Social Issues of the Progressive Era

1
Social Issues of the Progressive Era

• Background for Broken Blossoms, The Birth of a
  Nation, and Within Our Gates

2
Progressive Era

• Usually 1900 through U.S. entry into WWI (1918),
  although reforms dated from the late 1880s
• Belief in the power of governments at local,
  state, and national levels to effect political
  and social change
• For women, national housekeeping movement
  toward more involvement in government, including
  woman suffrage

3
Progressive Era Issues

• Industrialism, unions, and worker safety
  (corporate rapacity)
• Population control and womens sexuality
• Immigration
• Race
• Rise of organized crime
• Drug abuse and alcoholism
• Prostitution and white slavery
• Poverty and the urban underclass
• Urbanization, overcivilization, and the
  destruction of the wilderness

4
Reforms and Reformers

• Theodore Roosevelt
• Cleaned up police corruption as Police
  Commissioner of New York City
• As President of the U.S. (1901-1908), established
  the National Parks system (Gifford Pinchot)
• Supported an investigation in United Mine
  Workers strike in 1892 that led to higher wages
• Trust-buster enforcing the Interstate Commerce
  Act (1887), the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890)
• But--supported annexation of the Philippines and
  other imperial ventures

5
Reforms and Reformers

• Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House
  (settlement house)
• Margaret Sanger, birth control movement
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Robert M. LaFollette (politician)
• William Jennings Bryan, presidential candidate
• John Dewey (education)

6
Muckrakers

• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (led to the Pure Food
  and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906)
• Ida Tarbell, The History of The Standard Oil
  Company
• David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the
  Senate
• Ray Stannard Baker, The Right to Work
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors Lynch Law
  in All Its Phases
• Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
• McClures Magazine

7
Social Issues in Film

• White slavery
• Reginald Wright Kauffmann, The House of Bondage
• Traffic in Souls (1913)
• The Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913)
• The Red Kimono (1926)
• Birth Control and Abortion
• Where Are My Children? (1916)

8
Crime and Addiction

• The Black Hand
• Musketeers of Pig Alley
• Regeneration (1915)
• Human Wreckage (1923)
• The Cocaine Traffic / The Drug Terror (1914)
• John Barleycorn (1914, based on the book by Jack
  London)

9
Labor and Industrial Exploitation

• Griffith, A Corner in Wheat (1908)
• The Valley of the Moon (1914, from the novel by
  Jack London)
• Children Who Labor (1912)
• The Cry of the Children (1912)
• Fires of Youth (1914)

10
Ethnicity and Immigration

• The Italian (1915)
• Broken Blossoms (1919)
• The Immigrant (1917)
• Hungry Hearts (1922 based on the stories of
  Anzia Yezierska)

11
D. W. Griffith (1875-1948)

• Began as an actor and then a director with
  American Mutoscope and Biograph Company (14th
  St., New York)
• 1-2 reel pictures, including A Corner in Wheat
  (1908)
• Judith of Bethulia (1913), feature-length film
• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Intolerance (1916), four parallel stories
• Broken Blossoms (1919)
• Way Down East (1920)
• Orphans of the Storm (1921)
• The Struggle (1931) (last film)

12
The Birth of a Nation (1915)

• Based on the novel The Clansman (1905) by Thomas
  Dixon
• NAACP protested its release in most major cities
• Woodrow Wilson is supposed to have said it was
  like writing history with lightning.
• The myth of the Old South
• white supremacy aristocracy of blood
• purity of Southern womanhood as a symbol of the
  Souths values and Southern chivalry toward women
  as an emblem of masculinity
• racial hierarchy
• What does the artwork on this poster emphasize
  about the film?

13
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

• W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk
  (1903) The the problem of the Twentieth Century
  is the problem of the color-line.
• Concepts
• Talented tenth
• the veil
• double consciousness
• Being a race man versus passing for white

14
Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951)

• Homesteader, novelist, director
• Conquest, the Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913)
  (novel)
• The Homesteader (1917) (novel)
• The Homesteader (1919, film)
• Within Our Gates (1920)
• Body and Soul (1924, starring Paul Robeson)
• Veiled Aristocrats (1932)based on the novel The
  House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt.
  Micheaux had made a silent version in 1925 under
  Chesnutts original title.