❤️❤️ CH 20 Progressive Era Notes

Introduction

Jack London's 1908 novel, The Iron Heel, describes a dystopian future where a corporate oligarchy rules the United States, reflecting the anxieties of the time.
The Gilded Age's problems, including vast wealth inequality, imperialism, urban squalor, labor strife, social changes, and political radicalism, challenged Americans.
A new generation of middle-class Americans advocated reforms to address these issues of the Gilded Age.
The Progressive Era was named for the various progressive movements seeking reforms, with diverse ideas on how to manage the country's development and protect interests.
Reformers aimed to clean up politics, secure civil rights for Black Americans, advance women's rights, and improve workers' conditions.

Mobilizing for Reform

In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan resulted in 146 deaths due to unsafe working conditions (doors chained shut).
The owners were acquitted of manslaughter charges, highlighting a trend of leniency towards business owners responsible for dangerous conditions.
Tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire fueled the demand for reform and government intervention in the economy.
Muckrakers, including journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists, exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption, arousing public demands for reform.
Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) exposed the squalor of New York City slums through vivid descriptions and photography, leading to housing reform and recognition of society's responsibility to alleviate poverty.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) revealed the brutal exploitation of labor and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, leading to the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was a popular utopian novel that inspired many to question American life in the 19th century.
Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896) was a best seller that promoted the Social Gospel movement, urging Christians to address social problems.
The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity to address the salvation of society, not simply individual souls, encouraging Christians to engage society and challenge social, political, and economic structures to help those less fortunate.
Walter Rauschenbusch advocated for the Social Gospel, emphasizing the Kingdom of God encompassing every aspect of life and society, urging Christians to enact it on Earth.
Social Gospel advocates had blind spots: they often ignored the plight of women and minority groups. The movement fueled progressive reform and inspired future activists like Martin Luther King Jr.

Women’s Movements

Reform opened possibilities for women’s activism and gave new impetus to the campaign for women’s suffrage.
Women’s clubs flourished and focused on intellectual development, philanthropic activities, and the place of women in the larger political sphere.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Association of Colored Women were particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women’s rights.
Black women formed vibrant organizations to secure suffrage, challenge discrimination, and uplift Black communities.
Carrie A. Nation gained national attention for destroying saloons, but other women worked within more reputable organizations.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), transformed by Frances Willard into a national political organization, combatted the evils of drunkenness and embraced reforms to improve social welfare and advance women’s rights.
Reformers associated alcohol with social ills, cities and immigrants, maligning America’s immigrants, Catholics, and working classes.
Jane Addams was a famous, energetic, and innovative reformer. With Ellen Gates Starr She founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. They provided services and advocated for workers and social reform.
Hull House workers surveyed their community and produced statistics on poverty, disease, and living conditions, pressuring politicians for legislation.
Addams advocated cooperation between rich and poor and bosses and workers, whether cooperation was a realistic possibility or not.
Addams became the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention in 1912 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Addams saw militarism as a drain on resources and became a prominent opponent of America’s entry into World War I.
Women’s suffrage saw slow but encouraging steps forward in the West during the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Suffragists argued that women’s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils.
The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Some suffragists argued that white women’s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association developed a dual strategy and the National Woman’s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights.
In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women’s suffrage amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality.

Targeting the Trusts

Herbert Croly argued that wealth inequality eroded democracy and reformers had to win back for the people the power usurped by the moneyed trusts.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a trust was a monopoly or cartel associated with large corporations that consolidated control over specific products or industries.
Rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves.
Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts.
Between 1897 and 1904, over four thousand companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms.
Mergers and aggressive business policies earned wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller the epithet robber barons.
The great corporations became a major target of reformers.
During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. Railroads and others opposed these regulations.
In 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws, finding that railroads and other companies of such size necessarily a ected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states.
In Munn, the court declared, “Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and a ect the community at large.
In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices. It stated that a “trust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal”.
Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.
Theodore Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts.
Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones.
His first target was the Northern Securities Company, a “holding” trust used to hold controlling shares in major railroad companies.
Roosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart.
William Howard Taft firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in o ce more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt’s seven years in o ce.
Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.
Trust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912.
Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy.
Woodrow Wilson emphasized small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances.
Wilson signed the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914, which substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers or price discrimination and protecting labor’s access to collective bargaining.
Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act.

Progressive Environmentalism

The potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history.
As American development and industrialization marched westward, reformers embraced environmental protections.
Historians often cite preservation and conservation as two competing strategies that dueled for supremacy among environmental reformers during the Progressive Era.
The tensions between these two approaches crystalized in the debate over a proposed dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California.
John Muir advocated setting aside pristine lands for their aesthetic and spiritual value, while Gifford Pinchot emphasized the e cient use of available resources.
In Hetch Hetchy, conservation won out. Congress approved the project in 1913 and the dam was built in the valley.
While preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life, the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society.
Progressive Era environmentalism also addressed issues facing the urban poor. They focused on questions of health and sanitation, worksite hazards, and occupational and bodily harm.
The progressives’ commitment to the provision of public services at the municipal level meant more coordination and oversight in matters of public health, waste management, and even playgrounds and city parks.
The Country Life movement sought to support agrarian families and encourage young people to stay in their communities and run family farms.
Early-twentieth-century educational reforms included a commitment to environmentalism at the elementary level.
The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature.
Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers—even whole birds—on ladies’ hats. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines.

Jim Crow and African American Life

The Progressive Era did not erase American’s tragic racial history. In fact, in all too many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life.
In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting.
Southern Democrats turned to disenfranchisement and segregation to “purify” the ballot box and prevent racial strife.
Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of white supremacy.
The South had become the nation’s racial vanguard.
The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race, but Mississippi devised some legal defensible substitute to eliminate the nigger from politics.
Between 1895 and 1908, the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including disenfranchisement tools.
Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed su rage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867.
Each southern state adopted an all-white primary and excluded Black Americans from the Democratic primary.
At the same time that the South’s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region’s Black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious.
White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals.
In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states, not by individuals or businesses.
In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court established the legal principle of separate but equal.
Justice John Harlan warned that the court's decision would “permit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.”
Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected Black citizenship and relegated Black social and cultural life to segregated spaces.
Activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of Black Americans.
Booker T. Washington advocated industrial education and vocational training for African Americans, as well as economic independence.
Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech from that same year encouraged Black Americans to “cast your bucket down” to improve life’s lot under segregation.
Du Bois criticized Washington in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival.
Du Bois attacked Washington and urged Black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law.

Conclusion

The Progressive Era signaled a turning point for many Americans who were suddenly willing to confront the age’s problems with national political solutions.
Reformers sought to bring order to chaos, to bring e ciency to ine ciency, and to bring justice to injustice.
Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible e ects of so much energy was di cult to measure. However, the Progressive Era signaled a bursting of long-simmering tensions and introduced new patterns in the relationship between American society, American culture, and American politics.