The 1880s

April 27, 1882

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Auguste Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty, the best belated birthday present in history, was unveiled in New York harbor in 1886, ten years after the nation's centennial. But the words "Give us your tired, your poor" had barely been etched in the pedestal before Congress passed the first in a series of draconian immigration laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The move was a reaction to the waves of non-English speaking immigrants that were changing the face of America. If there was one word that seemed to characterize the 1880s, it was "backlash": a backlash against the immigrants, a backlash against Reconstruction, against Native Americans and organized labor. 

In the 1880s, Southern lawmakers passed the first Jim Crow law when Tennessee mandated that railroad coaches be segregated. While the Indian wars were winding down, the whole sordid history of America's dealings with the tribes were chronicled by Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor and her novel Ramona. With the latter, she hoped to raise America's consciousness about the Indian experience the same way Harriet Beecher Stowe did about slavery with Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though Ramona was a bestseller, it had little impact on policy. The Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that Indians were by birth aliens and dependents, while laws such as the Dawes General Allotment Act and the Indian Appropriations Bill opened hundreds of thousands of acres of reservation land to white settlers, leading to such notorious events as the Oklahoma land run of 1889.

Library of Congress

President James Garfield

Railroad magnate Jay Gould famously stated that he could "hire one half the working class to kill the other half," but strikes against his railroads were successful, as was a general strike in 1886 for the eight-hour day that was carried out over the objections of the leading labor group of the period, the Knights of Labor. Anarchism took hold among certain sectors of the movement, and their prominence led to the hanging of eight anarchists for the May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago.

The 1880s began with the assassination of President Garfield by a disgruntled office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. Millions of Americans also mourned the death of the Civil War's greatest hero, former President Ulysses S. Grant. Few mourned, however, when America's notorious outlaw, Jesse James, was gunned down by a member of his own gang.