Impact of Class, Gender, Ethnicity, Culture and Politics as They Relate to American History

The Founding Fathers stated in the Declaration of Independence (1776) that “all men are created equal”—but it was a statement that only rang partially true if one is to judge by their actions. Even though Thomas Paine (1791) had identified the “Rights of Man” in his treatise by the same name, the Americans were not really interested in applying Enlightenment philosophy to its fullest, for they still wished to deny the Negro his fair share of equality. Slavery persisted for nearly another century and it took the Civil War to bring that issue to the fore, with the Great Emancipator finally taking the first steps in freeing slaves in states still occupied by the Rebels of the South. However, Emancipation Proclamation was still hardly the turning point in African-American relations that was needed—and Lincoln himself had been working on a plan that would see the slaves deported to a new black state in Central America dubbed “Linconia” (Guelzo, 2000). The 13th Amendment officially ended slavery everywhere in the US, but it did not establish equal rights for blacks and Jim Crow laws sprang up in numerous states. It would be another century before the Civil Rights Act would finally ensure protection under the law for all.
Women, too, did not enjoy the kind of “equality” that the Declaration seemed to imply. They did not have the right to vote until the 20th century—but of course neither did those of the lower, working classes. The right to vote was a right reserved exclusively for the landed class—the wealthy aristocrats who wanted to be in charge of their states and the new nation and did not want lower classes, blacks or women having a say in how the nation should be governed. Such was the reality of American democracy from the beginning.
Women “won” the right to vote only after Carrie Chapman, a major leader in the Women’s Movement and in the Peace Movement, threw her support behind President Wilson, who eagerly wanted to enter America into WW1 so that he could have a chance at implementing his League of Nations. Chapman sold out the Peace Movement for a promise from Wilson that he would support her push for women’s suffrage (Van Voris, 1996). Thus, to afford themselves of the “rights” that a society founded upon the notion of equality promised from the beginning, all the Women’s Movement had to do was sell out the message of its own founders and embrace a war that very few people in America actually wanted to be part of. In fact, Wilson had been re-elected to the White House by running on a non-interventionist platform. He had promised to keep America out of the European war.
Essentially, America is a litany of broken promises, which is probably why it is called the American Dream: the reality is something quite different. Yet throughout its history immigrants from other countries have come to Americas seeking that Dream, and they continue to do so to this day. However, the dominant culture of America was always one in which the White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) population had a controlling stake. It was this population’s “Manifest Destiny” as O’Sullivan put it in the 19th century to control the lands as far as the eye could see—and when the WASPs ran out of land out West they turned to foreign lands, which is one reason the Spanish American War was fought in the Philippines, a Catholic country that the WASPs proceeded to ravage, viewing Catholicism as a savage religion unfit for the kind of culture the Protestant rulers of America could establish.
References
Declaration of Independence. (1776). Retrieved from http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/compare.html
Guelzo, A. C. (2000). Lincoln and the Abolitionists. The Wilson Quarterly, 24(4), 58-70.
O’Sullivan, J. (1845). Annexation. United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), 5-10.
Paine, T. (1791). The rights of man. Retrieved from https://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/
Van Voris, J. (1996). Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York City: Feminist Press at CUNY.