Answer Key for Practice Test 3

Section I: Multiple-Choice Questions
1. C	29. B
2. C	30. D
3. A	31. D
4. C	32. A
5. D	33. C
6. B	34. D
7. D	35. A
8. D	36. B
9. E	37. B
10. C	38. C
11. D	39. D
12. A	41. C
13. B	42. C
14. E	43. B
15. D	44. B
16. D	45. A
17. E	46. A
18. C	47. C
19. A	48. D
20. A	49. C
21. B	50. B
22. C	51. B
23. E	52. D
24. B	53. A
25. C	54. E
26. E	55. C
27. C	56. B
28. D	57. A
58. C	70. E
59. E	71. B
61. C	72. C
62. C	73. B
63. B	74. C
64. D	75. D
65. D	76. B
66. B	77. B
67. C	78. A
68. B	79. D
69. E	80. C

Answers and Explanations for Practice Test 3

Section I: Multiple-Choice Questions

1. C. Congress passed an exclusion act in 1882 barring Chinese for ten years. It was renewed in 1892 and then made indefinite. The policy was in effect until 1943.

2. C. The Supreme Court in the 1920s declared unconstitutional a federal child-labor law, a minimum-wage law for women, and restrictions on injunctions against labor. Examples include Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922).

3. A. At the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, William Lloyd Garrison insisted on the right of women to participate equally with men in the organization. Those members who opposed this position split off and formed the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Sarah and Angelina Grimke rejected the idea that working for abolition of slavery was “unfeminine.”

4. C. Anger at the attempts to make the American ambassadors pay a bribe before discussing the problem of French interference with American shipping led to U.S. and French warships firing on each other. A full war was averted when President John Adams refused to be stampeded into making such a commitment and a change in the revolutionary French government brought about a settlement of the dispute.

5. D. The delegates almost immediately demonstrated a concern for the creation of a Constitution in 1787 that would be national in its scope. The Virginia Plan, drafted by James Madison, reflected the idea of a truly national government and was the basis for the debate on the structure of the government provided for in the new Constitution.

6. B. In this 1901 statement, Booker T. Washington presented his views on accommodation to the dominant society and acceptance of the existing social inequality.

7. D. The rapid industrialization of the United States after the Civil War contributed to the population shift in several ways. Factories and mills located in urban areas acted as a magnet for workers, both American and the new immigrants. The mechanization of agriculture, which was part of industrialization, meant that fewer hands were needed on the farms. Farmers, displaced by machines, went to the cities to find work.

8. D. Britain, Japan. France, and the United States agreed to a status quo in the Pacific. They also agreed on a battleship and carrier ratio of 5-5-3 (United States and Britain each have five to every three of Japan’s).

9. E. A high tariff was the position held by the Republican party. Populists, who were mainly farmers, wanted low tariffs or none at all on imported items they needed and used.

10. C. The colonies in this question were founded as follows: Massachusetts Bay (1630), Maryland (1634), New York (1664), Pennsylvania (1681), and Georgia (1732). New York was begun as New Amsterdam by the Dutch in 1624, but the question asks about English colonies, and the English took it over and renamed it in 1664.

11. D. New England farmers, whose soil wasn’t particularly fertile to begin with, could not compete with western agricultural products transported to eastern cities through the canal.

12. A. The Maine Law was one of the earliest examples of a state’s prohibiting the making and selling of liquor and reflected the growing importance of the temperance movement that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

13. B. The key word here is “compromise,” which Wilson refused to do on the League of Nations issue. By refusing to compromise, Wilson did ignore the changes that the Reservationists wanted to make.

14. E. France claimed the Louisiana Territory until it ceded the area to Spain in 1763. Spain held it until 1800 when it was returned to France. France sold it to the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

15. D. The slave states that remained in the Union were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. West Virginia, which is usually included in this group, was admitted to the Union in 1863 with a provision in its constitution that its few slaves would be gradually emancipated.

16. D. The engraving was the work of Paul Revere, a leader of the Boston radicals. It was widely circulated and helped build support for the fight against Great Britain throughout the colonies.

17. E. The Mesilla Valley, the area south of the Gila River, was acquired from Mexico as part of the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.

18. C. In 1906, San Francisco required that Asian children — Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — attend segregated public schools. This requirement caused a major dispute with Japan. By the terms of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, Japan agreed to limit immigration to the United States in exchange for an end to the segregation order.

19. A. The Open Door Policy was stated in a series of notes prepared by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 and 1900. The policy urged that access to the markets in China be open to all nations and that countries respect the territorial integrity of China. The latter point reflected American concerns raised by the Boxer Rebellion.

20. A. The author of this message was trying to communicate with President Hoover after the Bonus Army was driven out of Washington, D.C., in July 1932. During the worst days of the Depression, the Bonus Army was demanding an early payment of the cash bonus to veterans of World War I.

21. B. In 1964, African-American civil rights workers began a major campaign to register black voters, an effort aided by passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

22. C. This is a tricky (though not a trick) question. You are asked to eliminate all reasons labor failed to grow except for C. Employers didn’t provide or rarely provided pension benefits to workers, and unions didn’t at this time ask for them.

23. E. The Forty-Niners, and those who followed, for the most part failed to find mineral wealth in California. Most soon left the gold fields for other economic pursuits such as farming or urban employment.

24. B. The term “Gilded Age” came from the title of a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirizing the political corruption of post-Civil War America.

25. C. Beginning in 1845, the people of Ireland experienced famine as the result of the potato blight, ruining their basic food crop several years in succession.

26. E. Roosevelt served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1897-98), Governor of New York (1899-1900), and Vice-President (1901) before becoming President after McKinley was assassinated.

27. C. This page from the directory is interesting to historians because it indicates the cultural and self-help organizations ethnic/immigrant groups established in Los Angeles.

Only the entire directory would allow the historian to map the neighborhoods in which Spanish-speaking residents lived, and the document indicates that the city’s public utilities were in private hands.

28. D. As provided in the debates over the adoption of the Constitution, the importation of slaves from abroad was banned in 1808.

29. B. John Peter Altgeld made this bitter comment in 1895 following the ruin of his political career after he pardoned some of the men convicted of murder in the Haymarket bombing.

30. D. British Orders in Council exasperated American merchant shipping, which was neutral in Britain’s war against France; British warships took (impressed) American sailors, accusing them of being British deserters; the War Hawks, led by Henry Clay, wanted Canadian territory; the British backed the Indians in unsettled frontier conditions.

31. D. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, before the atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945.

32. A. Germany agreed for a time to end its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare as a result of Wilson’s complaint that innocent Americans went down with the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. It was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in February 1917 that was an immediate cause of American entry into World War I.

33. C. Black Codes were passed in Southern states to exert control over the status of freed slaves. The Tenure of Office Act prohibited the President from removing officials without consent of the Senate; the 1866 Civil Rights Act made African-Americans U.S. citizens; the First Reconstruction Act (1867) divided the South into military districts; the 1868 Reconstruction Act declared that a majority of actual voters, not registered voters, was needed to ratify a state constitution.

34. D. The Coinage Act of 1873 omitted silver from the list of coins to be minted, to the outrage of western silver miners and farmers. The Treasury had maintained an artificially low ratio of silver to gold at sixteen to one. Silver miners refused to sell their silver to federal mints at this price, so Congress dropped the coining of silver dollars. Then new silver discoveries dropped the price of silver, but now the government wasn’t buying it. Gold- standard advocates resisted returning to bimetalism because it would have caused inflation.

35. A. The proposed amendments of the Hartford Convention (1814) included requiring a two-thirds vote of Congress to declare war, restrict foreign trade, and admit new states and limiting the President to one term.

36. B. In this 1904 case, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the first railroad holding company for violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. It opened the way for other prosecutions of trusts and monopolies.

37. B. Cotton gin (Eli Whitney, 1793); steamboat (Robert Fulton, 1807); reaper (Cyrus McCormick, 1831); telegraph (Samuel F. B. Morse, 1844).

38. C. The journalist Eric Sevareid made this comment critical of the work of the Peace Corps in 1963. The key clue in the quotation is “backward countries,” eliminating the CCC, Job Corps, and Corps of Engineers, which operated only in the United States.

39. D. In the eighteenth century, whites were less concerned with the moral and social effects of slavery on blacks than what it meant for themselves in a society that had pledged “all men are created equal.”

40. E. The Interstate Commerce Commission lacked the power to fix rates. It could bring railroads into court only if it considered rates to be unreasonably high.

41. C. The print shows the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his brother Hiram. After Smith’s death, Brigham Young became the leader of the Mormons and led them to their permanent settlement near the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

42. C. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) of Terre Haute, Indiana, led the American Railway Union in the 1894 Pullman strike; after its collapse. Debs declared himself “for socialism because I am for humanity.” He ran for President on the Socialist ticket in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920.

43. B. Horace Mann (1796-1859) was firmly committed to public education and believed that religious indoctrination has no place in the public-school curriculum.

44. B. Goldwater represented the right wing of the Republican party, and his nomination reflected the success, not the failure, of a strong grass-roots organization.

45. A. This tariff marked a beginning in the effort to protect new American industries following the War of 1812. It was supported by Jeffersonian Republicans as well as Federalists.

46. A. In addition to providing both food and medical relief, the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to regulate the new economic relations between former slaves and white landowners. This was done through formal labor contracts that specified wages and working conditions. The Bureau was active only in the states of the former Confederacy and encouraged African- Americans who had moved to the cities to return to farming.

47. C. The draft was enacted in March 1863 and applied to men between the ages of twenty and forty-five. A potential draftee could hire a substitute or pay $300 to have his service commuted. Perhaps because of the loopholes, opposition to the draft was widespread, leading, for example, to the infamous New York City draft riots of July 1863. Draftees and substitutes accounted for six percent of the Union forces.

48. D. The Marshall Plan was announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947. Although aid was offered to all the countries of war-torn Europe, neither the Soviet Union nor the Communist governments in Eastern Europe accepted.

49. C. For the Plains Indian culture, the buffalo provided far more than food. It also provided hides for tepees, blankets, and clothing; sinews for rope: bones for needles; and many other items.

50. B. The New England Confederation, founded in 1643, consisted of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven. Rhode Island was not invited to join. Its purpose was to act in defense of its member colonies, most notably in King Philip’s War in 1675-76.

51. B. Enumerated articles were products that could be shipped only to England or other English colonies and included tobacco, cotton, indigo, naval stores, and furs. These were goods that England needed but that it could not produce.

52. D. Installment buying allowed Americans to immediately purchase the host of consumer products that advertisers told them they needed. By the end of the 1920s, most cars, radios, and furniture were bought on the installment plan.

53. A. Successes included the Head Start program, the drop in infant mortality rates in minority communities, and a better economic condition for the elderly.

54. E. By bringing together representatives from nine of the colonies, the Stamp Act Congress (1765) was an important step toward colonial unity. The Congress petitioned Parliament for the repeal of the Stamp Act and claimed that Parliament had no right to impose taxes on the colonies.

55. C. As part of a compromise worked out during World War II. the Soviet Union was given three seats in the General Assembly — the USSR, Belorussia, and Ukraine. There have always been five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. China is now represented by the People’s Republic of China. It takes the vote of only one permanent member of the Security Council to veto a measure.

56. B. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which warned of the dangers of the pesticide DDT, is usually pointed to as the beginning of the environmental movement in the United States.

57. A. Cleveland sent federal soldiers to Chicago to safeguard delivery of the U.S. mail — an action that aided management and helped it to crush the strike.

58. C. Remember, “most recently” means last. The publication of The Federalist, which was intended to gather public support for the ratification of the Constitution, took place between October 1787 and July 1788.

59. E. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee Nation was a “distinct political community” in which Georgia law had no force. Although the decision was a victory for the Cherokees, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce it. In another important case a year earlier, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Court stated that while the Cherokees were not a foreign nation, and therefore did not have the right to bring suit, they did have an unquestioned right to their land.

60. C. Henry Wallace, former Secretary of Agriculture and Vice-President under Franklin Roosevelt, ran for President in 1948 because he supported a more liberal policy toward the Soviet Union. He represented the left wing of the Democratic party.

61. C. Based on mercantile theory, a colony was valuable to the mother country both as a source of raw materials and as a market for manufactured products. For the years given in the table, Pennsylvania shows least value of exports to England.

62. C. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, or Pact of Paris (1928), renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy. It included no method of implementation or enforcement. Although it was originally a treaty of friendship between the United States and France, dozens of other nations also signed it, including Germany, Italy, and Japan.

63. B. By depositing money in state “pet” banks, Jackson met federal expenses by drawing on Bank of the United States funds — in effect, draining the Bank of the United States of its funds.

64. D. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 has been considered a turning point in the Pacific war. The Japanese never regained the momentum lost by this defeat of their naval and air forces.

65. D. The Brain Trust included political scientist Raymond Moley, economists Rexford G. Tugwell and Adolf Berle, and Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School.

66. B. Written by John Dickinson and issued by the Second Continental Congress in July 1775, the Olive Branch Petition stated that the colonies continued to be loyal to King George III.

67. C. The Great Compromise resolved the differences between the large and small states over representation by providing for equal representation in the Senate and representation based on population in the House of Representatives. The 3/5 Compromise, which decided how slaves would be counted for representation, is sometimes considered part of the Great Compromise.

68. B. Approximately 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army during the Civil War. They served in all-black units under the command of white officers, and over 30,000 lost their lives in combat.

69. E. Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 1932; National Industrial Recovery Act, 1933; Securities and Exchange Commission, 1934; Works Progress Administration, 1935; Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938.

70. E. President Eisenhower did not believe that desegregation could be brought about by government edict. When the Governor of Arkansas called out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School in 1957, Eisenhower considered the action a direct challenge to federal authority. Integration was achieved when the President placed the Guard under federal control.

71. B. The Roosevelt Corollary stated that the United States would serve as the guardian of the Western Hemisphere — in effect, claiming the right to intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American nations.

72. C. The case was decided in favor of Warren Bridge, arguing that the original charter to Charles River Bridge did not confer a monopoly. Ambiguities in such contracts should be decided in favor of the public interest, as innovations should not be restricted under old charters.

73. B. Almost immediately after the French and Indian War, relations between England and the colonies became strained. One outcome of the war was a growing sense of American nationalism; the colonists began to think of themselves more as Americans than as Englishmen. England, of course, was faced with a huge debt and turned to the colonies to finance its empire.

74. C. The drop in voter participation in 1972 is the only other significant fact discernible from the graph. The presence of strong third-party candidates — George Wallace in 1968 — did not result in an increase in voter participation.

75. D. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, effectively restated Locke’s contract theory of government.

76. B. The Alliance for Progress program of economic assistance to Latin America was initiated under the Kennedy administration.

77. B. In contrast to the American Federation of Labor, the CIO believed that the best way to organize workers was on an industry-wide basis. The leaders were John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and the garment industry unions. These unions were expelled from the AFL because of their approach and formed the CIO in 1938.

78. A. In a controversial move, the United States abetted the Panamanian independence revolt against Colombia in 1903 and then signed a canal agreement that created a ten-mile-wide Canal Zone and gave the United States other economic and political advantages.

79. D. Lewis’s novels Main Street and Babbitt are critiques of the blandness of small-town life in middle America.

80. C. The Agricultural Adjustment Act aimed at resolving the chronic problem of overproduction by paying farmers to withdraw land from cultivation. The law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Section II: Essay Questions

Part A

Student DBQ Essay

The Good Neighbor Policy was a sharp break with the previous American attitude toward Latin America, particularly from the end of the Spanish-American War to around 1920. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, U.S.-Latin American relations were based on non-intervention. The concern with Communist activities in the Western Hemisphere during the cold war, however, brought an end to this policy as shown by events in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), and Chile (1973).

In the years following the war with Spain, the U.S. became the policeman for much of Latin America. Through the Platt Amendment (1901) the U.S. assumed the right to intervene in Cuba to preserve its independence. The so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904) broadened this authority and was used as the justification for sending American troops to Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The U.S. also became involved militarily in the Mexican civil war between 1914 and 1917. Although we began to back away from an interventionist approach in Latin America during the late 1920s, the significant change came with Roosevelt.

Being a “good neighbor” meant that the U.S. would not interfere in the internal or external affairs of other countries. This position was clearly stated by Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the 7th Pan-American Conference in December 1933 (Document A), and the U.S. entered into several agreements during the 1930s with the other countries of the Western Hemisphere that reinforced this principle. The U.S. backed up its statements on non-intervention with actions. A new treaty with Cuba was negotiated that ended our right to intervene and American troops were withdrawn from Haiti and other nations in the Caribbean and Central America as President Roosevelt pointed out (Document B). The American response to the expropriation of the property of American oil companies in Mexico in 1938 is a good example of how major a break with the past the new policy was. Rather than sending in the troops, the U.S. demanded compensation for the companies (Document G). This serious issue between the U.S. and Mexico was eventually settled by arbitration.

A case could be made that the Good Neighbor Policy was not that dramatic a shift from earlier policies. First, intervention was not rejected completely. As both Roosevelt himself (Document E) and State Department official Sumner Welles pointed out (Document F), “a breakdown of law and order” in one country that affected other countries might result in some sort of joint action. It is possible that the U.S., because of its power and influence, might have been able to persuade other Latin American states to support armed intervention under certain circumstances. More important, as William Appleman Williams points out, the U.S. was still ready to use economic intervention as the case of Bolivia shows (Document C).

The onset of the cold war brought an end to the Good Neighbor Policy. The U.S. supported regimes that were strongly anticommunist, and took action when pro-Communist or left-wing governments came to power. While American troops were not used, the U.S. provided covert support that led to the overthrow of the government of Guatemala in 1954. Again, the U.S. did not use its own military forces to invade Cuba but the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in the planning and training for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by anti-Castro Cubans in 1961. In 1973, the CIA also supported the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. The significance of these events in indicating a return to intervention, admittedly indirect, outweighs the evidence of a continuation of Roosevelt’s policies — the creation of the Organization of American States and Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.

Reader's Comments

The student has written a good essay that provides enough outside information to satisfy the DBQ requirements. This question is interesting because it’s rather obvious where the outside information fits in. The brief review of U.S. policy toward Latin America prior to the 1930s would have been strengthened, however, by reference to Dollar Diplomacy and the Clark Memorandum (1928). The latter rejected the idea that the Monroe Doctrine was intended to justify American intervention in the Western Hemisphere.

The student makes good use of the available documents. The point that the Good Neighbor Policy did not mean the complete abandonment of intervention is well taken; the distinction between military and economic intervention could have been more clearly made, however. The student should also have known that William Appleman Williams is a Revisionist historian of American foreign policy. The essay could have been made stronger if additional facts about the Good Neighbor Policy were included — for example, the importance of solidarity in the Western Hemisphere as the possibility of war in Europe became more likely.

Possible student score: 6

Part B

Question 2 Student Essay

In order for plantation agriculture to work, certain factors must exist. The southern colonies were particularly suited to plantation agriculture in the areas of environment and labor, much more so than the northern colonies. Patterns were set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that clearly established plantation agriculture as the economic mainstay of the region.

The southern environment provided a long growing season and fertile soil for the cultivation of tobacco, rice, indigo, and, later, cotton. The only problem with these crops was that they required extensive labor, a commodity lacking in the southern colonies. The environment itself dictated the kinds of agricultural products to be grown as cash crops. Wheat and corn required little extensive labor; a farmer and his family could grow such crops with a reasonable effort. The South, on the other hand, needed many people to plant, maintain, and harvest their cash crops.

With the colonies offering an opportunity for a new start, it is understandable that colonists would be reluctant to remain in an employment situation that suggested some form of servitude. There are many stories of runaway apprentices who left their masters as soon as they were old enough to do so. For the South, planters might rely on indentured servants, a practice by which a person who could not afford passage across the Atlantic could come to the colonies. The typical indentured contract was seven years. During that time the servant was in effect a slave. The problem was that many indentured servants had no desire to remain in that position once they arrived in the colonies. It was extremely difficult for the holder of an indentured contract to trace the whereabouts of a runaway servant. These servants were mainly English and white, and if they got far enough away, could simply melt into the colonial population.

The South’s answer was to import slaves from Africa. Slavery answered the labor question by providing a large work force to produce the cash crops grown by planters. At the same time, since slaves were African, running away was not much of an option, especially at a time when few people questioned the morality of slave ownership. By the nineteenth century, when those questions were raised, the South already had a pattern of almost 200 years of reliance on slavery as the foundation of its planter economy.

Reader's Comments

This is a weak essay. It is obvious that the student was unsure how to handle the question and really did not have the factual information to write a good answer. The theme of the interrelationship between environment and labor is valid but not developed. The student should have described the evolution of plantation agriculture, examined its impact on relations with the Native Americans — the demand for land led to conflicts — explained who indentured servants were and their status after their term of service ended, and gone into the transition from indentured servants to slaves brought from Africa as the principal labor force.

Possible student score: 2

Part B

Question 3 Student Essay

At first appearance the statement made by Catharine Beecher would seem to have little validity. Beecher clearly rejects the idea of women taking part in any reform or activity “outside her appropriate sphere.” This viewpoint clashes superficially with the accomplishments of such women as Dorothea Dix and her crusade on behalf of the mentally ill, the Grimke sisters and others who became abolitionists, and the stand of the Seneca Falls Convention. In fact, textbooks often give the impression that outspoken women were the role models of their era, that women looked to the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, and others who stood up and spoke up for women’s rights.

Beecher’s argument may be much closer to the mainstream of women's thought for the era in which she wrote. There would really be very little reason for women to disagree with Beecher. In the 1830s, the time in which Beecher made her statement, women had few rights in the United States. Women could not vote, of course, but that was only the most obvious example of their second-class citizenship. They also could not own property in their own name in most states. If a woman inherited money, on her marriage the control of the fortune went to her husband. Divorce was rare, but when it took place the husband came out ahead, down to custody of the children and possession of the home.

The “appropriate sphere” for women was very limited. But this does not mean that Beecher herself opposed women holding views on slavery, mental health, or voting rights. She believed that if a woman became a combatant, her behavior was not appropriate. But there were other ways in which women could demonstrate their concern with the problems of society. Beecher’s own sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a prominent abolitionist. It would be difficult to believe that Catharine opposed her own family in taking moral positions unless the statement was written as sarcasm or hypocrisy. It all depends on what Catharine Beecher defined as woman’s “appropriate sphere.”

Reader's Comments

This essay offers a powerful beginning and middle while falling somewhat flat at the end. The endorsement of the validity of Beecher’s statement is courageous, given the temptation to question it in the light of the much better known activity of such women as Susan B. Anthony and Dorothea Dix. The student correctly notes that just because these women are prominently featured in textbook history doesn’t mean that in their own time they were especially influential or served as role models for most women. The essay shows a more realistic side of the role of women in the pre-Civil War era in stating their limited role and economic subjugation.

The student is less successful in describing the “appropriate sphere” in which women could function. The statement doesn’t define “appropriate sphere,” but the student doesn’t fall into the trap of believing that Beecher meant that women’s place was in the home. Neither, however, does the essay indicate in what ways women could engage in activity that didn't make them combatants. Citing the accomplishments of Beecher’s famous siblings doesn’t necessarily mean that sister Harriet’s authorship of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was done without having taken the “attitude of a combatant.” One could argue that Stowe’s book violates Catharine Beecher’s definition of the appropriate sphere. Since no clear definition of that sphere is given, the essay is weakened by the conclusion. The student admits as much by confessing ignorance of what Beecher meant. The essay would be much stronger had the student tried to define the term.

Possible student score: 6

Part C

Question 4 Student Essay

In the first years of the twentieth century, the American people began to modify their earlier view of the resources of the nation as limitless. Under the leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt, the conservation movement made people aware of the importance of wise management of the forests and streams of America. The era, however, was not without its contestants and controversies. The Sierra Club was seen as an elitist organization by many people. The Newlands Reclamation Act failed to live up to expectations. Most controversial of all, the dispute between Gifford Pinchot and Secretary of the Interior Ballinger injected politics into the movement and helped split the Republican party.

The Sierra Club was formed in California around 1890 by John Muir. For many years it was an organization that was small in number but with political influence. When Theodore Roosevelt became President, he met with Muir and toured the redwood forests of California. The problem with the Sierra Club was that it seemed to be composed of wealthy people who had the image of trying to shut out average people from enjoying the environment. In the early 1900s few roads existed into the national parks and forests, for example, making a vacation trip to them both expensive and difficult. Muir wanted the wilderness to remain that way. but in doing so most people lacked the funds to visit places like Yosemite. Therefore, although the Sierra Club helped raise public consciousness about the environment, its actual contribution to the movement was limited and, given its elitist image, may even have been counterproductive.

In 1902 the Newlands Reclamation Act was passed, the idea being to reclaim marginal lands for agriculture through irrigation. This law had many supporters who argued that individual developers lacked the resources to build dams, irrigation ditches, and flood control projects. Only the federal government could afford to spend such money. The problem with the Newlands Act was that it was both radical and conservative at the same time, causing people from both ends of the political spectrum to oppose it. For example, farmers weren’t happy with the idea of land coming under irrigation because it would create more farms, and therefore more farm surpluses, and falling prices. On the other hand, critics noted that the Act required farmers on reclamation land to repay the costs of the projects, and the monetary demands placed a burden on those farmers that had to be extended so they could repay the debts. The Reclamation Act was a good idea, but it tried to do too many things for too many people, and as a result did little for the cause of conservation.

Finally, the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy did not occur under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. William H. Taft was the President and he was caught in a dispute between Chief Forester Pinchot and Secretary of the Interior Ballinger over the question of whether certain lands could be leased for the mining of coal. Ballinger was legally correct in his approval of the leases for the mining of coal, but Pinchot bitterly criticized his decision. It got to the point that Taft had to make a decision, and since Pinchot was under Ballinger’s authority, Taft fired Pinchot for insubordination.

The end result for the conservation movement is that these three factors have received considerable publicity in textbooks, but they actually did fairly little to promote the growth of conservation and in fact may also have contributed to an opposition movement that was not convinced of the motives behind supporters of the Sierra Club, the Newlands Act, or the defense of Pinchot.

Reader's Comments

Although the student gets around to evaluating the relative importance of the factors chosen, the introductory paragraph is not well thought out. The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt did not define the chronology of the early conservation movement, given the choices for selection. By focusing on Roosevelt, discussion of the Sierra Club is limited, and the student has to backtrack a little in noting that the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy took place after Roosevelt left the presidency. Why the Republican party was “split” is not explained. On the positive side, the student provides a fair amount of content in discussing each factor, and there are no serious or even minor factual errors. The conclusion is strongly stated, and the student demonstrates some courage in arguing that the factors did not do much to promote conservation. Whether the argument supports the conclusion, however, is another matter.

Possible student score: 5

Part C

Question 5 Student Essay

There is a measurable distance between promise and performance, and presidents who have created programs have found that critics will be only too willing to compare what the politicians hoped to accomplish with what was actually done. The Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society offer examples of how presidents succeeded or failed in varying degrees in trying to make their programs accepted by Congress and the American people.

President Harry Truman probably had one of the roughest times putting his Fair Deal program into effect. The main reason for this was because many of his ideas were far too advanced for Congress or the voters to accept. After Roosevelt’s death, Truman continued the New Deal programs, but he had his own agenda, especially in the area of civil rights and social welfare. He called his program the “Fair Deal” and hoped to expand government’s role in providing for the health, well-being, and equality of all Americans. Southern Democrats strongly indicated they weren’t ready for his civil rights views, modest as they were by the standards of a later era. Truman’s main accomplishment in the arena of civil rights was to order the integration of the armed forces, an act he could do as commander-in-chief and without the consent of Congress. Legislation was another matter. The Fair Deal promised national health care, but the American Medical Association labeled it “socialized medicine.” Truman’s Fair Deal is admired for its intent, but the ideals it expressed had to wait for a generation that would be more accepting of such concepts as social equality.

That time seemed to come with John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier program. Kennedy embodied youth and idealism, and many of his statements proved inspiring to young people. Unfortunately, Kennedy was elected president by so narrow a margin that he lacked a mandate to propose passage of controversial programs and laws. The successes of the New Frontier included the Peace Corps and, for a time, the Alliance for Progress. But the New Frontier encountered a deadlock in civil rights legislation, although many Americans sympathized with the movement that called for restoring voting rights to black Americans. After the march on Washington in the summer of 1963, Kennedy seemed to be heading towards a stronger position on civil rights, but his assassination left his intentions to speculation.

It was the Great Society that most closely matched promise and performance, even if many of the Great Society programs did not endure. President Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the national grief over Kennedy’s murder to propose important domestic programs, including the Job Corps, Head Start, and major civil rights laws, including voting acts that put teeth in the federal enforcement of laws protecting the rights of citizens to vote. Johnson might have been remembered as the greatest president of the 20th century, but his domestic Great Society programs were undermined by the costs of the Vietnam War.

In conclusion, all three of these programs demonstrate that unforeseen obstacles can undercut the most idealistic of presidential programs. Harry Truman misjudged the readiness of Americans to accept a government role in social concerns; Kennedy died before pursuing the most challenging ideals of the New Frontier; and Johnson lost his opportunity through his commitment to a controversial foreign policy.

Reader's Comments

This essay indicates that a student can do well in writing on a topic by first carefully reading what the question asks for. It does not ask for a “compare and contrast” or a relative evaluation of which program was most or least effective. It asks for an evaluation of each program’s own accomplishment in relation to its promise. The student clearly follows this directive. In some areas, the programs are somewhat vaguely described, and there may be too much emphasis on civil rights platforms. The argument connecting the Great Society to national remorse over Kennedy’s death is especially weak. But the structure on which the essay is built is solid, and the conclusion succinctly states a reasonable comprehension of the issues involved.

Possible student score: 8