American Social Equality

In the Declaration of Independence, authors Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, John Adams, and Robert Livingston, argued that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men...” These founding fathers heavily stressed the importance of equality and unknowingly paved the way towards the American Dream. However, the embodiment of the American Dream- social equality and economic independence- although widely favored, seemed too ambitious throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America. Many ethnic groups between 1865 and

Jewish immigrants, most fleeing from religious and ethnic persecution in the Pale settlements of Russia, faced anti-Semitism and were immediately regarded as the dregs of American Society throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Americans, fearing the Jewish peoples' inability to assimilate to American culture treated them unfavorably and labeled them as scum, dirt, and riff raff. They were social outcasts and of a lower class- thus, they were forced to work menial jobs for substandard wages. Most immigrants lived in overcrowded tenements and faced low wages, dangerous working conditions, and were inevitably surrounded in poverty and debt. Anzia Yezierska, in the novel, Bread Givers, revealed the Jewish perception regarding their impoverished life in the early twentieth century America. "I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering for the rent," Chapter 1, p. 1. Jewish immigrants spent most of their salaries and wages earned in rent. Most lived in overcrowded tenements in the lower east side

Inevitably, this resulted in poverty and social and economic inequality. The American federal government forced them from their lands, separated families, and pressured them to adopt American traditions in an aggressive attempt to assimilate the Native American population into the American culture. The U.S. government first placed Native American children in these boarding schools, where they were ‘educated and cultivated’ into the white man’s traditions and customs. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian children, removed from negative influences of their parents and tribes, were dressed in non- Indian clothes, given new names, and educated in white ways.” (Foner, p. 614) Native Americans were forced to assimilate to the white American settler’s customs and abandon their own cultural traditions. They were labeled as uncivilized, barbaric, and were treated as if they were an amusement show. (Foner 613) Additionally, Americans excluded Native Americans from society by forcibly placing them onto Indian Reservations in an effort to keep them self-contained. Andrew Carnegie in The Gospel of Wealth, depicts the white man’s exclusion of Native Americans. “In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers. The Indians are to-day where civilized