Chapter 21 Enduring Vision Notes: The Progressives

Chapter 21:  The Progressives

1.      What was the Progressive Movement?  Summarize their motives, goals, and tactics.

a.       Who

                                                              i.      Middle class, native born, protestant, mostly women

                                                            ii.      On issues affecting factory workers and slum dwellers, the urban immigrant political machines and workers provided critical support and often took the initiative

                                                          iii.      Some corporate leaders helped shape regulatory measures in ways to serve their interests.

b.      What

                                                              i.      Series of political and cultural responses to industrialization and its by-products: immigration, urban growth, the rise of corporate power, and widening class divisions.

c.        Goals

                                                              i.      Stricter regulation of business, from local transit companies to the almighty trusts.

                                                            ii.      protecting workers and the urban poor

                                                          iii.       Reform the structure of government, especially at the municipal level.

                                                          iv.      viewing immigration, urban immorality, and social disorder as the central problems, fought for immigration restriction or various social-control strategies

d.      Tactics

                                                              i.      Used books, newspapers, magazines to spread news

                                                            ii.      Reporters went undercover in factories

                                                          iii.      Science and reason, pragmatism

2.      Compare and contrast Progressives and populists.

Populist	Both	Progressive
-       strength lay in the cities -       enlisted many more journalists, academics, social theorists, and urban dwellers generally -       reformers -       wished to remedy the social ills of industrial capitalism	-       democratic	-       strength lay in the farms, west -       radicals -       wished to uproot the system of industrial capitalism

3.      How did artists, novelists, and journalists bring attention to many of the social and political issues of the time period?  List an example of each and its impact.

a.       The Octopus (1901 by: Frank Norris portrayed struggle between California railroad owners and the state’s wheat growers. Described the bribery, intimidation, rate manipulation, and other means they used to promote their interests.

b.      Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier (1912) featured a hard-driving business tycoon utterly lacking a social conscience.

                                                              i.      Modeled his story on the career of an actual tycoon, Charles Yerkes, a railway financier with a reputation for underhanded practices.

                                                            ii.      Undermined the reputation of the industrial elite and stimulated pressures for tougher regulation of business.

c.       McClure’s and Collier’s: Magazine that exposed urban political corruption and corporate wrongdoing

4.      Define direct primary, initiative, referendum and recall. How would these measure curb political corruption?

a.       direct primary:  enabled rank-and-file voters rather than party bosses to select the candidates who would run in the general election.

b.      Initiative: voters can instruct the legislature to consider a specific bill.

c.        Referendum:  enact a law or (in a nonbinding referendum) express their views on a proposed measure

d.      recall petition, voters can remove a public official from office if they muster enough signatures

5.      Who was Robert LaFollette and what did he do? What was the “Wisconsin Idea”?

a.       Introduced direct primaries

b.      Set up RR commission

c.       Increased corporate taxes

6.      What happened at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?

a.       A fire started at the factory. Since no fire escape available, 146 girls (teenagers mostly) died

b.      Lead to states passing 56 worker protection laws

c.       Made employers liable for job related injury and death.

7.      How did progressives work to improve city life?

a.       Urban beautification

b.      The New York legislature passed laws imposing strict health and safety regulations on tenements in 1911

c.       Progressive reformers called for improved water and sewer systems, regulation of milk suppliers and food handlers, school medical examinations and vaccination programs, and informational campaigns to spread public-health information to the urban masses

d.      Environmental consciousness of these years, air pollution (Smoke Prevention Association)

8.      What did the Mann Act do?

a.       made it illegal to transport a woman across a state line “for immoral purposes.

b.      the African-American boxer Jack Johnson convicted b/c traveled with white woman for immoral purposes across state line, went abroad.

1.      What were some of the achievements of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League?

a.       produced propaganda documenting alcohol’s role in many social problems and touting prohibition as the answer

b.      wanted to control the immigrant cites

2.      Define eugenics, and its relationship to immigration.

a.       Anti-immigrant fears helped fuel the eugenics movement.

b.      Eugenics is the control of reproduction to alter a plant or animal species, and some U.S. eugenicists believed that human society could be improved by this means.

c.       A leading eugenicist, the zoologist Charles B. Davenport, urged immigration restriction to keep America from pollution by “inferior” genetic stock.

d.      The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Madison Grant, a prominent progressive and eugenics advocate, used bogus data to denounce immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, especially Jews. He also viewed African Americans as inferior.

                                                               i.      Grant called for racial segregation, immigration restriction, and the forced sterilization of the “unfit,” including “worthless race types.”

3.      Did progressives try and attack racism? Why (or why not?)

a.       Lillian Wald, director of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, protested racial injustice.

b.      Muckraker Ray Stannard Baker documented racism in his 1908 book, Following the Color Line.

c.       Settlement house worker Mary White Ovington helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and wrote Half a Man (1911) about the emotional scars of racism.

d.      most progressive kept silent as blacks were lynched, disfranchised, and discriminated against.

e.      Many saw African Americans, like immigrants, not as potential allies but as part of the problem.

f.        Viewing blacks as inferior and prone to immorality and social disorder, white progressives generally supported or tolerated segregated schools and housing, restrictions on black voting rights, the strict moral oversight of African-American communities, and, at best, paternalistic efforts to “uplift” this supposedly backward and childlike people.

Pages 657-674 (due Fri, 2/15)

1.      What was the Niagara Movement and who founded the NAACP?

a.       held a conference at Niagara Falls

b.      The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he rejected Washington’s call for patience and his exclusive emphasis on manual skills. Instead, Du Bois demanded full racial equality, including the same educational opportunities open to whites, and called on blacks to resist all forms of racism

2.      How did W.E.B. DuBois’ views differ from Booker T. Washington’s?

a.       in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he rejected Washington’s call for patience and his exclusive emphasis on manual skills. Instead, Du Bois demanded full racial equality, including the same educational opportunities open to whites, and called on blacks to resist all forms of racism.

b.      Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison  In 1909 Du Bois, and other blacks from the Niagara Movement formed the National (NAACP).

3.      Who was Carrie Chapman Catt?

a.       Succeeded Susan B. Anthony as president of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

b.      lobbied legislators, but also organized parades in open cars; devised catchy slogans; ran newspaper ads; put up posters; waved eye-catching banners; held fundraisers; arranged photo opportunities for the media; and distributed fans, playing cards, and other items emblazoned with the suffrage message. Gradually, state after state fell into the suffrage column. Had state-by-state approach.

4.      Why did Alice Paul organize the Woman’s Party? What was their main goal and how did they fight to try and achieve it?

a.       In 1913 Paul founded Woman’s party, to pressure Congress to enact a woman-suffrage amendment. Targeting the “the party in power”—in this case, the Democrats—Paul and her followers picketed the White House round the clock in the war year of 1917 and posted large signs accusing President Wilson of hypocrisy in championing democracy abroad while opposing woman suffrage at home. Several protesters were jailed and, when they went on a hunger strike, force-fed. At both the state and federal level, the momentum of the organized woman-suffrage movement had become well-nigh irresistible.

5.      What types of progressive movements did women work for?

a.       the campaigns to bring playgrounds and day nurseries to the slums, abolish child labor, help women workers, and ban unsafe foods and quack remedies

6.      Describe the following explain who was allowed to join and what they believed in.

a.       International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union

                                                               i.      The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU),founded in 1900 by immigrants working in New York City’s needle trades

                                                              ii.      conducted a successful strike in 1909 (Clara Lemlich jumped up as speechmaking droned on at protest rally and passionately called for a strike. Thousands of women garment workers stayed off the job the next day)  &  1911 Triangle fire.

                                                            iii.      The women on the picket lines found these strikes both exhilarating and frightening. Some were beaten by police; others fired

                                                          iv.      Through such strikes, workers gained better wages and improved working conditions

b.      Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

                                                               i.      the most exploited workers was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), nicknamed the Wobblies, founded in Chicago in 1905.

                                                              ii.      leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, a compelling orator. Utah-born Haywood became a miner as a boy and joined the militant Western Federation of Miners in 1896.  In 1905 he was acquitted of complicity in the assassination of an anti-labor former governor of Idaho.

                                                            iii.      IWW membership peaked at around 30,000, and most members were western miners, Lumber-men, fruit pickers, and itinerant laborers.

                                                            iv.      The IWW led mass strikes of Nevada gold miners; Minnesota iron miners; and timber workers in Louisiana, Texas, and the Northwest.

                                                             v.      Its greatest success came in 1912 when it won a bitter textile strike in Massachusetts. This victory owed much to two women: the birth-control reformer Margaret Sanger, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a fiery Irish-American orator who publicized the cause by sending strikers’ children to sympathizers in New York City for temporary care.

                                                            vi.      Although the IWW’s reputation for violence was much exaggerated, it faced government harassment, especially during World War I, and by 1920 its strength was broken.

7.      What happened to McKinley? Who took the presidency?

a.       On September 6, 1901, in Buffalo, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley. On September 14, McKinley died. At age forty-two, Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States

8.      What was Roosevelt’s view toward business? What was “trust busting?”

a.       With his elite background, TR neither feared nor much liked business tycoons. The prospect of spending time with “big-money men,” he once wrote a friend, “fills me with frank horror.”

b.       While he believed that big corporations contributed to national greatness, he also embraced the progressive conviction that business behavior must be regulated.

c.       A strict moralist, he held corporations, like individuals, to a high standard

d.       His 1902 State of the Union message gave high priority to breaking up business monopolies, or “trustbusting.” Roosevelt’s attorney general soon filed suit against the Northern Securities Company, a giant holding company that had recently been formed to control railroading in the Northwest, for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890

9.      What was Roosevelt’s and the government’s reaction to The Jungle? What laws were enacted?

a.       Sensing the public mood, Roosevelt supported the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both passed in 1906

10.  How did Roosevelt work towards helping protect the environment? What was the Sierra Club and what was the job of the National Park Service?

a.       Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, environmental concerns ranked high on the national agenda. Singling out conservation in his first State of the Union message as “the most vital internal question” facing America

b.       organizations such as the Sierra Club battled to preserve the unspoiled beauty of wilderness areas

c.        While expanding the national forests, TR also created 53 wildlife reserves, 16 national monuments, and 5 new national parks. As the parks drew more visitors, Congress created the National Park Service in 1916 to manage them. Earlier, the Antiquities Act (1906) had protected archaeological sites, especially in the Southwest, some of which eventually became national parks.

11.  Who were the different candidates and what was the platform of each in the Four Way election of 1912?

a.       Roosevelt: Progressive party (including tariff reduction, woman suffrage, business regulation, the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour workday, workers’ compensation, the direct primary, and the popular election of senators)

b.      Taft: had political machines, republican party

c.        Wilson: Democratic party small government, small businesses, and free competition :new freedom

d.      Eugene Debs: Socialist party, end to capitalism and a socialized economic order

12.  In what ways did Wilson regulate business? Give at least 2 examples.

a.       the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act. Though both sought a common goal, they embodied significantly different approaches.