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The Progressive Era

Textbook 573-600 – Mark Bao

I.Introduction
A.McKinley administration wanted to ensure business confidence
B.Depression in the 1890s
1.industrial disputes created tension in the social tiers
C.Richard Olney: “the great Pullman strike had brought the country ‘to the ragged edge of
anarchy.’” (573)
D.Olney suppressed a strike, but did not want such strikes to happen again, and wanted gov-
ernment regulation of labor on the railroads
1.Congress passed the Erdman Mediation Act in 1898
E.There were a lot of costs to building “the world’s most advanced industrial economy” in
the United States – “a frightening concentration of corporate power, a rebellios working
class, misery in the cities, and the corruption of machine politics” (574)
II.The Course of Reform
A.progressivism: no single movement, agenda, or organization: it is a post-1900 effort to
build a better society
B.The Progressive Mind
1.Progressive thinking: “if the facts could be known, everything else was possible” (574)
2.Scientific investigation was becoming popular: various statistics, social research, etc.
3.Scientific management was also popular among progressives
a)founder Frederick W. Taylor said scientific analysis is useful in solving many prob-
lems in life and the world
4.A new institutional school wanted to take apart capitalism and the economy to see how
they worked
5.Progressives were against laws that were not verified in real life, and this became legal
realism
6.Liberty of contract was invoked by the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New York against a
law that limited working hours of bakers, which went against bakers’ own contracts
7.Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been
experience.” (574)
8.William James denied that there were absolute truths, and started the idea of pragmat-
ism judging ideas by their consequences
9.Sources of Progressive Idealism
a)Progressives are like idealists
b)Progressive ideas were rooted in literature such as Progress and Poverty, Wealth
against Commonwealth and Looking Backward, all against the idea of corporate
greed.
(1)Many socialists became progressivists
c)The most important source of progressive idealism was religion.
(1)The Protestant Church had a doctrine: the Social Gospel, in response to the
urban poor
10.The Muckrakers
a)New form of journalism in response to progressivism
b)“editors discovered that what interested readers was the exposure of mischief in
American life” (575)
(1)writers investigated corporate greed and poverty
c)muckrakers: coined by Theodore Roosevelt, journalists who exposed wrongdoings
and the like in America
C.Women Progressives
1.Women were part of charities and humanitarian efforts in cities
2.Josephine Shaw Lowell believed that the betterment of the working people would make
crime go down, and established an organization to improve wages and working condi-
tions of female clerks: New York Consumers’ League
a)Became a national organization: the National Consumers’ League became a lobby
organization for issues concerning women and children
3.Muller v. Oregon (1908) approved an Oregon law that limited the workday to 10 hours
for women
a)Lawyer Louis D. Brandeis used Consumers’ League data that showed the effect of
long hours on women’s health
b)After it was upheld, laws like it passed around the nation
4.Women’s lobby organizations affected women’s rights laws, child labour laws, among
others.
5.Settlement Houses
a)Following the Hull House established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in
1889, more settlement houses appeared as community centers
b)Addams believed it would improve conditions in cities and of slum dwellers
6.Revival of the Suffrage Movement
a)Reformers founded the Women’s Trade Union League
(1)Organized strikes, appointed leaders
(2)At first a state-by-state movement that won 6 states in the West
(3)Believed to be too slow–better, a constitutional amendment
7.The Birth of Feminism
a)feminism was made up of young, self-supporting college-educated women
(1)“freedom for full personal development” for women, without the social norms
of what women should be
b)In suffragism, instead of believing that they deserved suffrage because they would
improve politics, they believed they deserved the right to vote simply because they
were equal to men
c)Margaret Sanger was a public health nurse in NYC, who believed in birth control,
illegal at the time (refer to jigsaw notes)
(1)In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic
d)Feminism challenged Addams’ ideas about social reform: in her reform ideology,
protection for working women implicated that they were weaker
(1)Feminists did not want compensation for being different because they simply
did not believe that they were different
(2)progressive Gvoernor Charles J. Bonaparte had opposition against the 1914
minimum wage bill for women
(3)some suffragists believed that they did not need “special care, protection and
privilege” and laws like this were giving them that, which went against their ideas
of equality to men (583)
D.Reforming Politics
1.progressives attacked the party system “boss rule”
2.progressives had mixed motives and feelings about political power
3.La Follette: Political Reformer
a)Robert M. La Follette served in Congress for 3 terms, until a Republican boss tried
to bribe him to “fix a judge in a railroad case” (584).
b)Because of this, he realized the corruption in the political system and became a
political reformer focused on restoring democratic ideals
c)became Governor in 1900 with plans to increase taxes for corporations, make regu-
lation for utility and railroad stricter, and political reform
d)he thought that political reform could be achieved by changing the rules of nomina-
tions: the bosses do not choose who represent the candidacy, but rather, popular vote
does
e)Controlled the Wisconsin Republican system for 25 years
f)Like other successful progressive politicians, he was interested in political reform
4.Municipal Reform
a)People demanded more efficient government. Taxes increased, but the governments
were still inefficient
b)After a hurricane strike in Galveston, Texas, business owners wanted a nonpartisan
five-member board instead of the mayor and board of aldermen
(1)along with this a city manager was elected
(2)was managed like a business
5.Urban Liberalism
a)In 1910, Hiram Johnson was running for California governor, and wanted to reform
politics in the state as well as the Southern Pacific Railroad, appealing to the middle
class
(1)however, his second term became about social and labour legislation, appeal-
ing to the working class
(2)move towards reform of working class is called urban liberalism
b)Fire in New York factory in 1911 killed many people, trapped
(1)In response, the New York Stet Factory Commission developed 56 laws fore
general safety and wages for factories over 4 years
(2)Tammany realized that reform could not just happen on a low scale, only the
state had the power to make wide changes
6.Cultural Pluralism Embattled
a)“Urban liberal leaders championed both the economic needs of city dwellers and
their cultural and religious freedom” (586)
7.Organized Labour
a)American Federation of Labor (AFL) did not want the state to have a say in labor
b)trade unions did not adopt urban liberalism easily like city machines
c)trade unions thought workers should not seek government help but instead help
themselves, called voluntarism
(1)this idea died down in the progressive era
d)judges were willing to disallow strikes to happen
e)AFL wanted better treatment and lobbied this from Congress
8.Toward Social Insurance
a)2,000 coal miners killed every year
b)liability laws favored the employer, and rarely was enough compensation given
c)by 1917, all industrial states had insurance laws covering accidents during employ-
ment
d)urban liberalism in the Progressive Era was not able to reform unemployment bene-
fits, pensions, or healthcare benefits
E.Racism and Reform
1. Introduction
a)In the south, the primary was a white primary to prevent blacks from having politic-
al power
2.White Supremacy in the Progressive Vein
a)some believed that allowing the black vote with the 15th amendment wasn’t good
b)people including President Taft believed that the blacks were ignorant of politics
c)racial tensions in the north due to black migration from the south
3.The Civil Rights Struggle Revived
a)young black professionals started to fight back for civil rights, with a new ideology
of “resistance and aggression” due to the failings of the Booker T. Washington’s
“compromise” (589)
b)formed the Niagara Movement with W.E.B. Du Bois, based on:
(1)black pride
(2)demand for full political and civil equality
(3)black agreement to inferiority
c)Some whites were part of the African American reform, including Mary White
Ovington, who organized other white sympathizers to form the NAACP 1909
(1)The NAACP leadership was mostly white, with Du Bois as the editor of their
journal
d)also formed was the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs
III.Progressivism and National Politics
A.The Making of a Progressive President
1.Roosevelt was appointed to the “dead-end” job of McKinley’s VP
a)however, McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president
b)Roosevelt pushed for conservation of the outdoors
c)When it became necessary to quell a miners’ strike to prepare coal for the winter,
Roosevelt threatened a government takeover of the operation and enlisted J.P. Morgan
to help them, when the managers caved into an arbitration
d)was against irresponsible business
2.Regulating the Marketplace
a)elimination of competition after the depression was a primary motive of business,
trusts were formed
b)Trust-Busting
(1)Roosevelt established the Bureau of Corporations as well as started investiga-
tions into corporations
(2)Only investigated those that were abusing their power
c)Railroad Regulation
B.The Fracturing of Republican Progressivism
1.Taft’s Troubles
a)progressives were against tariffs because they stifled competition, and Taft cam-
paigned on tariff reform
b)however, Taft approved a tariff
2.New Nationalism
a)“human welfare versus property rights” (597)

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