A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation

By W. Lawrence Hogue

In this book, Hogue re-configures the history of modern America and re-represents the modern American novel, allowing conceptual spaces of race, gender, sex, nature, the non-rational, the non-human, consumption, and class to be critiqued or to be displaced, eventually highlighting that modern American history and literature are not singular. They are much more complex, diverse, heterogeneous, and richer because modern American history is a series of economic, social, anti-colonial, feminist, and political and social movements, levels, and conditions, with a whole interplay of differences. The book explains how, historically and institutionally, in the 1920s and 1930s modern American society and modern American literature have been represented singularly and monoculturally, with modernity breaking with the past/nature/the non-human—animals, plants, the water, the landscape, the non-rational, and/or indifferent forces of nature such as hurrica

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272615

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A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation

W. Lawrence Hogue

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © W. Lawrence Hogue 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955661

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-259-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-259-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Chapter One Capitalism, Imperialism, Race and Ethnicity, the Repressive State and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern America

Chapter Two Counterformations to Capitalism, Imperialism, Modern America and Its Repressive State and Ideological State Apparatuses, and the Formation of Modern American Literature, Art, and Culture

Chapter Three Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt : An Ethnographic Look at the Middle-Class, Individuated Subject in America in the 1920s

Chapter Four Nick Carraway’s Complicated Retreat from Modernity and the Construction of the Modern Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Chapter Five The African American Subaltern, Rearticulated African American Folklore, Modernity, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Chapter Six Trickster Narrator, Multinarrative Perspectives, and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded

Chapter Seven Intersectionality, Inoperative Community, Trauma, Social Justice, and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

Chapter Eight Theosophy, Plural Subjectivity, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Chapter Nine Exile, Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West

Chapter Ten Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book began more than 20 years ago as I tried to approach the teaching of the modern American novel, in a new multicultural, multiracial, and postcolonial way. Becoming increasingly aware that American writers of the 1920s and 1930s were socially, racially, ethnically, economically, and politically diverse—many coming out of economic, racial, gender, cultural, imperial, and political identitarian groups and social movements, I wanted to incorporate the richness and uniqueness of this diversity in my teaching. I also was fully aware that until recently, attempts to organize the history and literature of this period were exclusive, homogeneous, and quite Eurocentric. Second, as I read more American history, sociology, and economics of the modern and contemporary periods, it became clear to me that the issues confronting Americans in the 1920s and 1930s are still quite relevant today. The transformed modern America of the 1920s and 1930s has more in common with today than with the America of the 1820s and 1830s. Therefore, I wanted to look at that history and literature from a contemporary point of view, with contemporary historical, critical, and theoretical sensibilities, making the diverse history and literature of the 1920s and 1930s speak to the contemporary moment.

In addition to the diversity and richness of modern American history and literature, I was particularly impressed with, and interested in, how different American writers of this period understood, grappled with, engaged, and told stories about this new, modern American society. Therefore, I wanted to probe these writers’ examination of modern American society, comparing and contrasting the various assessments, critiques, visions, and perspectives.

A number of individuals and entities assisted me along the way. Over the years, I have had incredible students in my graduate seminars on the modern American novel. They allowed me the freedom to test this particular multicultural, postcolonial, and multiracial approach to the literature. I am thankful to them. I am deeply grateful to the Dean of CLASS, University of Houston, for a semester’s leave (FDL) during the spring of 2017, which allowed me to work full time on the manuscript. I am also indebted to the Office of the Provost, University of Houston, for a John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished professorship, which permitted me to visit and to procure documents from the Djuna Barnes Papers at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Emily Coleman Correspondences at the University of Delaware, and the D’Arcy McNickle Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago. I am forever beholden to the staff of Interlibrary Loan, M. D. Anderson Library, University of Houston, who diligently worked with me to locate copies of obscure articles on Younghill Kang, Agnes Smedley, and D’Arcy McNickle.

Equally as important, I want to thank Jeffrey R. Di Leo, editor and publisher of the American Book Review and the founder and editor of the journal symplokē, for inviting me to submit this manuscript to his Anthem Symplokē Studies in Theory Series. Over the years, Jeffrey has been wonderful in supporting my on the edge theoretical approach to theory and literature. For that support, I am forever grateful. I also want to thank the three anonymous, peer-review readers who did close readings of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions for revision, assuredly making it a better book. Of course, I take full responsibility for any misgivings in the manuscript. Finally, I want to thank Tej P. S. Sood, publisher and managing director, and Megan Greiving, acquisitions editor, who shepherded my manuscript through the peer-review process, and the editorial staff at Anthem Press, who recognized the importance of this manuscript and saw it through to publication.

Chapter One

CAPITALISM, IMPERIALISM, RACE AND ETHNICITY, THE REPRESSIVE STATE AND THE IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES, AND THE FORMATION OF MODERN AMERICA

The 1920s and 1930s were the culmination of a transformation of American history, literature, and culture, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. The transformation created not only a new and different but also an unequal and inequitable modern American society. Through a series of events—many of them happening sequentially and simultaneously without being held together by societal norms and values—the United States in the early twentieth century grew into an economic superpower, with confidence in its new imperial power. Culturally, the era of the 1920s is known as the age of obedience and social conformity, representing itself as a modern, rational, middle-class, Christian, and industrial society. Patriarchal (families), Eurocentric, Victorian values and the repression of desires, sexual prudery, crass moneymaking, and privileged Anglo-Saxon whiteness comprise the American norm, which was the accredited regime of power/knowledge. The darker side of this unequal and inequitable modern American society was legal racial segregation and deadly economic exploitation of the working class, colonized indigenous nations, incorporated/occupied territories and protectorates. There was also second-class citizenship for women and people of color. The relation of power to knowledge supported this unequal way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering¹ and that did not readily admit of the constraints by which that ordering takes place.²

But the United States’ emergence during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century into an unequal and inequitable conformist, consumer, and an imperial formation entailed not only coexistent and parallel developments in industrial and technological growth, mass production, the rise of corporations and the stock market, urbanization, an uneven constellation of state and local governments, colonized indigenous nations, and federally administered public lands³ but also parallel massive, multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious immigration from Ireland, Germany, eastern and southern Europe, China, Japan, the Caribbean, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In addition, there were the simultaneous rise of the labor, Civil Rights, Progressive, Native American and Asian, and women’s resistant and countermovements on the mainland and in the incorporated/occupied territories, which were not held together by a singular theme or value, which challenged and contested this unequal and inequitable modern American society, and which I will discuss in the next chapter. Thus, the emergence of modern America was a dynamic process of always becoming, which is a reinvention.

In this chapter, I construct a version of modern US history that will discursively capture the emergence of the parallel formation of these unequal and inequitable heterogeneous entities and their differential and relational capacities/configurations of power. I will view history not in terms of "grand narratives and causal explanations [but] in favour of events, […] not [in terms] of a unified history [but] in favour of a series of competing historical narratives,"⁴ a network of simultaneous connections and relations. I will utilize Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari’s concept of history as a set of contingent events—each with its own sequence and time line of becoming—that account for radical breaks or ruptures with history.⁵ This approach allows for a much richer and multilayered definition of history. Next, I will show how countermovements disrupt modern America’s commonsense power to coerce and appease, showing the social and economic transformation and exposing its structural racial, social, economic, gender, and political disparities, hierarchies, and inequalities. Finally, my approach to modern American history will take into account the multiple histories, cultures, classes, and identitarian references.

Different regimes narrate historical beginnings differently. Traditional history draws historical events or all phenomena [of history] around a single centre—a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape and moves to establish a system of homogeneous relations: a network of causality that makes it possible to derive each of them, a relations of analogy that show how they symbolize one another or how they all express one and the same central core.⁶ Using a linear schema, traditional history searches for silent beginnings and original precursors, as it rearrange[s], reduce[s, and] efface[s] these historical phenomena in order to reveal the continuity of events.⁷

But understanding history as a phenomenon can teach us that many of the disciplines that we hold as axiomatic are the result of social, not natural processes. They are socially constructed, and if they are constructed, they can change. The idea of modern American history has emerged out of a network of contingent events, circumstances, and human practices. By destabilizing the traditional form of modern America, I hope to free us from an unquestioned notion of modern America, allowing us to think differently about the making of modern America. As Foucault states, it is fruitful in a certain way to describe that-which-is by making it appear as something that might not be, or that might not be as it is.⁸

I am not particularly interested in pursuing the historical origin of modern America. As Foucault states, it is impossible to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities, because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.⁹ To give an account of history that is linear and progressive, that defines and inevitably delimits all the things that it expressed, and that insists on a superficial and limiting causality is to close down history by giving it a final signified. But history is dispersion, where different [events and] series, which [exist on different levels] are juxtaposed to one another, follow one another, overlap and intersect, without being […] reduced […] to a linear schema.¹⁰

In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Louis Althusser discusses how Western societies reproduce the relations of production by which they function. The State is thought of first and foremost as the State apparatus, that is, as the sum of the institutions—the government, the administration, the army, the police, the courts, and the prisons¹¹—which are relations of power, practices, and actions and by which the ruling class maintains its economic dominance and enforces its rule. This grouping constitutes what Althusser calls the Repressive State apparatus (RSA). It functions by violence. For Althusser, the State also contains an Ideological State apparatus (ISA), which comprises distinct and specialized ideological institutions that work together to maintain the order of the State and that have their own agenda and internal culture. The ISA comprises the religious, educational, family, media, legal, political communication, and the cultural apparatuses.¹² It functions by ideology.

I use Althusser’s concept of the RSA and the ISA to frame my discussion of the formation of an unequal and inequitable, modern American society where, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century, a system of hierarchies and exclusions takes the form of racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism. This is an unequal, modern American society where white, heterosexual, Christian, and property-owning males, who were the beneficiaries of this systematic or structural inequality and inequity, are defined as the privileged norm and the others—women, people of color, workers, southern and eastern European immigrants, indigenous nations, and overseas occupied territories—are represented in devalued terms, as second-class citizens. These others have unequal access to cultural and social capital and unequal access to the distribution of wealth. Whereas the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights state that all Americans are equal under the law, the actual practice of the law has been one of structural inequality and inequity. It is out of this unequal and inequitable formation of modern American society that we get modern American literature, which ultimately is my focus.

Because I am interested in constructing a version of modern US history that shows the making of modern America and the various series of social, economic, racial, and imperial disparities and inequalities in 1920s and 1930s modern America and how they are impacted by the capitalism and the RSA, I begin with two temporal, coexisting, resonating events from the past that played crucial roles in the emergence of modern America: the taking of the lands from Native nations and slavery and the development of the cotton empire.

The colonized American Indians in the Southeast and South entered the U.S. industrialization process with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, under the pretense of lifting the United States into modernity.¹³ But the Act was a part of a federal land policy, promoting the idea of the United States as a white settler nation. Very early on in the nation’s history, writes Princeton’s political science Professor Paul Frymer, the federal government asserted legal title over all the land that it acquired in its treaties with other sovereign nations.¹⁴ Andrew Jackson, in defiance of a US Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rightful claim of Native nations to remain on their land,¹⁵ forced thousands of Cherokees on a Trail of Tears to present-day Oklahoma, with the action becoming the first of many oppressive federal land policies to rid the United States of its Indian problem and to take their land. With the landmark decision of Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia in 1831, the US government created a colonial system of reservations and provided the affective operation for the State apparatus to make common sense in perpetuating the subjugation of indigenous nations. The decision rendered Indians as members of ‘domestic dependent nation,’ foreign to the rights guaranteed by states and territories, but domestic for federal purposes.¹⁶ Defined as a threat to the safety and security of white settlers, between 1830 and 1850 the local and federal State apparatuses such as the US army and local police violently forced more than 125,000 American Indians of the Southeast to relocate west of the Mississippi river.¹⁷ The aim was to establish and secure white majority states in the South and Southeast. But the second and perhaps more important reason for the confiscation of Native lands was European settlers’ cotton planters, who, as early as 1814, wanted to build the southern cotton empire. Therefore, they needed to remove [the land in southern states] from the control of its native inhabitants.¹⁸

The Removal Act had devastating consequences for the ecosystems of Native peoples, creating diasporic Native populations shorn of their land, belongings, and citizenship. As a colonial regime, the US government suspended indigenous Native American civil rights, denying them the vote and citizenship. In its form of imperial governance, the State succeeded in extend[ing] absolute US control of jurisdiction, land tenure, national allegiance, and governance over indigenous nations.¹⁹ These are the practices of a colonial state committed to replacing and displacing indigenous populations, and committed to its own expansion. These are also the well-honed practices of regimes that define colonialism.

Second, the taking of the Indian land coexisted with the parallel event of slavery and the development of the cotton empire. For cheap labor, this cotton empire used the exploitation of enslaved Africans/African Americans who were forced to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people, […] rapidly transform[ing] the southern states into [a] dominant force in the global cotton market.²⁰ Cotton and agriculture, the most valuable export made in the United States, had brought millions of Africans into the American southern chattel slavery system, building the modern American economy on the backs of enslaved Africans/African Americans and creating racialized economies. The slave system determined the life chances of those moving through society as black or white and served as an investment outlet for northern merchants and bankers and factory owners.²¹ For example, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison credits the Panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South.²² Until the Civil War, the value of southern enslaved African Americans in 1860 equaled 80 percent of the gross national product.²³ The returns from cotton monopoly, argues historian Edward E. Baptist, powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy,²⁴ organizing the nation’s politics, legal structures, and cultural practices. In 1860, writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the estates of large planters loomed.²⁵ The main reason the cotton empire was more successful in the South than in every other cotton-growing area in the world was [because of] planters’ command of nearly unlimited supplies of land, [cheap slave] labor, and capital, and their unparalleled political power.²⁶ Cotton and slavery played a major role in building the modern American economy.

Industrial capitalism and the great business boom, resulting from the events of the taking of the lands from the American Indians, the economy of the slaveholding South, and the Civil War, revolutionize the size, methods, and marketing of industrial enterprises. The rise of big business in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century was produced by a series of technological and mechanical becomings, happening contemporaneously. There were giant companies in the marketing of steel and the refining of sugar, usually with public money spent on behalf of private business.²⁷ Even farming became mechanized with the invention of the McCormick reaper,²⁸ which could do the work of 40 men, allowing farmers to grow enough crops not only to feed the nation but also to export the surplus abroad. Simultaneously, inventions such as the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and the linotype machine by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886 provided quicker and cheaper communication between and within the continents, bringing Europe closer and ending the isolation of California and the West from the eastern half of the United States.²⁹ The Edison Electric Illuminating Company constructed the first electric plant in New York City in 1882, and soon homes and city streets were illuminated by electricity.³⁰ Railroad tracks appeared in the 1880s, along with running water, sewer pipes, and central heating, which transformed the economic standard of living for many Americans. The steam railroad transformed urban living, changing horse-driven streetcars with electrified streetcars and expediting travel throughout the city.³¹ By 1900, there were several hundred thousand miles of railroad track connecting urban centers with remote towns and villages. The number of farms, as well as the number of acres under cultivation, had doubled between 1870 and 1900.³² Also, between 1860 and 1900, a total of 676,000 patents were granted. Finally, advancements in medicine and public health prolonged life and its quality. The development of anesthetics made the gruesome pain of amputations a thing of the past, and the invention of antiseptics in surgery cleaned up the squalor of the nineteenth-century hospital. X-rays, antibiotics, and modern treatments for cancer were all invented and implemented in the late nineteenth century.³³

These advances in machinery, medicine, and technology; the dynamic process of growth; and the transformation of the division of labor produced a reconfigured/reemergent social formation in the United States, with new and different power relations and capacities. Innovation within the dominant paradigm of capitalism served to refashion existing forms of domination, within the social classes. Also, these advancements enabled capitalism to achieve enormous gains in productivity, with workers’ wages stagnated at a very low level,³⁴ while distributing the resulting profits only among the elites. This caused enormous economic disparity and inequality among American working populations.

With the creation of many new corporations and companies during the second half of the nineteenth century, there arose monopolies and trusts to eliminate competition. For example, in 1882, the Standard Oil Company formed a trust with a number of other oil producers and refiners to create a company that controlled 90 percent of all the oil produced and refined in the United States.³⁵ Investment bankers financed consolidations in railroads, utilities, and other industrial enterprises. The number of trusts that were chartered by the states reached nearly 300, with investments ranging close to $250,000 million.³⁶ Along with a political economy of obscene, structural inequality, corporate monopolies resulted in the exploitation of workers—with stagnated wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions.

The perpetrators of this monopoly scheme and the exploiters of workers were called Robber Barons, the power elites, who were obsessed with maximizing their profits. They used federal and State institutions to achieve their end. They set about converting to a managerial form of capitalism by which they could better dominate their industry and form monopolies to maintain control, using bribery, conspiracy, conflict of interest, blackmail, and other assorted crimes. They [robber barons] exploited national resources, observes sociologist C. Wright Mills, waged economic wars against themselves, entered into combinations, made private capital out of public domain, and used any and every method to achieve their ends.³⁷ The robber barons made agreements with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors.³⁸ They used their money to control legislators and legislation, especially anything or anyone who would regulate or control their operations. Manufacturers not only sided with the railroads, writes historian Robert V. Remini, but [also] employed lobbyists and contributed to political campaigns to win greater protection of their products from foreign competition.³⁹ Finally, when big corporations control concentrated industries, they can pay employees less, because there are no other businesses to make better offers. By the 1880s the robber barons had successfully and politically dethroned the ruling intelligentsia/landed gentry and had taken over the running of the various federal, State, and ideological institutions in society—the government, the courts, the civil service, the universities, the police, the media, the political systems, etc. They were the force behind the creation of a new, capitalist social formation in the United States, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

But to fully achieve their goals, corporations and industries needed additional markets to sell their goods, and they needed additional cheap labor to produce their products. In its westward North American, continental expansion, the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803, which included the racially diverse and non-English-speaking, but mostly Catholic, inhabitants of the Territory of New Orleans, along with the Navajo, Apache, Comanche, and Pueblo nations in the Southwest.⁴⁰ Again, in this acquisition, the federal government asserted the authority to regulate the sale and distribution of property over the vast geographic territory, luring European immigrants to the United States to control the pace and direction with which settlers moved West and frequently offering free or subsidized land to white settlers.⁴¹ This purchase was followed by the annexation of Florida in 1819, the acquisition of Texas in 1845, and the seizure of territories from Mexico following the Mexican War in 1848, including the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, which proceed with similar settlement development before statehood.⁴² Then, in 1867, William Seward, secretary of state under presidents Lincoln and Johnson, negotiated a treaty with Russia by which Alaska was acquired for $7.2 million.⁴³ Finally, the Dakota Territory, ruled from Washington, with the successful removal of Native Americans to reservations, became the new states of North and South Dakota in 1889, engineering racial demographics and making them strong white settler states.⁴⁴

In less than a thousand days, from the colonization of Texas in 1845 to the conclusion of the Mexican–American War in 1848, along with Alaska and the Dakota Territory, the United States more than doubled in size, expanding its borders to continental proportions and incorporating indigenous nations, different races and cultures, and different languages. Because these territories had large population of non-whites, the federal government delayed full political incorporation for many decades. Arizona and New Mexico, along with Oklahoma, stalled in their move toward statehood because they too were home to large numbers of indigenous populations, which created significant obstacles for American state builders.⁴⁵ The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 regulated settlement of the Northwest Territory and one of the requirements for statehood was majority white settlers.⁴⁶ After a surge of white settlers at the turn of the century and the US government’s careful policy of land distribution, these states became white majority states. In addition to cheap labor, a continuation of what slavery provided, the expansion provided a wealth of natural resources and markets that industrial metropoles could turn into finished goods.

With expanding capitalist markets in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, happening simultaneously with the growth in US industries and the westward continental expansion, there was an impersonal demand for additional cheap labor, an event that brought hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Germans, and Irish into the country, thus beginning what Alyosha Goldstein calls the global circuits of expropriated labor.⁴⁷ Between 1870 and 1900 the urban population through immigration jumped from 9.9 million to 30.1 million.⁴⁸ With the demand for cheap labor for the burgeoning American economy, the United States turned to China for workers in the building of the transcontinental railroad. Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862, which authorized federal loans and land grants to the Union Pacific to extend tracks west from Omaha, Nebraska to California. Between 1849 and the early 1890s, more than 100,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States.⁴⁹ Most came over as indentured or bond servants, having their passage paid for in return for a promise to work for a stipulated period of time. They worked on the railroads, in agriculture and the mines, and at domestic chores. By 1900, two-thirds of California’s Chinese population had transitioned from a rural population to urban dwellers. They lived and worked in highly organized and closed communities, in San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, and Los Angeles, where many became businessmen.⁵⁰ Also, as a result of the hostility and racism against the Chinese in California, Oregon, and Washington in the 1880s, particularly the passage of the racially bias 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which came as a result of white Californians’ move to expel the Chinese from the West Coast and which was amended and/or extended in 1884, 1892, and 1902, many Chinese traveled across the United States, migrating east over the Rockies by rail, headed for cities in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.⁵¹ These Acts became affective mechanisms of power through which the State apparatus through the legislatures and the courts made it common sense to perpetuate structural inequality and/or racial discrimination against the Chinese.

Because there was a continued demand for cheap labor in the West and a need to replace the Chinese, by the turn of the twentieth century, large immigrant populations of Japanese and later Filipinos would arrive in California to work in agriculture, further increasing the US global circuits of expropriated labor. Between 1885 and 1924, 380,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawai’i and the continental United States.⁵² Early on, President Theodore Roosevelt did not think Japanese were capable of being assimilated into US society. Therefore, in the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 there was a pledge by the Japanese government to halt most immigration to the United States, ascribing sentiments that managed racial inequality for the Japanese. After Japan occupied and later colonized Korea in 1910, about 7,400 Koreans migrated to Hawai’i between 1902 and 1905. About 600 Korean political refugees, mostly young and male, and over 1,000 picture brides migrated to the United States between 1905 and 1924,⁵³ when the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 completely barred immigration from East and South Asia.⁵⁴ With the US government’s colonization of the Philippine Islands in 1898, farmers in California recruited Filipino workers; 1930 estimates placed anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 Filipinos in the United States. These Asian populations were discriminated against and were treated as second-class citizens.

Also happening simultaneously with Asian immigration and coexisting on another plateau was European immigration. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the bulk of US immigration came from southern and eastern Europe, which was fueled by the 1790 Naturalization law. It was this law and its unquestioned use of the word ‘white’, argues Matthew Jacobson, that allowed for the massive European migrations in the nineteenth century, beginning with the Irish Famine of 1845, the ‘48ers from Germany, the Scandinavian pioneers, and then successive waves of East European Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovenians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians.⁵⁵ From 1870 to 1920, approximately 55 million people came to the United States.⁵⁶ Unlike the immigrants from Asian countries, these European immigrants were given citizenship and land.

But there were differences within the European immigrant population. Like most Americans, earlier Nordic, Western European immigrants, who were mostly peasants, from Germany and Scandinavia lived in communities of no more than 2,500. Coming from the European countryside, they sought a place on an American homestead, particularly in the South, where many of them culturally and sexually intermixed and interacted with American Indians and blacks,⁵⁷ making these old colonial white families hybrid. Then in a single decade, argue Hymowitz and Weissman, from 1880 to 1890—the mostly northern urban population of the United States leaped from 14 to 22 million. Millions of [new European] immigrants turned such towns as Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo into cities, and such cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston into huge urban centers.⁵⁸

Many of these new European immigrants were quite different from those from Western Europe already in the United States. In addition to being defined as non-Nordics, they had different languages and religion (Catholicism). Many were poor and homeless and were perceived as being wholly ignorant of the world.⁵⁹ Non-Nordic, eastern and southern European immigrants were mostly industrial workers looking for higher wages in a worldwide market for their labor.⁶⁰ But with the arrival of these international workers, real wages for American industrial workers stagnated, dropped, or rose modestly, while those of the middle class and richer, Nordic American rose noticeably, creating visible economic disparities or class differences between non-Nordic and Nordic Americans of European descent. This shows what relations of power and domination existed between white social and economic groups.

But economic and social disparity and structural inequality was the norm for modern America. Approximately one hundred and twenty thousand Spanish-speaking and Native-speaking people occupied the lands ceded to the United States by Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,⁶¹ which was half of the land mass of Mexico but only 1 percent of its population,⁶² complicating and rearticulating the process of the division of labor and the further transformation of the social formation in the Southwest culturally and demographically. The Treaty also produced the affective procedure through which the State apparatus perpetuated Mexicans/Mexican Americans becoming second-class citizens. According to the terms of this Treaty, which ended the Mexican–American War in 1848, all Mexicans who remained in the ceded territories, which included the states of Texas, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, more than half of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming and Kansas, would enjoy all of the rights of the citizens of the United States. It stipulated that, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans […] shall be inviolably respected […] guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States.⁶³ But in controlling and regulating the land, which was sold only to white settlers, the federal government guaranteed that these new states would be white states, which was an act of racial engineering.⁶⁴ In Arizona, with the support of the local and federal governments, white settlers quickly replaced Mexican mining owners and skilled workers through legal and illegal means and relegated Mexicans to the most menial, dangerous, and low-paying positions in the mines,⁶⁵ creating racial and class differences. In addition, in the Southwest, labor unions like the AFL excluded Mexicans from its trade unions. In Texas in the 1890s, many counties established white primaries to disenfranchise Mexicans as well as blacks, with the State legislature establishing restrictions such as poll taxes to reduce Mexican political participation.⁶⁶ Also many Mexican ranchers lost their land in courts or to white settlers.

In addition, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the US government, through its army and cavalry apparatuses, violently conquered and colonized Native nations west of the Mississippi, continuing the colonial project and perpetuating toleration of obscene, structural inequality and racial difference for Native nations and individuals. But the conquest and colonization were done in the name of Manifest destiny, in the name of God, and the train of progress and modernization. After the Civil War, white settlers migrated West. As they strove to establish economic and political security, to till and develop the land for economic purposes, they encroached on American Indian lands and slaughtered the buffalo herds upon which American Indians depended for food, clothing, and shelter. With the support of local participatory government and federal constitutional protections, white settlers demanded military conquest of American Indians.

White settlers’ pressure on American Indian lands and Indian resistance convinced Congress to pass the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. The Act was, more importantly, a land use policy, causing the US government to take ownership of all Indian lands west of the Mississippi. Indians were forcefully relocated to reservations, which were held in trust by the federal government. American Indians were also forced to do American-style subsistence farming and to learn the Western conceptions of owning property (privatizing). The Dawes Act, which broke up traditionally communally owned systems of land tenure, allotted 160 acres to Full Blood American Indian family heads, who were deeded with trust patents, and Mixed Blood Indian family heads, who were deeded with patents in fee simple and were forced to accept US citizenship.⁶⁷ Blood quantum rules attempted to end traditional tribal identity practices.

The Dawes Act also included provisions for purchase of surplus Indian lands by white settlers. In 1889 more than 3,000,000 acres of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, were open to non-Indian homesteaders, so that a territory that had held virtually no whites in 1880 had 730,000 in 1900.⁶⁸ Other Indian lands were taken for corporate utilization or were incorporated into national parks and forests.⁶⁹ Controlling the process, Congress further reserved the power to allocate rights-of-way to telegraph and railroad companies through Indian lands. In short, between 1887 and 1934 approximately two-thirds (1 million acres) of all Indian-reserved land was appropriated by the government,⁷⁰ further creating diasporic Native populations shorn of their land, belongings, and citizenship. In 1887 American Indians held 138,000,000 acres of land, but by 1900 they held only 78,000,000 acres of land. By 1934, American Indians held only 48 million acres of land, most of it desert.⁷¹ As with the Removal Act of 1830, the effects of the Dawes Act were simply the continual legal confiscation of Native land, the destruction of their ecosystems—traditional hunting, fishing, farming, and gathering economies—and cultural practices and the establishment of white majority states in Oklahoma and throughout the West. Legislative majorities in the North, South, and West, writes Paul Frymer, passed laws that excluded people defined as ‘not white’ from naturalizing as American citizens, settling on public lands, or participating in the social economics of American life.⁷²

Ultimately, the 1890s witnessed the culmination of the US conquest of Indian nations with the brutality of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and the successful removal of all American Indians to US government-designed reservations. By 1890, the federal government determined that only 238,253 identifiable Indians remained alive within its borders, down from five to ten million in 1492.⁷³ They all live on the land. A commission study of the Indian, writes Daniel Snowman, submitted to Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work in 1928, said that most Indians lived on land so poor that, even if the government were to give them proper assistance […] they would not have been able to make a decent living out of it.⁷⁴ At the turn of the century, the American Indian population was shrinking. In 1910 it was at its smallest ever, 220,000—about one-third its number at the end of the eighteenth century.⁷⁵ By 1900 only four-tenth of a percent lived in cities, by the 1920s 6 percent lived in cities, and by 1930 the number had jumped to 9.9 percent.⁷⁶

By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a new social and racial order existed in the United States/Southwest: white settlers became the native and the Mexicans and the American Indians became the foreigners. During the debate at the end of the Mexican–American War about whether American Indians and Mexicans living in the colonized territories should be given US citizenship, the powerful Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina announced on the floor of the US Senate that we have never dreamt of incorporating into our union any but the Caucasian race […] Ours, sir, is the Government of the white race.⁷⁷ Without US citizenship, Mexicans and American Indians in the Southwest and West were legally discriminated against and reduced to second-class citizens.⁷⁸

During the change in the US dominant mode of economic production during the latter half of the nineteenth century and coexisting on a different plane from the subjugation and discrimination of Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians, African Americans were also subjected to similar State-sanctioned structural economic, racial, and political disparity, hierarchy, and inequality, along with State-sanctioned violence. Despite the fact that in 1860 the majority of blacks, who had helped build the modern southern and US economy into a sub-continental empire,⁷⁹ were in slavery, there were half a million free blacks in the United States, nearly all of them born in this country. For decades, their citizenship had been hotly contested. Finally, in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court declared that no black person could be a US citizen. The end of legal slavery, coupled with the service of 200,000 black men in the Union Army and Navy, again, put the question of black citizenship on the national agenda. In June 1866, the US Congress approved and sent to the states the 14th Amendment, invalidating the Dred Scott decision, whose opening section declares that all person born or naturalized in the United States […] are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.⁸⁰ The 14th Amendment made blacks legal citizens, producing the short period—from 1863 to 1877—of Reconstruction where blacks could vote, hold political offices, and participate socially and economically in society.

Yet despite the US economic boom after the Civil War, southern states changed very little. In the 1870s, they continued to plant and harvest crops as they had done for decades. But in reaction to gains blacks achieved during Reconstruction, southern states, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes and the Compromise of 1877, where Hayes who received fewer votes than Samuel Tilden was given the presidency in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South, began to enact Jim Crow laws, which socially, economically, and politically disenfranchised African Americans, putting them back into a semiform of slavery and reestablishing a regime of white rule. With the Compromise of 1877, writes Melissa Harris-Perry, which ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the South, white secessionists were given the power to craft segregation codes, disfranchise black voters, and revise the Confederate narrative as triumphant rather than traitorous.⁸¹

To return the South to a regime of white supremacy, to white-majority-ruled states, southern state governments established mechanisms of different types of coercion and elements of knowledge, regurgitating the slavery argument that blacks were inferior to whites with respect to reason and imagination and showing southern whites’ denied vulnerability. To integrate society and have race mixing would cause not only the decline of the higher race but also the decline of culture and civilization.⁸² In 1883 the US Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed racial differences in public accommodations. Here, the court practiced institutionalized, legal racism, reestablishing the political or affective mechanism through which a hierarchy of racial distinction devalued and disenfranchised African Americans, reengineering white majority states. As a consequence, Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law in 1881, when it resegregated railroad coaches, followed by Florida in 1887, Texas in 1889, and Louisiana in 1890. Also, in 1890, Mississippi ratified a new constitution that disenfranchised blacks, which the US Supreme Court accepted as constitutional in 1898, three years after South Carolina had disenfranchised its black population.⁸³ Again appeals reached the US Supreme Court, which in 1896 upheld these laws in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, so long, the Court said, as equal accommodations existed. This case, which legalized segregation and endorsed Jim Crow laws, argues Amy Kaplan, revoked African American rights achieved under Reconstruction.⁸⁴

To enforce the disenfranchisement of blacks, southern states enacted literacy, educational, and property tests. In addition, the terrorist Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tennessee, whose violence, lawlessness, and intimidation restored white rule. Lynching, mob violence, and beatings became daily occurrences, especially during elections, and it has been estimated that between 1885 and 1900, about 2,500 lynchings, mostly of blacks, occurred in the United States, mainly in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana.⁸⁵ Meanwhile, argues historian Nell Irvin Painter, neither federal nor state governments acted to curb extra-legal violence against blacks, the worst expression of which was lynching.⁸⁶ In short, the RSA and the ISA enforced racial discrimination and inequality.

Under the Jim Crow regime of white supremacy in the South during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, blacks were relegated to forced agricultural peonage through rural sharecropping, grinding urban poverty in the South’s new cities.⁸⁷ Jim Crow laws created black social and economic inequality and disparity by structurally and legally denying African Americans access to jobs, decent wages, education, housing, and the vote. In this period of Jim Crow segregation, only the lowest economic niches such as domestic, sharecropping, tenant farming under the crop-lien system, or field hand jobs were open to blacks, setting in motion the exodus of blacks out of the South.⁸⁸ These violent forms of governance racialized every aspect of daily life for African Americans.

As a consequence of Jim Crow terror, African Americans migrated in large numbers to southern and northern urban centers such as Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Between 1900 and World War I, approximately 150,000 African Americans left the South for the metropolitan areas of the North,⁸⁹ fleeing white terror. Another 500,000 moved northward to industrial cities following World War I. Their numbers continued to rise during the decade when another million blacks deserted the South and headed North to find employment in factories and packinghouses. In these northern urban centers blacks meet up with the approximately 5 million non-Nordic, eastern and southern European immigrants—Poles, Slavs, Jews, Mediterranean, Irish Catholics, etc.—further rearticulating social, class, and racial differences and the transformation of social formation in modern, urban America. Blacks became an essential part of the unequal multicultural, multiclass, and multiracial population that so characterized the 1920s.

Although they found work in these northern centers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, blacks continued to encounter State-sanctioned structural racism. They were segregated in the workplace and the position of subforeman of a group of black workers was the highest position a black worker could hope to reach.⁹⁰ In terms of unions, blacks were received ambiguously and ambivalently by labor unions. The National Labor Union, which opened its 1869 convention to black delegates, rhetorically supported black inclusion but neglected to push for either integrated locals or black civil rights.⁹¹ Race riots and hate strikes against black workers were far more common than biracial labor struggles […]. It was ridiculous for African Americans to expect to work alongside whites in skilled jobs and criminal for them to take the jobs of whites during strikes.⁹² As historian Eric Foner observes, The Northern labor movement failed to identify its aspirations and interests with those of former slaves.⁹³ Thus, within the labor movement during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, African Americans were either outright discriminated against or reduced to second-class citizens.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the situation was not much better for women, who also experienced discrimination, simultaneously happening on a different plateau from Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and African Americans. Women also had their experience of second-class citizenship sanctioned by the cultural, economic, educational, and legal institutions within the ISA. From the beginning, the United States had a rather Victorian view of women. They were said to be the weaker, gentler sex whose primary duty was the creation of an orderly and harmonious private sphere for husbands and children—as opposed to the public sphere, which men dominated. Respectable women did not participate in debates on public issues and did not attract attention to themselves. The State denied women the vote, credit, and higher education, making them second-class citizens. But the notion of the woman’s vote and inclusion in society persisted throughout the nineteenth century.

For example, during this period, women experienced inequality in the workplace. According to the census of 1900 there were six million women working in the United States, making up one-fifth of the nation’s total workforce.⁹⁴ (By 1910 the number of wage-earning women had increased to approximately nine million, increasing the divorce rate.)⁹⁵ Two million of these women were domestics—maids, cooks, nurses, and laundresses, who worked in private homes.