Reformers and
Progressives
American History
Unit II – Becoming a World Power
Chapter 6 Section 1- Progressivism
Progressivism
The Main Idea
Progressives focused on three areas of reform: easing the suffering of
the urban poor, improving unfair and dangerous working conditions,
and reforming government at the national, state, and local levels.
Reading Focus
• What issues did Progressives focus on, and what helped energize
their causes?
• How did Progressives try to reform society?
• How did Progressives fight to reform the workplace?
• How did Progressives reform government at the national, state, and
local levels?
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.
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
Progressivism and Its Champions
• Industrialization helped many but also created dangerous working
environments and unhealthy living conditions for the urban poor.
• Progressivism, a wide-ranging reform movement targeting these
problems, began in the late 19th century.
• Journalists called muckrakers and urban photographers exposed
people to the plight of the unfortunate in hopes of sparking reform.
Jacob Riis
• Danish immigrant
who faced New York
poverty
• Exposed the slums
through magazines,
photographs, and a
best-selling book
• His fame helped
spark city reforms.
Ida Tarbell
• Exposed the
corrupt Standard
Oil Company and
its owner, John D.
Rockefeller
• Appealed to
middle class
scared by large
business power
Lincoln Steffens
• Shame of the
Cities (1904)
exposed corrupt
city governments
Frank Norris
• Exposed railroad
monopolies in a
1901 novel
Muckrakers
Ida Tarbell
Lincoln Steffen
Upton Sinclair
Jacob Riis
•
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
•
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
Jacob Riis, exposed life in New York's slums.
immigrants who were worked to death in them.
Reforming Society
• Growing cities couldn’t provide people necessary services
like garbage collection, safe housing, and police and fire
protection.
• Reformers, many of whom were women like activist Lillian
Wald, saw this as an opportunity to expand public health
services.
• Progressives scored an early victory in New York State with
the passage of the Tenement Act of 1901, which forced
landlords to install lighting in public hallways and to provide
at least one toilet for every two families, which helped
outhouses become obsolete in New York slums.
• These simple steps helped impoverished New Yorkers, and
within 15 years the death rate in New York dropped
dramatically.
• Reformers in other states used New York law as a model for
their own proposals.
Fighting for Civil Rights
Progressives fought prejudice in society by forming
various reform groups.
NAACP
• National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People
• Formed in 1909 by a multiracial group
of activists to fight for the rights of
African Americans
• 1913: Protested the official
introduction of segregation in federal
government
• 1915: Protested the D. W. Griffith film
Birth of a Nation because of hostile
African American stereotypes, which
led to the film’s banning in eight
states
ADL
• Anti-Defamation League
• Formed by Sigmund Livingston, a
Jewish man in Chicago, in 1913
• Fought anti-Semitism, or prejudice
against Jews, which was common
in America
• Fought to stop negative
stereotypes of Jews in media
• The publisher of the New York
Times was a member and helped
stop negative references to Jews
Reforming the Workplace
• By the late 19th century, labor unions fought for adult male
workers but didn’t advocate enough for women and children.
• In 1893, Florence Kelley helped push the Illinois legislature to
prohibit child labor and to limit women’s working hours.
• In 1904, Kelley helped organize the National Child Labor
Committee, which wanted state legislatures to ban child labor.
• By 1912, nearly 40 states passed child-labor laws, but states didn’t
strictly enforce the laws and many children still worked.
• Progressives, mounting state campaigns to limit workdays for
women, were successful in states including Oregon and Utah.
• But since most workers were still underpaid and living in poverty,
an alliance of labor unions and progressives fought for a minimum
wage, which Congress didn’t adopt until 1938.
• Businesses fought labor laws in the Supreme Court, which ruled on
several cases in the early 1900s concerning workday length.
Labor Law in the Supreme Court
Lochner v. New York
•
1905: The Court
refused to uphold a
law limiting bakers to
a 10-hour workday.
•
The Court said it
denied workers the
right to make
contracts with their
employers.
•
This was a blow to
progressives, as the
Court sided with
business owners.
Muller v. Oregon
• The Court upheld a
state law
establishing a 10hour workday for
women in laundries
and factories.
• Louis D. Brandeis
was the attorney
for the state of
Oregon and a
future Supreme
Court Justice.
• He argued that
evidence proved
long hours harmed
women’s health.
Bunting v. Oregon
• Brandeis’ case, or
the Brandeis brief,
as his defense was
called, became a
model for similar
cases.
• Using the tactics of
its case for
women, in Bunting
v. Oregon the state
led the Court to
uphold a law that
extended the
protection of a 10hour workday to
men working in
mills and factories.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company
Fire
In 1911, a gruesome disaster in New York inspired progressives to
fight for safety in the workplace.
• About 500 women worked for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, a
high-rise building sweatshop that made women’s blouses.
• Just as they were ending their six-day workweek, a small fire broke
out, which quickly spread to three floors.
• Escape was nearly impossible, as doors were locked to prevent
theft, the flimsy fire escape broke under pressure, and the fire was
too high for fire truck ladders to reach.
• More than 140 women and men died in the fire, marking a turning
point for labor and reform movements.
• With the efforts of Union organizer Rose Schneiderman and others,
New York State passed the toughest fire-safety laws in the nation,
as well as factory inspection and sanitation laws.
• New York laws became a model for workplace safety nationwide.
The Unions
ILGWU
• In 1900, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union organized
unskilled workers.
• In 1909, the ILGWU called a general strike known as the Uprising of
20,000.
• Strikers won a shorter workweek and higher wages and attracted
thousands of workers to the union.
IWW
• In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World formed to oppose
capitalism, organizing unskilled workers that the American
Federation of Labor ignored.
• Under William “Big Bill” Haywood, the IWW, known as Wobblies,
used traditional tactics like strikes and boycotts but also engaged in
radical tactics like industrial sabotage.
• By 1912, the IWW led 23,000 textile workers to strike in
Massachusetts to protest pay cuts, which ended successfully after
six weeks.
• However, several IWW strikes were failures, and, fearing the IWW’s
revolutionary goals, the government cracked down on the
organization, causing dispute among its leaders and leading to its
decline a few years later.
Reforming Government
City Government
• Reforming government meant winning
control of it:
– Tom Johnson of Cleveland was a
successful reform mayor who set
new rules for police, released
debtors from prison, and
supported a fairer tax system.
• Progressives promoted new government
structures:
– Texas set up a five-member
committee to govern Galveston
after a hurricane, and by 1918,
500 cities adopted this plan.
– The city manager model had a
professional administrator, not a
politician, manage the
government.
State Government
• Progressive governor Robert La
Follette created the Wisconsin Ideas,
which wanted:
– Direct primary elections; limited
campaign spending
– Commissions to regulate
railroads and oversee
transportation, civil service, and
taxation
• Other governors pushed for reform,
but some were corrupt:
– New York’s Charles Evan Hughes
regulated insurance companies.
– Mississippi’s James Vardaman
exploited prejudice to gain
power.
Election Reforms
• Progressives wanted fairer elections and to make politicians more
accountable to voters.
– Proposed a direct primary, or an election in which voters
choose candidates to run in a general election, which most
states adopted.
– Backed the Seventeenth Amendment, which gave voters, not
state legislatures, the power to elect their U.S. senators.
• Some measures Progressives fought for include
Direct primary: voters
select a party’s
candidate for public
office
17th Amendment: voters
elect their senators
directly
secret ballot: people
vote privately without
fear of coercion
initiative: allows citizens
to propose new laws
referendum: allows
citizens to vote on a
proposed or existing law
recall: allows voters to
remove an elected
official from office
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.
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.
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.
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 Hine as their staff
investigator and photographer.
Hine traveled the country taking
pictures of children working in
factories. Hine 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.
Direct Democracy
 Secret Ballot
 Direct Primary- People select the candidates
 INITIATIVE: The people may initiate(propose) by 5-8%
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
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.