Essay Sample about Industrialization in America

The late 19th century saw unprecedented changes in American politics, social organization, and economics. Reconstruction had set new expectations for African-American participation in government, but also showed the limitation of Constitutional changes in affecting American social life. Industrialization powered the economy through a period of tremendous growth, but with it came irrevocable changes in how Americans were employed and the relationship between the government and business. As American continued to fulfill the ideals of Manifest Destiny, settlement in the western United States increased, spurred by a variety of factors. Completion of the transcontinental railroad, the discovery of gold, and the supposed availability of land for settling all contributed to the “opening” of the West to new inhabitants such as Chinese immigrants, as well as the displacing of prior ones, the Native Americans. Westward expansion granted economic opportunities to Chinese immigrants even as white Americans resisted integrating them into society, while Native Americans faced dwindling prospects with the loss of their land and culture.

Chinese immigration to the West, which began in earnest around 1850, lended itself to both economic opportunities and social challenges. Despite no initial land claims following the gold rush, the group eventually came to dominate the mining industry in California and beyond. According to Liping Zhu’s article in The Magazine of Western History, multiple Chinese companies in Montana were among the future state’s most profitable, while in Nevada, Chinese miners extracted $500,000 in gold from the Tuscarora region in 1871. Between 1855 and 1870, over 10% of gold and silver exports from San Francisco went to China, valued at over $1 billion today (Zhu, Liping). The Chinese had further success pioneering agriculture. The frost resistant orange, developed by Lue Gim Gong in Florida, and the noted Bing Cherry, bred in Oregon by Ah Bing, helped form the foundations of the growing agricultural industry (Takaki, Ronald). In the laundry industry as well, Chinese workers began to take hold, but their encroachment on labor markets which had been previously dominated by white immigrants stoked racial and economic anxieties that were already being accelerated by changes to the workplace brought forth by industrialization. Zhu notes that the Chinese faced legal discrimination as well as racial violence as a result of their success in mining, and, according to Rodman W. Paul’s The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, the lowered wages that Chinese immigrants offered to work for constituted a threat to wages that laborers had traditionally received and “made white workers angrily sensitive to the dangers of Chinese competition.” The social backlash against the Chinese formed by a white working class already struggling with the changes of industrialization were juxtaposed by their economic success in industries opened by westward expansion. 

While recent arrivals from China navigated a new land, Native Americans, many of whom called the West home for generations, were impacted by Westward Expansion through a loss of that land and their culture. The 1800s were marked by military conflicts between Native American and the U.S. government such as the Red River War from 1874-5 in Texas and the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, as well the confinement of Native Americans to reservations (Divine, Robert A.; et al.). As depicted in a 1878 photograph in the National Archive, buffalo, on which previously many Native Americans were reliant for food and sustenance, began being hunted in mass for their hides which held value back east further weakening the ability of Natives to provide for themselves independent of American culture. By the mid 1880s, Congress had moved to buy out all Native land claims in Oklahoma (Ward, Geoffrey C.). Where Natives did retain their land, they faced harassment from white settlers, who, according to Chester Anders Fee’s Chief Joseph: The Biography of a Great Indian, stole cattle and horses with the intention of provoking a war they knew the Native Americans could not fight successfully. In order to stop further conflicts after the Battle of Wounded Knee, Commissioner of Indian Affairs T.J. Morgan remarked that education was “the only possible solution to the Indian problem.” Without speaking the English language and adopting American customs, Native Americans would “remain handicapped in the struggle for survival” (Morgan). Schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School attempted to follow through on this idea by changing their habits, particularly their personal appearance. Photos of students from the school show traditional Native clothes replaced by European-American style school uniforms after students had attended there for three years (New York Public Library). The replacement of their own customs with that of white Americans marked a loss of their culture and policies of the United States government continued to dwindle the land on which they made their homes..  

Despite reluctance among white workers to integrate Chinese immigrants into broader society, the Chinese still experienced some economic success as a result of the roles they filled in the growing western United States. Native Americans, on the other hand, were impacted through continual loss of their culture and resources, which was considered at odds with the expansion of the U.S. economy. For many American settlers, the West represented an opportunity to start anew and achieve the economic success and freedom of lifestyle that so many of our past have yearned for. However, like many of the significant periods in United States history, the success that was achieved was not shared equally among different peoples.