Chapter 18: Progressive EraJSRCC 122

 Progressives

People in favor of or working towards improvements in politics and social settings

Muckrakers

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.

A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life.

Lincoln Steffens

Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills.

Upton Sinclair

Journalists fighting to expose corrupt politics in the early 1900s

Lincoln Steffens

Wrote the influential book the shame of the cities

Was an important expose of how corrupt most U.S. cities were

The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens

Published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901-1902

In book form in 1904

Ida Tarbell

Wrote the book called “The Standard Oil Company”

She revealed after years of diligent research the illegal means used by John D. Rockefeller to monopolize the early oil industry

published in two volumes in 1904

History if the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what Theodore Roosevelt disparaged as “muckraking”-the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life

Upton Sinclair

Published the Jungle in 1906

Whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage

Led directly to the passage of the pure food and drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906

5he Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, highlighted all of the unclean and/or unsafe practices of the meat packaging industry

Pure Food and Drug Act

An act “for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other purposes

Ellis Island

Reception center in New York Harbor through which most European immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954

Henry Ford

Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line.

Ford paid his employees five dollars a day so that they could afford to buy his car.

Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shop and later as an engineer

He didn’t invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans

1905; he established the Ford Motor Company, one of small automobile manufacturing firms

1913; ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line

Model-T

Socialist Party

1901

1912, they claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, publishes hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of labor, and had elected scores of local officials

Their goal was to abolish the “capitalistic system”

Eugene V. Debs

Socialism=Political equality and economic freedom’

Election of 1912- 6% of popular vote

Appeal to Reason-largest weekly circulation

The railroad union leader who, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894

Debs criss-crossed the country preaching that control of economy by a democratic government held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic freedom”

Eugene Debs Organized the American Socialist Party in 1901

Mother Jones

Mary “Mother” Jones

Who at the age of 83 had been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers

Margaret Sanger

Wrote : The Woman Rebel

Went to jailed of distributing

1911, she began a column on venereal disease, from the mails

1914, Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal called “Woman Rebel”

1916, she opened a clinic in a working class neighborhood of Brooklyn had began distributing contraceptive device to poor Jewish and Italian women, and action for which she was sentenced a month in prison

Robert LaFollette

Wisconsin’s “laboratory for democracy’

Primary elections

Taxing corporations

State regulations of railroads and utilities

Under the progressive Republican leadership of Robert La Follette, Wisconsin led the way in regulating big business

Known as the “Wisconsin Idea”

16th Amendment

The 16rth Amendment was ratifies in 1916

It legalized a graduated federal income tax

Senators now had to be chosen by a direct election of the people of a state, not by the state governments

U.S. Constitution create a national income tact

It gave the federal government the power to directly tax its citizens

17th Amendment

Congress passed the 17th Amendment in 1913

U.S. Constitution required state legislatures to select their state’s senators to the U.S. Congress

Constitution didn’t require any specific procedure for legislatures to follow.

As a result, each state’s method of selecting senators varied, and deadlocks within legislature led occasional unfilled seats

1866

Congress mandated each state voted separately

If, they didn’t agree on a senator, two bodies met in joint session and voted until senator was elected

Jane Addams

Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt's Square Deal attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between "good" and "bad" corporations.

Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company.

He pushed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and for more regulation of the food and drug industry.

Youngest man ever to hold the office of president

Succession to presidency; reelection in 1904

Limits on corporate power

"Good trusts" and "bad trusts"

Northern Securities case

Mediation between labor and capital; 1902 coal strike arbitration

Gifford Pinchot

Head of the U.S. Forest Service

Ordered millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves

Encouraged congress to create new national parks

Woodrow Wilson

Democrat

“new freedom”

State’s rights; Laissez-faire

Unions

Anti-trust

1st term

Held press conferences and delivered messages to Congress

Outlawed child labor

8 hour work day

Money to farmers

Graduated income tax