Progressive Packet Notes Maddie Amsterdam, Mr. Cruz, Per. 7 The Course of Reform I. II.

Progressivisma widespread, many-sided effort after 1900 to build a better society. Progressive reformers shared only this objective, plus an intellectual style that is called progressive. The Progressive Mind a. If the facts old be known, everything else was possible. The desire to reform led to investigation and research. b. Frederick W. Taylor founded scientific management. He argued that the scientific analysis of human activity offered solutions to waste and inefficiency in municipal govt, schools, hospitals, and homes. c. Progressives believed strongly in resisting ways of thinking that discouraged purposeful action. They disagreed with Social Darwinism. d. Progressives argued that without trade unions and public regulations, the strong would devour the weak in economics. e. Progressives opposed the conception o f the law that treated legal rights as if they arose from principles not rooted in social reality. i. Lochner v. NYan NY law limit the hours of bakers. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes disagreed, saying that if the choice was between working and starving, bakers did not freely accept the 14-hour a day labor. ii. Holmess reasoning was an example of legal realism, which rested on his conviction that the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. iii. Dean Roscoe Pound called for the adjustment of principles and doctrines to the human conditions they are to govern rather than assumed first principles. f. Sources of Progressive IdealismProgressives were unabashed idealists. i. Progress and Poverty by Henry George, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, Wealth Against Commonwealth by Henry Lloyd ii. The most important source of progressive idealism was religious. Protestant churches embraced the Social Gospel, which was led by Walter Rauschenbush. g. The Muckrakersduring the 1890s magazines like Colliers and McClures used lively, fact-filled reporting. Editors discovered that readers wanted exposure of mischief in American life. i. Lincoln Steffenss article Tweed Days in St. Louis started the trend. He wrote about the corrupt ties between business and political machines.

III.

ii. Theodore Roosevelt thought the journalists went too far. He compared them to a man with a muckrake in Pilgrims Progress who was too absorbed with raking the filth on the floor to look up and accept a celestial crown. The term muckraker was coined. Women Progressives a. Middle class women did humanitarian work in the cities. b. Josephine Shaw Lowell of NYC concluded that giving assistance to the poor was not enough. She founded the New York Consumers League in 1890, hoping to improve the wages and working conditions of female clerks in the citys stores by issuing a White Lista list of cooperating shops. i. the league spread to other cities and became the National Consumers League in 1899. Florence Kelley ran it. c. The Muller v. Oregon decision (1908) upheld an Oregon law limiting the workday for women to ten hours. i. The Consumers League recruited Louis D. Brandeis to defend the Oregon law before the Supreme Court. d. Womens organizations helped pass the first law providing public assistance for mothers with dependent children in IL (1911); the first minimum wage law for women in MA (1912); more effective child labor laws in many states; the Childrens and Womens bureaus in the Labor Department in 1912 and 1920. e. Settlement housesserved as community centers staffed by middleclass residents. The movement was started with Jane Addamss Hull House in Chicago. f. Revival of the Suffrage Movementin 1903, social reformers founded the National Womens Trade Union League. It organized women workers, played a considerable role in strikes, and trained workingclass leaders. i. Rose Schneiderman became a union organizer among NYCs garment workers. ii. Agnes Nestor led IL glove workers. iii. Alice Paul advocated a constitutional amendment that in one stroke would grant women everywhere the right to vote. In 1906 she organized the National Womans Party. iv. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was rejuvenated when Carrie Chapmann Catt became its leader in 1915. g. The Birth of Feminismthe feminist movement was started by a young generation of college-educated, self-supporting women. Feminism meant freedom for full personal development. i. Feminists were prosuffrage, but they wanted the right to vote because they believed they were equal to men, not because they wanted to effect politics.

IV.

ii. Margaret Sanger devoted herself to the cause of birth control, an illegal activity at the time. She published pamphlets, gave speeches, and opened the first birth control clinic in 1916. Reforming Politics a. La Follette: Political ReformerRobert M. LaFolette was an advocate of political reform, which for him meant restoring Americas democratic ideals. i. 1900He won WI governorship on a platform of higher taxes for corporations, stricter utility and RR regulation, and political reform. ii. The key to party reform was to deny bosses the power to choose the partys candidates. iii. The direct primary was enacted in 1903. b. Municipal Reformmunicipal reformers attacked the ward politics that underlay the corrupt patronage system. They wanted to reform city governance, i. After a hurricane devastated Galveston, TX, business leaders wanted to replace the mayor and board of aldermen with a nonpartisan five-member commission. This started the national drive toward municipal affairs. ii. They wanted to run cities the same way as a private business corporation, this was not democratic at all. c. Urban Liberalismcounterbalanced municipal reform. i. Republican Hiram Johnson ran form CA governor in 1910 as a reform candidate of the middle class. By his second term, he had shifted from the middle class to the working class. This reflected the gravity of progressivism. ii. This new strain of progressive reform is urban liberalism. iii. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in 1911, the NY State Factory Commission developed a program of labor reform. 1. Robert F. Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, two Tammany Hall politicians, chaired the commission. 2. Tammany conceded that social problems had grown too big to be handled by party machines, it would now be the states problem. d. Cultural Pluralism Embattledurban liberals denounced prohibition and anti-immigrant proposals as attacks on the personal liberty and worthiness of urban immigrants. The Democrats became the beneficiaries of the rise of urban liberalism. e. Organized LaborCity machines adopted urban liberalism easily. Trade unions did notthey opposed state interference in labors affairs. i. Voluntarism was the idea that workers should not seek form government what they could accomplish by their own economic power and self help.

V.

ii. The Danbury Hatters case (1908) declared a boycott by the Hatters Union against the antiunion D.E. Loewe & Company to be a conspiracy in restraint of trade under the Sherman act. iii. Judges were willing to grant orders prohibiting unions from carrying on strikes or boycotts. iv. 1906the AFL demanded that Congress grant unions immunity from antitrust suits and injunctions. 1. The unions became more politically active, supporting candidates who favored their program. 2. The Democrats were the more pro-labor party. f. Toward Social Insuranceindustrial hazards were common. Laborers demanded state-funded accident insurance like they had in Germany and Britain. i. Between 1910 and 1917, all the industrial states enacted insurance laws covering on-the-job accidents. ii. The US hesitated to hover health insurance and unemployment compensation. Racism and Reform a. In the South, the primary was a white primary. The Democratic nomination excluded African Americans from the nominating process b. White Supremacy in the Progressive VeinProfessor John W. Burgess denounced the 15th Amendment, believing that there was a vast difference in political capacity between blacks and whites. i. Early 1900s200,000 blacks migrated to the North. Whites resented their arrival and attacked them. ii. D.W. Griffiths film Birth of a Nation (1915) depicted Reconstruction as a moral struggle between rampaging blacks and a chivalrous KKK. c. Civil Rights Struggle Revived i. William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston guardian and critic of BT Washington, was the key figure of the fight against white supremacy. ii. Trotter joined with DuBois to call their supporters to meet at Niagara Falls. The Niagara Movement resulting from the meeting defined the struggle for rights of African Americans. 1. Encouragement of black pride by all possible means 2. An uncompromising demand for full political and civil equality. 3. The resolute denial that the black American assents to inferiority. iii. Mary White Ovington, a white reformer, fought racism and helped form the NAACP. iv. The National Urban League became the lead organization in social welfare. Its main architect was William Lewis Bulkley.

Progressivism and National Politics

I.

II.

The Making of a Progressive President a. Roosevelt came from a high-minded, Christian upbringing. He always identified himself with the cause of righteousness. b. 1898TR won the NY governorship. He signaled his progressivism by pushing through civil service reform and a tax on corporate franchises. c. Hoping to neutralize him, the Republicans promoted Roosevelt to VP of McKinley in 1900. He accepted reluctantly. i. 1901McKinley was assassinated by Leon F. Czolgosz, TR became president. d. Roosevelt emphasized conservation, but he was not a preservationist wholly opposed to the exploitation of the nations wilderness. He wanted to conserve the countrys resources and make certain that commercial development was mindful of the public interest. e. 1902Roosevelt intervened in the miners strike. i. The workers worked under the United Mine Workers, led by John Mitchell. Mitchell was willing to compromise, but the miners werent. ii. Although lacking any legal grounds fro intervening, the president called both sidesthe union and mine workersto a White House conference. iii. Roosevelt solved the conflict. Regulating the Marketplace a. Trust-Busting1903: TR established a Bureau of Corporations empowered to investigate business practices and bolster the Justice Depts capacity to mount antirust suits. i. TR became the nations trust-buster, a crusader against predatory wealth. ii. He was not antibusiness, only believing that firms that abused their power deserved punishment. iii. 1904the US Steel Corporations chairman Elbert H Gary agreed to open its books to the Bureau of Corporations. If it found evidence of wrongdoing, the company would be warned privately and given a chance to set matters right. b. Railroad Regulationconvince that the RRs needed firmer oversight, Roosevelt pushed throught he Elkins Act of 1903, which prohibited discriminatory rates that gave an unfair advantage to preferred or powerful customers.