Progressives

1. Progressives American History Unit II – Becoming a World Power Chapter 6 Section 1- Progressivism

2. Reading Quiz • What was the Seventeenth Amendment? • What was the N.A.A.C.P.? • Who were the ‘muckrakers’? • What reform did the progressives want in the workplace? • What was initiative? • What was referendum? • What was recall? • What was the IWW?

3. Populist Party • Farmers as a group did not share in the general prosperity of the latter nineteenth century, and believed that they had been marked out as special victims of the new industrial system • Agricultural areas in the West and South had been hit by economicdepression years before industrial areas. In the 1880s, as drought hit the wheat-growing areas of the Great Plains and prices for Southern cotton sunk to new lows, many tenant farmers fell into deep debt. This exacerbated long-held grievances against railroads, lenders, grain-elevator owners, and others with whom farmers did business. • Party of the People- farmers and reformers- 1892 • Governors, Senators and even a presidential candidate

4. Populist Party- The goal was not just to relieve economic pressure on agriculture, but also to restore democracy by eliminating what the Populists saw as the corrupt and corrupting alliance between business and government. • Platform: Omaha 1892 • Support Labor Unions • Wealth belongs to those who make it • Government ownership of Railroads, telephone and telegraph. • Free Silver • Graduated Income Tax • Secret Ballot • Shorten work hours. • Initiative and Referendum • Direct election of Senators • Restriction of Immigration Mary Lease

5. Who were the reformers? What did they want? Mostly middle class people (Roosevelt called them Muckrakers) concerned with social issues of the times. Issues such as; immigrants - oldcomers and newcomers city life- poor and needy, and prohibition crime and corruption strikes, Workman’s compensation, minimum wage Political bosses city/state governments- direct democracy, tax laws Giant business corporations Women’s Suffrage Child Labor

6. Muckrakers Name applied to American journalists, novelists, and critics who in the first decade of the 20th cent. attempted to expose the abuses of business and the corruption in politics. The term derives from the word muckrake used by President Theodore Roosevelt in a speech in 1906, in which he agreed with many of the charges of the muckrakers but asserted that some of their methods were sensational and irresponsible. The muckraking movement lost support in about 1912. Historians agree that if it had not been for the revelations of the muckrakers the Progressive movement would not have received the popular support needed for effective reform.

7. Muckrakers • Miss Ida Tarbell had been at work for years on her history of the Standard Oil Company, and it began to run in McClure's in November 1902. • Lincoln Steffen's first novel on municipal corruption, "Tweed Days in St. Louis" appeared in McClure's Oct 1902. • Henry Demerest Lloyd's Wealth Against Commonwealth, published in 1894, attacked the Standard Oil Company. • How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890 by Jacob Riis, exposed life in New York's slums. • John Spargo, an Englishman, published The Bitter Cry of the Children, an account of young kids at work in sweatshops. • Perhaps the most famous Muckraking novel, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, exposed the horrors of the Chicago meat-packing plants and the immigrants who were worked to death in them. Lincoln Steffen Ida Tarbell Upton Sinclair Jacob Riis

8. Jacob Riis and Upton Sinclair • In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. In the 1880s his work gravitated towards reform and he worked with other New York reformers then crusading for better living conditions for the thousands of immigrants flocking to New York in search of new opportunities. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate". As a writer Sinclair gained fame in 1906 with the novel The Jungle, a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry. The book won Sinclair fame and fortune, and led to the implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

9. Progressive Movement • The Progressive Movement was an effort to cure many of the ills of American society that had developed during the great spurt of industrial growth in the last quarter of the 19th century. The frontier had been tamed, great cities and businesses developed and an overseas empire established, but not all citizens shared in the new wealth, prestige and optimism. • Progressivism was rooted in the belief that man was capable of improving the lot of all within society. Progressivism also was full of strong political overtones and rejected the church as the driving force for change. Supporters of the movement were found in both major political parties, Democrat and Republican. • Specific goals included: • Remove corruption and undue influence from government • Conservation • Include more people more directly in the political process. • Government must play a role to solve social problems and establish fairness in economic matters. • Race- Blacks and Native Americans • Child Labor, Workers- young and old, workers compensation, • Political Reform- Direct Election, political reform, • Anti- monopoly reform.

10. Progressive Movement • The efforts and successes: • Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890). • A minority supported socialism with government ownership of the means of production. • conservation movement • railroad legislation • food and drug laws. • elect senators • prohibition • suffrage to women. • Workers compensation, civil service, and minimum wage • efforts to place limitations on child labor were routinely thwarted by the courts. • The needs of blacks and Native Americans were poorly served by the Progressives. • Secret Ballot, Direct Election, direct primary and initiative, referendum and recall • Robert LaFollette- Leader in reform measures and the candidate of the reform element of his party for the nomination for governor in 1896 and 1898: in 1900 unanimously nominated for Governor of Wisconsin and elected by the largest plurality ever given a candidate for that office.

11. Reforming Society • Housing Reform • Civil Rights- N.A.A.C.P.; A.D.L. (Anti-Defamation League)

12. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 1909 On February 12th The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by a multiracial group of activists, who answered "The Call." They initially called themselves the National Negro Committee. Organized to end discrimination and to prevent violence against blacks, especially lynching. FOUNDERS: Ida Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English Walling and led the "Call" to renew the struggle for civil and political liberty.

13. N.A.A.C.P. • The NAACP started its own magazine, Crisisin November, 1910 • NAACP campaigned, especially in the Supreme Court against lynching, segregation and racial discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting and transportation. • NAACP also fought for Women’s Suffrage.

14. Reforming the Workplace • Florence Kelly and the 1904- National Child Labor Committee. • Limiting Women’s workdays • No minimum wage. • Courts and Labor Laws • Lochner v. New York- sided with business owners and denied. • Muller v. Oregon- set a 10 hour workday for women. • Triangle Shirtwaist fire- death of over 140 men and women. Helped bring about tougher fire-safety laws. • Unions • ILGWU- International ladies Garment workers Union. • IWW- Industrial Workers of the World

15. Child Labor • The rise of child labor in the United States began in the late seventeen and early eighteen hundreds. Industrialization was a strong force in increasing the number of working children. • By nineteen hundred more than two million U.S. children worked. Children worked in factories, mines, fields and in the streets. They picked cotton, shined shoes, sold newspapers, canned fish, made clothes and wove fabric. Children were forced into this situation in order to help support their families. Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high. Has worked half a year.

16. Child Labor • Working conditions were often horrendous. Children would work twelve hours a day, six days a week throughout the year. • The hours were long, the pay was low and the children were exhausted and hungry. • Factory children were kept inside all day long, children who worked the fields spent long, hot days in the sun or went barefoot in mud and rain. • These young workers could not attend school and rarely knew how to read or write Breaker Boys" were used in the anthracite coal mines to separate slate rock from the coal after it had been brought out of the shaft. They often worked 14 to 16 hours a day.

17. Child Labor • Children in the United States continued to work under deplorable conditions until well into the mid-twentieth century. • In the early nineteen hundreds, reformers began working to raise awareness about the dangers of child labor and tried to establish laws regulating the practice. • In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee was formed. Throughout the nineteen hundreds, Congress and the Supreme Court were at odds over child labor regulation. • 1938- the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed and children were freed from the bondage of dangerous work

18. Lewis Hines In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee employed Lewis Hines as their staff investigator and photographer. Hines traveled the country taking pictures of children working in factories. Hines also lectured on the subject and once told one audience: "Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past."

19. Congress Attempts to Control Child Labor In 1916 Congress made its first effort to control child labor by passing the Keating-Owen Act. The legislation forbade the transportation among states of products of factories, shops or canneries employing children under 14 years of age, of mines employing children under 16 years of age, and the products of any of these employing children under 16 who worked at night or more than eight hours a day. In 1918 the Supreme Court ruled that the Keating-Owen Act was unconstitutional. After the Supreme Court ruled that the Keating-Owen Act was unconstitutional, Congress passed a Second Child Labor Law. This levied a tax of ten per cent on the net profits of factories employing children under the age of 14, and of mines and quarries employing children under the age of 16. This legislation was declared unconstitutional as a result of the Drexel Furniture Company case in 1922.

20. Fair Labor Standards Act June, 1938, that Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. The main objective of the act was to eliminate "labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers". This included the prohibition of child labor in all industries engaged in producing goods in inter-state commerce. It set the minimum age at 14 for employment outside of school hours in non-manufacturing jobs, at 16 for employment during school hours, and 18 for hazardous occupations.

21. Reforming Government • City Government reforms • New rules for police, releasing debtors from prison and a fairer tax system. • 5 member commission system • Council-manager model • State government reforms • Election reforms • Seventeenth Amendment • Initiative, referendum and recall.

22. City Government Commission Plan • Replaced the mayor and council with a small board of commissioners, each elected at large and each responsible for a single area of municipal administration. • Under the new plan voters could easily identify and punish those responsible for shortcomings in city services.

23. City Government City Manager scheme • Under this plan an elected city council determined basic policy and appointed a professional, nonpartisan city manager who was in charge of the day-to-day operation of the municipality. Worked well in small cities. • Critics of corruption urged adoption of nonpartisan elections, new methods of municipal accounting, a civil service system for city employees, and state constitutional amendments to halt state legislative interference in municipal affairs.

24. Direct Democracy • Secret Ballot • Direct Primary- People select the candidates • INITIATIVE: The people may initiate(propose) by 5-8% petition of voters a bill to a legislature. • REFERENDUM: The people may use referendum (popular ballot) to enact, approve or reject acts of the legislature. • RECALL: All elected public officials in the State, except judicial officers, are subject to recall (by petition) by the voters of the State and forced to stand for re-election at any time. • 17th Amendment: Direct Election of Senators. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote