The Progressive Era, 1900-1917

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, March 25, 1911

• A Normal Manufacturing Sweatshop

• 500 young female employees

• Unsafe conditions

• Flash fire in Rag Bin

• Trapped by doors

• Botched assistance

• 146 die, NY creates Bureau of Fire Prevention

The Progressive Society

• The Progressive Era

• Economic Growth:– +75% Physical Production– +20% Real Per Capita Income– Investment Abroad: +400%– Government doubles infrastructure spending

• But Inflation doubles the cost of living

Growth

• 1900: 38 cities of 100,000 or more

• 1920: 68 cities of 100,000+

• 1930: Over 100 cities of 100,000+

• Immigration: 8.8 million

Corporate Growth

• 1898: 82 trusts

• 1904: 318 large business combines

• Americans fear concentration of wealth

• Scientific Management: Frederick Winslow Taylor

• Ford and the Assembly Line

Rising Consumption

• Consumer Goods Mechanize Housework

• Rising Hygiene

• Home Electrification

• New Leisure: – Cameras, Phonographs, Films

Travel

• Railroads

• Automobiles:– 1895: 300– 1905: 77,928 – Model T: $950 in 1908, eventually only $290

• Roads: 2 million miles

Immigration

• 1900-1930: 19 million immigrants

• Working

• Living

• Fraternal Orders

Nativism

• Nativism--Political Machines and Strikebreaking

• House-Senate Dillingham Report (1911)

• Restrictions

• Americanization

The Social Gospel

• Social Gospel

• 1893: Rerum Novarium

• Walter Rauschenbusch: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

• Liberal Christianity

• Federal Council of Churches in America (1908)

The Muckrakers

• Journalists

• Mass Circulation Magazines

• Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904)

• Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

• Ida Tarbell vs. Standard Oil

Women’s Movement

• Voting, Children, Families

• Black Reformers

• General Federation of Women’s Clubs

• National Consumer’s League

• Birth Control League

• Suffrage

• 19th Amendment (1920)

Working Class Reform and Unions

• Conditions– 35% of workers in Industry, 59 hour week, $2 a

day ($46.72 a day in today’s money)– 2 million children, 1 in 4 women work– 1917: 11,000 workers die, 1.4 million injured

Union Action

• American Federation of Labor – 250,000 to 1,670,000 in 1904– Collective Bargaining

• New Unions

• Socialism: Eugene Debs, American Socialist Party

• International Workers of the World (1905)

Results

• Union Growth: 20% unionized by 1917 (3.1 million union workers)

• Corporate Welfare

• “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.” -- W.E.B. Dubois

New Black Militancy: W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

• First Black graduate in History at Harvard• Atlanta University Professor (Sociology)• The Soul of Black Folk (1903)• Niagara Movement (1905)• National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP)• Called for Black Education and Political Pressure

for the End of Segregation

Progressive Reforms

• Protective Legislation for Women and Children

• Reshaping Public Education• Electoral Reform

– Australian Ballot– Direct Primaries– Falling Participation and Disenfranchisement– 17th Amendment

Urban Progressivism

• Attack on Machine Politics

• The New Mayors

• Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy, 1905

• Urban Government Restructuring

State Progressivism

• Urban-Rural Alliance

• Popular Participation

• Robert M. La Follette, Governor of Wisconsin, 1900

• “Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for audience; he would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one.”--Mark Twain

Teddy Roosevelt, a New Model President (1901-1908)

• Unintended Ascension

• Child of Privilege

• Public Service

• Roosevelt vs. the Senate

• Trust-Busting

Teddy and Labor

• 1902 Coal Strike

• Anti-Trust?

• Meeting

• Threat of Force

• Settlement

Second Term

• 1904 Election

• Hepburn Act

• Consumer Legislation– 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act– Meat Processing Act

• Brownsville

Conservation

• Frederic Law Olmstead

• John Muir

• National Parks: Yellowstone 1872

• Roosevelt and Conservation

• Radicalism

• I am afraid I am a constant disappointment to my party. The fact of the matter is, the longer I am president the less of a party man I seem to become.” -- William Howard Taft

William Howard Taft (1909-12)

• 1908: Taft vs. Bryan

• More Trust-Busting

• Mann-Elkins Act of 1910

• Trouble with Progressives

• Roosevelt’s Response

• Bull Moose Revolt

• There can be no equality or opportunity if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. -- Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson (1913-1920)

• Southerner, Professor, NJ Governor

• The New Freedom

• Tariff Reform

• Banking Reform: 1913 Federal Reserve Act

Wilsonian Reforms

• Farm Legislation– Smith-Lever Act– Warehouse Act of 1916– Federal Farm Loan Act

• Anti-Trust Legislation– Federal Trade Commission Act (1914)– Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914)

Wilsonian Social Legislation

• Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914

• Workman’s Compensation Act of 1916

• Adamson Act of 1916

• Keating-Owens Act of 1916

• Federal Roads Act of 1916