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Following American victory in the Spanish-American War, Lodge came to represent the imperialist faction of the US Senate, those who called for the annexation of the Philippines.
Lodge did not object to the United States
interfering in other nations' affairs, and was a proponent
of imperialism (see Lodge Committee for further explanation).
Lodge was a vocal supporter of immigration restrictions because he
was concerned about the possible failure of American isolation, that is
the assimilation of immigrants with an alien culture. The public voice
of the Immigration Restriction League,
Lodge argued on behalf of literacy tests for incoming immigrants,
appealing to fears that unskilled foreign labor was undermining the
standard of living for American workers and that a mass influx of
uneducated immigrants would result in social conflict and national
decline. Lodge was alarmed that large numbers of immigrants, primarily
from Eastern and Southern Europe, were flooding into industrial
centers, where the poverty of their home countries was being
perpetuated and crime rates were rapidly rising. Lodge claimed that
these immigrants were "people whom it is very difficult to assimilate
and do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States." He felt that the United States should temporarily shut out all
further entries, particularly persons of low education or skill, in
order to more efficiently assimilate the millions who had come. From
1907 to 1911, he served on the Dillingham Commission,
a joint congressional committee established to study the era's
immigration patterns and make recommendations to Congress based on its
findings. The Commission's recommendations led to the Immigration Act of 1917.
Yet Lodge was no rampant xenophobe,
remarking once that "It [the U.S. flag] is the flag just as much of the
man who was naturalized yesterday as of the man whose people have been
here many generations."
Lodge, along with Theodore Roosevelt, was a supporter of "100% Americanism." In an address to the New England Society of Brooklyn in 1888, Lodge stated:
Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from
which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and
honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and
Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be
Americans...If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so
without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something
else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
He also said this, as quoted in the Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, August 8, 1891:
Within the last decades the character of the immigration to this
country has changed materially. The immigration of the people who have
settled and built up the nation during the last 250 years, and who have
been, with trifling exceptions, kindred either in race or language or
both is declining while the immigration of people who are not kindred
either in race or language and who represent the most ignorant classes
and the lowest labor of Europe, is increasing with frightful rapidity.
The great mass of these ignorant immigrants come here at an age when
education is unlikely if not impossible and when the work of
Americanizing them is in consequence correspondingly difficult. They
also introduce an element of competition in the labor market which must
have a disastrous effect upon the rate of American wages. We pay but
little attention to this vast flood of immigrants. The law passed by
the last congress has improved the organization of the Immigration
Department, but it has done very little toward sifting those who come
to our shores.
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In 1856, in his unpublished The Eighteenth Presidency,
addressing the men of the South, he wrote you are either to abolish
. Whitman also subscribed to the
slavery or it will abolish you
widespread opinion that even free African-Americans should not vote and was concerned at the increasing number of African-Americans in the legislature.
Taylor was the last President to hold slaves while in office.
Polk was a slaveholder for his entire life; inheriting twenty of his father's slaves, either directly or from deceased brothers. Polk rarely sold slaves, although once he became President and could better afford it, he bought more. Polk's will stipulated that their slaves were to be freed after his wife Sarah had died.
Brigadier General Winfield Scott arrived at the Cherokee Nation, on 6 April 1838. Within months, Brigadier General Winfield Scott captured (or killed) every Cherokee in north Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama who could not escape. His troops reportedly rounded up the Cherokee and held them in rat-infested stockades with little food. Private John G. Burnett later wrote:
Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter.
More than four thousand Cherokee died in this confinement before
ever beginning the trip west. The Cherokee removal later became known as the Trail of Tears.
In Van Buren's own words, Without strong national political organizations, there would be nothing to moderate the prejudices between free and slaveholding states.
("Martin Van Buren" 103–114)
In the case of the ship Amistad, Van Buren sided with the Spanish Government to return the kidnapped slaves. Also, he oversaw the "Trail of Tears", which involved the expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina to the Oklahoma territory. To help secure Florida, Van Buren also pursued the Second Seminole War: Which would prove the costliest of the Indian Wars.
When it came to the issue of slavery in DC and slavery in the United States, he was against its abolition, and said so in his Inaugural Address in 1836:
I must go into the Presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slaveholding States, and also with a determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with it in the States where it exists.
In 1836, President Jackson detached Jesup to deal with the Creek tribe in Georgia and Alabama, and then to assume command of all US troops in Florida during the Second Seminole War. His actions during the latter - in violating truces to capture Seminole leaders such as Osceola - provoked controversy.
On March 7, 1850, Webster gave a congressional speech in which he gave support to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; requiring federal officials to recapture and return runaway slaves.
Webster wanted high profile convictions: He led the prosecution when defendants were accused of rescuing Shadrach Minkins in 1851 from Boston officials who intended to return Minkins to his owner; the juries convicted no-one.
Thompson became an Indian agent to the Seminoles and was appointed in 1834 to superintend their from Florida. He was subsequently killed by a band of Seminoles led by Osceola at Fort King, Florida, on December 28, 1835.
Harrison participated in Wayne's decisive victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, which brought the Northwest Indian War to a successful close for the United States. After the war, Lieutenant Harrison was one of the signatories of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which opened much of present-day Ohio to settlement by European Americans
In 1803, Harrison lobbied Congress to repeal Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance, in order to permit slavery in the Indiana Territory. He claimed it was necessary to make the region more appealing to settlers and would make the territory economically viable. That year Harrison had the appointed territorial legislature authorize indenturing. He attempted to have slavery legalized outright, in both 1805 and 1807.
Turkey's scheming at the Strasbourg summit proves it doesn't belong in the European Union
We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is okay to target white girls in this way.
Of course, this is the projection-and-displacement of those who have an overwhelmingly-disproportionate number of child molesters in their own community while possessing no answers to the problem that they claim others must find.
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Monroe owned dozens of slaves and took some of them to serve him when he resided at the White House from 1817–1825. Other slave owning presidents also had the custom of bringing their slaves to work for them since there was no domestic staff provided for the presidents at that time.
