Ch. 18 - The Progressive Era, 1900-1916

Crystal Eastman

"What [women] are really after," explained her, is "freedom." A graduate of New York University Law School, she had taken a leading role both in the suffrage movement and in investigating industrial accidents. But her definition of freedom went beyond the vote, beyond "industrial democracy," to encompass emotional and sexual self-determination.

"Women and Economics"

(1898) The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in this influential book, offered evidence of a "spirit of personal independence" that pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman's writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman's freedom lay through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not fulfillment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of the word.

Federal Trade Commission

A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established this to investigate and prohibit "unfair" business activities such as price-fixing and monopolistic practices.

child labor

At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality.

Angel Island

At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California's fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii's sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown to 72,000. Between 1910 and 1940, here in San Francisco Bay—the "Ellis Island of the West"—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia.

Greenwich Village

Became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance attracted many homosexuals to the area, and although organized demands for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important element of the Village's lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self-supporting women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oftproclaimed personal independence.

workmen's compensation laws

By 1913, twenty-two states had enacted these laws to benefit workers, male or female, injured on the job. This legislation was the first wedge that opened the way for broader programs of social insurance. To avoid the stigma of depending on governmental assistance, contributions from workers' own wages funded these programs in part, thus distinguishing them from charity dispensed by local authorities to the poor. But state minimum wage laws and most laws regulating working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection, but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen as degrading.

Margaret Sanger

By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information and devices, she placed the issue of birth control at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, "What Every Girl Should Know," for The Call, a New York socialist newspaper. By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal, The Woman Rebel. "No woman can call herself free," she proclaimed, "who does not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn and began distributing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison. Few Progressives rallied to her defense. The IWW and Socialist Party distributed Sanger's writings.

Seventeenth Amendment

Democracy was enhanced by this—which provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures—by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary elections among party members to select candidates for office. Several states, including California under Hiram Johnson, adopted the initiative and referendum and the recall, by which officials could be removed from office by popular vote. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising women—the largest expansion of democracy in American history.

The Progressive Party blueprint

Drafted by a group of settlement-house activists, labor reformers, and social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and "living wage" for all workers, and a national system of social insurance covering unemployment, medical care, and old age. Described by Roosevelt as the "most important document" since the end of the Civil War, the platform brought together many of the streams of thought and political experiences that flowed into Progressivism.

Mexican immigration

Far larger was this immigrtion. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European countries. Many Mexicans entered through El Paso, Texas, the main southern gateway into the United States. Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino migrant workers.

Society of American Indians

Founded in 1911, it was a reform organization typical of the era. It 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. Because many of the Society's leaders had been educated at government-sponsored boarding schools, the Society united Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan-Indian public space independent of white control.

Hazen Pingree

He pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, he served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled the business interests that had dominated city government, forcing gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a municipal power plant. He became governor of Michigan in 1896, in which post he continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests.

Gifford Pinchot

He was the head of the U.S. Forest Service, and he halted timber companies' reckless assault on the nation's forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that development and conservation could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated. Conservation also reflected the Progressive thrust toward efficiency and control—in this case, control of nature itself.

Richard A. Ballinger

He was the new secretary of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in forest reserves. He decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused him of colluding with business interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the Roosevelt administration.

Hull House

In 1889, Jane Addams founded it in Chicago, a "settlement house" devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. It was modeled on Toynbee Hall, which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working-class neighborhood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor from afar, settlement house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. 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, more than 400 settlement houses had been established in cities throughout the country.

Pure Food and Drug Act

In 1902, Congress passed these acts which established a federal agency to police the quality and labeling of food and drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act. Many businessmen supported these measures, recognizing that they would benefit from greater public confidence in the quality and safety of their products.

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL's exclusionary policies formed this. Part trade union, part advocate of a workers' revolution that would seize the means of production and abolish the state, it made solidarity its guiding principle, extending "a fraternal hand to every wage-worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade." The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—the immigrant factory-labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. Its most prominent leader was William "Big Bill" Haywood

Hepburn Act

In 1906, Congress passed this, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads' business records and to set reasonable rates, a significant step in the development of federal intervention in the corporate economy.

"Muller v. Oregon"

In 1908, in this landmark case, Louis D. 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 condi- tions. Persuaded by Brandeis's argument, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women.

"Appeal to Reason"

In 1912, this socialist newspaper, published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly newspaper in the country. It declared the "socialism is coming."

Federal Reserve System

In 1913, Congress created this, consisting 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. The law was a delayed response to the Panic of 1907, when the failure of several financial companies threatened a general collapse of the banking system.

Heterodoxy

In 1914, a mass meeting at New York's Cooper Union debated the question "What is Feminism?" The meeting was sponsored by this, a women's club located in Greenwich Village that brought together female professionals, academics, and reformers. Feminists' forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the discussion of personal freedom. It was part of a new radical "bohemia" (a social circle of artists, writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices). Its definition of feminism merged issues like the vote and greater economic opportunities with open discussion of sexuality.

John Muir

In the 1890s, this Scottish-born naturalist organized the Sierra Club to help preserve forests, which he called "God's first temples," from uncontrolled logging by timber companies and other intrusions of civilization. Congress in that decade authorized the president to withdraw "forest reserves" from economic development.

"scab"

Is a worker who crosses the picket line during a strike.

Roosevelt and conservation

It was under Roosevelt that conservation became a concerted federal policy. Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks. The creation of parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier required the removal of Indians who hunted and fished there as well as the reintroduction of animals that had previously disappeared. City dwellers who visited the national parks did not realize that these were to a considerable extent artificially created and managed environments, not primordial nature.

Carlos Montezuma

Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations into family farms. But he, a founder of the Society of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been captured as a child by members of a neighboring tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to Chicago. There he attended school and eventually obtained a medical degree. In 1916, he established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning "signaling"), that condemned federal paternalism toward the Indians and called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His writings had little influence at the time on government policy, but Indian activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism.

"social legislation"

Meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of working-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States.

Ellis Island

Most European immigrants to the United States entered through here. Located in New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation's main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to an immigrant who passed through here. The less fortunate, who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or in other ways undesirable, were sent home.

Samuel Jones

Nicknamed "Golden Rule." He pioneered urban Prgressivism. He had instituted an eight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897 to 1905, he founded night schools and free kindergartens, built new parks, and supported the right of workers to unionize.

Eugene V. Debs

No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ideals of equality, self-government, and freedom than him, the railroad union leader who had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894. For two decades, he criss-crossed the country preaching that control of the economy by a democratic government held out the hope of uniting "political equality and economic freedom." As a champion of the downtrodden, he managed to bridge the cultural divide among New York's Jewish immigrants, prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals attracted to the socialist ideal. He received more than 900,000 votes for president (6 percent of the total) in 1912.

Isadora Duncan

One symbol of the new era was her, who brought from California a new, expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of traditional technique and costume.

Payne-Aldrich Tariff

Only a few months after taking office, he signed this, which reduced rates on imported goods but not nearly as much as reformers wished.

"The Jungle"

Perhaps the era's most influential novel was Upton Sinclair's work (1906), whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

maternalist reform

Reforms like mothers' pensions rested on the assumption that the government should encourage women's capacity for bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same time. Both feminists and believers in conventional domestic roles supported such measures.

coal miner's strike of 1902

Roosevelt also believed that the president should be an honest broker in labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with 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.

Square Deal

Roosevelt's program, which attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between "good" and "bad" corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel and Standard Oil, served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy financiers interested only in profit, and had no right to exist.

Americal Federation of Labor (AFL)

Saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, it sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. It's president was Samuel Gompers. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension plans for long-term workers. Most employers nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority, and resisted them stubbornly. It mainly represented the most privileged American workers—skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-born.

Emma Goldman

She toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive devices. "I demand freedom for both sexes," she proclaimed, "freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood." Goldman constantly ran afoul of the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or "obscene" statements or simply to keep her from speaking.

Florence Kelley

She was the daughter of Civil War-era Radical Republican congressman William D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women's power as consumers as a force for social change.

Sixteenth Amendment

Taft supported this to the Constitution, which authorized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). It was ratified shortly before he left office. A 2% tax on incomes over $4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a "communistic threat to property." The movement to resurrect the income tax united southern and western farmers who wished to reduce government dependence on revenue from the tariff, which they believed discriminated against nonindustrial states, and Progressives who believed that taxation should be based on the ability to pay.

Acts in Wilson's Presidency

The Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the Keating-Owen Act outlawing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce, the Adamson Act establishing an eight-hour workday on the nation's railroads, and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist sub-treasury plan, which extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses.

William "Big Bill" Haywood

The IWW's most prominent leader, who had worked in western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics "the most dangerous man in America," he became a national figure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former anti-union governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, he was found not guilty.

Fordism

The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption produced by Henry Ford. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country's poorly maintained roads. Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices. In 1913, Ford's factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of five dollars per day, enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers.

Jane Addams

The era's most prominent female reformer was her, who had been born in 1860, the daughter of an Illinois businessman. After graduating from college,she, who never married, resented the prevailing expectation that a woman's life should be governed by what she called the "family claim"—the obligation to devote herself to parents, husband, and children. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago.

Mary "Mother" Jones

The fiery organizer, who at the age of eighty-three had been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers (A strike that failed against the Rockefeeler-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company), later told a New York audience that the union "had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayonets." Yet the struggle 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. By and large, the courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth-century America.

Yellowstone

The first national park, in Wyoming, had been created in 1872—partly to preserve an area of remarkable natural beauty, and partly at the urging of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was anxious to promote western tourism.

Underwood Tariff

The first significant measure of Wilson's presidency was this, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost revenue, imposed a graduated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans.

birth-control movement

The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to changing sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to "control one's body" generally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman's husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children.

Lawrence Strike

The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public consciousness took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city's huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-five nationalities. They worked six days per week and earned an average of sixteen cents per hour. When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fifty-four-hour limit to the workweek, employers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those who had been laboring longer hours. Workers spontaneously went on strike, and called on the IWW for assistance. In February, Haywood and a group of women strikers devised the idea of sending strikers' children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist families in New York City agreed to take them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and half-starved, marching up Fifth Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the strikers. A few days later, city officials ordered that no more youngsters could leave Lawrence. When a group of mothers and children gathered at the railroad station in defiance of the order, club-wielding police drove them away, producing outraged headlines around the world. The governor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled on the workers' terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan to the labor movement: "We want bread and roses, too.

American standard of living

The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a "living wage"—that offered a new language for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan's influential book "A Living Wage" (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a "natural and absolute" right of citizenship.

Robert M. La Follette

The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was him, who made Wisconsin a "laboratory for democracy." After serving as a Republican member of Congress, he became convinced that an alliance of railroad and lumber companies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he instituted a series of measures known as the Wisconsin Idea, including nominations of candi- dates for office through primary elections rather than by political bosses, the taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin. His reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his administration reflected a larger Progressive faith in expertise.

vaudeville

The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the century was this, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into these shows. As the movies became longer and involved more sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly working-class urban residents, were attending "nickelodeons"—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower than at these shows.

"Drift and Mastery"

The title of Walter Lippmann's influential 1914 work of social commentary posed the stark alternatives facing the nation. "Drift" meant continuing to operate according to the outmoded belief in individual autonomy. "Mastery" required applying scientific inquiry to modern social problems. The new generation of educated professionals, Lippmann believed, 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.

National Consumers' League

Under Florence Kelley's leadership, this became the nation's leading advocate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. Freedom of choice in the marketplace, Kelley insisted, enabled socially conscious consumers to "unite with wage earners" by refusing to purchase goods produced under exploitative conditions.

"effective freedom"

Was a term coined by the philosopher John Dewey, was far different from the "highly formal and limited concept of liberty" as protection from outside restraint. Freedom was a positive, not a negative, concept—the "power to do specific things." As such, it depended on "the distribution of powers that exists at a given time." Thus, freedom inevitably became a political question.

Louis D. Brandeis

Was an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, main-tained that unions embodied an essential principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between "political liberty" and "industrial slavery," he insisted, was America's foremost social problem. Workers deserved a voice not only in establishing wages and working conditions but also in making such managerial decisions as the relocation of factories, layoffs, and the distribution of profits.

Frederick W. Taylor

Was an efficiency expert who pioneered what he called "scientific management."

Public Utilities Act

Was one of the country's strongest railroad-regulation measures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women.

Feminist Alliance

Was one organization that constructed apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home.

"scientific management"

Was pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor and was a program that sought to streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs and work practices. Through scientific study, the "one best way" of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to obey the detailed instructions of supervisors.

Samuel Gompers

Was the creator of the AFL and stood against Frederick Taylor's "scientific management."

Julia Lathrop

Was the first woman to head a federal agency (the Children's Bureau, established in 1912 to investigate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests).

Louis Brandeis

Was the one to file a famous brief citing in the "Muller v. Oregon" case. He insisted that government should concern itself with the health, income, and future prospects of all its citizens. He envisioned a different welfare state from that of the maternalist reformers, one rooted less in the idea of healthy motherhood than in the notion of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and protection against unemployment and work-related accidents. For him, the right to assistance derived from citizenship itself, not 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).

"Rerum Novarum"

Was written by John A. Ryan, who had grown up in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor, and the Populists. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII's powerful statement of 1894, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society. Ryan's insistence that economic relationships should be governed by moral standards had a powerful influence on social thought among American Catholics.

muckrakers

Were people who took the use of their journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life. Examples are: "The Shame of the Cities" by Lincoln Steffen, "History of the Standard Oil Company" by Ida Tarbell, "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser, and "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair.

The New Freedom

Wilson's program, in which envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses— creating, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that corporations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that proved remarkably accurate.