Chapter 16:
Uncovering Problems at the Turn
of the Century
What
social, political and
environmental problems did
Americans face at the turn of the
20th Century?
Industrialization
lured many immigrants to
the U.S. who became the urban poor and
lived in unhealthy living conditions.
Businesses boomed and provided jobs but
they were low paying in unsafe conditions
for ridiculous hours.
Progressivism, a wide-ranging reform
movement targeting these problems, began
in the late 19th century.
Journalists called muckrakers exposed
people to the plight of the unfortunate in
hopes of sparking reform.
The “frontier” is
considered closed in 1890
Mass
production led to new ways to
distribute and sell products on a national
scale
Immigrants
found work, entertainment
and modern attractions in growing cities
By
1910: a majority of the population of
cities like New York, Chicago and
Cleveland was foreign born
½
of the nation’s labor force was foreign
born
 Growing
cities couldn’t provide people
necessary services like garbage
collection, safe housing, and police and fire
protection.
 Families were jammed into slum tenements
 Infrastructure (roads, power, sanitation,
transportation) was inadequate
 Industrial jobs were unsafe and unstable
 Unsafe
products
• Caveat emptor = “buyer beware”
 How could the buyer beware if the buyer has no idea
about the conditions in which the product is made?
 Upton
Sinclair wrote The Jungle to raise
concerns about working conditions and
the poor sanitary state of meatpacking
plants
• “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I
hit it in the stomach”
 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 shovelled 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.

Now we have FOOD ACTION DEFECT LEVELS
 Forests
were cleared by loggers and
farmers
 Ranchers allowed their herds to overgraze
 Extractive Industries transformed the earth
• Take minerals from the soil
 Copper, silver, gold, iron, coal
 Oil
companies continued to pump
petroleum from the ground
 Pollution and factory waste contaminated
cities
 Lincoln
Steffens wrote The Shame of the
Cities that revealed corruption in city
government
 A political machine is made up of full
time politicians
• Money + Power + Influence
 Local
politicians fed and cared for their
constituents in exchange for votes
• At least someone was looking out for the urban
immigrants
 Tammany
Hall and Boss Tweed (NYC)
• The ultimate political machine
 The “Millionaire’s
Club” (the Senate)
• State legislatures selected their 2 Senators
• Patronage = give jobs to friends and political
supporters
 The
Pendleton Act
• Civil Service Reform
 Tests to prove competency to hold governmental jobs
 A merit system not just “who you know”
 Growing
gaps between the rich and the
poor
 Working class immigrants wages couldn’t
keep ahead of the cost of living
 Tensions between races
• Jim Crow laws segregated public facilities
• Voting rights were denied by literacy tests,
“grandfather clauses” and poll taxes
 Gender Inequality
• Women made up 18% of the workforce in 1900
• Opportunities were limited
• Only half of American colleges accepted women
• No voting at the national level
 Child
Labor
 Lack of education
 Alcohol
• Temperance Movement
 Morals
and Values of children
Who were the progressives and
how did they address the
problems they saw?
 Progressives
were
reformers committed to
improving conditions in
American life
 Jane
Addams-social worker
and founder of the Hull
House, Chicago’s 1st
settlement house.
 Industrialization, Urbanization, and
Immigration contributed to great
changes in America create both
opportunities and problems.
 The Progressives wanted to…
• Promote Social Welfare
• Protect the Environment
• Make Government more Efficient and
Democratic
 Progressive
Activists- people who took
political action to achieve reforms
 Roots of Progressivism
• Populism- rural movement to improve conditions of
famers
• Social Gospel- religious movement believing society
must take responsibility for the less fortunate
• Progressivism- improve conditions of industrial
workers
Progressives vs social Darwinism
Progressives opposed Darwin's theory of Natural
selection. They felt domination of rich and
powerful was a distortion of democracy.
 Progressives wanted to….
• Improve Living Conditions in Cities
 Progressives fought for court yards and garbage
collection. Central Park was built because of
progressives.
• Keep Children in School and out of Factories
 1890-4%of teenagers went to school
 National Child Labor Committee-Florence Kelly
1904, convinced 39 states by 1904 to prohibit child
labor
 1930-50% of teenagers were attending school
 Separate court system for Juveniles
• Improve Conditions in the Workplace
 Workers Compensation Laws- receive pay when
injured
 Fighting
for Honest Effective Local
Government
• People had to buy their jobs (teachers had to
pay $120 of the first $141 they earned in
Philadelphia)
• Toledo, Ohio Mayor Samuel Jones-reformed
the police department, set a minimum wage,
and improved city services
• Cleveland, Ohio Mayor Tom Johnson
reduced streetcar fares, set up public baths,
and increased the number of parks and
playgrounds
 Reforming State Government
• Goal- return the power to the people
• SECERT BALLOT- citizens voted in a private booth
• Direct Primary- elections held rather than party
•
•
•
•
leaders picking candidates
Recall- process which voters can remove an elected
official before his or her term expires through a
petition
Initiative- citizens can propose and pass a law
without the state legislature
Referendum- a law passed by state legislature then
placed on the ballot for approval or rejection by the
voters.
Electing like-minded officials

Women Fight for the Right to Vote
• “social housekeepers”- if women can clean
•
•
•
•
up their homes then they can clean up
society
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire a
politician answered the question, why
women factory workers had no fire
protection, by stating “that’s easy, they ain’t
got no votes!”
Women had been fighting for the right to
vote since 1848 at the Seneca Falls
Convention
National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA)- led by Elizabeth
Cady Stanton to organize the suffrage
movement at state and national levels
1876 Wyoming granted women the right to
vote followed by many other Western states.
By 1915 15 states granted women the right
to vote. Many southern states denied

African Americans Struggle for
Equality
• African Americans faced a tougher
•
•
•
•
battle than women…
4/5 of African Americans lived in the
South and were disenfranchised due to
literacy tests, poll taxes, and the
grandfather clause denying them the
right to vote
Booker T Washington- founded
Tuskegee Institute- vocational college
for African Americans in Alabama
W.E.B. Du Bois- founded National
Association for the Advancement of
Colored People- fought the battle of
racism and segregation through the
courts focusing on outlawing Lynching.
Between 1894-1898- 550 African
How well did Presidents
Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson
promote progressive goals in
National Policies?
 Theodore
Roosevelt
• Teddy became president in 1901
after the assassination of McKinley
• Youngest president at age 42, he was
short and stout, impulsive, but knew
how to get things done
• SQUARE DEAL- Roosevelt’s program
of reform focusing on regulating big
business and protecting workers and
consumers
 William Howard Taft
• Succeeded Roosevelt in 1908 with his support
• Taft was quite, reserved, and cautious- the exact
opposite of Roosevelt
• Taft supported low tariffs in his party platform but in
1909 after taking office he signed the PayneAldrich Bill, which raised tariffs and tarnished his
record as a progressive
 Woodrow Wilson
• Election of 1912-Roosevelt decided to run
again because Taft betrayed the progressive
ideals, but when the Republicans chose Taft to
represent them Roosevelt formed a third
political party, Progressive Party aka “Bull
Moose Party”
• Woodrow Wilson was running for the
Democrats and Eugene V. Debs as a
Socialists.
• Wilson received 42% of the votes, Debs 7%
and the Republican party split Taft-23% and
Roosevelt 27.5%, giving Wilson the
presidency.
• Wilson promotes NEW FREEDOM- a reform
program set in place to eliminate trusts and
reduce corruption in the federal government
 BUSTING TRUSTS
• Roosevelt passed the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act- could not merge
and form a trust or monopoly and
became known as a “trustbuster”
by breaking up J.P. Morgan’s
Northern Securities Company and
limiting the power of the Railroads
• Taft brought 90 lawsuits against
trusts during his presidency being
very harsh
• Wilson strengthened the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act by passing the
Clayton Anti-Trust Act in 1914-
 Protecting
Workers
Consumers and
• Roosevelt passed the Meat
Inspections Act which required the
department of Agriculture to
thoroughly inspect meat and The Pure
Food and Drug Act established the
FDA (food and drug administration)
to test and approve drugs before they
went to the market
• Roosevelt helped coal miners when
he pressured the miners and owners
to submit to arbitration- a legal
process in which neutral outside party
helps resolve a dispute. This process
 Protecting
Consumers and
Workers
• Taft and Wilson
expanded worker
protections by
establishing the
Children’s Bureau to
investigate child labor.
Wilson passed the
Keating Owen Child
Labor Act in 1916
which prohibited
companies from hiring
children under the age
 Protecting the Environment
• Preservation- the protecting of
wilderness lands from all forms of
development
• Conservation- the limited use of
resources
• Roosevelt backed the creation of the
U.S. Forest Service- which protected
forest and other natural areas from
excessive development. Roosevelt
set aside 150 million acres of
national forest
• Taft added 2.7 million acres to the
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWrklFuYnb0
National Wildlife Refuge
System
 Reforming the Banking System
• Taft urged Congress to reform the banking system but
no one could agree on the proper solution
• Wilson passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913- this
divided the country into 12 regions and create the
Federal Reserve System- a central bank of the United
States. “The Fed” would offer a safety net to private
banks buy lending them money and would set the
monetary policy to regulate the amount of money in
circulation by interest rates.
 Reforming
Taxes and Tariffs
• Big business’s favored high tariffs-taxes on
imported goods, but progressives felt this was
unfair to consumers
• Taft passed the 16th Amendment- Income tax
amendment, a graduated income tax which
placed a higher burden on those who had more
money.
• Wilson signed the Underwood Tariff Act in 1913
which reduced tariffs and created the graduated
income tax
 AMENDMENTS
• 17th Amendment- direct
election of senators, gave the
people more power
• 18th Amendment- prohibition
of “the manufacture, sale or
transportation of intoxicating
liquors”
 Women’s Temperance Christian
Movement-argued drinking of
alcohol made men unable to
support their wives and children.
“The Saloon Must Go”
• 19th Amendment- “the right of
citizens of the United states to