unit 6
Emma Goldman
A Lithuanian-born immigrant radical thinker known for her writings and speeches on topics ranging from anarchism, to patriotism, feminism, to birth control, to homosexuality.
Keating-Owen Act, 1916
A law enacted by President Wilson, this outlawed child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce (the Supreme Court would later declare it unconstitutional).
The Progressive Era
A periodization concept used by historians to refer to the era from 1900-1914, roughly spanning the Presidential administrations of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and William McKinley (until the outbreak of World War One), during which the Progressive Movement sought to find political solutions to many of the problems created by the Second Industrial Revolution.
Frederick W. Taylor's "scientific management," or "Taylorism"
A program that sought to streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs and work practices. Through this process, the "one best way" of producing goods could be determined, and workers must obey these detailed instructions from supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw this as a loss of freedom.
Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement
A reform movement espousing the idea that the right to control of one's body included the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. The most prominent activist associated with this movement was one of eleven children, and she challenged laws that had banned contraceptive Information and devices by openly advertising birth control devices in her journal, The Call, and distributing them in her clinic in Brooklyn.
"Bread and Roses"
A slogan of the labor movement that first emerged in the Lawrence, Massachusetts strike of 1912. The slogan was a metaphor declaring that workers sought not only higher wages but also the opportunity to enjoy the finer things in life.
Consumer freedom and mass-consumption
A social and economic ideal that encouraged the purchase of consumer goods as a way to realize freedom. It was during the Progressive Era that the promise of mass consumption became the foundation for this new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism. Large, downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhood, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents made available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation's factories. Leisure activities too took on the the characteristics of mass consumptions: amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds.
Social legislation
A term originating in Germany that referred to governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of working-class life.
The Uprising of 20,000
After 200 of Triangle's workers tried to join the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by firing them. This incident helped to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909. Among the strikers' demands was better safety in clothing factories. By the time the walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more than 300 firms, though the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them.
The Ludlow Massacre, 1914
An unsuccessful labor strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. When the walkout began in 1913, mine owners evicted 11,000 strikers and their families from company housing. They moved into tent colonies, which armed militia units soon surrounded. In 1914, the militia attacked the largest tent city, at Ludlow, and burned it to the ground, killing an estimated twenty to thirty men, women, and children. This was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers during the Progressive Era that placed labor's demand for the right to bargain collectively at the center of the reform agenda.
Maternalist Reform
Arising from the conviction that the state had an obligation to protect women and children, female reformers during the Progressive Era called for government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers and children by enacting policies such as mothers' pensions (state aid to mothers of young children who lacked male support.) and laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers.
The Conservation Movement
As opposed to preservationism, the philosophy of keeping natural areas "wild" and off limits to development, this movement proposes "wise use" of natural resources at a sustainable rate, and it is applied by the National Forest System. Both these movements took off during the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, who relying on advice from Gifford Pinchot, the first Head of the U.S. Forests Service, ordered millions of acres of land to be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks and forests.
State level Progressives
Because of the decentralized nature of American government, state and local governments enacted most of the Progressive Era's reforms measures. In cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of government to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public control over "natural monopolies" like gas and water works, and improve public transportation. They raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other facilities. Important progressive reformers working at the state and local levels included Hazen Pingree, Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones, Hiram Johnson, and Robert LaFollette.
The Woman Suffrage Movement
Beginning in 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention, and completing its mission in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, this movement aimed to give women the right to vote. Mostly a movement of white elites in the 1890s, after 1900 it engaged a broad coalition and became a mass movement for the first time.
The "new immigration"
Between 1870 and 1920, almost 25 million immigrants arrived from overseas. Increasingly, immigrants arrived not from Ireland, England, Germany, or Scandinavia (the traditional sources of immigration), but instead from southern and eastern Europe, especially from Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and many were Catholic or Jewish. They were widely described by native-born Americans as members of distinct "races" whose "lower level of civilization" posed a threat to the dominance of WASPS (white, anglo-saxon, protestants) in the U.S.. Limited economic opportunity and political turmoil were often among the numerous "push factors" causing immigrants to leave their homeland, and expectations of greater economic opportunity (often jobs in new industrial factories or on farms in newly opened western lands) as well as social, cultural, and political freedoms were likewise common among the "pull factors" attracting migrants to the U.S..
Collective bargaining
By using strength in numbers, this is the process whereby group of employees organizes together as a union in order to negotiate with their employer. Unions generally aimed to secure higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions through these negotiations with their employer.
The "working woman"
During the Progressive Era, more and more women were working for wages. For native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enormously. Despite continued wage discrimination and exclusion from many jobs, the working woman--immigrant and native, working class and professional--became a symbol of female emancipation.
Reforms to the democratic process: primary election, initiative, referendum, recall
During the Progressive Era, several states, including California under Hiram Johnson, adopted the initiative and referendum (the former allowed voters to propose legislation, the latter to vote directly on it) and the recall, by which officials could be removed from office by popular vote. The primary election allowed Parties to select candidates for office in a more democratic fashion.
The New Feminism
During the Progressive Era, the word "feminisms" first entered the political vocabulary. It referred to Women's emancipation, or equality, in the social, economic, cultural, and sexual spheres.
Herbert Croly and The New Republic
Editor of one of the most influential progressive journals, TNR, founded in 1914. As editor, his magazine justified a vision of progressive government as a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve "Jeffersonian ends" of democratic self-determination and individual freedom, he insisted, the country need to employ "Hamiltonian means" of government intervention.
16th Amendment (Graduated Income Tax), 1913
Established the federal income tax. A "graduated" tax, or a "progressive" tax, is one in which taxpayers with higher incomes are taxed at higher rates than those with lower incomes.
19th Amendment (woman suffrage), 1920
Extended the right to vote to women in federal or state elections.
The Clayton Act, 1914
Following through on his vision of New Freedom, Wilson enacted this law that exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing injunctions curtailing their right to strike.
The Society of American Indians and Carlos Montezuma
Founded in 1911, this was a reform organization (critical of of federal indian policy) that brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. Members of S.A.I came from many different Indian tribes, but because many had been been educated in government boarding schools, they were able to create one of the first pan-Indian organizations independent of white control. This prominent founder of S.A.I., established the newsletter Wassaja, which called for greater Indian self-determination and independence from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911
In 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. Inside, some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines, earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked--the owner's way of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire department rushed to the scene with water hoses, but their ladder could only reach the sixth floor. As the fire raged, girls leapt from the upper stories. By the time the blaze was put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building. This event led to accelerated efforts to organize the city's workers and the passing of state legislation for new factory inspection laws and fire safety codes. It became a became a classic example of why government needed to regulate industry.
Government by expert
In general, Progressive had faith in expertise; they believed that government could best exercise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impartial experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry.
Mary "Mother" Jones and the IWW free speech fights
In the Progressive Era, state courts regularly issued inunctions prohibiting strikers from speaking, picketing, or distributing literature during labor disputes. Like the abolitionists before them, the labor movement, in the name of freedom, demanded the right to assemble, organized, and spread their views. So the IWW, and the fiery eighty-three year old organizer Mary "Mother" Jones, relied on song, street theater, impromptu meetings, and street corner gatherings, which often met mass arrest. Yet the struggles of workers for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made free speech a significant public issue in the early twentieth century and laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in the twentieth century.
Child Labor
In the early twentieth century, more than two million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages.
Muller v. Oregon, 1908
In this case, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law that had set maximum working hours for women. Upholding this law ran counter to the Court's prevailing doctrine of liberty of contract (as expressed in Lochner v. New York, 1905) because the beneficiaries of the state regulation in this case were women. The future Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, filed a famous brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demonstrate that because they had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Brandeis's brief and the Court's opinion solidified the view of women workers as weak, dependent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men. Afterwards, many states enacted maximum hours laws for female workers, and many women derived great benefit from these laws; however, other women saw them as an infringement on their freedom.
The Progressive Party, 1912 (TR's "Bull-Moose Party")
Launched by Teddy Roosevelt to begin his independent campaign for the 1912 Presidential election
Workers compensation laws
Laws enacted to benefit workers, male or female, who are injured on the job. These laws reflected the concept of "economic citizenship," that government assistance derived from citizenship itself, not from some special service to the nation (as in the case of mothers) or upstanding character (which had long differentiated the "deserving" from the "undeserving" poor).
Federal Trade Commission, 1914
One of President Wilson's major acts against trusts, this agency was set up to investigate and prohibit unfair business activities such as price-fixing and monopolistic practices. Like the Federal Reserve System, it was welcomed by business leaders as a means of restoring order, but it reflected an expanding federal role in the economy during the Progressive Era.
Jane Addams and Hull House-
One of the Progressive era's most prominent female reformers, she founded this "settlement house" in Chicago in 1899, which was devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, inspired by this model, more than 400 settlement houses had been established in cities throughout the country.
Muckrakers
Originally a term of disparagement coined by Teddy Roosevelt, this term came to refer to writers who exposed corruption and abuses in politics, business, meatpacking, child labor, and more, primarily in the first decade of the twentieth century; their popular books and magazine articles spurred public interest in reform. They include the following people and books: Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890), Lincoln Steffens' The Shame of the Cities (1904), Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).
18th Amendment (Prohibition), 1919
Outlawed the manufacture, sale, and transportation (but not consumption) of alcoholic beverages. It became the only Amendment ever to be repealed when the 21st Amendment was ratified in 1933.
Rerum Novarum, 1894
Pope Leo XIII's powerful statement of 1894 that criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to form unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society.
Meat Inspection Act, 1906
Progressive Era law, signed by TR, created largely in reaction to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the law set strict standards of cleanliness in the meatpacking industry.
Hepburn Act, 1906
Progressive Era law, signed by TR, that Imposed stricter control over railroads and expanded the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission, including giving the ICC the power to set maximum rates, which was a significant step in the development of federal intervention in the corporate economy.
Pure Food and Drug Act, 1906
Progressive Era law, signed by TR, the first law to regulate manufacturing of food and medicines; prohibited dangerous additives and inaccurate labeling.
17th Amendment (Direct Election of Senators), 1913
Progressive reform that required U.S. senators to be elected directly by voters; previously, senators were chosen by state legislatures.
John Muir, Preservation, the Sierra Club, and Hetch Hetchy
Scottish-American preservationist who organized the Sierra Club in 1892 (the first organization devoted to environmental preservation) to help preserve forests in their "natural" state by making them off limits to logging by timber companies. His love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings; he believed people could experience God's presence directly through nature. A proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley (a beautiful area just north of Yosemite Valley in California) to provide water for the city of San Francisco lead to the first great environmental political battle in U.S. history between Sierra Club preservationists (opposed to building the dam) and "wise-use" conservationists resource managers who supported the dam. Muir and the Sierra Club lost the debate, and the dam was built.
Minimum wage, maximum hours, and worker's compensation laws
Several of the main legislative goals of the labor movement during the Progressive Era. While nearly half the states enacted worker's compensation laws during the era, the dominant ideology of "liberty of contract" meant that very few state-level minimum wage and maximum hour laws were enacted, and those that were only applied to female workers (a result of the maternalist reform movement).
American socialism
Socialism in the U.S. reached its greatest influence during the Progressive Era. The American Socialist Party, founded in 1901, called for free college education, legislation to improve conditions of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories. By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed over 150,00 dues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers--including Appeal to Reason, the largest weekly newspaper in the country--, enjoyed substantial support in the AFL, and had elected scores of officials to local governments.
TR and the 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike
Teddy Roosevelt believed that the president should be an "honest broker" in labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with the employers as his predecessors had usually done. When a strike paralyzed the West Virginia and Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902, he summoned union and management leaders to the White House. By threatening a federal takeover of the mines, he persuaded the owners to allow the dispute to be settled by a commission he himself would appoint. TR's insistence on negotiations between unions and management signaled a transition away from PBBLF and a shift towards the growing influence and power of organized labor.
The breakup of J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities, 1904
Teddy Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company. Created by financier JP Morgan, this "holding company" owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement. This event symbolized the shift away from the pro-big business laissez faire policies of the Gilded Age.
National Parks, including Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier
The United States led the world in environmental preservation, creating a National Park system that applied the preservationist philosophy of setting aside great areas of land for wilderness, personal growth, and recreation, rather than for resource extraction or agriculture. The National Park Service was created in 1916 to manage all the National Parks. In contrast to the National Park system, the National Forest system applies the philosophy of conservation ("wise use") by allowing regulated resource extraction.
Eugene Debs
The best known socialist in the U.S., no one was more important in spreading the socialist message or linking it to ideals of equality, self-government, and freedom. A champion of the downtrodden, he was one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States; director of the Pullman strike; he was imprisoned along with his associates for ignoring a federal court injunction to stop striking.
"Industrial Freedom" and "Industrial democracy"
The central demands of workers in the Progressive Era, these terms referred to empowering workers to participate in the economic decisions of their company via strong unions. They were considered to be the solution to the "labor problem" by many in the Progressive Era. Throughout the Gilded Age, workers had experienced a loss of freedom in the workplace and an undermining of their personal autonomy because of developments like Taylorism, the growth of white-collar work, and the declining odds of one day managing one's own business.
Theodore Roosevelt (TR) and the Square Deal, 1901-1909
The first of the three Progressive Era Presidents, and the term that refers to his legislative agenda while President.
Ellis Island and Angel Island
The first was the reception center in New York Harbor through which most European immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954. The second was in San Francisco Bay and served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia.
Henry Ford and "Fordism"
The founder of Ford Motor Company, who in the early twentieth-century exemplified the new consumer society by pioneering a business plan based on mass production and mass consumption. More specifically, Ford's system produced standardized, simple "Model T" automobiles (with nothing handmade or expensive to produce) targeted not to the elite consumer, but rather to the common man. He mass-produced them on the moving assembly line so as to greatly expand output by reducing the time it took to produce each car. He aggressively opposed unions among his employees. And yet he paid much higher wages than other employers, enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled workers, and enabling his workers to purchase what they made.
The Election of 1912: Taft, TR, Wilson, Debs
The four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business. Taft stressed that economic individualism could remain the foundation of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs cooperated in addressing social ills. Debs emphasized abolishing the capitalist system and also demanded including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter working hours and a minimum wage. However, it was the battle between Wilson's New Freedom and Roosevelt's New Nationalism over the role of federal government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public attention in 1912. In the end, Wilson was elected.
"American standard of living"
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to this popular, new concept that reflected, in part, the emergence of a mass-consumption society during the Progressive Era and was used to criticize the growing economic inequality in the nation.
Wilson's New Freedom, TR's New Nationalism
The respective slogans of the Democratic Party's and Progressive Party's candidates for POTUS in 1912. They represented competing strands of Progressivism; both believed government action necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing the government's power and the inevitability of economic concentration. Wilson envisioned the federal government staying relatively small but strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses--creating, in other words, the conditions of the renewal of economic competition in industrial capitalism without increasing government regulation of the economy. On the other hand, Roosevelt envisioned a big powerful federal government to match the huge size of the new industrial corporations in order to curb their abuses through heavy taxation on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.
William Howard Taft and "trust-busting"
The second Progressive Era President of the United States; Taft pursued antitrust policy even more aggressively than TR. HE persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, producing, and refining companies.
Woodrow Wilson
Third Progressive Era President of the United States; academic and progressive Democrat who was elected President of the United States in 1912 and again in 1916; his first term was concerned with domestic progressive reforms, but his second term was caught up in World War I and his efforts on behalf of the Versailles Treaty.
Walter Lippmann's Drift and Mastery (1914)
This influential book reflected the Progressive's faith in expertise. In it, Lippman argued that the new generation of educated professionals could be trusted more fully than ordinary citizens to solve America's deep social problems. Political freedom was less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualified persons devising the best public policies.
The Progressive Movement
This term came into common use around 1910 as a way of describe a broad, loosely defined political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about significant change in American social and political life. This movement included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers, female reform organizations who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big-business.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and William "Big Bill" Haywood
This was a radical union organized in Chicago in 1905 and nicknamed "the Wobblies." Part trade union, part advocate of a workers' revolution that would seize the means of production and abolish the state, the Wobblies rejected the AFL's exclusionary policies and made "solidarity" its guiding principle, extending "a fraternal hand to every wage-worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade." Its organizers also participated in many of the "free speech fights" of the era, and its opposition to World War I led to its destruction by the federal government under the Espionage Act.
Federal Reserve System, 1913
Woodrow Wilson created this powerful public agency (more consistent with TR's New Nationalism than Wilson's New Freedom) consisted of twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influence interest rates so as to promote economic growth. It was welcomed by business leaders as a means of restoring order, but it reflected an expanding federal role in the economy during the Progressive Era.