Progressive Era
1895 - 1920
Study Guide Identifications
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Progressives
Thorstein Veblen
Herbert Croly
Lester Frank Ward
Ida Tarbell
Ida B Wells
Jane Adams
S.S. McClure
Muckrakers
Frank Norris
David Graham Phillips
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Jacob Riis
Women’s Suffrage
Emma Goldman
Margaret Sanger
American Birth Control
Movement
Black progressivism
Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. Dubois
Americanization
Eugenics
Child labor Laws
Study Guide Questions
• How did intellectuals, novelists, & journalists help to
lay the ground work for the progressive movement?
• What problems of the new urban-industrial order
particularly disturbed progressives and how did they
address these problems?
• How did progressive reform affect ordinary Americans,
including workers, women, immigrants, city dwellers
and African Americans?
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The “Progressives’
• Various Movements that challenged traditional
relationships & attitudes
• Unified
– Addressed corruption of business and government
– Addresses social ills that were a consequence of
disparity of wealth and corruption of industrial order
– Government should act as the organized agent of
public responsibility to address social & economic
problems
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Origins of Progressivism
• Crisis of new Urban-Industrial order
– Severe depression of 1890’s
– Labor violence & industrial armies
– Political challenges of populism
– Ineffective government
– Questioning of the validity of social Darwinism
& Laissez-faire policies of government
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Poor neighborhood, Philadelphia, 1915
Poor neighborhood,
Philadelphia, 1915
Scenes like this in the immigrant wards of America's great
cities stirred middle-class reformers to action at the turn
of
the century.
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Opponents of Reform
• Protestant Fundamentalists
• Rejected idea of original sin as the cause of
human suffering
• Stressed personal salvation & Endorsed social and
political conservatism
• Evangelist Billy Sunday scorned all reforms but
prohibition, denounced labor unions, women’s
rights, business regulation as violating traditional
values
• Business Interests
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Intellectual
Movements
• Thorstein Veblen
• economist
• Theory of the Leisure
Class (1899)
• Critique of the wealthy
• “conspicuous consumption”
• Claims to superiority
• Workers better suited to
lead society
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Intellectual Movements
• Herbert Croly
• The Promise of American life
(1909)
– Activist Government that
promoted the welfare of its
citizens
• Alexander Hamilton (1790) called
for an activist government that
supported interests of the
business class
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Intellectual Movements
• Sociologist, Lester Frank Ward
– Dynamic Sociology (1883)
• Criticized social Darwinism
• Argued the conservative social scientists
responsible for Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer
& William Graham Sumner wrongly applied
evolutionary theory to human affairs
• Confused organic evolution with social evolution
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Intellectual Movements
• History of the Standard Oil Company
(1904)
– Ida Tarbell
– Conditions and exploitations of industrial
America
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Intellectual Movements
• Philosopher, John Dewey
– Criticized rigid, formal public education
– Advocated developing what he called
“creative intelligence” useful for improving
society
– Schools “embryonic societies” that
encouraged a wide range of experiences and
participation
– Encourage habit of systematic inquiry
– Education was a fundamental method of
social progress and reform
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Settlement House Movement
• Settlement workers found they could not
transform their neighborhoods without
addressing
– Chronic poverty
– Overcrowded tenement houses
– Child labor
– Industrial accidents
– Public health
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Intellectual/Social Movement
• Jane Adams
• Democracy and Social Ethics (1902)
• Twenty years at Hull house (1910)
– Rejected idea that unrestrained competition
offered the best path to social progress
– In atmosphere of unrestrained competition
individual well-being depends on the well-being of
all
• Hull House
– Chicago social settlement
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–
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Settlement work
• Achievements
– Lillian Wald & allies convinced new York Board of
Health to assign a nurse to every public school
– Lobbied board of education to create the first lunch
programs
– Persuaded municipal milk stations to ensure purity of
milk
– Pioneered tuberculosis treatment & prevention
– Playground construction, street cleaning, tougher
housing inspection, child labor, women suffrage
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New Journalism
• Helped fuel new reform consciousness
– Drew attention to urban poverty, political
corruption, plight of industrial workers,
immoral business practices
• S.S. McClure, 1893 began McClure
Magazine, included detailed accounts of
nations social problems
– Exposure journalism
– Factual reporting and moral exhortation
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The New Middle-Class and
Muckrakers
• All classes participated in reform
• Vanguard = new middle-class
professionals
• Upset by immorality, inefficiency, &
injustice
• Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Frank Norris,
exposed abuses of power in government,
business, & society
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Muckraker's
• Author Frank Norris
• The octopus (1901)
– Corruption of Rail Road and
corporations
– Bribery, intimidation, rate
manipulation
• McClure’s and Collier’s Mass
Magazines
– Articles exposed urban
political corruption7 corporate
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corruption
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Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells
Anti-Lynching Crusader
Responded to sexual
threat justification
Device to eliminate
African Americans who
competed with white
businesses or who became
to wealthy or powerful
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David Graham Phillips
• 1906 in a series for Cosmopolitan called
“The Treason of the Senate”
– Many conservative Senators were no more
than mouthpieces for big business
– President Theodore Roosevelt angered at the
attacks on his friends referred to Phillips and
his colleagues as Muckrakers.
• Those who raked the mud of society and never
looked up
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Jacob A. Riis
• Witnessed the conditions of Tenement
housing life in New York
• Reported conditions
• Photographed
• 2 years toured
– Presenting illustrated lecture
• “The Other Half: How it Lives and Dies in New
York”
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Reforms
• Political – regulation of government and
corporations until the 1890’s
• Social
• Moral
• Labor
• Legal thought
• Educational
• Economic
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Photograph from The White Slave Hell
Prohibition & Purity Crusades
The White Slave Hell
Moral reformers stirred up
emotions over accusations that evil
men were seducing innocent
young women into prostitution--or
white slavery, as it was called.
1910 Anti-vice publication, The
White Slave Hell: or, With Christ at
Midnight in the Slums of Chicago,
the man supposedly has gotten the
woman drunk and is about to lure
her into a life of sin.
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Suffrage parade
1920 19th Amendment
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Birth Control
• Emma Goldman
– New ideals of sexuality and new awareness of birth control
– Sexual freedom = birth control
– There was a need for alternatives to abortion
• Led to organized birth control movement by women so
that sexual experiences could be enjoyed and not feared
– Emma’s lectures
• Condoms, douching & withdrawal
• Most widely practice form of birth control previously – illegal
abortion
• 1900 – 1973 estimated one million women having illegal abortions
per year with 5 – 10,000 dying each year
Abortion procedures
• Simple procedure but requires skill
• Prior to vacuum aspirator
– Curettage/sharp instrument inserted into
uterus to scrape fetus from wall
– If uterus pierced – hemorrhage & death
– Poor women
• Coat hangers, shoe hooks, knitting needles,
poisonous douche solutions
– Sterility, illness, infection, death
Margaret Sanger
• Organized the American Birth Control Movement
– Experiences as a Nurse
– 1915 trained by scientist & sexologist, Havelock Ellis
in methods of medical research for advanced
contraceptive techniques
• Mensinga diaphragm, cut the maternal death rate in half in
the Netherlands
• Spaced pregnancies by two years
• Early diagnosis of gynecological problems – also saved lives
– Re-shaped public opinion on birth control
• Originally a gutter topic
• Recognition that birth control was a major public health issue
with profound economic and political significance
Margaret Sanger leaving court of Special Sessions after arraignment
Margaret Sanger, 1916
Women Rebel, 1916
Women’s Reproductive Rights
“a women’s body belongs to
herself alone, it does not belong
to the United States of America or
any other government on the
face of the earth…women cannot
be on an equal footing with men
until they have full and complete
control over their reproductive
function.”
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Visiting nurse
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Scribner's magazine cover
State Reform:
Allocated more
funds for state
universities
1898 Magazine
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The Masses cover, 1912
1912
•Socialist Publication:
•Denounced Abuses of
Capitalism
•Child labor
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Children
• Child labor shrank with
the passage of laws and
laws for compulsory
education and minimum
age requirements
• Wilson:
• 1916 – Keating-Owen
Act 1919 & 2nd Child
Labor Act
– limiting child labor
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African Americans
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Poor share croppers
Jim Crow laws
Poll taxes
White Terrorism – Mutilation & Murder
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Labor Movements
• American Federation of Labor
– Skilled, white male workers
• Ladies Garment Workers Union (1900) &
Amalgamated Clothing Workers (1914)
– Women, immigrant women
• Industrial Workers of the World (1905) or
the “Wobblies”
– Cross race, ethnicity & gender
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African Americans
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Poor share croppers
Jim Crow laws
Poll taxes
White Terrorism – Mutilation & Murder
Race riots
Coon songs
– Based on gross caricatures of black life were
extremely popular
• White Hatred
– Benjamin Tillman U.S. senator S.C
• Denounced the African American “as a fiend, a wild
beast, seeking whom they may devour”
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Booker T. Washington
Tuskegee Vocational School,
1881
• Advocated assimilation
through temporary
acceptance of
subordination/
segregation
– Called for hard work &
dignity of “common labor”
as paths to acceptance/
success
• Washington did not argue
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W. E. B. Dubois
• Rejecting Booker T
Washington’s gradualist
approach
• WEB Dubois claimed
for African Americans,
“every single right that
belongs to free born
Americans, political,
civil and social and
until we get these
rights we will never
cease to protest.”
•
In “The Souls of Black
Folks” he eloquently called
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Race Riots
• Race riots in Atlanta, Georgia (1906)
• Springfield, Illinois (1908)
• White mobs invaded black neighborhoods burning,
looting and killing
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Black Progressivism
• 1905 – Niagara Movement
– Du Bois & other black activists met in
Niagara Falls, Canada, to make plans to
promote political and economic equality
• 1910- NAACP
– they joined with White reformers including
Jane Adams conference organized the
National Organization for the Advancement
of Colored People in 1910.
• Most important civil rights organization and the
top 8 officers included on African American,
Dubois.
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1901 Roosevelt
• Progressive policies for African Americans
– Appointed African Americans to important federal
offices in South Carolina and Mississippi
– Tried to build a bi racial Republican party
– Denounced lynching
– Ordered the Justice department to act against
peonage.
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Immigrants
• 1901-1920 14.5 million immigrants
entered the United States
• Nativist’s agitated to restrict and
subordinate immigrants
• Immigration Restriction League
(1894)
• Federal Literacy law (1917)
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Racial Theories
• Nativism
• Eugenics
– suggested controls over the population growth of
“inferior people”
– 30 states legalized forced sterilization by 1930
– Pennsylvania first to pass laws in 1905
• By the 1970s 500,000 black women and at least 25,000
native American women sterilized
• Anti-Catholicism
• Anti-Semitic
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Americanization
• Henry Ford and other
employers tried to
erase ethnic and
cultural differences
– English classes
– Americanization
programs
– create good factory
workers and citizens
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Anti-Chinese Laws
1882 Chinese Exclusion
Act – suspended
immigration
1902 Ban of Chinese
Immigration
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Mexican Immigration
Helped to transform
the region, building
highways, irrigation
systems, RR tracks,
and worked in
agriculture.
– Legal
discrimination
– Segregation
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First Nations
• Progressive reformers professed to know what
was “best” for Indians and passed laws
– Guise of programs of assimilation and
movement towards citizenship
• General Allotment Act or Dawes act (1880)
100 million acres of land
The Curtis Act abolished tribal government and
courts
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Socialists parade
Socialists parade
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