Unit 2 Class Notes

2/17 Progressive Era

Challenges as Working People Saw Them: unsafe conditions, child labor, lack of education, lack of healthcare & sanitation, unions keep losing strikes in courts & courts of public opinions

Challenges as Professional People Saw Them: low productivity, unions shutting things down, corporate companies consolidating

Both faced: alcohol use, education, sanitation, working hours

Working Class Progressives’ Questions:

• can/should we “nationalize” mines & factories, as workers are demanding around the world

• how can we get big businesses to pay their “fair share” for the cost of infrastructure (schools, railroads, roads, public parks)

• how can we get federal, state, and local governments to better “protect” working families from financial and health calamities?

• how can we get big businesses to offer a minimum wage, limited workdays, and safety protections at work?

• how can we help more workers feel more in control over their lives & mechanized jobs?

Goals of the Progressive Era

1. Pass laws (& constitutional amendements if necessary) to constrain the abuses of big business and enforce a more democratic republic.

Trust Busting

Sherman AntiTrust Act (1890): “Every contract, comination in the form of trust or other-wise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states,…is hereby declared to be illegal.”

• faciliated trusts becoming mergers

• Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914): sought to investigate & break up holding companies and other discrete efforts to restrain trade

• bad trusts v. good trusts

Eugene Debs, “Socialism Only Cure For Trust Evils,” 1911:

• trusts are the future; harness them for the people

• “to deal intelligently with the trust we must know, first of all, that the trust we must know, first of all, that the trust is simply the twentieth-century tool of production, distribution, and exchange, and from the Socialist point of view there is but one question in reference to the trust that confronts the people, and that is shall the trust be privately owned by a relatively few and operated for their fabulous enrichment, or shall it be owned by the people in their collective, organized and enlightened capacity and operated for the benefit of all?”

Social Gospel Movement

• Partnerships between the churches and the labor movement to help workers win strikes (improve wages and working conditions, and get union recognition)

• Church investment in “redeeming sin in society,” recognizing the use of people for profit as sinful

  The Federal Council of Churches stands (1908)

  • all protestant denominations make a list of morally right things to do in relation to the progressive era- there are moral principles we ought to guide ourselves by

  • equal rights & complete justice (against child labor & sweat shops)

  • not support for the workers necessarily, but more of a middle-ground

  • tending to both justice and their richer members

“Progressive” Republicans, 1912 Bull Moose Party, advocated:

• labor reform

  • social insurance for elderly, unemployed, disabled

  • 8 hours day

  • protection for women’s work, the minimum wage for women

• campaign “graft” reform

  • disclosure requirements for campaign contributions

  • registration of lobbyists

• “updates” to the constitution

  • expansion of women’s suffrage to (at minimum) “domestic concerns” (local elections, school board elections)

  • direct election of senators

  • referendum, recall, initiative (petitions leading to popular vote)

Progressive Laws

• state laws mandating “mothers’ pensions”

• departments of public health in states and cities with inspectors who inspected workplaces and public buildings

• housing and sanitation reforms

• meat inspection act (1906)

• restrictions of human trafficking

• expansions of public education systems and efforts to restrict child labor

WCTU, “Home Protection”

2/24

Warren Harding: Republican Party, “Return to Normalcy”

• called himself a defender of law & order, America First

• League of Nations predated him

Harding Administration

• “American Plan” - no more protections for collective bargaining rights

  • class strife was “selfish” and “unamerican”

• Strong encouragement for business owners to contribute to welfare capitalism schemes (benefit plans) instead

• Celebration of business as a primary calling of the nation

  • American “standard of living” increased, more funding for schools and public facilities

• Celebration of white anglo-Protestantism as the definition of “all-American”

• extralegal violence perpetrated by the KKK

Welfare Capitalism

• “Profit sharing” (bonuses?) to workers who participated in employee-sponsored socializing, including dance halls, sports teams, and other recreation

• employer-sponsored “holidays” and healthcare

• employer oversight into the personal lives (social time) of their workers

How US Businesses Secured their Market Dominance

1. Bought stock

Public Schools Expanded

• One room schoolhouses expanded to “graded” schools

• In many states, the number of public “grammar schools” and “high schools” expanded dramatically

• Also, public schools limitied to white children in the South and mich of the midwest

“Every Man a Speculator”

• widespread stock purchasing, including purchasing on margin, among middling class folks

• Investment Clubs (mutual funds)

Agricultural Depressions and Disasters

• a series of floods, droughts and natural disasters

• poor nutrition

• disease

Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Acts

Segregation expanded and more enforced: what is white?

• Osawa v. United States, 1922

• Osawa applied for naturalization to citizenship in the territory of Hawaii, showing his “white skin”

  • graduated high school in California, spent a few years in college, attended church

  • Court grants that he is clearly “of a race that is not caucasian”

  • whiteness defined as “caucasian”

Immigrant Neighborhoods in Big Cities substantially transformed

• more pressure to send children of immigrants to “American”

Ku Klux Klan goals

• temperance (enforce prohibition)

• immigration restriction (from southern and eastern Europe)

• “100 Percent American”

2/26

The Great Depression & the New Deal

Widespread Poverty in Rural South Since the 1920s

• a series of floods, droughts, and natural disasters

• Poor nutrition (previously subsisting on salt pork, beans, peas, cornmeal, molasses, and whatever folks could hunt or fish)

• Disease

• Tenant farmers and sharecroppers, mainly in the South, lost their livelihoods and moved to cities

Dustbowl

• Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri hit the hardest

• government encouraged farmers to grow wheat in arid areas

• farmers plowed millions of acres of land, removing native grasses that held topsoil in place

• drought created dust storms that choked both livestock and humans

• over 300,000 migrants moved to California “okies” seeking hope

Cities in the North

• stock market crash, 1929

• “runs” on bank, loss of savings accounts

• unemployment at 20%, in some cities more like 50%

• National unemployment was 24.9% in 1933

• 13 million out of work

• credit crisis

• spending almost at a standstill

• lower demand for agricultural commodities led to an agricultural recession

Depression in Midwestern Cities

• Detroit: By 1929, 4th largest city in the country, with 1.6 million people and 160,000 in the auto industry

  • auto sales declined by 75%, causing bank insolvency, and 50% unemployment

• Chicago: 1930, 2nd largest in the country, with 3.4 million people and 50% in manufacturing

  • manufacturing jobs cut in half, Black and Mexican workers had the highest unemployment rates, and many public employees owed back pay

• growth of the Socialist Labor Party and Communist Party (international) demanding government-sponsored poor relief

What Hoover boasted he did:

• reassure Americans by preserving the Federal Reserve System, banks, and loan systems (low-cost government loans to corporations in Reconstruction Finance Corporation)

• Federal investment in construction work (TVA / electrification for jobs) to provide jobs

• Much higher tariff, protecting farmers from foreign goods

• maintaining low taxation and low government expenditures

• opposed demands for public works that would result in “waste” opposed systems that would create dependency on a public dole

Communist Party Platform, 1932

• “Self determination for the Black Belt” (African Americans)

• six-hour work day with no reduction in pay

• “cooperation of all races”…“in the struggle against unemployment, oppression and terrorism”

1932 Socialist Party Platform

• $5 billion “federal appropriation for states & localities to offer relief”

• $5 billion “federal appropriation for public works and roads, reforestation, slim clearance and decent homes for the workers, by the federal government, states & cities”

• “6-hour day and 5-day work week without a reduction in wages”

• “unemployment compensation with adequate benefits, based on contributions by the government and by employers”

• Social insurance: city & state payments for people who lose a breadwinner, workmen’s compensation, maternity insurance, etc.

What FDR accomplished: A New, “New Deal Democratic Party Coalition”

• Southern and Eastern European immigrants in major Northern cities

“First New Deal” - Get Economy Functioning Again

• Assistance to bankers, farm owners, states to stay in business and issue savings and loans again

• Civilian Conservation Corps- federal funds to states for creation and maintenance of state parks

• works progress administration

  • federal writers’ project- guidebooks, translations of newspapers, interviews with formerly enslaved people

  • federal art project- funded plays, funded public murals, provided work for painters, sculptors, muralists, graphic artists

3/5 WWII

“American Neutrality”

Charles Lindbergh, “America First,” 1941

• “The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together and organize for strength.”

Four Freedoms FDR, 1941

• Equality of opportunity for youth and others. Jobs for those who can work.

• Security for those who need it.

• The ending of special privilege for few.

• The preservation of civil liberties for all.

• Enjoying the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

Freedom of speech & expression, to worship God in his own way, from want, from fear

Double V Campaign

• executive order 8802, Committee on Fair Employment Practices- to investigate and prevent discrimination in employment

• NAACP - challenges to segregation under the 14th Amendment

• Congress of Racial Equality - organized picketing and sit-ins against racial segregation

3/10 The Cold War

• US foreign aid subsidized opportunities for the world’s peoples to purchase the products of US factories

• US sold itself to its people and the world as an “arsenal of democracy” made possible by the economic system called free enterprise (capitalism)

• Investment in foreign markets, foreign humanitarian aide, and the export of American luxury are the foundation of US foreign policy

1. Through foreign aid, the US subsidized export markets abroad. Meanwhile, protective tariffs in the US meant (and European devastation) that Americans bought mostly American-made goods. (Truman Doctrine - financial & economic assistance to Greece and Turkey to keep them from relying on assistance from the USSR, giving them money to buy things from us)

   Truman Doctrine: “To ensure the peaceful development of nations, free from coercion, the Inited States has taken a leading part in establishing the United Nations…We shall not realize our objections, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes.”

   • $400 million to Greece & Turkey - “This is an investment in world freedom and peace”

   Marshall Plan (Foreign Assistance Act/European Recovery Act)

   • US provided more than $12 billion in aide to Western Europe, including the UK, France, West Germany

   • “The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products - principally from America - are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

• With European consumers hooked on American goods, European countries lowered, or eliminated, their import restrictions on US exports. Meanwhile, European countries came to rely upon the US military-industrial complex for their ongoing welfare.

2. The US sold to Americans, and to the world, the image of the United States as the arsenal of democracy

UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

• 1. “All human beings are born free & equal in dignity and human rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act…

“Military Keynesianism” & “Soft Diplomacy”

• Federal investment in dozens of new air force bases, especially in the West

• Federal grants for scholars and students in “Area Studies” - to learn about the “Third World”

• Federal grants for foreign exchange programs around the world fo college students and scholars

• Federal grants for Peace Corps, Americorps, VISTA

• US-sponsored Americans to learn foreign languages

Federal Investment in Education for GIS

• Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), aka the GI Bill, provided tuition, subsistence, books, supplies, etc.