Here is some of what was attracting racial attention in 1877: Reconstruction
collapsed in the South, raising new questions about the relations among whites
and blacks in an era of black Emancipation and the re-integration of the South
into national political life. In the aftermath of Custer's demise the year before,
the Great Sioux Wars ended with the defeat of the Minneconjou Sioux; Sitting
Bull escaped to Canada, and Crazy Horse surrendered to federal troops. A vocal
and often violent anti-Chinese movement coalesced in the West, particularly in
California, where white workers decried the labor competition of "Mongolians" and
insisted upon a "white man's republic." The East and Midwest, meanwhile,
were wracked by labor unrest which raised questions in some quarters about the
white immigrant working class itself. Members of the radical Irish Molly Maguires
were on trial for murder in Pennsylvania; and
reverberations of the Tweed scandal in New York continued to raise doubts about
the Celtic proletariat there. Jewishness became a matter of intense debate following
a Saratoga hotel's decision to bar Joseph Seligman, a prominent Jewish banker.
A series of skirmishes (variously called "riots" and "raids")
erupted between Mexicans and Americans along the nation's southwestern border.
And, on the international scene, the Russo-Turkish war in the Caucasus ("the
traditional cradle of the race," as Harper's put it) produced a rash of
commentary on the "races of the Danube," while Henry Stanley's reports
from Africa aroused tremendous popular enthusiasm for the white-over-black adventure
of taming "the dark continent.'"