"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT...."
| |
|
|
| |
The First Amendment means to me ... that the only constitutional way our
Government can preserve itself is to leave its people the fullest possible
freedom to praise, criticize, or discuss, as they see fit, all governmental
policies and to suggest, if they desire, that even its most fundamental
postulates are bad and should be changed....
Hugo Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1886-1971), from his dissenting opinion in Barenblatt v. United States, 1959
|
|
| |
|
|
The earliest Americans did not speak of "human rights." But they did speak of freedom and liberties, and they valued them highly. As British subjects, they were well familiar with the steady evolution of British political and constitutional rights.
Many of the first colonists came to the New World seeking the religious freedom denied them in 17th-century Europe. Massachusetts was founded by Puritans, Pennsylvania by Quakers, Maryland by Catholics. French Calvinists -- Huguenots -- attempted an early colony in the Middle South, and later settled in important numbers in several colonies farther north. These highly religious groups may not have accepted each other from the beginning; in fact, some of them imposed their will on religious minorities by establishing state religions in colonial America. But over time, the exigencies of colonial life fostered a sense of religious tolerance among them, and, in most cases, freedom of worship was incorporated into colonial law and custom.
In addition to bringing their religious faith to the New World, American colonists brought a passion for self-government. Even before they landed on the coast of Massachusetts in 1620, America's early settlers, the Puritans, drew up the "Mayflower Compact," agreeing to abide by "just and equal laws" framed by leaders of their own choosing. Massachusetts was not a perfect democracy, but as more and more settlers filled the coastal towns and peopled the interior of the northeastern United States -- the area commonly known as New England -- the tendency was toward inclusion. By the 18th century, the democratic nature of the New England town meeting, at which inhabitants of a town come together as its legislative authority, was firmly established. Among America's founding fathers who emerged from this background were John and Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, James Otis, Alexander Hamilton, and many others.
In Virginia, the largest of the southern colonies and one with a much different social structure from New England, there was also a long tradition of participation in local government. From this heritage came George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, and other of America's founders.
Thus, when the time came for the American colonists to dissolve the political bonds that connected them to Britain, they looked to an already well-established body of law and custom that recognized freedom of speech, of religious worship, and of assembly, as well as the right to petition, to a jury trial, and to have a say in governing their own affairs. In fact, it was the curtailment of these liberties that sparked America's revolution to gain independence from Britain.
The Principles of Freedom
Although the first battles of the American Revolution occurred in 1775, the Declaration of Independence by the American colonies in 1776 formally announced the revolution. Its principal author was Thomas Jefferson, who later became the third president of the United States.
With the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson created a succinct yet eloquent affirmation of human rights and natural law. In the Declaration's second paragraph, Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable [inalienable] Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...."
As Abraham Lincoln, who led the United States during its fiercest battle over human rights -- the Civil War -- said of the Declaration more than a half-century later, its signers "meant simply to declare the right so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances might permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which would be familiar to all and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere."
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring the freeing of slaves in all the areas then in rebellion against the U.S.
Credit: Matthew Brady, Library of Congress.
Although the Declaration of Independence did not provoke the American Revolution, it did clarify the rationale for the battle, which continued, with assistance from the French, until the British surrendered. On September 3, 1783, American and British representatives signed articles of peace -- the Treaty of Paris - - in which Britain acknowledged the independence, freedom, and sovereignty of the 13 former American colonies, soon to be states.
For the first years of independence, the American states remained largely independent of each other, united only by loose-fitting Articles of Confederation that served as the basic law of the new nation. The articles were seen more as a treaty between equal states joining together for military security and economic advantage than a formal constitution governing the country. This was a deliberate choice by many who feared central government and believed that individual liberties would more likely be protected at the state than at the national level.
The success of the revolution gave Americans the opportunity to give legal form to their ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and to remedy some of the grievances through state constitutions. As early as May of 1776, Congress had passed a resolution advising the colonies to form new governments "such as shall best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents." Within a year after the Declaration of Independence, all but three states had drawn up constitutions.
The first objective of the framers of the state constitutions was to secure those inalienable rights whose violation had caused the former colonies to repudiate their connection with Britain. Thus, each began with a declaration or bill of rights. Virginia's constitution, which served as a model for the others, included a declaration of such principles as popular sovereignty, rotation in office, and freedom of elections, as well as an enumeration of fundamental liberties -- moderate bail and humane punishment, speedy trial by jury, freedom of the press and of conscience, and the right of the majority to reform or alter the government.
Other states enlarged the list of liberties. But the state constitutions also had some glaring limitations. The colonies south of Pennsylvania excluded their slave populations from their inalienable rights as human beings. Women had no political rights. No state went so far as to permit universal male suffrage, and even in those states that permitted all taxpayers to vote, office-holders were required to own a certain amount of property.
The U.S. Constitution
It was not until 1787 that representatives from the states met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to begin drawing up the U.S. Constitution. What they crafted was a document of compromise and representative democracy, one that has adapted well to changing circumstances for over 200 years. As its framers stated in the preamble to this basic law of the United States, the document was written "in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity...."
There were many who opposed the new Constitution, though. Their consent to the document came only with the promise that a series of amendments guaranteeing the civil liberties that were part of most state constitutions would soon accompany it.
To this end, in 1791, 10 amendments -- known collectively as the Bill of Rights -- were added to the Constitution. These amendments specifically guarantee freedom of religion, speech, and the press. They proclaim the right of the people to peaceable assembly; to petition the government for redress of grievances; to bear arms; to secure their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable search and seizure; to due process of law; and to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.
Since the adoption of the Bill of Rights, only 17 additional amendments have been made part of the Constitution. A number of these amendments revised the federal government's structure and operation, but many followed the precedent established by the Bill of Rights and expanded individual rights and freedoms.
But while the United States began with a well-established body of rights and liberties, it would take almost two centuries before those rights and liberties could be said to include all Americans.
One step toward greater inclusion was to expand the franchise beyond the narrow precepts of the times, which held that only white male property owners could vote or hold public office. By the early 19th century, virtually all the states had eliminated property qualifications as a condition for voting or holding office, and the aristocratic elite that had governed the country had been largely pushed aside for the new American, the self-made man. As the French author Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his introduction to Democracy in America in the mid-1800s, "The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived."
The spread of suffrage led to a new concept of education, for statesmen everywhere perceived the threat to universal suffrage from an untutored, illiterate electorate. These men were supported by organized labor, whose leaders demanded free, tax-supported schools open to all children; gradually, states enacted legislation to provide for such instruction. But while the public school system became common throughout the northern part of the country, in other parts the battle for public education continued for years.
The American quest for rights and opportunities also saw the beginning of the labor organization. In 1835, labor forces in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, succeeded in reducing the former "dark-to-dark" workday to a 10-hour day. Other reforms of the times addressed the problems of prisons and care for the insane. Efforts were made to turn prisons, which stressed punishment, into penitentiaries where the guilty would undergo rehabilitation, and to establish state hospitals for the care of the insane, who previously had been confined to wretched almshouses and prisons.
A House Divided
Despite the spread of democracy, the practice of slavery mocked the concept that liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the rights of all Americans. The battle to contain and ultimately defeat slavery took three-quarters of a century. It was Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, who struck the first blow. His Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was adopted under the Articles of Confederation, prohibited slavery in the more northern U.S. territories.
The international slave trade was abolished in 1808, and many thought that this would bring an end to slavery in America, too. But the expectation proved false, for during the next generation the southern United States united solidly behind the institution of slavery as the boom of such labor-intensive southern industries as cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane made slavery immensely profitable. Thus, the leaders of the South clung firmly to slavery and countered every move of the growing and increasingly vocal abolitionist movement.
Frederick Douglass, eloquent spokesman for the abolition of slavery in the United States and extension of full political rights to its African Americans.
Credit: National Archives.
Slavery was inherently a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings and the breakups of families through the sale of individual slaves were commonplace. However, the most trenchant criticism of slavery for many was its fundamental violation of every human being's right to be free.
With the election of Abraham Lincoln as the country's president in 1860, the situation began to change. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln had said in an 1858 Senate campaign speech. "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." Lincoln was sworn in as president on March 4, 1861. And on April 12 of that year, southerners opened fire on federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor, beginning the U.S. Civil War. The battle -- pitting the slave-owners of the South, who sought independence from the United States, against those living in the North -- cost half a million American lives before it ended in 1865.
Lincoln declared the end of slavery on January 1, 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, which proclaimed as "forever free" all slaves living in the areas that were in rebellion. Slavery was formally abolished in December 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Within a few months of the end of the war, Congress began to work out a plan for the reconstruction of the South, which had been devastated by the battle. By mid-1866, Congress had passed a civil rights bill and set up a Freedman's Bureau -- both designed to prevent discrimination against blacks by southern legislatures. Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This repudiated an earlier ruling -- known as the Dred Scott decision, for the black slave who was the claimant -- which had denied slaves the right of citizenship.
All southern legislatures with one exception refused to ratify the amendment. It was only after ratification was made a condition of southern states' escaping a permanent military government established in the South by the Congress that the amendment was ratified in 1868.
In 1870, yet another amendment was added to the Constitution, this one maintaining that race was not to be a bar to voting rights. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on March 30 of that year, states that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
In spite of laws passed and efforts made to resolve the problems of the South, Reconstruction was in many ways a period of regression. Southern state legislatures passed "black codes" aimed at reimposing bondage on the freedmen. The codes differed from state to state, but some provisions were common. Blacks were required to enter into annual labor contracts, with penalties imposed in case of violation; dependent children were subject to compulsory apprenticeship and corporal punishment by masters; and vagrants could be sold into private service if they could not pay severe fines. The last quarter of the 19th century also saw a profusion of "Jim Crow" laws in southern states that segregated public schools, forbade or limited black access to public facilities such as parks, restaurants, and hotels, and denied most blacks the right to vote by imposing poll taxes and arbitrary literacy tests.
In effect, slaves had been granted their freedom, but not equality. Their economic needs were not fully addressed by the North. While the Freedmen's Bureau attempted to protect slaves from violence, it could not provide them with political and economic opportunity. Blacks depended on northern whites -- some of them racists -- to protect them from the Ku Klux Klan, an organization of white men that threatened blacks and prevented them from exercising their rights. Without economic resources, many southern blacks were forced to work as tenant farmers on land owned by their former masters, in a cycle of poverty.
The failure of the Reconstruction period meant that the struggle of African-Americans for freedom and equality was deferred until the 20th century, when it would become a national, not a southern, issue.
The Battle for Women's Suffrage
One of the most powerful voices for freedom in the 19th century was Frederick Douglass. Born a southern slave in 1817, he had escaped to the North and later found the means to buy his freedom as a guarantee against being returned to the South as a piece of property.
Although slaves were forbidden to learn how to read by the laws of the time, once freed, Douglass discovered that he had a gift for writing and for speaking before audiences. He founded a newspaper called North Star to campaign against slavery, he wrote scores of magazine and newspaper articles, and he became a spokesperson for the Anti-Slavery Society in Massachusetts. Douglass also helped form the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes in which both blacks and whites helped runaway slaves make their way north to freedom.
Douglass was a leading voice for freedom not only for black Americans. He fought for human rights for all people, including voting rights for women. If less bloody than the war against slavery, the battle for women's suffrage, which began in the 19th century and continued into the early part of the next, nevertheless necessitated a long and arduous fight against narrow-mindedness, tradition, prejudice, and exclusion.
During the 1830s and 1840s, women had been playing important roles in various American reform movements, such as temperance (prohibition of alcohol), abolition (slavery), and educational reform. And while the work they did was significant, women found they could not take leadership roles nor could they lobby strongly for their positions. They were expected to be part of the background. For some, the situation became intolerable.
The first important "women's meeting" was held in 1848 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Not surprisingly, its chief sponsors were linked to the abolitionist movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had attended an anti-slavery meeting in London and had been excluded because they were women. Their anger at this treatment led directly to the Seneca Falls meeting, where 240 people, 40 of them men, came together to draft a "women's bill of rights" modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Although the bill included a provision calling for the right of women to vote, most of the delegates were reluctant to pass such a measure, and it was only after Frederick Douglass spoke to the assembly that it was adopted.
From this moment on, gaining the franchise would be the rallying cry at every women's rights convention. Gradually, women were allowed to speak in public, and individual states adopted laws enabling women to own property in their own names, to keep their earnings, and to retain custody of their children in cases of divorce.
In 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association and began an all-out campaign for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to give women the right to vote. The two would form a 50-year alliance, becoming the most outspoken advocates of the women's movement across the United States.
That same year, the western U.S. state of Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote within its borders. But it was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting the right to vote to every adult woman in the country, was passed.
The New Deal
Yet another struggle involved the worker. The life of the 19th-century American worker was far from easy. Even in good times, wages were low, hours long, and working conditions hazardous. Before 1874, when Massachusetts passed the nation's first legislation limiting the number of hours women and child factory workers could perform to 10 a day, virtually no labor legislation existed in the country. Indeed, it was not until the 1930s that the federal government became actively involved.
In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency of the United States. With that election, the concept of rights expanded to include economic and social rights. Roosevelt's program of direct federal relief and economic security, known as the New Deal, won the support of the overwhelming majority of Americans, then suffering through the devastating Great Depression of the 1930s.
In 1935, the U.S. Congress passed the Social Security Act. Social Security created a system of insurance for the aged, the unemployed, and the disabled based on employer and employee contributions. The program was funded in large part by taxes on the earnings of current workers. Although its origins were modest, Social Security today is one of the largest domestic programs administered by the U.S. government, guaranteeing to millions of Americans a modicum of financial protection.
During the same year, workers gained the right to organize and bargain collectively. And in 1938, a minimum wage and a maximum work week were established.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1933 through 1945, in January 1941 called on all governments to assure their citizens freedom from want and fear, as well as freedom of speech and worship.
Credit: USIA Files.
Although Roosevelt saw himself very much in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in terms of his concern for political rights, he was, by necessity, preoccupied with the problems of poverty and basic economic needs. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 forced Roosevelt to turn from the country's pressing domestic problems and begin considering the kind of world that might emerge from the devastation of so many millions. In January of 1941, in what came to be known as the "Four Freedoms" address, Roosevelt called on all governments to guarantee their citizens freedom from want and fear, as well as freedom of speech and worship.
In August 1941, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed on the Atlantic Charter, which proclaimed a broad vision of a new postwar world order based on democracy, freedom, disarmament, and international cooperation. In January 1942, two dozen nations fighting Japan and Nazi Germany adopted the charter's basic principles. Roosevelt's term "the United Nations" was used for the first time in this document.
In December 1941, the Japanese attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The viciousness of the attack and fear of Asian espionage led the U.S. government to inter Japanese-Americans without due process of law. In February 1942, nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans residing in California were removed from their homes and placed behind barbed wire in 10 temporary camps, later to be moved to "relocation centers" outside isolated southwestern towns. More than 60 percent of these Japanese-Americans were American born and were U.S. citizens. No evidence of espionage ever surfaced. In fact, Japanese-Americans from Hawaii and the continental United States fought with distinction on the Italian front, while others served as interpreters and translators in the Pacific. Although the exclusion of the Japanese from the U.S. West Coast was upheld in 1944 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Korematsu v. U.S., in 1983, the U.S. government acknowledged the injustice of its actions with payments to those Japanese-Americans of that era who were still living.
Throughout World War II, Roosevelt remained intensely interested in the peace to follow and in establishing effective international institutions to promote the fundamental human rights of all mankind, not just Americans. As political philosopher Isaiah Berlin said, Roosevelt's vision of international responsibility made him a hero "to the indigent and oppressed far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."
Roosevelt's belief that a better world lay ahead after the war never dimmed. "The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization is forever upward," he noted in his January 1945 inaugural address -- his fourth and his last. At the time he died later in 1945, the United Nations and the international financial institutions he had done so much to create were well on their way to becoming enduring institutions. In contrast to the years following World War I, when the United States rejected membership in the League of Nations and adopted a policy of isolationism, its participation in the 1945 San Francisco conference to erect the framework of the United Nations signaled to the world that the United States intended to play a key role in international affairs.
The Civil Rights Movement
The changes that Franklin Roosevelt and World War II wrought upon the United States helped begin the process of extending the full benefits of freedom to African-Americans. Despite the Bill of Rights, amendments to the U.S. Constitution granting full citizenship rights, and numerous presidential executive orders, African-Americans continued to suffer from widespread, blatant, and often legal discrimination.
African-Americans became increasingly restive in the postwar years. During the war they had challenged discrimination in the military services and in the work force, and they had made limited gains. Millions of blacks had left southern farms for northern cities, where they hoped to find better jobs. They found, instead, crowded conditions in urban slums. Now, black servicemen returned home, intent on rejecting second-class citizenship, as other blacks began to argue that the time was ripe for racial equality.
Blacks in the South then enjoyed few, if any, civil and political rights. More than one million black soldiers had fought in World War II, but those who came from the South could not vote. Blacks who tried to register to vote faced the likelihood of beatings, loss of jobs, loss of credit, or eviction from their land. Lynchings still occurred, and Jim Crow laws enforced segregation of the races in street cars, trains, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreational facilities, and employment.
President Harry Truman, a Democrat, supported the campaign for civil rights, and he responded by sending a 10-point civil rights program to the Congress. When southern Democrats, angry about a strong civil rights stance, left the Democratic party in 1948, Truman issued an executive order barring discrimination in federal employment, ordered equal treatment in the armed forces, and appointed a committee to work toward an end to military segregation.
Blacks also began to take matters into their own hands. In the years after slavery ended, blacks had formed scores of nongovernmental organizations to organize and lobby for the rights that other Americans took for granted. The most influential of these was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909 and included the participation of many non-blacks who believed in equal justice.
In the decade following World War II, attorney Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP's chief legal counsel and later to become the first black to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, traveled throughout the country, laying the legal foundations for an assault on racial segregation. His efforts culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 -- Brown v. Board of Education -- outlawing the segregation of black and white students in public schools. A year later, the Supreme Court demanded that local school boards move with "all deliberate speed" to implement the decision.
Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, black Americans were impatient at the slow rate of progress toward full integration. On December 1, 1955, a seemingly insignificant event took place in Montgomery, Alabama -- then still a southern stronghold of segregation -- that ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement. An African-American woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man, as was then required by Alabama law. She was arrested.
Her act of defiance might have gone unnoticed had it not been for Martin Luther King, Jr., a young Baptist minister. King led a 382-day boycott of the city's public transportation system that forced the city to integrate it.
In 1960, black college students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina and refused to leave. Their sit-in captured media attention and led to similar demonstrations throughout the South. The next year, civil rights workers organized "freedom rides" in which blacks and whites boarded buses heading south toward segregated terminals.
Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to be part of these activities. A life-long advocate of nonviolence, King, with other ministers, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was dedicated to the nonviolent struggle against racism and discrimination. But in his quest for racial justice, he joined forces with many other organizations to, as he put it, "make America what it ought to be."
There were many important milestones in the Civil Rights Movement. One of the most memorable took place on an August day in 1963, when over 200,000 Americans, black and white, assembled at the memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. Scores of speakers addressed the crowd, but the day belonged to King, who set aside his prepared text and spoke from his heart. "I have a dream," he said. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ` We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.' "
King was to see the U.S. Congress in 1964 pass the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in all public accommodation, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act, which authorized the federal government to appoint examiners to register voters where local officials made black registration impossible. The year after passage, 400,000 blacks registered in the Deep South. King was killed by an assassin's bullet in April 1968, while on a visit to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, to champion the rights of sanitation workers there, most of whom were black and poor.
King's primary objective was equality for African-Americans, but he realized that racism is not just an American problem but a global one. "Among the moral imperatives of our time," he said, "we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism. It is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical boundaries."
Discontent and Change
During the debate on the 1964 Civil Rights bill, some legislators had hoped to defeat the measure by proposing an amendment to outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender as well as race. First the amendment, then the bill itself, passed, giving women the legal tool to secure their rights.
Women themselves took measures to improve their lot. In 1966, 28 professional women established the National Organization for Women (NOW) "to take action to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now." Four years later, membership had reached 15,000. NOW and similar organizations helped make women increasingly aware of their limited opportunities and strengthened their resolve to increase them.
Organized activity on behalf of women's rights reached its peak in the early 1970s. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which declared: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Over the next several years, 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified the amendment, but this was not enough for passage, and the amendment died in 1982 as the women's movement stagnated. Although the effort to protect women from gender discrimination continues today, the gains made by women during the 1970s and in the years following firmly established their place in all aspects of American life.
In post-World War II America, Spanish-speaking groups faced discrimination as well. Coming from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Central America, they were often unskilled and unable to speak English. Some worked as farm laborers and, at times, were cruelly exploited while harvesting crops; others gravitated to the cities where, like earlier immigrant groups, they encountered difficulties in their quest for a better life.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which secured many gains for U.S. workers, had excluded agricultural workers from its guarantee of the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively. But the example of black activism had taught Hispanics the importance of pressure politics in a pluralistic society. Cesar Chavez, founder of the overwhelmingly Hispanic United Farm Workers, called for a nationwide consumer boycott of selected agricultural products that laid the foundation for representation to secure higher wages and improved working conditions for migrants. Also during this time, Hispanics became politically active, further increasing their assimilation into American society.
One final group that worked to claim their rights in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement were Native Americans. In the 1950s, the federal government had undertaken a program of moving Native Americans off reservations and into cities, where they might become part of "mainstream America." Not only did they face the loss of land; many of the uprooted Indians often had difficulties adjusting to urban life.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans became aggressive in pressing for their rights. A new generation of leaders went to court to protect what was left of tribal lands or to recover that which had been taken, often illegally, in previous times. In state after state, they challenged treaty violations and, in 1967, won the first of many victories guaranteeing long-abused land and water rights. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, helped channel government funds to Indian-controlled organizations and assisted neglected Indians in the cities.
Indian activism brought results. Other Americans became more aware of Native American needs, and officials in all branches of government had to respond to pressure for equal treatment that was long overdue.
The Cold War and Beyond
From its beginning, the Cold War put limits on those who hoped to make human rights America's top international priority. Locked in competition with the Soviet Union, the United States chose to accept responsibility for countering Communist moves in Eastern and Central Europe and elsewhere.
The most dramatic defense of Western freedom took place in Berlin, when Soviet occupation forces closed off the city, still struggling to recover from wartime devastation, in June 1948. U.S. and Allied forces flew 277,000 missions, keeping the city alive until the Soviets lifted the embargo some 10 months later.
With the arrival of d¡¦ente, an era of lowered U.S.-Soviet tensions began. A high point of the era was the Helsinki Accords. Signed in 1975, they set the stage for the struggle for freedom and human rights that would culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall 14 years later.
In November 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States. Carter took office two months later with a strong commitment to human rights. In 1977, a human rights bureau was created within the U.S. Department of State. Its first human rights reports were issued that year. Since then, reports have been produced every year; they now cover every country, including, for the first time in 1995, the United States itself.
To some, Carter's belief in the universality of human rights was too idealistic. Nonetheless, despite ideological differences, the succeeding U.S. presidential administrations have made human rights a fundamental tenet of national policy.
