Introduction

• The many problems associated with the Gilded Age confronted Americans

  • Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms

Mobilizing for Reform

• In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caught fire

  • The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks, leaving over 200 women to the flames

  • By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died

  • A year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions

  • After the fire, Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges but were acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation

    • The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that saw workers’ deaths answered with little punishment of the business owners responsible for such dangerous conditions

• Events such as the Triangle Shirtwaist fire convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy

  • Reformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation’s poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order

  • Journalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice

  • Americans were urged to action not only by books and magazines but by preachers and theologians as well

    • The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century

      • Social gospel emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society and not simply individual souls

      • Social gospel advocates encouraged Christians to engage society; challenge social, political, and economic structures; and help those less fortunate than themselves

Women’s Movements

• Reform opened new possibilities for women’s activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women’s suffrage

  • Women’s clubs flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

    • In the 1890s women formed national women’s club federations, which were significant in campaigns for suffrage and women’s rights

  • Other women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life

    • The temperance movement also helped women’s suffrage

      • Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease

• It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life

• Women’s suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts

  • Many suffragists argued that women’s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils

• Many suffragists adopted a much crueler message

  • Some, even outside the South, argued that white women’s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy

• The final push for women’s suffrage came on the eve of World War I, when 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

• Many reformers believed 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 the large corporations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras who entered into agreements to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity

    • Some powerful entities were able to use trusts to control entire national markets, which was new and unsettling

• The rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves

  • Once dominant in a market, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians

• Big business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system

  • And as more and more power and capital and market share flowed to the great corporations, the onus of regulation passed to the federal government

• 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, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations

  • It declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that “unreasonably” stifled free

  • The courts seized on the law’s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions

  • Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation

• Aggression against the trusts—and the progressive vogue for “trust-busting”—took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt

  • Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts

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

• While reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities

Jim Crow and African American Life

• America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era, in fact, reform often removed African Americans ever farther from American public

• In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting

  • Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of “negro domination” and of Black men violating white women

  • The region’s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated

• The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement

  • The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race

  • It began with African Americans hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding them from political power

  • The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud

• 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

  • While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference

  • The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South

• Segregation was built on a fiction—that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans

  • Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of “separate but equal.”