Race and Ethnicity: Life in the Melting Pot

Sources

The Rise of Hate Groups. As more and more people with different customs, religious beliefs, and languages filled American cities, people worried that there would not be enough jobs or housing for the immigrants and that newcomers would take the jobs and overrun the neighborhoods of established citizens. People worried, too, that the beliefs and customs they cherished would be undermined by outsiders determined radically to alter the American way of life. These fears evolved into a hatred of racial, ethnic, and religious differences. Militant hate groups were formed, typically under the guise of protecting American values, to deny rights to racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. African Americans, Asian immigrants, and Native Americans were especially vulnerable to prejudice from white Protestants, who also resented Catholics and Jews because of their religious beliefs. Hate groups flourished after Reconstruction.

Nativism. Nativism, a generalized prejudice against foreigners and outsiders, and xenophobia, a fear of foreigners, mushroomed as immigration increased. Native-born whites argued that this new wave of immigrants, unlike earlier generations, was unworthy of American liberty, dangerous to American order, and incapable of assimilation. They encouraged politicans to place quotas on immigration and vigorously upheld traditional social values. Flash points included conflicts over bilingual education in public schools, the required observance of the Christian Sabbath, and restriction in the use of alcoholic beverages. In the face of mounting hostility, ostracized groups turned to each other for strength. Such group solidarity translated into voting blocs that gave new immigrants a strong political voice, inflaming traditionalists all the more because they believed that minority voters who belonged to such groups were controlled by foreign forces who sought to subvert Americanism. Some of the new immigrants were outspoken political or social radicals on whom nativists were quick to blame the labor unrest of the period.

Anti-Catholicism . Catholics in America had faced prejudice against their religious views since the colonial period. Increases in southern European immigration in the 1880s brought a new wave of Catholics to the country, reviving hate-group charges that Catholics were unworthy citizens because they pledged their allegiance to the Pope in Rome and not to the U.S. government. During the 1884 presidential campaign native-born Protestants voiced fears of a Catholic conspiracy against public schools and republican government. A host of secret anti-Catholic groups was formed, each with an elaborate initiation procedure and a code secrecy deemed necessary to fight what they saw as the ruthless, secretive Catholic enemy. In 1887 the American Protective Association (APA) absorbed several small, local nativist groups to become the largest anti-Catholic association in the country. The APA adopted the secrecy of the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, including written and verbal codes to safeguard the secrecy of its communications. The APA was neither anti-immigrant nor racist and accepted African American and immigrant Protestant I members. It also supported the woman suffrage movement as a way to mobilize Protestant women to protect public schools.

A CALL FOR BLACK POWER

Ida B. Wells was effective in her crusade against I what she called “the last relic of barbarism and savagery” — lynching of African Americans — because she was a good journalist who did not mince words. And she supported her stories with facts. In A Red Record she printed the name of every one of the 197 lynched black men in America in 1894, the date of his murder, the reason, and the place. One-third more blacks were killed that year by lynch mobs than were legally executed. It was assumed, she pointed out, that sex crimes against white women most often aroused lynch mobs, but in fact only about one-third of all lynchings were for alleged sexual indiscretion. Moreover, she said, many white women enjoyed the sexual attentions of black men and made false accusations of rape to save their own reputations. She followed that statement with examples of white women who, after an attack of conscience, had recanted their charges of rape against black men. That was an inflammatory assertion at a time when modesty was considered the primary virtue of respectable women, and it was intended to attract readers’ attentions and make them angry.

Wells offered solutions to lynching. She said it was up to blacks to take the offensive against such outrageous mistreatment. In Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) she observed that

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in selfdefense.

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

Anti-Semitism . Hostility to members of the Jewish faith had a much longer history than anti-Catholicism. Throughout Western history Christians blamed the Jews for the Crucifixion and characterized them as a prideful, bigoted, money-hungry people. In popular folklore Jews were often blamed for disasters such as famines, epidemics, and even wars. Many Protestant Americans viewed Jews as excessively self-protective and tribalistic and thus unworthy of participating in a democracy that called for I individuals to transcend group identity. During the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s nativists viewed Jews as a menace to civilization, as unable to assimilate, and as conspirators to subvert Christianity and Gentile society. Prejudice against Jews became a prime example of American xenophobia in the 1880s, symbolizing for the hate groups the dangers posed by open immigration.

Social Darwinism. In the mid nineteenth century a new theory of social evolution supported the belief that African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians—as well as poor people of all races—were unworthy of full citizenship and unequipped to participate in the democratic process. This new kind of prejudice had its roots in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), which put forth the theory that all species evolved from less complex life forms through a process of natural selection 1 that gave the greatest chance of survival to those species most capable of adapting to their environments. His fellow Englishman Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s theory to society, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest” to argue that human society and institutions were progressively evolving toward “the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.” In this view the wealthiest individuals had proved their superior capacity for survival, while the poor were the least fit. Efforts to help the poor would impede the greater good of progress toward social perfection, which would benefit humanity as a whole. Social Darwinism also had racial implications. Groups long described as “biologically” inferior were now identified as victims of incomplete evolution—they were less than fully human. On both sides of the Atlantic whites believed that they represented the most advanced expression of human evolution.

Social Darwinism in the United States. In the United States one of the foremost academic spokesmen for Social Darwinism was William Graham Sumner, a professor at Yale University who argued in favor of letting natural selection take its own course in human society in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) and other works. His chief opponent was Lester Frank Ward, who argued against applying Darwin’s theory on the social level. In his Dynamic Sociology (1883) Ward pointed out that the human mind was capable of purposeful decision making, which allowed people to reflect on situations and then act to change them, thus influencing the course of evolution. Rather than viewing humankind as helpless pawns of the evolutionary process, Ward believed that individuals and government could shape the future through eradication of poverty and education of the masses.

Eugenics. In 1869 Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton founded the science of eugenics, the study of ways to improve hereditary physical and mental characteristics of a race or breed. Concluding that the races could be ranked and that higher and lower grades of people existed within each race, nineteenth-century eugenicists talked of social engineering that would eliminate feeblemindedness, criminality, and poverty through selective breeding. Eugenicists favored immigration barriers, social segregation, stricter marriage laws, and even sterilization of individuals considered physically or mentally inferior. In the United States racial theorists argued that African Americans were the least developed race and that as a people they were “unfit” to assume full political and social equality. Similarly, they argued that Native Americans were an “inferior,” childlike race that required white protection. Reservations were cast as the only way to ensure that Indian populations would survive.

WHAT IS A TENEMENT?

In his exposé How the Other Half Lives (1890) Jacob Riis defined the tenement as follows:

The law defines it as a house “occupied by three or more families, living independently and doing their cooking on the premises; or by more than two families on a door, so living and cooking and having a common right in the halls, stairways, yards, etc.” That is the legal meaning, and includes flats and apartment-houses, with which we have nothing to do. In its narrower sense the typical tenement was thus described when last arraigned before the bar of justice: “It is generally a brick building from four to six stories high on the street, frequently with a store on the first floor which, when used for the sale of liquor, has a side opening for the benefit of the inmates and to evade the Sunday law; four families occupy each floor, and a set of rooms consists of one or two dark closets, used as bedrooms, with a living room twelve feet by ten. The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with two families on a floor.” The picture is nearly as true to-day as ten years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The dim light admitted by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements are still “good property,” and the poverty of the poor man his destruction. A barracks down town wheere he has to live because he is poor brings in a third more rent than a decent flat house in Harlem. The statement once made a sensation that between seventy and eighty children had been found in one tenement. It no longer excites even passing attention, when the sanitary police report counting 101 adults and 91 children in a Crosby Street house, one of twins, built together. The children in the other, if I am not mistaken, numbered 89, a total of 180 for two tenements! Or when a midnight inspection in Mulberry Street unearths a hundred and fifty “lodgers” sleeping on filthy floors in two buildings. Spite of brown-stone trimmings, plate-glass and mosaic vestibule floors,the water does not rise in summer to the second story, while the beer flows unchecked to the all-night picnics on the roof. The saloon with the side-door and the landlord divide the prosperity of the place between them, and the tenant, in sullen submission, foots the bill.

Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scnbaers, 1890).

The “Yellow Peril.” The California gold rush of 1849 and new discoveries of gold in Colorado and Nevada in

the late 1850s attracted a large number of Asians to the American West. In the 1860s others came to work on the cross-country railroad, and some were shipped east to break strikes in the 1870s. Denigrated as the “Yellow Peril,” Asians became the target of racist attacks. Anti-Chinese riots erupted in San Francisco in 1877, leading President Rutherford Hayes to write in his diary in 1879, “I would consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.” In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended all immigration from China for ten years. The act was extended periodically until 1904, when Congress made it permanent.

Racism in the South. After the end of Reconstruction white state governments in the South stripped former slaves of their newly established rights. Throughout the 1880s whites forcibly removed black officeholders and through intimidation, poll taxes, literacy tests, and even murder effectively robbed black majorities in the Deep South of their rights as citizens. A series of Supreme Court rulings between 1882 and 1888 upheld segregation based on race. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret organization of whites devoted to terrorizing and intimidating African Americans and their white Republican allies, was founded during Reconstruction. The Klan exerted a powerful presence in nearly every southern state, acting as a guerrilla military force to reassert white supremacy. The national organization was formally disbanded in 1869, but local Klan groups continued to be active into the 1870s, killing hundreds of Africans Americans during the first three years of the decade and terrorizing thousands.

Responses to Racism. Southern Republicans, who supported the goals of Reconstruction, turned to Washington to stem the violence. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 made the violent infringement of civil and political rights a federal crime, and hundreds of Klansmen in North Carolina and Mississippi were prosecuted. Other federal laws asserted the sanctity of voting for all eligible citizens and pledged government support for the freedoms of African Americans, but the laws proved more an assertion of principle than a direct federal intervention. Though many Americans felt outraged at the violence inflicted on African Americans, political options failed to stop it. The federal government justified its inaction by calling lynching a southern practice that must be addressed by the individual southern states. African Americans organized to fight back. Journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett began a national and international campaign to end lynching. Using the language of Social Darwinism, but turning its logic on its head, she argued that white society could not be as civilized as it claimed if it relied on violence and murder to maintain its so-called superiority. Wells-Barnett and others aroused public sentiment against lynching, but the practice continued well into the twentieth century.

MODESTY IN DRESS

Julia Ward Howe was a prudish woman. The famous reformer, women’s rights advocate, and author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was sixty-eight when she wrote “Dress and Undress,” an article in Forum Magazine in 1887 that showed how narrow her view of women’s rights was when measured by the standards of the 1990s.

The object of Mrs. Howe’s irritation was the fashion current among young socialites of wearing evening dresses that bared their arms and their chests. Just as shocking, in her view, were what she called tranparencies — dresses that featured sheer fabric, often beeded, around the upper arms and bodice, allowing titillating glimpses of unshielded skin.

Mrs. Howe’s argument that such attire was scandalous had four parts. First, she submitted, it was unhealthy. “The female slaves of a Turkish harem are obliged to leave the bosom so much exposed that pulmonary disease is frequently the result,” she warned.

Second, such dress invited subjugation; “The girl who sits beside the young man at college, the woman who meets men at the lecture or in the clinic, meets them as an equal. She is bound to abstain from all that could subject them to that slavery of the senses from which she herself claims to be free,”

Third, because such dress is uncomfortable, it is impolite: By failing to wear proper undergarments that cover her body to the neck she risks chafing her skin, and the resulting discomfort would create tension among those around her, proving her to be inconsiderate of the feeling of others.

Finally, bare skin is immodest, Mrs. Howe declared, and thus unattractive: “Good women are bound to maintain the best traditions of their sex. Refinement and good sense are foremost among these and neither of them will permit either the dressing or the acting down to a low level of attraction.”

Sources

Gail Bederman, “Civilization, The Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells’ Anti-Lynching Campaign (1892-1894),” in Gender and American History Since 1890, edited by Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 207-239;

Rogers Daniels and Harry Kitano, American Racism: Exploration of the Nature of Prejudice (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970);

Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);

Michael Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979);

John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, revised edition (New York: Atheneum, 1963).