The Progressive Impulse

1
The Progressive Impulse

• Progressivism was an optimistic vision, an idea
  of progress, believed society was capable of
  improvement and that continued growth and
  advancement were the nation's destiny, believed
  that direct, purposeful human intervention in
  social and economic affairs was essential to
  ordering and bettering society

2
The Progressive Impulse

• Antimonopoly was the fear of concentrated power
  and the urge to limit and disperse authority and
  wealth, this appealed to workers, farmers, and to
  some middle class Americans

3
The Progressive Impulse

• Social Cohesion was the belief that individuals
  are not autonomous but part of a great web of
  social relationships, the welfare of any single
  person is dependent on the welfare of society as
  a whole

4
The Progressive Impulse

• Based on a deep faith in knowledge, social order
  was a result of intelligent social organization
  and rational procedures for guiding social and
  economic life

5
The Progressive Impulse

• Role of Government modernized government must
  play an important role in the process of
  improving and stabilizing society

6
The Progressive Impulse

• Muckrakers crusading journalists, committed to
  exposing scandal, corruption and injustice to
  public view

7
The Progressive Impulse

• Charles Francis Adams Jr- began to uncover
  corruption among railroad barons

8
The Progressive Impulse

• Ida Tarbell most notable of railroad trust
  exposes, wrote an enormous and influential study
  of the Standard Oil trust

9
The Progressive Impulse

• Lincoln Steffens wrote a portrait of machine
  governments and boss rule, his tone studied moral
  outrage (The Shame of the Cities) - all helped
  arouse sentiment for urban political reform

10
The Progressive Impulse

• Muckrakers investigated governments, labor
  unions, corporations explored the problems of
  child labor, immigrant ghettoes, prostitution,
  and family disorganization denounced the waste
  of natural resources, subjugation of women, and
  occasionally the oppression of blacks

11
The Progressive Impulse

• Muckrakers argued that people themselves must
  take greater interest in public life by
  presenting social problems to the public with
  indignation and moral fervor they helped inspire
  other Americans to take action

12
The Progressive Impulse

• Expressed basic progressive impulses opposition
  to monopoly, belief in the need for social unity
  in the face of corruption and injustice

13
The Progressive Impulse

• Social Gospel reformers committed to the
  pursuit of social justice, powerful movement
  within American Protestantism, chiefly concerned
  with redeeming nation's cities

14
The Progressive Impulse

• Salvation Army- example of fusion of religion
  with reform, offered both material aid and
  spiritual service to the urban poor

15
The Progressive Impulse

• Charles Sheldon wrote In His Steps about a young
  minister who abandoned comfortable life to work
  among the needy, became the most successful novel
  of the era

16
The Progressive Impulse

• Walter Rauschensbusch published a series of
  influential discourse on the possibilities for
  human salvation through Christian reform

One could hear human virtue cracking and
crashing all around. Walter Rauschenbusch
17
The Progressive Impulse

• Catholic liberal Father John A. Ryan worked to
  expand the scope of Catholic social welfare
  system

18
The Progressive Impulse

• Critics of Social Gospel saw it as irrelevant
  moralization, William Graham Sumner argued that
  people's fortunes reflected their inherent
  "fitness" for survival, many progressive
  theorists disagreed ignorance, poverty and
  criminality were not result of genetic failings-
  effects of unhealthy environment

19
The Progressive Impulse

• Jacob Riis exposed the crowded immigrant
  neighborhoods of the American cities through
  photographs and lurid descriptions

20
The Progressive Impulse

• Jane Adams established the Hull House which
  became a model for more than 400 similar
  institutions, sought to help immigrant families
  adapt to the language and customs of their new
  country, training ground for future female
  leaders, spawned the profession of social work
  where women played a vital role, produced
  elaborate surveys, reports and collected
  statistics

21
The Progressive Impulse

• Women played an important role in social work
  where they produced elaborate surveys and
  reports, collected statistics, and published
  scholarly tracts on the need for urban reform

22
The Progressive Impulse

• Many reforms came to believe that only
  enlightened experts and well-designed
  bureaucracies could create stability and order

23
The Progressive Impulse

• Thorstein Veblen was one of the most influential
  social scientists, critical of the "leisure
  class" (industrial tycoons), proposed new
  economic system in which power would reside in
  the hands of highly trained engineers

24
The Progressive Impulse

• Taylorism impulse toward expertise and
  organization, encouraged development of mass
  production techniques, assembly line, new
  organization, resulted in a dramatic expansion in
  number of Americans engaged in administrative and
  professional tasks, the new Middle Class placed
  high value on education

25
The Progressive Impulse

• Doctors who considered themselves trained
  professionals began forming local associations
  and societies- American Medical Association
  reorganized into a national professional society

26
The Progressive Impulse

• Johns Hopkins compared favorably with the leading
  medical schools in Europe, and doctors there such
  as William H. Welch taught by moving the students
  out of the classrooms and into laboratories and
  clinics

27
The Progressive Impulse

• By 1916 lawyers in 48 states had established
  professional bar associations
• The Progressive Impulse
• Business administration created the National
  Association of Manufactures and the United States
  Commerce

28
The Progressive Impulse

• Admission requirements into newly formed
  professions effort to defend the professions from
  the untrained and incompetent, women found
  themselves excluded from most of the emerging
  professions, most important job for women was
  teaching 90 of all professional women were
  teachers

29
The Progressive Impulse

• Women's Professions had much in common with other
  professions, value placed on training and
  expertise, creation of professional organizations
  and professional identity usually helping
  professions like nursing and librarians

30
Women and Reform

• New Woman house work was less onerous, occupies
  only a small part of the day, began looking for
  activities outside the home, declining family
  size, lived longer, single women were among the
  most prominent female reformers, high levels of
  education became available

31
Women and Reform

• The divorce rate rose quickly in the late 19th
  century from one divorce in 21 to one in 9 by
  1916.
• Boston Marriages women lived together,
  sometimes romantically

32
Women and Reform

• Women's Clubs were a large network of
  organizations to provide an outlet for
  intellectual energies, General Federation of
  Women's Clubs had over 1 million members by 1917,
  became more concerned with social betterment,
  most excluded blacks who formed their own clubs

33
Women and Reform

• National Association of Colored Women some
  crusaded against lynching, protested aspects of
  segregation

34
Women and Reform

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her book Woman and
  Economics argued that the traditional definition
  of gender roles was obsolete

35
Women and Reform

• Accomplishments of Clubs supported schools,
  libraries, settlement houses, built hospitals,
  important force in winning passage of state laws
  that regulated conditions of women and child
  labor, outlawed the manufacture and sale of
  alcohol

36
Women and Reform

• Mother's Pensions some state legislatures
  provided pensions to widowed or abandoned mothers
  with small children, became part of the Social
  Security system

37
Women and Reform

• Childrens Bureau in the Labor Department
  directed to develop policies to protect children

38
Women and Reform

• Womens Trade Union League persuaded women to
  join unions, the WTUL raised money to support
  strikers on picket lines and bail strikers out of
  jail

39
Women and Reform

• Suffrage seemed a very radical demand, women
  presented their views in terms of "natural
  rights", Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that a
  woman is the arbiter of her own destiny

40
Women and Reform

• Powerful anti suffrage movement emerged defended
  existing social norms, posed a threat to "natural
  order", suffrage associated with divorce,
  promiscuity, looseness and neglect of children

41
Women and Reform

• Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt were a
  Boston social worker and journalist, thanks to
  them membership in the National American Woman
  Suffrage Association grew to over 2 million,
  argued enfranchisement would help temperance
  movement.

42
Women and Reform

• National American Woman Suffrage Association
  believed war would become a thing of the past,
  promised to reshape the role of women and reform
  social order, separation of the suffrage movement
  from more radical feminist goals and its
  associations with other reform causes of concern
  helped it gain widespread support

43
Women and Reform

• Some suffrage advocates claimed that once women
  could vote war would stop, one reason why WW1
  gave a decisive push for suffrage

44
Women and Reform

• Florence Kelley helped organize NAACP, was a
  prominent social reformer

45
Women and Reform

• In 1910, Washington became the first state in 14
  years to extend suffrage to women, California
  followed a year later, strength of suffrage in
  western states result of an absence of large
  Catholic communities, suffrage fight rarely
  intersected with other, more divisive issues

46
Women and Reform

• By 1919, 39 states has given women the right to
  vote, in 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment
  guaranteed political rights to women, Alice Paul
  was the head of the militant National Woman's
  Party and argued women needed a constitutional
  amendment that would provide clear legal
  protection for their rights, prohibit
  discrimination on the basis of sex- Equal Rights
  Amendment

47
The Assault on the Parties

• Only government could effectively counter the
  many powerful private interests that threatened
  the nation

48
The Assault on the Parties

• Before they could reform society effectively they
  would have to reform government- considered
  parties corrupt, undemocratic and reactionary

49
The Assault on the Parties

• Former Mugwumps (Independent Republicans) became
  important supporters of progressive political
  reform

50
The Assault on the Parties

• States adopted secret ballot- helped chip away at
  the power of the parties over the voters

51
The Assault on the Parties

• Party Rule could be broken by increasing the
  power of the people and by permitting them to
  circumvent partisan institutions and express
  their will directly at the polls or by placing
  more power in the hands of nonpartisan officials

52
The Assault on the Parties

• By the end of the century a new generation of
  activists were taking a growing interest in
  government no longer "vulgar" activity

53
The Assault on the Parties

• Opponents city bosses, large group of special
  interests, saloon owners, businessmen who
  established lucrative relationships with the
  urban machines, influential newspapers ridiculed
  reforms as naive do gooders

54
The Assault on the Parties

• Galveston, Texas after a devastating tidal wave
  the reformers won approval of a new city charter
  mayor and council replaces by an elected
  nonpartisan commission

55
The Assault on the Parties

• City-manager-Plan another approach to municipal
  reform, elected officials hired an outside expert
  to take charge of the government

56
The Assault on the Parties

• Tom Johnson celebrated reform mayor of
  Cleveland- waged a long and difficult war against
  powerful streetcar interests.
• Cleveland came to be known as the best-governed
  city in America

57
The Assault on the Parties

• State-level progressives considered existing
  state government unfit to answer society's needs

58
The Assault on the Parties

• Initiative allowed reformers to circumvent state
  legislatures altogether by submitting new
  legislation directly to voters in general
  elections

59
The Assault on the Parties

• Referendum provided a method by which actions of
  legislature could be returned to the electorate
  for approval.

60
The Assault on the Parties

• Direct primary attempt to take selection of
  candidates away from the bosses and give it to
  the people- effort to limit black voting

61
The Assault on the Parties

• Recall gave voters the right to remove a public
  official from office at a special election

62
The Assault on the Parties

• Robert M La Follette helped turn the state of
  Wisconsin into a "laboratory of progressivism"
  regulated railroads and utilities, referendums,
  primaries, initiatives, compensation for laborers
  injured on the job

63
The Assault on the Parties

• Decline in voter turnout and political parties,
  1900 73 of the electoral voted while by 1920 it
  declined to 49

64
The Assault on the Parties

• Interest groups new organizations outside the
  party system, designed to pressure government to
  do their member's bidding

65
The Assault on the Parties

• New pattern of politics many individual
  interests organized to influence government
  directly rather than through party structure

66
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Middle class reformers mainly from the east
  dominated the public image of progressivism, but
  working class Americans, African Americans,
  westerners, and even party bosses played
  important roles in reforms of the era

67
Sources of Progressive Reform

• California passed a child labor law, womens
  compensation law and a limitation on working
  hours for women

68
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Tammany Hall leader Charles Francis Murphy, used
  political power on behalf of legislation to
  improve working conditions, protect child
  laborers and eliminate the worst abuses of
  industrial economy

69
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire killed 146
  workers mostly women, many of them died because
  the management had locked the emergency exits to
  keep malingering resulted in reports calling for
  major reforms in the conditions of modern labor

70
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Most effective supporter were two Tammany
  Democrats- Wagner and Smith- steered through a
  series of pioneering labor laws that imposed
  strict regulations on factory owners and
  established effective mechanisms of enforcement

71
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Western state reformers important target was the
  federal government- authority over the land
  rested in federal bureaucracies- could move
  quickly and decisively to embrace reforms.
  Question of who had the rights to the waters of
  the Colorado River

72
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Most of the growth of the west was a result of
  federally funded dams and water projects

73
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Booker T. Washington to work for immediate
  self-improvement rather than long- range social
  change

74
Sources of Progressive Reform

• W.E.B Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk rather
  than content themselves with education at trade
  and agricultural schools advocated talented
  blacks should accept nothing less than a full
  university education, fight for immediate
  restoration of their civil rights- not simply
  wait for them to be granted

Is it possible and probable that nine millions
of men can make effective progress in economic
lines if they are deprived of political rights,
made a servile caste, and allowed only the most
meager chance for developing their exceptional
men? W. E. B. Du Bois
75
Sources of Progressive Reform

• Niagara Movement formed the NAACP, led the drive
  for equal rights
• NAACP one of the nations leading black
  organizations, stressed the opportunity for
  exceptional blacks to gain positions of full
  equality

76
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Women saw alcohol as a source of some of the
  greatest problems of working-class wives and
  mothers, hoped through temperance to reform male
  behavior and thus improve women's lives

77
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Political reformers saw an attack on drinking as
  an attack on the city bosses

78
The Crusade for Social Reform

• 1873 temperance advocates formed the Women's
  Christian Temperance Union led by Frances
  Willard, publicized the evils of alcohol and the
  connection between drunkenness and family
  violence, unemployment, poverty and disease

79
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Anti-Saloon League joined with the WCTU and began
  to press for legal abolition of saloons

80
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Americas entry into World War 1 and the moral
  fervor it unleashes provided last push to
  advocates of prohibition

81
The Crusade for Social Reform

• 1920 18th amendment became a law- Rhode Island
  and Connecticut last to ratify

82
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Some progressives argued that the introduction of
  immigrants was polluting the nations' racial
  stock.

83
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Eugenics the science of altering the
  reproductive processes of plants and animals to
  produce new hybrids and breeds

84
The Crusade for Social Reform

• When applied to people an effort to grade races
  and ethnic groups according to their genetic
  qualities, advocated forced sterilization of the
  mentally retarded, criminals and others

85
The Crusade for Social Reform

• Madison Grant The Passing of the Great Race-
  nations most effective nativist, warned of the
  dangers of racial mongrelization and importance
  of keeping Anglo-Saxon pure

86
The Crusade for Social Reform

• The Dillingham Report argued that the new
  immigrant groups had proven themselves less
  assimilatable than earlier immigrants-
  immigration should be restricted by nationality

87
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Issue that overshadowed and helped to shape all
  others in the minds of reformers was the
  character of the dramatically growing modern
  industrial economy- corruption and growing
  influence of corporate America

88
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Socialist Party of America grew during the
  progressive era
• Socialist Presidential Candidate 1912 Eugene
  Debs
• Strongest following in urban immigrant
  communities, Germans and Jews, Protestant farmers
  in the South and Midwest

89
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Supporters Lincoln Steffens, crusader against
  municipal corruption, Walter Lipman brilliant
  social critic, Florence Kelley, Frances Willard
• Beliefs need for basic structural changes in the
  economy, some endorsed radical goals of European
  Marxists, other envisioned a more moderate reform
  that would allow small-scale private enterprise
  to survive

90
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies)
  radical labor union, under leadership of William
  (big Bill) Haywood- advocated single union for
  all workers and abolition of the "wage slave"
  system, rejected political action in favor of
  strikes, dynamiting of railroads lines and power
  stations

91
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• 1917 strike by IWW timber workers in Washington
  and Idaho virtually shut down production in the
  industry- federal authorities imprisoned the
  leaders of the union

92
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Reformers argued that the federal government
  should work to break up the largest combinations
  and enforce a balance between the need for big
  business and the need for competition

93
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Louis D Brandeis brilliant lawyer and later
  justice of the Supreme court- spoke about the
  "curse of bigness", threat not just to efficiency
  but to freedom

94
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Government should distinguish between good and
  bad trusts- continued oversight by strong
  centralized government was essential

95
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Herbert Croly The Promise of American Life
  became one of the most influential progressive
  documents, "nationalist" position, focused on
  some form of coordination of the industrial
  economy

96
Challenging the Capitalist Order

• Theodore Roosevelt was one who endorsed the
  notion of the government playing a more active
  role in regulating and planning economic life