Topic 17 – www.buschistory.net
Urban America and The Progressive
Era
1901-1921
What is Progressivism?
• A broad movement to ameliorate societal
problems
• Included broad Legislation and local social
efforts
• Includes 4 Constitutional Amendments: 16-19
• Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson
• 1901-1921
Progressivism in General
• Found in all classes, regions, and classes
• Not a unified movement, but a collection of reforms
• Themes:
– Anger towards rise of big business
– Emphasis on the lack of individualism and social Darwinism
– Belief that citizens need to intervene to improve society
• Inspiration:
– Evangelical Protestantism
– Natural and social scientists
• Believed they had a mission to frame laws that restricted
minorities
Promoting Reform
• Muckraking
– Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives
– S. S. McClure’s McClure’s
– Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the
Cities
– Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
• Social Sciences (sociology, psychology,
anthropology, economics)
– Lester Frank Ward (sociologist against
social Darwinism)
– John Dewey (philosopher that critiqued
approach to education)
– John R. Commons (organized a state
industrial commission)
– Richard Ely (wanted government to
intervene and solve social problems)
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (wanted laws
to take changing social conditions into
account)
Social Control
• Prohibition
– WCTU was a large temperance group for women
– Core strength was Protestant, rural Americans
– 18th Amendment (1919)
• Prostitution
• Standardized education
Immigrants, Cities, and Unions
• Immigrants were majority in the industrial labor force
– Ghettos
– Company towns
• Garment industry
– The Uprising of the 20,000
– ILGWU
– Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (1911)
• Ludlow Massacre (1914)
• American Federation of Labor (founded 1886)
• Industrial Workers of the World (1905)
Women and African Americans
• Settlement house movement
– Jane Adams and Hull
House (1889)
– Florence Kelley
• General Federation of
Women’s Clubs
• Anti-prostitution
• Birth control debate
(Margaret Sanger)
• Muller v. Oregon limits
maximum hours for working
women
• 4/5 of 10 million African
Americans lived in the South
• Racial Darwinism
• Booker T. Washington and
Tuskegee Institute
• W. E. B. Du Bois and NAACP
A Disagreement on African American
Reforms
• Booker T. Washington –
(4/5 1856 – 11/14 , 1915
• Washington offered black
acquiescence in
disenfranchisement and
social segregation if
whites would back the
idea of black progress in
education, agriculture,
and economics.
• Blacks would learn trades
that are useful to whites
• W.E.B. DuBois – 2/23,
1868 – 8/27, 1963
• Disagreed with
Washington’s acceptance
of lesser status for Blacks
• Fought for complete
equality in education,
employment, and voting
Teddy Roosevelt 1901- 1909
• Foreign Policy
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Roosevelt Corollary
Big Stick
Panama Canal
Russo-Japanese War
Great White Fleet
– http://www.pbs.org/tpt/sl
avery-by-anothername/themes/progressivis
m/
• Domestic Reforms
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Pure Food and Drug Act
Meat Inspection Act
Elkins Act
Hepburn Act
Trust Buster – Northern
Securities
– Square Deal
– Conservation
Conservation and Preservation
• Newlands Reclamation Act (1902)
– Established Reclamation Bureau to turn arid land into farms
• National Conservation Committee
– Studied minerals, water, forest, and soil resources
• US Forest Service (1905)
– Gifford Pinchot was the head
– Fought with John Muir over a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley
– Later went head to head with Richard Ballinger about coal mines in
Alaska
• National Park Service (1916)
After Roosevelt…
• Roosevelt chose William Howard Taft to be
his successor
• Taft won the 1908 election
• Unhappy with Taft’s presidency, Roosevelt
tried to run for presidency again in 1912
• Four candidates:
– Woodrow Wilson (Democrat
– Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive/Bull
Moose)
– William Taft (Republican)
– Eugene Debs (Socialist)
• Wilson won
William Howard Taft 1909-1913
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Payne-Aldrich Tariff
90 Anti-Trust suits
US Steel
US Chamber of Commerce
Corporate Income Tax
Dollar Diplomacy
Woodrow Wilson 1913-1921
• Sixteenth Amendment – Income Tax -1913
• Seventeenth Amendment - Election of Senators by popular
vote - 1913
• Eighteenth Amendment – Prohibition – 1919
• Twentieth Amendment – Suffrage - 1919
• The Underwood-Simmons Act (1913)
– Reduced taxes on materials such as wool, sugar, agricultural
machinery, shoes, iron and steel
• The Federal Reserve Act (1913)
– Established 12 Federal Reserve Acts
• Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)
– Replaced Sherman’s Antitrust Act
– Exempted labor unions
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) (1914)
– Government controls corporations like the ICC controls
railroads