Bugs Bunny does corrupt politics

Speak softly, and carry a BIIIIIGGGGGGGG STICK! Who said that?

Links regarding the Annexation of Hawai’i

Here’s the State Department’s modern explanation: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/gp/17661.htm

A timeline of events regarding the annexation of Hawai’i: http://www.opihi.com/sovereignty/timeline.htm

UNITED STATES PUBLIC LAW 103-150

103d Congress Joint Resolution 19

Nov. 23, 1993

President Clinton signs the apology resolution in the presence of the Hawai'ian congrressional delegation

Here is the actual (excerpt) apology from the US House of Representatives:

….Whereas, it is proper and timely for the Congress on the occasion of the impending one hundredth anniversary of the event, to acknowledge the historic significance of the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, to express its deep regret to the Native Hawaiian people, and to support the reconciliation efforts of the State of Hawaii and the United Church of Christ with Native Hawaiians;

Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND APOLOGY.

The Congress –

(1) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on January 17, 1893, acknowledges the historical significance of this event which resulted in the suppression of the inherent sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people;

(2) recognizes and commends efforts of reconciliation initiated by the State of Hawaii and the United Church of Christ with Native Hawaiians;

(3) apologizes to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the people of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii on January 17, 1893 with the participation of agents and citizens of the United States, and the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination;

(4) expresses its commitment to acknowledge the ramifications of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, in order to provide a proper foundation for reconciliation between the United States and the Native Hawaiian people; and

(5) urges the President of the United States to also acknowledge the ramifications of the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii and to support reconciliation efforts between the United States and the Native Hawaiian people.

SEC. 2. DEFINITIONS.

As used in this Joint Resolution, the term “Native Hawaiians” means any individual who is a descendent of the aboriginal people who, prior to 1778, occupied and exercised sovereignty in the area that now constitutes the State of Hawaii.

SEC. 3. DISCLAIMER.

Nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.

Approved November 23, 1993

______________________________
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY – S.J. Res. 19:

SENATE REPORTS: No. 103-125 (Select Comm. on Indian Affairs)
CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, Vol. 139 (1993):

Excerpt on “The Social Gospel”

The Social Gospel, 1908
Walter Rauschenbusch:
from the Modern History Sourcebook

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918 ) was a Baptist minister among the poor and the industrial workers of New York city. From CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1908): 230-86.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. In what ways is an industrial worker more vulnerable than a farmer?

2. Why is it logical that workingmen lack pride in their work, according to Rauschenbusch? What truth of capitalism do businessmen overlook when they don’t pay their laborers a decent wage?

In the agricultural stage of society the chief means of enrichment was to gain control of large landed wealth; the chief danger to the people lay in losing control of the great agricultural means of production, the land. Since the industrial revolution the man-made machinery of production has assumed an importance formerly unknown. The factories, the machines, the means of transportation, the money to finance great undertakings, are fully as important in the modern process of production as the land from which the raw material is drawn. Consequently the chief way to enrichment in an industrial community will be the control of these factors of production; the chief danger to the people will be to lose control of the instruments of industry.

That danger, as we saw in our brief sketch of the industrial revolution, was immediately realized in the most sweeping measure. The people lost control of the tools of industry more completely than they ever lost control of the land. Under the old system the workman owned the simple tools of his trade. To-day the working people have no part nor lot in the machines with which they work. In capitalistic production there is a cooperation between two distinct groups: a small group which owns all the material factors of land and machinery; a large group which owns nothing but the personal factor of human labor power. In this process of cooperation the propertyless group is at a fearful disadvantage.
No attempt is made to allot to each workman his share in the profits of the joint work Instead he is paid a fixed wage. The upward movement of this wage is limited by the productiveness of his work; the downward movement of it is limited only by the willingness of the workman to work at so low a return. His willingness will be determined by his needs. If he is poor or if he has a large family, he can be induced to take less. If he is devoted to his family, and if they are sick, he may take still less. The less he needs, the more he can get; the more he needs, the less he will get. This is the exact opposite of the principle that prevails in family life, Where the child that needs most care gets most. In our family life we have solidarity and happiness; in our business life we have individualism and-well, not exactly happiness.
The statistics of wages come with a shock to any one reading them with an active imagination. In my city of Rochester the average wage for males over sixteen reported by the United States Census of 1900 was $480.50 a year and for females $267.10. I do not know how accurate that was. It hardly matters. Fifty dollars one way or the other would mean a great deal to the families affected, but it would not change the total impression of pitiable inadequacy.
But the real wages are not measured by dollars and cents, but by the purchasing power of the money. That the necessaries of life have risen in price in recent years is familiar enough to every housekeeper. Wages, too, have risen in some trades. Very earnest efforts have been made by experts to prove that the rise in wages has kept pace with the rise in prices, but with dubious results. Dun’s Review some time ago compared the prices of 350 staple commodities in July 1, 1897, and December 1, 1901, and found that $1013 in 1901 would buy no more than $724 in 1897. Hence if wages had remained apparently stationary, they had actually declined.
The purchasing power of the wages determines the health and comfort of the workingman and his family. It does not decide on the justice of his wage. That is determined by comparing the total product of his work with the share paid to him. The effectiveness of labor has increased immensely since the advent of the machine. The wealth of the industrial nations consequently has grown in a degree unparalleled in history. The laborer has doubtless profited by this in common with all others. He enjoys luxuries that were beyond the reach of the richest in former times. But the justice of our system will be proved only if we can show that the wealth, comfort, and security of the average workingman in 1906 is as much greater than that of the average workingman in 1760 as the wealth of civilized humanity is now greater than it was in 1760. No one will be bold enough to assert it. The bulk of the increase in wealth has gone to a limited class who in various ways have been strong enough to take it. Wages have advanced on foot; profits have taken the Limited Express. For instance, the report of the Interstate Commerce Commission of June, 1902, stated that from 1896-1902 the average wages and salaries of the railway employees of our country, 1,200,000 men, had increased from $550 to $580, or five per cent. During the same period the net earnings of the owners had increased from $377,000,000 to $610,000,000, or sixty-two per cent. Thorold Rogers, in his great work “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” says: “It may well be the case, and there is every reason to fear it is the case, that there is collected a population in our great towns which equals in amount the whole of those who lived in England and Wales six centuries ago; but whose condition is more destitute, whose homes are more squalid, whose means are more uncertain, whose prospects are more hopeless, than those of the peasant serfs of the Middle Ages or the meanest drudges of the mediaeval cities.” If the celebrated saying of John Stuart Will is true, that ” it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” it means that the achievements of the human mind have been thwarted by human injustice. Our blessings have failed to bless us because they were not based on justice and solidarity.
The existence of a large class of population without property rights in the material they work upon and the tools they work with, and without claim to the profits resulting from their work, must have subtle and far-reaching effects on the character of this class and on the moral tone of the people at large.
A man’s work is not only the price he pays for the right to fill his stomach. In his work he expresses himself. It is the output of his creative energy and his main contribution to the common life of mankind. The pride which an artist or professional man takes in his work, the pleasure which a housewife takes in adorning her home, afford a satisfaction that ranks next to human love in delightsomeness.
One of the gravest accusations against our industrial system is that it does not produce in the common man the pride and joy of good work. In many cases the surroundings are ugly, depressing, and coarsening. Much of the stuff manufactured ‘is dishonest in quality, made to sell and not to serve, and the making of such cotton or wooden lies must react on the morals of every man that handles them. There is little opportunity for a man to put his personal stamp on his work. The mediaeval craftsman could rise to be an artist by working well at his craft. The modern factory hand is not like to develop artistic gifts as he tends his machine.
It is a common and true complaint of employers that their men take no interest in their work. But why should they? What motive have they for putting love and care into their work? It is not theirs. Christ spoke of the difference between the hireling shepherd who flees and the owner who loves the sheep. Our system has made the immense majority of industrial workers mere hirelings. If they do conscientious work nevertheless, it is a splendid tribute to human rectitude. Slavery was cheap labor; it was also dear labor. In ancient Rome the slaves on the country estates were so wasteful that only the strongest and crudest tools could be given them. The more the wage worker approaches their condition, the more will the employer confront the same problem. The finest work is done only by free minds who put love into their work because it is their own. When a workman becomes a partner, he ” hustles ” in a new spirit. Even the small bonus distributed in profit-sharing experiments has been found to increase the carefulness and willingness of the men to such an extent that the bonus did not diminish the profits of the employers. The lowest motives for work are the desire for wages and the fear of losing them. Yet these are almost the only motives to which our system appeals. It does not even hold out the hope of promotion, unless a man unites managing ability to his workmanship. The economic loss to the community by this paralysis of the finer springs of human action is beyond computation. But the moral loss is vastly more threatening.
The fear of losing his job is the workman’s chief incentive to work. Our entire industrial life, for employer and employee, is a reign of fear. The average workingman’s family is only a few weeks removed from destitution. The dread of want is always over them, and that is worse than brief times of actual want. It is often said in defence of the wages system that while the workman does not share in the hope of profit, neither is he troubled by the danger of loss; he gets his wage even if the shop is running at a loss. Not for any length of time. His form of risk is the danger of being out of work when work grows slack, and when his job is gone, all his resources are gone. In times of depression the misery and anxiety among the working people are appalling; yet periodical crises hitherto have been an unavoidable accompaniment of our speculative industry. The introduction of new machinery, the reorganization of an industry by a trust, the speeding of machinery which makes fewer men necessary, the competition of cheap immigrant labor, all combine to make the hold of the working classes on the means of life insecure. That workingmen ever dare to strike work is remarkable testimony to the economic pressure that impels them and to the capacity of sacrifice for common ends among them.
While a workman is in his prime, he is always in danger of losing his job. When he gets older, he is almost certain to lose it. The pace is so rapid that only supple limbs can keep up. Once out of a job, it is hard for an elderly man to get another. Men shave clean to conceal gray hairs. They are no longer a crown of honor, but an industrial handicap. A man may have put years of his life into a business, but he has no claim on it at the end, except the feeble claim of sympathetic pity. President Eliot thinks that he has a just but unrecognized claim because he has helped to build up the goodwill of the business. There is a stronger claim in the fact that the result of his work has never been paid to him in full. If, for instance, a man has produced a net value of $800 a year and has received $500 a year, $300 annually stand to his credit in the sight of God. These dividends with compound interest would amount to a tidy sum at the end of a term of years and ought to suffice to employ him at his old wages even if his productive capacity declines. But at present, unless his employer is able and willing to show him charity, or unless by unusual thrift he has managed to save something, he becomes dependent on the faithfulness of his children or the charity of the public. In England a very large proportion of the aged working people finally “go on the parish.” In Germany they have a socialist system of insurance for old age. The fact that so few Germans have emigrated in recent years is probably due in part to the hope held out by this slight capitalization of their life’s labor. We are not even thinking of such an institution in America. Fear and insecurity weigh upon our people increasingly, and break down their nerves, their mental buoyancy, and their character.
This constant insecurity and fear pervading the entire condition of the working people is like a corrosive chemical that disintegrates their self-respect. For an old man to be able to look about him on the farm or business he has built up by the toil of his life, is a profound satisfaction, an antidote to the sense of declining strength and gradual failure. For an old man after a lifetime of honest work to have nothing, to amount to nothing, to be turned off as useless, and to eat the bread of dependence, is a pitiable humiliation. I can conceive of nothing so crushing to all proper pride as for a workingman to be out of work for weeks, offering his work and his body and soul at one place after the other, and to be told again and again that nobody has any use for such a man as he. It is no wonder that men take to drink when they are out of work; for drink, at least for a while, creates illusions of contentment and worth.

…The human animal needs space, air, and light, just like any other highly developed organism. But the competitive necessities of industry crowd the people together in the cities. Land speculation and high car-fares hem them in even where the location of our cities permits easy expansion. High rents mean small rooms. Dear coal means lack of ventilation in winter. Coal-smoke means susceptibility to all throat and lung diseases. The tenement districts of our great cities are miasmic swamps of bad air, and just as swamps teem with fungous growths, so the bacilli of tuberculosis multiply on the rotting lungs of the underfed and densely housed multitudes. The decline in the death-rate with the advance in sanitary science, the sudden drop of the rate after the destruction and rebuilding of slum districts in English cities,2 prove clearly how preventable a great proportion of deaths are. The preventable decimation of the people is social murder.
The human animal needs good food to be healthy, just like a horse or cow. The artificial rise in food prices is at the expense of the vital force of the American people. The larger our cities, the wider are the areas from which their perishable food is drawn and the staler and less nourishing will be the food. Canned goods are a sorry substitute for fresh food. The ideal housewife can make a palatable and nourishing meal from almost anything. But the wives of the workingmen have been working girls, and they rarely have a chance to learn good housekeeping before they marry Scorching a steak diminishes its nutritive value and the appetite of the eater, and both are essential for nutrition.
Poor food and cramped rooms lower the vitality of the people. At the same time the output of vitality demanded from them grows ever greater. Life in a city, with the sights and sounds, the hurry for trains, the contagious rush, is itself a flaring consumer of nervous energy. The work at the machine is worse. That tireless worker of steel, driven by the stored energy of the sun in forgotten ages, sets the pace for the exhausted human organism that feeds it. The speeding of machines is greater in America than anywhere in the world. Unless the food and housing remain proportionately better, the American workman is drained faster. Immigrants who try to continue the kind of food that kept them in vigor at home, collapse under the strain.
Under such a combination of causes the health of the people inevitably breaks down. Improved medical science has counteracted the effects to a large extent, but in spite of all modern progress the physical breakdown is apparent in many directions. Diseases of the nerves, culminating in prostration and insanity; diseases of the heart through overstrain; diseases of the digestion through poor nutrition, haste in mastication, and anxiety; zymotic diseases due to crowding and dirt-all these things multiply and laugh at our curative efforts.

Tuberculosis, which might be eradicated in ten years if we had sense, continues to cripple our children, to snuff out the life of our young men and women in their prime, and to leave the fatherless and motherless to struggle along in their feebleness. Alcoholism is both a cause and an effect of poverty. The poor take to drink because they are tired, discouraged, and flabby of will, and without more wholesome recreation. When the narcotic has once gained control over them, it works more rapidly with them than with the well fed who work in the open. Tuberculosis and alcoholism are social diseases, degenerating the stock of the people, fostered by the commercial interests of landowners and liquor dealers, thriving on the weak and creating the weak.
This condition of exhaustion tends to perpetuate itself. Children are begotten in a state of physical exhaustion. Underfed and overworked women in tenement and factory are nourishing the children in their prenatal life. During the years when a workingman’s family is bringing up young children, before their earnings become available, the family is submerged in poverty through these parental burdens, and neither the parents nor the growing children are likely to be well fed and well housed. Very early in life the children are hitched to the machine for life, and the vitality which ought to build their bodies during the crucial period of adolescence is used up to make goods a little cheaper, or, what is more likely, merely to make profits a little larger. Imagine that any breeder of live stock should breed horses or cows under such conditions, what would be the result in a few generations? Our apple orchards are planted in wide squares, so that every tree has the soil, the air, the sunshine, which it needs. If we planted a dense jungle of trees, we should have a dwarfed growth, scraggy and thorny, and only here and there a crabbed apple. What harvest of human kind will we have in the broad field of our republic if we plant men in that way?

The physical drain of which we have spoken is gradual and slow, and therefore escapes observation and sympathy. But it is the lot of the working people in addition to this to suffer frequent mangling and mutilation. A workman who tends one of our great machines is pitted against a monster of blind and crushing strength and has to be ever alert, like one who enters a cage of tigers. Yet human nature is so constituted that it grows careless of danger which is always near, and cheerfully plucks the beard of death. Unless the machines are surrounded with proper safeguards, they take a large toll of life and limb. The state accident insurance system in Germany has revealed a terrible frequency of industrial accidents. We have never yet dared to get the facts for our country, except in mining and railroading; but it is safe to say that no country is so reckless of accidents as our own. It is asserted that one in eight of our people dies a violent death. The Interstate Commerce Commission in October, 1904, stated that 78,152 persons had been killed on the railroads in the previous ten years, and 78,247 had been injured in the single preceding year. Any one who has ever been through a railway accident knows what a horrible total of bloody and groaning suffering these figures imply. Yet few railways voluntarily introduced automatic car-couplers to lessen one of the most frequent causes of accident. They resisted legislation as long as they could; introduced the automatic couplers as slowly as they could; and are now resisting the introduction of the block system in the same way. Yet automatic coupling reduced the number of men killed from 433 in 1893 to 167 in 1902, and the number injured from 11,277 to 2864, in spite of the fact that the total number of employees had greatly increased during these ten years. The same resistance met the efforts to guard the lives of sailors by the Plimsoll mark, and indeed almost every effort to compel owners to provide safety appliances, or to make them liable for accidents to their servants. It is dividends against human lives. All great corporations have agents whose sole business it is to look after accidents and see that the company suffers as little loss as possible through the claims of the injured. Yet many are injured in railway work and elsewhere because long hours in the service of those same corporations had so worn them down that their mind was numb and they were unable to look out for themselves.
I venture to give concreteness to these matters by telling a single case which I followed from beginning to end.
An elderly workingman, a good Christian man, was run down by a street car in New York City. His leg was badly bruised. He was taken to an excellent hospital near by. His wife and daughter visited him immediately. After that they had to wait to the regular visiting day. On that day they came to me in great distress and said that he had been sent forward to Bellevue Hospital. I went with them and we found that he had been there only one night, and had again been sent on to the Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island. At both hospitals they said the case was not serious and they had shifted him to make room for graver cases. The steamer connecting Bellevue and the Island had left on its last trip that day. If the two women had been alone, they would have been helpless in their anxiety till the next day. I got them across. After hours of fear, which almost prostrated them, we found the old man. He was fairly comfortable and reported that his night at Bellevue had been spent on the floor. A few days later gangrene set in the leg was twice amputated, and he died. I am not competent to say if this result was due to neglect or not. I know of other cases in which that first hospital shipped charity patients elsewhere without giving any notice whatever to the relatives.
The agent of the street-car company promptly called on the family and offered $100 in settlement of all damages. I saw the manager on their behalf. He explained courteously that since the case resulted in death, $5000 would be the maximum allowed by New York laws, and since the man’s earnings had been small and he had but few years of earning capacity before him, the amount of damage allowed by the courts in his case would be slight. The suffering to the affections of the family did not enter into the legal aspect of the matter. The company paid its counsel by the year. If the family sued and was successful in the lower court, the manager frankly said they would carry it to the higher courts and could wear out the resources of the family at slight expense to the corporation. The president, a benevolent and venerable- looking gentleman, explained to me that the combined distance traveled by their cars daily would reach from New York to the Rocky Mountains. People were constantly being run over, and the company could not afford to be more generous. The widow concluded to submit to the terms offered. The $100 was brought to her in the usual form of single dollar bills to make it look like vast wealth to a poor person. The daughter suffered very serious organic injury through the shock received when her father had disappeared from the hospital, and this was probably one cause for her death in child-birth several years later.
The officers of the hospitals and the officers of the street railway company were not bad men. Their point of view and their habits of mind are entirely comprehensible. I feel no certainty that I should not act in the same way if I had been in their place long enough. But the impression remained that our social machinery is almost as blindly cruel as its steel machinery, and that it runs over the life of a poor man with scarcely a quiver.

There is certainly a great and increasing body of chronic wretchedness in our wonderful country. It is greatest where our industrial system has worked out its conclusions most completely. Our national optimism and conceit ought not to blind us longer to the fact. Single cases of unhappiness are inevitable in our frail human life; but when there are millions of them, all running along well-defined grooves, reducible to certain laws, then this misery is not an individual, but a social matter, due to causes in the structure of our society and curable only by social reconstruction. We point with pride to the multitude of our charitable organizations. Our great cities have annual directories of their charitable organizations, which state the barest abstract of facts and yet make portly volumes. These institutions are the pride and the shame of Christian civilization; the pride because we so respond to the cry of suffering; the shame, because so much need exists. They are a heavy financial drag. The more humane our feeling is, the better we shall have to house our dependents and delinquents. But those who have had personal contact with the work, feel that they are beating back a swelling tide with feeble hands. With their best intentions they may be harming men more than helping them. And the misery grows. The incapables increase faster than the population. Moreover, beyond the charity cases lies the mass of wretchedness that spawns them. For every halfwitted pauper in the almshouse there may be ten misbegotten and muddle-headed individuals bungling their work and their life outside. For every person who is officially declared insane, there are a dozen whose nervous organization is impaired and who are centres of further trouble. For every thief in prison there are others outside, pilfering and defrauding, and rendering social life insecure and anxious. Mr. Hunter t estimates that about four million persons are dependent on public relief in the United States that an equal number are destitute, but bear their misery in silence; and that ten million have an income insufficient to maintain them even in a state of physical efficiency to do their work. The methods by which he arrives at these results seem careful and fair. But suppose that he were a million or two out of the way, does that affect the moral challenge of the figures much?
Sir Wilfred Lawson told of a test applied by the head of an insane asylum to distinguish the sane from the insane. He took them to a basin of water under a running faucet and asked them to dip out the water. The insane merely dipped and dipped. The sane turned off the faucet and dipped out the rest. Is our social order sane?

Important announcements, assignments, and deadlines

Due to our crazy, whacked out schedule the last two weeks, I want to remind you about a few things:

1. Make sure you read the posts on the blog for chapters 24 and 25 (front page and archives), since they help make up for all the classtime we have lost. If it’s there, it’s to help you prepare for your upcoming FOUR CHAPTER TEST. Make sure you note that chapter 26 is due on Tuesday!

2. Next week, your big assignment will be to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal historical essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” You need to read the (excerpted) essay (it’s several pages long) and be ready to discuss it thoroughly (I would prefer a good discussion to assigning you an essay on it, and I bet you would too).There are questions I wish you to answer thoroughly that will be listed on this post and will be used to help you discuss this essay. These questions and this discussion take the place of outline notes or questions for chapter 26. The questions over the essay will be due (and the discussion will take place) Wednesday or Thursday of next week, depending upon your class period.

You can find the essay online first of all in the chapter 26 archive, where I posted it last year. If you want to be more adventurous, you can also find it  here http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html or here http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/frontierthesis.html , or you can pick up a hard copy from me on Tuesday. I would not wait that long to start this assignment! I will update the essay in the archives to put it on this page on Sunday morning, as well. I just don’t want to push all the other posts on chapter 25 too far down the page just yet.

My true champions can also get the complete essay in a .pdf here atwww.honorshumanities.umd.edu/205%20Readings.pdf, but that would be going above and beyond the call of duty, and is not really necessary (but might interest you…)

I want you to see an example of historical analytical writing, and this is one of the most well-known ones by a progressive American historian. Some of you are still struggling with emphasizing analysis in you writing rather than narrative, so please pay attention to HOW Jackson uses his information as well as WHAT he is saying.

Questions– Turner’s Frontier Thesis
1) In your own words, what is The Frontier Thesis? What role has the frontier has played in American history, according to Turner?
2) What does Turner say about American distinctiveness (or “exceptionalism”) in the essay? What evidence does he provide for his argument?
3) Trace the process which Turner identifies as “Americanization.” How does that process proceed? What are the steps and stages along the way?
4) Turner is often identified as a “Progressive” historian, meaning that he views history as the inevitable process from chaos to improvement, with the underlying assumption that change is for the better. What “Progressive” assessments of history appear in Turner’s thesis? Does he identify any threats to that progress?
5) Think about America in the 1890s. What are the major social changes shaping peoples’ lives during this era? How does Turner’s thesis reflect these changes, try to make sense of them, or sound a warning call for ways in which America might be losing its way as a result of the changes?
6) What makes it possible for Turner to argue that the land on the other side of the “frontier” is “empty,” despite Native American and Spanish settlement in the region? Of what is this area really “empty?” How does this relate to the understanding of Manifest Destiny in the middle of the 19th century?
7) Examine the language used by Turner. What does his use of such terms as “savagery” reveal about his social philosophy? How is he a product of his times?
8) Who is Turner’s “normative” American? (Look it up!) What activities, identities, geographic locations, etc., reveal that American’s normative status? In what ways is Turner’s thesis a statement of American hegemony (Look it up!) at the moment of the 1890s, both with regards to that normative American and American territorial expansion?

EXTRA CREDIT for those who include a summary of criticisms of Turner’s thesis by other historians.

Susan B. Anthony’s arrest for voting

Go to this link (http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/whm/trials/anthony.htm) to read a short (1 page) summary of Susan B. Anthony’s trial for attempting to vote.

You need to understand why Anthony refused to pay her fine and avoid trial. She WANTED to bring the issue to court, and only someone who has been harmed by a law has the right to challenge a law in court.  The entire episode here is an example of civil disobedience– in registering to vote, in voting, and finally, in demanding to take the case to trial rather than to settle the incident quietly and allow it to fade away, which is exactly what the authorities wanted.

As yo read the summary, note the sometimes accidentally humorous (in the charge against her the prosecutor states that at the TIME she voted she was ____– as if she haad a choice) and note what happened when she attempted to take the stand. Note what the verdict was, and what the consequences for Anthony were.

Another great resource online on this incident is found here at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/anthony/sbahome.html.

I would actually recommend that you bookmark the law school at UMKC’s website for use with all manner of legal questions and review. That and the Yale University Avalon project are particularly well-done.

Excerpt: How the Other Half Lives

This is a brief excerpt from muckraker Jacob Riis’s expose on the appalling conditions in the tenements in New York City. The Full text of this book can be found here.

Questions for consideration:

1. What specific health and safety concerns would one have if living in a tenement?

2. How was  Edward Mulhearn making his living on the streets of New York?
From How the Other Half Lives
by Jacob Riis

Bottle Alley is around the corner in Baxter Street; but it is a fair specimen of its kind, wherever found. Look into any of these houses, everywhere the same piles of rags, of malodorous bones and musty paper, all of which the sanitary police flatter themselves they have banished to the dumps and the warehouses. Here is a “flat” of “parlor” and two pitch-dark coops called bedrooms. Truly, the bed is all there is room for. The family tea-kettle is on the stove, doing duty for the time being as a wash-boiler. By night it will have returned to its proper use again, a practical illustration of how poverty in “the Bend” makes both ends meet. One, two, three beds are there, if the old boxes and heaps of foul straw can be called by that name; a broken stove with crazy pipe from which the smoke leaks at every joint, a table of rough boards propped up on boxes, piles of rubbish in the corner. The closeness and smell are appalling. How many people sleep here? The woman with the red bandanna shakes her head sullenly, but the bare-legged girl with the bright face counts on her fingers—five, six! “Six, sir!” Six grown people and five children. “Only five,” she says with a smile, swathing the little one on her lap in its cruel bandage. There is another in the cradle—actually a cradle. And how much the rent? Nine and a half, and “please, sir! he won’t put the paper on.” “He” is the landlord. The “paper” hangs in musty shreds on the wall.

Well do I recollect the visit of a health inspector to one of these tenements on a July day when the thermometer outside was climbing high in the nineties; but inside, in that awful room, with half a dozen persons washing, cooking, and sorting rags, lay the dying baby alongside the stove, where the doctor’s thermometer ran up to 115°! Perishing for the want of a breath of fresh air in this city of untold charities! Did not the manager of the Fresh Air Fund write to the pastor of an Italian Church only last year 2 that “no one asked for Italian children,” and hence he could not send any to the country?

….The metropolis is to lots of people like a lighted candle to the moth. It attracts them in swarms that come year after year with the vague idea that they can get along here if anywhere; that something is bound to turn up among so ma ny. Nearly all are young men, unsettled in life, many–most of them, perhaps–fresh from good homes, beyond a doubt with honest hopes of getting a start in the city and making a way for themselves. Few of them have much money to waste while looking around , and the cheapness of the lodging offered is an object. Fewer still know anything about the city and its pitfalls. They have come in search of crowds, of “life,” and they gravitate naturally to the Bowery, the great democratic highway of the city, where the twenty-five-cent lodging-houses take them in. In the alleged reading-rooms of these great barracks, that often have accommodations, such as they are, for two, three, and even four hundred guests, they encounter three distinct classes of associates: th e great mass adventurers like themselves, waiting there for something to turn up; a much smaller class of respectable clerks or mechanics, who, too poor or too lonely to have a home of their own, live this way from year to year; and lastly the thief in se arch of recruits for his trade. The sights the young stranger sees, and the company he keeps, in the Bowery are not of a kind to strengthen any moral principle he may have brought away from home, and by the time his money is gone, with no work yet in sig ht, and he goes down a step, a long step, to the fifteen-cent lodging-house, he is ready for the tempter whom he finds waiting for him there, reinforced by the contingent of ex-convicts returning from the prisons after having served out their sentences fo r robbery or theft. Then it is that the something he has been waiting for turns up. The police returns have the record of it. “In nine cases out of ten,” says Inspector Byrnes, “he turns out a thief, or a burglar, if, indeed, he does not sooner or later b ecome a murderer.” As a matter of fact, some of the most atrocious of recent murders have been the result of schemes of robbery hatched in these houses, and so frequent and bold have become the depredations of the lodging-house thieves, that the authorities have been compelled to make a public demand for more effective laws that shall make them subject at all times to police regulation.

Inspector Byrnes observes that in the last two or three years at least four hundred young men have been arrested for petty crimes that originated in the lodging-houses, and that in many cases it was their first step in crime. He adds his testimony to the notorious fact that three-fourths of the young men called on to plead to generally petty offences in the courts are under twenty years of age, poorly clad, and without means. The bearing of the remark is obvious. One of the, to the police, well-known thieves who lived, when out of jail, at the Windsor, a well-known lodging-house in the Bowery, went to Johnstown after the flood and was shot and killed there while robbing the dead.

An idea of just how this particular scheme of corruption works, with an extra touch of infamy thrown in, may be gathered from the story of David Smith, the “New York Fagin,” who was convicted and sent to prison last year through the instrumentality of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Here is the account from the Society’s last report:

“The boy, Edward Mulhearn fourteen years old, had run away from his home in Jersey City, thinking he might find work and friends in New York. He may have been a trifle wild. He met Smith on the Bowery and recognized him as an acquai ntance. When Smith offered him a supper and bed he was only too glad to accept. Smith led the boy to a vile lodging-house on the Bowery, where he introduced him to his ‘pals’ and swore he would make a man of him before he was a week older. Next day he took the unsuspecting Edward all over the Bowery and Grand Street, showed him the sights and drew his attention to the careless way the ladies carried their bags and purses and the easy thing it was to get them. He induced Edward to try his hand. Edward tried and won. He was richer by three dollars! It did seem easy. ‘Of course it is,’ said his companion. From that time Smith took the boy on a number of thieving raids, but he never seemed to become adept enough to be trusted out of range of the ‘Fagin’s’ watchful eye. When he went out alone he generally returned empty-handed. This did not suit Smith. It was then he conceived the idea of turning this little inferior thief into a superior beggar. He took the boy into his room and burned his arms with a hot iron. The boy screamed and entreated in vain. The merciless wretch pressed the iron deep into the tender flesh, and afterward applied acid to the raw wound.

“Thus prepared, with his arm inflamed, swollen, and painful, Edward was sent out every day by this fiend, who never let him out of his sight, and threatened to burn his arm off if he did not beg money enough. He was instructed to te ll people the wound had been caused by acid falling upon his arm at the works. Edward was now too much under the man’s influence to resist or disobey him. He begged hard and handed Smith the pennies faithfully. He received in return bad food and worse treatment.”

Updates…

1. The terms and questions for semester 2 are now updated on the page listed on the tab above this post. The reading schedule is also posted on the upcoming deadlines page.

2. Chapter 25 will be due on January 13th for 5th period, and on January 14th for 4th and 6th period. The assignment for this chapter is outline notes according to my format. They can either be found in the archive for chapter 25 or below this post.

3. There are readings and links you need to look at for chapter 24 below the post on the second semester reading schedule on this page.

Hope you enjoyed your break!

Reading schedule for semester 2

AP United States History
Second Semester Reading Schedule
The following schedule includes due dates of all reading assignments and test dates for the semester.  We will do our best to stick to the schedule.  You must be responsible for keeping up with all assignments and readings.  There will be additional primary and secondary source readings and in-class and out-of-class essays throughout the semester.
January    5 —   Chapter 24 Due            —Industrialization

January 13-14–    Chapter 25 Due —           Urbanization

January 19–    Chapter 26 Due–            Westward Expansion

January 25 —   Chapter 27 Due–            Imperialism

January 29 —   Chapters 24-27 Test

February    1–    Chapter 28 Due–            Teddy Roosevelt

February 3 —   Chapter 29 Due —           Woodrow Wilson

February 8 —   Chapter 30 Due —           World War I

February 12–    Chapters 28-30 Test

February 16 —   Chapter 31 Due–            1920s

February 19–    Chapter 32 Due–            1920s

February 23–    Chapter 33 Due —           Great Depression

February 26–     Chapters 31-33 Test

March        1 —   Chapter 34 Due —           World War II

March 8 —   Chapter 35 Due–            World War II

March 12–    Chapters 34-35 Test

March 22–    Chapter 36 Due —           Cold War

March 29–    Chapter 37 Due —           Dwight Eisenhower

April        5–    Chapter 38 Due–            1960s

April 9–    Chapters 36-38 Test

April 12 —   Chapter 39 Due —           1970s

April  19 —   Chapter 40 Due–            1980s

April  26 —   Chapter 41 Due —           1990s

April  30–    Chapters 39-41 Test

May   3-6th–    Review

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!May 7th AP Test!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Notice that there is not much in class time to review for the AP Exam.  Out of class review sessions will be scheduled to begin after spring break.  More information will be given in class.

Chapter 25 Outlines

Ch 25 Outline
Outlines due January 13- 14

Fill in the details or explanations, and include any effects or significance.

Big Question: What factors caused American cities to grow so rapidly in the late 19th century, and what impact did this have on American life? In what ways are cities melting pots, and in what ways are they pressure cookers?

I. Two “I”s for “U”: Industrialization and Immigration expand the Urban landscape
—–A. Job opportunities in the city
—–B. “America fever” brings “New Immigrants”
———-Why do they come, and do they all stay?
———-How are they different from the “Old Immigrants?”
———-How does this difference pose a challenge for society?
———-Nativism rises again- APA
—–C. Describe attempts to limit immigration (Consider the debate over immigration in our time to help shape your thoughts)
———-Why does organized labor take sides?
—–D. Transportation revolutionizes the “walking city”
———-“Bedroom communities” and suburbs
—–E. Housing methods, for better or worse
———-Ethnic neighborhoods, Dumbbell tenements, slums
—–F. What impact does urbanization and industrialization have on families?

II. How do scientists, reformers, and writers challenge the status quo?
—–A. Liberalism vs. Conservatism in the Churches
———-Can “robber barons” be religious people?
———-Revivalism rises again: Moody, Gibbons, Rauschenbusch, and Eddy try to awaken the spirit
———-YMCA and Salvation Army provide havens
—–B. Social Gospel vs. Gospel of Wealth
———-Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel
———-Women reformers: Addams, Wald, Kelley
———-Hull House, Henry Street Settlement, and Americanization
—–C. Darwinism vs. the Churches
———-Biblical literalism (Fundamentalism) vs. science
———-“Accomodationists”—what did they believe?
—–D. Du Bois vs. Washington
———-Tuskegee and accomodationism
———-George Washington Carver
———-Founding of the NAACP
———-The “talented tenth” and integration
———-Colleges for Blacks
—–E. Muckraking authors call for change
———-Magazines
———-Godkin
———-George
———-Bellamy
———-Ida B. Wells
—–F. Moral regulation: Woodhull vs. the Comstock Laws
———-Prohibition: Is it just a backlash against immigrants?
—–G. What impact does urbanization have on women?
———-Charlotte Gilman and the birth of feminism: why now?
———-The fight for suffrage: Anthony, Catt, Stanton, and NAWSA
—–H. The Metaphysical Club– who are they, and what areas of knowledge do they impact?

III. Education and literature blossoms-Is this the start of a new information age?
—–A. High schools and “normal” schools
———-Chatauquas
—–B. How do land grant colleges change the education levels of Americans?
———-Morrill Act, Hatch Act and their impact
———-Coeducation and Colleges of Blacks
—–C. The rise of the research universities
———-Stanford, Hopkins, Chicago
—–D. Changing curricula reflect changing society
—–E. Newspapers and public libraries- what is their impact?
—–F. Serious literature and dime novels
———-Twain, Dickinson, Harte, Crane, Adams, James, London, Dreiser
—–G. Artistic triumphs

IV. The rise of the consumer culture
—–A. The birth of the disposable society–Packaging creates waste: impact?
—–B. Catalogs and shopping!
—–C. Birth of advertising
—–D. Amateur and Professional sports
———-Baseball, basketball, boxing, bicycling
—–E. Wild West shows and circuses: Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum
—–F. Question for understanding: Where do people get the money and the time to enjoy these things?

Review of Industrialization and Urbanization

Mr. Wallace, our helper to all those who have missed class or just need a good review from another perspective, explain abut America during the late 9th century as we struggle to adopt to the changes in society from the move to the city and the city’s factories.

Once again, this is just part I of his review.