Unit 6 Standing at Armageddon Key Terms List

Upton Sinclair

socialist muckraker who wrote The Jungle (1906), in which he hoped to indict the capitalist system but instead helped convince Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act (1906), which cleaned up the meat industry.

Pure Food and Drug Act (1906)

law that regulated the food and patent medicine industries; some business leaders called it socialistic meddling by the government.

Ida Tarbell

crusading journalist who wrote The History of the Standard Oil Company a critical expose that documented John D. Rockefeller's ruthlessness and questionable business tactics.

Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies)

revolutionary industrial union founded in 1905 and led by "Big Bill" Haywood that worked to overthrow capitalism; during World War I, the government pressured the group, and by 1919, it was in serious decline.

Lincoln Steffens

a leading muckraking journalist who exposed political corruption in the cities; best known for IUs The Shame of Cities (1904), he was also a regular contributor to McClure's Magazine.

Robert La Follette

progressive governor (1900-1904) and senator (1906-1925); he established the "Wisconsin idea" that reformed the state through direct primaries, tax reform, and anti-corruption legislation. La Follette was the Progressive Party's presidential nominee in 1924.

Theodore Roosevelt

26th president of the United States (1901–09) and a writer, naturalist, and soldier. He expanded the powers of the presidency and of the federal government in support of the public interest in conflicts between big business and labor and steered the nation toward an active role in world politics, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Preservationists

sought to protect nature from use. During the Progressive Era, preservationists believed that land should be preserved for its natural beauty and inspiration, and that humans should only use it for that purpose.

Conservationists

sought to promote the proper use of nature. During the Progressive Era, conservationists were people who advocated for the preservation of natural resources and the regulation of human use of the environment.

New Nationalism

Theodore Roosevelt's progressive platform in the election of 1912; building on his presidential "Square Deal," he called for a strong federal government to maintain economic competition and social justice but to accept trusts as an economic fact of life.

Federal Reserve Act (1913)

established a national banking system for the first time since the 1830s; designed to combat the “money trust,” it created 12 regional banks that regulated interest rates, money supply, and provided an elastic credit system throughout the country.

Carrie Chapman Catt

president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association; Catt led the organization when it achieved passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 and later organized the League of Women Voters.

Alice Paul

American women’s suffrage leader who first proposed an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She advocated the use of militant tactics to publicize the need for a federal women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Paul organized marches, White House protests, and rallies. Her militancy in the fight for women’s suffrage led to her imprisonment on three more occasions before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

granted women the right to vote; its ratification capped a movement for women’s rights that dated to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Although women were voting in state elections in 12 states when the amendment passed, it enabled 8 million women to vote in the presidential election of 1920.

Eighteenth Amendment (1919)

prohibited the sale, transportation, and manufacture of alcohol; part of rural America’s attempt to blunt the societal influence of the cities, it was called the “Noble Experiment” until it was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment (1933).

Booker T. Washington

influential black leader; his “Atlanta Compromise” speech (1895) proposed blacks accept social and political segregation in return for economic opportunities in agriculture and vocational areas. He received money from whites and built Tuskegee Institute into a powerful educational and political machine.

W.E.B. DuBois

black intellectual who challenged Booker T. Washington’s ideas on combating Jim Crow; he called for the black community to demand immediate equality and was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Ida B. Wells

American investigative journalist, sociologist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wells dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence, and advocating for African-American equality—especially that of women. Throughout the 1890s, Wells documented lynching of African-Americans in the United States in articles and through pamphlets.

Great Migration

movement of southern, rural blacks to northern cities starting around 1915 and continuing through much of the twentieth century; blacks left the South as the cotton economy declined and Jim Crow persisted. Thousands came north for wartime jobs in large cities during World Wars I and 2.

Harlem Renaissance

black artistic movement in New York City in the 1920s, when writers, poets, painters, and musicians came together to express feelings and experiences, especially about the injustices of Jim Crow; leading figures of the movement included Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes

leading literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance who wrote verse, essays, and 32 books; he helped define the black experience in America for over four decades.

Ku Klux Klan

Reconstruction-era organization that was revived in 1915 and rose to political power in the mid-1920s when membership reached 4 to 5 million; opposed to blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants, its membership was rural, white, native-born, and Protestant.

Marcus Garvey

black leader in early 1920s who appealed to urban blacks with his program of racial self-sufficiency / separatism, black pride, and pan-Africanism; his Universal Negro Improvement Association ran into financial trouble, however. He was eventually arrested for mail fraud and deported to his native Jamaica in 1927.

Lusitania

British passenger liner sunk by a German submarine in May 1915; among the 1,200 deaths were 128 Americans. This was the first major crisis between the United States and Germany and a stepping-stone for American involvement in World War I.

Zimmermann Note (1917)

a secret German proposal to Mexico for an alliance against the United States; Germany offered to help Mexico get back territories it lost to the United States in 1848. Britain alerted the Wilson administration to the plan, and Mexico refused the idea.

Fourteen Points (1918)

Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the world after World War I; it called for free trade, self-determination for all peoples, freedom of the seas, open diplomacy, and a League of Nations. Wilson hoped his Fourteen Points would be the basis for a negotiated settlement to end the war. However, they were not harsh enough on Germany for the other Allies to accept. Only a few of them were incorporated into the treaty.

American Expeditionary Forces

Led by John Pershing, this was the United States military contingent that fought in Europe during World War I. It played a crucial roles in the Allied victory on the Western Front.

John Pershing

American commander in France during World War I; his nickname of “Black Jack” resulted from his command of black troops earlier in his career. Before being dispatched to France, Pershing led an American incursion into Mexico in 1916 in a failed attempt to capture Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

Woodrow Wilson

successful Democratic presidential nominee in 1912 and his progressive program that viewed trusts as evil and called for their destruction rather than their regulation; his social and political philosophy drew heavily on the ideas of Louis Brandeis. As president (1931-1921). Wilson led the nation through World War I.

Treaty of Versailles (1919)

ended World War I; it was much harder on Germany than Wilson wanted but not as punitive as France and England desired. It was harsh enough, however, to set stage for Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in the 1930s.

League of Nations

an organization for international cooperation. It was established in 1920, at the initiative of the victorious Allied powers at the end of World War I and was formally disbanded on April 19, 1946. Although ultimately it was unable to fulfill the hopes of its founders, its creation was an event of decisive importance in the history of international relations.

Henry Cabot Lodge

chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who accepted the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League but demanded reservations to the League to maintain congressional authority in foreign affairs; Wilson’s unwillingness to accept these conditions caused the Senate to reject the treaty.

William Borah

led a group of senators who were irreconcilably opposed to joining the League of Nations; he promoted ideals of traditional isolationism and believed the League was “an entangling foreign alliances.”

Red Scare

period of hysteria after World War I over the possible spread of Communism to the United States; aroused by the Russian Revolution (1917), the large number of Russian immigrants in the United States, and a series of terrorist bombings in 1919, it resulted in the denial of civil liberties, mass arrests and deportations, and passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1920.