5. Who were
Progressives?
• Broad movement of people who
hoped to change American social
and political life
• Included:
• Businessmen who gave workers
a voice
• Labor activists
• Female reformers
• Social scientists who wanted to
use research to solve social
problems
• Middle class people who felt
threatened by big companies
6. What did Progressives do?
• Progressives sought to counter the negative
effects of industrial development on society
• Immigrants were often the target of
Progressive reformers’ efforts, because they
were at the lower rungs of the industrial
economy
• Immigrants, women, and African Americans
also fought on their own behalf during the
Progressive Era for better working and living
conditions
8. Immigrants and
Migrants
• Millions of immigrants from
southern and eastern
Europe, Mexico and Asia
• Many found miserable
conditions and racism
• 1/3 returned to home
countries
• Joined other Americans on
the move: 1900-1910, 4.5
million Americans moved
west; 80,000 migrated
south to north
10. Women
and Girls• Women worked in
factories
• By 1920, 25% of employed
women were office
workers or telephone
operators
• 8 million women worked
for wages
13. Middle-class activists:
Reform
• Muckrakers: journalists
who wrote exposés of
problems in industrial
life; e.g. Upton Sinclair,
The Jungle
• (The Jungle is a piece of
fiction inspired by
Sinclair’s journalistic
work)
14. Section 1-Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in
the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out
of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid,
one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and
trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a
person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base
of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which
the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would
be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to
count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had
worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that
their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in
the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by
artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live
for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.
Excerpt from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
17. Industrial
Reform• Ford Motor Company:
a new business model
• 1914: wages at $5/day
- more than double of
most other industrial
workers
• An “American way of
life” requires a “living
wage” - Father John A.
Ryan book 1906
18. Ideas and Reform
• Industrial freedom -
unions to empower
industrial workers
• Response to Frederick
W.Taylor and scientific
management
• Brandeis: contradiction
between “political
liberty” and “industrial
slavery”
19. While the Declaration of Independence established civil
and political liberty, it did not, as you all know, establish
industrial liberty.... Liberty means more than the right to
choose the field of one’s employment. He is not a free man
whose family must buy food today with the money that is
earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to
work unduly long hours and for wages so low he cannot
provide the necessities of life for himself and his family;
who must live in a crowded tenement and see his children
go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before
their bodies are developed and their minds trained....
From John Mitchell,“TheWorkingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty”
(1910)
21. The Socialist Party
• Founded in US 1901: free
college; labor laws; public
ownership of railroads and
factories
• 1912: 150,000 members in
Socialist party
• EugeneV. Debs:“While
there is a lower class, I am
in it.... while there is a soul
in prison, I am not free.”
22. AFL
• American Federation
of Labor - 1.6 million
members by 1904 -
represented
privileged workers
• Samuel Gompers,
first president
23. IWW - Wobblies• International Workers
of the World founded
1905 - more radical,
mobilized wider
coalition of workers
• coordinated and
supported local
strikes, building
ethnic solidarity
• Lawrence, MA
textile strike - 1912
• free-speech fights
24. Women in the
Progressive Era
• = reformers, =
workers
• city life led to new
ways of thinking about
what it meant to be a
woman
• feminism invented and
suffrage movement
grows
25. Women and Reform
• Settlement house
movement
• Jane Addams, Hull
House
• Targeted immigrant
families
• Florence Kelley - National
Consumers’ League -
protective labor legislation
26. New Feminism
• 1914:“feminism” part
of political language -
women’s emancipation
“as a human being and
a sex-being”
• Birth control
movement - Emma
Goldman and Margaret
Sanger
Top: Isadora Duncan; Bottom: Margaret Sanger
27. Every girl should first understand herself: she should
know her anatomy, including sex anatomy: she should
know the epochs of a normal woman's life, and the
unfoldment which each epoch brings: she should know
the effect the emotions have on her acts, and finally
she should know the fullness and richness of life when
crowned by the flower of motherhood.
…
It is not my intention to thrust upon any one a special
code of morals, or to inflict upon the reader of this
page my own ideals of morality. I only presume to
present the facts for you to accept according to your
understanding.
Margaret Sanger, "What Every Girl
Should Know," 17 Nov 1912.
28. Students of vice, whether teachers, clergymen, social workers or
physicians, have been laboring for years to find the cause and cure for
vice, and especially for prostitution.They have failed so far to agree on
either the cause or the cure, but it is interesting to know that upon one
point they have been compelled to agree and that is that IGNORANCE
OF THE SEX FUNCTIONS is one of the strongest forces that sends
young girls into unclean living…
Who shall instruct? To the writer the answer is simple.The mother is the
logical person to teach the child as soon as questions arise, for it is to
the mother that the child goes for information before he enters the
schoolroom. If, therefore, the mother answers his questions truthfully
and simply and satisfies his curiosity, she will find that the subject of sex
ceases to be an isolated subject, and becomes a natural part of the child's
general learning.A woman does not need to be a college graduate, with a
special degree in the study of botany, before she can tell her child the
beautiful truth of its birth. But she does need to clear her own mind of
prudishness, and to understand that the procreative act is natural, clean
and healthful; that all nature is beatified through it, and consequently that
it is devoid of offensiveness.
29. Women’s Suffrage
• National American Woman
Suffrage Association: 13,000 in
1893; 2 million in 1917
• 1900: more than half of states
allow women’s vote in school-
related elections
• 1900:WY, CO, ID, UT had full
woman suffrage
• CA: 1911
Poster, 1911?
Source: calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu
30. Maternalist
Reform
• Female reformers:
government should
support mothers
• Muller v. Oregon (1908) -
upholds maximum
working hours for
women
• 1913: workman’s
compensation in 22
states
• But assumed women’s
weakness
In a factory like this one, female workers were protected by law; men
were not.
31. Politics of
Progressivism• “social legislation” -
reforms meant to help
with urban problems and
working-class life
• inspired by European
policies
• freedom = “power to do
specific things”
33. Progressive
Democracy
•Seventeenth Amendment
(1917) - US Senators by
popular vote
•CA: adoption of initiative
and referendum - allowing
voters to propose
legislation and vote directly
on it
•but disenfranchisement of
poor, uneducated, blacks in
the South
35. Theodore Roosevelt
• 1901 becomes president when
McKinley is assassinated
• Square Deal: fight “bad” corporations;
support “good” ones
• Fight against Northern Securities
Company
• New laws to regulate economy -
strengthen Interstate Commerce
Commission
37. Taft• Roosevelt’s chosen
successor; wins in 1908
• More aggressive antitrust
policy than Roosevelt -
Standard Oil Company
• Sixteenth Amendment:
graduated income tax
• More conservative
Top: Taft throws the first
pitch at a Washington
baseball game, 1910
(Source: theatlantic.com);
Bottom:The President’s
Bathtub (Source:
classroomhelp.com)
38. The Election of
1912
• Four-way race:
• Roosevelt:The
Progressive Party (27%)
• Taft: Republican (23%)
• Woodrow Wilson:
Democrat (42%)
• EugeneV. Debs: Socialist
(6%)
39. New Freedom vs. New
Nationalism
• Wilson: New Freedom
• big government can be a threat
• but the govt does have a role:
• antitrust laws
• protecting union rights
• encouraging small business
• Roosevelt: New Nationalism - only “controlling and directing
power of government” could return “the liberty of the
oppressed”
40.
41. Wilson as
President
• Activist policies
• Federal Reserve System
(1913) - central board
appointed by president
• regulate issuing of
currency
• help banks about to fail
• influence interest rates for
growth
• Federal Trade Commission
(FTC) (1914) - investigate
and prohibit “unfair” business
President WilsonVisits California
Source: LA Times
42. Conclusions
• The Progressive Era has the problems of the
Gilded Age, but a different approach:
• middle class people want to fix problem of
poverty
• they are more sympathetic to working-class
efforts to organize
• politicians adopt policies to limit the power of
big business, protect “vulnerable poor”
