APUSH Unit 7 Flashcards Concsise

Progressive Era

Reform movement (1890–1920) responding to Gilded Age industrial capitalism. Urban middle-class pushed for corporate regulation, democratic reforms (initiative/referendum/recall), labor protections, and social welfare. IMPORTANCE: Permanently ends laissez-faire as the default — government is now expected to intervene in the economy. Sets ideological foundation for the New Deal. CONNECTIONS: → New Deal (FDR expands what TR started, under crisis conditions) | ↔ Populism (both fight corporate power, but Populism = rural/agrarian/grassroots; Progressivism = urban/middle-class/expert-driven) | → 16th/17th/19th Amendments (income tax, direct Senate elections, women's suffrage — the legislative wins)

Muckrakers

Progressive Era investigative journalists who exposed real corruption to drive reform. Upton Sinclair (The Jungle → meatpacking), Ida Tarbell (Standard Oil), Jacob Riis (urban poverty). IMPORTANCE: Translated abstract ideals into visceral public pressure. The Jungle directly caused the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906). Proves the media → public outrage → legislation reform mechanism. CONNECTIONS: → Pure Food & Drug Act (direct cause-effect from The Jungle) | ↔ Yellow Journalism (both provocative, but muckrakers documented real conditions for reform; yellow journalists exaggerated for profit/war) | ↔ Espionage Act (muckrakers thrived under free press; Espionage Act prosecuted anti-war journalists a decade later — same government, opposite posture)

Theodore Roosevelt / Square Deal

TR's domestic agenda (1901–09): regulate corporations (trust-busting), protect consumers (Pure Food & Drug, Meat Inspection Act), conserve natural resources. Broke up Northern Securities (1904), pushed Hepburn Act railroad regulation. IMPORTANCE: Establishes the president as active "steward of the people." First president to seriously enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act. CONNECTIONS: → New Deal (FDR literally TR's cousin; both use executive power to regulate markets — FDR at Depression scale) | ↔ Taft (Taft busted more trusts but TR attacked him for firing conservationist Gifford Pinchot — shows Progressivism was a fragile coalition) | → 1912 Bull Moose Party (TR-Taft split → third party run → GOP fractured → Wilson wins)

Woodrow Wilson / New Freedom

Wilson's Progressive agenda (1913–21): Underwood Tariff (lower tariffs), Federal Reserve Act (1913), Clayton Antitrust Act, Federal Trade Commission. Favored restoring competition over TR's regulated monopoly. IMPORTANCE: Completes the Progressive legislative project. Federal Reserve becomes the central institution of American monetary policy. CONNECTIONS: → Federal Reserve (created 1913, but contracted money supply 1929–33, deepening the Depression — Progressive institution, catastrophic failure under stress) | ↔ TR's Square Deal (both regulate big business, but TR accepts large corporations under oversight; Wilson wants to break them up — two visions of regulated capitalism) | → 14 Points / WWI (same president pivots from domestic reform to international idealism — and fails at both by term's end)

Great Depression (1929)

Stock market crash (Oct 1929) + bank failures + Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930, triggered global retaliatory tariffs) + Federal Reserve money contraction → 25% unemployment by 1933. Hoover's response: voluntarism + RFC loans to businesses = inadequate. IMPORTANCE: Destroys laissez-faire consensus. Delegitimizes Hoover and the Republican Party for a generation. Creates the political mandate for the New Deal and the modern welfare state. CONNECTIONS: → New Deal (no Depression = no New Deal; FDR's entire presidency is a response) | ↔ 1920s Consumer Economy (installment-plan credit and stock speculation that fueled the boom made the crash worse — prosperity was fragile) | → WWII Mobilization (historians now largely agree WWII defense spending — not the New Deal alone — ended the Depression)

New Deal

FDR's Depression response. First 100 Days (1933): bank holiday + FDIC, CCC, TVA, AAA, NRA. Second New Deal (1935): Wagner Act, Social Security, WPA. Faced opposition from left (Huey Long's "Share Our Wealth") AND right (Supreme Court struck down NRA/AAA; Liberty League). IMPORTANCE: Creates the modern American welfare state. Redefines liberalism as government responsibility for economic security. Creates the New Deal Coalition (urban workers, Black Americans, Southern whites, liberals) dominating politics through the 1960s. CONNECTIONS: → Wagner Act (guaranteed collective bargaining → CIO organized mass-production workers → massive union growth; restructured capital vs. labor) | ↔ Hoover (Hoover: voluntarism, no direct relief. FDR: direct relief, public employment, deficit spending. Sharpest executive policy reversal in American history.) | → Court-Packing (1937) (FDR threatened to add 6 justices after Court struck down programs; failed politically but Court immediately reversed course — "the switch in time that saved nine")

1920s Consumer Economy / Mass Culture

Post-WWI boom driven by assembly-line manufacturing (Ford Model T), consumer credit (installment plans), and mass media (radio, cinema). Majority of Americans lived in cities by 1920. IMPORTANCE: First true mass consumer culture. Radio and film create a shared national culture. But prosperity was uneven — farmers and laborers excluded. This inequality helps explain why 1929 was so catastrophic. CONNECTIONS: → Great Depression (speculative bubble — buying stocks on margin, goods on credit — collapses in 1929; the boom contained seeds of the bust) | ↔ Harlem Renaissance (while white middle-class America bought appliances, Black artists built a parallel cultural movement outside the economic prosperity — mass culture was racially stratified) | → Nativism / Immigration Act of 1924 (cultural anxiety about rapid change drove anti-immigrant backlash even during prosperity)

Immigration Act of 1924 (National Origins Act)

Established immigration quotas based on the 1890 census (before peak Southern/Eastern European immigration), sharply limiting Italians, Poles, Russians, Jews, and nearly banning Asians entirely. IMPORTANCE: Encodes racial hierarchy into immigration law. Ends the era of mass European immigration. Reflects 1920s nativism, scientific racism (eugenics), and Red Scare anti-radical anxieties. CONNECTIONS: ↔ Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) (1924 extends the same racial logic from one Asian nationality to a global system of racial/national quotas) | → Great Migration / Urban Tensions (same decade, same cities — as European immigration shut down, Black Southerners flooded Northern cities and faced riots instead of welcome) | → WWII Bracero Program (1924 restrictions created labor shortages during WWII, forcing the U.S. to import Mexican agricultural workers — restriction created contradiction)

Great Migration

~6 million African Americans moved from rural South to Northern/Western cities in two waves (1910–1940, 1940–1970). Driven by Jim Crow violence, boll weevil crop destruction, and Northern industrial labor demand (especially as WWI cut off European immigrant labor). IMPORTANCE: Reshapes American cities. Creates the demographic foundation for the Harlem Renaissance. Shifts Black political power to the urban North. The precondition for all Black American politics through the civil rights movement. CONNECTIONS: → Harlem Renaissance (concentration of Black intellectuals in Harlem = critical mass for the cultural movement; migration is cause, Renaissance is effect) | ↔ Dust Bowl / "Okies" Migration (both are internal migrations driven by economic catastrophe; both groups face discrimination at destination — parallel examples of KC 7.2 migration) | → Executive Order 8802 (WWII second wave + A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington pressured FDR to ban war-industry discrimination — migration created political leverage)

Harlem Renaissance

1920s cultural movement in Harlem, NY: Black artists, writers, musicians asserted African American identity as a source of pride. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington. Also includes Marcus Garvey (UNIA, Black nationalism) and W.E.B. Du Bois (The Crisis, NAACP, "Talented Tenth"). IMPORTANCE: Challenges white assumptions about Black intellectual capacity. Central to KC 7.2. The Du Bois vs. Garvey debate (integration vs. separatism) defines the spectrum of Black political thought. CONNECTIONS: ↔ Du Bois vs. Garvey (Du Bois = integration, work within American democracy; Garvey = Black pride, separatism, Pan-Africanism — same moment, opposite responses to racism) | ↔ KKK Revival / 1920s Nativism (KKK peaked at ~4 million members in the 1920s; cultural flourishing and violent suppression happened simultaneously — AP loves testing this coexistence) | → Civil Rights Movement / Period 8 (Harlem Renaissance's intellectual framework — Black dignity, self-determination, political mobilization — directly feeds into postwar civil rights)

Schenck v. United States (1919)

Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act. Charles Schenck distributed anti-draft leaflets; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the "clear and present danger" test — speech can be restricted if it poses an immediate threat ("falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater"). IMPORTANCE: Establishes the legal framework for First Amendment limits during wartime. The AP tests this because it shows how emergency powers suppress civil liberties — a pattern that repeats with Korematsu. CONNECTIONS: → Korematsu v. US (1944) (both show Supreme Court deference to executive wartime power; Schenck restricts speech, Korematsu restricts liberty based on ethnicity — same "military necessity" logic applied more radically) | → Red Scare 1919–20 (Espionage Act apparatus built for WWI immediately repurposed for Palmer Raids against suspected radicals — war emergency powers outlived the war) | ↔ Progressive Era Free Press (muckrakers thrived under expansive press freedom; Schenck demonstrates rights contract under crisis — same government, reversed posture)

U.S. Imperialism / Spanish-American War (1898)

War with Spain triggered by USS Maine explosion + yellow journalism + Cuban independence movement. U.S. wins quickly; gains Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines (Treaty of Paris). Cuba becomes a U.S. protectorate (Platt Amendment). Imperialists: Mahan (naval power/trade), Josiah Strong (racial/missionary duty). Anti-imperialists: Mark Twain, Anti-Imperialist League (self-determination). IMPORTANCE: U.S. emerges as a global imperial power. Forces first national debate over whether a republic born from anti-colonialism can justify colonial rule. CONNECTIONS: → Philippine-American War (Filipinos expected independence; got a new colonizer — U.S. suppression (1899–1902) exposed the gap between democratic rhetoric and imperial practice) | → Roosevelt Corollary (1904) (TR extended Monroe Doctrine to claim U.S. right to intervene in Latin America to "maintain stability" — Mahan's sea-lane logic applied hemispherically) | ↔ WWI Entry (both wars had ambiguous/manufactured triggers — Maine, Zimmermann Telegram — that pulled a reluctant executive into conflict via public outrage)

WWI & U.S. Entry (1917)

U.S. neutral 1914–1917. Entry triggered by: German unrestricted submarine warfare (Lusitania, 1915), Zimmermann Telegram (Germany proposes Mexico-U.S. alliance to retake TX/NM/AZ), Wilson's "make the world safe for democracy" framing. Congress declares war April 1917. IMPORTANCE: Transforms U.S. from isolationist to global military power. Triggers massive domestic repression (Espionage/Sedition Acts, CPI propaganda). The gap between Wilson's idealism and Senate rejection of the League defines the interwar period. CONNECTIONS: → Committee on Public Information (CPI manufactured pro-war public opinion through posters, films, "Four-Minute Men" — government shapes public consent) | → Espionage/Sedition Acts (entry → immediate civil liberties suppression; Eugene Debs imprisoned for anti-war speech) | → 14 Points / League failure (Wilson promises just peace, Senate rejects the League, Treaty of Versailles imposes punitive terms — idealism collapses on both ends)

Committee on Public Information (CPI)

WWI propaganda agency run by George Creel. Used posters, films, pamphlets, and "Four-Minute Men" (volunteers giving 4-minute pro-war speeches in movie theaters) to build support for the war and demonize Germany. IMPORTANCE: First large-scale federal propaganda operation. Shows how government manufactures consent — and how "patriotism" became a weapon against dissent. Fed the anti-German hysteria that justified the Espionage and Sedition Acts. CONNECTIONS: ↔ Muckraking / Free Press (Progressivism celebrated investigative truth-telling; CPI is the inversion — government-controlled information. Same era, opposite media philosophy.) | → Red Scare (1919) (CPI's anti-radical, anti-foreign propaganda primed the public for the Red Scare — once you've spent 2 years demonizing "foreign radicals," turning that fear toward domestic communists is easy) | ↔ WWII Propaganda / Japanese Internment (WWII propaganda similarly dehumanized Japanese people, providing cultural context that made internment politically feasible — same mechanism, different target)

Fourteen Points & League of Nations

Wilson's 1918 peace program: self-determination, freedom of the seas, open diplomacy, arms reduction, League of Nations (collective security). Senate rejected U.S. League membership twice (1919–20), led by Henry Cabot Lodge's "reservations" that Wilson refused to accept. IMPORTANCE: Wilson's failure = most consequential Senate defeat in U.S. foreign policy history. No League = no mechanism to stop Hitler in the 1930s. Shows constitutional constraint on presidential foreign policy (2/3 Senate required for treaties). CONNECTIONS: → Neutrality Acts (1935–37) (League failure reinforced isolationism; Congress built non-intervention into law — fighting the WWI trap they believed Wilson had walked into) | → United Nations (FDR learned from Wilson — built bipartisan support, consulted the Senate throughout; Wilson's idea, executed with political competence) | → Treaty of Versailles / WWII Origins (Wilson failed to enforce his own 14 Points in Paris; punitive reparations + German humiliation → conditions Hitler exploited)

Neutrality Acts (1935–1937)

Laws prohibiting arms sales to belligerent nations and banning American travel on belligerent ships. Designed to prevent the WWI sequence (economic entanglement → submarine incidents → war) from repeating. Passed by isolationist Congress over FDR's objections. IMPORTANCE: Peak of interwar isolationism. Directly hamstrung U.S. ability to aid Britain/France as Hitler rose. FDR invented workarounds (cash-and-carry 1937, then Lend-Lease 1941) to help the Allies while Congress blocked him. CONNECTIONS: → Lend-Lease (1941) (FDR's end-run around Neutrality Acts; U.S. "lent" weapons to Britain — effectively ended neutrality without saying so) | ↔ Wilson's WWI Neutrality (Wilson also tried neutrality before German submarines forced his hand; Neutrality Acts tried to prevent that exact sequence and failed for the same reason — direct attack) | → Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941 rendered Neutrality Acts irrelevant overnight — shows how completely a single event can overturn years of legislative policy)

Japanese American Internment / Korematsu v. US

FDR's Executive Order 9066 (1942) forcibly relocated ~120,000 Japanese Americans (2/3 U.S. citizens) to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. Korematsu v. United States (1944) — Supreme Court upheld internment 6-3 under "military necessity." IMPORTANCE: Most significant WWII civil liberties violation. Exposes the contradiction of fighting fascist racial ideology while practicing racial discrimination at home. "Double V" campaign used internment as evidence of American hypocrisy. CONNECTIONS: ↔ Schenck v. US (both show Supreme Court deference to executive wartime power; but Schenck targeted political speech, Korematsu targeted ethnicity — no individual act required, just ancestry — more radical) | ↔ Immigration Act of 1924 (same racial logic across 20 years — Asian Americans as permanently foreign/unassimilable; 1924: excluded from immigration, 1942: excluded from freedom) | → Civil Rights Movement / Period 8 (Double V campaign + hypocrisy of fighting racism abroad while practicing it at home accelerated postwar Black civil rights activism; WWII created the moral vocabulary)

WWII Home Front

U.S. mobilization: war production replaced consumer goods, women entered workforce ("Rosie the Riveter"), rationing, war bonds, African Americans migrated north for defense jobs. FDR's Executive Order 8802 (1941) banned discrimination in war industries — forced by A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington. IMPORTANCE: WWII finally ended the Depression (full employment through military spending). Permanently changed gender roles and African American expectations. EO 8802 is the first federal civil rights action since Reconstruction. CONNECTIONS: → Great Depression ends (WWII defense spending = Keynesian stimulus at massive scale; the war did what the New Deal couldn't fully accomplish) | → Women's postwar expectations / Period 8 (women entered workforce in huge numbers, then were pushed back into domestic roles after the war — creating tensions Betty Friedan documents in The Feminine Mystique) | ↔ WWI Home Front / CPI (both wars mobilized civilian production and propaganda, but WWII mobilization was far larger and had more lasting effects on gender and race)

Manhattan Project / Atomic Bomb (1945)

Secret U.S. program to develop nuclear weapons (Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos). Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (Aug 6) and Nagasaki (Aug 9), 1945 → Japan surrenders, WWII ends. Truman justified it as avoiding a costly land invasion of Japan. IMPORTANCE: Ends WWII and immediately begins the Cold War arms race. Most morally contested military decision in U.S. history. On the AP exam, it's the hinge between Period 7 and Period 8. CONNECTIONS: → Cold War / Arms Race (USSR developed its own bomb by 1949 → nuclear arms race → mutual assured destruction; the decision to use the bomb created the defining strategic condition of the next 40 years) | ↔ Japanese Internment (both involved massive government decisions affecting Japanese lives with no public accountability, justified as military necessity — both now viewed as morally compromised) | → Federal Science / Big Government (Manhattan Project created the model of federal funding for large-scale scientific research — template for NASA, NSF, and the postwar research university)

Alfred Thayer Mahan

Naval officer whose 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued national greatness depends on naval power, overseas coaling stations, and control of sea lanes. IMPORTANCE: Intellectual architect of American imperialism. Directly influenced TR and Congress to build a modern steel navy and acquire strategic territories (Hawaii, Guam, Philippines). CONNECTIONS: → Hawaiian Annexation (Mahan explicitly argued Pearl Harbor was a necessary coaling station — his influence made annexation a strategic priority) | ↔ Josiah Strong (both justify expansion; Mahan uses realpolitik — naval power, trade routes; Strong uses Social Darwinism and Protestant missionary duty — secular-strategic vs. religious-racial) | → Roosevelt Corollary (Mahan's sea-lane logic extended into TR's 1904 claim of U.S. right to intervene in Latin America)

Dust Bowl

1930s ecological disaster caused by drought + decades of over-plowing that destroyed topsoil across the Great Plains (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas). Hundreds of thousands of "Okies" migrated to California, documented by Dorothea Lange's photographs and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. IMPORTANCE: Shows the Depression was not just a financial crisis but an ecological and agricultural collapse. Structural causes beyond Wall Street. Connects to New Deal agricultural policy and the human cost of internal migration. CONNECTIONS: → Agricultural Adjustment Act (Dust Bowl devastation justified the AAA — paying farmers to reduce production to raise prices — making federal intervention in agriculture politically legitimate) | ↔ Great Migration (both are major internal migrations driven by economic catastrophe; both groups faced discrimination at destination cities — parallel KC 7.2 examples) | → New Deal Conservation (Dust Bowl discredited laissez-faire land management; FDR's CCC and Soil Conservation Service introduced the first large-scale federal environmental management programs)

Espionage Act (1917) & Sedition Act (1918)

Federal laws criminalizing interference with military recruitment, disloyalty, and anti-war speech. Eugene V. Debs (Socialist) sentenced to 10 years for an anti-war speech. Upheld by Schenck v. United States (1919) under the "clear and present danger" test. IMPORTANCE: Most significant suppression of civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The AP tests this as evidence of how wartime emergency powers expand the state at the expense of civil liberties — a pattern that repeats in WWII. CONNECTIONS: → Red Scare / Palmer Raids (Espionage Act apparatus built for WWI immediately repurposed to deport suspected radicals in 1919–20 — war emergency powers outlived the war) | ↔ Progressive Era Free Press (muckrakers operated in an era of expansive press freedom; Espionage/Sedition Acts reversed this in wartime — rights contract under crisis) | ↔ Japanese Internment (both suppress civil liberties under wartime emergency; Espionage Act targets political dissent/speech, internment targets ethnicity/race — same justification, more radical application)