The Progressive Era
(Part 1)
Progressivism:
Competing Conceptions
A Liberal movement for social justice
A Conservative attempt at social control
A search for order and efficiency
Challenges to Social Stability
 Control of economic and political life by big
business
 Unrest and discontent among lower classes
 Factory workers
 Immigrants
Progressive Movements:
Shared Characteristics
Agreed on need for large-scale efforts
Belief in the basic goodness of human nature
Moral dogmatism
Progressive Movements:
Shared Characteristics
Agreed on need for large-scale efforts
Belief in the basic goodness of human nature
Moral dogmatism
Women (particularly middle-class women)
Pre-Civil War Reform Movements
Abolitionist movement
Woman’s suffrage movement
Temperance movement
Anti-prostitution movement
Social Justice Movements
Women’s Rights
Black rights
American Woman Suffrage Assoc.
(AWSA)
Moderates
Close ties w/ Republican Party
Worked for passage of 15th Amend
Actively sought male support
Maintained ties with abolitionist networks
Worked at achieving vote at state level
National Woman Suffrage Assoc.
(NWSA)
Radical (Stanton & Anthony)
All female
Broad spectrum of goals
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Voting rights for women
Equal pay
Property law reform
Divorce law reform
Marriage law reform
Black Leaders:
Different Philosophies; Matching Goals
Booker T. Washington
 Accommodation “Cast down your Bucket”
 Pragmatic
 Worked for economic equality
 Successfully attracted white support
 Was consulted by Pres. Roosevelt & Taft
 Was influential in increasing funding for black schools
 Worked behind the scenes to challenge disfranchisement and
segregation
Black Leaders:
Different Philosophies; Matching Goals
W.E.B. Du Bois
Argued that the black community must fight for
 Right to vote
 Civic equality
 Higher education
 Niagara movement (1905)
Persistent manly agitation as way to freedom
Protested:
 Legal segregation
 Restriction of voting rights
 Exclusion from labor unions
 Other civil rights
 Led to founding of NAACP in 1909
Social Control Movements
 Prohibition
 The “Social Evil”
 The Redemption of Leisure
 Standardized Education
Mamie Pinzer, (prostitute) “I don’t propose to get up
at 6:30 to be at work at 8:00 and work in a close,
stuffy room with people I despise, until dark, for $6 or
$7 a week! When I could, just by phoning, spend an
afternoon with some congenial person and in the end
have more than a week’s work could pay me.”
Reformer Frederic Howe (1914) “Commercialized leisure must be controlled by
the community, if it is to become an agency of
civilization rather than the reverse.”
Elwood Cubberly, a leading educational reformer: “Our task
is to break these groups or settlements, to assimilate and
amalgamate these people as part of our American race, and
to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the AngloSaxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and
popular government.”
“The earliest opportunity to catch the little Russian, the little
Italian, the little German, Pole, Syrian, and the rest, and
begin to make good American citizens of them.” (Cubberly
commenting on the founding of the first Kindergartens)
Themes of Progressivism
 Democratizing government
 Efficiency and good government
 Regulation of giant corporations
 Social justice