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• “laissez faire is obsolete”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!