Social Issues of the
Progressive Era
Background for Broken Blossoms,
The Birth of a Nation, and Within
Our Gates
Progressive Era
• Usually 1900 through U.S. entry into WWI
(1918), although reforms dated from the
late 1880s
• Belief in the power of governments at
local, state, and national levels to effect
political and social change
• For women, “national housekeeping”
movement toward more involvement in
government, including woman suffrage
Progressive Era Issues
• Industrialism, unions, and worker safety (corporate
rapacity)
• Population control and women’s sexuality
• Immigration
• Race
• Rise of organized crime
• Drug abuse and alcoholism
• Prostitution and “white slavery”
• Poverty and the urban underclass
• Urbanization, “overcivilization,” and the destruction of the
wilderness
Reforms and Reformers
• Theodore Roosevelt
– Cleaned up police corruption as Police Commissioner
of New York City
– As President of the U.S. (1901-1908), established the
National Parks system (Gifford Pinchot)
– Supported an investigation in United Mine Workers’
strike in 1892 that led to higher wages
– “Trust-buster” enforcing the Interstate Commerce Act
(1887), the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)
– But--supported annexation of the Philippines and
other imperial ventures
Reforms and Reformers
• Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
(settlement house)
• Margaret Sanger, birth control movement
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Robert M. LaFollette (politician)
• William Jennings Bryan, presidential
candidate
• John Dewey (education)
Muckrakers
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (led to the Pure Food
and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906)
• Ida Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil
Company
• David Graham Phillips, “The Treason of the
Senate”
• Ray Stannard Baker, The Right to Work
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch
Law in All Its Phases
• Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
• McClure’s Magazine
Social Issues in Film
• “White slavery”
– Reginald Wright
Kauffmann, The House of
Bondage
– Traffic in Souls (1913)
– The Inside of the White
Slave Traffic (1913)
– The Red Kimono (1926)
• Birth Control and Abortion
– Where Are My Children?
(1916)
Crime and Addiction
•
•
•
•
•
The Black Hand
Musketeers of Pig Alley
Regeneration (1915)
Human Wreckage (1923)
The Cocaine Traffic / The
Drug Terror (1914)
• John Barleycorn (1914,
based on the book by
Jack London)
Labor and Industrial Exploitation
• Griffith, A Corner in
Wheat (1908)
• The Valley of the Moon
(1914, from the novel by
Jack London)
• Children Who Labor
(1912)
• The Cry of the Children
(1912)
• Fires of Youth (1914)
Ethnicity and Immigration
• The Italian (1915)
• Broken Blossoms
(1919)
• The Immigrant (1917)
• Hungry Hearts (1922;
based on the stories
of Anzia Yezierska)
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)
• Began as an actor and then a director
with American Mutoscope and
Biograph Company (14th St., New
York)
• 1-2 reel pictures, including A Corner in
Wheat (1908)
• Judith of Bethulia (1913), featurelength film
• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Intolerance (1916), four parallel stories
• Broken Blossoms (1919)
• Way Down East (1920)
• Orphans of the Storm (1921)
• The Struggle (1931) (last film)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Based on the novel The Clansman
(1905) by Thomas Dixon
• NAACP protested its release in most
major cities
• Woodrow Wilson is supposed to
have said it was “like writing history
with lightning.”
• The myth of the “Old South”:
– white supremacy; aristocracy of
“blood”
– purity of Southern womanhood as a
symbol of the South’s values and
Southern chivalry toward women as
an emblem of masculinity
– racial hierarchy
• What does the artwork on this poster
emphasize about the film?
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
• W. E. B. Du Bois in The
Souls of Black Folk (1903):
“The the problem of the
Twentieth Century is the
problem of the color-line.”
• Concepts:
–
–
–
–
“Talented tenth”
“the veil”
“double consciousness”
Being a “race man” versus
passing for white
Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951)
• Homesteader, novelist, director
• Conquest, the Story of a Negro
Pioneer (1913) (novel)
• The Homesteader (1917) (novel)
• The Homesteader (1919, film)
• Within Our Gates (1920)
• Body and Soul (1924, starring Paul
Robeson)
• Veiled Aristocrats (1932)—based
on the novel The House Behind
the Cedars by Charles W.
Chesnutt. Micheaux had made a
silent version in 1925 under
Chesnutt’s original title.