How Does This Contemporary Depiction of Lady Liberty Represent the Main Issues That Accompanied the Us`s Emergence as an Industrial Power?

How does this contemporary depiction of Lady Liberty represent the main issues that accompanied the US`s emergence as an industrial power?

Following the American Psychological Association`s Guidelines

Jay Lopez

American Military Academy

        It is well known that the age of Reconstruction in the United States was a time of many positive and negative “advancements”. Even so, the period that succeeded it, the Gilded Age, was also one in which people like blacks, natives and other immigrants were treated unfairly and cruelly, be it physically or, in most cases, psychologically. All this due to the extents corporations would go to and ultimately reach the common goal: Corporate Wealth. Consequently, as part of the ways of big corporate trusts and companies, a huge part of the population was immensely affected by these monopolists; the being the Native Americans. Farther and farther was the United States getting away from its main ideals of liberty and equality where all men were created equal, hence making Lady Liberty cry before the acts committed by her own people. Situations such as the remaking of Indian lives organized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Dawes Act, and the legal case and consequences over Indian citizenship of Elk v Wilkins, are perfect examples of the atrocious psychological warfare Monopolists took over, with Indians especially, that make Lady Liberty Cry and make up a great part of the main issues that sprung up as the US was turning into an Industrial Power.

        For the leading powers such as: The Standard Oil, Copper, and Iron Trusts, among many others, to succeed into turning the United States into a fully Industrialized nation, they had to do away with all disturbances that were caught in their way. In many cases, Native Americans were a reoccurring threat for their advancement simply because allowing them to have the same rights as an equal part of society posed a threat to the way they were continually taking over society as a whole; obviously due to the fact that they were not very easily assimilated into society, thus being marginalized from it. For instance, we see one of the many tactics these leading powers used to rid Native Americans from their original ways was through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The author of Give Me Liberty stated that “The Bureau of Indian Affairs established boarding schools where Indian children, removed from the “negative” influences of their parents and tribes, were dressed in non-Indian clothes, given new names, and educated in white ways.”

        Consequently, this was simply a way of stripping away what they are and what they believed in. They were taken out of their comfort zones and later “absorbed”. This is a case of “Assimilation”, where you take a person from another racial or cultural background and completely change their ways through educating an entirely different way of being according to the “assimilators” culture or race. The mentality of Monopolists now was one of “our culture is superior to yours, therefore, we strip you of yours, involuntarily and by force”. This, in other words, was a way of destroying them.

        Moreover, in 1887with the approval of the Dawes Act, there came another way of <> as stated in Give Me Liberty. The Dawes Act was a way in which the leading powers managed to “break up the land of nearly all tribes into small parcels to be distributed to Indian families, with the remainder auctioned off to white purchasers”. In other words, this was destroying the concept of tribes. So, they distributed land in individual plots. This way, there are no tribes, only family plots. This resulted in a rather ambivalent manner of being positive and negative for the Natives. The Native Americans had now, thanks to the Dawes Act, acquired a land title, but, on the negative side of things, the tribe, as a whole, lost all its land. Henceforth eradicating the sense of unity tribes had and breaking them down spiritually and morally.