An Outline of American History (Chapter VII growth and transformation)

Summary
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, in a period between two great wars - the Civil War and the First World War - the United States transformed itself. A rural, agricultural nation became an industrial power whose backbone was steel and coal, railroads and steam power. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction period left a contradictory record. It was an era of tragic aspirations and failures, but also of unprecedented legal, political, and social change. The Reconstruction governments enthusiastically promoted industry. Confederates had seen how industry aided the North during the war. The southern railroad system was rebuilt and expanded. Both industrialization and immigration were surging, hastening the pace of change in national life. Postwar industrial production increased. Nonagricultural workers outnumbered farmers. Also, government financial policies did much to bring about this rapid growth. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, an industrial revolution swept through parts of the United States. By the 1870s and 1880s, government officials sought more peaceful means of dealing with western natives, through landholding and education. In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act. Indian policy, as required by the Dawes Act, distributed reservation land to individual families in the belief that the American institution of private property would fashion good citizens and integrate Indians into the large society. The Dawes Act reduced native control over land. The direction of U.S. foreign policy after the Civil War became unmistakable: American intended to exert their influence beyond the continental United States, to reach for more space, more land, more markets, more cultural penetration, and more power. In international affairs, there was renewed pressure for expansion. In 1867 Secretary of State H. Seward arranged a vast addition of territory to the national domain through the purchase of Alaska from the Russian government. Also in 1867 the United States took control of the Midway Islands, a thousand miles from Hawaii. The Progressive era (1895-1920) often ignored issues directly affecting former slaves, nonwhite immigrants, Indians, and women. Most blacks could neither escape nor conquer white society. They sought other routes to economic and social improvements. In 1881 Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational school for blacks. Yet though Washington endorsed a separate-but-equal policy, he projected a subtle racial pride that would find more direct expression in black nationalism later in the 20th century, when some African Americans advocated control of their own businesses and schools. Also, W. E. B. Du Bois formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which aimed to end racial discrimination and obtain voting rights by pursuing legal redress in the courts. The dilemma of identity bedeviled Native Americans as well. In 1911 educated middle-class Indians formed their own association, the Society of American Indians (SAI), to work for better education, civil rights, and healthcare. Between the end of Reconstruction and the end of the First World War, a new consumer society took shape. The outpouring of products created a new mass society based on consumerism. In the years from the Civil War to the First World War, expansionism and imperialism elevated the United States to the world power status. Americans had also developed a lucrative foreign trade with most of the world and spread their culture wherever they traveled.

KEY WORDS: Reconstruction, industrialization, immigration, Native Americans, African Americans, expansionism, imperialism, Progressive era, consumerism