What Occurred During The Reconstruction Era

Democracy is a system of government built for the welfare of the people by the people of their country. After the civil war (1861-1865), the time periods – Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and the 1920s – showed dramatic changes in the US democracy socially and politically. The US democracy progressed the most in the 1920s amongst the three above mentioned time periods, as every group in the society aim for social and political rights. The Reconstruction period (1865-1877), as the name suggests, was a period of massive remodeling of the US democracy. The reconstruction, started by Abraham Lincoln to attract former supporters of the Republicans, required southern states to secure the rights of the newly freedmen, African-Americans, in order to
The industries also relied on the global network to fill its need of labors. More than 8 million migrants from different parts of the world moved to the US for work [Pg-378, e-book]. The workers performed life endangering tasks, for instance, the building of Brooklyn Bridge (1871) that had low safety standards and working conditions due to which many workers were injured, bedridden for years, and lost their hearing ability [Pg-8, Social Class PDF]. The jobs exploited the worker’s rights as they offered no lunch break, no compensation, and no death benefits to the worker’s family [Gilded Age Lecture]. Industrial workers earned between two and three dollars a day and struggled for food and daily supplies [Pg-19, Social Class PDF]. Women constituted about 17% of the industrial workforce and earned half the wage of men; many other women did piecework at home such as cracking the nut. Nearly 1.7 million children worked during the night and earned even less than women [Gilded Age Lecture]. On the other hand, African-Americans suffered worse than what they experienced in the reconstruction period; the Congress passed segregation laws, also known as Jim Crow laws, that separated public facilities for African-Americans [Reconstruction Lecture]. The US democracy of the Gilded Age did not progress or decline because the rich became
In 1914, Oklahoma, a seventeen-year-old girl was lynched by a group of white men because her brother killed two white men who assaulted her [Pg-9, Anti-Lynching PDF]. The major causes of lynching were homicides, felonious assault, rape, robbery and theft, and the insult to white persons [Pg-33, Anti-Lynching PDF]. The Anti-Lynching bill (1918), also known as Dyer bill, that assured equal protection of laws and to punish the crime of lynching failed in 1922 as the number of lynching increased [Pg-2, Anti-Lynching PDF]. Between 1882 and 1968, 3445 blacks and 1297 whites were lynched [Pg-36, Anti-Lynching PDF]. The supporters of the bill formed the Anti-Lynching Movement; the vision of the movement was to gather a million women against lynching and collect at least a dollar to promote awareness about lynching in the US. The democracy of the 1920s showed progress for some minorities like new women but showed no progress for other minorities like