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Progressivism. Realizing our nation’s wrongs. Problems of Urbanization. Tenements : run-down overcrowded apartment houses that led to the spread of disease Slum : an entire neighborhood with overcrowding and dangerous living
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Progressivism Realizing our nation’s wrongs
Problems of Urbanization • Tenements: run-down overcrowded apartment houses that led to the spread of disease • Slum: an entire neighborhood with overcrowding and dangerous living • Political machines: illegal gangs in urban areas that influenced people to vote for their political candidate and led to political corruption • Patronage: the exchange of a government job for political support (I’ll give you a job if you vote for me)
Problems of Industrialization • Sweatshops: A factory with long hours, low wages, and poor conditions • Chinese Exclusion Act: A law passed in 1882 that banned Chinese immigration for ten years • Prejudice and hate crimes
The Progressive Era (1890-1920) • Progressivism: Reform movements with the goal of raising living standards and correcting the wrongs in American society • Reform: To improve, correct error, and remove defect • Improving labor • Protecting consumers • Protecting the environment • Expanding democracy • Expanding the government • Women’s rights
Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt William Howard Taft Woodrow Wilson
Writers expose corruption • A muckraker is a journalist who exposes the “muck”, or corruption, in society. • Posing as a patient with a mental illness, Nellie Bly describes her experience, “My teeth chattered and my limbs were goose-fleshed and blue with cold. Suddenly I got, one after the other, three buckets of water over my head—ice-cold water, too, into my eyes, my ears, my nose, and my mouth.”
The Labor Movement The workers who went on strike never got their jobs back • Creation of labor unions, organizations that negotiated with businesses for better working conditions • Example: In the Homestead Strike, Unions organized a strike against Carnegie’s steel mills. The mills hired nonunion workers and 300 armed guards to protect the mills. After four months, the workers on strike gave up and the union broke up.
The Labor Movement • Example: The Pullman Strike occurred when the Pullman Palace Car Company cut workers’ pay by 25 percent. The workers began a strike which spread throughout the entire rail industry in 1894 • Railroads across the country were no longer used until President Grover Cleveland called federal troops to stop the strike
Protecting Consumers • The Jungle: A novel written by Upton Sinclair describing the conditions in a food packaging plant, including finding dead rats in sausage. • Theodore Roosevelt passed the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act • Roosevelt’s Square Deal was an attempt to eliminate corruption in business • Broke up trusts, businesses that teamed up to control the industry
Excerpt from The Jungle “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan.”
Theodore Roosevelt was a conservationist, a person who strives to conserve natural resources As president, he preserved 194 million acres of land, including the Grand Canyon Protecting the Environment
Expanding Democracy • Direct Primaries: Voters could choose candidates for public office • Initiative: Voters may directly propose laws. • Referendum: Voters can approve proposed laws. • Recall: Elected officials can be voted out of office. • William Howard Taft • The Seventeenth Amendment gave voters the right to elect senators.
Expanding the Government • William Howard Taft • The Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to create federal income taxes. • Woodrow Wilson • Federal Reserve Act: Government-owned banks (the Federal Reserve) that distribute money to consumer banks (Bank of America, Chase, etc). • The rise of Socialism • An economic system controlled by the government; the opposite of capitalism
Women’s Rights • With more jobs available due to industrialization, more women entered the workplace. • The fight for women’s suffrage, the right to vote • Susan B. Anthony became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1892 • Led major campaigns to gain the right to vote, and by 1914, 11 western states had given women the right to vote • Arrested in 1872 for illegally voting
Women’s Rights • In 1918, during World War I, Carrie Chapman Catt, the newest president of NAWSA, offered the services of NAWSA to the government • Under the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, giving women the right to vote.
Carrie Chapman Catt “This government is menaced with great danger....That danger lies in the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the cities, and the ignorant foreign vote which was sought to be brought up by each party, to make political success....There is but one way to avert the danger--cut off the vote of the slums and give to woman, who is bound to suffer all, and more than man can, of the evils his legislation has brought upon the nation, the power of protecting herself that man has secured for himself--the ballot.”
