Studied by 11 people
Muckrakers, late 1800s - early 1900s
American journalists, writers, and critics in the early twentieth century who exposed the corruption of big business and government ∙ Theodore Roosevelt gave them this name in reproach, borrowing the term from John Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, in which a character so busied himself with raking muck that he didn’t pay attention to higher things. ∙ Muckrakers drew the attention of the American public to the problems in American society and won increased support for the progressive movement.
Scientific Management aka Taylorism aka Scientific Taylorism, 1890s
System of organizing work developed by Frederick W. Taylor in the late 1800s. ∙ Scientific management was designed to get the maximum amount of work from the individual worker and reduce the cost of production, using methods such as the time-and-motion study to determine how factory work should be organized. ∙ Labor resisted this effort because it deskilled workers and led to the speedup of production lines. Scientific management ideas were most popular at the height of the Progressive Era.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1909
Coalition of blacks and whites who sought legal and political rights for African Americans through the courts. Like many progressive reform coalitions, the NAACP attracted a diverse group—social workers, socialists, and black intellectuals. In the coming decades, the organization evolved from an interracial organization to a largely black organization.
Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 1911
Fire in a garment factory that killed 146 workers, most of them women. They were trapped inside the building because management had locked the doors to prevent workers from leaving early. Many of them chose to jump to their death rather than burn to death. ∙ The tragedy led to public pressure to investigate workplace conditions and in 1914 a commission called for major reforms. ∙ The commission’s finding resulted in trailblazing labor laws being passed in New York that enacted strict regulations for factories and the power to enforcement these laws.
Susan B. Anthony, 1800s
Attempted to vote in Rochester, New York, on the grounds that she was a citizen and had that right under the 14th Amendment. However, a judge refused to grant her the right to vote. In 1874, the Supreme Court then ruled that although women were citizens, they could not vote. Voting, according to the court, was not necessarily a “privilege” of citizenship. Anthony continued to fight for women’s suffrage, co-founding the National Women's Suffrage Association with Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Pure Food and Drug Act, 1906
President Theodore Roosevelt supported this act which restricted the sale of dangerous or ineffective medicines and regulated the ingredients in prepared foods by requiring clear labels on packaging. It was the first law to protect consumer health although it lacked strong methods of enforcement.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906
Sinclair was a muckraker and his best-known work of the period was The Jungle, a sensational expose of the meatpacking industry. The book depicted the appalling conditions in the meatpacking industry and was intended to stir demand for labor reform. Instead, it prompted demand for sanitation regulation and resulted in the Meat Inspection Act.
Dollar Diplomacy, early 1900s
Taft, like Roosevelt, wanted to expand U.S. influence abroad. His plan was to replace “dollars for bullets.” The plan was known as dollar diplomacy. ∙ Taft encouraged U.S. bankers and industrialists to invest abroad and used diplomatic pressure to force U.S. capital into regions where “it would not go of its own accord.” One of the first regions he chose was China, where he persuaded U.S. bankers to finance railroad construction. In Latin America, Taft worked to replace European loans with U.S. loans.
Panama Canal, 1904-1915 (official opening 1920)
Built to make passage between Atlantic and Pacific oceans easier and faster which the U.S. really needed after the Spanish-American War since we had acquired an Asia empire as a result of the war. ∙ The overall cost of the canal was about $350 million. The canal was the largest and most expensive work ever undertaken by the U.S. government. It became one of the world’s outstanding feats of engineering.
Battle of Argonne Forest, 1918
Over one million American soldiers took part in this offensive against the Germans and by the end of October Germany had been pushed back toward their own border and had their supply line cut.
Schenck v. U.S. aka “Clear and present danger” test - 1919
A standard established in the 1919 Supreme Court case Schenck v. U.S. to determine when the government could limit the right to free speech. ∙ The Court found Charles Schenck and other members of the Socialist Party who had mailed out flyers during World War I urging young men subject to the draft to oppose the war guilty of urging draft resistance. ∙ Justice Oliver Homes established the “clear and present danger” test for freedom of speech and wrote that writings like Schenck’s were akin to shouting “Fire” in a crowed theater. The “clear and present danger” test laid the groundwork for those who wanted to limit First Amendment freedoms.
Marcus Garvey, 1919
Black Jamaican who attracted a good deal of support from poor urban American blacks. Garvey wanted African Americans to take pride in their African culture rather then trying to assimilate into white culture. ∙ He formed the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He urged blacks to return to Africa and create their own societies. ∙ His influence declined after he was indicted on business fraud charges in the early 1920s, but the influence of black nationalism remained long after Garvey was gone.
Sacco and Vanzetti, 1920
Infamous case of two Italian immigrants - - Nicola Sacco and Bartolomem Vanzetti, charged with murdering a paymaster in Massachusetts. ∙ The evidence wasn’t clear, but because they were professed anarchists, the presumption of many people was they were guilty. They were convicted in a biased court with a bigot judge. ∙ All trial appeals were turned down and the men were executed in 1927 - - their conviction grew out of the lingering legacy of the Red Scare.
Creationism / Scopes Trial, 1925
The belief that a Supreme Being created Earth and all its life. Most creationists were Christians who based their beliefs on the Bible’s story of creation. ∙ Creationism opposed the belief that life on Earth was formed from an evolutionary process (Charles Darwin, 1850s). U.S. public schools began teaching evolution in science classes in the early 1900s. ∙ In the 1920s, creationists proposed laws in 20 states to ban the teaching of evolution. In 1925, John Scopes was found guilty of violating a Tennessee state law for teaching evolution. ∙ The significant of the trial was the conflict it demonstrated between traditional and modern culture in 1920s America. ∙ Clarence Darrow defended Scopes and William Jennings Bryan was a key witness for the prosecution.
Henry Ford / Model T, 1920s
Ford founded his car company in 1903. In 1913 Ford started using standardized interchangeable parts and assembly-line techniques in his plant. Although Ford neither originated nor was the first to employ such practices, he was primarily responsible for their general adoption. ∙ By 1914 this innovation greatly increased productivity, but the monotony of assembly-line work and repeated increases in production quotas brought a monthly labor turnover of 40-60 percent. ∙ Ford met this problem by doubling the daily wage then standard in the industry, raising it from about $2.50 to $5. The overall result was more stability in his labor force and a substantial reduction in operating costs. ∙ Ford practiced welfare capitalism by raising wages, shortening the work week, and creating paid vacations. .He developed the mass-produced Model T car, which sold at an affordable price.
Charles Lindbergh, Spirit of St. Louis, 1927
Lindbergh flew his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, across the Atlantic in the first transatlantic solo flight. He became a national hero because he appealed to both modernists and traditionalists with his individualism combined with the use of the new technology of aviation.
Teapot Dome Scandal, 1923
Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, secretly leased rich naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming and Elk Hills, California to two wealthy businessmen and, in return, got almost half a million dollars in “loans” to clear up his debts. The scandal broke after Harding’s death. After the scandal came to light, Fall was sentenced to a year in jail for bribery.
Fireside Chats, 1933-1945
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's regularly scheduled radio broadcasts to the American public. The name suggested an intimate conversation and demonstrated the president's effective use of the new electronic political medium of radio. Many newspapers were hostile to FDR, so he used the radio to bypass the papers. Roosevelt fused this technique when he explained the Bank Holiday to the American people.
Eleanor Roosevelt, 1930s-1940s
Eleanor Roosevelt was married to President Franklin Roosevelt. Theirs was a political partnership as well as a marriage. She was more liberal than her husband and served as a spokesperson for women and minority groups. When the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the black opera singer Marian Anderson to give a concert in their auditorium in 1939 she resigned from the DAR and got permission for Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She served as a political lighting rod for her husband, often people who disliked a particular policy of the President blamed it on Eleanor's influence. She also wrote a daily syndicated news column called "My Day" and after her husband's death served as a United Nations ambassador.
Keynesian economics aka "deficit spending / John Maynard Keynes
Theory of British economist John Keynes that government spending should be used to stimulate the economy in times of economic recession or depression. Roosevelt adopted this policy in the New Deal and it led to deficit spending - that was spending to stimulate the economy or direct assistance to people overrode the goal of a balanced federal budget. Although the New Deal used Keynesian spending, the Roosevelt administration never spent in sufficient quantity to end the Great Depression.
"Relief, Recovery, and Reform,” 1932-1941
These three areas, relief, recovery, and reform, are the categories into which the New Deal was split. The Relief category was defined by the acts implemented in the area of aid to the unemployment. The Recovery category put forth measures that would help aid in the speedy recovery of areas hit hardest by the depression (i.e. agriculture and industry). Reform was a category in which the government tried to solve problems that created economic instability (such as the banking system or the stock market).
Social Security Act, 1935
This was the most important single piece of social welfare legislation in American history. It set up a pension program that was intended to supplement (not replace) the retirement income of the elderly. The pensions were funded by tax contributions from employers and workers. It also established unemployed insurance and gave direct assistance to single mothers with dependent children (welfare) and the disabled (disability). The scope of the program was limited because it left out two large groups of impoverished workers - agricultural and domestic workers (many of these two groups were women and blacks). Roosevelt's support of the program was prompted in large part by challenges from the left of the political spectrum - in particular by the proposal of Dr. Charles Townshend that the government pay pensions to the elderly.
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) / John L. Lewis, 1936
The CIO was an industrial union, rather than organizing skilled workers by craft (such as the American Federation of Labor, which was made up of craft unions) it organized them, regardless of their skill level, by industry. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers first established the CIO within the AFL. In 1936, Lewis broke with the AFL and established the CIO as its own entity. The CIO was more inclusive of women and blacks and was more militant than the AFL, and led the organizing battle in the automotive and steel industries.
New Democratic Party Coalition, 1936-1960s
First evidenced in the 1936 election, the Democratic coalition consisted of western and southern farmers, urban working classes, the poor and unemployed, and the black communities in northern cities. In addition it still pulled support from traditional progressives and new liberals. This coalition would be viable for the next 30 to 40 years.
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