Chapter 22

The Progressive Era

Who were the Progressives?

• New Middle Class of young professionals

• Apply principles of professions to problems of society

• Volunteer organizations• Never fully united/often

contradictory• Mainly urban• Hofstadter’s theory:

“status revolution”

Muckrakers

• Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell, exposed Standard Oil

• Lincoln Steffens, “The Shame of the Cities,” attacked political machines

The Progressive Mind

• Arouse “conscious of the people”

• “laissez faire is obsolete”

• Paternalistic, oversimplified issues

• Often at war with themselves

Progressive Artists

• Sloan, Henri, Luks: “ashcan artists”

• Felt they were “rebels”

• Angry when European artists like Matisse and Picasso got all the glory!

• Henri’s Gypsy Girl

“Radical” Progressives

• Eugene Debs and Socialists

• IWW and Bill Haywood

• Freud• “Bohemian thinkers”

like Duncan, Stiglietz, Dell, O’Neill

Margaret Sanger

• Militant campaigner for birth control

• Mother’s 18 pregnancies and 11 live births

• Arrested for violating “postal indecency” laws

• American Birth Control League (in 1942 becomes Planned Parenthood)

Writers

• Ezra Pound• Carl Sandburg

Cities First: Reform!

• Abe Ruef in San Francisco, p. 577

• Toledo Mayor Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones

• Mayor Tom Johnson (Cleveland), Seth Low and John P. Mitchell (New York), Hazen Pingree (Detroit)

• City manager system starts in Dayton

• “gas and water socialism”

State Reform: Wisconsin Leads the Way

• Bob Lafollette and WISCONSIN IDEA

• Direct primary, limit campaign contributions

• Commissions and agencies

• Oregon experiments with initiative and referendum

State Social Legislation

• Role of 14th Amendment in striking down progressive laws?

• Lochner v. NY, Hammer v. Dagenhart, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital

• 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire disaster

Consumer’s League

• “investigate, agitate, legislate”

• Louis Brandeis and “Brandeis Brief,” based on evidence!

Women’s Suffrage

• Failures of 14th and 15th Amendment

• American Women’s Suffrage Association

• National Women’s Suffrage Association– E. C. Stanton, S. B.

Anthony

• “Victorian ideals”

National American Women’s Suffrage Association

• Stanton and Anthony, later Carrie Chapman Catt

• More radical Congressional Union– Alice Paul, Alva

Belmont

– Pickets White house

Political Reform

• 16th Amendment• 17th Amendment• Reforms in House of

Reps– “Czar” Tom Reed

              

 

TR: “Cowboy in the White House”

• His background

• Alarmed conservatives!

• ICC, Newlands Act, Dept. of Commerce and Bureau of Corps, Elkins RR Act

• Needed EFFECTIVE regulation—not afraid to DO IT!

Roosevelt takes on Big Business

• Northern Securities: JP Morgan tries to stop him!

• 1902 Coal Strike: he organizes mediation

• Evolution of Modern Presidency!