While major changes were occurring in American society at large, the federal government, but for the "bloody shirt" and debates over the tariff, currency, and civil-service reform, essentially disengaged itself from any meaningful issues of the day. Like most Americans, it took a laissez-faire approach to (not) regulating business; social Darwinism for many justified such an approach. Mark Twain called this era the "Gilded Age," dazzling on the surface but base underneath. In the South, blacks were gradually disenfranchised through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests, while the Supreme Court curtailed blacks' civil rights and the power of the government to defend them. Blacks responded with militant nationalism, a revival of the back-to-Africa movement, and, as preached by Booker T. Washington and most popularly, accommodation and concentration on self-improvement. Meanwhile, Americans were filling the West at breakneck speed, provoking more conflict with the Indians. First the United States attempted a policy of "concentration," which might have worked had it not been for white encroachments on Indian lands. It was then decided that the Indians should be given reservations and take up farming; some tribes yielded but others went to war against the U.S. and settlers. The army eventually broke Indian resistance, though not before taking some spectacular losses, and the Dawes Severalty Act parceled tribal lands out to individual Indians, effectively killing tribal life. Whites were drawn to the West by the great mineral strikes made there and the lure of land, but the reality was that both the mines and most of the land could only be afforded by large corporations or wealthy speculators. Among those corporations were the railroads, which were subsidized by government land grants and loans. The railroads aided western farmers by providing them with cheap and convenient transportation to markets; likewise the railroads helped the growth of cattle ranching in the West, which, until the crowding, fencing, and overproduction caused a crash in the late 1880s, prospered on the open range.
