History 166A, Winter 2004
Professor Mary Furner
(furner@history.ucsb.edu)
TR 11:00-12:15, HSSB 1173
Office HSSB 3255, TR 1:30-3:00
The United States in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1932
www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/furner (then click on links)
By the start of the twentieth century, many Americans had lost faith in a laissez faire
system that conspicuously failed both to prevent ruinous depressions and to provide a
decent living for vast numbers of hard working people. They were impressed by the
huge resources and productive capacity of the American economy and by the phenomenal
inventiveness of its people. Yet they believed as well that “the promise of American life”
should encompass more than material things. People caught up in movements such as the
Social Gospel, the New Liberalism, Marxian and Christian socialism, feminism, and
pragmatism questioned individualist doctrines and distributive politics. They sought a
new kind of democracy built on social unity and an expanded conception of citizenship
and social rights. In the first three decades of the 20th century, reformers from all classes
and ethnic groups attempted to renew the cities, build government capacity for controlling
corporations, alleviate poverty, and unite the nation around common goals. Exchanging
ideas with their counterparts in other industrializing nations, these reformers invented
institutions for expressing a collective purpose. They studied evils, debated solutions,
organized, and crusaded for what they understood as “the public good.”
In time, these men and women took to calling themselves “progressives.” Like political
labels today, this one was imprecise and fluid in meaning. Progressives themselves and
historians subsequently have disagreed about who progressives were and what they stood
for. (Regrettably, some so-called “progressives” were eugenicists who sought
improvement in racist terms, through disfranchisement of ethnic minorities and
involuntary sterilization of those they considered “defective.) Even so, the term
“progressive” has endured, and in recent years come back into active use, adopted now by
“middle way” advocates and shapers of community-based democratic movements who
hope to distinguish themselves from “big-government liberals” who have borne the brunt
of conservative attacks on the welfare state since the 1980s. Today’s progressives see a
return of many of the problems reformers crusaded against in the early twentieth
century—problems of poverty, bad housing or homelessness, low wages, sweated labor,
and great and growing inequality. Mitigated to a significant extent between the 1930s
and the 1970s, these social problems have returned since the 1980s along with domestic
deindustrialization, the rise of the low-wage service economy, and government policies
designed to implement a “return to the market.” Once more, along with concerns about
poverty and inequality, women’s roles, workers’ rights, immigration, and new doctrines
justifying projection of U. S. power abroad have become controversial.
Thus we can learn something useful for today by studying society, economy, politics, and
ideology during the long Progressive Era and the 1920s. In this course we will try to
understand the challenges faced by Americans between the 1890s and the early 1930s; we
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will compare and contrast their experiences and reform efforts with those underway
today.
Required Reading:
Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms or Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Both if you can!)
Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914 (a basic political narrative)
Course Reader available from Associated Students
Required Papers:
Progressives believed in the power of public opinion to transform and uplift society.
Seeking the causes of social and economic evils, they created powerful new social roles
devoted to investigating problems and reporting the results to an interested public. Their
pioneering work in social investigation became the hallmark of an age of optimism
sharply in contrast with today’s cynical outlook toward what can be done by collective
efforts. Progressives addressed public opinion through diverse forms and medial.
Muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell and Henry Demarest Lloyd, investigative journalists such
as Lincoln Stephens and Ida Wells-Barnett, classic photo-journalists such as Lewis Hine
and Jacob Riis, social investigators such as W. E. B. DuBois and Margaret Byington,
settlement house workers such as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams, realist writers such
as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, and crusading social scientists such as John
Commons, Crystal Eastman, John Andrews, and John Fitch recorded, analyzed, and
exposed—hoping to prod public officials into action. “People of the word,” they often
join forces with social movements of disfranchised groups. These organizing efforts
created new “publics” capable of influencing policy. They expanded the political agenda
to include not only the perennial trust question and labor issues, but also child labor,
women’s rights, and family welfare—subjects previously seen as “private,” and off limits
from government action.
For your main course paper, I want you to take on the role of a crusading journalist or
social investigator. Choose a major social, economic, or political problem of the
period, and prepare a detailed investigative report on it for a newspaper or political
journal prominent in that day. Your story must reach the heart by dramatizing the
issue, showing how conditions hurt real people or the environment. But it must also aim
at the head; it must be fact-filled, accurate, deeply grounded historically, informative, and
critical. As a social investigator, you must show clearly what the issue is, what its
causes are, why the public must know about it, and what activists think should be
done. Give appropriate facts, numbers, pictures, and anecdotes. Lay out the all sides of
the argument, and identify who takes each position. As a news reporter, you should not
take a personal position, but strive for a report that forces your readers to think.
There are hundreds of possible subjects. A few examples would be child labor or industrial
accidents in a specific industry, lynching, pollution of rivers or air, prostitution, tenement
house conditions in a specific city (not all cities had tenements), specific violations of
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women’s rights or access to professions, conditions on Indian reservations, diseases among
black populations of the South, corruption of city and state governments, political campaign
practices, the “tramp evil” (i. e., homelessness), or unemployment. Don’t be limited by
these examples.
You may set your paper up in either of two characteristic forms for this period: a blazing
newspaper or magazine article under a dramatic headline, or a more sedate and
dispassionate, fact-filled government or foundation report, less flashy, but perhaps more
lasting in its influence. Do some looking in the library in the journals, papers, and agency
reports of the day to see how they were done, and set the story up as realistically as possible.
Your readers need to know how credible you are, so you must show your sources. You may
use assigned course readings for context, but you must refer to at least two major primary
sources and one additional secondary source as well. If you use material from the web,
you must cite the source completely, including who put it up, when, and the complete web
address. No paper may come entirely from the web. Brevity enhances effect; thus papers
may not exceed 6 pages in length. They must be typed, double-spaced, with adequate
margins. Use standard form for footnotes or endnotes and bibliography. You should not
clutter your story. So do not use text notes (meaning sources in parentheses right in the
text). Turn in an abstract including a clear statement of your subject and the sources you
will use on January 29. Papers are due March 9. (No late papers accepted unless you
have contacted me in advance with a good reason for an extension.) Let me know if you
would like to do an oral presentation of your findings for a small group or the whole
class.
Grades: midterm exam (1/3); papers, reports or presentations, and class discussion (1/3);
final exam (1/3). In addition to the investigative report, I’ll ask from time to time for brief
response papers on the readings. There will be lots of chances for extra credit: debates,
panel discussions, oral reports on the readings, presentations from your course paper.
Readings: (Do the assigned reading prior to class so you are prepared to ask questions
and to participate in discussion.) Note that three of the five major texts for the class are
novels. Through choosing them, I intend to highlight for you the revolution in fiction
writing underway in this period that transformed the novel from a largely sentimental
form that avoided “unpleasant” subjects to a potent vehicle for exposing the gritty side of
life aimed at reshaping not only society but selves. Novelists in the realist and naturalist
traditions exposed the tough realities of life in filthy tenements, dangerous factories, and
bleak farms. They also searched within the psyche, drawing upon the new psychology to
portray people driven by ambition, cowardice, lust, and a will to dominate others. Novels
became subjects for discussion and thus they entered the public sphere, dramatizing—in
ways that fact-filled reports could never do—the tensions and injustices of the emerging
corporate order, and also the quiet heroism evoked by modern life. The three period
novels you will read are classics of American fiction. They can be treated as historical
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sources, which is how we will use them. Read them respectfully. Let them become a part
of who you are. There are in the bookstore, or you can obtain copies easily on line.
There is no conventional “textbook.” I have selected a variety of readings on specific
subjects instead, along with the brief Gould book to provide a basis political narrative. I
will put a U. S. survey course text (Roark, et al., The American Promise) on reserve that
you can use if you feel you need a more basic “story line.”
Syllabus:
Section 1: Making Modern America
Think about: How was capitalism transformed in the Industrial Era?
How did the corporate reorganization affect values and political beliefs?
January 6
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Introduction: Triangle Fire: Symbol for an Age
American Capitalism and the Crisis of Laissez Faire
Von Drehle, Triangle, Chs. 1-3
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 1-7
January 13
Workers and Managers: The Transformation of Work and Control
Marchand, “AT&T: Vision of a Loved Monopoly,” 179-205
Barrett, Work & Community, 13-35, 54-58, 62-63, 65-73, 90-97, 108-114
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 8-14
January 15
Shopgirls and Ad-Biz: The Consumer Economy in the Land of Desire
Benson, “Shopgirl to Saleswoman,” Counter Cultures, pp. 124-67
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 15-21
January 20
Living On the Edge: Urban Poverty, Tenement Housing, and the Sources of
Progressive Reform
Riis, “The Sweaters of Jewtown,” How the Other Half Lives, pp. 88-100
Von Drehle, Triangle, Chs. 4-7
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 22-28
Section 2: Protest Rising: The Meaning of Citizenship and the Role of the State
Think about: How did Progressives remake gender, class, and race?
January 22
Progressivism and the Expansion of the Public Sphere
Croly, Promise of American Life, pp. 22-25
Ryan, Living Wage, pp. 67-74
Preamble to the IWW Constitution, 1 p.
National Women’s Party Program, Liberator (April 1921), 1 p.
Diner, “Progressive Discourse,” A Very Different Age, pp. 200-232
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 29-35
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Struggling for Racial Equality
Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address, September 1895
W.E.B. DuBois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”
Giddings, “Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and the Crusade Against
Lynching,” Women’s Bodies, Women’s Rights, pp. w49-260
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 36-41
January 29
Women’s Work, Feminism, and the Changing Women’s Sphere
Byington, Homestead: Households of a Mill Town, pp. 145-57
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Chs. 42-48
February 3
Sister Carrie as a Metaphor for Modernity
Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Reports and Discussion
Review for midterm exam
February 5
Midterm Exam
Section 3: Political Solutions
Think about: Was progressivism a “democratic moment,” or a victory for
corporate power? Compare Roosevelt, Wilson, and Hoover on industrial
policy.
*Note: I divided up the novels to make them manageable for those who choose to read both
Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If you decide you can read only Fitzgerald, you should obviously
start on it right away in order to lighten the load toward the end of the course. Again, I urge
you to read both of these great classics. Novel reading goes faster than reading historical texts
because you read in a different way. Dip into both and maybe you’ll get hooked!
February 10
Taming the Tiger: Roosevelt, the Public Interest, and the Trusts
Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” The New Nationalism
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chs. 1-12
February 12
Leaving the Roar: Woodrow Wilson and Modern U. S. Liberalism
Wilson, “Benevolence or Justice,” The New Freedom
Cooper, “The New Freedom,” Pivotal Decades, pp. 190-219
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chs. 13-15
February 17
Mobilization of the Excluded: Suffragists, Socialists, Wobblies, and People of
Color for Equal Citizenship
Von Drehle, Triangle, Chs. 8-9, Epilogue
February 19
War Statism, Anti-Radicalism, and the Loss of American Innocence
From Fink, ed., America and the Great War
Wilson’s War Message
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LaFollette dissent
Creel on the Selling of the War, 1920
The Espionage Act
Vigilante Attack on Wobblies
Debs’ Canton, Ohio Speech
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chs. 16-28
February 24
Making the Old World Over: Treaty Making and the Tragedy of Versailles
Wilson, “Fourteen Points”
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chs. 29-41
February 26
The Great Migration, Racism, and Black Culture in the 1920s
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Reports and Discussion
Grossman, “Bound for the Promised Land,” Land of Hope: Chicago, Black
Southerners, and the Great Migration, pp. 98-119
Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation (1926)
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Preface, Chs. 1-4
March 2
Resisting Modernity: Prohibition, Americanization, and Fundamentalism
Jeansonne, “Age of Fear,” Transformation and Reaction, Ch. 3, pp. 33-53
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chs. 5-9
March 4
Flappers and Floosies, Dilettantes and Climbers: Social Class in the Twenties
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, Reports and Discussion
March 9
Hoover’s Corporatist Vision v. The Progressive Party of 1924
Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an
‘Associative State,’ 1921-1928,” JAH 61 (1974):116-40
Berle & Means, The Modern Corporation & Private Property, pp. 270-78
Progressive Party Platform of 1924
March 11
The Great Depression and the Failure of Voluntarism
Nash, “American Society in Crisis,” The Crucial Era, 1929-45, pp. 10-25
FDR Inaugural Address, 1932
March 18
Final Exam
12:00-3:00