1890s-1920
A21 w
9.2.13

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Consider: political change, social change (industrial conditions, urban life, women, prohibition)

WHEN?
“Progressive Reform Era”
1890s 1901 1917 1920s
WHO?
“Progressives” urban middle-class: managers
& professionals; women
WHY?
Address the problems arising from: industrialization ( big business, labor strife) urbanization
(slums, political machines, corruption) immigration ( ethnic diversity) inequality
& social injustice
(women & racism)

WHAT are their goals?
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Democracy
– government accountable to the people
Regulation of corporations & monopolies
Social justice
– workers, poor, minorities
Environmental protection
Address political corruption
HOW?
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Government
(laws, regulations, programs)
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Efficiency value experts; use of scientific study to determine the best solution
Called – Scientific Management
Question is … HOW MUCH?????

Read only
1 and
Answer ?’s
“Muckrakers” – investigative journalists
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Jacob Riis – How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Ida Tarbell – “The History of the Standard Oil Co.” (1902)
Lincoln Steffens – The Shame of the Cities (1904)
Ida Tarbell Lincoln Steffens

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Example Event: Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory Fire - 1911
It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in
American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable
**The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers

As we watch…in your notebook
I. What were conditions like in the factory for the workers?
Who was working?
Work day?
Working conditions?
Safety?
II. What happened to start the fire?
III. Immediate Reaction of the workers
IV. During the fire…what was happening?
V. Problems that occurred battling the fire?
VI. Aftermath

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Changed the regulation by government of business
Before – government mostly stayed away from business
Felt had no power to legislate it
AFTERWARDS COULD NOT AVOID INSTITUTING
LAWS TO PROTECT WORKERS
ONCE NEW YORK
LEGISLATURE ENACTED
SAFETY LAWS, OTHER
STATES FOLLOWED SUIT

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Workers also looked towards UNIONS to voice concern over safety and pay
Factory Commission (1911)
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union
Led a march of 100,000 to tell NY legislature to move into action and address concerns

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March 25, 1990
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Happy Land Social Club (Bronx)
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87 Killed (customers, not workers)
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Why?
NO
Sprinkler System
Fire Alarms
Exits
Windows - iron bars
One Exit Door

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Sept. 3 1991
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North Carolina Poultry Factory
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25 Killed (workers)
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Why?
EXITS
Not marked well
Or blocked
Or padlocked (to prevent theft)

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Countless state and federal laws
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Unions gathered numerous new workers
Look
Around
You…
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Employers have a clear set of guidelines that need to be followed to ensure safety of their employees
Fire Drills and instructions posted
Firefighting equipment must be maintained and portable fire extinguishers
Fire Sprinklers
Employee training

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Additional Workplace & labor reforms eight-hour work day improved safety & health conditions in factories workers compensation laws minimum wage laws unionization
Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire, 1913

State Social Reform: Child Labor
“Breaker Boys” Pennsylvania, 1911
Child Laborers in Indiana Glass Works,
Midnight, Indiana. 1908
Child Laborer, Newberry, S.C. 1908
Shrimp pickers in Peerless Oyster Co.
Bay St. Louis, Miss., March 3, 1911

One of the most persistent causes of
Progressive Era reformers was child labor reform.
Children (ten to fifteen years old) worked in America.
The 1890 census  more than one million
The 1910 census  increased to two million
Industries employed children as young as five or six to work as many as eighteen to twenty hours a day.

► Industrialization did not create child labor, but it did contribute to the need for child labor reform.
The replacement of skilled artisans by machinery and the growth of factories and mills made child labor increasingly profitable for businesses.
Why - Children cost less to employ than adults, and were paid only a fraction of what an adult worker would make (or sometimes, nothing) about 5 pence (penny) a day or
$1.50 for 16 hours of work ($25 now)
Many employers preferred hiring children because they were quick, easy to train, could fit in small places, small fingers, and were willing to work for lower wages.
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Let’s hear about some history…
Camella Teoli Testifies about the
1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
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Background
30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the
Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912
The strike began because of unsafe working conditions in the mills
Also Massachusetts had passed a law requiring a shorter work week  textile mill owners responded by reducing workers' wages

Let’s hear some history…
She went before a U.S.
Congressional hearing in March
1912.
Testified about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating
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Gained national headlines— in part because
Helen Taft, the wife of the
President Taft, was there
The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory

Where the Progressives came in…
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Believed that child labor was detrimental to children and to society.
Children should be:
Protected from harmful environments so that they would become healthy, productive adults.
Their goals were to develop programs that would: eliminate children's participation in industry increase their involvement in education and extracurricular activities.

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The Keating-Owen Act (1916) would have freed children from child labor only in industries that engaged in interstate commerce
Supreme Court declared law unconstitutional in
1918 on the grounds that Congress could not regulate local labor conditions

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President Woodrow Wilson approved and signed into law the "Tax on Employment of
Child Labor“ (1919)
This placed a 10% tax on net profits of businesses that employed children under age fourteen or made them work more than eight hours a day, six days a week.
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The Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional.

Still a great deal of opposition to a national amendment against child labor
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Opponents labeled the proposed amendment a communist idea that government would control the nation's businesses
Yet the initial passage of bills may have had some effect on businesses
Number of working children (10 – 15) declined by almost fifty percent between 1910 and 1920.

Some laws did make it onto the books
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The Smith-Hughes Act (1917)
Provided one million dollars to states that agreed to improve their public schools by providing vocational education programs.
Why?
– Would offer children an alternative to work.
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By 1929 every state had a provision banning children under fourteen from working

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In February 1941 the
Supreme Court overruled the 1918 decision
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As a result, businesses that shipped goods out of state had to abide by the ruling that children could only work outside of school hours and that children under eighteen were unable to work in jobs that were hazardous to their health .

Progressive
Reforms today
For example
Child Labor Laws do not permit employees younger than 18 to work with or repair, adjust, or clean power-driven machinery like meat/deli slicers or bakery mixers

Who was he?
Grew up in wealthy family
Began his career as a journalist at the New York
Evening Post .
- Later became an editor of McClure's magazine (worked with other muckrakers)
- He and McClure’s took on corporate monopolies and political machines
(corruption) , the awful conditions most
Americans lived and worked in, the tainted food and water they ate and drank.
Cities began to use city commissions and city managers **see later
Lincoln
Steffens
The commercial spirit is the spirit of profit, not patriotism; of credit, not honor; of individual gain, not national prosperity; of trade and dickering, not principle. "My business is sacred," says the businessman in his heart.
"Whatever prospers my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hinders it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe is bad, that is, it is a bad thing to take; but it is not so bad to give one, not if it is necessary to my business.“
~ Lincoln Steffens The Shame of The Cities

► A hundred thousand people lived in rear tenements in New York City last year.
Here is a room neater than the rest. The spice of hot soapsuds is added to the air already tainted with the smell of boiling cabbage, of rags and uncleanliness all about. It makes an overpowering compound.
~
How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis
Jacob
Riis
Who was he?
Social reformer, "muckraking" journalist and social documentary photographer
Worked as a police reporter whose work appeared in several New York newspapers
- documented the living and working conditions of the poor
**As a result of his work - NYC passed building codes to promote safety and health.
Let’s take a look

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Target
Relieving the poverty of immigrants and other city dwellers
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Early Reform Program
Social Gospel movement
Preached salvation through service to the poor
Leaders encouraged churches erected in poor communities
Persuaded some business leaders to treat workers more fairly

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The Settlement House Movement
Community Centers in slum neighborhoods
Provided- education (ex: English classes), culture (ex: crafts, drama plays, music painting), day care
Butler YMCA – when established ?
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Also the YMCA and Salvation Army took on service roles
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Way to address some of the ongoing problems of urbanization

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Chicago Hull-House – Jane Addams
Jane Addams (1905) Hull-House Complex in 1906

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Was the daughter of a well-to-do Illinois businessman
Jane often went with her father on his trips to the mills that he owned.
One day in 1867, her father had business in the town of Freeport.
The mill next to the poorest section of town.
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Rows of run-down houses crowded one beside the other
Children dressed in ragged, dirty clothing played in the streets.
"
Papa, why do these people live in such
horrid little houses so close together?" she asked.
"Because they have no money to live in better
places," he replied.
"Well, when I grow up, I shall live in a big house…But it will not be built among the other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little
houses like these."

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Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr, rented a run-down mansion that once had belonged to a man named Charles Hull.
Location: in one of Chicago's industrial areas.
Many European immigrants lived in the neighborhood.
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Spoke little, if any, English
Lived in crowded, dirty tenements.
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Most worked in nearby factories earning barely enough money to feed their families.
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Addams and Starr hoped that
Hull House would bring some light into these people's lives

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.
~Jane Addams "20 Years at Hull House", 1910

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Kindergarten class/daycare for
► children left at the settlement while their mothers worked in
► the sweatshops
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Provided nutritious food for the sick
Offered courses
Became well known for its success in aiding American assimilation, especially with immigrant youth
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Established the city’s first public playground, bathhouse, and public gymnasium

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Starr and Addams volunteered as on-call doctors when the real doctors weren't available (studied medicine)
Acted as midwives
Saved babies from neglect
Prepared the dead for burial
Nursed the sick
Gave shelter to domestic violence victims.
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For example, one Italian bride had lost her wedding ring and in turn was beaten by her husband for a week.
She sought shelter at the settlement and it was granted to her
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In another case, a woman was about to give birth to an illegitimate baby, so none of the Irish nurses would touch it.
Addams and Starr stepped in and delivered the baby

► won the Nobel Peace Prize in
1931 for her work
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When she died in 1935,
Hull House filled an entire city block.
It had inspired the creation of hundreds of similar houses across the U.S.

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Focus on: Corruption and social injustice
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Raise the consciousness of America
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Muckrakers
Upton Sinclair and The Jungle 1906

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Born in Baltimore
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Grew up poor though money on his mother’s side
(stayed with grandparents due to mother-son relationship)
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Gave him insight into how both the rich and the poor lived

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Love for reading (5 yrs old) read every book that his mother owned for a deeper understanding of the world.
Entered City College of New York
(14 yrs old)
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He graduated in 1897 
Columbia University
Major - Law, but he was more interested in writing, and he learned several languages including Spanish, German and French.
He supported himself through college by writing boys' adventure stories and jokes
He wrote jokes, dime novels and magazine articles in boy's weekly and pulp magazines to pay for his tuition.

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In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise, working undercover in
Chicago's meatpacking plants to research his political fiction exposé
► When it was published two years later, it became a bestseller

Audio
Online
Extra:
Video

Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle Aftermath
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Consumer Protection
Pure Food and Drug Act
(1906)
Halted the sale of contaminated foods and medicines and called for truth in labeling
Meat Inspection Act
(1906)
The Act mandated cleaner conditions for meatpacking plants
Chicago Meatpacking Workers, 1905
"A nauseating job, but it must be done"