Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt

1
Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt

• Ch. 28

2
Progressive Roots

• Progressivism was response to social, political,
  and economical ills
• Lloyd publishes book about Standard Oil Co.
  Wealth Against Commonwealth
• Riis publishes book How the Other Half Lives
  that talks about the slums
• Muckrakers expose corruption and scandal

3
Racking Muck with Muckrakers

• 1902, New York reporter, Lincoln Steffens
  launched a series of articles in McClure's titled
  "The Shame of the Cities" which unmasked the
  corrupt alliance between big business and
  municipal government.

4

• David G. Phillips published a series, "The
  Treason of the Senate" in Cosmopolitan that
  charged that 75 of the 90 senators did not
  represent the people but they rather represented
  railroads and trusts.

5

• Ray Stannard's Following the Color Line (1908)
  about suppression of blacks
• John Spargo wrote of the abuses of child labor in
  The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906).

6
Political Progressivism

• Progressives consisted mostly of middle class men
  and women.
• 2 goals to use state power to control the
  trusts and to stem the socialist threat by
  generally improving the common person's
  conditions of life and labor.

7

• Progressives wanted to regain the power that had
  slipped from the hands of the people into those
  of the "interests." 
• Progressives supported direct primary elections
  and favored "initiative" so that voters could
  directly
• They also supported "referendum" and "recall." 
  Referendum would place laws on ballots for final
  approval by the people, and recall would enable
  the voters to remove faithless corrupt officials.
• As a result of pressure from the public's
  progressive reformers, the 17th Amendment was
  passed to the Constitution in 1913.  It
  established the direct election of U.S. senators.
•  

8
Progressivism in the Cities and States

• States start to regulate RR trusts

9
Progressive Women

• settlement house movement-exposed middle-class
  women to poverty, political corruption, and
  intolerable working and living conditions.
• Female activists worked through organizations
  like the Women's Trade Union League and the
  National Consumers League.
• Florence Kelley took control of the National
  Consumers League in 1899 and mobilized female
  consumers to pressure for laws safeguarding women
  and children in the workplace. 
• Caught up in the crusade, some states controlled,
  restricted, or abolished alcohol.

10
TRs Square Deal for Labor

• Control of the corporations, consumer protection,
  and conservation of natural resources.
• Pennsylvania Mine company-TR made sure
  negotiations were made
• Dep. Of Commerce (1903) created to help
  relationship between capital and labor

11
TR Corral Corruption

• ICA was worthless, RR found ways around it,
  Congress reacts.
• Elkins Act-heavy fines to be placed on railroads
  that gave rebates and on the shippers that
  accepted them.
• Hepburn Act-restricting free passes and expanding
  the Interstate Commerce Commission to extend to
  include express companies, sleeping-car
  companies, and pipelines

12

• In 1902, President Roosevelt challenged the
  Northern Securities Company, a railroad trust
  company that sought to achieve a monopoly of the
  railroads in the Northwest.  The Supreme Court
  upheld the President and the trust was forced to
  be dissolved.

13
Caring for the Consumer

• Meat Inspection Act of 1906-act stated that the
  preparation of meat shipped over state lines
  would be subject to federal inspection. 
• Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906- designed to
  prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of foods
  and pharmaceuticals.

14
Earth Control

• Desert Land Act of 1887-the federal government
  sold dry land cheaply on the condition that the
  purchaser would irrigate the soil within 3
  years. 
• Forest Reserve Act of 1891-authorized the
  president to set aside public forests as national
  parks and other reserves.

15

• Carey Act of 1894 distributed federal land to the
  states on the condition that it be irrigated and
  settled.
• Newlands Act of 1902-authorized the federal
  government to collect money from the sale of
  public lands in western states and then use these
  funds for the development of irrigation projects.

16

• Under President Roosevelt, professional foresters
  and engineers developed a policy of "multiple-use
  resource management."  They sought to combine
  recreation, sustained-yield logging, watershed
  protection, and summer stock grazing on the same
  expanse of federal land.  Many westerners soon
  realized how to work with federal conservation
  programs and not resist the federal management of
  natural resources.
•  

17
Roosevelt Panic of 1907

• Roosevelt was elected for a 3rd term.
• A panic descended upon Wall Street in 1907.  The
  financial world blamed the panic on President
  Roosevelt for unsettling the industries with his
  anti-trust tactics.
• Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908 which authorized
  national banks to issue emergency currency backed
  by various kinds of collateral.

18
Rough Riders Thunders Out

• Taft wins 1908 election. Was TRs sec of war
• Roosevelt attempted to protect against socialism
  and to protect capitalists against popular
  indignation.  He greatly enlarged the power and
  prestige of the presidential office, and he
  helped shape the progressive movement and beyond
  it, the liberal reform campaigns later in the
  century.  TR also opened the eyes of Americans to
  the fact that they shared the world with other
  nations.

19

• Taft wasnt TR. Was very passive.
• Taft encouraged businesses to invest in foreign
  countries
• President Taft saw in the Manchurian monopoly a
  possible strangulation of Chinese economic
  interests and a slamming of the Open Door
  policy.  In 1909, Secretary of State Philander C.
  Knox proposed that a group of American and
  foreign bankers buy the Manchurian railroads and
  then turn them over to China.  Both Japan and
  Russia flatly rejected the selling of their
  railroads.
•  

20
Taft the Trustbuster

• 90 lawsuits against the trusts during his 4 years
  in office as opposed to Roosevelt who brought
  just 44 suits in 7 years.
• 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution
  of the Standard Oil Company, stating that it
  violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. 
• 1911, the Courts handed down its "rule of
  reason" a doctrine that stated that only those
  trusts that unreasonably restrained trade were
  illegal.

21
Taft Splits the Republican Party

• Payne-Aldrich Bill in 1909, a tariff bill that
  placed a high tariff on many imports.  With the
  signing, Taft betrayed his campaign promises of
  lowering the tariff.

22

• 1910, the Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel erased much
  of his conservationist record.  When Secretary of
  the Interior Richard Ballinger opened public
  lands in Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska to
  corporate development, he was criticized by chief
  of the Agriculture Department's Division of
  Forestry, Gifford Pinchot.  When Taft dismissed
  Pinchot, much protest arose from
  conservationists.

23

• 1910, the reformist wing of the Republican Party
  was furious with Taft and the Republican Party
  had split.  One once supporter of Taft,
  Roosevelt, was now an enemy.  Taft had broken up
  Roosevelt's U.S. Steel Corporation, which
  Roosevelt had worked long and hard to form.

24
Taft-Roosevelt Rupture

• National Progressive Republican League was formed
  with La Follette as its leading candidate for the
  Republican presidential nomination.
• In February of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, with his
  new views on Taft, announced that he would run
  again for presidency, clarifying that he said he
  wouldn't run for 3 consecutive terms.
• The Taft-Roosevelt explosion happened in June of
  1912 when the Republican convention met in
  Chicago.  When it came time to vote, the
  Roosevelt supporters claimed fraud and in the end
  refused to vote.  Taft subsequently won the
  Republican nomination.
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