Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 179 Essays

Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. These four acts of Congress were meant to protect the new nation from French immigrants. They reflected a broad paranoia that French newcomers would poison American minds and weaken the new American government. In 1882 President Arthur signed into federal law the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese immigrant labor was the infrastructure backbone of the 19th century California Gold Rush, but by the 1880s a significant economic downturn increased competition and turned up animosity. Fueled by scarcity-stoked fear, nativists pushed an anti-immigration agenda, culminating in the 1882 Act that excluded Chinese workers from entering the United States. In 1943 this act was repealed. In the 1880s Reconstruction ended in the U.S. South. States of the former Confederacy began to enact legislation that stripped black citizens of the right to vote, ejected black office holders from their posts, and forcibly segregated public accommodations and public transportation. Architects of these Jim Crow Laws justified the exclusion of black Americans from the public sphere as a protection of the values and culture of Southern life. In 1890 the state of Wisconsin passed the Bennett Law and the state of Illinois passed the Edwards law. Both restricted the use of German-language instruction in the state's classrooms. These were antagonist legislative acts meant to cripple the extensive German parochial school system in these states. Many believed German immigrants to be a threat to American values and political interests. In 1892 both laws were repealed. In 1942 the United States began the forcible internment of more than 100,000 Japanese nationals, more than half of whom were American citizens. The "War Relocation Camps" were justified as a protective measure for American interests in the wake of Pearl Harbor. In 1945 the internment camps were closed and in 1948 reparations were made to many of the survivors. In 2008 the United States of America elected its first black president. He is the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. He was born in an American state with a sizeable Japanese-American population. He went to grade school in Indonesia. He chose a Catholic man as his running mate. In the general election he won Virginia, a state that was once the capital of the Confederacy. In 2009 he worked with Congressto craft legislation aimed at providing affordable health insurance coverage to all. While addressing a joint session of Congress he was called a liar by a Representative from South Carolina. Those who opposed his policies decried him as a socialist, a Nazi, a bigot and a murderer. They suggested that his ideas were dangerous and threatened the values of the United States. This prominent New York journalist blanketed the nation with fairy tales of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black Republican politicians. Reconstruction's enfranchising policies were a "tragedy," Pike wrote, nothing but "the slave rioting in the halls of his master." His "objective" reporting caused many once sympathetic Northerners to demand a national reunion based on white rule. In the 1880s, Southern segregationists marketed their region as the New South, among them this Methodist bishop and Emory College president. In his popular book, Haygood eased consciences that the end of Reconstruction meant the end of black rights. The New South will be as good for black folk as the old, Haygood declared, as new white Southerners would continue to civilize inferior black folk in their nicely segregated free-labor society. "Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro," by Frederick Hoffman (1896) Better covered than the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that year, "Race Traits" catapulted this statistician into scientific celebrity. At the time of emancipation, blacks were "healthy in body and cheerful in mind," Hoffman wrote. Thirty years later, the 1890 census forecasts their "gradual extinction," due to natural immoralities and a propensity for diseases. He blazed the trail of racist ideas in American criminology when he concluded that higher black arrest rates indicated blacks committed more crimes. As Americans fought against Nazism overseas, this Swedish economist served up an encyclopedic revelation of racial discrimination in their backyards. If there was a scholarly trigger for the civil rights movement, this was it. Myrdal concluded that "a great majority" of whites would "give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts." Segregationists seethed, and racial reformers were galvanized to show the truth of Jim Crow.