The Progressive Era

Middle-Class Motherhood: Cult of Domesticity

  1. The belief that women should be devoted to the home
  2. As wealth increased, differences between genders became more pronounced
  3. Women are seen as
  4. Incapable of rational thought
  5. Clean, Pure, and mostly Decorative
  6. Morally Superior

Women and Reform

  1. Woman’s role as ‘social Housekeepers’

    1. Jane Addams - settlement houses (Hull House)

  2. Social Gospel: Responsibility of Christians to help the urban poor

  3. Women’s status as moral icons

  4. Biggest Issue: ALCOHOL!!!

    1. Women’s Christian Temperance Union

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Suffrage Movement

  1. Woman’s role as a champion for social justice reinvigorated the suffrage movement

  2. Taken from Britain, a more militant approach was used by some

    1. Leader: Alice Paul and National Women’s Party
    2. Mass pickets
    3. Hunger Strikes

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African Americans

  1. Railroads and laissez-faire attitudes led to some diversification of the Southern economy

  2. Still, the majority of Southerners lived in poverty

    1. Late start in industrialization
    2. Poorly educated workforce

  3. Farmers (tenants, sharecroppers) lived in a cycle of debt

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One Party Rule in the South

  1. Democrats had “redeemed” the South.

  2. Republican party vanquished

  3. The biggest threat to the Democratic Elite was the prospect of interracial populism

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Disenfranchisement

  1. Literacy Tests

  2. Grandfather clauses

  3. Property requirements and poll taxes also kept out poor whites

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Jim Crow Laws

  1. Legal separation of the south along race lines
  2. It began with railroad cars
  3. Segregated all public facilities by the 1890s

Jim Crow Laws

  1. Legal separation o the south along race lines

  2. It started with railroad cars

  3. Segregated all public facilities by the 1890s

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The Triumph of Gegregation

  1. Plessy v. Ferguson established the “separate but equal” doctrine

  2. Williams v. Mississippi validated the methods of disenfranchising black voters

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Two Views

  1. Faced with racist lynching mobs, economic deprivation and exploitation, and denial of civil rights, two leaders led the debate on how to respond:

  2. Booker T Washington: Stress on Economics

  3. W.E.B. DuBois: Stress on Civil Rights

    \n Booker T. Washington

  4. Reconciliation, not confrontation.

  5. Blacks would only gain political rights after economic progress

  6. “The Atlanta Compromise” known as accommodationist (Speech by Booker)

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W.E.B. DuBois

  1. Frustrated with Washington’s silence, Harvard-educated DuBois demanded equal social and political rights

  2. Met with other black intellectuals in 1905 to establish a program of protest and action known as the Niagara Movement

  3. 3 Years later founded NAACP

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Ida B. Wells

  1. Journalist and educator and leader in the civil rights movement. One of the founders of the NAACP

Progressive Era
Definition: A response to changes in American society; a movement to make a moderate political change and social improvement through government action.
Time frame: 1901 - 1917
Presidencies, Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson

Problems Progressives Identified
Political: End corruption at all levels, increase the efficiency of government, expand democracy
Economic: Big business regulation, address worker’s rights, farmers’ concerns
Social: Gap between the rich and poor, help those suffering cities
Environmental: Preserve or conserve resources
Tensions: More democracy or less? Restrict immigration or not? Ignore segregation or openly support it?
Social Classes: Middle/upper-class involvement in the progressive movement. Heavy involvement by women

Social classes why?
Middle-class white people had always held dominance in American society - feared power concentrating in hands of corporations; feared the possibility of the poor rising in revolution.
Leisure time, Protestantism, Social Gospel, fear of decline in morality, civic responsibility, sense of duty, etc.

Progressive Ideas
-Pragmatism

  • Scientific Management
    -Social Darwinism
    -Eugenics
  • Segregation

Relationship between scientific management and progressivism
-Bring Taylor’s efficiency to the government
-Improve bureaucracy, emphasize expertise, and end the corruption that weakened the sound functioning of the government

Muckrakers
Journalists who exposed problems and led people to call for change
-Ida Tarbell (Standard Oil)
-Lincoln Steffens (Political Machines)
-Jacob Riis (tenements)
Ida B. Wells (Lynching)
Upton Sinclair(Meat Packing)

National Change Overview (Result of Jungle Book)
Consumer protection
Meat inspection Act
Pure food and drug act
Creation of the Department of labor and commerce to oversee labor disputes
Federal Reserve System
Business Regulation
Elkins/ Hepburn Acts regulated railroads
Trust Busting
Northern Securities Co. (TR), Standard Oil (Taft)
Conservationism
Newlands Act
National Parks created
Amendments
16th: Income tax
17th: direct election of senators
18th: Prohibition
19th: vote for women
Had already passed civil service reform with Pendleton Act in 1883

State Changes
Political
Secret ballots
Initiative/ referendum/recall
Direct primaries
Civil Service Tests
Social Welfare (safety, schooling, limits on the death penalty)
Laws to protect children, women, laborers
Regulation of RR and public utilities

Local Changes
Control of public utilities
More elected officials in some cases (used “at large voting” to diminish the political power of immigrants)
Civil Service systems/focus on expertise to combat political machines
City beautification movements
Settlement houses
Scientific management of bureaucracy
Prison reform

Limitations of Progressivism
Labor relations are better but no major, national changes
Some help is given to farmers but not much
Power is taken from a business but back in the hands of the white middle class only