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Y319: Civil Rights in the USA 1865–1992

Depth study: Civil rights in the ‘Gilded Age’ c.1875–c.1895 — Nature and extent of progress

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  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on nature and extent of progress in civil rights in this era, the varied impact of industrialisation on women.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Evaluation

What was the impact of industrialisation on workers in the Gilded Age, and how effective were their responses?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Why is the period from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s called the Gilded Age, and what does the label imply about civil rights?

    Model answer

    The name comes from the novel Twain and Warner published in 1873, and it implies a thin layer of gold over base metal: spectacular industrial wealth and constitutional promises of equality concealing corruption, poverty and the collapse of the rights supposedly secured by the Reconstruction amendments.

  2. 2

    What is the case that African Americans went backwards in this era?

    Model answer

    Federal protection was withdrawn after 1877, the Supreme Court gutted the enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments, Mississippi began systematic disfranchisement in 1890, convict leasing and the crop lien tightened, and lynching reached its peak in 1892 with well over 200 recorded killings, which is why Rayford Logan described the years around the turn of the century as the nadir of American race relations.

  3. 3

    Explain what the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 decided and why the ruling mattered.

    Model answer

    The Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 by ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment restrained only state action and gave Congress no power over discrimination by private hotels, theatres and railways, which left segregation in daily life beyond federal reach for eighty years.

  4. 4

    Explain C Vann Woodward's argument about the origins of Jim Crow and how later historians have challenged it.

    Model answer

    Woodward argued that rigid statutory segregation was not the automatic successor to slavery but a later creation of the 1890s, after a period of fluid and varied race relations, implying that things could have turned out otherwise; critics such as Joel Williamson and Howard Rabinowitz replied that separation was already the practical rule from the 1860s and that the alternative to segregated facilities was usually no facilities at all.

  5. 5

    Assess the effectiveness of federal and state government policy on civil rights in the Gilded Age.

    Model answer

    Federal effort collapsed: Hayes bought the presidency by abandoning the South, Cleveland was openly unsympathetic, and although Harrison backed the Lodge Bill of 1890 to restore federal supervision of elections its defeat in the Senate ended any serious attempt until the twentieth century; at state level Redeemer governments in the South actively dismantled rights through disfranchising constitutions, convict leasing and the starving of Black schools, while some western states extended the vote to women, so state governments were the decisive actors in both directions.

  6. 6

    How did the Supreme Court's use of the Fourteenth Amendment differ for freedpeople and for corporations?

    Model answer

    In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, United States v Cruikshank in 1876 and the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 the Court read the amendment so narrowly that it protected almost no Black citizen from violence or exclusion, yet from Santa Clara in 1886 it treated corporations as persons entitled to due process and used the same clause to strike down state regulation of business.

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