The Progressive Era, American Imperialism, and the Great Migration
Scope of the Progressive Era
The lecture addresses the main chronology and time period associated with the Progressive Era, roughly spanning from to .
While the book Ladies of Labor by Nan Enstad focuses heavily on industrial history in Northeast cities, this lecture provides a broader national context by examining developments in the West and the South during the same period.
Historically, the narrative is situated by looking back at the map of the United States a decade before the Civil War and comparing it to the shifts occurring at the turn of the century.
Westward Expansion and the Definition of the Continental United States
Post-Mexican-American War (): The western half of what would become the United States began to be defined.
The central labor question of this time was whether new territories would allow slavery as the defining economic labor system or if they would utilize "free labor."
Free labor is defined by the relationship between workers and their labor: specifically, whether workers are paid or if their labor is owned by a master.
This question was resolved by the Civil War, which resulted in the abolition of slavery.
1898 to 1907: This period saw the final definition of what is referred to as the "Continental United States."
Territories gained official statehood and representation in the federal government during this window.
Alaska and Hawaii were organized as territories under the federal government's political mechanism but did not achieve statehood until the century.
Economic Motivations for Expansion:
Southern plantations sought larger landholdings to maintain economic superiority as existing fields "ran dry."
Economic superiority in the plantation system relied on unpaid labor (slavery), making products profitable and cheap for buyers because there were no labor costs.
Northern expansion was driven by the industrial economy, specifically the railroad and the factory system used to process raw materials like cotton, lumber, and cattle.
The expansion project involved the systematic pushing out of indigenous people through the mid- century.
By the turn of the century, expansion reached the Pacific Coast, and there was no contiguous land left to convert into new states.
The Rise of the American Empire and Colonial Projects
As westward expansion reached the coast, expansionist fever shifted toward colonial projects abroad, mirroring the British, French, Belgian, and Russian Empires.
Key Imperial Milestone Dates:
Early s (): The United States orchestrated the overthrow of the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy to establish it as a territory.
: The United States instigated a war against Spain, which was then considered to be on its "last legs."
US Acquisitions: The US defeated Spain and took over colonial holdings in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam.
Haiti ( - ): Despite Haiti being independent for years following successful slave rebellions in the century, the US orchestrated an overthrow of the Haitian government in . The US military government maintained power there until .
Ideological Justification for Empire:
The US framed itself as an "improved empire," distancing itself from the "horrible" Spanish empire and the British empire associated with "dirty minerals and slavery."
The colonial project was sold to the American public as a "civilizing mission" and a way of bringing "Western modernity" and democracy to colonized peoples.
Propaganda Analysis: Images of the time depicted colonized people (from Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico) transitioning from being oppressed under the "Spanish Yoke" or "industrial slavery" to becoming upright, well-dressed, educated, and wealth-bearing modern Western citizens.
Specifically in Panama, the US intervention was framed as a solution to disease, such as the "horrible problems" with malaria and yellow fever.
Economic Drivers: Resource Extraction and Manufacturing Circuits
Resource extraction was the primary driver of colonial and westward expansion. This included:
Logging in areas like Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec.
The discovery and extraction of oil.
Heavy agriculture such as sharecropping and fruit production.
The Manufacturing Circuit:
Raw materials were extracted and shipped to processing factories in the industrial North to be turned into usable goods.
Example: Bananas. Cold climates cannot produce bananas, so they were sourced from colonies like Hawaii or Cuba.
Port City Example: In Baltimore, laborers (predominantly African American) worked at the ports managed by white supervisors.
Technological Innovation: The use of ventilated refrigerator cars allowed manufacturers to transport perishable goods like fruit from colonies across the US rail system to consumers.
The system required extreme economic concentration: laborers at the ground level (extracting or manufacturing) were paid very low wages, while the goods moved higher up the chain for profit.
Labor Organizing, Nativism, and the Exclusion of Racialized Workers
The sites of economic growth—factories and resource extraction points (mines, forests)—were magnets for immigrant laborers.
Patterns of Immigrant Labor:
Urban Immigrants: Often stayed in one city, working in the same factory, leading to "ghettoization." While this provided a sense of community (shared language, food, religion), it resulted in overcrowding and slums.
Migrant Immigrants: Often single men (along with women in domestic roles) who followed resource lines, moving as forests were cleared or mines were exhausted.
Labor Union Tensions:
Capitalism seeks the cheapest labor and highest output (described as "one notch different than slavery").
Labor unions formed to add a "human element," fighting for worker safety, controlled hours, and higher pay.
Union Exclusion: Historically, labor organizing was reserved for white male laborers and "ethnic whites."
Racialized workers (Chinese, South Asian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and African American) were often excluded from protection.
Unions often viewed recruited racialized workers as a threat to the value of white male labor because they were often paid less, which was frequently a condition of their entry into the country.
Nativism Defined: A virulent, racist belief that the United States is best managed only by Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. It holds that Anglo-Saxons possess a "native superiority" over all other groups, including Indigenous people, African Americans, Asians, Catholics, and Jews.
In the West: Nativism led to draconian laws against Chinese and Japanese immigrants.
In the South: Nativism was manifest in the Ku Klux Klan (), focusing on anti-Black, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish agendas.
The Progressive Era: Reform, Urbanization, and Social Control
Social Ills: Reformers on both the right and left targeted five key "social ills": industrialization, urbanization, corruption (political and economic), migration, and immigration.
Divergent Reform Approaches:
Progressive/Left-Leaning: Focused on labor laws and public systems.
Conservative: Focused on religious mandates and nativism to exclude immigrants.
The Urban "Threat": Cities were labeled as dangerous sites of "disorder" and "degeneracy."
Traditional social norms were disrupted: young women working independently, living alone, and bypassing traditional family roles; Black and white people sharing blocks and streetcars.
Sites of "Vice": Alcohol, parties, sex, drugs, and jazz were concentrated in "vice districts."
Moral Panic: Huge emphasis was placed on protecting "vulnerable white women" from prostitution and urban dangers.
Resulting Policy Responses: Increased segregation, larger police forces, heightened immigration restrictions, and moral policing.
Gender Reform and the Shift from Victorian Norms
Women were central to Progressive Era reform, utilizing "science instead of religion."
Education and Fields: Women entered universities for social work, home economics, nursing, education, and urban planning—collectively termed "domestic sciences."
Public vs. Private Sphere: The -century Victorian concept of women staying in the home (private) while men occupied the world (public) was dismantled.
Working-class women moved into factory and manufacturing spaces.
Educated women (both Black and white) entered the public world to conduct case studies and charitable work.
Contextual Limit: In the s, common celebration of themes like queerness or polyamory had not yet arrived; the focus was on the basic right for women to exist in the public sphere without a male chaperone.
Post-Reconstruction South: The Rise of Jim Crow and Sharecropping
End of Reconstruction ( - ): The "Compromise of Rutherford B. Hayes" resulted in the withdrawal of federal troops and initiated "Southern Redemption."
Southern Redemption: The federal government allowed the South to define itself as long as it maintained a veneer of constitutional rights.
Northern Complacency: Specifically driven by the economic benefit of cheap cotton. Northern factory owners did not want the cost of Southern labor to rise to Northern levels.
The Jim Crow System (/ - ):
A system of geographic racial organization to maintain white supremacy.
Established hierarchical spaces (e.g., Black people forced to ride in the back of streetcars) to communicate Black inferiority.
Disenfranchisement: Swift erosion of voting rights through poll taxes, literacy tests, and "grandfather clauses" (if your grandfather couldn't vote, you couldn't vote).
Judicial Interpretation: The Supreme Court repeatedly affirmed the degradation of voting rights. By , almost no African Americans voted in the South.
The African American Response: Separatism, Resistance, and Professionalism
The Nadir: Termed by African American historians as the lowest point in their history, characterized by the lynching system—publicly orchestrated torture and killing at the hands of white vigilantes without legal recourse.
Separatism (Self-Segregation): A philosophy of "doing for ourselves" to escape white violence.
Development of Black institutions: hospitals, businesses, mutual aid organizations, and churches.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (): Spelman College and Howard University (Washington D.C.) rose as centers for a new professional class.
The rise of Black doctors, insurance companies, and firefighter brigades.
Armed Resistance: African Americans, particularly veterans of the Civil War with military and gun training, organized to resist white vigilante groups.
The Great Migration ( - ):
Roughly African Americans left the South for Northern and Western industrial areas.
Push Factors: Sharecropping, racist violence, crop failures (Mississippi River floods), and lack of opportunity.
Pull Factors: Higher paying jobs (even in menial labor like janitorial work), the chance for women to work outside white homes, lack of legal (de jure) segregation, and the presence of leisure sites (beach, clubs, concerts).
Respectability Politics and Gender in African American Movements
Uplift: The idea of bettering oneself and the community, synonymous with the Progressive Era's focus on improvement.
Respectability Politics: Adhering to strict gender norms (femininity, domesticity, marriage, heterosexuality) to counter dehumanizing stereotypes of criminality or animality.
Women's Club Movement: A political and secular movement (often church-aligned) to bring Black women into political consciousness.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (): Founded in .
Key Intellectual Leaders:
Booker T. Washington (South): Founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama; proponent of separatism and economic self-sufficiency.
W.E.B. Du Bois (North): Harvard-educated sociologist; proponent of integration and full participation in the civic and economic life of the United States.
Pan-Africanism: Both thinkers engaged with the African Diaspora, the common original root in Africa, and the global struggle against European colonization.
World War I, The Great Migration, and the Red Summer of 1919
World War I ( - ): The US entered in , with African American troops volunteering.
Motivations: Soldiers hoped to prove their patriotism and heroism to earn full citizenship rights upon return.
Reality: Soldiers faced dehumanizing segregation in training camps, many of which were located in the South.
Red Summer of 1919: A period of unrelenting racial violence as Black veterans returned home.
Over "race riots" occurred—essentially white mobs attacking Black neighborhoods in places like Atlanta, Arkansas, Omaha, Chicago, Tulsa, and East St. Louis.
Triggers for Violence: Seeing Black men in uniform, Black men refusing to move to the back of buses, or Black workers wanting to join unions.
The era closed with profound tension between economic expansion, migration, and racial status quo, setting the stage for the Great Depression in .