Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 221Civil War. The period from then until the end of the century saw no less than
fourteen million new arrivals, mostly from Poland, Italy, Russia, Austria, Turkey,
Greece, and Syria. Catholic or Jewish, many of them non-English speakers, their
different manners, customs, and beliefs – and, in many instances, different
languages – inspired feelings of resentment and distrust, the suspicion that the
Anglo-Saxon hegemony was being threatened. Such feelings were, in a sense,
a twisted response to a tangible reality: the United States was becoming an even
more ethnically mixed, culturally plural nation. Along with these new immigrants
arriving mostly on the eastern seaboard were others arriving mostly on the west-
ern: some 264,000 Chinese and a much smaller number of Japanese between 1860
and 1900. Again, the numbers were not necessarily large or out of proportion to
earlier waves of immigration. But the Chinese immigrants, in particular, inspired
fear, resentment, and racial antagonism, with violence against them in the western
states escalating in the 1870s and 1880s, and repression culminating in the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, which outlawed the immigration of all Chinese people
apart from a few professionals, students, and tourists.
The experience of other minority groups, already in the United States before the
Civil War, was mixed, during the second half of the nineteenth century. With the
passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, four million African-
American were freed. With a decade of reform and Reconstruction, about a quarter
of a million received an education, many achieved political office, and many more
exercised the right to vote. But when federal troops withdrew from the South in
1877, African-Americans swiftly lost the franchise. By 1910, all the former
Confederate states had radically restricted black voting rights, while even before that
a whole raft of laws established segregation in everything from schools to public
transport. Where legal means of repression appeared not to work, then violence was
used: by the Ku Klux Klan, established in 1866, and other white vigilante groups.
And the basic economic situation for African-Americans remained unchanged. Sixty
percent of the land in the South was owned by 10 percent of the white population.
Freed black people found themselves forced into sharecropping or tenant farming –
by 1900, over 75 percent of black farmers were tenant farmers. They had, to an
extent, merely moved from slavery to serfdom. Mexican-Americans were in a more
fortunate position. They were not really immigrants, since the United States had
merely annexed the territory where most of them already lived. They represented a
majority in many of the territories in the Southwest. They could, as a result, maintain
their own culture and their own language, their own fierce ethnic pride and
independence. For Native Americans, however, the four decades after the Civil War
were nothing short of tragic, with the tribes suffering more than they had ever done
or were to do in the following years. With whites penetrating into even the remotest
corners of the West, the policy of removal was replaced by one of assimilation: the
idea being that allotting plots of land to individual Native Americans would draw
them into mainstream American society. The new policy was as dismal and disastrous
as the old one. It ignored Native American traditions of communal land use, the
poor quality of much of the land in question, and the lack of operating capital. ItGGray_c03.indd 221ray_c 03 .indd 221 8 8/1/2011 7:54:17 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 17 AM