Progressives
American History
Unit II – Becoming a World Power
Chapter 6 Section 1- Progressivism
Reading Quiz
1. What was the Seventeenth Amendment?
2. What was the N.A.A.C.P.?
3. Who were the ‘muckrakers’?
4. What reform did the progressives want in the
workplace?
5. What was initiative?
6. What was referendum?
7. What was recall?
8. What was the IWW?
Populist Party
• Farmers as a group did not share in the general
prosperity of the latter nineteenth century, and
believed that they had been marked out as special
victims of the new industrial system
• Agricultural areas in the West and South had been
hit by economic depression years before industrial
areas. In the 1880s, as drought hit the wheatgrowing areas of the Great Plains and prices for
Southern cotton sunk to new lows, many tenant
farmers fell into deep debt. This exacerbated longheld grievances against railroads, lenders, grainelevator owners, and others with whom farmers did
business.
• Party of the People- farmers and reformers- 1892
• Governors, Senators and even a presidential
candidate
Populist Party-
The goal was not just to relieve
economic pressure on agriculture, but also to restore democracy by eliminating
what the Populists saw as the corrupt and corrupting alliance between business
and government.
• Platform: Omaha 1892
– Support Labor Unions
– Wealth belongs to those who
make it
– Government ownership of
Railroads, telephone and
telegraph.
– Free Silver
– Graduated Income Tax
– Secret Ballot
– Shorten work hours.
– Initiative and Referendum
Mary Lease
– Direct election of Senators
– Restriction of Immigration
Who were the reformers?
What did they want?
Mostly middle class people (Roosevelt called
them Muckrakers) concerned with social
issues of the times. Issues such as;
immigrants - oldcomers and newcomers
city life- poor and needy, and prohibition
crime and corruption
strikes, Workman’s compensation, minimum wage
Political bosses
city/state governments- direct democracy, tax laws
Giant business corporations
Women’s Suffrage
Child Labor
Muckrakers
Name applied to American journalists, novelists, and
critics who in the first decade of the 20th cent. attempted to
expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics.
The term derives from the word muckrake used by
President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech in 1906, in which he
agreed with many of the charges of the muckrakers but
asserted that some of their methods were sensational and
irresponsible.
The muckraking movement lost support in about 1912.
Historians agree that if it had not been for the revelations of
the muckrakers the Progressive movement would not have
received the popular support needed for effective reform.
Muckrakers
Ida Tarbell
Lincoln Steffen
•
Miss Ida Tarbell had been at work for years on her
history of the Standard Oil Company, and it began
to run in McClure's in November 1902.
•
Lincoln Steffen's first novel on municipal
corruption, "Tweed Days in St. Louis" appeared in
McClure's Oct 1902.
•
Henry Demerest Lloyd's Wealth Against
Commonwealth, published in 1894, attacked the
Standard Oil Company.
•
How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by
Jacob Riis, exposed life in New York's slums.
•
John Spargo, an Englishman, published The Bitter
Cry of the Children, an account of young kids at
work in sweatshops.
•
Perhaps the most famous Muckraking novel, The
Jungle by Upton Sinclair, exposed the horrors of
the Chicago meat-packing plants and the
immigrants who were worked to death in them.
Upton Sinclair
Jacob Riis
Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair
•
In 1877 Riis became a police
reporter for the New York
Tribune. In the 1880s his work
gravitated towards reform and
he worked with other New York
reformers then crusading for
better living conditions for the
thousands of immigrants flocking
to New York in search of new
opportunities. He constantly
argued that the "poor were the
victims rather than the makers of
their fate".
As a writer Sinclair gained fame
in 1906 with the novel The
Jungle, a report on the dirty
conditions in the Chicago
meatpacking industry. The book
won Sinclair fame and fortune,
and led to the implementation of
the Pure Food and Drug Act in
1906.
Progressive Movement
•
The Progressive Movement was an effort to cure many of the ills of American society that had
developed during the great spurt of industrial growth in the last quarter of the 19th century. The
frontier had been tamed, great cities and businesses developed and an overseas empire
established, but not all citizens shared in the new wealth, prestige and optimism.
•
Progressivism was rooted in the belief that man was capable of improving the lot of all within
society. Progressivism also was full of strong political overtones and rejected the church as the
driving force for change. Supporters of the movement were found in both major political parties,
Democrat and Republican.
• Specific goals included:
–
Remove corruption and undue influence from government
–
Conservation
–
Include more people more directly in the political process.
–
Government must play a role to solve social problems and establish fairness in economic
matters.
–
Race- Blacks and Native Americans
–
Child Labor, Workers- young and old, workers compensation,
–
Political Reform- Direct Election, political reform,
–
Anti- monopoly reform.
Progressive Movement
• The efforts and successes:
•
–
Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890).
–
A minority supported socialism with government ownership of the means of
production.
–
conservation movement
–
railroad legislation
–
food and drug laws.
–
elect senators
–
prohibition
–
suffrage to women.
–
Workers compensation, civil service, and minimum wage
–
efforts to place limitations on child labor were routinely thwarted by the courts.
–
The needs of blacks and Native Americans were poorly served by the
Progressives.
–
Secret Ballot, Direct Election, direct primary and initiative, referendum and
recall
Robert LaFollette- Leader in reform measures and the candidate of
the reform element of his party for the nomination for governor in
1896 and 1898: in 1900 unanimously nominated for Governor of
Wisconsin and elected by the largest plurality ever given a candidate
for that office.
Reforming Society
• Housing Reform
• Civil Rights- N.A.A.C.P.; A.D.L.
(Anti-Defamation League)
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
1909
On February 12th The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored
People was founded by a multiracial group
of activists, who answered "The Call." They
initially called themselves the National
Negro Committee. Organized to end
discrimination and to prevent violence
against blacks, especially lynching.
FOUNDERS:
Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois,
Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington,
Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English
Walling and led the "Call" to renew the
struggle for civil and political liberty.
N.A.A.C.P.
• The NAACP started its
own magazine, Crisis in
November, 1910
• NAACP campaigned,
especially in the Supreme
Court against lynching,
segregation and racial
discrimination in housing,
education, employment,
voting and transportation.
• NAACP also fought for
Women’s Suffrage.
Reforming the Workplace
• Florence Kelly and the 1904- National Child Labor Committee.
• Limiting Women’s workdays
• No minimum wage.
• Courts and Labor Laws
– Lochner v. New York- sided with business owners and denied.
– Muller v. Oregon- set a 10 hour workday for women.
• Triangle Shirtwaist fire- death of over 140 men and women. Helped bring
about tougher fire-safety laws.
• Unions
– ILGWU- International ladies Garment workers Union.
– IWW- Industrial Workers of the World
Child Labor
 The rise of child labor in the
United States began in the late
seventeen and early eighteen
hundreds. Industrialization was
a strong force in increasing the
number of working children.
Sadie Pfeifer, 48
inches high. Has
worked half a
year.
 By nineteen hundred more than
two million U.S. children
worked. Children worked in
factories, mines, fields and in the
streets. They picked cotton,
shined shoes, sold newspapers,
canned fish, made clothes and
wove fabric. Children were
forced into this situation in order
to help support their families.
Child Labor
 Working conditions were often
horrendous. Children would
work twelve hours a day, six
days a week throughout the
year.
 The hours were long, the pay
was low and the children were
exhausted and hungry.
Breaker Boys" were used in the anthracite coal
mines to separate slate rock from the coal after it
had been brought out of the shaft. They often
worked 14 to 16 hours a day.
 Factory children were kept
inside all day long, children who
worked the fields spent long, hot
days in the sun or went barefoot
in mud and rain.
 These young workers could not
attend school and rarely knew
how to read or write
Child Labor
 Children in the United States
continued to work under deplorable
conditions until well into the midtwentieth century.
 In the early nineteen hundreds,
reformers began working to raise
awareness about the dangers of child
labor and tried to establish laws
regulating the practice.
 In 1904, the National Child Labor
Committee was formed. Throughout
the nineteen hundreds, Congress and
the Supreme Court were at odds
over child labor regulation.
 1938- the Fair Labor Standards Act
was passed and children were freed
from the bondage of dangerous work
Lewis Hines
In 1908 the National Child
Labor Committee employed Lewis
Hines as their staff investigator and
photographer. Hines traveled the
country taking pictures of children
working in factories. Hines also
lectured on the subject and once told
one audience: "Perhaps you are
weary of child labor pictures. Well, so
are the rest of us, but we propose to
make you and the whole country so
sick and tired of the whole business
that when the time for action comes,
child labor pictures will be records of
the past."
Congress Attempts to Control
Child Labor
In 1916 Congress made its first effort to control child labor by passing
the Keating-Owen Act. The legislation forbade the transportation
among states of products of factories, shops or canneries employing
children under 14 years of age, of mines employing children under
16 years of age, and the products of any of these employing
children under 16 who worked at night or more than eight hours a
day. In 1918 the Supreme Court ruled that the Keating-Owen Act
was unconstitutional.
After the Supreme Court ruled that the Keating-Owen Act was
unconstitutional, Congress passed a Second Child Labor Law. This
levied a tax of ten per cent on the net profits of factories employing
children under the age of 14, and of mines and quarries employing
children under the age of 16. This legislation was declared
unconstitutional as a result of the Drexel Furniture Company case
in 1922.
Fair Labor Standards Act
June, 1938, that Congress passed the Fair
Labor Standards Act.
The main objective of the act was to
eliminate "labor conditions detrimental to
the maintenance of the minimum
standards of living necessary for health,
efficiency and well-being of workers". This
included the prohibition of child labor in
all industries engaged in producing goods
in inter-state commerce. It set the
minimum age at 14 for employment
outside of school hours in nonmanufacturing jobs, at 16 for employment
during school hours, and 18 for hazardous
occupations.
Reforming Government
• City Government reforms
– New rules for police, releasing debtors from prison and
a fairer tax system.
– 5 member commission system
– Council-manager model
• State government reforms
• Election reforms
– Seventeenth Amendment
– Initiative, referendum and recall.
City Government
Commission Plan
 Replaced the mayor and council with a
small board of commissioners, each elected
at large and each responsible for a single
area of municipal administration.
Under the new plan voters could easily
identify and punish those responsible for
shortcomings in city services.
City Government
City Manager scheme
Under this plan an elected city council determined
basic policy and appointed a professional,
nonpartisan city manager who was in charge of the
day-to-day operation of the municipality. Worked
well in small cities.
Critics of corruption urged adoption of nonpartisan
elections, new methods of municipal accounting, a
civil service system for city employees, and state
constitutional amendments to halt state legislative
interference in municipal affairs.
Direct Democracy
 Secret Ballot
 Direct Primary- People select the candidates
 INITIATIVE: The people may initiate(propose) by 58% petition of voters a bill to a legislature.
 REFERENDUM: The people may use referendum
(popular ballot) to enact, approve or reject acts of the
legislature.
 RECALL: All elected public officials in the State, except
judicial officers, are subject to recall (by petition) by the
voters of the State and forced to stand for re-election at
any time.
 17th Amendment: Direct Election of Senators. The
Senate of the United States shall be composed of two
Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof,
for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote