Lectures of The Linguistic Culture, страница 10

The plight of the Indian population was even worse. The land-hungry American pioneers stopped at nothing in their drive to the West. In 1830 the Indian Removal Act was passed. The terrible implementation of this Act produced one of the darkest chapters in American history. The story of treaties and broken agreements, raids and massacres, was repeated in the settlement of the trans-Mississippi West and the Northwest.

The period after the Civil War was the period of the reservation policy. The blocks of land where Indians were forced to live were usually the poorest barren places where nobody else wanted to live. Extermination of the buffalo herds eventually led to destruction of the traditional Indian life as they had always lived on the buffalo hunt, and their ritual and worship had been dedicated to its success. The disappearance of the buffalo left the Indians starving, purposeless and hopeless.

By the 20-th century poverty, perpetual hunger, European diseases and hostilities had reduced the Indian population in reservations to only 250000.The Indian civilization was facing extinction. Indians were not allowed to keep their traditional culture, dances, religion and language.

1. Answer the questions.

1. What was the situation with Indians and black slaves in the USA after the Revolution?

2. Were Indians and Blacks granted Civil rights?

3. Why did the abolition issue become particularly stressful in the 1850?

4. How did the southerners regard slavery?

5. How did the secession process develop?

6. What was Abraham Lincoln attitude to slavery?

7. How did the Civil War actually start?

8. How long did the war last?

9. Were the black slaves liberated immediately after the Civil War? What instruments were designed by Southern whites to terrorize blacks?

10.What were the activities of the K. K. K.?

11.Why did black Americans fail to achieve real equality during the term of reconstruction?

2. Render the texts in English:

A).Завоевание независимости было лишь первым шагом, облегчавшим путь к модернизации. Прошло лишь несколько десятилетий после американской революции, как появилась новая проблема, грозившая стране разрушением государственного единства или отходом от завоеваний демократии. Эту проблему создавало растущее противоречие между городским, индустриальным, демократическим Севером и Югом, который по-прежнему оставался рабовладельческим и сельскохозяйственным. После революции многие политические деятели, в том числе и Дж. Вашингтон, думали, что рабство, запрещенное в северных штатах, постепенно, само собой будет исчезать и на Юге. Однако ход событий был совсем иным.

Выращивание хлопка, сахарного тростника и табака на рынок требовали организованного труда большого количества людей. По мере того, как США расширяли свои границы, присоединяя или осваивая новые территории, Юг поднимал вопрос о распространении рабства на вновь образовавшиеся штаты. Между Севером и Югом вспыхивали острые конфликты из-за штатов Миссури, Канзас, Нью-Мексико. Постепенно все более реальной становилась возможность политического отделения южных штатов. В апреле 1861 г. южные рабовладельческие штаты подняли мятеж (апрель 1861 г.) с целью сохранения рабства и распространения его по всей стране.

В) Приход к власти А. Линкольна – непримиримого противника рабства и тем более его распространения на новые территории – ознаменовал начало давно назревавшей гражданской войны. Военные действия длились с 1861 по 1865 г. и нанесли стране огромный урон. Помимо людских потерь были и потери экономические. Некоторые города (Колумбия, Ричмонд, Атланта) были сожжены до основания, многие заводы и железные дороги разрушены. На первом этапе (1861-1862 гг.) война со стороны Севера велась нерешительно, “по конституционному”, что привело к ряду военных поражений северян. Второй этап характеризуется революционными методами ведения войны с участием широких народных масс. В 1864-1865 гг. были разгромлены основные силы южан и в апреле 1865 г. взят город Ричмонд – столица рабовладельческих штатов. Победа Севера сохранила страну как единое государство. Она уничтожила господство плантаторов и рабство (официально отменено 1 января 1863 г.) и создала условия для капиталистической индустриализации и освоения западных земель. На большой части территории США победил фермерский (так называемый американский) путь развития капитализма в сельском хозяйстве. Однако взаимная ненависть на долгие годы разъединяла южан и северян. Гражданская война не принесла действительной свободы черным рабам, освобожденным без земли. По стране бродили тысячи бывших невольников, потерявших хозяев и привычное место работы.

В) Индейцы в Америке. В течение двух веков американское правительство вело настоящую войну против “краснокожих”, виноватых только в том, что они занимали прекрасные плодородные земли. Это была долгая кровопролитная война, исход которой был предрешен. Силой и обманом индейцев заставляли подписывать договоры о капитуляции и под вооруженным конвоем отправляли в резервации, на самые бесплодные, не пригодные для жизни человека территории. Это было сознательная политика “расчистки” нового континента от его хозяев.

3. Discussion Points:

I.The main reasons of the Civil War.

2.The abolition of slavery.

3.Abraham Lincoln and his Contribution to American history.

Chapter II. Years of Growth

H 1896 Ford Quadricycle

Read and translate the words and word combinations:

backwater slums

A slaughter house to streamline

obliterate installment plan

to be plagued thugs

to succumb(syn. submit, relent) military conscription act

to work at full swing to clang (clangorous)

to pay the way desegregation

unscrupulous incipient

to put down the riot a dismal failure

to pave the way relocation policy

After the end of the Civil War the United States continued the acquisition of the new territories. The United States acted like an imperial nation, gathering and settling new territories, pushing aside those who stood in its path. In 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia, later Spain gave most of its oversea empire to the USA – Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and a small Pacific island Guam. At the same time the USA also annexed Hawaii - a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Having started as a colonial country, the USA quickly became a colonial power herself.

In the early 1900s the American government wanted to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama to join North and South America and separates the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific Ocean. As the Columbian government was slow to give the Americans permission to build the canal, in 1903 president Theodore Roosevelt sent warships to Panama. The warships helped a small group of Panamanian businessmen to rebel against the Columbian government and to give the Americans Control over a ten-and-a-half-mile wide strip of land called the Canal Zone.

Parallel to the acquisition of the oversea lands the USA continued the settlements of North American territories. After the “Gold Rush» in California gold and silver were also discovered in Colorado, Nevada and Arizona, Wyoming and Dakota. Some former mining settlements grew into permanent communities. New towns sprang up throughout the gold and silver regions.

Within twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War the Great Plains were divided into States and territories of the USA. Ranchers were feeding large herds of cattle on the “sea of grass”; farmers were using the latest harvesting technology on the large irrigated fields of “Great American Desert” to grow wheat. By 1890 the separate areas of settlement on the Pacific Coast and along the Mississippi River had moved together and the wilderness had been largely conquered.

In the 1880s great Mesabi deposits of iron were found near lake Superior. Soon the Mesabi became one of the largest producers of iron ore in the world. Besides iron at that time a great amount of coal was being extracted in the USA. Iron and coal were used to make steel for the railroads, locomotive, freight wagons and passenger cars. The first railroad finished in 1869 and was quickly joined by others. By 1884 four more major transcontinental lines had crossed the continent to link the Atlantic with the Pacific Coasts. New towns appeared along the railroads. By 1890 the industries of USA were earning the country more than its farmlands. Within a few decades after the civil war the USA transformed from an undeveloped backwater into a primary world power..

By 1913 more than one third of the whole world’s industrial production had been originated from the mines and factories of the USA. The growth of American industry was organized and controlled by the number of powerful businessmen like Andrew Carnegie, the owner of the giant Carneqie steel corporation and D. Rockfeller, the “king” of the growing oil industry. As the corporations grew bigger and more powerful, they often became “trusts”. By the early 20-century the trusts had controlled large parts of American industry. The biggest trusts were richer than most other nations. By their wealth and power - and especially their power to decide wages and prices - they controlled the lives of millions of people.

The United States was created as a land of equal opportunities to everyone. Yet half the American people had hardly enough finance to buy sufficient food and clothing. In the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago and Pittsburgh, immigrant workers still labored long hours for low wages in steel mills, factories and slaughter houses. The workers’ homes were over-crowded slums. In the South thousands of poor farmers, both black and white, worked from sunrise to sunset to earn barely enough to live on.

The handful of rich and powerful men bribed politicians to pass laws, which favored them. Others hired private armies to crush any attempts by their workers to obtain better conditions. Their attitude to the rights of other people was summed up in a famous remark of the railroad “king” William H. Vanderbilt. When he was asked whether he thought that railroads should be run in the public interest, “The public be damned” he replied.

Progressive Americans were alarmed by the power of the trusts and the contemptuous way in which leaders of industry like Vanderbilt rejected the criticism. In the early years of the twentieth century a stream of books and magazine articles drew people’s attention to a large

number of national problems. Novelists like Mark Twain and Henry James analyzed the impact of wealth and ambition on social life. Herbert G. Wells in his novel “The War in the Air”(1908) sharply criticized “ the unprecedental multitudousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all…” He wrote: “I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic process of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving failures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between, all set in a texture of spacious countryside, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great exploitation, of district and crowded factories, of wide deserts and mine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers”.

The Progressive movement found a leader in the Republican Theodore Roosevelt T. Roosevelt who became president in 1901 got particularly concerned about the power of the trusts. His idea was to give the USA the best of both worlds. He wanted to allow the businessmen enough freedom of action to make their firms efficient and prosperous, but at the same time to prevent them from taking unfair advantage of other people (the policy of so-called “square deal». However the “square deal” of Roosevelt’s administration (1901-1909) failed to bring the trusts under control.

President Woodrow Wilson who won the presidential elections in 1912 started his policy “The New Freedom». One of Wilson’s first steps was to reduce the powers of the trusts, give more rights to labor unions and make it easier for farmers to borrow money from the federal government to work their land.

The Progressive movement changed and improved American life in many ways, but did not help unemployed or unprivileged very much. The ideals of equal opportunity, proclaimed in the USA, were often denied to Americans who were non-white. Millions of the Blacks still lived in great poverty. Most of them still lived in Southern farms. In cities they lived in so-called “black ghettos”, because many whites resented their moving into white neighborhoods.

The First World War and the Roaring Twenties.

The World War 1 contributed to the USA to become even more powerful. While the war started on the continent of Europe, brought death and sufferings to millions of European people, the USA, physically untouched by combat and greatly enriched by wartime profits, quickly became the main supplier of weapon and capital to the countries of the Anti-German allies. The entire railroad system came under government supervision, the demand for industrial production grew fast. Guns, ships, shells, and other essential goods were made for the war.

When in May 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed in Europe, the USA met it as the country with a primary world economy, with enormous productive capacity and extensive markets for manufactured goods. Having less than 10% of the world’s population, the USA produced about 25% of the world’s goods and more than 40% of the world manufacture. Business boomed. Automobiles and trucks transformed the life of the nation. Airplanes, used during the war, were now geared to peacetime purposes. Chemical and electrical processes, together with light machinery made of alloyed metals, were changing the character of factories. Mass production proved itself in building ships and airplane motors. Electricity also speeded the revolution in production: in 1914 some 30% of manufacturing was electrified, in 1929 70% of all factories benefited from the power sources. In the field of finance, New York began to replace London as the hub of the world’s finance market.

Businessmen became popular heroes in the 1920s.There were widespread beliefs in the USA that individuals were responsible for their own life success, and that unemployment or poverty were the result of personal failings. The newspaper and magazine writers maintained that although not all Americans could become rich, at least middle-class Americans ought to be rich.

Journalist L .Allen wrote that at that time “business had become almost the national religion of America”. Men like automobile-maker Henry Ford, steel industry owner Andrew Carnegie, oil and finance tycoon Rockefeller, George Pullman, W. Colgate, Procter and Gamble and others were widely admired as the creators of nation’s prosperity, the models of so-called “American Dream.” In 1913 Ford began using interchangeable parts and assembly-line method in his plant. By 1920 the half of the cars produced in the world were his cars, by 1930 there were over 26.7 million cars, registered in the USA. Cars in America became the “family horses, used for more than commuting to work or driving for leisure. The automobile revolution started the consumer revolution. Appliances-radios, telephones, electric refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners led the parade. The consumer boom stimulated advertising. Americans had to be convinced to spend their money, to buy all-electric kitchen, “to keep up with the Joneses” (to live better than the neighbors). “Live now, pay tomorrow” was the general motto. Incredible number of Americans began to buy goods on the installment plan (monthly payments). Thousands of Americans invested money in successful firms so that they could share their profits. There was also an orgy of speculation in real estate and stocks, buying and selling shares - “playing the market” became a national hobby and a sort of fever. Many Americans borrowed the large sums of money from the banks to buy shares on credit and to get “easy money” on selling them later “on the margin” (a higher price).