Passage 3

Questions 11 to 15 are based on the following passage.

The history of the U.S. from Lincoln's death to the wave of assassination in the 1960s can be seen as a struggle to realize Lincoln's vision of a society whose citizens are not held back by parentage or origin. The struggle to secure this chance for all Americans has been biter and bloody, and it is far from over. After Lincoln's death, the Fourteenth Amendment promised that the Federal Union would guarantee the rights of all persons against violation by the states. However, this guarantee was exploited by business corporations while remaining a hollow promise to millions of actual persons. Women did not get the vote until five amendments later, and their legal rights were often lost in marriage. As for blacks, political equality remained mostly something unreal until the passage of the Voting Rights Act one hundred years after Lincoln's death.

The struggle to realize Lincoln's ideal was undertaken not only by workers against capital but also by immigrants against the political system. In less than one human life span following the Civil War, the U.S. absorbed a great number of immigrants who formed the next wave of what Lincoln had called "prudent and penniless" Beginners. They found that social services were forgotten by a political system that ran on graft (腐败). The risk of injury, disease, and early death were largely ignored, forcing millions to rely on themselves, on family, and on the charity of friends.

To some who watched the immigrants pour in, it seemed that America would have to reorganize itself according to the multicultural principle that we hear so much about today. The term “multiculturalism” was popularized by Horace Kallen. He wrote in his book The Nation in 1915 that with the growth of large immigrant communities, the rate of mixed marriage would drop (he was wrong) and the likelihood of a new American race would decline. The U.S., he predicted, would turn into a democracy of nationalities in which "selfhood is ancestrally determined." To other observers, however, the country was simply sliding into disorder, as it seemed to Henry Adams in 1905 when he looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue and felt himself in the disorderly Rome as witnessed by Emperor Diocletian.

Lincoln imagined that the U.S. would be a society free from the influence of one's______.