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The Progressive Era

Chapter 17

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THE ORIGINS OF PROGRESSIVISM

Section 1

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Progressivism

  • A social and political movement aimed at correcting injustices in American life and reforming society for the better

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Goals of Progressivism

  1. Social welfare
  2. Moral improvement
  3. Economic Reform
  4. Efficiency

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Progressivism

Goals, Organizations/Leaders, and Successes

(Goes with the chart on pages 3-4 of the packet)

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PROTECTING SOCIAL WELFARE

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Goal: Help the less fortunate

  • Jacob Riis
  • Salvation Army
  • Red Cross
  • YMCA

  • Successes: awareness, �settlement houses

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Goal: Racial Equality

  • NAACP
  • Booker T. Washington’s
    • Success: Tuskegee Institute
  • W.E.B. Du Bois

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Nellie Bly

  • Goal: Reform mental institutions

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PROMOTING MORAL IMPROVEMENT

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Temperance

  • Goals:
    • Prohibition – banning alcohol
    • Ban gambling
  • Organizations: Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-Saloon League
  • Success: 18th Amendment

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ECONOMIC REFORM

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Trustbusting

  • Leaders:
    • Theodore Roosevelt
    • Grover Cleveland
    • William Taft
  • Successes:
    • Sherman Antitrust Act (1890)
    • Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)

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Workplace Reform

  • Goals:
    • Higher wages, shorter work day, worker’s compensation, ban child labor
  • Organizations/Leaders:
    • Labor unions
    • Louis Brandeis
      • Brandeis Brief – long workdays take a toll on the individual and society
  • Successes:
    • Federal Trade Commission (watchdog – check for violations by corporations)
    • Keating-Owen Act (1916) – banned the interstate sale of goods made with child labor

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Goal: Food Safety

  • Leader: Upton Sinclair – The Jungle
  • Successes:
    • Meat Inspection Act
    • Pure Food and Drug Act – labels must be truthful, stopped sale of contaminated food

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Excerpts from The Jungle

“It seemed that he was working in the room where the men prepared the beef for canning, and the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they set Antanas with his mop slopping the "pickle" into a hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!”

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“There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.”

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FOSTERING EFFICIENCY

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Taylorism

  • Goal: make production more efficient
  • Leaders: Frederick Winslow Taylor
  • Success: Taylorism – assembly line

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REFORMING GOVERNMENT

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Social Housekeeping

  • Women led most reform movements
  • Women’s suffrage
    • Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
  • Organizations/Leaders:
    • Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt
    • National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

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Why is the right to vote called “suffrage”?

  • In the earlier sense of "privilege," suffrage had been in the English language since the Middle Ages. Suffrages originally were prayers. Then the meaning was extended to requests for assistance, then to assistance itself, then the assistance provided by a supporting vote, and finally the vote itself. So it stood when in 1787 the Constitution used suffrage to mean "an inalienable right to vote.”

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Not all women liked the idea of feminism…

  • “We are not merely against feminism, but for the family. We cannot reconcile feminism and the family. We hope to hear the sound of women’s feet, walking away from the factory and back to the home.”

– Mrs. Martin

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Arguments for Woman Suffrage

  • Women would bring an emotional component to politics, so war would be a thing of the past
  • Minority men had the right to vote, so women should too
  • Women wouldn’t be invading the “separate sphere” of men… they would simply add a vote to their husband’s preference
  • Other arguments?

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Suffrage

  • Success: 19th Amendment (1920) granted women the right to vote

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Political Machines

  • Goal: ban political machines
  • Successes:
    • Secret ballot (lessened their control over voters)
    • Replaced by interest groups

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Reform Elections

  • Goal: Reform elections
  • Leaders: Robert M. La Follette (Wisconsin native!)
  • Successes:
    • Secret ballot
    • Initiative
    • Referendum
    • Recall election

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Reform Government

  • Successes:
    • Commission system (group of experts take care of issues)
    • Council-manager system (council and a council manager is elected by the people to run the city)
    • 17th Amendment – direct election of senators

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CONSERVATION

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Conservation

  • Goals: preserve nature
  • Organizations/Leaders:
    • Teddy Roosevelt
    • John Muir
      • Sierra Club
    • Gifford Pinchot
      • U.S. Forest Service

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Conservation

  • Successes:
    • John Muir worked with Roosevelt to set aside approx. 200 million acres for conservation
    • Creation of the U.S. Forest Service (chairman: Gifford Pinchot)
    • National Reclamation Act of 1902 – some land would be conserved, other land would be developed for the common good
    • Yellowstone National Park (1872)

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