A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in A by Michael McGerr

Author:Michael McGerr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-05-08T05:00:00+00:00

Differences between red and white were much easier to manage. At the start of the twentieth century, Native Americans posed little threat to whites. Far less numerous than African-Americans, the Indians seemed to be declining. Federal census takers enumerated 248,253 Native Americans in 1890; ten years later, even though the Indian Wars had come to an end in 1891, the census counted only 237,196. The Indians were more diverse and more fragmented than the African-American population. At least 170 tribal groups were spread across the country, from the Penobscot and Passamaquody in Maine to the Seminoles in Florida to the Luisenos and Cahuillas in Southern California to the Makahs and Puyallups in Washington. The largest numbers of Native Americans lived in the states and territories west of the Mississippi River. More than 64, 000 lived in Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, which would be joined to form the state of Oklahoma in 1907. Given these numbers, Indians did not pose the sort of social, economic, and political challenge that whites felt from blacks. And Native Americans had seemingly been put in their “place” even more decisively than African-Americans had been put in theirs during the Redemption. Defeated in the Indian Wars, largely confined to reservations, and denied citizenship rights, the Indians were effectively excluded from the mainstream of white America.37

Nevertheless, Native Americans had become a problem by the turn of the century. Their “place” had become uncertain, not because of their actions but because of the machinations of whites. The Native Americans had one resource that white society did covet—land. Throughout the late nineteenth century, whites wanted further access to the lands controlled by the tribes. At the same time, other whites, mainly the sort of genteel New England Republicans who had once backed Reconstruction, wanted to draw Native Americans into white society. The confluence of these desires was the federal policy of assimilation, which emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, and which received its fullest legislative expression in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. The white assimilationists intended to dismantle Native American culture, dissolve the tribes, and educate Native American children in schools—all to turn the Indians into individualistic, hard-working citizens of the United States. The Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, served this goal by providing for the gradual distribution of collectively held tribal lands to individual Native Americans—and to whites. Given the motives of its white supporters, this was at once a cynical and an optimistic policy: Indians would be exploited, but they would be transformed. It also underscored the exceptional status of Native Americans in the United States. At a time when workers, immigrants, and blacks were suspect, when boundaries were being drawn across America, the line between Indians and whites would be obliterated.

Assimilation had disappointed its advocates by 1900. For land-hungry whites, the implementation of the Dawes Act was too slow; they wanted quicker access to Indian land. For whites sympathetic to Native Americans, assimilation did not seem to be working; it even appeared to be hurting the Indians.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.