AP US History

February 5 – 9 2018

MONDAY (5th Period 1st Lunch: No Lunch in my room for the next couple of days)

  • Short Answer Format Quiz on Progressivism

MaterialsStrategy/format

Ppt lecture-discussion

Student Skill Types

Chronologic Reasoning (1,3)

Comp/Context (5)

Historical Arguments (7)

Interpretation/Synthesis (8, 9)

TUESDAY

  • Discuss key policies of the Wilson Years 1912-1920 (POL-2,3) (WXT-3)

MaterialsStrategy/format

Ppt lecture-discussion

Student Skill Types

Chronologic Reasoning (1,3)

Comp/Context (5)

Historical Arguments (7)

Interpretation/Synthesis (8, 9)

The Wilson Administration

  • Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia but grew up in Augusta, Georgia, where his father was an official of the Southern Presbyterian church. After briefly practicing as a lawyer (he only had two clients, one of whom was his mother), he attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins and taught history and political science at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton--his alma mater. He wrote several highly acclaimed books, including Congressional Government, which decried the weakening of presidential authority in the United States, and The State, a call for increased government activism.
  • As Princeton's president, he developed a reputation as a reformer for trying to eliminate the school's elitist system of teaching clubs. Professional politicians in NewJersey, wrongly thinking that they could manipulate the politically inexperienced Wilson, helped make him the state's governor, and then, arranged his nomination as president in 1912. The nomination was a way to block another bid by William Jennings Bryan, whose prairie populism had been rejected three times by voters.
  • As Princeton's president, he developed a reputation as a reformer for trying to eliminate the school's elitist system of teaching clubs. Professional politicians in New Jersey, wrongly thinking that they could manipulate the politically inexperienced Wilson, helped make him the state's governor, and then, arranged his nomination as president in 1912. The nomination was a way to block another bid by William Jennings Bryan, whose prairie populism had been rejected three times by voters. With the Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt, Wilson became the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War. He carried 40 states, but only 42 percent of the vote. After his election, the moralistic, self-righteous Wilson told the chairman of the Democratic Party: "Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States." Wilson later said that the United States had been created by God "to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty." We will discuss this more on Wilson and foreign policy next unit

During his first term, he initiated a long list of major domestic reforms. These included:

  • The Underwood Simmons Tariff (1913), which substantially lowered duties on imports for the first time since the Civil War and enacted a graduated income tax;
  • The Federal Reserve Act (1913), which established a Federal Reserve Board and 12 regional Federal Reserve banks to supervise the banking system, setting interest rates on loans to private banks and controlling the supply of money in circulation;
  • The Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), which established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC sought to preserve competition by preventing businesses from engaging in unfair business practices;
  • Clayton Act Anti-Trust Act (1914), which limited the ownership of stock in one corporation by another, implemented non-competitive pricing policies, and forbade interlocking directorship for certain banking and business corporations. It also recognized the right of labor to strike and picket and barred the use of anti-trust statutes against labor unions.

Unlike Roosevelt, who believed that big business could be successfully regulated by government, Woodrow Wilson believed that the federal government should break up big businesses in order to restore as much competition as possible. Other social legislation enacted during Wilson's first term included:

  • The Adamson Act (1916), which established an eight-hour workday for railroad workers;
  • The Workingmen's Compensation Act (1916), which provided financial assistance to federal employees injured on the job;
  • The Child Labor Act (1916), which forbade the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor; and
  • The Farm Loan Act (1916), which made it easier for farmers to get loans.

Following Wilson's election in 1912, four constitutional amendments were ratified:

  • 16th Amendment (1913) gave Congress the power to impose an income tax;
  • 17th Amendment (1913) required the direct election of senators;
  • 18th Amendment (1919) banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages; and
  • 19th amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote.

Wilson's second term was dominated by American involvement in World War I. At the end of September 1919, Wilson suffered a mild stroke. Then in early October, he had a major stroke that almost totally incapacitated him.

Conclusion

Wilson’s domestic record was overshadowed by two factors: the first was Wilson’s record on race. As a southerner, he harbored many of the old prejudices. He ordered the segregation of Federal offices and refused to meet with Ida B. Wells to sponsor an anti-lynching law.

Homework

Read pp: 556 – 564 Immigrants east and West (be prepared for bell work or recap questions)

WEDNESDAY

  • Explain the causes and features of “New Immigration” during the Gilded Age (WXT-2,3) (MIG-2)

(WOR-3)

MaterialsStrategy/Format

PPT and videolecture-discussion SL.CCR.1 and

L.CCR.2-3

Student Skill Types

Chronological Reasoning (1, 2, 3)

Comp/Context (4, 5)

Interpretation/Synthesis (8, 9) Homework

Introduction

  • An integral part of both the massive expansion of industry and the resultant labor union movement was the fact that American experienced the highest rate of immigration in our history! Obviously immigration is a common thread in our nation's experience but in the Gilded Age it took on major ramifications. We will be splitting up this discussion into two class periods because video evidence on this topic is, I believe, critical for understanding. The basic plan is to look at European immigration on the Tuesday and Asian immigration on day Wednesday.
  • In 1887 the Statue of Liberty was erected in New York. The immigrants who would catch a glimpse of the statue would mainly come from eastern and southern Europe. Immigration during this period has come to be called “new immigration” to denote a wave from the Civil War years continuing to the First World War when refugees started trying to escape the horrors of the 1914-1918. Ellis Island developed as a reception center where European immigrants were screened and allowed to enter. Some immigrant’s names were anglicized by the government officials. One could imagine someone trying to spell or pronounce the names of Duke Head basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski!!!!! My own history involves a similar story perhaps on my father's side.
  • As always seems to be the case, the term while not a misnomer does lead to misunderstanding. The immigrants were only new in the sense that the massive wave from many locations in Europe and Asia was much larger than before. Also, the countries of origin tended to be different, with southern and eastern Europe being more represented than the traditional central and western European points of origin. Also, the wave of Asian immigration was unprecedented.
  • The immigrants of the new immigration period were sometimes much worse off and less prepared to immigrate and success was much harder. Language and religious barriers played a much greater role. Tensions were also higher. As we have already seen with Irish (and others), the children of recent immigrants were often the most oppressive and unwilling to accommodate the new immigrants. By the end of the period, in 1924 the nation’s first immigration laws will be written and a quota system established.

European Immigration and the East Coast

Some 334,203 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1886, the year of the statue's dedication. A Cuban revolutionary, Jose Marti, wrote: "Irishmen, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Germans freed from tyranny or want--all hail the monument of Liberty because to them it seems to incarnate their own uplifting."

  • In 1900, 14 percent of the American population was foreign born, compared to 8 percent a century later. Passports were unnecessary and the cost of crossing the Atlantic was just $10 in steerage.
  • European immigration to the United States greatly increased after the Civil War, reaching 5.2 million in the 1880s then surging to 8.2 million in the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 20 million immigrants came to the United States. In 1907 alone, 1.285 million arrived. By 1900, New York City had as many Irish residents as Dublin. It had more Italians than any city outside Rome and more Poles than any city except Warsaw. It had more Jews than any other city in the world, as well as sizeable numbers of Slavs, Lithuanians, Chinese, and Scandinavians.
  • During the Late 19th century the wave of immigration was called “New Immigration.” Unlike earlier immigrants, who mainly came from northern and western Europe, the "new immigrants" came largely from southern and eastern Europe. Largely Catholic and Jewish in religion, the new immigrants came from the Balkans areas (Latvia Lithuania, and Estonia) Italy, Poland, and Russia.
  • Racial tensions in Europe erupted into a series of pogroms against Jews in Russia and Poland. This touched off one of the highest waves of Jewish immigration. Unlike some of the other groups, many Jews were craftsmen in the old countries and translated those skills into more success here. Jews tended to congregate in ghettos, a term whose meaning has changed and is tinged with racism. In this era it simply referred to similar nationalities congregating in the same neighborhoods. Harlem in New York was a good example. In this period, Germans had lived there; giving way in the early 20th century to African-Americans, and now it is heavily Hispanic. Many of the eastern Europeans came as family units and intended to never go back to their homelands. Of course Jews were not the only ones to face religious tensions. Italians were almost exclusively Catholic and Greeks were Eastern Orthodox and, like the Russians and Poles, had a language that was very different. People have always feared what they do not understand and the Gilded Age was no exception!
  • Many of the millions of immigrants who arrived to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did so with the intention of returning to their villages in the Old World. Known as "birds of passage," many of these eastern and southern European migrants (Italian and Greek) were peasants who had lost their property as a result of the commercialization of agriculture. These immigrants were predominately male and hoped to earn enough money to buy back their farms. Many of these immigrants came to America alone, expecting to rejoin their families in Europe within a few years. From 1907 to 1911, of every nearly 75% of Italians repatriated. For Southern and Eastern Europe as a whole,a little less than 50% would return to Europe

The West Coast

  • Called the "Ellis Island of the West.” Angel Islandin San Francisco was also a check point for immigrants in the early years of the 20th century. But only a small proportion of the 175,000 people who arrived at Angel Island were allowed to remain in the United States. Angel Island was a detention center for Chinese immigrants. It was surrounded by barbed wire.
  • We have already discussed the Chinese Exclusion Act but they were not the only targeted group. Overpopulation and rural poverty led many Japanese to emigrate to the United States, where they confronted intense racial prejudice. In California, the legislature imposed limits on Japanese land ownership, and the Hearst newspaper ran headlines such as 'The Yellow Peril:” How Japanese Crowd out the White Race.'
  • The San Francisco School Board stirred an international incident in 1906 when it segregated Japanese students in an 'Oriental School.' The Japanese government protested to President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt negotiated a 'gentlemen's agreement' restricting Japanese emigration.
  • A key issue in eastern immigration was contract labor. During the 19th century, demand for manual laborers to build railroads, raise sugar on Pacific Islands, mine precious metals, construct irrigation canals, and perform other forms of heavy labor, grew. Particularly in tropical or semi-tropical regions, this demand for manual labor was met by indentured or contract workers. Nominally free, these laborers served under contracts of indenture which required them to work for a period of time--usually five to seven years--in return for their travel expenses and maintenance. In exchange for nine hours of labor a day, six days a week, indentured servants received a small salary as well as clothing, shelter, food, and medical care.
  • An alternative to the indenture system was the "credit ticket system." A broker advanced the cost of passage and workers repaid the loan plus interest out of their earnings. The ticket system was widely used by Chinese migrants to the United States. Beginning in the 1840s, about 380,000 Chinese laborers migrated to the U.S. mainland and 46,000 to Hawaii. Between 1885 and 1924, some 200,000 Japanese workers went to Hawaii and 180,000 to the U.S. mainland.
  • The Chinese immigrants were sometimes derogatorily referred to as "coolies." Today, this term carries negative connotations of passivity and submissiveness, but originally it was an Anglicization of a Chinese word that refers to manual workers impressed into service by force or deception. In fact, indentured labor was frequently acquired through deceptive practices and even violence.
  • Between 1830 and 1920, about 1.5 million indentured laborers were recruited from India, one million from Japan, and half a million from China. Tens of thousands of free Africans and Pacific Islanders also served as indentured workers under the contract labor system.

The Anti-Immigration Backlash

  • We have already seen an anti-immigration movement, the Know Nothings. In this era immigration was more complex because many big business Republicans favored open immigration because of cheap labor. But, others especially middle class Republicans sought restrictions. Democrats who had long benefitted from the immigrant vote had no desire to stop the flow. The coasts were the main scenes of anti-immigration.
  • The wave of anti-Catholicism seen with the early waves of Irish and German immigration of the 1840s returned with a vengeance. A group called the APA (American Protective Association) lobbied and raised funds for WASP candidates against Catholic ones.

Conclusion

Immigration issues were became a political issue during this period and of course has continued to this day. Interestingly enough, there did not seem to be as great a feeling of angst against Hispanic immigration at this point. In fact at various points, the practice was encouraged and no one worried about the illegality. After all, in the southwest, Americans were the first immigrants!

Homework

Read pp: 556 – 564 Immigrants east and West (be prepared for bell work or recap questions)

THURSDAY

  • Examine the nature of changes in gender roles and culture during the late 19th –early 20th century (CUL-2,3,4)

MaterialsStrategy/Format

Ppt/video?Lecture-discussion SL.CCR.1

Student Skills

Chronological Reasoning (2,3)

Comp/Context (4,5)

Crafting Arguments (6)

Historical Interpretation (9)

Introduction

  • I know that I harp on this a great deal but social history makes up 40% of materials on the AP Exam and furthermore, ongoing trends are overwhelming represented on essays. As a result we need to make sure that we cover gender issues.
  • In the colonial period in America what rights did women possess? Any political rights? We know that women were protected under the law as citizens of colonies but simply did not have any voting or office holding ability. What about economic rights? Did this vary by region? Women in the Chesapeake did have property rights for a while (do you remember why). However as this was not true in England, women generally lost this right over time.
  • In the New Republic Period there was great hope among middle/upper class women that the rhetoric of the Revolution would be made real. But as it turns out that when Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” he really meant men (and of course not all of them either). Abigail Adamshad admonished John to “not forget the ladies” at the Constitutional Convention but alas despite the contributions to women helping to enforce the protests against taxes and serving sometimes very near and on some cases on the field of battle, no rights were forthcoming.
  • The Antebellum Period was where we see the first political moves for women. The protest against slavery moved Northern Middle class women into the abolitionism realm (Sojourner Truth, Sarah and Angela Grimke) and all of the major reform movements of the period (Dorothea Dix). Members of the Liberty Party tried to keep women out but key leaders like William Lloyd Garrison supported their right to become politically active within the movement. This effectively created the first major move in women’s rights; the Seneca Falls Movement (Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton). Women and male supporters called for complete equality but this was mostly ignored even by most women. Not all women sought to become equal in politics agreeing that women should not play a role outside of the home. IN the U.S. Catherine Beecher’s “cult of domesticity became the rival of a growing sense of feminism. And then the horrors civil war came.
  • During Civil War and Reconstruction years women were even more active in military affairs. While none could legally serve as soldiers there are known cases where they did….but this was a rarity. Importantly women in the North and South served as nurses and the U.S. Sanitary Commission (Clara Barton later of the Red Cross) involved hundreds of women as caregivers. However the end of combat saw men once again ignore their contributions. Then, in both the north and south howls of anger went up over passage of the Fifteenth Amendment allowing black men to vote while at the same time ignoring all women.

The Gilded Age and Women