Majority & Minorities: Population Growth and the Evolution of Civil rights

Immigration & Ethnicity: "Natives", "Americans" and Others:

"a nation of immigrants"

This page has evolved somewhat from being just the basic outline displayed during the lecture. I have started working on it from the end, which was covered very quickly during the lecture; I plan to develop it considerably in the days to come, so check back regularly for updates.

(Last update: December 7, 2006)

(More about the population of the US can be found at the Wikipedia page about demographics here.)

The United States is often referred to as a "nation of immigrants". This is clearly something of a paradox: a nation is typically thought of as consisting of a more or less homogeneous group, living in a fairly clearly defined geographical area, characterized by shared customs, values, language, etc. Many of the members of the group would in most cases be considered "natives", in the sense of having been born within the boundaries of the country, and descended from people who were born or naturalized there. Immigrants, who typically choose to live and work in the country but who arrive from outside the geographical area of the nation, are by definition "outsiders" in relation to the native group. However, as will be seen, the expression a nation of immigrants is perhaps more applicable than might at first appear.

One characteristic perception of the US is that the people most often thought of as "American" (i.e. as US natives) are white English-speakers. Statistically, it true that white English-speakers dominate the population; though the proportion of white English speakers is declining somewhat relative to the whole, they represent between two-thirds and three-fourths of the total according to the census taken in the year 2000.

However, white English-speakers are in fact much more likely than some other populations to be immigrants themselves or descendants of recent immigrants. The so-called Indians are the most obvious example of a group which can base its claim to "nativeness" on generations of family history on American soil, so many generations that virtually no memory remains of the generations preceding settlement in America. Another such group is that of the so-called "African-Americans", many of whom have family histories reaching back five, six, or more generations in what is now the US.

The use of the word "native" has, in fact, evolved over time. The most basic dictionary definition of a native is, of course, a person who was born in a place, speaks its language and practices its customs, including its religion. Who the term refers to and the degree of prestige attached to it, has, however, varied a great deal in the course of European and American history. (Look here for some thoughts on the word "native".)

Another term that is often used and that has evolved in discussing the population of the US is "minority". Look here for some thoughts on minorities in US history

Population Stats

It is possible to obtain quite precise information regarding the population of the US, as a census is conducted every ten years, in accordance with Article I of the Constitution. [A census is required by the Constitution in order to insure that representation of the states in the House of Representatives, which is proportional to population, is an accurate reflection of population distribution.] [There have been occasions when the statistics provided by the Census Bureau were contested, such as the one in 1990, which was said to have undercounted the population by several million people, mostly among minorities.] [Look here for more about the census and the Census Bureau.]

The census in the year 2000 found somewhat more than 281,000,000 people, an increase of at least 20,000,000 over 1990 (and almost 30 million, if the contested figure from 1990 is used). France, by way of comparison, has a population of slightly more than 60,000,000. Total population density is this about 30.5 people / square km (281M people / 9.2M sq km). Again for the sake of comparison, France's population density is slightly less than 110 people / square km.

Settlement & "Civilization"

The term "settle" is typically used to refer to the establishment of towns, roads, farms, and possibly other features of sedentary societies. In the case of the Americas in the Age of Exploration, this colonizing effort followed closely on the heels of the European explorations, and from the Europeans' point of view, involved "humanizing" land which had been left in its natural state by the indigenous peoples, who had thus created no legitimate claim to the land for themselves.

The term "civilization" was used for generations to suggest that the colonization of the New World by Europeans brought benefits to the indigenous populations. The term suggests that the "civilizers" had achieved a high level of refinement of taste, had escaped from primitive savagery, and could and would generously assist the native populations in overcoming the barbarity that characterized their cultures. The word is put in quotation marks here to convey a hint of irony: the most striking feature of European colonization for Americans, whether in North America or South, was not benevolent enlightenment and improved standards of living, but a tidal wave of destruction and death. Indeed, the native population was nearly eradicated by a combination of factors, including ships, horses, and guns, disease, and profound differences in philosophy.

The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marked by European expansion and imperialism in the most literal sense: European countries conquered other lands, and made colonies of them. In some cases (Africa and India are examples), the native population was subjected to the authority of the invading power, and the indigenous people carried out the work intended to enrich the "mother country". In the case of the Americas, and notably of that part of North America that would become the United States, the effects of disease had been so devastating that there were hardly any natives left to perform the work of the colonies. Furthermore, the difference between the natives' and the Europeans' conceptions of property and land ownership meant that the Europeans perceived the American continent as a nearly totally unexploited virgin land, available for colonisation without the transactions that would have been necessary in Europe. Partly because so many of the indigenous peoples had been killed off by disease, there were

European colonists went to America by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, but there was nevertheless a chronic shortage of labor, due at least in part to the decimation of the native peoples, (this was even more true in the Latin American and Caribbean than in the future US). As a consequence, in order to exploit the New World, Europeans expanded the institution of slavery. Historians debate why slavery as practiced by Europeans after the beginning of the modern period (after about 1500) was race-based, but it unquestionably was: the slaves in the New World were purchased in sub-Saharan Africa and were made to work, in many cases to death, in the indigo, tobacco, sugar and cotton plantations of the New World. Some 400,000 of the Africans that underwent the rigors of the "Middle Passage" were sold in the English colonies that would become the United States.

The image here shows stowage conditions on a slave ship after the adoption by Parliament of legislation to make slave transport more humane and less cruel.

The Civil War

• Secession to protect "states' rights" & slavery (Some of the causes of the Civil War are explained in Wikipedia here.)
• S: Confederate States of America (President Jefferson Davis)
• N: USA or "Union" (President Abraham Lincoln)
• Victory of N (= Union)
• Civil War Amdts:
• 13th 1865 abolition
• 14th 1868 citizenship, equal protection
• 15th 1870 male suffrage

When Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Presidency of the US in 1860, many Southerners were fearful that he would ultimately attempt to abolish slavery. Largely in order to avoid that outcome, eleven states seceded from the Union, and formed what they

Lincoln considered the states of the south not to be a new nation, but to be engaged in an open and organized rebellion.

The 19th century: a century of (white) immigration

Between 1820, when statistics began to be recorded, and 1900, the US was indeed a "nation of immigrants": there was hardly a year when immigration represented less than 15% of total population growth. The vast majority of immigrants during this period went to the US from Europe, principally from Northern and Western Europe (i.e., the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia). They had many motivations, including what sociologists call "push" & "pull" factors, i.e., elements of people's environments (economic, social, political, religious) that tend to encourage them to leave a place (push factors) or to go to a place (pull factors).

Nineteenth century pull factors include the Gold Rush in California in 1849, which brought thousands of prospectors from the Eastern US, but also from other parts of the world to seek their fortunes in the Sierra Nevada. In fact, few gold miners made large fortunes, but gold helped create some large fortunes, mostly of merchants who sold goods and equipment to the miners, and investors who saw the need for transportation and who bought stock in railroads.

The railroads were themselves a pull factor, as they created an enormous demand for manual laborers, some skilled, some unskilled, for example to carry the rails up the mountains to the places where they would be installed. Numbers of men came from China to perform this backbreaking labor. The first transcontinental rail link was completed in 1869.

The railroad was one example of the economic revolution of the end of the nineteenth century, which led to the accumulation of incomparably huge fortunes by a few lucky capitalists, including investors in railroads and also such industries as coal, petroleum and steel. Mark Twain, the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and also an acerbic social critic, characterized the last part of the century as the "Gilded Age", i.e., the age of glittering appearances with little underneath. The Gilded Age needed manpower, however, and the vast job market was another pull factor, despite the complete lack of social or health protection for workers.

An example of a push factor in the nineteenth century is the potato famine in Ireland in the mid 1840s, during which time a disease of the potato plant destroyed the harvest for several years in succession, in a country where the people depended almost exclusively on the potato for food. Thus, many poor Irish people had to choose between starving to death in Ireland and leaving the country. Many of those who had enough money to do so chose to leave, and among those, many went to the US. Another example of a push factor in nineteenth century Europe was the pogroms at various times in Tsarist Russia, notably in the 1880s: rioters killed Jews and destroyed homes and synagogues, making life unbearable. Large numbers of Jews fled Russia, and again, many went to the US.

In one sense, the Russian Jews that went to the US in the latter part of the nineteenth century exemplified a pull factor as well: like many immigrants, they went to the US in the belief that they would find religious freedom there. Not all the factors that have contributed to the growth of the US are of a material nature, in other words.

The hope of making a new start, economically, socially, religiously, or otherwise, motivated many migrants to the US, and also became a part of the mythology of immmigration to the US. On the whole, the immigrants of the nineteenth century managed to fit into the economy and society of the US, and became "Americanized" in what came to be called the "melting pot". The notion of the melting pot itself became part of the mythology of immigration. One striking example of the ways in which the myth has been perpetuated is to be found in "The New Colossus", the sonnet by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty (a gift of the French in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of 1776) in New York harbor:

     The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tos’t to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
     (Emma Lazarus 1883)

The idea that the United States would welcome the poor of other nations, on the sole condition that they might desire freedom, became a central part of the myth of immigration. That it was a myth is amply demonstrated by the events of the early twentieth century as well as the early twenty-first.

The 20th century: trying to control immigration

Like many myths, the one about immigration had elements of truth in it: many immigrants did manage to fit into the economy and society of the US, and became "Americanized". For them, immigration was a success story. For others, of course, the story did not turn out so well. Some (many, in fact) left the US within a few years of their arrival. Meanwhile, some "native Americans" perceived immigration as a threat, especially after about 1880, for a variety of reasons. During the first two-thirds or more of the nineteenth century, the principal source of immigration was what came to be called the "old immigration", almost exclusively from Northern and Western Europe (the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia). After about 1880 or 1890, the "old" began to give way to the "new immigration", which included a much larger proportion of people from Eastern and Southern Europe (Italy, the Balkans, Poland, Russia, etc.). At about the same time, the Census Bureau published a report in which it reported the "closing of the frontier", by which it meant the end of a large area of unsettled and uninhabited territory available for "pioneers" to colonize. In other words, at a time when there appeared to be a new limit on territorial expansion, there also A variety of factors near the end of the nineteenth century led the US to begin to try to control and regulate immigration.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was for all practical purposes the first immigration legislation the US adopted: before 1882, immigration was largely uncontrolled. As its title suggests, the Act simply prohibited all further immigration from China, and explicitly excluded Chinese nationals already in the US from becoming citizens.

In 1924, the National Origins Act imposed quotas on immigration, based on the national origins of prospective immigrants. The Act was intended to reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe and to encourage immigrants from northern and western Europe, with the objective of preserving the distinctive "Anglo-Saxon" character of the population of the US.

The Immigration Act of 1965 fits into the prevailing atmosphere of the 1960s, during which major legislation insisted that race should not be the basis of access to civil rights, and greatly expanded federal powers in enforcing civil rights, notably for African-Americans. The Immigration Act similarly took steps to take account of individual, personal cases and situations, rather than relying on race or national origin as a criterion for permission to immigrate to the US. After 1965, although the number of immigrants continued to be regulated, the criteria for admission shifted: rather than admitting a certain number of immigrants from certain countries, the US admitted immigrants on the basis of their personal qualifications and the probability that they would make a contribution to US society.

Further federal legislation attempted to deal with the growing problem of illegal (and therefore unregulated) immigration. The 1986 Act, for example, provided for penalties for employers of illegal immigrants, while at the same time establishing a procedure for illegals who had been in the US for more than 5 years to gain legal status, and ultimately, it was hoped, citizenship.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, increased security measures have made immigration more difficult; according to some reports, more stringent border controls have reduced legal immigration, but have not had much effect on illegal immigration.

That seems to be borne out by statistics in the Jan-Feb 2006 issue of The Atlantic, in which it is reported that in 2004, 1.3 million illegals were apprehended trying to enter the US from Mexico. This means that illegal immigration (or at least attempted immigration) in 2004 involved as many people as all immigration in 1907, the peak year of the peak decade of the early twentieth century.

20C & 21C A Melting Pot, but with a Big Exception

After the end of Reconstruction, the main objective for most white Americans was to rebuild a United States in which the economic boom of what Mark Twain would call the "Gilded Age" could flourish. This meant finding ways of healing the breach between North and South that had remained after the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The main bone of contention was the status of the ex-slaves, now citizens under the terms of the "Civil War Amendments". The Southern white elite wished to maintain its ascendancy over the largely agricultural Southern economy; one of the economic mechanisms that made this possible was the development of widespread share-cropping, in which both poor whites and blacks "rented" land from large land-lords, in exchange for a part of the crop, which was determined by the land-lord, and was most commonly cotton.

The more industrial North of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was geographically and culturally distant from the rigid social and economic hierarchies that were maturing in the South. "Wage-slaves" (i.e., factory workers in an economy in which no protection for wage-earners nor any trade-union movement had yet appeared) had no interest in encouraging Southern African-Americans to move to the North, where they would compete for jobs, and Northern industrialists had an interest in maintaining friendly relations with wealthy Southern "aristocrats", who represented a market for goods produced in the North. Economic interest thus combined with ambient racism to create indifference at virtually every level of society in the North to the plight of Southern Blacks. The seeds of "Jim Crow", the legal structures in the Southern states that required racial segregation, thus fell on fertile ground. "Jim Crow" was reinforced by federal regulations during World War I, which establised racial segregation of federal employees, both in civilian administrations and in the military.

In 1896, the Supreme Court, in a decision which completed the distortion of the obvious meaning of Civil War Amendments, gave Constitutional sanction to "Jim Crow" with the infamous Plessy vs Ferguson. Plessy established the legal doctrine of "separate but equal": racial segregation was acceptable, the Court ruled, as long as facilities and equipment of equal quality were provided for the races. For example, schools could be segregated into white and black on condition that the school district provided schools for blacks that were as good as those provided for whites. It hardly needs saying that Southern states provided separate schools, but virtually never equal ones.

Part of the Supreme Court's reasoning in Plessy was that the law could require equality, but could not impose social relations or proximity. It suggested that there might be two completely separate spheres, one white, and one black. The underlying bad faith of this reasoning can easily be seen in the fact that whites and blacks were in fact constantly in contact, but never on terms of social equality: the white children that attended segregated schools never sat next to black pupils, but the janitors that swept the floors and the cooks that prepared meals in the school lunch-room were invariably black. The same was true of private race relations: the vast majority of cleaning women in white people's homes were black.

Combatting such thoroughly entrenched institutions required something akin to heroism. Few whites were interested in the situation of African-Americans, who were thus largely left to find ways of reaching toward equality on their own. An early example is to be found in the foundation in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: the NAACP. One of the names associated with the early NAACP is that of W.E.B. Dubois, a brilliant scholar, and the first Black to obtain a PhD from Harvard University. Part of the strategy of the NAACP almost from the outset was to try to use the judicial system to pursue change, since it seemed obvious that political officials, whether legislators or governors, would not risk their political careers to defend the interests of a constituency that had been so completely marginalized.

The US's participation in the fight against Nazism in World War II helped to make at least some white Americans more aware of the contradiction of fighting a viciously racist ideology abroad while at home tolerating and even sanctioning the legal structures of "Jim Crow", themselves founded on racism.

This awareness was one of the factors that led the Supreme Court to reverse its interpretation of the Constitution in the Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954. In that decision, the court held that racial segregation violated the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the XIVth Amendment. It is worth noting that the case was argued before the Court by a lawyer employed by the NAACP, which thus demonstrated how well-founded its strategy was. The lawyer himself, Thurgood Marshall, was subsequently (in 1967) appointed as a Justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the first African-American to sit on that bench.

The Brown decision was not applied universally by any means, and it provoked enormous resistance in the South, but very gradually, some schools and Universities began to revise their segregationist policies. Historians differ on what the effect of the Brown decision was on the beginnings of the civil rights movement, but it is certain that the following year, in 1955, an African-American woman named Rosa Parks set in motion an extremely important drive for equality and liberty when she refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man (so much for the myth of the gallant South: women who happened to be black were required by law to give up their seats on the bus to men who happened to be white) [read the Wikipedia article about Rosa Parks here]. The boycott lasted more than a year, and was one of the factors that contributed to the end of racially segregated buses in Montgomery [read the Wikipedia article about the boycott here]. In addition to the local significance, and in addition to Mrs Parks's role, the event was significant because it brought national attention to the organizer of the boycott, a Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr [read the Wikipedia article about Martin Luther King, Jr here]. Rosa Parks was arrested, and found guilty of failing to observe the "Jim Crow" legislation in the town; she paid a $10 fine and $4 in court charges, but far more importantly, she became a symbol of the civil rights movement. She died on October 24, 2005. (Proof that choices by everyday individuals may influence the course of history may be found in the story of the bus driver that told Mrs Parks to move; read about it here.)

The 1960s were a watershed decade for the Civil rights Movement as well as in many other ways. In particular, Martin Luther King, Jr gave the speech in which he improvised a long passage which came to be called the "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington. The speech was part of a major demonstration intended to encourage Congress to pass a federal law to impose an end to racial discrimination [read the Wikipedia article about the speech here]. The Senate failed to adopt the law in 1963, but in 1964, under President Lyndon Johnson, Congress finally adopted a Civil Rights Act. It was followed in 1965 (the same year in which the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was assassinated) by a Voting Rights Act. (1964 and 1965 also saw major race riots in the "ghettoes" of the inner cities of several large Northern cities, notably in Watts in Los Angeles.) In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated, in a further show of white violence against Blacks.

The 1970s were marked by some progress in the area of civil rights, with efforts to overcome the evils of discrimination through the use of affirmative action. However, though affirmative action produced some positive results, it has nonetheless been contested as creating a sort of "reverse discrimination". All told, though enormous progress has unquestionably been made in improving the status of racial minorities in the US, there is still considerable work to be done.