# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ida B. Wells: Crash Course Black American History #20

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America in 20th Century The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.body
Use the McGraw Hill textbook to answer the questions

# data[].attributes.body
The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
America in the 20th Century_ The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.body
The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.headline
Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives”

# data[].attributes.subject
Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives”

# data[].attributes.body
link

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Layman's Sermon - Jacob Riis: Revealing "How the Other Half Lives" | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jacob Riis delivered his first lecture, "How the Other Half Lives and Dies in New York," on January 22, 1888, at the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York. Terry Borton of the American Magic-Lantern Theater has created the abridged version of the lecture playing here, which is based on a transcript of an illustrated talk Riis delivered in Washington, D.C., in 1891.

# data[].attributes.body
Video

# data[].attributes.body
with Dr. Byrd

# data[].attributes.body
worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
Using Primary Sources

# data[].attributes.body
Benchmark Note Cards

# data[].attributes.body
Benchmark Skill Activities

# data[].attributes.body
Visual Summary

# data[].attributes.body
Lesson 3

# data[].attributes.body
Lesson 2

# data[].attributes.body
Lesson 1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ch 6 Lesson 1 The Roots of Progressivism

# data[].attributes.body
Overview

# data[].attributes.body
PPT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version After the United States entered World War I, many suffrage supporters argued that women should receive the vote as a war measure. Adoption of women's suffrage would prove that the allies were fighting for democracy. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support for a women's suffrage amendment. That year Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota gave women the vote. Additionally, the House of Representatives ratified a suffrage amendment by the precise two-thirds vote needed for passage.

Ratification was repeatedly defeated in the Senate. It was not until 1919, when Republicans had a majority, that the Senate finally passed what would become the 19th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. One member of Congress left his wife's deathbed to vote on ratification. When he returned home, she was dead.

Within six days of Congress' ratification of the amendment, six states also ratified the amendment. To become part of the Constitution, the amendment had to be ratified by 36 states. In March 1920, West Virginia, by a single vote, became the 34th state to ratify. Washington State quickly followed.

There appeared to be one state left to go. But Ohio's state constitution provided for a voter referendum to confirm the legislature's ratification of a constitutional amendment. Petition drives were mounted in other states to reverse their ratification of the amendment. In June 1920, the Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio referendum provision was unconstitutional, ending the threat of reversals in other states.

All eyes turned to Tennessee, which seemed to be the most likely remaining state to ratify the amendment. At the urging of President Wilson, the governor called a special session. The decisive vote was cast by the assembly's youngest member, Harry Burn, who was just 24 years old and had earlier opposed ratification. He said that he changed his vote after receiving a letter from his mother, urging him to be a good boy and "help Mrs. Catt put rat in Ratification." The measure passed 49 votes to 47 votes. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

In 1920, the United States became the 27th country to give women the vote, after countries such as Denmark, Mexico, New Zealand, and Russia. In fact, most of these countries adopted women's suffrage during or immediately after World War I.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version After the United States entered World War I, many suffrage supporters argued that women should receive the vote as a war measure. Adoption of women's suffrage would prove that the allies were fighting for democracy. In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson announced his support for a women's suffrage amendment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version Liquor manufacturers and saloon owners opposed suffrage out of fear that women would vote to ban alcohol sales. The suffrage amendment was not ratified until a year after the country adopted prohibition. Some business interests opposed suffrage out of fear that women would vote against the use of child labor and for limitations on work hours.

Many opponents of suffrage argued that politics would debase, de-feminize, and destroy the family. At an 1894 state convention, Kansas Democrats said the vote for women would "destroy the home and family." In 1918, an Alabama representative predicted:

There will be no more domestic tranquility in this nation. No more "Home Sweet Home," no more lullabies to the baby. Suffrage will destroy the best thing in our lives and leave in our hearts an aching void that the world can never fill.
Some arguments against suffrage reflected simple gender bias. President William Howard Taft said that he opposed suffrage because women were too emotional. "On the whole," he wrote, "it is fair to say that the immediate enfranchisement of women will increase the proportion of the hysterical element of the electorate."

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version Liquor manufacturers and saloon owners opposed suffrage out of fear that women would vote to ban alcohol sales. The suffrage amendment was not ratified until a year after the country adopted prohibition. Some business interests opposed suffrage out of fear that women would vote against the use of child labor and for limitations on work hours.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization's leaders were more pragmatic than their predecessors. Instead of arguing for suffrage in terms of equal rights, they increasingly emphasized arguments based on utility, contending that the vote for women was necessary to clean up politics and fight social evil.

One pro-suffrage cartoon pictured a man sitting on a pier holding a life preserver while women identified as sweatshop workers and "white slaves," who had been forced into prostitution, drown. Sitting at the man's side is a woman labeled as anti-suffrage. The cartoon's caption: "When all women want it, I will throw it to them."

At times, some suffrage supporters made the ugly argument that giving the vote to women would guarantee that white, native-born voters would outnumber immigrant and non-white voters. Particularly in the South, the struggle for the vote was linked to the issue of race. In Florida, a leader in the suffrage movement argued that "letting the women vote will double the number of white voters and make the colored seem rather small." In the end, four Southern states did ratify the amendment: Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas.

In the North, some suffragists questioned why women could not vote while illiterate and immigrant men could. In 19th century America, immigrants who had declared their intention of becoming citizens were allowed to vote in most states.

After 1900, the suffrage campaign developed a new, broader constituency, drawing support from many women who had received a college education or who held white collar jobs. Beginning in 1910, a new wave of states adopted women's suffrage. As in the past, all the states were in the West, including Arizona, California, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. By 1916, eleven Western states had given women the right to vote.

In 1915, Carrie Chapman Catt became head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The Iowa-born former schoolteacher had paid her own way through Iowa State College, where she was the valedictorian and the only woman in her class. She married a journalist and after he died, a civil engineer. When she married her second husband, she negotiated a prenuptial agreement that allowed her to work on the suffrage movement away from home four months a year.

Catt developed a new political strategy to win the vote. Called the "Winning Plan," it involved fighting on two fronts: for state laws that would give women the vote and for ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Her strategy called for referenda campaigns in six states east of the Mississippi River, the defeat of several key senators, and the identification of supporters ready to lobby in every state legislative district in the country.

Meanwhile, a group of younger women grew impatient with the slow pace of change and the cautious approach of the NAWSA and adopted more confrontational tactics. Many of these women had received graduate education abroad, held professional jobs, and were influenced by the example of the militant British suffrage movement. They were led by Alice Paul, a Philadelphia Quaker who formed the National Woman's Party. Its strategies included picketing, marches, outdoor rallies, and hunger strikes in jail.

On the day of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration in 1913, Alice Paul organized a protest of 5,000 women, who marched up Pennsylvania Avenue while 100,000 spectators watched. Protesters crossed the barriers that had been set up along the march's route, heckled the suffragists, and blocked their march. Police refused to come to their aid. Finally, cavalry were called in to allow the march to proceed.

In 1915, some 40,000 women and men marched in a suffrage parade in New York, the largest parade that had ever been held in the city. In January 1917, Alice Paul and her supporters began to picket the White House--the first time this had ever taken place. Six days a week, picketers marched in front of the White House, regardless of the hour or the weather. They carried banners that read: "How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty" and "Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage."

The picketers were physically attacked. In June 1917, some 168 picketers were arrested for obstructing traffic and sentenced to up to six months in jail. When 30 prisoners went on hunger strikes, they were force-fed three times a day with tubes. In 1918, an appeals court struck down the convictions.

The combination of Catt's careful organizing and Paul's militant tactics, which included publicly burning copies of speeches by President Wilson, helped to make suffrage an inescapable issue. By 1916, a million American women already had the vote in national elections and were an influential force.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The new organization's leaders were more pragmatic than their predecessors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The first breakthroughs for women's suffrage took place in the West. In 1869, Wyoming territory was the first to give women the vote on equal terms with men. This led Wyoming to call itself the "Equality State" after its admissions to the Union in 1890. Utah territory enacted women's suffrage in 1873; and Colorado in 1893, where the movement received support from the state's coal miners, many of whom had lost their jobs during the financial panic of that same year. In Colorado, Caroline Nickols, who edited a newspaper for women called the Colorado Antelope, had written in 1879:

All women are victims more or less; all suffer in one way or another from a preponderance of masculine influence....[men fear] her emancipation will be the death blow to their pet vices and their darling sins.
Idaho adopted women's suffrage in 1896. Not another state would give women the vote until 1910.
In the West, support for suffrage was intermixed with a variety of seemingly unrelated issues. Some Westerners favored women's suffrage as a way to attract settlers; others believed that it would attract women and help "civilize" the region. In Utah, suffrage was related to efforts to maintain a Mormon voting majority within the state.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The first breakthroughs for women's suffrage took place in the West. In 1869, Wyoming territory was the first to give women the vote on equal terms with men. This led Wyoming to call itself the "Equality State" after its admissions to the Union in 1890.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version There were 72 years of struggle by women and their male supporters before women achieved political equality. In order to win the vote, suffragists had to engage in petitioning, lobbying, politicking, marching, and picketing the White House. They also ran campaigns to defeat anti-suffrage legislators.

Proponents of women's suffrage waged 480 campaigns in state legislatures to persuade them to adopt suffrage amendments to state constitutions. There were 56 statewide referenda among male voters and 47 campaigns to convince state constitutional conventions to adopt women's suffrage provisions. There were also 277 campaigns at state party conventions; 30 at national conventions; and 19 in separate Congresses to get state parties to adopt women's suffrage planks.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version There were 72 years of struggle by women and their male supporters before women achieved political equality. In order to win the vote, suffragists had to engage in petitioning, lobbying, politicking, marching, and picketing the White House. They also ran campaigns to defeat anti-suffrage legislators.

# data[].attributes.headline
Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Accommodation

# data[].attributes.subject
Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Accommodation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version As the plight of African Americans in the South was beginning to worsen, Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, was invited to speak before a bi-racial audience at the opening of the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition--a celebration of the "new" industrializing South. A former slave who had toiled in West Virginia's salt mines and earned a degree from Hampton Institute, Washington was the first African American to ever address such a large group of Southern whites. Frederick Douglass had died several months earlier, and Washington would immediately take his place as the spokesperson for his people.

In his ten-minute oration, which is often termed the "Atlanta Compromise," Washington called for patience, accommodation, and self-help. He played down political rights and emphasized vocational education as the best way for African Americans to advance. "In all things that are purely social," Washington said, "we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. African Americans should accommodate themselves to racial prejudice and concentrate on economic self-improvement." To his critics, this was capitulation to segregation.

From 1895 to 1915, Washington was viewed as African Americans' leading spokesperson. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, became a best seller. He was the first African American to dine at the White House, and he had an audience with Britain's Queen Victoria.

Yet, he also received bitter opposition from critics led by W.E.B. DuBois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard and a co-founder of the National Association of Colored People. DuBois, born in Great Barrington, Mass., believed that the only way to defeat segregation was through protest and agitation.

Washington was harshly criticized for failing to ask President Theodore Roosevelt to suppress a race riot in Atlanta (in which ten blacks died) or to condemn the President's dismissal of three companies of black soldiers after a riot in Brownsville, Texas. What Washington's critics did not know was that he sometimes worked quietly behind the scenes. He secretly bankrolled legal challenges to disfranchisement and segregation on railroads.

At his death, a commentary in the Nation criticized Washington for failing to demand full civil and political equality for African Americans:

He had failed to speak out on the things which the intellectual men of the race deemed of far greater moment than bricks and mortar, industrial education, or business leagues--the matter of their social and political liberties.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version As the plight of African Americans in the South was beginning to worsen, Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, was invited to speak before a bi-racial audience at the opening of the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition--a celebration of the "new" industrializing South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version In Alabama, hospitals were segregated, as were homes for the mentally handicapped, the elderly, the blind and the deaf. In Florida, a law ordered that textbooks used for black and white children be kept separate, even when they were in storage. In Louisiana, a law regulating circuses and sideshows required separate entrances, exits, and ticket windows, and required that they be at least 25 feet apart.

In South Carolina, a code required that black and white workers in textile factories labor in different rooms, using different water fountains and toilets as well as different stairways and pay windows.

In Atlanta, an ordinance banned amateur baseball games within two blocks of each other if the players were of different races. In New Orleans, ferries, public libraries, and even brothels were segregated. For a time, public education for African American children was eliminated past the fifth grade. On streetcars, there was a movable screen that black riders had to sit behind.

Woodrow Wilson became the first Southern president since before the Civil War. He brought segregation to the federal bureaucracy, setting up all-black divisions within agencies.
Disfranchisement
Within five years of the Plessy decision, most Southern states had circumvented the 15th Amendment and deprived African Americans of the vote by using such devices as literacy tests, property requirements, poll taxes, and white-only primaries. In 1896, in Louisiana there were 130,334 black registered voters; in 1904, there were only 1,342. Proponents of disfranchisement justified it as a way to end electoral fraud and violence and to ensure that only an educated citizenry would take part in elections.

The poll tax was typically a one or two-dollar tax, which was the equivalent of several days' pay. By 1910, all of the Southern states had adopted a poll tax. Turnout dropped dramatically, and in most areas, all-white primaries determined the election of government officials. As late as 1935, the Supreme Court allowed the Texas Democratic Party to exclude black voters from the Democratic primary, even though a primary victory was tantamount to election.

It should be noted that after 1900, Northern states also imposed literacy tests and registration requirements to "purify" their own electorate and to reduce the influence of "ignorant" or boss-controlled votes in urban centers.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version In Alabama, hospitals were segregated, as were homes for the mentally handicapped, the elderly, the blind and the deaf. In Florida, a law ordered that textbooks used for black and white children be kept separate, even when they were in storage.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version In 1890, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting people of different races from traveling together on trains. This law was one of many forms of segregation, formal and informal, that came to be known as Jim Crow (named after a minstrel song). A group of African American educators, lawyers, journalists, and civic leaders in New Orleans decided to test the law in court. At the time, New Orleans had the country's largest African American population. "This act," black leaders declared, "will be a license to the evilly disposed...to insult, humiliate and maltreat...those who have a dark skin."

Homer Plessy, a shoemaker whose great-grandmother was black, challenged the law by sitting in a car reserved for white passengers. Despite the fact that he was seven-eighths white, he was arrested and convicted. Plessy's attorney argued that the state law violated the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

The Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana's favor in 1896. Segregation statutes were constitutional, the court said, as long as equal provisions were made for both races. The court's majority declared:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

The court's majority distinguished between legal or political equality and social equality. According to the majority opinion, the 14th Amendment only protected legal and political equality.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, the son of a Kentucky slave owner and himself a former Confederate officer, issued the lone dissent, saying it was wrong to separate citizens on the basis of race. "Our Constitution is color blind," he wrote, "...all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." "What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races," he asked, "than state enactments which...proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior...that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?"

Harlan, who had a black half-brother 16 years his senior, warned that the Plessy decision "will in time prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case." Harlan's half-brother, Robert Harlan, had purchased his freedom for $500 and gone on to become Ohio's most prominent black Republican.

In the Plessy decision, the court gave its sanction to the "separate but equal doctrine" and gave states permission to legally separate blacks and whites at everything from drinking fountains to schools. Plessy v. Ferguson remained in effect until it was reversed in 1954 by the court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate public schools.

The implications of the Plessy decision for education became apparent three years later. In 1897, the Richmond County, Ga., school board closed the only African American high school in Georgia, even though state law required that school boards "provide of the same facilities for each race, including schoolhouses and all other matters appertaining to education." At that time, the school board provided two high schools for white children. It also provided sufficient funds to educate all white children in the county, while it provided funding for only half of school-aged African American children.

The Supreme Court upheld the county's decision. In the case of Cumming v. School Board of Richmond County, Ga. (1899), it ruled that African Americans not only had to show that a law or practice discriminated against them, but that it was adopted because of "racial hostility."

The issues raised in the Plessy case are at the heart of a debate about race in America today: Whether race may be taken into account in hiring and promoting in the workplace, admission to schools, and the makeup of legislative districts. Today, it is opponents of affirmative action who quote Justice Harlan, arguing that race should not be used to remedy the effects of past discrimination.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version In 1890, Louisiana passed a law prohibiting people of different races from traveling together on trains. This law was one of many forms of segregation, formal and informal, that came to be known as Jim Crow (named after a minstrel song).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version After the Civil War ended in 1865, the court severely limited federal power to fight lynchings and private discrimination. When the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, it was expected that the Supreme Court would protect the rights of African Americans. But in the 30 years after the 14th Amendment was adopted, the Supreme Court restricted its scope. Eight years after the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled (in the Slaughter-House Cases) that the 14th Amendment's prohibition against states restricting the privileges or immunities of American citizens was not intended to protect citizens of a state against the legislative power of their state. The court made this 1873 ruling even though the 14th Amendment states in its first paragraph:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Supreme Court decision in the Slaughter-House Cases reduced the "privileges and immunity" clause to a dead-letter. A 5-4 majority held that the clause only protected the rights of national citizenship and placed no new obligations on the states. This ruling left African American residents of the South powerless against discriminatory actions by state legislatures.

In the Civil Rights Case (1883), involving an inn in Jefferson, Mo., which barred blacks, the court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress the power to ban private discrimination in public accommodations.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the court said that the 14th Amendment "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." It would not be until 1954 that a unanimous Supreme Court would rule that legal segregation violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version After the Civil War ended in 1865, the court severely limited federal power to fight lynchings and private discrimination. When the 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, it was expected that the Supreme Court would protect the rights of African Americans.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version While most believe that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a loophole was opened that resulted in the widespread continuation of slavery in the Southern states of America--slavery as punishment for a crime. According to the 13th Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Convict leasing began in Alabama in 1846 and lasted until July 1, 1928, when Herbert Hoover was vying for the White House. In 1883, about 10 percent of Alabama's total revenue was derived from convict leasing. In 1898, nearly 73 percent of total revenue came from this same source. Death rates among leased convicts were approximately 10 times higher than the death rates of prisoners in non-lease states. In 1873, for example, 25 percent of all black leased convicts died. Possibly, the greatest impetus to the continued use of convict labor in Alabama was the attempt to depress the union movement.

Convicts were invariably leased to prominent and wealthy Georgian families who worked them on railroads and in coal mining. Arkansas actually paid companies to work their prisoners for much of the time the system was in place. No state official was empowered to oversee the plight of the prisoners, and businesses had complete autonomy in the disposition and working conditions of convict laborers. Mines and plantations that used convict laborers commonly had secret graveyards containing the bodies of prisoners who had been beaten and/or tortured to death. Convicts would be made to fight each other, sometimes to the death, for the amusement of the guards and wardens.

Unlike the other Southern states, only half of Texas inmates were black. Blacks were sent to sugar plantations.

The Southern states were generally broke and could not afford either the cost of building or maintaining prisons. The economic but morally weak and incorrect solution was to use convicts as a source of revenue, at least, to prevent them from draining the fragile financial positions of the states. The abolition of the system was also motivated mostly by economic realities. While reformers brought the shocking truths and abuses of this notorious system before the eyes of the world, the real truth was far different. In every state, the evils of convict labor and abuses were in newspapers and journals within two years of implementation and were generally repeated during every election cycle.

The convict leasing system was not abolished but merely transformed. Prisoners, who labored for private companies and businesses increasing their profits, now labored for the public sector. The chain gang replaced plantation labor.

During the 1880s, many African Americans continued to vote in the South. The physical segregation of the races (which a later generation took for granted) was not yet a codified system. But beginning in Florida in 1887, Southern states moved to separate the races on railroads. After 1900, segregation spread to nearly every facet of Southern life. In 1890, Mississippi adopted several devices--including the poll tax and the literacy test--to disfranchise African Americans. All other Southern states followed suit by 1910.

Why race relations worsened in the late 1880s and 1890s is a hotly contested question:

In part, it reflected the collapse of the cotton economy, which led many whites to search for scapegoats.

Mounting discrimination was related to a fear among many Southern whites that a new generation of African Americans, which had been born after the Civil War and had not been subjected to slavery, would not defer to white authority.

In addition, the extreme violence was a reaction against the increasing economic independence of Southern blacks. From 1880 to 1900, black farm ownership increased from 19.6 to 25.4 percent, while sharecropping declined from 54.4. to 37.9 percent.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version While most believe that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a loophole was opened that resulted in the widespread continuation of slavery in the Southern states of America--slavery as punishment for a crime.

# data[].attributes.headline
The State of African Americans in the South

# data[].attributes.subject
The State of African Americans in the South

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version In 1900, the plight of African Americans in the South was bleak. The average life expectancy of an African American was 33 years--a dozen years less than that of a white American and about the same as a peasant in early 19th century India.

Thirty-five years after the abolition of slavery, the overwhelming majority of African Americans toiled in agriculture on land that they didn't own. Nine out of ten African Americans lived in the South (almost the same proportion as in 1860), and three out of four were tenant farmers or sharecroppers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, some 44.5 percent of all African American adults were illiterate. In 1915, South Carolina spent one-twelfth as much on the education of a black child as on a white child. In 1916, only 19 black youths were enrolled in public high schools in North Carolina and 310 were enrolled in Georgia.

Increasingly, African Americans in the South were subject to a degrading system of social segregation and deprived of the right to vote and other prerogatives of citizenship. This system of racial discrimination based on law and custom was called "Jim Crow," after a mid-19th century black-faced minstrel act. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, every Southern state, except Kentucky and Tennessee, had disenfranchised the vast majority of its African American population by 1907 through the use of literacy tests and poll taxes.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version In 1900, the plight of African Americans in the South was bleak. The average life expectancy of an African American was 33 years--a dozen years less than that of a white American and about the same as a peasant in early 19th century India.

# data[].attributes.body
From Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From Digital History Along the Color Line

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version Today, William Howard Taft is better known for his weight than for his presidency. The most corpulent president, he was 6-feet, 2-inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. A special bathtub was installed in the White House large enough to accommodate four average sized adults. When he was governor of the Philippines, he sent a cable that referred to a horseback ride he had taken into the mountains. The reply: "Referring to your telegram--how is the horse?"

Taft had served as a federal judge and as the appointed governor of the Philippines before Roosevelt named him secretary of war. However, his talents as administrator served him poorly as a president. He was perceived, wrongly, as a tool of entrenched interests. In 1930, he was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

As president, Taft had very substantial Progressive accomplishments. He filed twice as many anti-trust suits as Roosevelt, expanded Roosevelt's program of conserving public lands, created a Children's Bureau within the Labor Department, and pushed through Congress the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which strengthened the federal government's power to regulate the railroads. He also submitted a proposal for a tax on corporate income and called for a constitutional amendment to permit an income tax. The amendment was ratified in 1913 during the waning days of days of his administration.

Taft also fired Roosevelt's trusted lieutenant, Gifford Pinchot, who had attacked his conservation policies. He supported the reelection of Joe Cannon, the Republican old guard speaker of the House, in return for conservative support on other issues. He tried to lower tariffs on foreign trade, only to have his proposal gutted by Congress. Said Roosevelt of his successor:

Taft, who is such an admirable fellow, has shown himself such an utterly commonplace leader, good-natured, feebly well-meaning, but with plenty of small motive; and totally unable to grasp or put into execution any great policy.

Disenchanted with Taft and missing the glory of the presidency, Roosevelt challenged his successor for the 1912 presidential nomination. "We stand at Armageddon," said Roosevelt in 1912, "and we battle for the Lord."

During the campaign, Roosevelt called the president a "fathead" and a "puzzlewit" who was "dumber than a guinea pig." Roosevelt's remarks deeply embittered Taft. "Even a cornered rat will fight," he reported said to a journalist.

Roosevelt won most of the primaries, but lost a rules fight at the Republican convention, and won only a third of the delegates. Charging Taft with "hijacking" the nomination, Roosevelt launched a third party. As the Progressive Party candidate, Roosevelt received 27 percent of the vote--which today is still a record for a third-party presidential candidate. Taft only won 23 percent of the popular vote, partly due to his failure to publicize his progressive achievements.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version Today, William Howard Taft is better known for his weight than for his presidency. The most corpulent president, he was 6-feet, 2-inches tall and weighed 330 pounds. A special bathtub was installed in the White House large enough to accommodate four average sized adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The split in the Republican ranks in 1912 enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency. Despite receiving only 42 percent of the popular vote, Wilson steered through Congress the creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, tariff reduction, anti-trust legislation, and a graduated income tax.

Wilson began as something of an isolationist in foreign policy. He apologized to Colombia for the U.S. role in Panama's independence; and he appointed the pacifistic William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state. But he would later vow to teach Latin Americans lessons in democracy.

Only a week after taking office in 1913, Wilson called upon Mexico's president, Victoriano Huerta, who had seized power after the constitutional president was murdered, to step aside when elections were held. When Huerta refused, Wilson used minor incidents--including the arrest of some American sailors in Tampico and the arrival of a German merchant ship carrying supplies for Huerta--as a pretext for occupying the Mexico port of Veracruz. Within weeks, Huerta was forced to leave his country.

During the conflict, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa had made a number of raids into U.S. territory near the Mexican border. Wilson responded by ordering Gen. John J. (Black Jack) Pershing to cross into Mexico.

As president, Wilson also sent American troops to occupy Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916. A year later, the United States bought the Virgin Islands, thereby gaining control of every major Caribbean island except British Jamaica. He engaged in more military interventions abroad than any other American president.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia but grew up in Augusta, Georgia, where his father was an official of the Southern Presbyterian church. After briefly practicing as a lawyer (he only had two clients, one of whom was his mother), he attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins and taught history and political science at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton--his alma mater. He wrote several highly acclaimed books, including Congressional Government, which decried the weakening of presidential authority in the United States, and The State, a call for increased government activism.

As Princeton's president, he developed a reputation as a reformer for trying to eliminate the school's elitist system of teaching clubs. Professional politicians in New Jersey, wrongly thinking that they could manipulate the politically inexperienced Wilson, helped make him the state's governor, and then, arranged his nomination as president in 1912. The nomination was a way to block another bid by William Jennings Bryan, whose prairie populism had been rejected three times by voters. Before he launched his campaign, Wilson described himself with these words:

I am a vague, conjectural personality, more made up of opinions and academic prepossessions than of human traits and red corpuscles. We shall see what will happen!

With the Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt, Wilson became the first Southerner to be elected president since the Civil War. He carried 40 states, but only 42 percent of the vote. After his election, the moralistic, self-righteous Wilson told the chairman of the Democratic Party: "Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States." Wilson later said that the United States had been created by God "to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty."

During his first term, he initiated a long list of major domestic reforms. These included:

The Underwood Simmons Tariff (1913), which substantially lowered duties on imports for the first time since the Civil War and enacted a graduated income tax;

The Federal Reserve Act (1913), which established a Federal Reserve Board and 12 regional Federal Reserve banks to supervise the banking system, setting interest rates on loans to private banks and controlling the supply of money in circulation;

The Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), which established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC sought to preserve competition by preventing businesses from engaging in unfair business practices;

Clayton Act Anti-Trust Act (1914), which limited the ownership of stock in one corporation by another, implemented non-competitive pricing policies, and forbade interlocking directorship for certain banking and business corporations. It also recognized the right of labor to strike and picket and barred the use of anti-trust statutes against labor unions.

Unlike Roosevelt, who believed that big business could be successfully regulated by government, Woodrow Wilson believed that the federal government should break up big businesses in order to restore as much competition as possible. Other social legislation enacted during Wilson's first term included:

The Seaman Act (1915), which set minimum standards for the treatment of merchant sailors;

The Adamson Act (1916), which established an eight-hour workday for railroad workers;

The Workingmen's Compensation Act (1916), which provided financial assistance to federal employees injured on the job;

The Child Labor Act (1916), which forbade the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor; and

The Farm Loan Act (1916), which made it easier for farmers to get loans.

Following Wilson's election in 1912, four constitutional amendments were ratified:

16th Amendment (1913) gave Congress the power to impose an income tax;

17th Amendment (1913) required the direct election of senators;

18th Amendment (1919) banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages; and

19th amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote.

Wilson's second term was dominated by American involvement in World War I. At the end of September 1919, Wilson suffered a mild stroke. Then in early October, he had a major stroke that almost totally incapacitated him.

More than most presidents, Wilson's historical reputation had swung up and down. During the 1920s, he was viewed as a priggish and an anti-business president, an impractical visionary and fuzzy idealist who embroiled the United States in a needless war. During the 1940s, in sharp contrast, he was depicted in the Hollywood film, Wilson (1944), as an idealistic leader struggling to create a new world order based on international law.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The split in the Republican ranks in 1912 enabled Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency. Despite receiving only 42 percent of the popular vote, Wilson steered through Congress the creation of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, tariff reduction, anti-trust legislation, and a graduated income tax.

# data[].attributes.body
Conservation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The United States was the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks. Theodore Roosevelt launched conservation as a national political movement. As president, he argued on behalf of conserving natural resources and preserving wild lands; he set aside the first national monuments and wildlife refuges. In 1906, he signed the Antiquities Act, which enabled a president to protect wild lands as national monuments. The Grand Canyon was among the places he protected under the act.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The United States was the first nation in the world to create wilderness parks. Theodore Roosevelt launched conservation as a national political movement. As president, he argued on behalf of conserving natural resources and preserving wild lands; he set aside the first national monuments and wildlife refuges.

# data[].attributes.body
Government Regulation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version At the beginning of the 20th century, milk distributors frequently adulterated milk by adding chalk or plaster to improve its color and molasses and water to cut costs. Meatpackers killed rats by putting poisoned pieces of bread on their floors; sometimes, the poisoned rats made their way onto the production lines.

The publication of Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, exposed unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, generating widespread public support for federal inspection of meatpacking plants. The Department of Agriculture disclosed the dangers of chemical additives in canned foods. A muckraking journalist named Samuel Hopkins uncovered misleading and fraudulent claims in non-prescription drugs.

To deal with these problems the federal government enacted:

The Meat Inspection Act (1906), mandating government enforcement of sanitary and health standards in meatpacking plants;

The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), prohibiting false advertising and harmful additives in food

Progressives often portrayed their battles as simply the latest example of an older struggle between "the people" and business interests and proponents of democracy against the defenders of special privilege. In fact, this view is quite misleading. Corporate managers were often strong supporters of Progressive reform. During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, mining companies worked closely with the administration in order to try to rationalize the extraction of natural resources. Big meatpackers promoted the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to prevent smaller packers from exporting bad meat and closing foreign markets to all American meat products.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version At the beginning of the 20th century, milk distributors frequently adulterated milk by adding chalk or plaster to improve its color and molasses and water to cut costs. Meatpackers killed rats by putting poisoned pieces of bread on their floors; sometimes, the poisoned rats made their way onto the production lines.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version During the Progressive era, the states were "laboratories for democracy," where state governments experimented with a wide range of reforms to eliminate governmental corruption, abolish unsafe working conditions, make government more responsive to public needs, and protect working people.

The severe Depression beginning in 1893 had discouraged states from engaging in policy innovation. Government retrenchment was the watchword of many lawmakers in the 1890s. Most of the endeavors reformers undertook during these years were efforts to eliminate political bossism, corruption, and governmental waste. The Depression also encouraged the consolidation of corporations, a development that would make trusts a major issue after the turn of the century. The Spanish American War had also diverted attention from domestic matters.

During the early 20th century, many states adopted reforms that had been enacted years earlier in Massachusetts, which, along with Rhode Island, had been the first state to have a majority of its population live in cities. Many of these reforms involved protections for working people, including:

compulsory school attendance laws, adopted in every state except Mississippi by 1916;

laws limiting work hours for women and children in 32 states, and minimum wages for women workers in 11 states;

workmen's compensation, which provided compensation for workers injured on the job in 32 states.

Other laws established an eight-hour workday for state employees; authorized credit unions; created public utility commission; established state employee pensions; and instituted a host of health and safety regulations. Several states also passed laws prohibiting children from working at night.

To make the electoral process more democratic, all but three states adopted direct primaries by 1916, which allowed voters to choose among several candidates for a party's nomination. To allow voters to express their dissatisfaction with elected officials, Progressives proposed the recall, which allowed voters to vote to remove them before the end of their term in office. To give voters a greater voice in law making, Progressives proposed the initiative and the referendum. The initiative allowed voters to propose a bill and legislation, and the referendum permitted them to vote directly on an issue. Oregon, South Dakota, and Utah were the first states to adopt the initiative and referendum.

Beginning in the 1880s, Britain, France, Germany, and Scandinavia adopted a series of social welfare programs--unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, and industrial accident and health insurance. During the Progressive era, many reformers borrowed these ideas and adapted them to meet American circumstances.

Perhaps the most dramatic American innovation was "widow's pensions." Adopted by most states, these programs provided widows with a monthly payment that allowed them to keep their children at home, rather than putting them in orphanages or up for adoption.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version During the Progressive era, the states were "laboratories for democracy," where state governments experimented with a wide range of reforms to eliminate governmental corruption, abolish unsafe working conditions, make government more responsive to public needs, and protect working people. The severe Depression beginning in 1893 had discouraged states from engaging in policy innovation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version Tom L. Johnson represented a model of Progressivism at the local level. He was a four-term mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909. In office, he removed all the "Keep Off the Grass" signs from parks and embarked on an aggressive policy of municipal ownership of utilities. He fought the streetcar monopoly, reformed the police department, professionalized city services, and built sports fields and public bathhouses in poor sections of the city. He also coordinated the architecture and placement of public buildings downtown, set around a mall.

James Michael Curley, Boston's mayor, represented the kind of leader that many Progressives opposed. The Boston Evening Transcript called Curley "as clear an embodiment of civic evil as ever paraded before the electorate." Twice sent to prison for fraud, he acquired a 21-room mansion (which had gold-plated bathroom fixtures) paid for by kickbacks from contractors.

The son of an Irish washerwoman, Curley won office by speaking the language of class and ethnic resentment. But Curley also built new schools for the children of working-class Bostonians, tore down slum dwellings, established beaches and parks for the poor, and added an obstetrics wing to the city hospital. He also helped the poor in very direct ways; he provided bail money, funeral expenses, and temporary shelter for those made homeless by fire or eviction. When he died, a million people lined Boston's streets to pay their last respects.

To weaken political machines, municipal Progressives sought to reduce the size of city councils and to eliminate the practice of electing officials by ward (or neighborhood). Instead, they proposed electing public officials on a city-wide (an at-large) basis. Candidates from poorer neighborhoods lacked funds to publicize their campaigns across an entire city. Urban Progressives also diminished the influence of machines by making municipal elections non-partisan, by prohibiting the use of party labels in local voting. A number of cities attempted to eliminate politics from city government by introducing city managers. Beginning with Staunton, Virginia, in 1908, a number of cities began to hire professional administrators to run city government.

Many Progressives wanted to improve the quality of urban life. The World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage of discovery, was an inspiration to many urban reformers. As a symbol of its recovery from the disastrous Great Fire of 1871, Chicago erected a massive "White City" to hold the event. Chicago's White City demonstrated the value of careful planning and beautification and provided the impetus for many Progressive efforts to introduce city planning, zoning regulations, housing reform, and slum clearance.

The most far-reaching progressive effort to transform the city was known as "municipal socialism." Many cities established municipal waterworks, gasworks, and electricity and public transportation systems.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version Tom L. Johnson represented a model of Progressivism at the local level. He was a four-term mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909. In office, he removed all the "Keep Off the Grass" signs from parks and embarked on an aggressive policy of municipal ownership of utilities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Herbert Croly and The Promise of American Life

# data[].attributes.subject
Herbert Croly and The Promise of American Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version If any one book can be said to offer a manifesto of Progressive beliefs, it was Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life. Croly (1869-1930), a political theorist and journalist who founded The New Republic, was Progressivism's preeminent philosopher. Published in 1909, his book argued that Americans had to overcome their Jeffersonian heritage, with its emphasis on minimal government, decentralized authority, and the sanctity of individual freedom, in order to deal with the unprecedented problems of an urban and industrial age. Industrialism, he believed, had reduced most workers to a kind of "wage slavery," and only a strong central government could preserve democracy and promote social progress.

Croly, like most Progressives, was convinced that only a public-spirited, disinterested elite, guided by scientific principles, could restore the promise of American life. Thus, he called for the establishment of government regulatory commissions, staffed by independent experts, to protect American democracy from the effects of corporate power. He also believed that human nature "can be raised to a higher level by an improvement in institutions and laws."
Progressivism in Government
According to Croly, the challenge confronting early 20th century America was to respond to the problems that had accompanied the transformation of American society from a rural, agricultural culture into an urban, industrial society. Filled with faith in the power of government, Progressives launched reform in the areas of public health, housing, urban planning and design, parks and recreation, workplace safety, workers' compensation, pensions, insurance, poor relief, and health care.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version If any one book can be said to offer a manifesto of Progressive beliefs, it was Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life. Croly (1869-1930), a political theorist and journalist who founded The New Republic, was Progressivism's preeminent philosopher.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The turn of the 20th century witnessed a sudden clamor for social, political, and economic reform. Progressives boldly challenged the received wisdom in every aspect of life.

Of all the changes that took place in women's lives during the 20th century, one of the most significant was women's increasing ability to control fertility. In 1916, Margaret Sanger, a former nurse, opened the country's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Police shut it down ten days later. "No woman can call herself free," she insisted, "until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." Margaret Sanger coined the phrase "birth control" and eventually convinced the courts that the Comstock Act did not prohibit doctors from distributing birth control information and devices. As founder of Planned Parenthood, she aided in the development of the birth control pill, which appeared in 1960.
Civil Rights
The publication of W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk heralded a new, more confrontational approach to civil rights. "The problem of the 20th century," DuBois's book begins, "is the problem of the color line." In his book, DuBois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, condemns Booker T. Washington's philosophy of accommodation and his idea that African Americans should confine their ambitions to manual labor. The Nashville Banner editorialized: "This book is dangerous for the Negro to read, for it will only excite discontent and fill his imagination with things that do not exist, or things that should not bear upon his mind." In 1908, after anti-black rioting took place in Springfield, Ill., DuBois and a group of African Americans and whites convened at a convention in Harpers Ferry, Va. The meeting became the basis for the first country's first national civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). By 1914, the NAACP had 6,000 members and offices in 50 cities.
Conservation
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt stated,

We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; and wastefulness in dealing with it today means that our descendants will feel the exhaustion a generation or two before they otherwise would.

During Roosevelt's presidency, 148 million acres were set aside as national forest lands and more than 80 million acres of mineral lands were withdrawn from public sale.
Government Reform
A Republican governor in Wisconsin, Robert LaFollette, put into effect the "Wisconsin idea," which provided a model for reformers across the nation. It provided for direct primaries to select party nominees for public office and for a railroad commission to regulate railroad rates. The model also presented tax reform, opposition to political bosses, and the initiative and recall, devices to give the people more direct control over government.
Labor Relations
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to intervene on the side of workers in a labor dispute. He threatened to use the army to run the coal mines unless mine owners agreed to arbitrate the strike. The president handpicked a commission to mediate the settlement.
Medical Education
Abraham Flexner's 1910 study of American medical colleges transformed the training of doctors. His report led to the closing of second-rate medical schools and to sweeping changes in medical curricula and teaching methods.
Philanthropy
John D. Rockefeller revolutionized philanthropy by setting up a foundation staffed by experts to evaluate proposals and support programs to solve critical public problems. His foundation and others funded social surveys--systematic, non-partisan examination of subjects by experts.
Radical Trade Unionism
"One Big Union for All" was the goal of the radical labor leaders and Socialists who met in Chicago in 1905. This group also formed the International Workers of the World (IWW). Rejecting the approach of the American Federation of Labor, which only admitted skilled craft workers to its ranks, the IWW opened its membership to any wage earner regardless of occupation, race, creed, or sex.
Socialism
A new political party, the American Socialist Party, was founded in 1901. At its peak in 1912, the party had 118,000 members. The largest socialist newspaper, The Appeal of Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, had a weekly circulation of 761,000. In the 1912 election, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs received 800,000 votes; Socialists captured 1,200 political offices, including the mayors of 79 cities.
Trust-Busting
In 1902, President Roosevelt instructed his attorney general to file suit against Northern Securities, a railroad holding company, and the Beef Trust in Chicago, for illegal constraint of trade. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled on the government's behalf.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The turn of the 20th century witnessed a sudden clamor for social, political, and economic reform. Progressives boldly challenged the received wisdom in every aspect of life. Of all the changes that took place in women's lives during the 20th century, one of the most significant was women's increasing ability to control fertility.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version Few periods in American history witnessed more ferment than the years between the founding of Hull House and American entry into World War I. This movement touched every aspect of American life. It transformed government into an active, interventionist entity at the national level, most notably under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but also at the state and local levels. For the first time Americans were prepared to use government, including the federal government, as an instrument of reform.

Progressive reformers secured a federal income tax based on the ability to pay; formulated inheritance taxes; devised a modern national banking system; and developed government regulatory commissions to oversee banking, insurance, railroads, gas, electricity, telephones, transportation, and manufacturing.

Education also became a self-conscious instrument of social change. The ideas of the educator and philosopher John Dewey influenced the reformers. Progressive educational reformers broadened school curricula to include teaching about health and community life; called for active learning that would engage students' minds and draw out their talents; applied new scientific discoveries about learning; and tailored teaching techniques to students' needs. Progressive educators promoted compulsory education laws, kindergartens, and high schools. They raised the literacy rate of African Americans from 43 percent to 77 percent.

During the Progressive era, public health officers launched successful campaigns against hookworm, malaria, and pellagra, and reduced the incidence of tuberculosis, typhoid, and diphtheria. Pure milk campaigns also slashed rates of infant and child mortality.

Urban Progressives created public parks, libraries, hospitals, and museums. They also constructed new water and sewer systems and eliminated "red-light" districts, such as New Orleans' Storyville, in most major cities.

To bridge the gap between capital and labor, Progressives called for arbitration and mediation of labor disputes. Meanwhile, many Progressive businessmen called for a new-style "welfare capitalism" that provided workers with higher wages and pensions.

The Progressive era was one of the most creative in the realm of culture and the arts. In the hands of Alfred Stieglitz, photography became an art form for the first time. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright helped create modern architecture. The first exhibition of modern art, the Armory Show in New York in 1913, was held in the United States.

A new vocabulary characterized this era. Americans would speak about a "public interest" that was opposed by "special interests." They would also speak about "efficiency" and "expertise" in government and "morality" in foreign affairs. For the first time, Americans spoke of "social workers," "muckrakers," "trustbusters," "feminists," "social scientists," and "conservation."

To increase popular control over government, Progressive reformers lobbied successfully for direct primaries; the elimination of boss rule; the direct election of Senators; woman's suffrage; and in many state legislatures, adoption of the referendum, the initiative, and the recall. Reformers also saw adoption of the first restrictions on political lobbyists and the first regulations on campaign finances.

To modernize government finances, Progressives successfully instituted the income tax and established the Federal Reserve System to oversee the nation's economy. To regulate corporate behavior, Progressives enforced new anti-trust laws and established the country's first effective regulatory commissions. They also established licenses for such professionals as pharmacists, veterinarians, and undertakers. To improve social welfare, they lobbied for workmen's compensation laws, minimum wage laws for women workers, and old-age and widow's pensions. To improve public health, Progressive reformers successfully lobbied for water standards, state and local departments of health, sanitary codes for schools, and laws prohibiting the sale of adulterated foods and drugs.

The Progressive era also had a much more negative side. It saw the spread of disfranchisement and segregation of African Americans in the South and even in the federal government. This era also saw the enactment of reforms, such as at-large voting, that lessened the political influence of immigrant groups at a time when city budgets were increasing. Critics frequently condemned Progressives as moralistic, undemocratic, and elitist.

Progressives did not agree on a single agenda. They disagreed vehemently in their attitudes toward such subjects as immigration restriction and prohibition of alcohol. They were a diverse lot that included Republicans and Democrats, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and urban and rural reformers. Women's organizations stood at the forefront of the social reforms and policy innovations during the Progressive era. Women activists were especially active in efforts to end child labor and to protest companies that had unsafe working conditions or produced unsafe products. For the most part, Progressives were urban and college-educated, including journalists, academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses, as well as many business people.

Uniting these various reform movements stemmed from a preoccupation with the elimination of corruption and waste and an emphasis on efficiency, science, and professional expertise as the best ways to solve social problems. A book published in 1913, Benjamin Parker De Witt's The Progressive Movement, argued that three tendencies underlay progressive reforms: the desire to eliminate political corruption, the impulse to make government more efficient and effective, and a belief that government should "relieve social and economic distress." Progressives wanted to apply the techniques of systematization, rationalization, and bureaucratic administrative control developed by business to problems posed by the city and industry.

For all its flaws and limitations, the Progressive era was instrumental in formulating the rationale for much of the welfare state, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and aid to single parent families.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version Few periods in American history witnessed more ferment than the years between the founding of Hull House and American entry into World War I. This movement touched every aspect of American life. It transformed government into an active, interventionist entity at the national level, most notably under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but also at the state and local levels.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The Social Gospel

Religious ideas and institutions have always been one of the wellsprings of the American reform impulse. Progressive reformers were heavily influenced by the body of religious ideas known as the Social Gospel, the philosophy that the churches should be actively engaged in social reform. As elaborated by such theologians as Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel was a form of liberal Protestantism which held that Christian principles needed to be applied to social problems and that efforts needed to be made to bring the social order into conformity with Christian values.
Muckrakers
Muckraking reporters, exploiting mass circulation journalism, attacked malfeasance in American politics and business. President Theodore Roosevelt gave them the name "muckrakers" after a character in the book Pilgrim's Progress, "the Man with the Muckrake," who was more preoccupied with filth than with Heaven above.

Popular magazines such as McClure's, Everybody's, Pearson's, Cosmopolitan, and Collier's published articles exposing the evils of American society--political corruption, stock market manipulation, fake advertising, vices, impure food and drugs, racial discrimination, and lynching. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry. John Spargo's Bitter Cry of the Children disclosed the abuse of child laborers in the nation's coal mines. Lincoln Steffens' The Shame of the Cities uncovered corruption in city government.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The Social Gospel Religious ideas and institutions have always been one of the wellsprings of the American reform impulse. Progressive reformers were heavily influenced by the body of religious ideas known as the Social Gospel, the philosophy that the churches should be actively engaged in social reform.

# data[].attributes.body
Jame Addams

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version Jane Addams was the daughter of one of Illinois' richest men. Instead of leading a life of leisure, however, she dedicated her life to aiding the urban poor. A friend of labor, a proponent of women's suffrage, a foe of city bosses, and an opponent of war, she struggled to make the ideal of civic equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence a reality. Instead of offering charity, she sought to assimilate the immigrant poor into American society and became a pioneer social worker.

Born in 1860, Addams was just two years old when her mother died. Suffering a severe curvature of her spine, she was coddled by her family. Her Quaker-born father, a banker, mill owner, and Republican politician, sent her to Europe twice and to college at Rockford Female Seminary. But like many other members of America's first generation of college-educated women, she felt deeply torn about what to do with her life. "A woman," she wrote, "was practically faced with an alternative of marriage or a career." She could enter teaching, or medicine, or missionary work, or else she could marry and devote her life to homemaking.

She enrolled at Philadelphia's Women's Medical College, but suffered a nervous collapse after her father's sudden death. For eight years she suffered excruciating back pain, nervous prostration, and serious depression. She turned to Philadelphia's leading physician, Dr. S. Wier Mitchell, for help. He prescribed rest cure as treatment, confining her to bed and forbidding all visitors and activities. As he told another patient: "Live as domestic a life as possible. Have but two hours of intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live."

Addams spent most of her 30s adrift, undergoing repeated rest cures. Then, suddenly she found her mission in life while on a trip to England. She was shocked by the squalor of London's East End slums. In response, she and a friend, Ellen Starr, decided to set up an institution to uplift America's urban poor.

In 1889, they moved into Hull House, a decaying mansion in one of Chicago's most destitute neighborhoods, and provided social services to the city's poor. Hull House offered classes that taught cooking, hygiene, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Hull House also provided child care and a kindergarten and built the first playground in Chicago. Each week 9,000 people, mostly immigrants from 28 different countries, came to the mansion. Her example helped inspire more than 400 other settlement houses around the country.

From Hull House, Addams tirelessly campaigned for an end to sweat shops and a ban on child labor. She convinced many professors at the University of Chicago to produce empirical, social scientific data. She advocated an eight-hour work day and legal protections for immigrants. Addams called for compulsory education, woman suffrage, and improved sanitation. She also sought to organize unions for female workers; to establish a state bureau to inspect factories; and to create the nation's first juvenile court. In effect, she helped create the career of the social worker.

Addams was a key architect of what we would come to call the welfare state. She tirelessly campaigned to end sweatshops and tenement housing, end corrupt boss rule, ban child labor, provide legal protections for immigrants, and establish juvenile courts.

Her memoir, Twenty Years at Hull House, was a best-seller when it appeared in 1910. But in 1915, public opinion began to turn against her when she founded the Women's Peace Party, an international organization dedicated to waging "a women's war" against World War I. Elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, she opposed the peace treaty ending the war as vindictive. In 1931, four years before her death, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version Jane Addams was the daughter of one of Illinois' richest men. Instead of leading a life of leisure, however, she dedicated her life to aiding the urban poor. A friend of labor, a proponent of women's suffrage, a foe of city bosses, and an opponent of war, she struggled to make the ideal of civic equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence a reality.

# data[].attributes.body
Teddy Roosevelt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version At the Republican convention in 1900, a senator warned his colleagues not to make Theodore Roosevelt their vice presidential nominee: "Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between this madman and the presidency?" As New York's governor, Roosevelt had challenged banking and insurance interests; Republican Party boss Tom Platt wanted him out of state affairs.

Born in New York City in 1858, Roosevelt was, in his own words, "nervous and timid" as a youth. He suffered headaches, fevers, and stomach pains. He was so frail and asthmatic that he could not blow out a bedside candle. So he hiked, swam, boxed, and lifted weights to build up his strength and stamina. In 1912, he would be shot in the chest by a deranged man, but proceeded to deliver an hour-long speech before having the bullet removed.

At the age of 23, Roosevelt was elected to the New York state legislature. Then in 1884, his wife and his mother died on the same day. To distance himself from these tragedies, he retreated to a 25,000-acre ranch in North Dakota's Badlands and became a cowboy. He wore spurs and carried a pearl-handled revolver from Tiffany, the New York jewelers.

Roosevelt returned to serve as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner; he also served as New York City's crusading police commissioner, wearing disguises in order to root out corruption. He subsequently became assistant secretary of the Navy and governor of New York, before his election as vice president in 1900.

Lacking any military experience and wearing a uniform custom-tailored by Brooks Brothers, Roosevelt served as second-in-command of the Rough Riders, a volunteer cavalry unit that fought in Cuba during the Spanish American War. With William McKinley's assassination, he became, at the age of 42, the youngest president in American history.

Even those who know nothing about his presidency instantly recognize his image carved on Mount Rushmore--his huge, toothy smile and his wire-rimmed glasses. As president, he made anti-trust, conservation of natural resources, and consumer protection national priorities. He forced coal operators to recognize the United Mine Workers.

Roosevelt's life was filled with contradictions. He was a member of one of the country's 20 richest families, yet he denounced business magnates as "malefactors of great wealth." The first president born in a big city, he was a hunter as a well as a conservationist. He was a bellicose man who boxed in the White House. He was also the first American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Russia and Japan.

Incredibly active and energetic, Roosevelt was "a steam engine in trousers" who somehow found time to write three dozen books, on topics ranging from history to hunting and in languages ranging from Italian and Portuguese to Greek and Latin. He was the first celebrity president known simply by his initials. Said a British envoy, "You must always remember the president is about six."

In office, Roosevelt greatly expanded the powers of the presidency. A bold and forceful leader, he viewed the White House as a "bully pulpit" from which he could preach his ideas about the need for an assertive government, the inevitability of bigness in business, and an active American presence in foreign policy. He broke up trusts that dominated the corporate world and regulated big business. He created the Departments of Commerce and Labor and the U.S. Forest Service. He supported a revolt in a province of Colombia that allowed the United States to build the Panama Canal. He sent a Great White Fleet on an around-the-world voyage to symbolize America's rise to world power. He made a dramatic public statement about race when he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.

Roosevelt pushed legislation though Congress, authorizing and establishing the authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission to set railroad rates. In 1904, he won reelection by the largest popular majority up to that time. But on election night, he announced that he would not seek reelection in 1908--a statement that undercut his influence during his second term. In 1909, he retired to hunt big game in Africa, and passed the presidency to his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft.

Apart from his philosophy of an active, interventionist government, Roosevelt's most lasting legacy is that he became the model for a new kind of president: a charismatic, hyperkinetic, heroic leader, who sought to improve every aspect of society. He made the presidency as large as the problems posed by industrialization and urbanization.

Copyright 2019 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version At the Republican convention in 1900, a senator warned his colleagues not to make Theodore Roosevelt their vice presidential nominee: "Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between this madman and the presidency?" As New York's governor, Roosevelt had challenged banking and insurance interests; Republican Party boss Tom Platt wanted him out of state affairs.

# data[].attributes.body
The Rise of Mass Communication

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies. American culture also made a critical shift to commercialized forms of entertainment.

The Mass Market Newspaper

The urban tabloid was the first instrument to appear. It was pioneered by Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and E.W. Scripp's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These popular newspapers differed dramatically from the upper-class and staunchly partisan political newspapers that had dominated 19th century journalism. They featured banner headlines, a multitude of photographs and cartoons, and an emphasis on local news, crime, scandal, society news, and sports. Large ads made up half a paper's content, compared to just thirty percent in earlier newspapers. For easier reading on street railways, page size was cut, stories were shortened, and the text heavily illustrated.

The Hungarian born Pulitzer migrated to the United States at the age of 17 and purchased the struggling New York World from financier Jay Gould. His newspaper crusaded against corruption and fraud. He pledged that the World would be "dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of the purse-potentates" and would "expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses...[and] serve and battle for the people." Using simple words, a lively style, and many illustrations, his newspaper could be read by many immigrants who understood little English. By 1905, the World had a circulation of two million.

Hearst developed the newspaper's entertainment potential. Entertainment was stick in trade of yellow journalism (named for the "yellow kid" comic strip that appeared in the Journal). Among the innovations he pioneered were the first color comic strips, advice columns, women's pages, fashion pages, and sports pages.

Scripps's legacy was the development of the business side of the modern American newspaper. From the early 1870s through his retirement in 1908, he established or bought more than 40 newspapers, stretching from Portland, Ore., to New York City. His biggest innovations were a national news service and a feature syndicate that provided all of his newspapers with common material. He claimed that he only needed two employees--a reporter and an editor--to start a newspaper, because he could rely on his news service and features syndicate. Syndicated material accounted for 25 to 35 percent of each issue and, at times, even up to half or three-quarters.

Instead of directly competing for established readers, he instead sought to serve new readers. In his opinion, most newspapers either ignored or were hostile to the working class. His news stressed labor issues and was directed to a less-educated audience. His newspapers sold for just a penny at a time when others sold for two cents for home delivery and five cents on the street. His papers were half the size of other papers of the time.

His papers exposed trusts, supported strikes, and favored government regulation of food and transportation industries, as well as government ownership of water and electric utilities. They advocated power for the common people by direct election of public office and through initiative, referendum, and recall. They offered advice on how to run a home on a limited budget.

The Mass Circulation National Magazine, the Bestseller, and Records

Also during the 1890s the world of magazine publishing was revolutionized by the rise of the country's first mass circulation national magazines. After the Civil War, the magazine field was dominated by a small number of sedate magazines-like The Atlantic, Harper's, and Scribner's--written for "gentle" reader with highly intellectual tastes. The poetry, serious fiction, and wood engravings that filled these monthly's pages rigidly conformed to upper-class Victorian standards of taste. These magazines embodied what the philosopher George Santayana called the "genteel tradition," the idea that art and literature should reinforce morality not portray reality. Art and literature, the custodians of culture believed, should transcend the real and uphold the ideal. Poet James Russell Lowell spoke for other genteel writers when he said that no man should describe any activity that would make his wife or daughter blush.

The founders of the nation's first mass-circulation magazines considered the older "quality" magazines stale and elitist. In contrast, their magazines featured practical advice, popularized science, gossip, human interest stories, celebrity profiles, interviews, "muckraking" investigations, pictures, articles on timely topics--and a profusion of ads. Instead of cultivating a select audience, the new magazines had a very different set of priorities. By running popular articles, editors sought to maximize circulation, which, in turn, attracted advertising that kept the magazine's price low. By 1900, the nation's largest magazine, the Ladies' Home Journal reached 850,000 subscribers--more than eight times the readership of Scribner's or Harper's.

The end of the 19th century also marked a critical turning point in the history of book publishing, as marketing wizards like Frank Doubleday organized the first national book promotional campaigns, created the modern best seller, and transformed popular writers like Jack London into celebrities. The world of the Victorian man of letters, the defender of "Culture" against "Anarchy," had ended.

At the International Exposition in Paris in 1878, 30,000 people lined up to see the first demonstration of Thomas Edison's phonograph. The phonograph was treated as a dictation machine for a decade after Thomas Edison invented it in 1877. It was not until 1890 that cylinders of recorded music were first sold. In 1901, cylinders gave way to discs.

Advertising

In 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) launched the first million dollar national advertising campaign. It succeeded in making Uneeda biscuits and their water-proof "In-er-Seal" box popular household items. During the 1880s and 1890s, patent medicine manufacturers, department stores, and producers of low price packaged consumer goods (like Campbell Soups, H.J. Heinz, and Quaker Oats), developed modern advertising techniques. Where earlier advertisers made little use of brand names illustrations, or trademarks, the new ads made use of snappy slogans and colorful packages. As early as 1900, advertisements began to use psychology to arouse consumer demand by suggesting that a product would contribute to the consumer's social and psychic well-being. To induce purchases, observed a trade journal in 1890, a consumer "must be aroused, excited, terrified." Listerine mouthwash promised to cure "halitosis." Scott tissue claimed to prevent infections caused by harsh toilet paper.

By stressing instant gratification and personal fulfillment in their ads, modern advertising helped undermine an earlier Victorian ethos emphasizing thrift, self-denial, delayed gratification, and hard work. In various ways, it transformed Americans from "savers" to "spenders" and told them to give in to their desire for luxury.

The Purveyors of Mass Culture

The creators of the modern instruments of mass culture tended to share a common element in their background. Most were "outsiders"--recent immigrants or Southerners, Midwesterners, or Westerners. Joseph Pulitzer was an Austrian Jew, the pioneering "new" magazine editors, Edward W. Bok and Samuel Sidney McClure, were also first-generation immigrants. Where the "genteel tradition" was dominated by men and women from Boston's elite culture or upper-class New York, the men who created modern mass culture had their initial training in daily newspapers, commerce, and popular entertainment--and, as a result, were more in touch with popular tastes. As outsiders, the creators of mass culture betrayed an almost voyeuristic interest in what they called the "romance of real life," with high life, low life, power, and status.

The new forms of popular culture that they helped create shared a common style: simple, direct, realistic, and colloquial. The 1890s were the years when a florid Victorian style was overthrown by a new "realistic" aesthetic. At various levels of American culture, writers and artists rebelled against the moralism and sentimentality of Victorian culture and sought to live objectively and truthfully, without idealization or avoiding the ugly. The quest for realism took a variety of guises. It could be seen in the naturalism of writers like Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane, with their nightmarish depictions of urban poverty and exploitation in the paintings of the "ashcan" school of art, with their vivid portraits of tenements and congested streets and in the forceful, colorful prose of tabloid reporters and muckraking journalists, who cut through the Victorian veil of reticence surrounding such topics as sex, political corruption, and working conditions in industry.

Mass Culture Blossoms

Although they relied on 19th century inventions, the most influential innovations in mass culture would take place after the turn-of-the-century. Thomas Edison first successfully projected moving pictures on a screen in 1896, but it would not be until 1903 that Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery"--the first American movie to tell a story --demonstrated the commercial appeal of motion pictures. And while Guglielmo Marconi proved the possibility of wireless communication in 1895, commercial radio broadcasting did not begin until 1920 and commercial television broadcasts until 1939. In the 20th century, these new instruments of mass communication would reach audiences of unprecedented size. By 1922, movies sold 40 million tickets a week and radios could be found in three million homes.

The emergence of these modern forms of mass communication had far-reaching effects upon American society. They broke down the isolation of local neighborhoods and communities and ensured that for the first time all Americans, -- regardless of their class, ethnicity, or locality -- began to share standardized information and entertainment.

Copyright 2021 Digital History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Printable Version The last ten years of the 19th century were critical in the emergence of modern American mass culture. In those years emerged the modern instruments of mass communication--the mass-circulation metropolitan newspaper, the best-seller, the mass-market magazine, national advertising campaigns, radio, and the movies.

# data[].attributes.body
Ch 20 The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The many problems associated with the Gilded Age-the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism-confronted Americans. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age.

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. Americans had many different ideas about how the country's development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Reformers sought to clean up politics, black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights, women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large, and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Whatever their goals, "reform" became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name.

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 (the managers who held the keys saved themselves, but left over 200 women behind). A rickety fire ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. Women lined the rooftop and windows of the ten story building and jumped, landing in a "mangled, bloody pulp." Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. Among the onlookers, "women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines." By the time the fire burned itself out 71 workers were injured and 146 had died.

A year before, the Triangle workers had gone out on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Remembering their workers' "chief value," the owners of the factory decided that a viable fire escape and unlocked doors were too expensive and called in the city police to break up the strike. After the 1911 fire, reporter Bill Shepherd reflected, "I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer." Former Triangle worker and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman said, "This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers... the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death." After the fire Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges. They 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. But as such tragedies mounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequality grew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for this new modern order.

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. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform.

Journalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice. In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city's slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis's book led to housing reform in New York and other cities, and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty. In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the Stock Yards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production. The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. "The slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors," wrote Sinclair, "like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory." Sinclair's exposé led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

"I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents." Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward

The social gospel emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. It emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society, and not simply individual souls. Instead of just caring for family or fellow church members, social gospel advocates encouraged Christians to engage society, challenge social, political, and economic structures, and help those less fortunate than themselves. Responding to the developments of the industrial revolution in America and the increasing concentration of people in urban spaces, with its attendant social and economic problems, some social gospelers went so far as to advocate a form of Christian socialism, but all urged Americans to confront the sins of their society.

One of the most notable advocates of the social gospel was Walter Rauschenbusch. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1886 Rauschenbusch accepted the pastorate of a German Baptist church in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City, where he was confronted by rampant crime and stark poverty, problems not adequately addressed by the political leaders of the city. Rauschenbusch joined with fellow reformers to elect a new mayoral candidate, but he also realized that a new theological framework had to reflect his interest in society and its problems. He revived Jesus' phrase, "the Kingdom of God," claiming that it encompassed every aspect of life and made every part of society a purview of the proper Christian. Like Charles Sheldon's Rev. Maxwell, Rauschenbusch believed that every Christian, whether they were a businessperson, a politician, or stay-at-home parent, should ask themselves what they could to enact the kingdom of God on Earth.

"The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations." Walter Rauschenbush, A Theology For The Social Gospel, 1917

Glaring blindspots persisted within the proposals of most social gospel advocates. As men, they often ignored the plight of women and thus most refused to support women's suffrage. Many were also silent on the plight of African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed minority groups. However, Rauschenbusch and other social gospel proponents' writings would have a profound influence upon twentieth-century American life, not only most immediately in progressive reform but later, too, inspiring Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, to envision a "beloved community" that resembled Rauschenbusch's "Kingdom of God."

Reform opened new possibilities for women's activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women's suffrage. Much energy for women's work came from female "clubs," social organizations devoted to various purposes. Some focused on intellectual development, others emphasized philanthropic activities. Increasingly, these organizations looked outwards, to their communities, and to the place of women in the larger political sphere.

Women's clubs flourished in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In 1890s women formed national women's club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women's rights were the General Federation of Women's Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896), both of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were bi-racial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy mid-nineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters. The segregation of black women into distinct clubs nonetheless still produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all blacks, as well as equal rights for women.

Other women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life. And still others worked as moral vigilantes. The fearsome Carrie A. Nation, an imposing woman who believed she worked God's will, won headlines for destroying saloons. In Wichita, Kansas, on December 27, 1900, Nation took a hatchet and broke bottles and bars at the luxurious Carey Hotel. Arrested and charged with $3000 in damages, Nation spent a month in jail before the county dismissed the charges on account of "a delusion to such an extent as to be practically irresponsible." But Nation's "hatchetation" drew national attention. Describing herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like," she continued her assaults, and days later smashed two more Wichita bars.

Few women followed in Nation's footsteps, and many more worked within more reputable organizations. Nation, for instance, had founded a chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, (WCTU) but the organizations' leaders described her as "unwomanly and unchristian." The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combatting the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a "do everything" policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women's rights. Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.

Many American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The 1912 Anti-Saloon League Yearbook, for instance, presented charts indicating comparable increases in alcohol consumption alongside rising divorce rates. The WCTU called alcohol a "home wrecker." More insidiously, perhaps, reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants, necessarily maligning America's immigrants, Catholics, and working classes in their crusade against liquor. Still, reformers believed that the abolition of "strong drink" would bring about social progress, would obviate the need for prisons and insane asylums, would save women and children from domestic abuse, and usher in a more just, progressive society.

From the club movement and temperance campaigns emerged powerful, active, female activists. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams' in fame, energy, and innovation. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, Addams lost her mother by the age of two and lived under the attentive care of her father. At seventeen, she left home to attend Rockford Female Seminary. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked upon on a multi-year "grand tour" of Europe. Jane found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. After visiting London's Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the US and in 1889 founded Hull House in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr.

The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other ... It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House

Hull House workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, administering classes for parents and clubs for children, and organizing social and cultural events for the community. Florence Kelley stayed at Hull House from 1891 to 1899, taking the settlement house model to New York and founding the Henry Street Settlement there. But Kelley also influenced Addams, convincing her to move into the realm of social reform. Hull House began exposing conditions in local sweat shops and advocating for the organization of workers. She called the conditions caused by urban poverty and industrialization a "social crime." Hull House workers surveyed their community and produced statistics of poverty, disease, and living conditions that proved essential for reformers. Addams began pressuring politicians. Together Kelley and Addams petitioned legislators to pass anti-sweatshop legislation passed that limited the hours of work for women and children to eight per day. Yet Addams was an upper class white Protestant woman who had faced limits, like many reformers, in embracing what seemed to them radical policies. While Addams called labor organizing a "social obligation," she also warned the labor movement against the "constant temptation towards class warfare." Addams, like many reformers, favored cooperation between rich and poor and bosses and workers, whether cooperation was a realistic possibility or not.

Addams became a kind of celebrity. In 1912, she became the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention when she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the Progressive Party's candidate for president. Her campaigns for social reform and women's rights won headlines and her voice became ubiquitous in progressive politics.

It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women-and, occasionally, men-had pushed for women's suffrage. Suffragists' hard work resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions.

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. By the 1890s, for example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, then the largest women's organization in America, endorsed suffrage. An alliance of working-class and middle- and upper-class women organized the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 and campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Suffrage Association, a leading suffrage organization comprised largely of middle and upper-class women. WTUL members viewed the vote as a way to further their economic interests and to foster a new sense of respect for working-class women. "What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist," said Ruth Schneiderman, a WTUL leader, during a 1912 speech. "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too."

Many suffragists adopted a much crueler message. Some, even outside of the South, argued that white women's votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy. Many American women found it advantageous to base their arguments for the vote on the necessity of maintaining white supremacy by enfranchising white, upper and middle class women. These arguments even stretched into international politics. But whatever the message, the suffrage campaign was winning.

The final push for women's suffrage came on the eve of World War I. Determined to win the vote; the National American Suffrage Association developed a dual strategy that focused on the passage of state voting rights laws and on the ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, a new, more militant, suffrage organization emerged on the scene. Led by Alice Paul, the National Women's Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Women's Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women.

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. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by both the promise of change, but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began, the US was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.

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-legal or otherwise-or consolidations to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity. Certain types of monopolies, specifically for intellectual property like copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade-secrets, are protected under the Constitution for the "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," but for power entities to control entire national markets was something wholly new, and, for many Americans, wholly unsettling.

The rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves. The "second industrial revolution," made possible by the available natural resources, growth in the labor supply through immigration, increasing capital, new legal economic entities, novel production strategies, and a growing national market, was commonly asserted to be the natural product of the federal government's laissez faire, or "hands off," economic policy. An unregulated business climate, the argument went, allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first utilized vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.

Between 1897 and 1904 over 4,000 companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. As one historian wrote, "By 1904 a total of 318 trusts held 40% of US manufacturing assets and boasted a capitalization of $7 billion, seven times bigger than the US national debt." With the 20 th century came the age of monopoly. From such mergers and the aggressive business policies of wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller-controversial figures often referred to as "robber barons," so named for the cutthroat stifling of economic competition and their mistreatment of their workers-and the widely accepted political corruption that facilitated it, opposition formed and pushed for regulations to reign the power of monopolies. The great corporations became a major target of reformers.

Big business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in single state. They might ship goods across state lines or to other countries, but they typically had offices and factories in just one state. Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. In the Midwest, so-called "Granger laws" (spurred by farmers who formed a network of organizations that were part political pressure group, part social club, and part mutual-aid society that became known as "the Grange") regulated railroads and other new companies. Railroads and others opposed these regulations for restraining profits and, also, because of the difficulty of meeting the standards of each state's separate regulatory laws. In 1877, the United States Supreme Court upheld these laws in a series of rulings, finding in cases such as Munn v. Illinois and Stone v. Wisconsin that railroads, and other companies of such size necessarily affected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states. In Munn, the court declared that "Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devoted his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created."

Later rulings, however, conceded that only the federal government could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. 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 a "trust ...or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce... is declared to be illegal" and that those who "monopolize...any part of the trade or commerce...shall be deemed guilty." The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that "unreasonably" stifled free trade. 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 loop holes in previous legislation.

Aggression against the trusts-and the progressive vogue for "trust busting"-took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. A reform Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901, Roosevelt's youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation. The writer Henry Adams said that he "showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter-the quality that medieval theology assigned to God-he was pure act." Roosevelt was by no means anti-business. Instead, he envisioned his presidency as a mediator between opposing forces, like, for example, between labor unions and corporate executives. Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for anti-trust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied upon to break up the trusts. Roosevelt also used his own moral judgment to determining which monopolies he would pursue. Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation was wildly exaggerated, he was first major national politician to go after the trusts.

"The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown." Teddy Roosevelt

His first target was the Northern Securities Company, a "holding" trust in which several wealthy bankers, most famously J.P. Morgan, used to hold controlling shares in all the major railroad companies in the American Northwest. Holding trusts had emerged as a way to circumvent the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: by controlling the majority of shares, rather than the principal, Morgan and his collaborators tried to claim that it was not a monopoly. Roosevelt's administration sued and won in court and in 1904 the Northern Securities Company was ordered to disband into separate competitive companies. Two years later, in 1906, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act, allowing the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate best practices and set reasonable rates for the railroads.

Roosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust-busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the quantity of monopoly break-ups that occurred during Roosevelt's seven years in office. Taft notably went after Carnegie's 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. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt's return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive, or "Bull-Moose," Party. 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. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his "New Freedom" agenda neither trust-busting or federal regulation but rather small business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances. Yet once he won the election, Wilson edged near to Roosevelt's position, signing the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers, price discrimination, and protecting labor's access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting. Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act, ensuring at least some measure of implementation.

While the three presidents-Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson-pushed the development and enforcement of anti-trust law, their commitments were uneven, and trust-busting itself manifested the political pressure put on politicians by the workers and farmers and progressive writers who so strongly drew attention to the ramifications of trusts and corporate capital on the lives of everyday Americans.

The potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history. Professional bison hunting expeditions nearly eradicated an entire species, industrialized logging companies could denude whole forests, chemical plants could pollute an entire region's water supply. As Americans built up the West and industrialization marched ever onward, reformers embraced environmental protections.

Historians often cite preservation and conservation as the 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. The fight revolved around the provision of water for San Francisco. Engineers identified the location where the Tuolomne River ran through Hetch Hetchy as an ideal site for a reservoir. The project had been suggested in the 1880s but picked up momentum in the early twentieth century. But the valley was located inside Yosemite National Park. (Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890, though the land had been set aside earlier in a grant approved by President Lincoln in 1864.) The debate over Hetch Hetchy revealed two distinct positions on the value of the valley and on the purpose of public lands.

John Muir, a naturalist, writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the "God of the Mountains" in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition. Gifford Pinchot, arguably the father of American forestry and a key player in the federal management of national forests, meanwhile emphasized what he understood to be the purpose of conservation: "to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people."Muir took a wider view of what the people needed, writing that "everybody needs beauty as well as bread." These dueling arguments revealed the key differences in environmental thought: Muir, on the side of the preservationists, advocated setting aside pristine lands for their aesthetic and spiritual value, for those who could take his advice to "[get] in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth." Pinchot, on the other hand, led the charge for conservation, a kind of environmental utilitarianism that emphasized the efficient use of available resources, through planning and control and "the prevention of waste." In Hetch Hetchy, conservation won out. Congress approved the project in 1913. The dam was built and the valley flooded for the benefit of San Francisco residents.

While preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life and as a welcome respite from the challenges of modernity (at least, for those who had the means to escape), the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the "greatest good for the greatest number" was very nearly the catch phrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation's financial interests. For example, many states instituted game laws to regulate hunting and protect wildlife, but laws could be entirely unbalanced. In Pennsylvania, local game laws included requiring firearm permits for non-citizens, barred hunting on Sundays, and banned the shooting of songbirds. These laws disproportionately affected Italian immigrants, critics said, as Italians often hunted songbirds for subsistence, worked in mines for low wages every day but Sunday, and were too poor to purchase permits or to pay the fines levied against them when game wardens caught them breaking these new laws. Other laws, for example, offered up resources to businesses at costs prohibitive to all but the wealthiest companies and individuals, or with regulatory requirements that could be met only by companies with extensive resources.

But it Progressive Era environmentalism was about more than the management of American public lands. After all, reformers addressing issues facing the urban poor were doing environmental work. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both 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, even playgrounds and city parks. Their work focused on the intersection of communities and their material environments, highlighting the urgency of urban environmental concerns.

While reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities. The Country Life movement, spearheaded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, 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. Led by Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, the nature study movement took students outside to experience natural processes and to help them develop observational skills and an appreciation for the natural world.

Other examples highlight the interconnectedness of urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature. Passenger pigeons were actively hunted, prepared at New York's finest restaurants and in the humblest of farm kitchens. Some hunted them for pay; others shot them in competitions at sporting clubs. And then they were gone, their ubiquity giving way only to nostalgia. Many Americans took notice at the great extinction of a species that had perhaps numbered in the billions and then was eradicated. Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers-even whole birds-on ladies' hats. Upper and middle-class women made up the lion's share of the membership of these societies. They used their social standing to fight for birds. 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. Following the feathers backward, from the hats to the hunters to the birds themselves, and examining the ways women mobilized contemporary notions of womanhood in the service of protecting avian beauty, reveals a tangle of cultural and economic processes. Such examples also reveal the range of ideas, policies, and practices wrapped up in figuring out what-and who-American nature should be for.

Just as reformers advocated for business regulations, anti-trust laws, environmental protections, women's rights, and urban health campaigns, so too did many push for racial legislation in the American South. America's tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. 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. 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. And as the remaining African American voters threatened to the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms-disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would "purify" the ballot box by restricting black voting and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South movement were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of a shared Anglo-Saxon, white supremacy. As the nation took up the "white man's burden" to uplift the world's racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage non-white populations. The South had become the nation's racial vanguard.

The question was how to accomplish disfranchisement. The 15 th Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890, a Mississippi state newspaper called on politicians to devise "some legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies." The state's Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. 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 state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped the suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state's African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so called "understanding clause" allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. 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.

Between 1895 and 1908 the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed the suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded through mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests would still be eligible, at least until grandfather clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary, excluded blacks from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South.

For all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later Governor of Mississippi, boasted "there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi's constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant-but the nigger."These technically colorblind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Blacks were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying in order to prevent the fraud that had plagued the region's elections.

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. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community's racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region's railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern blacks. Southern cities were becoming a center of black middle class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. 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. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of blacks into the very geography of public spaces.

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." Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected black citizenship and relegated black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region's growing black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.

And yet, many black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as 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.

Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute. Located in Alabama, Washington envisioned Tuskegee's contribution to black life to come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans too accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.

As a leading spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass's exit from the historical stage in early 1895, 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. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America's unjust racial hierarchy, Washington's public advocacy of a conciliatory posture towards white supremacy concealed the efforts to which Washington went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in black journalism, working to fund and support black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois's growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Du Bois's criticism reveals the politicized context of the black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, W. E. B. Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. Raised by a hardworking and independent mother, Du Bois's New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois's sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life's work to study what he called the "Negro problem," the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois's educational path trended back North, and he attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard and in 1895-the same year as Washington's famous Atlanta address-became the first black American to receive a Ph.D. there.

Du Bois became one of America's foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois's work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia, but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Darkwater (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate black personhood and attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois's main work with the NAACP lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis, one of America's leading black publications. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.

"We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults... Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice ... discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed ... Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty." W.E.B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. Reared in different settings, early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leader's lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois's confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Although Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington" in Souls of Black Folk, four years later in 1907 they shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. As much as the philosophies of Du Bois and Washington diverged when their lives overlapped, highlighting their respective quests for racial and economic justice demonstrates the importance of understanding the multiple strategies used to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.

Industrial capitalism unleashed powerful forces in American life. Along with wealth, technological innovation, and rising standards of living, a host of social problems unsettled many who turned to reform politics to set the world right again. The Progressive Era signaled that a turning point had been reached 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 efficiency to inefficiency, and to bring justice to injustice. Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible effects of so much energy was difficult to measure, but 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.
Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. DuBois on Black Progress (1895, 1903) Booker T. Washington, born a slave in Virginia in 1856, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 and became a leading advocate of African American progress. Introduced as "a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization," Washington delivered the following remarks, sometimes called the "Atlanta Compromise" speech, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. Jane Addams, "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (1892) Hull House, Chicago's famed "settlement house," was designed to uplift urban populations. Here, Addams explains why she believes reformers must "add the social function to democracy." As Addams explained, Hull House "was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal." Eugene Debs, "How I Became a Socialist" (April, 1902) A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Eugene V. Debs began working as a locomotive fireman (tending the fires of a train's steam engine) as a youth in the 1870s. His experience in the American labor movement later led him to socialism. In the early-twentieth century, as the Socialist Party of America's candidate, he ran for the presidency five times and twice earned nearly one-million votes. He was America's most prominent socialist. In 1902, a New York paper asked Debs how he became a socialist. This is his answer. Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister and theologian, advocated for a "social gospel." Here, he explains why he believes Christianity must address social questions. Alice Stone Blackwell, Answering Objections to Women's Suffrage (1917) Alice Stone Blackwell was a feminist activist and writer. In an edited volume published in 1917, Blackwell responded to popular anti-women's-suffrage arguments. Woodrow Wilson on the "New Freedom," 1912 Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive democrat. Wilson argued that changing economic conditions demanded new and aggressive government policies-he called his political program "the New Freedom"- to preserve traditional American liberties. "Next!" (1904) Illustration shows a "Standard Oil" storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House-President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a "trust buster."
"College Day on the Picket Line" (1917)
Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women's suffrage. 1917.
This chapter was edited by Mary Anne Henderson, with content contributions by Andrew C. Baker, Peter Catapano, Blaine Hamilton, Mary Anne Henderson, Amanda Hughett, Amy Kohout, Maria Montalvo, Brent Ruswick, Philip Luke Sinitiere, Nora Slonimsky, Whitney Stewart, and Brandy Thomas Wells.

Recommended citation: Andrew C. Baker et al., "The Progressive Era," Mary Anne Henderson, ed., in The American Yawp, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, eds., last modified August 1, 2017, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

Recommended Reading

1. Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

2. Bay, Mia. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

3. Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

4. Dawley, Alan. Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

5. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Knopf, 1955.

6. Dubois, Ellen Carol. Women's Suffrage & Women's Rights. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

7. Filene, Peter. "An Obituary for `The Progressive Movement,"' American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970). 20-34.

8. Flanagan, Maureen. America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

9. Foley, Neil. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

10. Gilmore, Glenda E. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

11. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

12. Hicks, Cheryl. Talk With You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

13. Johnson, Kimberley. Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism, 1877-1929. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

14. Kessler-Harris, Alice. In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

15. Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

16. Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism. New York: The Free Press, 1963.

17. Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974.

18. McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. New York: Free Press, 2003.

19. Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

20. Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

21. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

22. Sanders, Elizabeth. The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

23. Stromquist, Shelton. Re-Inventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

24. White, Deborah. Too Heavy a Load: In Defense of Themselves. New York: Norton, 1999.

25. Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Notes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The many problems associated with the Gilded Age-the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism-confronted Americans.

# data[].attributes.body
From Don't Know Much About History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who Were the Muckrakers  from Don't Know Much About History

# data[].attributes.body
American Studies Progressive Era Visual Story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Studies Progressive Era Visual Story - Muckrakers

# data[].attributes.body
Video

# data[].attributes.body
Shame of Our Cities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Voters are in a bad mood. Again. We are routinely (and justifiably) frustrated with our politicians, but "throwing the bums out" doesn't seem to change much. And we are all bracing for another anger-pageant that will stomp through American life for the next 13 months until election day.

A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is not more rage, but a new political perspective. Around 1900, after years of anger at "vulgar" politicians, a young journalist pushed voters to resist the easy impulse "to go out with the crowd and 'smash something.'" It was too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe that bad politicians were just immoral people. Instead he asked his massive readership to look at the structure rather than the individual, to think about the warped systems that enabled political corruption, and to consider the ways angry voters inadvertently encouraged behavior they condemned.

Lincoln Steffens was the perfect man for the job. The young writer had bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan, driven by wanderlust, contrarianism, and a preference for the sleazy over the respectable. He honed his scorching prose, and learned about New York's "low-life," as a crime reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. There was something feisty about Steffens. Over his long career, he was often wrong, sometimes a sucker, but rarely a coward. One politico called him "a born crook that's gone straight."

Like many Americans, Steffens grew up cursing his leaders. Between 1865 and 1900, frustrated citizens pointed to the never-ending string of political scandals and stolen elections, as leaders failed to address the massive traumas of the Gilded Age. Citizens often looked down on the parties, like the wealthy young man who wrote that all politicians were a "shifty-eyed lot, dribbling tobacco juice, badly dressed, never prosperous and self-respecting ... a degraded caste."

Attacking leaders was an easy route to becoming one. Self-impressed tycoons, high-toned editors, and rising politicians "greedy for power" all insisted that they knew how to clean up politics. Replace bad, immoral men with "the best men"-wealthy, God-fearing, respectable-and the democracy would fix itself. And by "the best men," they meant themselves.

Again and again, angry voters tried this approach, throwing the bums out in election after election. In major cities, "reformers" applied the same formula, winning the mayor's office periodically, but falling out of power just as quickly. And control of Congress changed hands with dizzying speed in the 1880s and 1890s, yet politics only grew more corrupt.

But as a crime reporter who befriended crooked cops and scheming politicos, Steffens stumbled onto a new approach to journalism. Instead of moralizing, he listened. People would talk, he found, if you let them. Steffens hung around police stations and pool halls, absorbing everything he could. He even tolerated the ceaseless lectures of a young police commissioner named Roosevelt (though Steffens devised ways to shut his new friend Teddy up). And he refused to sit, isolated, in New York, setting out across the country to study dirty tricks from Boston to San Francisco.

Steffens introduced American readers to corrupt bosses who make today's most obnoxious candidates look timid. He befriended characters with nicknames like "Hinky Dink" and "Bathhouse John." Taciturn party thugs opened up to Steffens, analyzing their best tricks like fans of the same sport. By humanizing election-buyers, union-busters, accused murderers, and confirmed murderers, he helped explain why America's leadership problem persisted.

Steffens came away with two major insights. Bad politicians were not necessarily bad people, and society, as a whole, encouraged their sins.

He learned the most from Israel Durham, boss of the Philadelphia political machine, an organization so rotten that Ben Franklin and George Washington's names often showed up on voting rolls. (People in Philly joked: "The founders voted here once, and they vote here yet.") But Steffens liked Iz' Durham. He concluded that Durham was not a bad man, but merely a successful man, trapped at the head of a system beyond his control. Durham was certainly guilty of tremendous crimes, but society kept rewarding him for them. Among other things, Durham explained that regular campaign donations, coming from upstanding citizens, did more to buy influence than any illegal kickback. Such contributions, the boss shouted, were "worse than bribes!"

Conversations with Durham and other bosses led Steffens to conclude that the angry public was focused on the wrong problem. Political dirty tricks were not "exceptional, local, and criminal ... not an accidental consequence of the wickedness of bad men, but the impersonal effect of natural causes." Americans-obsessed with individualism-liked to rage against immoral men, but really it was big, impersonal structures-like the steady drip of campaign contributions-that did more to buy power and harm the democracy.

Steffens began to write, furiously, publishing his "dawning theory" in his famous "Shame of the Cities" series in McClure's Magazine between 1901 and 1904. Politicians were not a special caste of wicked men; they were no more immoral than bribing businessmen or lazy cops or short-sighted voters. Often, angry middle-class citizens, looking for someone to blame, perpetuated the pointless cycle of reform and relapse, throwing out individuals but failing to make real change.

Their outrage at the "bad men" in government was really just a "thought-saver of the educated who think that they think," Steffens declared, a way to avoid considering the deeper problems with their political system.

Steffens was the most articulate voice of the new burst of reform remaking American democracy after 1900. American voters began to see that the country's political problems were, really, social problems. Instead of hollering about immoral bosses, reformers simply went around them, introducing primary elections, ballot initiatives, recall votes, and eventually the direct election of senators. Progressive activists focused on improving political structures, not what they labeled electoral " lynchings " of the bad guys.

Some clever bosses jumped on the bandwagon. Tammany Hall cleverly recast itself as a reform organization. But this was fine; it meant that voters were rewarding reform over corruption. By 1910, journalist William Allen White imagined the sleaziest bosses of the 19th century observing the new, cleaner elections, "cackling in derision until they were black in the face" at neutered politicians forced to play by the fairer rules. These changes marked the greatest moment of political reform, not sparked by a major crisis like a war or depression, in American history.

In our own era of intense skepticism towards the media, it's important to remember how much we owe muckrakers like Steffens. And in our time of anger at politicians, it's important to consider where bad leaders come from. Those today who attack all politicians, while running for office, are no better than phony Gilded Age moralists, who condemned the "bad men" in Washington while trying to join them. Their rhetoric turns every campaign into a contest that rewards anger, providing a smokescreen behind which elites masquerade as outsiders.

And it confuses the issue: politicians are, as a group, no better or worse than the rest of us. If they stink, something's rotten with the system that feeds them.

Yet anger at our leaders is the political cliché of our day. As long as we see politics as a war between good and bad individuals, ignoring the structures that reward or punish them, this will continue. America's stalled democracy is not our leaders' fault alone, but ours as well, for treating all political problems as personnel problems.

Jon Grinspan is a curator and Jefferson fellow in the Division of Political History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. His book- The Virgin Vote -on the role young people played in 19th-century American democracy, will come out this spring.

Primary editor: Siobhan Phillips. Secondary editor: Jia-Rui Cook.

*Photos courtesy of Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Early 20th-Century Muckraker Lincoln Steffens Is a Man For Our Times : What It Means to Be American

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Voters are in a bad mood. Again. We are routinely (and justifiably) frustrated with our politicians, but "throwing the bums out" doesn't seem to change much. And we are all bracing for another anger-pageant that will stomp through American life for the next 13 months until election day.

# data[].attributes.body
Upton Sinclair

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION
Bill of Rights in Action

FALL 2008 (Volume 24, No. 1)
Reform
Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy in China | Upton Sinclair's The Jungle | John Dewey and the Reconstruction of American Democracy

Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws.

Before the turn of the 20th century, a major reform movement had emerged in the United States. Known as progressives, the reformers were reacting to problems caused by the rapid growth of factories and cities. Progressives at first concentrated on improving the lives of those living in slums and in getting rid of corruption in government.

By the beginning of the new century, progressives had started to attack huge corporations like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the Armour meat-packing company for their unjust practices. The progressives revealed how these companies eliminated competition, set high prices, and treated workers as "wage slaves."

The progressives differed, however, on how best to control these big businesses. Some progressives wanted to break up the large corporations with anti-monopoly laws. Others thought state or federal government regulation would be more effective. A growing minority argued in favor of socialism, the public ownership of industries. The owners of the large industries dismissed all these proposals: They demanded that they be left alone to run their businesses as they saw fit.

Theodore Roosevelt was the president when the progressive reformers were gathering strength. Assuming the presidency in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, he remained in the White House until 1909. Roosevelt favored large-scale enterprises. "The corporation is here to stay," he declared. But he favored government regulation of them "with due regard of the public as a whole."

Roosevelt did not always approve of the progressive-minded journalists and other writers who exposed what they saw as corporate injustices. When David Phillips, a progressive journalist, wrote a series of articles that attacked U.S. senators of both political parties for serving the interests of big business rather than the people, President Roosevelt thought Phillips had gone too far. He referred to him as a man with a "muck-rake."

Even so, Roosevelt had to admit, "There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake." The term "muckraker" caught on. It referred to investigative writers who uncovered the dark side of society.

Few places had more "filth on the floor" than the meat- packing houses of Chicago. Upton Sinclair, a largely unknown fiction writer, became an "accidental muckraker" when he wrote a novel about the meat-packing industry.

Packingtown

By the early 1900s, four major meat-packing corporations had bought out the many small slaughterhouse companies throughout the United States. Because they were so large, the Armour, Swift, Morris, and National Packing companies could dictate prices to cattle ranchers, feed growers, and consumers.

The Big Four meat-packing companies centralized their operations in a few cities. Largest of all was the meat-packing industry in Chicago. It spread through acres of stockyards, feed lots, slaughterhouses, and meat-processing plants. Together with the nearby housing area where the workers lived, this part of Chicago was known as Packingtown.

Long before Henry Ford adapted it to automobile production, meat packers had developed the first industrial assembly line. It was more accurately a "disassembly line," requiring nearly 80 separate jobs from the killing of an animal to processing its meat for sale. "Killing gangs" held jobs like "knockers," "rippers," "leg breakers," and "gutters." The animal carcasses moved continuously on hooks until processed into fresh, smoked, salted, pickled, and canned meats. The organs, bones, fat, and other scraps ended up as lard, soap, and fertilizer. The workers said that the meat-packing companies "used everything but the squeal."

Unskilled immigrant men did the backbreaking and often dangerous work, laboring in dark and unventilated rooms, hot in summer and unheated in winter. Many stood all day on floors covered with blood, meat scraps, and foul water, wielding sledgehammers and knives. Women and children over 14 worked at meat trimming, sausage making, and canning.

Most workers earned just pennies per hour and worked 10 hours per day, six days a week. A few skilled workers, however, made as much as 50 cents an hour as "pacesetters," who sped up the assembly line to maximize production. The use of pacesetters caused great discontent among the workers.

By 1904, most of Chicago's packing-house workers were recent immigrants from Poland, Slovakia, and Lithuania. They crowded into tenement apartments and rented rooms in Packingtown, next to the stinking stockyards and four city dumps.

Real estate agents sold some immigrants small houses on credit, knowing that few would be able to keep up with the payments due to job layoffs, pay cuts, or disabling injuries. When an immigrant fell behind in payments, the mortgage holder would foreclose, repaint, and sell the house to another immigrant family.

Upton Sinclair

Born in Baltimore in 1878, Upton Sinclair came from an old Virginia family. The Civil War had wiped out the family's wealth and land holdings. Sinclair's father became a traveling liquor salesman and alcoholic. The future author's mother wanted him to become a minister. At age 5, he wrote his first story. It told about a pig that ate a pin, which ended up in a family's sausage.

When he was 10, Sinclair's family moved to New York City where he went to school and college. While attending Columbia University, he began to sell stories to magazines. He specialized in western, adventure, sports, and war-hero fiction for working-class readers.

Sinclair graduated from Columbia in 1897, and three years later he married Meta Fuller. They had one child. Sinclair began to write novels but had difficulty getting them published.

As he was struggling to make a living as a writer, he began reading about socialism. He came to believe in the idea of a peaceful revolution in which Americans would vote for the government to take over the ownership of big businesses. He joined the Socialist Party in 1903, and a year later he began to write for Appeal to Reason, a socialist magazine.

In 1904, the meat-packer's union in Chicago went on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. The Big Four companies broke the strike and the union by bringing in strikebreakers, replacements for those on strike. The new workers kept the assembly lines running while the strikers and their families fell into poverty.

The editor of Appeal to Reason suggested that Sinclair write a novel about the strike. Sinclair, at age 26, went to Chicago at the end of 1904 to research the strike and the conditions suffered by the meat-packing workers. He interviewed them, their families, lawyers, doctors, and social workers. He personally observed the appalling conditions inside the meat-packing plants.

The Jungle

The Jungle is Sinclair's fictionalized account of Chicago's Packingtown. The title reflects his view of the brutality he saw in the meat-packing business. The story centered on a young man, Jurgis Rudkis, who had recently immigrated to Chicago with a group of relatives and friends from Lithuania.

Full of hope for a better life, Jurgis married and bought a house on credit. He was elated when he got a job as a "shoveler of guts" at "Durham," a fictional firm based on Armour & Co., the leading Chicago meat packer.

Jurgis soon learned how the company sped up the assembly line to squeeze more work out of the men for the same pay. He discovered the company cheated workers by not paying them anything for working part of an hour.

Jurgis saw men in the pickling room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs. Workers with tuberculosis coughed constantly and spit blood on the floor. Right next to where the meat was processed, workers used primitive toilets with no soap and water to clean their hands. In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers had to urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were rare, and workers ate where they worked.

Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken."

Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats. His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats:

. . . and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he was injured on the assembly line. No workers' compensation existed, and the employer was not responsible for people injured on the job. Jurgis' life fell apart, and he lost his wife, son, house, and job.

Then Jurgis met a socialist hotel owner, who hired him as a porter. Jurgis listened to socialist speakers who appeared at the hotel, attended political rallies, and drew inspiration from socialism. Sinclair used the speeches to express his own views about workers voting for socialist candidates to take over the government and end the evils of capitalist greed and "wage slavery."

In the last scene of the novel, Jurgis attended a celebration of socialist election victories in Packingtown. Jurgis was excited and once again hopeful. A speaker, probably modeled after Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, begged the crowd to "Organize! Organize! Organize!" Do this, the speaker shouted, and "Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!"

The Public Reaction

The Jungle was first published in 1905 as a serial in The Appeal to Reason and then as a book in 1906. Sales rocketed. It was an international best-seller, published in 17 languages.

Sinclair was dismayed, however, when the public reacted with outrage about the filthy and falsely labeled meat but ignored the plight of the workers. Meat sales dropped sharply. "I aimed at the public's heart," he said, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Sinclair thought of himself as a novelist, not as a muckraker who investigated and wrote about economic and social injustices. But The Jungle took on a life of its own as one of the great muckraking works of the Progressive Era. Sinclair became an "accidental muckraker."

The White House was bombarded with mail, calling for reform of the meat-packing industry. After reading The Jungle, President Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House to discuss it. The president then appointed a special commission to investigate Chicago's slaughterhouses.

The special commission issued its report in May 1906. The report confirmed almost all the horrors that Sinclair had written about. One day, the commissioners witnessed a slaughtered hog that fell part way into a worker toilet. Workers took the carcass out without cleaning it and put it on a hook with the others on the assembly line.

The commissioners criticized existing meat-inspection laws that required only confirming the healthfulness of animals at the time of slaughter. The commissioners recommended that inspections take place at every stage of the processing of meat. They also called for the secretary of agriculture to make rules requiring the "cleanliness and wholesomeness of animal products."

New Federal Food Laws

President Roosevelt called the conditions revealed in the special commission's report "revolting." In a letter to Congress, he declared, "A law is needed which will enable the inspectors of the [Federal] Government to inspect and supervise from the hoof to the can the preparation of the meat food product."

Roosevelt overcame meat-packer opposition and pushed through the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The law authorized inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop any bad or mislabeled meat from entering interstate and foreign commerce. This law greatly expanded federal government regulation of private enterprise. The meat packers, however, won a provision in the law requiring federal government rather than the companies to pay for the inspection.

Sinclair did not like the law's regulation approach. True to his socialist convictions, he preferred meat-packing plants to be publicly owned and operated by cities, as was commonly the case in Europe.

Passage of the Meat Inspection Act opened the way for Congress to approve a long-blocked law to regulate the sale of most other foods and drugs. For over 20 years, Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist at the Department of Agriculture, had led a "pure food crusade." He and his "Poison Squad" had tested chemicals added to preserve foods and found many were dangerous to human health. The uproar over The Jungle revived Wiley's lobbying efforts in Congress for federal food and drug regulation.

Roosevelt signed a law regulating foods and drugs on June 30, 1906, the same day he signed the Meat Inspection Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act regulated food additives and prohibited misleading labeling of food and drugs. This law led to the formation of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The two 1906 laws ended up increasing consumer confidence in the food and drugs they purchased, which benefitted these businesses. The laws also acted as a wedge to expand federal regulation of other industries, one of the strategies to control big business pursued by the progressives.

After The Jungle

The Jungle made Upton Sinclair rich and famous. He started a socialist colony in a 50-room mansion in New Jersey, but the building burned down after a year. In 1911, his wife ran off with a poet. He divorced her, but soon he remarried and moved to California.

During his long life, he wrote more than 90 novels. King Coal was based on the 1914 massacre of striking miners and their families in Colorado. Boston was about the highly publicized case of Sacco and Vancetti, two anarchists tried and executed for bank robbery and murder in the 1920s. His novel Dragon's Teeth, about Nazi Germany, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize. None of these novels, however, achieved the success of The Jungle.

Several of Sinclair's books were made into movies. In 1914, Hollywood released a movie version of The Jungle. Recently, his work Oil!, which dealt with California's oil industry in the 1920s, was made into the film There Will Be Blood.

During the Great Depression, Sinclair entered electoral politics. He ran for governor of California as a socialist in 1930 and as a Democrat in 1934. In the 1934 election, he promoted a program he called "End Poverty in California." He wanted the state to buy idle factories and abandoned farms and lease them to the unemployed. The Republican incumbent governor, Frank Merriam, defeated him, but Sinclair still won over 800,000 votes (44 percent).

After the death of his second wife in 1961, Sinclair moved to New Jersey to be with his son. He died there in 1968 at age 90.

People still read The Jungle for its realistic picture of conditions in the meat-packing industry at the turn of the 20th century. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Jungle proved the power of fiction to move a nation.

For Discussion and Writing

1. Why did the existing inspection system fail to guard the safety of meat for human consumption?

2. Why was Upton Sinclair dismayed about the public reaction and legislation that followed publication of The Jungle?

3. How did The Jungle help the progressives achieve their goals?

For Further Reading

Mattson, Kevin. Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. Hoboken, N. J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

Phelps, Christopher, ed. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.

A C T I V T Y

Working in Packingtown

Upton Sinclair was disappointed that Congress did not address the injustices suffered by workers in Packingtown's meat-packing industry. Take on the role of a muckraker and write an editorial that details the injustices to workers and what Congress should do about them.

A L T E R N A T I V E A C T I V I T Y

A Modern Muckraker

Look at a contemporary problem in the community, state, or nation. Investigate it. Write an editorial on what should be done about it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BRIA 24 1 b Upton Sinclairs The Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry - Constitutional Rights Foundation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reform Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy in China | Upton Sinclair's The Jungle | John Dewey and the Reconstruction of American Democracy Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws.

# data[].attributes.body
The Jungle

# data[].attributes.body
You Will Love History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Objective 2.12- Progressivism Under Taft

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Objective 2. 11- Roosevelt's Square Deal

# data[].attributes.body
You Will Love History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Objective 2.9- Goals of the Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.headline
Top 10 similarities between Batman and Teddy Roosevelt

# data[].attributes.subject
Top 10 similarities between Batman and Teddy Roosevelt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 Similarities Between BATMAN And President Teddy ROOSEVELT

# data[].attributes.body
Mr. Betts Class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight" Parody) - @MrBettsClass

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Let's ring in the new year with some good ol' fashioned muckraking. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle advocates socialism and takes on the meat industry to the tune of the The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"! Make sure you enter the contest to win a video on the topic of your choice: http://youtu.be/C5qt0l6og7c New videos every Tuesday!

# data[].attributes.body
Video

# data[].attributes.body
Ch 7

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Study with Quizlet and memorise flashcards containing terms like Progressives, Social Gospel Movement, Salvation Army and others.

# data[].attributes.headline
Theodore Roosevelt: Conserving America's Future

# data[].attributes.subject
Theodore Roosevelt: Conserving America's Future

# data[].attributes.body
Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Theodore Roosevelt: Conserving America's Future

# data[].attributes.body
Hip Hughes History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Muckrakers for Dummies -- Muckraking and the Tradition of Investigative Reporting

# data[].attributes.body
He's awesome!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The History of Theodore [Teddy] Roosevelt - A Short Story

# data[].attributes.body
Worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
Progressive Presidents

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course U.S. History and today we're going to finish our discussion of progressivism and indulge in a bit of Great Man history. Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Great Man history, huh? Well, I was born on a sunny summer morning in 197- Yeah, you're not that great me from the past.

# data[].attributes.body
Ida Tarbell and Standard Oil

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the age of 14, Ida Tarbell witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, in which dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a daunting choice that seemed to come out of nowhere: sell their businesses to the shrewd, confident 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his newly incorporated Standard Oil Company, or attempt to compete and face ruin. She didn't understand it at the time, not all of it, anyway, but she would never forget the wretched effects of "the oil war" of 1872, which enabled Rockefeller to leave Cleveland owning 85 percent of the city's oil refineries.

Tarbell was, in effect, a young woman betrayed, not by a straying lover but by Standard Oil's secret deals with the major railroads-a collusive scheme that allowed the company to crush not only her father's business, but all of its competitors. Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with a 19-part series in magazine, a masterpiece of journalism and an unrelenting indictment that brought down one of history's greatest tycoons and effectively broke up Standard Oil's monopoly. By dint of what she termed "steady, painstaking work," Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and-with the help of Mark Twain-candid conversations with Standard Oil's most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which sealed the company's fate.

She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age, helping to usher in that age of political, economic and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era. "They had never played fair," Tarbell wrote of Standard Oil, "and that ruined their greatness for me."

Ida Minerva Tarbell was born in 1857, in a log cabin in Hatch Hollow, in Western Pennsylvania's oil region. Her father, Frank Tarbell, spent years building oil storage tanks but began to prosper once he switched to oil production and refining. "There was ease such as we had never known; luxuries we had never heard of," she later wrote. Her town of Titusville and surrounding areas in the Oil Creek Valley "had been developed into an organized industry which was now believed to have a splendid future. Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between the eyes."

That blow came in the form of the South Improvement Company, a corporation established in 1871 and widely viewed as an effort by Rockefeller and Standard Oil in Ohio to control the oil and gas industries in the region. In a secret alliance with Rockefeller, the three major railroads that ran through Cleveland-the Pennsylvania, the Erie and the New York Central-agreed to raise their shipping fees while paying "rebates" and "drawbacks" to him.

Word of the South Improvement Company's scheme leaked to newspapers, and independent oilmen in the region were outraged. "A wonderful row followed," Tarbell wrote. "There were nightly anti-monopoly meetings, violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground, their buyers turned out of the oil exchanges."

Tarbell recalled her father coming home grim-faced, his good humor gone and his contempt directed no longer at the South Improvement Company but at a "new name, that of the Standard Oil company." Franklin Tarbell and the other small oil refiners pleaded with state and federal officials to crack down on the business practices that were destined to ruin them, and by April of 1872 the Pennsylvania legislature repealed the South Improvement Company's charter before a single transaction was made. But the damage had already been done. In just six weeks, the threat of an impending alliance allowed Rockefeller to buy 22 of his 26 competitors in Cleveland. "Take Standard Oil Stock," Rockefeller told them, "and your family will never know want." Most who accepted the buyouts did indeed become rich. Franklin Tarbell resisted and continued to produce independently, but struggled to earn a decent living. His daughter wrote that she was devastated by the "hate, suspicion and fear that engulfed the community" after the Standard Oil ruckus. Franklin Tarbell's partner, "ruined by the complex situation," killed himself, and Tarbell was forced to mortgage the family home to meet his company's debts.

Rockefeller denied any conspiracy at the time, but years later, he admitted in an interview that "rebates and drawbacks were a common practice for years preceding and following this history. So much of the clamor against rebates and drawbacks came from people who knew nothing about business. Who can buy beef the cheaper-the housewife for her family, the steward for a club or hotel, or the quartermaster or commissary for an army? Who is entitled to better rebates from a railroad, those who give it for transportation 5,000 barrels a day, or those who give 500 barrels-or 50 barrels?"

Presumably, with Rockefeller's plan uncovered in Cleveland, his efforts to corner the market would be stopped. But in fact, Rockefeller had already accomplished what he had set out to do. As his biographer Ron Chernow wrote, "Once he had a monopoly over the Cleveland refineries, he then marched on and did the same thing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and the other refining centers. So that was really the major turning point in his career, and it was really one of the most shameful episodes in his career."

Still a teenager, Ida Tarbell was deeply impressed by Rockefeller's machinations. "There was born in me a hatred of privilege, privilege of any sort," she later wrote. "It was all pretty hazy, to be sure, but it still was well, at 15, to have one definite plan based on things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic justice if I should ever awake to my need of one."

At age 19, she went to Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. But after studying biology, Tarbell came to realize that she preferred writing. She took an editing job for a teaching publication and eventually worked her way up to managing editor before moving to Paris in 1890 to write. It was there that she met Samuel McClure, who offered her a position at McClure's magazine. There, Tarbell wrote a long and well-received series on Napoleon Bonaparte, which led to an immensely popular 20-part series on Abraham Lincoln. It doubled the magazine's circulation, made her a leading authority on the early life of the former president, and landed her a book deal.

In 1900, nearly three decades after the Cleveland Massacre, Tarbell set her sights on what would become "The History of the Standard Oil Company," a 19-part series (and book) that, as one writer described, "fed the antitrust frenzy by verifying what many had suspected for years: the pattern of deceit, secrecy and unregulated concentration of power that characterized Gilded Age business practice with its 'commercial Machiavellianism.' "

Ironically, Tarbell began her research by interviewing one of her father's former fellow independents back in Pennsylvania- Henry H. Rogers. After the Cleveland Massacre, Rogers spent 25 years working alongside Rockefeller, building Standard Oil into one of the first and largest multinational corporations in the world. Rogers, it seems, may have been under the impression, after the McClure's series on Lincoln, that Tarbell was writing a flattering piece on him; he reached out to her through his good friend Mark Twain. Meeting her in his home, Rogers was remarkably candid in some regards, even going to far as to provide her with internal documents and explaining the use of drawbacks in Standard Oil's history.

Tarbell recalled that Rogers also arranged for her to interview another of Rockefeller's partners, Henry Flagler, who refused to give specifics about the origins of the South Improvement Company. Instead, she sat "listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered him," she wrote. "I was never happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr. Flagler was to have me go."

Franklin Tarbell warned Ida that Rockefeller and Standard Oil were capable of crushing her, just as they'd crushed her home town of Titusville. But his daughter was relentless. As the articles began to appear in McClure's in 1902, Rogers continued to speak with Tarbell, much to her surprise. And after he went on record defending the efficiency of current Standard Oil business practices, "his face went white with rage" to find that Tarbell had uncovered documents that showed the company was still colluding with the railroads to snuff out its competition.

"Where did you get that stuff?" Rogers said angrily, pointing to the magazine. Tarbell informed him that his claims of "legitimate competition" were false. "You know this bookkeeping record is true," she told him.

Tarbell never considered herself a writer of talent. "I was not a writer, and I knew it," she said. But she believed her diligent research and commitment (she spent years examining hundreds of thousands of documents across the country, revealing strong-arm tactics, espionage and collusion) "ought to count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write."

In The History of the Standard Oil Company, she managed to combine a thorough understanding of the inner workings of Rockefeller's trust and his interest in the oil business, with simple, dramatic and elegant prose. While avoiding a condemnation of capitalism itself and acknowledging Rockefeller's brilliance, she did not hesitate to criticize the man for stooping to unethical business practices in pursuit of his many conquests:

It takes time to crush men who are pursuing legitimate trade. But one of Mr. Rockefeller's most impressive characteristics is patience. There never was a more patient man, or one who could dare more while he waited. The folly of hurrying, the folly of discouragement, for one who would succeed, went hand in hand. Everything must be ready before he acted, but while you wait you must prepare, must think, work. "You must put in, if you would take out." His instinct for the money opportunity in things was amazing, his perception of the value of seizing this or that particular invention, plant, market, was unerring. He was like a general who, besieging a city surrounded by fortified hills, views from a balloon the whole great field, and sees how, this point taken, that must fall; this hill reached, that fort is commanded. And nothing was too small: the corner grocery in Browntown, the humble refining still on Oil Creek, the shortest private pipe line. Nothing, for little things grow.

Ida Tarbell concluded her series with a two-part character study of Rockefeller, where she described him as a "living mummy," adding, "our national life is on every side distinctly poorer, uglier, meaner, for the kind of influence he exercises." Public fury over the exposé is credited with the eventual breakup of Standard Oil, which came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that the company was violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Tarbell ultimately forced Americans to consider that the nation's best-known tycoon was using nefarious tactics to crush legitimate competitors, driving honest men from business. Ultimately, Standard Oil was broken into "baby Standards," which include ExxonMobil and Chevron today. Rockefeller, a great philanthropist, was deeply stung by Tarbell's investigation. He referred to her as "that poisonous woman," but told advisers not to comment on the series or any of the allegations. "Not a word," Rockefeller told them. "Not a word about that misguided woman."

Almost 40 years after the Cleveland Massacre cast a pall over Titusville, Ida Tarbell, in her own way, was able to hold the conglomerate accountable. She died in Connecticut in 1944, at the age of 86. New York University placed her book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, at No. 5 on a list of the top 100 works of 20th⁻ century American journalism.
Sources
Books: Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day's Work, Macmillan, 1939. Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, The Macmillan Company, 1904. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Random House, 1998. Steve Weinbert, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Clarice Stasz, The Rockefeller Women: Dynasty of Piety, Privacy, and Service, iUniverse, 2000.

Articles: "The Rockefellers," American Experience, PBS.org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/sfeature/sf_7.html "The Lessons of Ida Tarbell, by Steve Weinberg, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, 1997, http://aliciapatterson.org/stories/lessons-ida-tarbell "Ida Tarbell and the Standard Oil Company: Her Attack on the Standard Oil Company and the Influence it had Throughout Society," by Lee Hee Yoon, http://hylee223.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/research-paper-ida-tarbell-and-the-standard-oil-company/

About Gilbert King

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the age of 14, Ida Tarbell witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, in which dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a daunting choice that seemed to come out of nowhere: sell their businesses to the shrewd, confident 32 year-old John D.

# data[].attributes.body
Photographs of NYC’s Underbelly in the 1890s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. So when he finally found work as a police reporter in 1877, he made it his mission to reveal the crime and poverty of New York City's East Side slum district to the world.

The resulting book,How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, was published in 1890, and is still considered "a landmark in the annals of social reform." Filled with pictures, sketches and graphic descriptions of the un-imaginable living conditions he found, the book forced the topic of tenement reform to the forefront of every New Yorker's attention.

The photograph above is titled "Bandit's Roost," and shows 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend) in New York City - an area that was considered the most crime-ridden and dangerous part of the entire city.

Riis pulled no punches. Indignant, pedantic, and at times racist ( some believe he was simply playing on the biases of his target audience) his sometimes hard-to-swallow descriptions of the residents of the tenement district are paired with equally hard-to-swallow photography:

Riis and photographers he worked with were among the first Americans to incorporate flash photography into their work. Many of their nighttime photos were captured by removing the lens cap (thus beginning the exposure), igniting a batch of flash powder, and then putting the lens cap back on the camera.

Said to be inspired by Dickens and his writing about London's poor, Riis' work had a profound effect on the lives of those he photographed. A photojournalist who had himself lived in these condition, his book was the agent of social change that New York needed at the time.

Not to say that Riis was a saint. He separated the impoverished into two categories: those deserving of assistance and everyone else. He also never outright called for any government intervention, even though it came anyway. What most people seem to agree on is that his photojournalistic work was based on a genuine, heartfelt sympathy for those people whose lives he documented and helped to improve.

If you'd like to read How the Other Half Lives yourself, you can find it in text and audio formats here and here, respectively. And if you'd like to see a large collection of Jacob Riis photography in one place, you can do so at the Museum Syndicate website here.

(via Boing Boing)
Image credits: Photographs by Jacob A. Riis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Other Half Lives: Photographs of NYC's Underbelly in the 1890s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide.

# data[].attributes.body
Lynch Law (1893)
Primary Source

# data[].attributes.body
worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
Reading and Questions

# data[].attributes.body
PPT

# data[].attributes.body
worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
Worksheet

# data[].attributes.body
Flow Chart and Review Cards

# data[].attributes.body
Ch 7 from Gateway Textbook

# data[].attributes.body
The Gateway Book

# data[].attributes.body
The Progressive Era

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Crash course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. The associate producer is Danica Johnson, the show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer, Rosianna Rojas, and myself, and our graphics team is Thought Cafe. Every week there's a new caption for the Libertage.

# data[].attributes.body
Wikipedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Progressive Era (1896-1917) was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States focused on defeating corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency. The main themes ended during American involvement in World War I (1917-1918) while the waste and efficiency elements continued into the 1920s. Progressives sought to address the problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption; and by the enormous concentration of industrial ownership in monopolies. They were alarmed by the spread of slums, poverty, and the exploitation of labor. Multiple overlapping progressive movements fought perceived social, political and economic ills by advancing democracy, scientific methods, professionalism and efficiency; regulating businesses, protecting the natural environment, and improving working conditions in factories and living conditions of the urban poor. Spreading the message of reform through mass-circulation newspapers and magazines by "probing the dark corners of American life" were investigative journalists known as "muckrakers". The main advocates of progressivism were often middle-class social reformers.

Corrupt and undemocratic political machines and their bosses were a major target, as were business monopolies which progressives worked to regulate through methods such as trustbusting and antitrust laws, to promote equal competition for the advantage of legitimate competitors. Progressives also advocated new government roles and regulations, and new agencies to carry out those roles, such as the FDA. The banking system was transformed with the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

To revitalize democracy, progressives established direct primary elections, direct election of senators (rather than by state legislatures), initiative and referendum, and women's suffrage which was promoted to advance democracy and bring a "purer" female vote into the arena. For many progressives this meant prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

Another theme was bringing to bear scientific, medical, and engineering solutions to reform local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and much else. They aimed to professionalize and make "scientific" social sciences, especially history, economics, and political science. Efficiency was improved with scientific management, or Taylorism.

Progressive national political leaders included Republicans Theodore Roosevelt, Hiram Johnson, Robert M. La Follette, and Charles Evans Hughes; Democrats William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith. Outside of government, Jane Addams, Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, and Jacob Riis were influential reformers.

Initially, the movement operated chiefly at the local level, but later it expanded to the state and national levels. Progressives drew support from the middle class, and supporters included many lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers, and business people.

Certain key groups of thinkers, writers, and activists played key roles in creating or building the movements and ideas that came to define the shape of the Progressive Era.

Inspiration for the initiative movement was based on the Swiss experience. New Jersey labor activist James W. Sullivan visited Switzerland in 1888 and wrote a detailed book that became a template for reformers pushing the idea: Direct Legislation by the Citizenship Through the Initiative and Referendum (1893). He suggested that using the initiative would give political power to the working class and reduce the need for strikes. Sullivan's book was first widely read on the left, as by labor activists, socialists and populists. William U'Ren was an early convert who used it to build the Oregon reform crusade. By 1900 middle class "progressive" reformers everywhere were studying it.

Christmas 1903 cover of McClure's features a muckraking expose of Rockefeller and Standard Oil by Ida Tarbell.

Magazines experienced a boost in popularity in 1900, with some attaining circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In the beginning of the age of mass media, the rapid expansion of national advertising led the cover price of popular magazines to fall sharply to about 10 cents, lessening the financial barrier to consume them. Another factor contributing to the dramatic upswing in magazine circulation was the prominent coverage of corruption in politics, local government, and big business, particularly by journalists and writers who became known as muckrakers. They wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. Relying on their own investigative journalism, muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckraking magazines, notably , took on corporate monopolies and political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor. Most of the muckrakers wrote nonfiction, but fictional exposés often had a major impact as well, such as those by Upton Sinclair. In his 1906 novel , Sinclair exposed the unsanitary and inhumane practices of the meatpacking industry, as he made clear in the Jungle itself. He quipped, "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach," as readers demanded and got the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Others such as Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell is famed for her criticisms of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. In 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of corruption in the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained they were not being helpful by raking up too much muck.

The Progressives were avid modernizers, with a belief in science and technology as the grand solution to society's flaws. They looked to education as the key to bridging the gap between their present wasteful society and technologically enlightened future society. Characteristics of Progressivism included a favorable attitude toward urban-industrial society, belief in mankind's ability to improve the environment and conditions of life, belief in an obligation to intervene in economic and social affairs, a belief in the ability of experts and in the efficiency of government intervention. Scientific management, as promulgated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, became a watchword for industrial efficiency and elimination of waste, with the stopwatch as its symbol.

The number of rich families climbed exponentially, from 100 or so millionaires in the 1870s to 4,000 in 1892 and 16,000 in 1916. Many subscribed to Andrew Carnegie's credo outlined in The Gospel of Wealth that said they owed a duty to society that called for philanthropic giving to colleges, hospitals, medical research, libraries, museums, religion, and social betterment.

In the early 20th century, American philanthropy matured, with the development of very large, highly visible private foundations created by Rockefeller and Carnegie. The largest foundations fostered modern, efficient, business-oriented operations (as opposed to "charity") designed to better society rather than merely enhance the status of the giver. Close ties were built with the local business community, as in the "community chest" movement. The American Red Cross was reorganized and professionalized. Several major foundations aided the blacks in the South and were typically advised by Booker T. Washington. By contrast, Europe and Asia had few foundations. This allowed both Carnegie and Rockefeller to operate internationally with a powerful effect.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (pictured) wrote these articles about feminism for the Atlanta Constitution, published on December 10, 1916.

A hallmark group of the Progressive Era, the middle class became the driving force behind much of the thought and reform that took place in this time. With an increasing disdain for the upper class and aristocracy of the time, the middle class is characterized by their rejection of the individualistic philosophy of the Upper Ten. They had a rapidly growing interest in the communication and role between classes, those of which are generally referred to as the upper class, working class, farmers, and themselves. Along these lines, the founder of Hull-House, Jane Addams, coined the term "association" as a counter to Individualism, with association referring to the search for a relationship between the classes. Additionally, the middle class (most notably women) began to move away from prior Victorian era domestic values. Divorce rates increased as women preferred to seek education and freedom from the home. In 1860 one marriage in 800 ended in divorce; by 1900 it was one marriage in 8. Victorianism was pushed aside by the rise of progressivism.

Robert M. La Follette and his family were the dominant forces of progressivism in Wisconsin from the late 1890s to the early 1940s. He tried for a national leadership role in 1912 but blundered badly in a highly embarrassing speech to leading journalists. Starting as a loyal organizational Republican, he broke with the bosses in the late 1890s, built up a network of local organizers loyal to him, and fought for control of the state Republican Party, with mixed success. The Democrats were a minor factor in the state, but he did form coalitions with the active Socialist Party in Milwaukee. He failed to win the nomination for governor in 1896 and 1898 before winning the 1900 gubernatorial election. As governor of Wisconsin, La Follette compiled a progressive record, implementing primary elections and tax reform. La Follette won re-election in 1902 and 1904. In 1905 the legislature elected him to the United States Senate, where he emerged as a national progressive leader, often clashing with conservatives like Senator Nelson Aldrich. He initially supported President Taft, but broke with Taft after the latter failed to push a reduction in tariff rates. He challenged Taft for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1912 presidential election, but his candidacy was overshadowed by Theodore Roosevelt. La Follette's refusal to support Roosevelt, and especially his suicidal ranting speech before media leaders in February 1912, alienated many progressives. La Follette forfeited his stature as a national leader of progressive Republicans, while remaining a power in Wisconsin.

La Follette supported some of President Wilson's policies, but he broke with the president over foreign policy, thereby gaining support from Wisconsin's large German and Scandinavian elements. During World War I, La Follette was the most outspoken opponent of the administration's domestic and international policies.

With the major parties each nominating conservative candidates in the 1924 presidential election, left-wing groups coalesced behind La Follette's third-party candidacy. With the support of the Socialist Party, farmer's groups, labor unions, and others, La Follette was strong in Wisconsin, and to a much lesser extent in the West. He called for government ownership of railroads and electric utilities, cheap credit for farmers, stronger laws to help labor unions, and protections for civil liberties. La Follette won 17% of the popular vote and carried only his home state in the face of a Republican landslide. After his death in 1925 his sons, Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Philip La Follette, succeeded him as progressive leaders in Wisconsin.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a leader of the Progressive movement, and he championed his " Square Deal" domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness, breaking of trusts, regulation of railroads, and pure food and drugs. He made conservation a top priority and established many new national parks, forests, and monuments intended to preserve the nation's natural resources. In foreign policy, he focused on Central America where he began construction of the Panama Canal. He expanded the army and sent the Great White Fleet on a world tour to project the United States naval power around the globe. His successful efforts to broker the end of the Russo-Japanese War won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. He avoided controversial tariff and money issues. He was elected to a full term in 1904 and continued to promote progressive policies, some of which were passed in Congress. By 1906 he was moving to the left, advocating some social welfare programs, and criticizing various business practices such as trusts. The leadership of the GOP in Congress moved to the right, as did his protégé President William Howard Taft. Roosevelt broke bitterly with Taft in 1910, and also with Wisconsin's progressive leader Robert M. La Follette. Taft defeated Roosevelt for the 1912 Republican nomination and Roosevelt set up an entirely new Progressive Party. It called for a "New Nationalism" with active supervision of corporations, higher taxes, and unemployment and old-age insurance. He supported voting rights for women but was silent on civil rights for blacks, who remained in the regular Republican fold. He lost and his new party collapsed, as conservatism dominated the GOP for decades to come. Biographer William Harbaugh argues:

In foreign affairs, Theodore Roosevelt's legacy is judicious support of the national interest and promotion of world stability through the maintenance of a balance of power; creation or strengthening of international agencies, and resort to their use when practicable; and implicit resolve to use military force, if feasible, to foster legitimate American interests. In domestic affairs, it is the use of government to advance the public interest. "If on this new continent", he said, "we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing".

Woodrow Wilson gained a national reputation as governor of New Jersey by defeating the bosses and pushing through a progressive agenda. As president he introduced a comprehensive program of domestic legislation. He had four major domestic priorities: the conservation of natural resources, banking reform, tariff reduction, and opening access to raw materials by breaking up Western mining trusts. Though foreign affairs would unexpectedly dominate his presidency, Wilson's first two years in office largely focused on the implementation of his New Freedom domestic agenda.

Wilson presided over the passage of his progressive New Freedom domestic agenda. His first major priority was the passage of the Revenue Act of 1913, which lowered tariffs and implemented a federal income tax. Later tax acts implemented a federal estate tax and raised the top income tax rate to 77 percent. Wilson also presided over the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which created a central banking system in the form of the Federal Reserve System. Two major laws, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, were passed to regulate business and prevent monopolies. Wilson did not support civil rights and did not object to accelerating segregate of federal employees. In World War I, he made internationalism a key element of the progressive outlook, as expressed in his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations-an ideal called Wilsonianism.

New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes is known for exposing the insurance industry. During his time in office he promoted a range of reforms. As presidential candidate in 1916 he lost after alienating progressive California voters. As Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, he often sided with Oliver Wendell Holmes in upholding popular reforms such as the minimum wage, workmen's compensation, and maximum work hours for women and children. He also wrote several opinions upholding the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause. His majority opinion in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad v. Interstate Commerce Commission upheld the right of the federal government to regulate the hours of railroad workers. His majority opinion in the 1914 Shreveport Rate Case upheld a decision by the Interstate Commerce Commission to void discriminatory railroad rates imposed by the Railroad Commission of Texas. The decision established that the federal government could regulate intrastate commerce when it affected interstate commerce, though Hughes avoided directly overruling the 1895 case of United States v. E. C. Knight Co. As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court he took a moderate middle position and upheld key New Deal laws.

Gifford Pinchot was an American forester and politician. Pinchot served as the first Chief of the United States Forest Service from 1905 until 1910 and was the 28th Governor of Pennsylvania, serving from 1923 to 1927, and again from 1931 to 1935. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his life, though he also joined the Progressive Party for a brief period. Pinchot is known for reforming the management and development of forests in the United States and for advocating the conservation of the nation's reserves by planned use and renewal. He called it "the art of producing from the forest whatever it can yield for the service of man." Pinchot coined the term conservation ethic as applied to natural resources. Pinchot's main contribution was his leadership in promoting scientific forestry and emphasizing the controlled, profitable use of forests and other natural resources so they would be of maximum benefit to mankind. He was the first to demonstrate the practicality and profitability of managing forests for continuous cropping. His leadership put the conservation of forests high on America's priority list.

Herbert Croly was an intellectual leader of the movement as an editor, political philosopher and a co-founder of the magazine The New Republic. His political philosophy influenced many leading progressives including Theodore Roosevelt, Adolph Berle, as well as his close friends Judge Learned Hand and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Croly's 1909 book The Promise of American Life looked to the constitutional liberalism as espoused by Alexander Hamilton, combined with the radical democracy of Thomas Jefferson. The book influenced contemporaneous progressive thought, shaping the ideas of many intellectuals and political leaders, including then ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. Calling themselves "The New Nationalists", Croly and Walter Weyl sought to remedy the relatively weak national institutions with a strong federal government. He promoted a strong army and navy and attacked pacifists who thought democracy at home and peace abroad was best served by keeping America weak.

Croly was one of the founders of modern liberalism in the United States, especially through his books, essays and a highly influential magazine founded in 1914, The New Republic. In his 1914 book Progressive Democracy, Croly rejected the thesis that the liberal tradition in the United States was inhospitable to anti-capitalist alternatives. He drew from the American past a history of resistance to capitalist wage relations that was fundamentally liberal, and he reclaimed an idea that progressives had allowed to lapse-that working for wages was a lesser form of liberty. Increasingly skeptical of the capacity of social welfare legislation to remedy social ills, Croly argued that America's liberal promise could be redeemed only by syndicalist reforms involving workplace democracy. His liberal goals were part of his commitment to American republicanism.

Upton Sinclair was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel , which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.

Ida Tarbell, a writer and lecturer, was one of the leading muckrakers and pioneered investigative journalism. Tarbell is best known for her 1904 book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. The book was published as a series of articles in McClure's Magazine from 1902 to 1904. The work helped turn elite public opinion against the Standard Oil monopoly.

Lincoln Steffens was another investigative journalist and one of the leading muckrakers. He launched a series of articles in , called Tweed Days in St. Louis, that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities. He is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and leftist values.

Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator and author. She was a notable figure in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States and an advocate of world peace. She co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses. In 1920, she was a co-founder for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. Maurice Hamington considered her a radical pragmatist and the first woman "public philosopher" in the United States. In the 1930s, she was the best-known female public figure in the United States.

According to James Wright, the typical Progressive agenda at the state level included:

A reduction of corporate influence, open processes of government and politics, equity entrance in taxation, efficiency in government mental operation, and an expanded, albeit limited, state responsibility to the citizens who are most vulnerable and deprived.

In the south, prohibition was high on the agenda but controversial. Jim Crow and disenfranchisement of Black voters was even higher on the agenda. In the Western states, woman suffrage was a success story, but racist anti-Asian sentiment also prevailed.

The Oregon Direct Legislation League was an organization of political activists founded by William S. U'Ren in 1898. Oregon was one of the few states where former Populists like U'Ren became progressive leaders. U'Ren had been inspired by reading the influential 1893 book Direct Legislation Through the Initiative and Referendum, and the group's founding followed in the wake of the 1896 founding of the National Direct Legislation League, which itself had its roots in the Direct Legislation League of New Jersey and its short-lived predecessor, the People's Power League.

The group led efforts in Oregon to establish an initiative and referendum system, allowing direct legislation by the state's citizens. In 1902, the Oregon Legislative Assembly approved such a system, which was known at the time as the " Oregon System".

Democrats who promoted progressive policies included George Earle Chamberlain (governor 1903-1909 and senator 1909-1921); Oswald West (governor 1911-1915); and Harry Lane (senator 1913-1917). The most important Republican was Jonathan Bourne Jr. (senator 1907-1913 and national leader of progressive causes 1911-1912).

California built the most successful grass roots progressive movement in the country by mobilizing independent organizations and largely ignoring the conservative state parties. The system continues strong into the 21st century. Following the Oregon model, John Randolph Haynes organized the Direct Legislation League of California in 1902 to launch the campaign for inclusion of the initiative and referendum in the state's constitution. The League sent questionnaires to prospective candidates to the state legislature to obtain their stance on direct legislation and to make those positions public. It then flooded the state with letters seeking new members, money, and endorsements from organizations like the State Federation of Labor. As membership grew it worked with other private organizations to petition the state legislature, which was not responsive. In 1902 the League won a state constitutional amendment establishing direct democracy at the local level, and in 1904, it successfully engineered the recall of the first public official.

The South was a main target of Northern philanthropy designed to fight poverty and disease, and help the black community. Booker T. Washington of the National Negro Business League mobilized small black-owned business and secured access to Northern philanthropy. Across the South the General Education Board (funded by the Rockefeller family) provided large-scale subsidies for black schools, which otherwise continued to be underfunded. The South was targeted in the 1920s and 1930s by the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which contributed matching funds to local communities for the construction of thousands of schools for African Americans in rural areas throughout the South. Black parents donated land and labor to build improved schools for their children.

North Carolina, along with all the southern states, imposed strict legal segregation in the early 20th century. The poor rural backward state took a regional leadership role in modernizing the economy in society, based on expanded roles for public education, state universities, and more roles for middle-class women. State leaders included Governor Charles B. Aycock, who led both the educational and the white supremacy crusades; diplomat Walter Hines Page; and educator Charles Duncan McIver. Women were especially active through the WCTU in church activism, promoting prohibition, overseas missions, and local public schools. They worked to limit child labor in the textile mills, and supported public health campaigns to eradicate hookworm and other debilitating diseases. They promoted gender equality and woman suffrage, and demanded a single standard of sexual morality for men and women. In the black community, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, built the Palmer Memorial Institute to educate the black leadership class, Brown worked with Booker T. Washington (in his role with the National Negro Business League), who provided ideas and access to Northern philanthropy.

Apart from Wisconsin, the Midwestern states were about average in supporting Progressive reforms. Ohio took the lead in municipal reform.

The negative effects of industrialization triggered the political movement of progressivism, which aimed to address its negative consequences through social reform and government regulation. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr pioneered the settlement house outreach to newly arrived immigrants by establishing Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Settlement houses provided social services and played an active role in civic life, helping immigrants prepare for naturalization and campaigning for regulation and services from city government. Midwestern mayors-especially Hazen S. Pingree and Tom L. Johnson, led early reforms against boss-dominated municipal politics, while Samuel M. Jones advocated public ownership of local utilities. Robert M. La Follette, the most famous leader of Midwestern progressivism, began his career by winning election against his state's Republican party in 1900. The machine was temporarily defeated, allowing reformers to launch the " Wisconsin idea" of expanded democracy. This idea included major reforms such as direct primaries, campaign finance, civil service, anti-lobbying laws, state income and inheritance taxes, child labor restrictions, pure food, and workmen's compensation laws. La Follette promoted government regulation of railroads, public utilities, factories, and banks. Although La Follette lost influence in the national party in 1912, the Wisconsin reforms became a model for national progressivism.

The Democrats were a minor conservative factor in Wisconsin. The Socialists, with a strong German and union base in Milwaukee, joined the progressives in statewide politics. Senator Robert M. La Follette tried to use his national reputation to challenge President Taft for the Republican nomination in 1912. However, as soon as Roosevelt declared his candidacy, most of La Follette's supporters switched away. La Follette supported many of his Wilson's domestic programs in Congress. However he strongly opposed Wilson's foreign policy, and mobilized the large German and Scandinavian elements which demanded neutrality in the World War I. He finally ran an independent campaign for president in 1924 that appealed to the German Americans, labor unions, socialists, and more radical reformers. He won 1/6 of the national vote, but carried only his home state. After his death in 1925 his two sons took over the party. They serve terms as governor and senator and set up a third party in the state. The third party fell apart in the 1930s, and totally collapsed by 1946.

Between 1901 and 1911, Progressive Republicans in Wisconsin created the nation's first comprehensive statewide primary election system, the first effective workplace injury compensation law, and the first state income tax, making taxation proportional to actual earnings. The key leaders were Robert M. La Follette and (in 1910) Governor Francis E. McGovern. However, in 1912 McGovern supported Roosevelt for president and LaFollette was outraged. He made sure the next legislature defeated the governor's programs, and that McGovern was defeated in his bid for the Senate in 1914. The Progressive movement split into hostile factions. Some was based on personalities-especially La Follette's style of violent personal attacks against other Progressives, and some was based on who should pay, with the division between farmers (who paid property taxes) and the urban element (which paid income taxes). This disarray enabled the conservatives (called "Stalwarts") to elect Emanuel Philipp as governor in 1914. The Stalwart counterattack said the Progressives were too haughty, too beholden to experts, too eager to regulate, and too expensive. Economy and budget cutting was their formula.

The progressive Wisconsin Idea promoted the use of the University of Wisconsin faculty as intellectual resources for state government, and as guides for local government. It promoted expansion of the university through the UW-Extension system to reach all the state's farming communities. University economics professors John R. Commons and Harold Groves enabled Wisconsin to create the first unemployment compensation program in the United States in 1932. Other Wisconsin Idea scholars at the university generated the plan that became the New Deal's Social Security Act of 1935, with Wisconsin expert Arthur J. Altmeyer playing the key role. The Stalwarts counterattacked by arguing if the university became embedded in the state, then its internal affairs became fair game, especially the faculty preference for advanced research over undergraduate teaching. The Stalwarts controlled the Regents, and their interference in academic freedom outraged the faculty. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the most famous professor, quit and went to Harvard.

Ohio was distinctive for municipal reform in the major cities, especially Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton. The middle class lived in leafy neighborhoods in the city and took the trolley to work in downtown offices. The working class saved money by walking to their factory jobs; municipal reformers appealed to the middle-class vote, by attacking the high fares and mediocre service of privately owned transit companies. They often proposed city ownership of the transit lines, but the homeowners were reluctant to save a penny on fares by paying more dollars in property taxes

Dayton, Ohio, was under the reform leadership of John Patterson, the hard-charging chief executive of National Cash Register company. He appealed to the businessman with the gospel of efficiency in municipal affairs, run by non-partisan experts like himself. He wanted a city manager form of government in which outside experts would bring efficiency while elected officials would have little direct power, and bribery would not prevail. When the city council balked at his proposals, he threatened to move the National Cash Register factories to another city, and they fell in line. A massive flood in Dayton in 1913 killed 400 people and caused $100 million in property damage. Patterson took charge of the relief work and demonstrated in person the sort of business leaders he proposed. Dayton adopted his policies; by 1920, 177 American cities had followed suit and adopted city manager governments.

Iowa had a mixed record. The spirit of progressivism emerged in the 1890s, peaked in the 1900s, and decayed after 1917. Under the guidance of Governor (1902-1908) and Senator (1908-1926) Albert Baird Cummins the "Iowa Idea" played a role in state and national reform. A leading Republican, Cummins fought to break up monopolies. His Iowa successes included establishing the direct primary to allow voters to select candidates instead of bosses; outlawing free railroad passes for politicians; imposing a two-cents-per-mile railway maximum passenger fare; imposing pure food and drug laws; and abolishing corporate campaign contributions. He tried, without success, to lower the high protective tariff in Washington.

Monopoly brothers--Politically powerful trusts created high prices all carried by hapless little consumer 1912; by Thomas Powers

Standard Oil was widely hated. Many newspapers reprinted attacks from a flagship Democratic newspaper, The New York World, which made this trust a special target. For example, a feature article in 1897 stated:

There has been no outrage too colossal, no petty meanness too contemptible for these freebooters to engage in. From hounding and driving prosperous businessman to beggery and suicide, to holding up and plundering widows and orphans, the little dealer in the country and the crippled peddler on the highway-all this is entered into the exploits of this organized gang of commercial bandits.

There were legal efforts to curtail the oil monopoly in the Midwest and South. Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky and Kansas took the lead in 1904-1905, followed by Arkansas, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia. The results were mixed. Federal action finally won out in 1911, splitting Standard Oil into 33 companies. The 33 seldom competed with each other. The federal decision together with the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the creation that year of the Federal Trade Commission largely de-escalated the antitrust rhetoric among progressives. The new framework after 1914 had little or no impact on the direction and magnitude of merger activity.

By 1890, the secret ballot was widely adopted by the states for elections, which was non-controversial and resulted in the elimination of purchased votes since the purchaser couldn't determine how the voter cast their vote. Despite this change, the candidates were still selected by party conventions. In the 1890s, the South witnessed a decrease in the possibility of Republican or Populist or coalition victories in most elections, with the Democratic Party gaining full control over all statewide Southern elections. To prevent factionalism within the Democratic Party, Southern states began implementing primaries. However, candidates who competed in the primaries and lost were prohibited from running as independents in the fall election. Louisiana was the first state to introduce primaries in 1892, and by 1907, eleven Southern and border states had implemented statewide primaries.

Disturbed by the waste, inefficiency, stubbornness, corruption, and injustices of the Gilded Age, the Progressives were committed to changing and reforming every aspect of the state, society and economy. Significant changes enacted at the national levels included the imposition of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, prohibition of alcohol with the Eighteenth Amendment, election reforms to stop corruption and fraud, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

At the local level the new city manager system was designed by progressives to increase efficiency and reduce partisanship and avoid the bribery of elected local officials. Kansas was a leader, where it was promoted in the press, led by Henry J. Allen of the Wichita Beacon, and pushed through by Governor Arthur Capper. Eventually 52 Kansas cities used the system.

Colorado judge Ben Lindsey, a pioneer in the establishment of juvenile court systems

By the late 19th century urban and rural governments had systems in place for welfare to the poor and incapacitated. Progressives argued these needs deserved a higher priority. Local public assistance programs were reformed to try to keep families together. Inspired by crusading Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver, cities established juvenile courts to deal with disruptive teenagers without sending them to adult prisons.

Pure food, drugs, and water

With the decrease in standard working hours, urban families had more leisure time. Many spent this leisure time at movie theaters. Progressives advocated censorship of motion pictures as it was believed that patrons (especially children) viewing movies in dark, unclean, potentially unsafe theaters, might be negatively influenced in witnessing actors portraying crimes, violence, and sexually suggestive situations. Progressives across the country influenced municipal governments of large urban cities, to build numerous parks where it was believed that leisure time for children and families could be spent in a healthy, wholesome environment, thereby fostering good morals and citizenship.

The social hygiene movement brought together different groups that were concerned with venereal disease, prostitution, society's moral standards, and family life. The primary objective was to enhance public health and promote social morality, specifically in matters concerning sexuality and reproductive health. The movement targeted prostitution or "white slavery" and aimed to eliminate it by criminalizing it and enforcing stricter penalties for those involved in the sex trade. When the U.S. entered the war a high priority was to end prostitution in proximity to military installations. The result was a permanent closing of red light districts in major cities.

Glass works in Indiana, from a 1908 photograph by Lewis Hine

President Taft signed the March 4, 1913, bill (the last day of his presidency), establishing the Department of Labor as a Cabinet-level department, replacing the previous Department of Commerce and Labor. William B. Wilson was appointed as the first Secretary of Labor on March 5, 1913, by President Wilson. In October 1919, Secretary Wilson chaired the first meeting of the International Labour Organization even though the U.S. was not yet a member.

In 1912 women's suffrage headquarters reached out to men in Cleveland, Ohio.

Across the nation, middle-class women organized on behalf of social reforms during the Progressive Era. Using the language of municipal housekeeping women were able to push such reforms as prohibition, women's suffrage, child-saving, and public health.

Middle-class women formed local clubs, which after 1890 were coordinated by the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC). Historian Paige Meltzer puts the GFWC in the context of the Progressive Movement, arguing that its policies:

built on Progressive-era strategies of municipal housekeeping. During the Progressive era, female activists used traditional constructions of womanhood, which imagined all women as mothers and homemakers, to justify their entrance into community affairs: as "municipal housekeepers," they would clean up politics, cities, and see after the health and well-being of their neighbors. Donning the mantle of motherhood, female activists methodically investigated their community's needs and used their "maternal" expertise to lobby, create, and secure a place for themselves in an emerging state welfare bureaucracy, best illustrated perhaps by clubwoman Julia Lathrop's leadership in the Children's Bureau. As part of this tradition of maternal activism, the Progressive-era General Federation supported a range of causes from the pure food and drug administration to public health care for mothers and children, to a ban on child labor, each of which looked to the state to help implement their vision of social justice.

Women's suffrage

The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890 as a unification of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The NAWSA set up hundreds of smaller local and state groups, with the goal of passing woman suffrage legislation at the state and local level. The NAWSA was the largest and most important suffrage organization in the United States, and was the primary promoter of women's right to vote. Carrie Chapman Catt was the key leader in the early 20th century. Like AWSA and NWSA before it, the NAWSA pushed for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's voting rights, and was instrumental in winning the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. A breakaway group, the National Woman's Party, tightly controlled by Alice Paul, used civil disobedience to gain publicity and force passage of suffrage. Paul's members chained themselves to the White House fence to get arrested, then went on hunger strikes to gain publicity. While the British suffragettes stopped their protests in 1914 and supported the British war effort, Paul began her campaign in 1917 and was widely criticized for ignoring the war and attracting radical anti-war elements.

A lesser-known feminist movement in the progressive era was the self-defense movement. According to Wendy Rouse, feminists sought to raise awareness about the sexual harassment and violence that women faced on the street, at work, and in the home. They wanted to inspire a sense of physical and personal empowerment through training in active self-defense.

Rural blacks were heavily involved in environmental issues, in which they developed their own traditions and priorities. George Washington Carver (1860-1943) was a leader in promoting environmentalism, and was well known for his research projects, particularly those involving agriculture.

Although there were some achievements that improved conditions for African Americans and other non-white minorities, the Progressive Era was still in the midst of the nadir of American race relations. While white Progressives in principle believed in improving conditions for minority groups, there were wide differences in how this was to be achieved. Some, such as Lillian Wald, fought to alleviate the plight of poor African Americans. Many, though, were concerned with enforcing, not eradicating, racial segregation. In particular, the mixing of black and white pleasure-seekers in "black-and-tan" clubs troubled Progressive reformers. The Progressive ideology espoused by many of the era attempted to correct societal problems created by racial integration following the Civil War by segregating the races and allowing each group to achieve its own potential; most Progressives saw racial integration as a problem to be solved, rather than a goal to be achieved. As white Progressives sought to help the white working class, clean up politics, and improve the cities, the country instated the system of racial segregation known as Jim Crow.

One of the most impacting issues African Americans had to face during the Progressive Era was the right to vote. By the beginning of the 20th century, African Americans were " disfranchised", while in the years prior to this, the right to vote had been guaranteed to "freedmen" through the Civil Rights Act of 1870. Southern whites wanted to rid of the political influence of the black vote, citing "that black voting meant only corruption of elections, incompetence of government, and the engendering of fierce racial antagonisms." Progressive whites found a "loophole" to the 15th Amendment's prohibition of denying one the right to vote due to race through the grandfather clause. This allowed for the creation of literacy tests that would essentially be designed for whites to pass them but not African Americans or any other persons of color. Actions such as these from whites of the Progressive Era are some of the many that tied into the Progressive goal, as historian Michael McGerr states, "to segregate society."

Legal historian Herbert Hovenkap argues that while many early Progressives inherited the racism of Jim Crow, as they began to innovate their own ideas, they would embrace behaviorism, cultural relativism, and marginalism, which stress environmental influences on humans rather than biological inheritance. He states that ultimately Progressives "were responsible for bringing scientific racism to an end".

Many Progressives sought to enable the citizenry to rule more directly and circumvent machines, bosses and professional politicians. The institution of the initiative and referendums made it possible to pass laws without the involvement of the legislature, while the recall allowed for the removal of corrupt or under-performing officials, and the direct primary let people democratically nominate candidates, avoiding the professionally dominated conventions. Thanks to the efforts of Oregon State Representative William S. U'Ren and his Direct Legislation League, voters in Oregon overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in 1902 that created the initiative and referendum processes for citizens to directly introduce or approve proposed laws or amendments to the state constitution, making Oregon the first state to adopt such a system. U'Ren also helped in the passage of an amendment in 1908 that gave voters power to recall elected officials, and would go on to establish, at the state level, popular election of U.S. Senators and the first presidential primary in the United States. In 1911, California governor Hiram Johnson established the Oregon System of "Initiative, Referendum, and Recall" in his state, viewing them as good influences for citizen participation against the historic influence of large corporations on state lawmakers. These Progressive reforms were soon replicated in other states, including Idaho, Washington, and Wisconsin, and today roughly half of U.S. states have initiative, referendum and recall provisions in their state constitutions.

The Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, requiring that all senators be elected by the people (they were formerly appointed by state legislatures). The main motivation was to reduce the power of political bosses, who controlled the Senate seats by virtue of their control of state legislatures. The result, according to political scientist Henry Jones Ford, was that the United States Senate had become a "Diet of party lords, wielding their power without scruple or restraint, on behalf of those particular interests" that put them in office.

Reformers also sought to streamline government through the introduction of the short ballot. By reducing the number of elected officials and consolidating their power in singular officials like a governor they hoped to increase accountability and clarity in government. Woodrow Wilson was at one point the President of the National Short Ballot Organization.

The direct primary became important at the state level starting in the 1890s and at the local level in the 1900s. However, presidential nominations depended chiefly on state party conventions until 1972.

The first primary elections came in the Democratic Party in the South starting in Louisiana in 1892. By 1897 in 11 Southern and border states the Democratic party held primaries to select candidates. Unlike the final election run by government officials, primaries are run by party officials, making it easy to discriminate against black voters in the era of Jim Crow. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the white primary unconstitutional in Smith v. Allwright in 1944.

Insurgent Midwestern Republicans began promoting primaries starting in 1890 with Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. He crusaded against Stalwart party bosses of the state Republican Party, and won voter approval in a referendum in 1904. While La Follette always won his primary, that was not necessarily the case with other progressives. For example, his son Bob La Follette lost his Senate seat in the 1946 primary to Joseph McCarthy, a much more energetic candidate.

In New Jersey, on the other hand, the party leaders introduced the primary in every county by 1902. Their goal was to keep the various factions united for the fall campaign and minimize ticket-splitting.

The Northeast was laggard in adopting the direct primary, with Connecticut and Rhode Island the last states to sign up. The Massachusetts Democratic Party were gravely weakened by the primary system. New York Republican Governor Charles Evans Hughes made a primary law his top goal in 1909 and failed.

A coalition of middle class reform-oriented voters, academic experts, and reformers hostile to the political machines started forming in the 1890s and introduced a series of reforms in urban America, designed to reduce waste, inefficiency and corruption, by introducing scientific methods, compulsory education and administrative innovations.

Progressive mayors took the lead in many key cities, such as Cleveland, Ohio (especially Mayor Tom Johnson); Toledo, Ohio; Jersey City, New Jersey; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; and many other cities, especially in the western states. In Illinois, Governor Frank Lowden undertook a major reorganization of state government. In Wisconsin, the stronghold of Robert La Follette, the Wisconsin Idea used the state university as a major source of ideas and expertise.

The Gary Plan was much discussed method of building a highly efficient public school system. It was in part inspired by the educational ideas of philosopher John Dewey. It was designed by School Superintendent William Wirt in 1907 and implemented in the newly built steel mill city of Gary, Indiana. Reformers tried to copy it across the country. Wirt later promoted it in New York City. In New York City it was strongly opposed by unions and local political forces and was reversed in 1917. By 1929 over 200 cities in 41 states adopted variations of the plan. Ronald Cohen states that the Gary Plan was popular because it merged Progressive commitments to:

paedagogical and economic efficiency, growth and centralization of administration, an expanded curriculum, introduction of measurement and testing, greater public use of school facilities, a child-centered approach, and heightened concern about using the schools to properly socialize children.

As late as 1920, half the population lived in rural areas. They experienced their own progressive reforms, typically with the explicit goal of upgrading country life. By 1910, most farmers subscribed to a farm newspaper, where editors promoted efficiency as applied to farming. Special efforts were made to reach the rural South and remote areas, such as the mountains of Appalachia and the Ozarks.

The most urgent need was better transportation. The railroad system was virtually complete; the need was for much better roads. The traditional method of putting the burden on maintaining roads on local landowners was increasingly inadequate. New York State took the lead in 1898, and by 1916 the old system had been discarded in every area. Demands grew for local and state government to take charge. With the coming of the automobile after 1910, urgent efforts were made to upgrade and modernize dirt roads designed for horse-drawn wagon traffic. The American Association for Highway Improvement was organized in 1910. Funding came from automobile registration, and taxes on motor fuels, as well as state aid. In 1916, federal aid was first made available to improve post-roads, and promote general commerce. Congress appropriated $75 million over a five-year period, with the Secretary of Agriculture in charge through the Bureau of Public Roads, in cooperation with the state highway departments. There were 2.4 million miles of rural dirt rural roads in 1914; 100,000 miles had been improved with grading and gravel, and 3000 miles were given high quality surfacing. The rapidly increasing speed of automobiles, and especially trucks, made maintenance and repair a high priority. Concrete was first used in 1933, and expanded until it became the dominant surfacing material in the 1930s. The South had fewer cars and trucks and much less money, but it worked through highly visible demonstration projects like the " Dixie Highway."

The Progressives fixed some of their reforms into law by adding amendments 16, 17, 18, and 19 to the Constitution of the United States. The 16th amendment made an income tax legal (this required an amendment due to Article One, Section 9 of the Constitution, which required that direct taxes be laid on the States in proportion to their population as determined by the decennial census). The Progressives also made strides in attempts to reduce political corruption through the 17th amendment (direct election of U.S. Senators). The most radical and controversial amendment came during the anti-German craze of World War I that helped the Progressives and others push through their plan for prohibition through the 18th amendment (once the Progressives fell out of power the 21st amendment repealed the 18th in 1933). The ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, which recognized women's suffrage was the last amendment during the progressive era. Another significant constitutional change that began during the progressive era was the incorporation of the Bill of Rights so that those rights would apply to the states. In 1920, Benjamin Gitlow was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices decided that the First Amendment applied to the states as well as the federal government. Prior to that time, the Bill of Rights was considered to apply only to the federal government, not the states.

President Wilson used tariff, currency, and antitrust laws to prime the pump and get the economy working.

By the start of the 20th century, a middle class had developed that was weary of both the business elite and the radical political movements of farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West. The Progressives argued the need for government regulation of business practices to ensure competition and free enterprise. Congress enacted a law regulating railroads in 1887 (the Interstate Commerce Act), and one preventing large firms from controlling a single industry in 1890 (the Sherman Antitrust Act). These laws were not rigorously enforced, however, until the years between 1900 and 1920, when Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), Democratic President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), and others sympathetic to the views of the Progressives came to power. Many of today's U.S. regulatory agencies were created during these years, including the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Muckrakers were journalists who encouraged readers to demand more regulation of business. Upton Sinclair's (1906) was influential and persuaded America about the supposed horrors of the Chicago Union Stock Yards, a giant complex of meat processing plants that developed in the 1870s. The federal government responded to Sinclair's book and the Neill-Reynolds Report with the new regulatory Food and Drug Administration. Ida M. Tarbell wrote a series of articles against Standard Oil, which was perceived to be a monopoly. This affected both the government and the public reformers. Attacks by Tarbell and others helped pave the way for public acceptance of the breakup of the company by the Supreme Court in 1911.

When Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected president with a Democratic Congress in 1912 he implemented a series of Progressive policies in economics. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, and a small income tax was imposed on higher incomes. The Democrats lowered tariffs with the Underwood Tariff in 1913, though its effects were overwhelmed by the changes in trade caused by the World War that broke out in 1914. Wilson proved especially effective in mobilizing public opinion behind tariff changes by denouncing corporate lobbyists, addressing Congress in person in highly dramatic fashion, and staging an elaborate ceremony when he signed the bill into law. Wilson helped end the long battles over the trusts with the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. He managed to convince lawmakers on the issues of money and banking by the creation in 1913 of the Federal Reserve System, a complex business-government partnership that to this day dominates the financial world.

Roosevelt's Antitrust record over eight years included 18 civil cases and 26 criminal antitrust cases resulting in 22 convictions and 22 acquittals. Taft's four years had 54 civil and 36 criminal suits and Taft's prosecutor secured 55 convictions and 35 acquittals. Taft's cases included many leading firms in major sectors: Standard Oil; American Tobacco; United States Steel; Aluminum Company of America; International Harvester; National Cash Register; Westinghouse; General Electric; Kodak; Dupont; Union Pacific railroad; and Southern Pacific railroad. It also included trusts or combinations in beef, lumber, wine, turpentine, wallpaper, licorice, thread, and watches. The targets even included operations run by Taft's personal friends, such as Ohio-based National Cash Register. The media gave extensive exposure, especially to cases against Standard Oil and American Tobacco, which reached directly tens of millions of consumers. Taft's attorney general George W. Wickersham personally supervised the most important cases against Standard Oil and American Tobacco. He argued to the Supreme Court that trusts should be dissolved into their constituent parts, arguing they were artificial creations and did not achieve their positions through normal business methods and hence were guilty of violating the Sherman act. The government brief argued that dismemberment would correct this inequity and would force and restore normal competition. The Court agreed in 1911 and ordered the Justice Department to draw up complete reorganization plans in six months. Wickersham and his staff, all expert lawyers, were not experts in business management. The hurriedly created over thirty new corporations to replace Standard, plus several in tobacco.

Manhattan's Little Italy, Lower East Side, c. 1900.

The influx of immigration grew steadily after 1896, with most new arrivals being unskilled workers from southern and eastern Europe. These immigrants were able to find work in the steel mills, slaughterhouses, fishing industry, and construction crews of the emergent mill towns and industrial cities mostly in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 halted most transcontinental immigration, only after 1919 did the flow of immigrants resume. Starting in the 1880s, the labor unions aggressively promoted restrictions on immigration, especially restrictions on Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigrants. In combination with the racist attitudes of the time, there was a fear that large numbers of unskilled, low-paid workers would defeat the union's efforts to raise wages through collective bargaining. In addition, rural Protestants distrusted the urban Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and on those grounds opposed immigration. On the other hand, the rapid growth of industry called for a greater and expanding labor pool that could not be met by natural birth rates. As a result, many large corporations were opposed to immigration restrictions. By the early 1920s, a consensus had been reached that the total influx of immigration had to be restricted, and a series of laws in the 1920s accomplished that purpose. A handful of eugenics advocates were also involved in immigration restriction for their own pseudo-scientific reasons. Immigration restriction continued to be a national policy until after World War II.

Newspaper reporting the annexation of the Republic of Hawaii in 1898

A cartoon of Uncle Sam seated in restaurant looking at the bill of fare containing "Cuba steak", "Porto Rico pig", the "Philippine Islands" and the "Sandwich Islands" (Hawaii)

While anti-imperialist sentiments had been prevalent in the United States during this time, the acquisition of the Philippines sparked the relatively minor population into action. Voicing their opinions in public, they sought to deter American leaders from keeping the Asian-Pacific nation and to avoid the temptations of expansionist tendencies that were widely viewed as "un-American" at that time.

The Philippines was a major target for the progressive reformers. A 1907 report to Secretary of War Taft provided a summary of what the American civil administration had achieved. It included, in addition to the rapid building of a public school system based on English teaching, and boasted about such modernizing achievements as:

steel and concrete wharves at the newly renovated Port of Manila; dredging the River Pasig; streamlining of the Insular Government; accurate, intelligible accounting; the construction of a telegraph and cable communications network; the establishment of a postal savings bank; large-scale road- and bridge-building; impartial and incorrupt policing; well-financed civil engineering; the conservation of old Spanish architecture; large public parks; a bidding process for the right to build railways; Corporation law; and a coastal and geological survey.

In 1903, the American reformers in the Philippines passed two major land acts designed to turn landless peasants into owners of their farms. By 1905, the law was clearly a failure. Reformers such as Taft believed landownership would turn unruly agrarians into loyal subjects. The social structure in rural Philippines was highly traditional and highly unequal. Drastic changes in land ownership posed a major challenge to local elites, who would not accept it, nor would their peasant clients. The American reformers blamed peasant resistance to landownership for the law's failure and argued that large plantations and sharecropping was the Philippines' best path to development.

Elite Filipina women played a major role in the reform movement, especially on health issues. They specialized on such urgent needs as infant care and maternal and child health, the distribution of pure milk and teaching new mothers about children's health. The most prominent organizations were the La Protección de la Infancia, and the National Federation of Women's Clubs.

Although the Progressive Era was characterized by public support for World War I under Woodrow Wilson, there was also a substantial opposition to the war.

The great ends of the church are the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

Roosevelt's rhetoric was characterized by an intense moralism of personal righteousness. The tone was typified by his denunciation of "predatory wealth" in a message he sent Congress in January 1908 calling for passage of new labor laws:

Predatory wealth-of the wealth accumulated on a giant scale by all forms of iniquity, ranging from the oppression of wageworkers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing out competition, and to defrauding the public by stock jobbing and the manipulation of securities. Certain wealthy men of this stamp, whose conduct should be abhorrent to every man of ordinarily decent conscience, and who commit the hideous wrong of teaching our young men that phenomenal business success must ordinarily be based on dishonesty, have during the last few months made it apparent that they have banded together to work for a reaction. Their endeavor is to overthrow and discredit all who honestly administer the law, to prevent any additional legislation which would check and restrain them, and to secure if possible a freedom from all restraint which will permit every unscrupulous wrongdoer to do what he wishes unchecked provided he has enough money....The methods by which the Standard Oil people and those engaged in the other combinations of which I have spoken above have achieved great fortunes can only be justified by the advocacy of a system of morality which would also justify every form of criminality on the part of a labor union, and every form of violence, corruption, and fraud, from murder to bribery and ballot box stuffing in politics.

Prohibition was the outlawing of the manufacture, sale and transport of alcohol. Drinking itself was never prohibited. Throughout the Progressive Era, it remained one of the prominent causes associated with Progressivism at the local, state and national level, though support across the full breadth of Progressives was mixed. It pitted the minority urban Catholic population against the larger rural Protestant element, Progressivism's rise in the rural communities was aided by the general increase in public consciousness of social issues of the temperance movement, which achieved national success with the passage of the 18th Amendment by Congress in late 1917, and the ratification by three-fourths of the states in 1919. Prohibition was backed by the Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Scandinavian Lutherans and other evangelical churches. In the South, especially in Texas, prohibition was a top priority of the Protestant progressives.

Activists were mobilized by the highly effective Anti-Saloon League. Timberlake (1963) argues the dries sought to break the liquor trust, weaken the saloon base of big-city machines, enhance industrial efficiency, and reduce the level of wife beating, child abuse, and poverty caused by alcoholism. Agitation for prohibition began during the Second Great Awakening in the 1840s when crusades against drinking originated from evangelical Protestants. Evangelicals precipitated the second wave of prohibition legislation during the 1880s, which had as its aim local and state prohibition. During the 1880s, referendums were held at the state level to enact prohibition amendments. Two important groups were formed during this period. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in 1874. The Anti-Saloon League which began in Ohio was formed in 1893, uniting activists from different religious groups. The league, rooted in Protestant churches, envisioned nationwide prohibition. Rather than condemn all drinking, the group focused attention on the saloon which was considered the ultimate symbol of public vice. The league also concentrated on campaigns for the right of individual communities to choose whether to close their saloons. In 1907, Georgia and Alabama were the first states to go dry followed by Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee in the following years. In 1913, Congress passed the Webb-Kenyon Act, which forbade the transport of liquor into dry states.

By 1917, two-thirds of the states had some form of prohibition laws and roughly three-quarters of the population lived in dry areas. In 1913, the Anti-Saloon League first publicly appealed for a prohibition amendment. They preferred a constitutional amendment over a federal statute because although harder to achieve, they felt it would be harder to change. As the United States entered World War I, the Conscription Act banned the sale of liquor near military bases. In August 1917, the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act banned production of distilled spirits for the duration of the war. The War Prohibition Act, November 1918, forbade the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages (more than 2.75% alcohol content) until the end of demobilization.

The drys worked energetically to secure two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress and the support of three-quarters of the states needed for an amendment to the federal constitution. Thirty-six states were needed, and organizations were set up at all 48 states to seek ratification. In late 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment; it was ratified in 1919 and took effect in January 1920. It prohibited the manufacturing, sale or transport of intoxicating beverages within the United States, as well as import and export. The Volstead Act, 1919, defined intoxicating as having alcohol content greater than 0.5% and established the procedures for federal enforcement of the Act. The states were at liberty to enforce prohibition or not, and most did not try.

Consumer demand, however, led to a variety of illegal sources for alcohol, especially illegal distilleries and smuggling from Canada and other countries. It is difficult to determine the level of compliance, and although the media at the time portrayed the law as highly ineffective, even if it did not eradicate the use of alcohol, it certainly decreased alcohol consumption during the period. The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933, with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment, thanks to a well-organized repeal campaign led by Catholics (who stressed personal liberty) and businessmen (who stressed the lost tax revenue).

Prohibition also brought a rise to organized crime, which was able to profit off the sales of illegal alcohol. Al Capone was one of the most well-known criminals to partake in illegal alcohol sales. There was a huge demand for alcohol, but most business owners were unwilling to risk getting involved in the transportation of alcohol. The business owners did however have little issue with selling the alcohol that the criminals like Capone provided.

Organized crime was able to be successful due to their willingness to use intimidation and violence to carry out their illicit enterprises. During prohibition, the mafia was able to grow their stronghold on illegal activities throughout the United States. This illegal behavior began almost in conjunction with prohibition being voted into law. Within the first hours of prohibition, the police in Chicago reported the theft of medicinal liquor. The prohibition era gangsters outlasted the law and used it as a starting point to launch their criminal enterprises.

The reform of schools and other educational institutions was one of the prime concerns of the middle class during this period. The number of schools in the nation increased dramatically. The face of the Progressive Education Movement in America was John Dewey, a professor at the University of Chicago (1896-1904) who argued, in books such as The Child and the Curriculum and Schools of Tomorrow, that, in addition to teaching academic content, schools should teach everyday skills and promote democratic participation. A higher level of education also gained popularity. By 1930, 12.4% of 18- to 21-year-olds were attending college, whereas in 1890 only about 3% of this demographic had an interest in higher learning.

Women's education in home economics

A new field of study, the art and science of homemaking, emerged in the Progressive Era in an effort to feminize women's education in the United States. Home economics emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the many changes occurring both at the level of material culture and practices and in the more abstract realm of gender ideology and thinking about the home. As the industrial revolution took hold of the American economy and as mass production, alienation, and urbanization appeared to be unstoppable trends, Americans looked for solutions that could soften the effects of change without slowing down the engines of progress. Alternatively called home arts, the major curriculum reform in women's education was influenced by the publication of Treatise on Domestic Economy, written by Catherine Beecher in 1843. Advocates of home economics argued that homemaking, as a profession, required education and training for the development of an efficient and systematic domestic practice. The curriculum aimed to cover a variety of topics, including teaching a standardized ways of gardening, child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, performing household maintenance, and doctoring. Such scientific management applied to the domestic sphere was presented as a solution to the dilemma black middle-class women faced in terms of searching for meaning and fulfillment in their role of housekeeping. The feminist perspective, by pushing for this type of education, intended to explain that women had separate but equally important responsibilities in life with men that required proper training.

Breaker boys sort coal in an anthracite coal breaker near South Pittston, Pennsylvania, 1911

Enrollment for children (age 5 to 19) in school rose from 51 percent to 59 between 1900 and 1909. Enrollment in public secondary school went from 519,000 to 841,000. School funds and the term of public schools also grew.

The Flexner Report of 1910, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, professionalized American medicine by discarding the scores of local small medical schools and focusing national funds, resources, and prestige on larger, professionalized medical schools associated with universities. Prominent leaders included the Mayo Brothers whose Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, became world-famous for innovative surgery.

Progressive scholars, based at the emerging research universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Michigan, Wisconsin, and California, worked to modernize their disciplines. The heyday of the amateur expert gave way to the research professor who published in the new scholarly journals and presses. Their explicit goal was to professionalize and make "scientific" the social sciences, especially history, economics, and political science. Professionalization meant creating new career tracks in the universities, with hiring and promotion dependent on meeting international models of scholarship.

The Commission on Training Camp Activities sought to "socialize and Americanize" troops, especially native-born and foreign-born men, to meet the expected level of societal standards and integrate them into American culture. The ideology of the Commission was characterized by that of the Progressive Era, which strived against prostitution, alcoholism, social diseases, and poor sanitary conditions in major cities. The CTCA attempted to eradicate these problems from military training camps.

Some Progressives sponsored eugenics as a solution to excessively large or underperforming families, hoping that birth control would enable parents to focus their resources on fewer, better children. Progressive leaders like Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann indicated their classically liberal concern over the danger posed to the individual by the practice of eugenics. The Catholics strongly opposed birth control proposals such as eugenics.

In the 1940s typically historians saw the Progressive Era as a prelude to the New Deal and dated it from 1901 (when Roosevelt became president) to the start of World War I in 1914 or 1917. Historians have moved back in time emphasizing the Progressive reformers at the municipal and state levels in the 1890s.

The Progressive political crusades were overshadowed in 1919 by violent confrontations with Bolsheviks (Communists), anarchists and violent strikes. The crusading element of progressivism thus largely ended, apart from prohibition, although business-oriented efficiency efforts continued. In 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died and Wilson's health collapsed, leaving a void in top leadership. The major new face was Herbert Hoover.

Much less settled is the question of when the era ended. Some historians who emphasize civil liberties decry their suppression during 1917-1919 and do not consider the war as rooted in Progressive policy. A strong anti-war movement headed by noted Progressives including Jane Addams, was suppressed by the Preparedness Movement and Wilson's 1916 re-election, a victory largely enabled by his campaign slogan, "He kept us out of the war." The slogan was no longer accurate by April 6 of the following year, when Wilson surprised much of the Progressive base that twice elected him and asked a joint session of Congress to declare war on Germany. The Senate voted 82-6 in favor; the House agreed, 373-50. Some historians see the so-called "war to end all wars" as a globalized expression of the American Progressive movement, with Wilson's support for a League of Nations as its climax.

The politics of the 1920s was unfriendly toward the labor unions and liberal crusaders against business, so many if not most historians who emphasize those themes write off the decade. Urban cosmopolitan scholars recoiled at the moralism of prohibition, the intolerance of the nativists and the KKK, and on those grounds denounced the era. Richard Hofstadter, for example, in 1955 wrote that prohibition, "was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform" that "was carried about America by the rural-evangelical virus". However, as Arthur S. Link emphasized, the Progressives did not simply roll over and play dead. Link's argument for continuity through the 1920s stimulated a historiography that found Progressivism to be a potent force. Palmer, pointing to leaders like George Norris, says, "It is worth noting that progressivism, whilst temporarily losing the political initiative, remained popular in many western states and made its presence felt in Washington during both the Harding and Coolidge presidencies." Gerster and Cords argue that, "Since progressivism was a 'spirit' or an 'enthusiasm' rather than an easily definable force with common goals, it seems more accurate to argue that it produced a climate for reform which lasted well into the 1920s, if not beyond." Some social historians have posited that the KKK may in fact fit into the Progressive agenda, if Klansmen are portrayed as "ordinary white Protestants" primarily interested in purification of the system, which had long been a core Progressive goal. This however ignores the violence and racism central to Klan ideology and activities, that had nothing to do with improving society, so much as enforcing racial hierarchies.[fact or opinion? ]

While some Progressive leaders became reactionaries, that usually happened in the 1930s, not in the 1920s, as exemplified by William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Al Smith, and Henry Ford.

Historians of women and of youth emphasize the strength of the Progressive impulse in the 1920s. Women consolidated their gains after the success of the suffrage movement, and moved into causes such as world peace, good government, maternal care (the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921), and local support for education and public health. The work was not nearly as dramatic as the suffrage crusade, but women voted and operated quietly and effectively. Paul Fass, speaking of youth, says "Progressivism as an angle of vision, as an optimistic approach to social problems, was very much alive." International influences that sparked many reform ideas likewise continued into the 1920s, as American ideas of modernity began to influence Europe.

By 1930, a block of progressive Republicans in the Senate were urging Hoover to take more vigorous action to fight the depression. There were about a dozen members of this group, including William Borah of Idaho, George W. Norris of Nebraska, Robert M. La Follette Jr., of Wisconsin, Gerald Nye of North Dakota, Hiram Johnson of California and Bronson M. Cutting of New Mexico. While these western Republicans could stir up issues, they could rarely forge a majority, since they were too individualistic and did not form a unified caucus. Hoover himself had sharply moved to the right, and paid little attention to their liberal ideas. By 1932, this group was moving toward support for Roosevelt's New Deal. They remained staunch isolationists deeply opposed to any involvement in Europe. Outside the Senate, however, a strong majority of the surviving Progressives from the 1910s had become conservative opponents of New Deal economic planning.

Jane Addams, social reformer

Susan B. Anthony, suffragist

Robert P. Bass, New Hampshire politician

Charles A. Beard, historian and political scientist

Albert J. Beveridge, Indiana Politician, Biographer

Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court justice

William Jennings Bryan, Democratic presidential nominee in 1896, 1900, 1908; Secretary of State

John Burke, North Dakota politician

Lucy Burns, suffragist

Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate, philanthropist

Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist

James M. Cox, Ohio governor; presidential candidate 1920

Herbert Croly, journalist

Clarence Darrow, lawyer

Eugene V. Debs, five times the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party

John Dewey, philosopher

W. E. B. Du Bois, African American leader, scholar

Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne, Mayor of Chicago; governor of Illinois

Thomas Edison, inventor

Irving Fisher, economist

Abraham Flexner, education

Henry Ford, automaker

Henry George, writer on political economy

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, feminist

Susan Glaspell, playwright, novelist

Martin H. Glynn, Governor of New York 1913-1914

Madison Grant, lawyer, writer, zoologist

Lewis Hine, photographer

Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, President

Charles Evans Hughes, New York governor

William James, philosopher

Hiram Johnson, Governor of California, Senator

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, union activist

Samuel M. Jones, politician, reformer

Florence Kelley, child advocate

Robert M. La Follette, Governor of Wisconsin, Senator, presidential candidate 1924

Fiorello LaGuardia, Mayor of New York City

Walter Lippmann, journalist

Mayo Brothers, medicine

Fayette Avery McKenzie, sociologist

John R. Mott, YMCA leader

George Mundelein, Catholic leader

Alice Paul, suffragist

Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor in 1930s

George Walbridge Perkins, leading banker and organizer of Progressive Party in 1912

Ulrich B. Phillips, historian of South

Amos Pinchot, a leader of Progressive Party of 1912

Gifford Pinchot, conservationist

Walter Rauschenbusch, theologian of Social Gospel

Jacob Riis, journalist, photographer, urban reformer

John D. Rockefeller Jr., philanthropist

Theodore Roosevelt, Governor of New York, President

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York, President

Elihu Root, statesman

Maria Sanford, reformer

Margaret Sanger, birth control activist

Anna Howard Shaw, suffragist

Upton Sinclair, novelist, journalist

Albion Small, sociologist

Al Smith, governor of New York; Democratic presidential candidate 1928

Ellen Gates Starr, sociologist

Lincoln Steffens, journalist

Henry Stimson, secretary of war for Taft and FDR; and secretary of state for Harding

William Howard Taft, Secretary of War, President, Chief Justice

Ida Tarbell, journalist

Frederick Winslow Taylor, efficiency expert

Frederick Jackson Turner, historian

Mary van Kleeck, social scientist

Thorstein Veblen, economist

Robert F. Wagner Senator from New York

Lester Frank Ward, sociologist

Ida B. Wells, Black leader

Burton Kendall Wheeler, Montana politician

William Allen White, journalist

Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, President

AT&T the telephone monopoly as a grasping octopus taking control of entire cities out West. from Telephony (April 1907) p. 235.

Adelstein, Richard (2008). "Progressive Era". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 398-400. ISBN 978-1412965804.

Baker, Paula. "Politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era." in The Oxford Handbook of American Political History (Oxford UP, 2020) pp. 115-134.

Buenker, John D., John Chynoweth Burnham, and Robert Morse Crunden. Progressivism (Schenkman Books, 1977). online

Buenker, John D., and Edward R. Kantowicz, eds. Historical dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Greenwood, 1988). online

Cocks, Catherine, Peter C. Holloran and Alan Lessoff. Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era (2009)

Diner, Steven J. A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (1998)

Flanagan, Maureen. America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s (2007)

Gould, Lewis L. America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914 (2000)

Gould Lewis L. ed., The Progressive Era (1974)

Hays, Samuel P. The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914 (1957),

Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (1954), Pulitzer Prize

Jensen, Richard. "Democracy, Republicanism and Efficiency: The Values of American Politics, 1885-1930," in Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger, eds, Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (U of Kansas Press, 2001) pp. 149-180; online version

Johnston, Robert D. "Influential Works About the Gilded Age and Progressive Era." in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017): 437-449. online

Kennedy, David M. ed., Progressivism: The Critical Issues (1971), readings

Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain victory: social democracy and progressivism in European and American thought, 1870-1920 1986 online at ACLS e-books

Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (1991)

Lears, T. J. Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Remaking of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2009) excerpt and text search

Leuchtenburg, William E. "Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 39#3 (1952), pp. 483-504. JSTOR 1895006

Link, William A. The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (1992) online

Mann, Arthur. ed., The Progressive Era (1975) excerpts from scholars and from primary sources

McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003) excerpt and text search

McNeese, Tim, with Richard Jensen. The Gilded Age and Progressivism: 1891-1913 (Chelsea House, 2010) for middle schools

Milkis, Sidney M., and Jerome M. Mileur. Progressivism and the New Democracy (1999), essays by scholars

Mowry, George. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912. (1954) scholarly survey of era online

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987) excerpt and text search

Piott, Steven L. American Reformers, 1870-1920: Progressives in Word and Deed (2006); examines 12 leading activists excerpt

Piott, Steven L. Giving Voters a Voice: The Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in America (2003) online

Postell, Joseph W. and Johnathan O'Neill, eds. Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era (2013)

Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (2000). stresses links with Europe online edition

Rothbard, Murray. The Progressive Era (2017), libertarian economics; strong on voters

Solty, Ingar. "Social Imperialism as Trasformismo: A Political Economy Case Study on the Progressive Era, the Federal Reserve Act, and the U.S.'s Entry into World War One, 1890-1917", in M. Lakitsch, Ed., Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War (LIT, 2015), pp. 91-121.

Thelen, David P. "Social Tensions and the Origins of Progressivism", Journal of American History 56 (1969), 323-341

Wiebe, Robert. The Search For Order, 1877-1920 (1967). online

Chambers, Clarke. Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (U of Minnesota Press, 1963)

Dawley, Alan. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003) excerpt and text search

Feinman, Ronald L. Twilight of Progressivism: The Western Republican Senators and the New Deal (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)

Jensen, Richard. "Democracy, Republicanism and Efficiency: The Values of American Politics, 1885-1930", in Byron Shafer and Anthony Badger, eds, Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (U of Kansas Press, 2001) pp. 149-180; online version

Lemons, J. Stanley. "The Sheppard-Towner act: Progressivism in the 1920s." Journal of American History 55.4 (1969): 776-786.

Levy, David W., and Bruce Allen Murphy. "Preserving the Progressive Spirit in a Conservative Time: The Joint Reform Efforts of Justice Brandeis and Professor Frankfurter, 1916-1933." Michigan Law Review 78 (1979): 1252+ online.

Link, Arthur. "What happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920s?" American Historical Review 64#4 (1959), 833-851. online

Link, William A. The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (1992) online

Murphy, Kevin C. Uphill all the way: The fortunes of progressivism, 1919-1929 (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2013; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013. 3552093.) online.

Putnam, Jackson K. "The Persistence of Progressivism in the 1920's: The Case of California." Pacific Historical Review 35#4 (1966), pp. 395-411. online

Young, Jeremy C. The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940 (2017) excerpt and text search

Zieger, Robert H. "Labor, Progressivism, and Herbert Hoover in the 1920's." Wisconsin Magazine of History (1975): 196-208. online

Beale Howard K. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. (1956). online

Brands, H.W. Theodore Roosevelt (2001), scholarly biography

Clements, Kendrick A. The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1992).

Coletta, Paolo. The Presidency of William Howard Taft (1990).

Collin, Richard H. "Symbiosis versus Hegemony: New Directions in the Foreign Relations Historiography of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft." Diplomatic History 19.3 (1995): 473-497. online

Cooper, John Milton The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. (1983). online; a dual biography

Cooper, John Milton Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009), a standard scholarly biography

Dalton, Kathleen. "Changing interpretations of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive era." in Christopher M. Nichols and Nancy C. Unger, eds A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017): 296-307.

Edwards, Barry C. "Putting Hoover on the Map: Was the 31st President a Progressive." (1975). Congress & the Presidency 41#1 (2014) pp. 49-83

Gould, Lewis L. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1991). Short scholarly biography; online

Harbaugh, William Henry. Power and Responsibility The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (1961), a standard scholarly biography emphasizing politics. online free

Harrison, Robert. Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (2004).

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition (1948), ch. 8-9-10.

Kolko, Gabriel (1963). The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916. New York, NY: The Free Press.

Link, Arthur S. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917 (1972) a standard political history of the era online

Lurie, Jonathan. William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative (2011)

Morris, Edmund Theodore Rex. (2001), biography of T. Roosevelt covers 1901-1909

Moreno, Paul D. The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism (Cambridge UP, 2013).

Mowry, George E. Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement. (1946). online free

Murphy, William B. "The National Progressive Republican League and the Elusive Quest for Progressive Unity." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8.4 (2009): 515-543; it promoted La Follette in 1912.

Pestritto, R.J. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. (2005).

Rothbard, Murray N. The Progressive Era (2017), libertarian interpretation online excerpt

Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers and the American State, 1877-1917 (1999).

Sarasohn, David. The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (UP of Mississippi, 1989).

Abrams, Richard M. Conservatism in a Progressive Era: Massachusetts Politics 1900-1912. (Harvard UP, 1964) online

Berman, David R. Governors and the Progressive Movement (University Press of Colorado, 2019) online.

Buenker, John D. Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (1973).

Buenker, John D. The History of Wisconsin, Vol. 4: The Progressive Era, 1893-1914 (1998).

Buenker, John D., and Edward R. Kantowicz, eds. Historical dictionary of the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Greenwood, 1988). online good coverage of states and major cities.

Cherny, Robert W. Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885-1915 (1981)

Chrislock, Carl H. The Progressive Era in Minnesota, 1899-1918 (1971) online review.

Connolly, James J. The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Harvard UP, 1998).

Ebner, Michael H., and Eugene M. Tobin, eds. The Age of Urban Reform: New Perspectives on the Progressive Era (1977)

Folsom, Burton W. "Tinkerers, tipplers, and traitors: ethnicity and democratic reform in Nebraska during the Progressive era." Pacific Historical Review 50.1 (1981): 53-75. online

Gould, Lewis L. Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (1973)

Grantham, Dewey W. "The Contours of Southern Progressivism." American Historical Review 86.5 (1981): 1035-1059.

Grantham, Dewey W. Southern progressivism: The reconciliation of progress and tradition (U of Tennessee Press, 1983), a major scholarly history; covers every state and all major reforms.

Griffith, Ernest S. A history of American city government: the progressive years and their aftermath 1900-1920 (Praeger, 1974), a major scholarly history covering every state.

Johnston, Robert D. The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003)

La Forte, Robert Sherman. Leaders of Reform: Progressive Republicans in Kansas, 1900-1916 (1974) online

Liazos, Ariane. Reforming the City: The Contested Origins of Urban Government, 1890-1930 (Columbia University Press, 2020) excerpt, a major scholarly survey

Link, Arthur S. Wilson: The Road to the White House vol 1 (1947) pp 93-308 on New Jersey politics. online

Link, William A. The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (1992), a major scholarly study

Laugen, R. Todd. The Gospel of Progressivism: Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930 (UP Colorado)

Lubove, Roy. The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917 (1974). online

Lubove, Roy. Twentieth Century Pittsburgh Volume 1: Government, Business, and Environmental Change (1995) online

McCormick, Richard L. From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910 (Cornell UP, 1981).

Maxwell, Robert S. La Follette and the Rise of the Progressives in Wisconsin. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1956.

Miller, Worth Robert. "Building a Progressive Coalition in Texas: The Populist-Reform Democrat Rapprochement, 1900-1907." Journal of Southern History 52.2 (1986): 163-182. online

Mowry, George E. The California Progressives (1951), focus on leadership
Mowry, George E. "The California Progressive and His Rationale: A Study in Middle Class Politics." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36#2 (1949), pp. 239-50. online

Noble, Ransom E. New Jersey Progressivism Before Wilson. Princeton UP, 1946) online.

Olin, Spencer C. California's Prodigal Sons: Hiram Johnson and the Progressives, 1911-1917 (U California Press, 1968).

Piott, Steven L. Holy Joe: Joseph W. Folk and the Missouri Idea (U Missouri Press, 1997).

Recchiuti, John Louis. Civic Engagement: Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City (2007).

Reynolds, John F. Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880-1920 (1988).

Richter, Hedwig. "Transnational Reform and Democracy: Election Reforms in New York City and Berlin Around 19001." The Journal Of The Gilded Age And Progressive Era 15.2 (2016): 149-175. online

Sealander, Judith. Grand plans: business progressivism and social change in Ohio's Miami Valley, 1890-1929 (1988) online

Starr, Kevin. Inventing the dream: California through the progressive era (Oxford UP, 1986).

Thelen, David. The New Citizenship, Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885-1900 (1972) online review.

Wallace, Mike. Greater Gotham: A history of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford UP, 2017).

Warner, Hoyt Landon. Progressivism in Ohio 1897-1917 (1964) online review

Wesser, Robert F. Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910 (Cornell UP, 1967).

Wesser, Robert F. A response to progressivism : the Democratic Party and New York politics, 1902-1918 (1986) online

Wright, James. The Progressive Yankees: Republican Reformers in New Hampshire, 1906-1916 (1987)

Gender, ethnic, business, labor, religion

Abell, Aaron I. American Catholicism and Social Action: A Search for Social Justice, 1865-1950 (1960).

Campbell, Barbara Kuhn. "Prominent Women in the Progressive Era: A Study of Life Histories" (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1976. 7700270.

Frankel, Noralee and Nancy S. Dye, eds. Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (1991).

Galambos, Louis. The public image of big business in America, 1880-1940: a quantitative study in social change (JHU Press, 2019).

Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003).

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The workplace, the state, and American labor activism, 1865-1925 (1987).

Muncy, Robyn. Creating A Feminine Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (1991).

Stromquist, Shelton. Reinventing 'The People': The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, (U. of Illinois Press, 2006). ISBN 0-252-07269-3. online review

Fink, Leon, ed. Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1993) primary sources and scholarly essays.

Groman, George L. ed. Political Literature of the Progressive Era (Michigan State UP, 1967)

Eisenach, Eldon J. ed. The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism (Hackett, 2006)

Pease, Otis, ed. The Progressive Years: The Spirit and Achievement of American Reform (1962)

Pestritto, Ronald J., and William J. Atto, eds. American Progressivism: A Reader (2008)

Resek, Carl, ed. The Progressives (1967)

Wilson, Woodrow. A Crossroads Of Freedom The 1912 Speeches Of Woodrow Wilson (1956) online

These pamphlets from 100 to 500 pages contain official platforms, arguments, biographies, speeches and statistics, all designed to help local party speakers.

Democratic Party Congressional Committee. Democratic campaign book: Congressional Election 1906 (1906), used in every state.online

National Democratic Congressional Committee. Democratic campaign book: Congressional Election 1910 (1910), used in every state. online

Democratic Party (Ohio). State Executive Committee. Ohio Democratic Campaign Text-book, 1914 (1914); online

Republican National Committee. Republican campaign text-book, 1912 (1912), 416 online

Social-Democratic party. Milwaukee municipal campaign book 1912 (1912) online; local; issues only

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Progressive Era (1896-1917) was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States focused on defeating corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency. The main themes ended during American involvement in World War I (1917-1918) while the waste and efficiency elements continued into the 1920s.

# data[].attributes.body
Hip Hughes History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Square Deal for Dummies - Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Era Reforms

# data[].attributes.body
Hip Hughes History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Progressive Era Explained: US History Review