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The origins of Progressivism
Four Goals of Progressivism
Protecting Social Welfare
Relief of urban problems
YMCA
Opened libraries
Sponsored classes
Built swimming pools and handball
The Salvation Army
Fed poor people in soup kitchens
Cared for children in nurseries
Sent "slum brigades" to convert poor immigrants to the
middle-class values of hard work and temperance
Florence Kelly
Illinois Factory Act of 1893
Prohibited child labor
Limited women’s working hours
Soon became a model for other states
Promoting Moral Reform
Morality held the key to improving the lives of poor people
Prohibition
WCTU
Frances
Willard
Anti-Saloon
League
Creating Economic Reform
Panic of 1893 caused some to question the capitalist economic system
Criticism of laissez-faire
Socialism
Eugene V. Debs
American Socialist Party
Fostering Efficiency
Increase the efficiency of American society
Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Improve efficiency in the workplace by applying scientific principles
to make tasks simpler and easier
Henry Ford
Assembly line
Increased production but high worker turnover often due to injuries
suffered by exhausted workers
The "Five Dollar Day"
Muckrakers
Journalists who wrote about the corrupt side of business and public life
Ida
Tarbell
History
of the Standard Oil Company
Upton
Sinclair
The Jungle
Jacob Riis
How
the Other Half Lives
Cleaning Up Government
Corruption was widespread in the big city political machines
Efforts to reform grew from the desire to make government more efficient
and responsive to its constituents but also from distrust of immigrants’
participation in politics
Reforming Local Government
Natural disasters
Commissions
Council-manager
Reform Mayors
Hazen Pingree
Detroit, Michigan (1890-1897)
Concentrated on economic issues
Fairer tax structure
Lowered fares for public transportation
Rooted out corruption
City workers built schools, parks, and a municipal lighting plant
Lowered gas rates
Set up a system of work relief for the unemployed
Tom Johnson
Cleveland, Ohio (1901-1909)
Socialist
Believed that citizens should play a more active role in city
government
Held large meetings and invited citizens to question officials about
how the city was managed
Strove toward honest government
Johnson was one of 19 socialist mayors who worked to institute
progressive reforms in America’s cities
"Gas and water socialism"
Focused on dismissing corrupt and greedy private owners of utilities
and converting the utilities to publicly owned enterprises
Reform at the State Level
Spurred by progressive governors, many states passed laws to regulate
railroads, mines, mills, telephone companies, and other large businesses
Reform Governors
Robert M. La Follette
Wisconsin
Led the way in regulating big business
Railroads were his major target
Leader of the progressive wing of the Republican Party of Wisconsin,
he served three terms as governor before entering the U.S. Senate in
1906
Other Reform Governors
Charles B. Aycock of North Carolina
Albert B. Cummins of Iowa
Joseph W. Folk of Missouri
James S. Hogg of Texas
Protecting Workers
National Child Labor Committee
Formed in 1904 to end child labor
Joined by labor unions who thought that child labor lowered wages for all
workers, they pressured the national government into passing the
Keating-Owen Act of 1916
Barred goods made by children from interstate commerce
Keating-Owen was overturned by the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart
(1918)
Reversal of precedent on interstate commerce
Failing at the national level, reformers succeeded in banning child labor
and setting maximum hours in nearly every state
Muller v. Oregon (1908)
Supreme Court said that a state could legally limit the working hours of
women to ten hours
Duty of state to protect health and welfare of citizens overrides freedom
of contract
"Brandeis brief"
Louis D. Brandeis
Same argument used in Bunting v. Oregon to uphold ten hour workday for
men
Workers’ Compensation laws passed
Reforming Elections
Australian Ballot
Secret
Initiative
Referendum
Recall
Direct Primary
By 1915, about 2/3 of the states had adopted some form of direct primary,
and by 1920, 20 states had adopted at least one of these procedures
17th Amendment
Direct election of senators
Women in Public Life
Women in the Work Force
Farm Women
Critical part of the economic structure of the family
Roles had not changed substantially
Cooking, cleaning, sewing, and a host of other chores
If husbands were ill or absent they had to plow and plant the fields
and harvest the crops
Domestic Workers
African-American women migrated by the thousands to cities to work as
cooks, laundresses, scrubwomen, and maids
Unmarried immigrant women also did domestic labor
Women in Industry
At the turn of the century, one out of five American women worked; 25%
of them held jobs in manufacturing
Most were immigrants or the children of immigrants
Garment trade claimed about all women industrial workers
Typically held least skilled positions and received lowest pay
Working women were assumed to be supporting only themselves, while men
were assumed to be supporting families
Other business opportunities
Stenographers, typists, bookkeepers, and teachers
Required high school education
By 1890 women high school graduates outnumbered men
Women’s Leadership in Reform
Women in Higher Education
Vassar College
1865
Faculty
8 men and 22 women
Maria
Mitchell
Smith and Wellesley College (1875)
Randolph Macon Women’s College (1891)
Columbia, Brown and Harvard established separate colleges for women
Barnard (1889), Pembroke (1891), Radcliffe (1894)
Female graduates still expected to fulfill traditional domestic roles
Marriage no longer a woman’s only option
Almost half of college-educated women in the late 19th
century never married
Many began to apply skills toward achieving social reforms
Women and Reform
Not allowed to vote or run for office
"Social Housekeeping"
Targeted unsafe factories and labor abuses
Promoted housing reform, educational improvement, and food and drug
laws
National Association of Colored Women (NACW)
1896
Managed nurseries, reading rooms, and kindergartens
Mission was "the moral education of the race with which we are
identified
Suffrage
Women split over rights for blacks
Some supported 14th and 15th Amendments as
progress toward their goals
Others opposed them because they excluded women
Movement united by 1890 under the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA)
Leaders
Susan B. Anthony
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Lucy Stone
Julia Ward Howe
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
Three Part Strategy
Convince state legislatures to grant women the right to vote
Wyoming (1869)
By 1896, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, but after that, no others
Attempting to vote in order to test, in court, whether women were
considered citizens under the !4th Amendment
Minor v. Happersett (1875)
Court said that while women might be citizens under the 14th
Amendment, that didn’t necessarily mean they had the right to vote
Push for a national constitutional amendment that would grant women the
right to vote
First proposed in 1878
Not accomplished until 1920
Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidency
Election of 1900
McKinley over
McKinley assassinated
Roosevelt became president in 1901
Strong president
The Square Deal
Six policies
Increase the power of the federal government
Mediate strikes
Should be settled in an orderly and unbiased manner
Government shouldn’t necessarily side with management and should
intervene not only to protect private property but also to protect
public welfare
Regulate trusts
Wanted to curb trusts if their actions were oppressive to the public
but did not want to destroy large corporations
Regulate transportation
Strengthened the Interstate Commerce Act
Elkins Act(1903)
Once a railroad had set rates it could not raise them without
first notifying the public
Hepburn Act(1906)
Gave the ICC power to set maximum railroad rates, with court
approval, whenever shippers complained
Protect health
Response to The Jungle
Pure Food and Drug Act(1906)
Called for meat inspection and the listing of ingredients on labels
Conserve natural resources
People began to realize that natural resources were limited
Roosevelt withdrew millions of acres of land from public sale and
created a system of national parks
Active role for government
Foreign policy
Treaty of Portsmouth
Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty between Russia and Japan
Won the Nobel Prize in 1906
Panama Canal
US helped Panama win independence from Columbia
After gaining independence, Panama gave the US a ten mile wide canal
zone forever
Building began in 1904 and was finished in1914
Greatly increased US position as a world power
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
Any interfering in Latin America would be done by the US
The US would protect its interests in Latin America, if necessary by
being the policeman of the area
"Walk softly and carry a big stick"
Roosevelt easily won the election of 1904 over Democrat Judge Alton B.
Parker
Progressivism Under Taft
William
Howard Taft Becomes President
Roosevelt picked Taft as his successor to carry his policies
Election of 1908
Democrats ran William Jennings Bryan for the third time against Taft
Taft won easily largely due to popularity of Roosevelt
Taft Stumbles
Though Taft pursued a cautiously progressive agenda, he received little
credit for it
Roosevelt busted 44 trusts in 7½ years while Taft busted 90 in 4
years
Not as effective at the bully pulpit or at subduing troublesome members
of his own party
Tariffs and conservation posed his first problems
Payne-Aldrich Tariff
After promising to lower tariffs in the campaign, Taft signed this
bill which was crafted by conservative Senate Republicans
Disputing Public Lands
Taft angered conservationists by appointing as his secretary of the
interior Richard A. Ballinger, a wealthy Seattle lawyer who
disapproved of conservationist controls on western lands
Ballinger removed 1 million acres of forest and mining lands from
the reserved list and approved the sale to Seattle businesses of
several million acres of coal-rich land in Alaska
Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service under Roosevelt,
testified against Ballinger in a congressional hearing
Taft fired Pinchot
Pinchot retaliated in a book called The Fight for Conservation
The Republican Party Split
Problems Within the Party
Progressives and conservatives split over Taft’s support of political
boss Joseph Cannon, Speaker of the House
Under Cannon’s virtual dictatorship, the House often ignored or
weakened progressive bills
With the help of Democrats, progressive Republicans stripped Cannon
of most of his power in March 1910
In the midterm elections, the Democrats gained control of the House of
Representatives for the first time in 18 years
Voters voiced concerns over the rising cost of living, which they
blamed on the Payne-Aldrich Tariff
They also believed Taft to be against conservation
The Bull Moose Party
Roosevelt returned from big game hunting in Africa in 1910 and declared
that the country needed a "New Nationalism" under which the
federal government would exert its power for the "welfare of the
people"
By 1912 Roosevelt had decided to run for a third term
Taft was the incumbent, and his supporters were able to refuse seats to
Roosevelt delegates at the Republican Convention
Roosevelt supporters held their own convention and formed the
Progressive Party and nominated Roosevelt
The Progressive Party became known as the Bull Moose Party after
Roosevelt’s boast that he was "as strong as a bull moose"
Platform
Direct election of senators, initiative, referendum, recall, women’s
suffrage, national workman’s compensation, an eight-hour workday, a
minimum wage for women, a federal law against child labor, and a federal
trade commission to regulate business
The
Election of 1912
Democrats ran Woodrow
Wilson
Endorsed a progressive platform, called the New Freedom, that demanded
even stronger antitrust legislation, banking reform, and reduced tariffs
Split between Taft and Roosevelt turned nasty
Wilson benefited
Eugene Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate
Wilson captured only 42% of the popular vote, but he won an electoral
victory and a Democratic majority in Congress
Roosevelt defeated Taft in both popular and electoral votes
75% of went to reform candidates Wilson, Roosevelt, and Debs
Wilson could claim mandate to expand the government’s role in social
reform
Wilson’s New Freedom
Progressive Reform Under Wilson
Attack on the triple wall of privilege
Trusts, tariffs, and high finances
Trusts
Clayton Antitrust At
Sought to strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act
Corporations could no longer acquire the stock of another
corporation if doing so would create a monopoly
If a company violated the law, its officers would be prosecuted
Specified that labor unions and farm organizations not only had a
right to exist but also would no longer be subject to antitrust laws
Federal trade Act
Federal
Trade Commission
Power to investigate possible violations of regulatory
statutes, to require periodic reports from corporations, and to
put an end to unfair business competition and unfair business
practices
Tariffs
Believed high tariffs created monopolies by reducing competition
Underwood Tariff of 1913
Substantially reduced tariff rates for first time since Civil War
Needed to replace lost revenue
16th Amendment (1913)
Legalized a graduated (progressive) federal income tax
Taxed larger incomes at higher rates than smaller incomes
High Finances
Needed to make credit more readily available and a way to quickly
adjust the amount of money in circulation
Federal Reserve Act of 1913
Federal
Reserve System
Divided country into twelve districts
Each district had a federal reserve bank with which all banks
within the district were affiliated
Federal Reserve banks made loans to member banks which in turn
made loans to customers
Federal Reserve determines interest rates on loans
Still serves as the basis for the nation’s banking system
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