The ideas that were created in the Social Gospel would have a considerable influence on the Progressive Movement (Norton, 2015). Part C-2: One movement from the reform that helped to define the Progressive Era was prohibition. Prohibition movements started springing up across the country by the late 1800s as religious groups that saw alcohol, especially drunkenness, as a threat to the nation. This was brought on by the wave of revivalism that swept through America during the 1820s and 30s leading to the formation of the first temperance legislation appearing in Massachusetts in 1838, with the law prohibiting the sale of alcohol, or spirits, in less than 15-gallon quantities. Maine passed the first state prohibition law in 1846 which was repealed two years later in 1848, and by the start of the Civil War many other states had passed their own prohibition laws too. Starting around 1906, the Anti-Saloon League led the renewal of the calls for prohibition legislation at state levels. Through various methods the advocates for prohibition sought to convince the people the by getting rid of alcohol in society it would also stamp out poverty and social vices like immoral behaviors and physical violence. 23 out of 48 states passed anti-saloon legislation by 1916 while several went a step further by prohibiting the manufacturing of alcoholic beverages too. The congressional elections also took place in 1916 and brought with it a two-thirds majority vote by the “dry” supporters, or those who were in favor of a national prohibition of alcohol over the “wet”, or those who were opposed to a national prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution which prohibited the manufacturing, transportation, or sale of alcohol in the United States was ratified on January 29, 1919, by Congress and would go into effect in January of 1920. The National Prohibition Act, otherwise known as the Volstead Act for its legislative sponsor, Representative Andrew J. Volstead, was authorized to give the government the means to

enforce Prohibition. Several loopholes in the act in addition to the variances in the levels of government support throughout the 1920s impeded the enforcement of Prohibition causing it to remain as more of an ideal rather than a reality. Due to the public position on Prohibition changing by the late 1920s, the arrival of the Great Depression only accelerated the downfall of Prohibition with part of the people arguing that the ban on alcohol denied jobs to the unemployed and revenue that was much-needed for the government. 1932 Democratic presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt used the platform of repealing Prohibition in his bid for the presidency and with his win in November the end of Prohibition was certain. Congress passed the adopted the 21st Amendment to the Constitution in February 1933 which successfully repealed both the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act (History.com Editors, 2010). Another reform movement that helped define the Progressive Era was the women’s suffrage movement. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920, after a decades-long battle that spanned nearly 100 years giving all American women, like men, the right to vote. The women’s suffrage campaign actively started in the decades preceding the Civil War during the 1820s and 30s as various other reform groups were quickly increasing across the United States with women playing leading roles within them. In addition to this, many women were becoming irritated with the concept that the only “true” woman was a pious, submissive wife as well as a mother that is only concerned with her home and family. When all of these were combined, they contributed to a new way of thinking regarding what it was like to be a woman and a citizen of the United States. Reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott invited a group of mostly women abolitionist reformers to Seneca Falls, New York in 1848 to go over the problems of women’s rights. Many of the delegates at the Seneca Falls Convention were in agreement that the women of America were autonomous individuals that deserved their own

political identities because all men and women were created equal by their creator. The women’s rights movement had gained momentum during the 1850s but slowed down during the Civil War with the 14th and 15th Amendments being added to the Constitution quickly after the war ended and raising questions about suffrage and citizenship. With the 14th Amendment defining citizens as male and the 15th Amendment giving black males the right to vote, had advocates of women’s suffrage thinking this would be their opportunity to push for a truly universal suffrage with lawmakers. A few states in the West started to allow women to vote in 1910 after almost twenty years of not being allowed to. As America entered into World War I, the campaign for women’s suffrage lost some momentum but the work completed by women on behalf of the war efforts gave proof that women were just as patriotic and deserving of citizenship as men are. Finally, after their decades long fight, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920 officially giving women the right to vote which 8 million women took advantage of on November 2, 1920 when they cast their votes in an election for the very first time (Norton, 2015). Part C-3: The Progressives wanted to allow citizens more direct rule and the ability to circumvent the political bosses thereby giving citizens more power. In 1902 Oregon Populist Party State Representative William S. U’Ren with the help of his Direct Legislation League saw voters giving an overwhelming approval for a ballot measure that would create the initiative and referendum processes so citizens to be able to directly introduce or approve proposed laws or amendments to the state constitution making Oregon to first state to take up such a system. An initiative gave the ability to require a public vote if a petition was signed by a certain number of voters with the initiative being able to be either a direct or an indirect initiative. If a direct

initiative is issued a measure is able to be put to a vote immediately after being submitted by a petition, but with an indirect initiative the measure is initially referred to the legislature and then put to a popular vote only if it is not enacted by the legislature. A referendum is a direct vote where the entire electorate is asked to vote on a proposal that is the result of a successful initiative and has the potential of being ratified into a new law. This vote can take place on a proposed statue, constitutional amendment, charter amendment, local ordinance, or to accommodate the executive or legislature to give regard to the subject by submitting it to the order of the day which is a form of direct democracy. In addition to helping initiative and referendum be formed, U’ren also assisted in the passing of the 1908 amendment that gave voters the right to recall elected officials. A recall election, or a recall referendum, is a process in which are able to remove an elected official from office through a direct vote by a direct vote before their term has ended. Recalls are also initiated when a petition has been signed by enough voters. California went on to adopt Oregon’s system of “Initiative, Referendum, and Recall” in 1911, with other states soon moving to replicate the Progressive reforms (Norton, 2015). Part D: Commanding the attention of the United States with commercial, missionary, religious, naval, and diplomatic appeal the Hawaiian Islands appeared as America’s new frontier. Secretary of State James Blaine had already acknowledged that the islands of Hawaii were virtually “ a part of the American system” by 1881 with Americans owning around three-quarters of the wealth in Hawai’i and overwhelming their economy that that of the United States via sugar exports that came into America duty free by 1890. Chinese and Japanese citizens outnumbered Americans in Hawai’i’s multiracial society with the more important Americans on the islands arranging secret clubs and military units opposed the royal government. In an effort to shift

decision making on the island from the monarchy to the legislature the group of Americans forced the king to agree to a constitution that would give foreigners the vote in 1887. In that same year, the United States was given naval rights to Pearl Harbor and left native Hawaiians to believe that foreigners, specifically Americans, were stealing their country. The McKinley Tariff of 1890 which further undermined the native government would eliminate Hawai’i’s duty-status with the United States on their sugar exports causing Hawai’i to endure declining sugar prices and profits. The American elite on the island pushed for annexation by the U.S. which would classify their sugar as domestic, and in 1891 when Princess Lili’uokalani took the throne she looked to roll back the power in politics that the foreigners had causes the white autocracy to form the subversive Annexation Club. The Annexationists in a plot with John L. Stevens, the chief diplomat to Hawai’i for America, led a strike in January 1893 by sending troops to the USS Boston so they could occupy Honolulu. Instead of bowing to the new provisional regime that was led by the son of missionaries and a prominent attorney, Sanford B. Drake, the princess chose to release her authority to the United States government. After the release President Benjamin Harrison quickly issued and annexation treaty to the Senate. Grover Cleveland, who was the incoming president, sensed that foul play was involved in the annexation and launched an investigation into it finding that most native Hawaiians were against annexation. However, when Hawai’i was proven to be a strategic and commercial way into Asia and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War led to then President William McKinley navigated an annexation through Congress on July 7, 1898 and the people of Hawai’i became citizens of the United States under the Organic Act of June 1900 while obtaining statehood in 1959 (Norto...