Social Studies Test - The Progressive Era & The Roaring 20s

The Progressive Era (1890s-1920)

• Period of US politics in which political activism sought to reform life and politics in the US

• Response to industrialization, urbanization, immigration

  • wealth inequality, urban disparities

• Both parties engaged in progressive politics

• Presidents associated with progressivism: T. Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson

Political Issues under Progressivism

• Labor/wages/working conditions - child labor, immigration

• Feminism - women’s suffrage, reproductive care

• Educational reform - public school up to high school

• Prohibition of alcohol, (some) civil rights, economic and foreign policy, conservation, more democratic politics: primary elections, voting for senators

Jane Addams and Hull House

• Social reformer

• Started settlement house in Chicago to teach working-class women mannerisms of middle-class women, “New Woman”

• Shifted focus - programs to alleviate poverty; job skills

• Hull House Papers - sociological papers co-authored by inhabitants, studied Chicago and socioeconomic issues

Margaret Sanger

• Reproductive rights activist

• Campaigned for birth control for women

• Gained popularity with eugenics movement, birth control seen as means to keep down non-white population

Women’s Suffrage Movement

• Began in 1840s - Seneca Falls Convention (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony)

• Tension between (white) abolitionists and Black voting rights activists after Civil War

• Movement largely segregated

• First states to pass suffrage were out west - Wyoming 1869, connections to increasing number of white voters

Mary McLeod Bethune

• Equal Suffrage League, founded National Association of Colored Women

• Intersectional voting issues, raised money to pay poll taxes and helped mobilize Black women’s suffrage leaders to pass the 19th Amendment in 1920

18th and 19th Amendments

• 19th Amendment passed suffrage for women - 1920

• 18th Amendment gave government power to ban alcohol sales and consumption

• Anti-suffrage activists activists campaigned against 19th Amendment, claiming women would ban alcohol

• Many suffrage leaders wanted restrictions on alcohol-related violence against women

Roaring 20s

• Term used to describe economic boom before the Great Depression

• High prosperity (especially in Europe and the US)

• Cheaper consumer goods (cars, appliances, etc)

• Mass media - rise of film (Hollywood), music genres (blues, jazz)

• Rise in affluence in Black neighborhoods and cultural institutions in North post-Great Migration

Prohibition

• Alcohol banned after passage of 18th Amendment

• Alcohol consumption still high, organized crime (Mafia, Al Capone), speakeasies, bootlegging, homebrew, medical exemptions

American Conservation

• Backlash to Woodrow Wilson/Progressivism after WWI

• Conservative presidents - Harding, Coolidge, Hoover

• Economic policies benefiting Wall Street - little regulation

• Government corruption: Warren G. Harding - Interior Secretary illegally gave government oil reserves to a company for bribes

Race in the 1920s

• Jim Crow policies - segregation rose after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) - court ruled that “separate but equal” was okay

• Immigration Act of 1924 - strict quotas on immigration, favored Europeans, influence of eugenics movement

• Rise of 2nd KKK - South: anti-Black, North: anti-Catholic and Jewish, West: anti-Asian, Latino

Harlem Renaissance

• Rise in Black intellectualism, literature

• Based in Harlem (Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Arturo Schomburg, WEB Dubois)

• Black separatist politics, Marcus Garvey

Youth Culture

• Automobile, rise in dating culture, brand marketing toward young people

  • Clothing, makeup, cigarettes, media, cartoons, movies

• Literature - magazines, fiction

• Athletics