USH Chapter 18 Flashcards

Chapter 18 - The Progressive Era 1900–1916

Traingle Shirtwaist Fire:

• On March 25, 1911, a fire erupted at the Triangle Shirtwaist

Company in the Greenwich Village, New York City.

• The employees, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant

women, earned as little as $3 per week working sewing

machines, could not escape from the building’s top three floors.

• The owners had locked the doors to stop theft and bathroom

breaks, and fire truck ladders only reached the sixth floor. Forty-

six women jumped to their deaths, while 100 more died inside.

• The Triangle fire drew attention to the social divisions in

America in the twentieth century’s first two decades, a period

known as the Progressive era.

• Urbanization and labor conflict raised the issue of the

government’s responsibility to intervene in the economy and

mitigate social inequalities.

• The fire and its aftermath also highlighted how gender roles

were changing as women took on new responsibilities in the

workplace and in the making of public policy.

• “Progressivism” described a loosely defined movement to bring

about significant change in American society and politics.

Urban Age and a Consumer Society

• In the Progressive era, the economy grew enormously as industrial

production increased, the population boomed, and the consumer

marketplace expanded. For the last time, farms and cities grew together,

and agriculture entered its “golden age,” with growing cities demanding

more agricultural goods. Farm families poured into the western Great

Plains.

• Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma

increased by nearly 2 million people. The Dakotas, Kansas, and Nebraska

added 800,000 people. Major areas of commercial farming erupted in

Arizona and California due to irrigation.

• But the city was the focus of Progressive politics and the new mass-

consumer society, and the number of cities in the United States with a

population of more than 100,000 grew. New York was the largest with 4.7

million people.

Inequalities of Urban Life and Muckrakers

• The inequalities of urban life was apparent in the 1890s persisted, with immigrants living

in slums and the very wealthy living in isolated neighborhoods and luxurious mansions.

• J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial and

industrial capital in the nation, while more than a third of mining and factory workers

lived in poverty. The cities attracted writers and artists who captured its dynamism and

modernity.

• Others saw cities as places where corporate greed eroded traditional American values.

• A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed

the problems of industrial and urban existence.

• Lincoln Steffens’s series for McClure’s Magazine, published as The Shame of the Cities,

showed how party bosses and businessmen profited from political corruption.

• In the same magazine, Ida Tarbell pointed to the arrogance and economic machinations

of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

• Theodore Roosevelt criticized this kind of journalism, calling it “muckraking,” or the use

of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.

• Novelists produced similarly critical works of fiction, such as The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair,

whose descriptions of unsanitary slaughterhouses and rotten meat led directly to the

passage of the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Acts of 1906.

Early-Twentieth-Century Immigration

• Most characteristic of early-twentieth-century cities was the presence of immigrants. The “new

immigration” from southern and eastern Europe reached its peak in the Progressive Era.

• Most European immigrants to America entered through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, which became the

main facility for processing immigrants.

• Those who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or otherwise

undesirable, were sent home.

• By 1910, one of every seven people in America was foreign-born, the highest percentage in American

history. More than 40 % of New York’s population was born abroad, as was more than 30 percent in other

major cities like Chicago and Milwaukee.

• Many immigrants moved west, most of them settling in industrial centers. By 1910, nearly three fifths of the

workers in the twenty leading manufacturing and mining industries were foreign born.

• The new immigrants imagined America as a land of freedom, where everyone enjoyed equality before the

law, worshipped as they pleased, found economic opportunity, and were emancipated from their

homelands’ oppressive social hierarchies.

• The new wave of immigrants settled mostly in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own businesses

and community organizations and continued to speak their own language and published foreign-language

newspapers and other publications. Churches were central in these communities.

• Although most immigrants earned more in the United States than they could have at home, they faced long

hours, low wages, and dangerous working conditions in the mines, factories, and fields. “My people are not

in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”

Mass Consumption Society

• Cities were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that

gave new meaning to American freedom. The promise of American

life had always in part resided in the enjoyment of goods that in

other nations were available only to the wealthy.

• In the Progressive era, large downtown department stores, chain

stores in cities, and retail mail-order houses for rural residents make

accessible the goods produced in America’s factories.

• Some of these goods included electric sewing machines, washing

machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players.

• Leisure activities also were part of mass consumption, with mass

entertainment in amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters

attracting large crowds.

• The most popular form of mass entertainment was vaudeville, a live

theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts. In this

period, motion pictures also became a mass phenomenon, in which

even working-class moviegoers attended the “nickelodeons,” so

named because of their five-cent ticket price.

Changing Gender Roles

• Traditional gender roles also changed dramatically, as women were newly visible in public places

such as workplaces, stores, and sites of entertainment. More and more women worked for wages,

and although black and immigrant women were still confined to low-paid, low-skilled jobs, native-

born white women found expanding opportunities in white-collar work.

• Women workers were no longer only young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In

1920, of 8 million women working for wages, a quarter of them were married and living with their

husbands.

• Working women became symbols of female emancipation, showing economic independence

from men and moving beyond their traditional roles as wives and mothers.

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote Women and Economics (1898) to demonstrate that women were

seeking lifelong careers and would find their freedom through the workplace. In the home,

Gilman argued that women found oppression, as a servant to her husband and children.

• Prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom.

Their desire to participate in the new mass-consumer society caused many women, both native

and immigrant, to earn money independently of their families.

• This caused great friction, especially in immigrant families who sought to maintain their cultural

practices under constant threat of new American ways of life.

Fordism and the American Way of Life

• Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he created production and marketing

techniques that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans.

• In 1905, he founded the Ford Motor Company, only one of many small automobile

manufacturers at the time. In 1908, he introduced the Model T, a simple and light

vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poor roads.

• Ford focused on standardizing output and lowering prices to bring a luxury good to

the masses of consumers. Ford focused on standardizing output and lowering prices,

rather than catering to an elite marking like some European competitors.

• In 1913, Ford’s Highland Park, Michigan, factory adopted the moving assembly line, in

which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt.

This process allowed to reduce the time to produce an auto, expanded its output.

• In 1914, Ford raised the wages to $5 per day, allowing him to attract skilled workers.

But assembly-line work was monotonous, and Ford used spies and armed detectives

to prevent his employees from unionizing.

• Ford justified the high wages by arguing that workers needed to be able to afford the

goods being produced by America’s factories.

• By 1916, Ford’s Model T’s were affordable for many workers. The economic system

based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism.

Scientific Management

• Progressives wanted to humanize industrial capitalism and find common ground

in a society seemingly fragmented by labor conflict and mass immigration.

• While some desired a return to a competitive marketplace of small producers,

others accepted the large corporation and looked to the government to combat a

growing concentration of wealth and ensure social justice.

• Others located freedom in a private sphere of personal fulfillment and self-

expression. Nearly all Progressives felt that freedom had to take on a new

meaning to confront early-twentieth-century social and economic realities.

• Frederick W. Taylor’s’ method of “scientific management”: a way of increasing

production and profits by scientifically studying and controlling costs and work

practices.

• Many skilled workers saw “Taylorism,” in which the role of workers became

obeying the detailed instructions of their supervisors, as an assault on their

traditional control over work processes, and thus, a loss of freedom.

Economic Freedom

• The Socialist Party, founded in 1901, united late 19th-century radicals such as Populists and followers of

Edward Bellamy with parts of the labor movement.

• The party called for immediate reforms like free college, laws to improve working conditions, and it

ultimately proposed democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and

factories.

• By 1912, the Socialist Party had 150,000 dues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers, had

significant support in the American Federation of Labor, and elected dozens of local officials.

• Socialism flourished in immigrant communities, such as among Jews in the Lower East Side in New York City

and Germans in Milwaukee and gained support among farmers in old Populists states like Oklahoma and

mining regions in Idaho and Montana.

• Most important in spreading socialist ideas and linking socialism to American ideals of equality, self-

government, and freedom was Eugene V. Debs, the former railroad union leader jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894.

• Debs united the disparate and often dueling factions of the party including New York’s Jewish immigrants,

prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals.

• As socialism gained in strength in Europe, particularly in the Atlantic world, Debs led socialism forward in

America, too. In 1912, he received 900,000 votes for president, nearly 6 percent of the total, and the

socialist newspaper, Appeal To Reason, had the largest weekly circulation in the nation.

Labor Unions

• American Federation of Labor (AFL) membership tripled to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904,

while its leaders became closer to corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a means to

stabilizing labor relations.

• Samuel Gompers president of the AFL, joined with large capitalists in the National Civic

Federation, which accepted workers’ rights to collective bargaining in “responsible” unions.

• The National Civic Federation (NCF) helped settle hundreds of industrial disputes and improved

safety and created pensions for long-term workers.

• But most employers still adamantly opposed unions. The AFL mostly represented America’s most

privileged workers: skilled industrial and craft labor, mostly all white, male, and native-born.

• In 1905, unionists rejecting the AFL’s exclusionist approach formed the Industrial Workers of the

World. The IWW was both a union and a revolutionary organization dedicated to seizing the

means of production and abolishing the state, and it made solidarity its guiding principle.

• It sought to organize all workers excluded from the AFL: immigrant factory workers, migrant

timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the Chinese.

• The IWW’s most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who critics dubbed as, “the

most dangerous man in America.”

Mass Strikes

• Mass strikes by immigrant workers placed workers’ demand to bargain collectively with employers at the

front of Progressive reform.

• The strikes showed that ethnic divisions might impede labor solidarity, but that ethnic cohesiveness could be

a basis of unity, if strikes were organized democratically.

• In 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after men, women, and child workers there went on strike against pay

cuts and legislation which limited the working week to 54 hours. The IWW forged the strikers into a united

group, survived militia and police attacks, and won the strike on the unions’ terms.

• At this strike a famous labor slogan was born: “We want bread and roses, too.”

• Another famous strike was the 1907 New Orleans dockworkers strike, in which black and white workers

made an uncommon cross-racial alliance to resist pay cuts and attacks on their unions.

• Perhaps the most famous strike was a failure, the strike by the United Mine Workers against the Rockefeller-

owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company for union recognition, wage increases, an eight-hour day, and the

right to live and shop in places not owned by the company.

• The owners responded to the strike by evicting strikers from their houses, and after armed militias

surrounded a tent colony erected by the strikers, they attacked the tent city in April 1914, killing up to thirty

men, women, and children in what became known as the Ludlow Massacre.

• After the Ludlow Massacre, labor organizer, Mary “Mother” Jones argued that the union “had only the

Constitution: the other side held the bayonets.” Union struggles put free speech at the center of Progressive

reform.

• Even while courts rejected unions’ claims to be exercising First Amendment rights, labor struggles created

the modern demands of civil liberties so critical in the twentieth century.

Feminism

• “Feminism” first became a widely used word in the Progressive era. Inspired by the

writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist Alliance, a small organization of

New York professional women, developed plans to aid women in their community

by building apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare

centers, to free women from the constraints of the home.

• In 1914, a mass meeting in New York that debated the question, “What Is

Feminism?” was organized by Heterodoxy, a women’s club in Greenwich Village.

• New Feminism’s attack on traditional gender norms and sexual behavior added a

new dimension to the idea of personal freedom.

• Women’s growing presence in the labor market strengthened demands for birth

control, giving political expression to changes in sexual behavior. In the 19th

century, the right to “control one’s body” meant the ability to refuse sexual

advances, including those of a husband, but now it meant enjoying an active sexual

life without necessarily bearing children.

• Emma Goldman, an anarchist and Lithuanian immigrant, regularly wrote and

lectured about the right to birth control, called for a more enlightened view of

homosexuality, and was arrested frequently.

• Margaret Sanger placed birth control at the center of the new feminism. By 1914,

after facing censorship from the U.S. Post Office for writing about how to use birth

control, she openly advertised birth-control devices in her journal, The Woman

Rebel.

• She argued no woman could be free who did not control her own body and

decisions about whether to become a mother. In 1916, when Sanger opened a

clinic in a working-class area of Brooklyn and started giving contraceptive devices

to poor Jewish and Italian women, she was jailed for a month. Labor radicals and

cultural modernists, not just feminists, promoted Sanger and birth control.

Native Americans

• Native Americans also shared the Progressive impulse. The

Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, was a typical

reform organization.

• It united Indian intellectuals around the discussion of Native

Americans’ problems and sought to arouse public awareness.

• It brought together Indians from many different backgrounds

and created a pan-Indian public space free from white influence.

Many in the Society shared the basic goals of federal Indian

policy, including transforming communal lands on the

reservations into family farms.

• But the group’s founder, Carlos Montezuma, became an avowed

critic who condemned government paternalism and demanded

the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

• He called for self-determination and for Indians to be granted full

citizenship. Montezuma’s writings had little influence at the

time, but Indian activists would later rediscover him as a

forerunner of Indian radicalism.

New Progressive ideas

• John Dewey was one of the foremost proponents of a school of philosophy called

pragmatism, which insisted that institutions and social policies must be judged by their

concrete effects, not their longevity or how well they comport with religious doctrine or

traditional political beliefs.

• Experience, pragmatists insisted, was more important than doctrine. Some saw

pragmatism as a way of using evidence to moderate conflicts between religion and

science.

• For others, the outlook encouraged an experimental approach to social problems

characteristic of Progressivism.

• Dewey was a founder of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which

stressed the importance of scientifically evaluating public policy.

• The idea that with proper information, social improvement could be achieved, was widely

shared among American Progressives, as well as their counterparts in other countries.

• Gilded Age mayors Hazen Pingree and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones pioneered urban

Progressivism. Pingree battled the business interests that had dominated city

government, forced gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a

municipal power plant.

• Jones instituted an eight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil

drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, he founded night schools and free

kindergartens, built new parks, and supported the right of workers to unionize.

• Since state legislatures defined the powers of city government, urban Progressives often

carried their campaigns to the state level. Pingree became governor of Michigan in 1896,

in which post he continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests.

Political Reformers

• Important populists in the West were Hiram Johnson of California and

Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Oregon stood at the forefront of

Progressive reform. Progressives established the Oregon System, which

included direct legislature, direct primaries, initiative, referendum, and

the recall.

• Women gained suffrage in the state. The Oregon System was supported

by middle-class reformers, and reform-minded workers and farmers.

• Other states adopted the Oregon System. In California, Progressives

dismantled the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

• In Wisconsin, Robert La Follette made the state a “laboratory for

democracy.” Instituted a series of reforms called the Wisconsin Idea,

which included primary elections, taxation of corporate wealth, and

state regulation of utilities.

• Wisconsin offered the most striking merger of the social and political

impulses that went under the name of Progressivism.

• Progressives wanted to restore democracy by returning political power

to citizens and civic harmony to a divided America.

• Afraid of violent class conflict and corporate power, they thought

political reforms would help create a unified “people” devoted to

greater democracy and social reconciliation. But increasing government

power made it more necessary to determine who should be able to

participate in politics.

Women and Progressive Politics

• Unable to vote and hold office in most states, women were central to

Progressive politics. They were moved to act most often by the conditions

faced by poor immigrant communities and women and child workers. The

era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams.

• Addams never married and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago, a

“settlement house” dedicated to improving the lives of the immigrant

poor.

• Settlement-house workers moved into poor neighborhoods, built and ran

schools, employment bureaus, and health clinics, and helped women

victims of domestic abuse. By 1910, more than 400 settlement houses

had been established in cities around the nation.

• Through settlement and other social work, these women learned that

legislation was necessary for dealing with housing, income, and health

inequalities.

• Hull House led several campaigns for legislation in Illinois, around shorter

working hours, workplace safety, and union organizing rights, which

inspired others to do likewise.

• In the South, however, race affected reform, as ending child labor was

justified as necessary for giving white children the education they would

need as members of the South’s ruling race.

• The settlement houses have been called “spearheads of reform,” as they

produced prominent Progressive leaders, such as Florence Kelley, who

organized the National Consumers’ League to use purchasing power to

force manufacturers to improve working conditions

Women’s Suffrage- A Mass Movement

• After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage became a mass movement for the first time. The National

American Woman Suffrage Association’s membership grew. By 1917, and its campaigns had some success in

states, half of which allowed women to vote in local elections regarding schools.

• It won woman suffrage in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. The West also led the way in women holding

public office. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more western states gave women the vote.

• These campaigns were conducted with a new spirit of militancy, and used modern methods of advertising,

publicity, and entertainment characteristic of a mass consumer society. But state campaigns were costly, and

increasingly efforts focused on gaining suffrage at the national level.

• Many Progressive proposals emerged from the idea that the state should protect women and children, and

female reformers formed a movement for improving the lives of poor mothers and children.

• In the landmark case, Muller v. Oregon (1908), the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the arguments of Louis D.

Brandeis that long hours of labor were dangerous for women, whose child-bearing abilities required

government protection.

• This was the first major breach of “liberty of contract” doctrine, just three years after the Lochner decision,

which invalidated a New York law limiting the working hours of male bakers.

• But the costs of Muller were high, as while even more states passed protective laws for women workers,

these laws both benefited women and tied them to their family roles and kept reinforced gender

discrimination and exclusion in labor markets.

• Though the use of government to regulate working conditions raised questions about liberty of contract,

maternalistic policies built gender inequality into the early foundations of the welfare state.

Progressive Presidents

• Theodore Roosevelt was the first of the Progressive-era presidents. As vice president,

Roosevelt became the youngest president ever to hold office after an anarchist

assassinated William McKinley in 1901. He was an impetuous and energetic man who

celebrated the “strenuous life” of manly adventure and daring.

• Roosevelt advanced a program he called the “Square Deal,” which addressed problems

of economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations.

• Soon after taking office, Roosevelt shocked the business world by prosecuting the

Northern Securities Company, a “holding” company created by the financier J. P.

Morgan to run three western railroads that monopolized rail transport between the

Great Lakes and the Pacific. In 1904, the Supreme Court handed the antitrust

movement a significant victory by ordering Northern Securities dissolved.

• Roosevelt also believed the president should help settle labor disputes as a neutral third

party, and not simply act in favor of business, as had previous presidents.

• In 1902, when a strike paralyzed the coal industry, he brought union leaders and

managers to the White House and settled the strike by appointing a commission.

• Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt advocated more direct economic regulations, including

reinforcing the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), whose powers had been

restricted by the Supreme Court.

• In 1906, public opinion had shifted in support of Roosevelt, and Congress passed the

Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to set railroad rates, an important step in giving

the federal government regulatory power.

Conservation policy

• In the 1890s, the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir founded the Sierra

Club to help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging from timber

corporations.

• He believed that his sight was restored so that he could appreciate the

natural beauty of “God’s creations.” For example, he called forests “God’s

first temples.”

• Like the Transcendentalists, he lamented the intrusion of civilization on the

natural environment. Muir developed a broad following as Americans came

to see nature as a place for recreation and personal growth.

• Roosevelt was also an avid outdoorsman. While the United States led the

world in conserving wilderness areas, having established the first national

park at Yellowstone in 1872, it had no national conservation policy until

Roosevelt’s administration.

• He ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and

urged the creation of new national parks. Conservation was typically

Progressive in some ways.

• Experts would help the government serve the public good while preventing

“special interests” from damaging the environment.

• But conservation also served efficiency and control, as it aimed to control

the exploitation of minerals and forests on national lands, not prevent it.

• In the West, water was especially scarce and required regulation to

conserve and distribute it fairly.

William Howard Taft

• Roosevelt’s successor to run for president in 1908 was William Howard Taft, a

federal judge from Ohio and former governor of the Philippines.

• Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan in his third unsuccessful run for the

presidency. Taft was Progressive in that he believed government should go beyond

laissez-faire principles of the nineteenth century, and he pursued antitrust more

aggressively than had Roosevelt.

• In 1911, he convinced the Supreme Court to declare John D. Rockefeller’s Standard

Oil Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered its breakup into

separate companies.

• This case, along with a similar prosecution of the American Tobacco corporation,

allowed the government to distinguish between “good” companies and the “bad”

companies that stifled competition.

• Taft also supported the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized Congress to

establish a graduated national income tax, thus giving the national government a

more reliable and flexible revenue source than the tariff.

• But despite his Progressive policies, Taft tended to ally himself with the more

conservative wing of the Republican Party, and a dispute in 1910 with reform-

minded officials within his administration alienated Progressives.

• Richard A. Ballinger, the secretary of the interior, decided to return some of

Roosevelt’s claimed land back to the public domain.

• Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger of colluding with business interests and forsaking

Progressive environmental goals.

• When Taft fired Pinchot, the breach with Party progressives became to deep to

repair. In 1912, when Roosevelt failed in challenging Taft for the Republican

nomination, he launched the new and independent Progressive Party.

1912 Presidential Campaign

• The different tendencies in Progressive thought were expressed in the 1912 presidential campaign, which saw a four-way contest

among Taft, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson (the Democratic candidate), and the Socialist Eugene V. Debs.

• They each took a different position in what became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in

the age of big business. Taft, the most conservative, argued that economic individualism could still be the basis of society if business

and government worked together to solve social ills.

• Debs stood at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Taft, and although most Americans did not support the Socialists’

revolutionary goals, their proposals for public ownership of railroads and banks, unemployment assistance, and laws limiting working

hours and setting a minimum wage were typically Progressive.

• But it was the fight between Roosevelt and Wilson over the federal government’s role in the economy that captivated most voters in

1912. While they both believed government was necessary to preserve individual freedom, they disagreed about the dangers of

increasing government power. Wilson, believing in states’ rights and laissez-faire, was Progressive in his policies as New Jersey’s

governor, where he helped create workmen’s compensation and state regulation of utilities and railroads.

• To Roosevelt and his supporters, Wilson’s program was outdated, as it focused on small business but ignored inevitable economic

concentration and the interests of professionals, consumers, and labor. Roosevelt’s program, the New Nationalism, accepted bigness

and the need for strong government regulation to check its abuses.

• Roosevelt proposed heavy personal and corporate taxes and federal regulation of industries such as rail, mining, and oil. His

Progressive Party adopted a platform with many other Progressive reforms, such as woman suffrage, an eight-hour day and living wage

for workers, and a national system of social insurance covering medical care, unemployment, and old age. This program contained

much of the agenda that came to define liberalism in the twentieth century.

Woodrow Wilson

• The split in the Republican Party gave Wilson a resounding victory, although Roosevelt came in

second, embarrassing Taft. Wilson became a strong and effective president.

• He regularly dealt with Congress regarding legislation, and he was the first president to hold

regular press conferences. He was also the first president to deliver messages personally to

Congress.

• With Democrats controlling Congress, Wilson pushed to implement his Progressive vision. He

passed the Underwood Tariff, which reduced duties on imports but made up for them with a

graduated income tax on the wealthy.

• The Clayton Act of 1914 exempted unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing

injunctions that limited workers’ right to strike.

• Other laws outlawed child labor, limiting work in railroads to eight hours per day, and gave

credit to farmers who stored their crops in government warehouses.

• Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in line with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism than his own

New Freedom agenda of 1912, and he abandoned antitrust for more government economic

regulation.

• Wilson pushed Congress to create the Federal Reserve System in 1913, which gave government-

regulated banks the ability to issue currency, help failing banks, and influence interest rates. In

1914, at Wilson’s urging, Congress also created the Federal Trade Commission, tasked with

investigating and prosecuting “unfair” business activity such as price fixing and monopoly.

• By 1916, Progressive-era efforts had vastly increased the powers of the national state.

Government had established rules for labor relations, business behavior, and financial policy,

protected citizens from market abuses, and acted as broker among the groups whose conflicts

threatened to destroy social harmony

CHAPTER 18 OUTLINE

I. Introduction: Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire

B. City Expansion and Social Inequality

C. Progressive Reformers

II. An Urban Age and a Consumer Society

A. Farms and Cities

1. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together.

2. American agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its golden age.

3. It was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass-consumer society.

a. New York was the largest city

B. The Muckrakers

1. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life.

a. Lincoln Steffens

2. Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills.

a. Upton Sinclair

C. Immigration as a Global Process

1. Between 1901 and 1914, 13 million immigrants came to the United States, many through Ellis Island.

2. Industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture set in motion a larger process of worldwide migration.

3. A large part of this migration shift occurred in Asia.

4. Asian and Mexican immigrants entered the United States in smaller numbers.

a. Asians entered through Angel Island.

D. The Immigrant Quest for Freedom

1. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom.

a. Some immigrants were birds of passage, who planned on returning to their homeland.

2. The new immigrants clustered in close-knit ethnic neighborhoods.

E. Consumer Freedom

1. The advent of large department stores in central cities, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents made the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories available to consumers throughout the country.

2. Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption.

a. Vaudeville

F. The Working Woman

1. Traditional gender roles were changing dramatically as more and more women were working for wages.

a. Married women were working more.

2. The working woman became a symbol of female emancipation.

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman claimed that the road to woman’s freedom lay through the workplace.

4. Battles emerged within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously "free" children, especially daughters.

G. The Rise of Fordism

1. Henry Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering the price of automobiles.

2. Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line.

3. Ford paid his employees five dollars a day so that they could afford to buy his cars.

H. The Promise of Abundance

1. Economic abundance would eventually come to define the American way of life, in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods.

2. Earning a living wage came to be viewed as a natural and absolute right of citizenship.

a. Father John A. Ryan

3. Mass consumption came to occupy a central place in descriptions of American society and its future.

III. Varieties of Progressivism

A. Industrial Freedom

1. Frederick W. Taylor pioneered scientific management.

a. Eroded freedom of the skilled workers

2. Many believed that unions embodied an essential principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves.

B. The Socialist Presence and Eugene Debs

1. Socialism flourished in diverse communities throughout the country.

a. New York

b. Milwaukee

2. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) provides part of Gilman’s book Women and Economics (1898), in which she argues that economic freedom is the key to true liberation.

3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes part of a speech by John Mitchell, the head of the United Mine Workers, on "The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty" (1910).

4. Eugene Debs was socialism’s loudest voice.

5. He ran for president in 1912 on the Socialist ticket.

C. AFL and IWW

1. The AFL sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders who were willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations.

2. A group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary policies formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

D. The New Immigrants on Strike

1. Immigrant strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of unity.

2. The Lawrence strike demonstrated that workers sought not only higher wages but also the opportunity to enjoy the finer things in life.

E. Labor and Civil Liberties

1. The courts rejected the claims of labor.

2. Labor unions fought for the right to assemble and speak freely.

F. The New Feminism

1. Feminists’ forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the discussion of personal freedom.

2. Issues of intimate personal relations that were previously confined to private discussion blazed forth in popular magazines and public debates.

G. The Birth-Control Movement

1. Emma Goldman lectured on sexual freedom and access to birth control.

2. Margaret Sanger placed the issue of birth control at the heart of the new feminism.

3. The birth-control issue became a crossroads where the paths of labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected.

H. Native Americans and Progressivism

1. The Society of American Indians was founded in 1911 as a reform organization independent of white control.

2. Carlos Montezuma became an outspoken critic, demanding that all Indians be granted full citizenship.

IV. The Politics of Progressivism

A. Effective Freedom

1. Progressivism was an international movement; cities throughout the world experienced similar social strains from rapid industrialization and urban growth.

2. Drawing on the reform programs of the Gilded Age and the example of European legislation, Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious government.

3. Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful government posed a threat to freedom because their understanding of freedom was itself in flux.

B. Pragmatism

1. The philosopher John Dewey was a prominent proponent of a school of philosophy called pragmatism that emerged in the late 1800s and strongly influenced Progressive thinkers.

2. As a philosophical movement, pragmatism, as explained in a 1907 book by the philosopher William James, insisted that institutions and policies must be judged by their concrete effects, not their longevity or adherence to traditional beliefs.

3. Pragmatism encouraged an experimental approach to social problems, characteristic of Progressivism.

4. Dewey was a founder of the New School for Social Research in New York City, which stressed the importance of scientifically evaluating public policy.

a. The idea that social improvement could be achieved with proper information was widely shared among American Progressives.

C. State and Local Reforms

1. State and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures.

2. The Gilded Age mayors and governors pioneered urban Progressivism.

D. Progressivism in the West

1. The Oregon System instituted the initiative and referendum.

a. Initiatives, also known as direct legislation, enabled citizens to propose and vote directly on laws, bypassing state legislatures.

b. Referenda similarly provided for popular votes on public policies.

c. Recalls allowed for the removal of public officials by popular vote.

2. The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M. La Follette, who made Wisconsin a "laboratory for democracy."

E. Progressive Democracy

1. Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society.

2. But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation.

a. Voting was seen more as a privilege for a few.

F. Jane Addams and Hull House

1. Organized women reformers spoke for the more democratic side of Progressivism

2. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago.

3. The "new woman" was college educated, middle class, and devoted to providing social services.

4. Settlement houses produced many female reformers.

G. The Campaign for Women’s Suffrage

1. The campaign for women’s suffrage became a mass movement.

2. By 1900, over half the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues.

H. Maternalist Reform

1. Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s roles within the home did much to inspire the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement.

2. Muller v. Oregon upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women.

a. Louis Brandeis

b. A breach in "liberty of contract" doctrine

V. The Progressive Presidents

A. Theodore Roosevelt

1. The Square Deal attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between "good" and "bad" corporations.

2. Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company.

3. He improved the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and regulated the food and drug industries.

B. John Muir and the Spirituality of Nature

1. The United States led the industrial world in efforts to preserve natural beauty.

a. Congress created Yellowstone National Park in 1872 with future tourism in mind.

2. John Muir developed a broad following for his evangelical romanticizing of nature.

3. Muir’s Sierra Club led the fight against uncontrolled logging by timber companies.

C. The Conservation Movement

1. Congress began regulating the economic development of "forest reserves," but President Roosevelt made conservation a federal policy.

2. Conservation also reflected the Progressive thrust toward efficiency and control.

D. Taft in Office

1. Taft pursued antitrust policy even more aggressively than Roosevelt.

2. He supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

3. Progressive Republicans broke from Taft after the Ballinger-Pinchot affair.

E. The Election of 1912

1. The election was a four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and the Socialist Eugene Debs.

a. It became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business.

F. New Freedom and New Nationalism

1. Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market competition and freeing government from domination by big business.

2. Roosevelt called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and for federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.

3. The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice.

G. Roosevelt’s Americanism

1. A redefinition of what it meant to be an American united many strands of Progressive-era thought.

2. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism was one example.

a. Roosevelt wanted immigrants to "Americanize" rather than retain traditional cultures.

b. He believed that fitness for citizenship was both inborn and related to past historical experience.

c. Only persons with "self-control"—mainly white people—were capable of participating in democracy.

H. Wilson’s First Term

1. Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader.

2. With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his version of Progressivism.

a. Underwood Tariff

b. Clayton Act

I. The Expanding Role of Government

1. Wilson presided over the creation of two powerful new public agencies.

a. Federal Reserve System

b. Federal Trade Commission