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Example research essay topic: Jim Crow Laws Gilded Age - 1,710 words

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The Gilded Age was characterized by rapid industrialization, reconstruction, ruthless pursuit of profit, government, corruption, and vulgarity (Cashman 1). After the Civil War, America was beginning to regroup as a nation. There were many other changes developing in the country. Industrialization was taking over the formerly agricultural country. The nations government was also in great conflict (Foner 20).

Many changes occurred during the Gilded Age. These changes affected farmers, labor, business, and politics. Many southerners saw Reconstruction as an attempt by the north to punish the south, rather than an attempt to rebuild the nation (Foner 29). This period was marked by intense bitterness and anger.

Regional and racial pressure remained powerful. The Ku Klux Klan came into full force, terrorizing blacks by tactics such as night riding (Foner 94). Poll taxes forced an unreasonable fee on blacks at the voting booth. During Reconstruction, the northern economy experienced a tremendous industrial boom, while the South struggled through Reconstruction (Powers 48). Immigrants began pouring into northern cities and provided a cheap labor source for Northern Industry. The south remained primarily agricultural.

Much of the Gilded Age can be seen as a response to the result of the events of Reconstruction. Almost all of the Gilded Age politics revolved around the effort of the government to find some system so they could regulate big business and to regulate its own abuses. Machine Politics was the governments response. The first reason machine politics worked was because there were no secret ballots (Mandelbaum 135).

Ballots were very colorful and it was easy to tell who someone was voting for when they went to the polls (Mandelbaum 139). When a party controlled a district, which was very common, that party might threaten people who decide to vote against it. Police officers did nothing about this although it was illegal because they have government jobs also (Mandelbaum 148). Boss Tweed is the best example of machine politics. He was in charge of the Tweed Ring in New York City. Machine politics worked wonderful in New York City where the Irish stuck together and used machine politics to their advantage (Mandelbaum 28).

Tweed gained control over the police officers allowing him to exercise control over contracts of jobs. The Tweed Ring stole more than two hundred million dollars from the city and state (Mandelbaum 97). In 1872, the New York Times exposed and the lawyer Samuel Tilden exposed Tweed and destroyed his career (Mandelbaum 199). The 1883 Pendleton Act was just what America need to get away from machine politics. The act instituted a merit based system of competitive exams, requiring that civil servants prove their skills in order to be hired to a government office (Cashman 4).

The Pendleton Act did not cover all government jobs. The strongest supporters of the Pendleton Act were educated north easterners (Powers 201). They knew that they could easily pass the competitive exams. Once they were in the government system, they would have protection against being fired meaning many civil servers were almost guaranteed a lifelong career in government (Powers 201). As the Pendleton Act solved old problems, it also introduced new ones.

It increased the power of big business. The Democrats took a laissez-faire (hands off) view towards the economy (Foner 123). They were concerned about social equality, except in the case of blacks, where the democrats were the party of white supremacy. The democrats were also friendlier to immigrants than the Republicans. Urbanization went hand in hand with the rise of the new corporation and increases manufacturing and the demand for labor. Cities provided a central marketplace for goods, labor, and a center of communication.

The cities also provided much-needed jobs. People flocked to the cities, and the cities grew very rapidly. The cities could not keep up with this growth. Crowed and unsanitary slums developed often filled with new immigrants working low paying manufacturing jobs. Cities became sites of unrest due to poor living conditions, new ideas like communism, socialism, and European immigrants who were veterans of the European revolts of 1848 (Chermayeff 32).

As the slums developed in the cities, new technologies like the Cable Car and the Trolley allowed the city to grow into a larger slump (Chermayeff 55). This made it possible for the middle and upper classes that worked in the city to live farther away and commute from the growing suburbs. The flight of the upper and middle classes only added to the poverty of the cities. Since the upper classes were generally native rather than immigrant, the cities became almost all immigrants.

The United States had always been a nation of immigrants but the Native Americans could claim an American heritage lasting around four generations. The nature of immigration changed during the Gilded Age. Immigrants use to come from England, France, Italy, and Ireland (Chermayeff 13). After 1880, immigrants came from eastern and northern Europe.

This breed of immigrants was disliked all over America and played a large part of establishing anti-immigration leagues (Chermayeff 104). These leagues did not form just because they felt the United States could not accommodate the rush of immigrants, but they formed because they did not like the kind of people immigrating from Europe (Reimers 47). Many immigrants in the Gilded Age only came to the United States for a couple of years. These Birds of Passage would earn some money and then return home to their country (Fuchs 3).

Around thirty percent of immigrants to the United States during the Gilded Age made a round trip back home (Fuchs 3). Some immigrants including the Germans and Scandinavians came to the United States in search of acres of land, but the majority came for higher wages. The anti-immigration leagues failed mostly because of the political power of manufacturers. Manufacturers valued immigrants because they wanted cheap labor that these immigrants provided. The Chinese were excluded from immigrating by the Chinese immigration Act of 1882, but they received praise from railroad Robber-Baron Leland Stanford for being very hard workers and able to survive on very low wages (Reimers 213).

The result of this free immigration policy resulted in a more ethnically diverse America by the end if the Gilded Age. The United States was transforming into a multi-ethnic society during the era. Based on the treatment of blacks in the south and the exclusion of the Chinese immigrants show, it was not ready to become a multi-racial society. Not only did immigration provide cheat labor and ethnic diversity; it helped manufactures in another way. American workers were from so many different backgrounds, worker groups found it difficult to unify. The ethnic diversity of the American working class found it hard to cooperate with each other Chermayeff 192).

Labor unions were relatively weaker in the United State than they were over seas. In 1896, the National Labor Union made the first attempt in history to bring together a couple of different divisions Cashman 6). The National Labor Unions main goals were to reduce the workday to eight hours in certain industries (Cashman 6). This movement did little good due to the Panic of 1873 and the resulting depression. During this time, big business successfully used blacklisting, Yellow DOG Contracts, and Pinkerton Devices to break strikes and discourage unionization (Powers 249). The Knights of Labor were founded and led by Terence Powder, the Grand Master Workman (Powers 287).

The Knights soon became the most popular labor union. They united various trade unions into a secret brotherhood concerned with broad social issues. The Knights often went on strike and were very visible Samuel Gompers developed a second major union, which was called the American Federation of Labor. The American Federation of Labor went on strike less, fought only for specific labor compromises, and excluded unskilled laborers from their ranks (Jones 3).

The AFL had greater power, was more reasonable to business interests, and was therefore much more successful in achieving its goals (Jones 4). During the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, whites tried to think up new ways to get blacks from voting (Foner 231). Between 1892 and 1908 all of the southern states adopted Jim Crow laws. These laws were very effective on the Southern blacks. In 1896 the Supreme Court found in Please v. Ferguson that racial segregation stated that buildings, buses, bathrooms, and railway cars could be separate, but they had to be equal.

The secret ballot was adopted in many southern states to stop illiterate blacks from voting (Powers 149). The secret ballot limited the amount of intimidation that could go on at polling stations. Once this ballot was an adopted nationwide, party boss had no way of knowing who voted how, and secret ballots put a near end to machine politics. The Jim Crow Laws also consisted literacy tests and the Grandfather Clause. Literacy tests were impossible for blacks to pass because the whites made the test too difficult for the blacks to pass and many blacks had not be allowed to go to school. The Grandfather Clause stated that those whose Grandfathers had voted before the Civil War were exempt from Poll Taxes (Foner 249).

No slaves could vote before the Civil war, only whites were free from poll taxes. The Black community's varying responses to these trying times were seen in two important men, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois.

Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, hoped to train blacks for humble but respectable professions. He looked for peaceful race relations and small steps forward. Dubois, was the first black man to hold a degree form a Harvard graduate school, vigorously disagreed with Washington and sought equality, hoping to develop a black elite. At the Niagara Conference, Dubois helped set the groundwork for the later National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Foner 253). Overall, the Gilded Ages impact on America was positive. It is hard to imagine life with out many things that have come out of the Gilded Age.

The government learned not to let monopolies get too strong, and the industrial order helped immigration, turning the United States into the melting pot of the world. The Gilded Age also was the start in the process of America trying to get over its racial differences and problems.


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Research essay sample on Jim Crow Laws Gilded Age

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