Progressive Era Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from a lecture on the Progressive Era.

Progressives

A diverse group who worked on issues like the growing power of big business, uncertainties in the economy, conflict between labor and employers, political machines, Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, and alcohol.

Progressive Belief

Significant government intervention was the only cure for society's deterioration.

Muckrakers

Investigative journalists who sought to expose the rotten underbelly of American corruption.

Upton Sinclair

Muckraker who wrote "The Jungle," exposing unsanitary conditions in meat packing plants.

Ida Tarbell

Muckraker who published an exposé on John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company.

Jacob Rees

Photojournalist whose book "How the Other Half Lives" exposed unsanitary living conditions of the poor in New York's tenements.

Secret Ballot

A way to challenge the influence of political bosses by allowing voting to be done in secret.

Seventeenth Amendment (1913)

Transferred the responsibility of electing senators from state legislatures into the hands of the people.

Eighteenth Amendment

Established American prohibition, forbidding the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

Nineteenth Amendment (1920)

Officially recognized women's right to vote.

Initiative

Voters could require legislators to consider a bill they chose to ignore.

Referendum

Voters could vote on the adoption of proposed laws.

Recall

A way to remove corrupt politicians before their term was complete.

Frederick Taylor

Advocated scientific management to make factory work more efficient.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Supreme Court case that established racial segregation as legal as long as separate facilities were equal.

Niagara Movement

Led by W. E. B. Du Bois, organized protests and other acts to secure rights for black population.

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, aimed to abolish segregation and expand educational opportunities for black children.

Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal

Presidency that did not consistently side with big business, but worked for a fair outcome for both sides.

Pure Food and Drug Act

Assured consumers that their food was safe and unadulterated.

Meat Inspection Act

Assured consumers that meat packing plants would conform to a minimum standard of sanitation.

Forest Reserve Act of 1891

Used by Roosevelt to reserve 150,000,000 acres of unspoiled land.

Yellow Journalism

Publishing increasingly sensational stories that danced on the outer edges of truth and responsible journalism, used to rile up public over Spanish atrocities

Platt Amendment

Allowed the US to intervene militarily in Cuba if American economic interests were threatened

Open Door Policy

Requested that European powers observe an open door of trading privileges in China

Imperialism

Describes the expansion of one country's political, economic, and military influence over another country. In other words, it's the expansion of empire.

Arguments For Expansionism

Access to raw materials, secure new Markets, social Darwinism: America could get on the international stage and flex its giant pectorals of Liberty, to Christianize the dark and backward lands of the World.

Arguments Against Expansionism

Principle of self-determination for nations, America had a long history of isolationism from foreign affairs, What happens when we take over a country full of brown people?

Marshall Plan

The United States offered a buttload of money to European nations who were trying to rebuild. The idea was that if they could rebuild and do so with their hands in the pockets of the democratic United States, then those countries would choose democratic capitalism and not Soviet communism.

United Nations

International peacekeeping assembly with mess of peacekeeping soldiers that are supplied by member nations and whose mission is to stabilize unstable environments when they arise.

Battle of the Coral Sea and Battle of Midway

Battles when The US was able to push back the Japanese who had conquered a large portion of key strategic Pacific territories.

D Day invasion

The D Day invasion on the Normandy beaches of Northern France where Over 200,000 Allied troops landed that day and in the following weeks more than a million followed that lead to the Liberation of France.

island hopping campaign

Campaign where US forces engaged in what's called essentially, this just meant that they bypassed the heavily fortified Japanese occupied islands in favor of smaller, less strategic islands, and in doing so, they effectively cut off the Japanese supply line.

Manhattan Project

Experiment where The US and its collaborators had already developed and tested nuclear bombs.

Double V campaign

Working for victory in the war and victory against racism at home.

Korematsu versus The United States (1944)

The court ruled that the Japanese relocation was constitutional on the grounds that it was a quote martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage.

Warren G. Harding

Promised a return to normalcy, saying, America's present need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not revolution but restoration, not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality

Fordy McCumber Act

Raised tariffs dramatically in 1922

Kellogg Brand Pact

Pact signed among 63 nations, The United States included, which tried to make war illegal or at least renounce war in principle

cash and carry program

Act that allowed any belligerent in the war to purchase armaments from The US as long as they paid cash and used their own ships to transport them.

Destroyers for Bases program

American destroyers were exchanged for land rights on various British possessions.

Lend Lease Act

Allowed Britain to obtain arms they needed from The US on credit.

Model T

Mass produced automobile

Assembly Line

In 1913 Ford opened his manufacturing plant that had a large conveyor belt that slowly transported the partially built car from worker to worker. Each worker would perform the same task on each part of the car. That worker's job was to put that bolt in that hole all day, er day.

Frederick Taylor

Went into factories with a stopwatch and timed every little task that workers performed and then made recommendations for how those workers could shave a second off here and shave another second off there to Create Efficiency.

Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Human Psychology

Helped discover how to promote their products through ads that attempted to tap into the subconscious of their customers.

Amos and Andy

Nightly serialized show made in the image of the old minstrel shows popular during the Gilded Age.

The Jazz Singer

The first movie to have synchronized sound and music thus ending the silent film era.

The Exodusters

huge numbers of the Southern Black population left the South in order to settle in the North and Midwest.

The Harlem Renaissance

Revival of the arts and intellectual pursuits of the recently migrated black population.

Langston Hughes and Claude McKay Writers

Put words to the black experience in America.

The Lost Generation

A group with folks like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and some of their main themes were the pervasive materialism that plagued American culture and the waste of life and resources expended in World War I

Fundamentalists

Believed that every word of the Bible must be taken seriously and condemned the degradation of the morals they saw in the cities.

The Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925

John Scopes decided it was a dumb law and began teaching Darwin and was subsequently arrested. Clarence Darrow defended Scopes and the prosecuting attorney was populist hero and thrice failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

Black Tuesday

10/29/1929, The Day the stock market crashed

Agricultural overproduction and high tariffs

Created Depression stew

buying on margin, otherwise known as speculation

Because it was assumed that the stock market prices would continue to rise then it became a common practice to borrow money to buy stocks.

Hoovervilles

The homeless took up residence in shantytowns, which they dubbed these out of criticism of Hoovers laissez faire economic policies at the beginning of the Great Depression.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal

heavy government intervention, Roosevelt did more to expand the size and scope of the federal government than any president before him.

Three R's of the New Deal

relief for the unemployed, recovery for businesses, and reform of economic institutions.

Public Works Administration or the PWA

Employed Americans to do federal infrastructure work

Tennessee Valley Authority or the TVA

Hired people to run electric power plants and did work to control flooding and erosion.

Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC

Employed young men between the ages of 18 to 24 to manage soil conservation and forestry projects.

The NIRA's Codes

codes created security for workers by establishing minimum wage levels, shorter working hours, and the regulation of prices of certain petroleum products.

The Glass Steagall Act

Increased regulation in banks and limited the ways that banks could invest people's money.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or the FDIC

Guaranteed people's bank deposits with federal money.

Judicial reorganization bill, also known as the court packing scheme

Would allow the president to appoint new Supreme Court justices for every justice that was older than 70 years old.

Flappers

Women who threw off convention during this era by cutting their hair short and smoking and drinking and showing their ankles in public.

Nativism

Effort to protect the rights of native born citizens

The Tulsa Massacre

Began because a white woman claimed a black shoeshine assaulted her where Three hundred black folks had been killed.

Red Scare

Growing anti communist sentiment after World War I where Mass arrests of socialists and radicals and labor union leaders and many others.

Schenck versus the United States

Restriction of civil liberties because freedom of speech is not absolute. In other words, when speech constitutes a clear and present danger, then it is constitutional for it to be silenced.

Zimmerman telegram

Hostile intention toward the US where Germany solicited Mexico to start a war The United States and help them regain its land lost in the Mexican American War

League of Nations

A worldwide representative body where countries could negotiate their problems instead of going to war that Congress would not let America join.