PROGRESSIVISM OUTLINE

ARE THESE 2 QUOTES CONTRADICTORY?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely certain way of bringing the nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.          

Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

The Progressive Era:

I.               Origins

A. Populism:

Farmers' Alliance

Omaha Platform:

--inflationary currency policy

--graduated income tax

--direct government ownership of railroad and telegraph industries

--redistribution of railroad owned lands

B. Hull House—1889

      Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr

II.             A New Mindset:

Progressivism Defined:

Progressivism was a series of movements designed to combat the ills of industrialism. Some progressives also wanted to control the behavior of the working classes.

Stanley Schultz, Univ. of Wisconsin:

·       Government should be more active

·       Social problems are susceptible to government legislation and action

·       Throw money at the problem

·       The world is “perfectible”

III.           Progressive Movements:

A.    Anti-Trust

Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890

“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

B.    Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives

To help prepare you to deal effectively with this book for the midterm, find as many specific examples (page numbers) as you can.

Let’s start with the pictures. Which photograph was most compelling?

According to Riis, what is the cause of crime?

How does Riis deal with race? What impact does race have on poverty in this book?

Based on your reading, define poverty.

What is the role of government in the slums?

According to Riis, what should be the role of government in the slums?

C.     Anti-Lynching (Ida B. Wells-Barnett)

D.    Good Government Movement

--17^th Amendment=direct election of senators

--referendums and recalls

E.     Consumer Protection: The Jungle

Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

IV.           Progressivism in Practice:

Immigration:

Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):

Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in

the national stomach.”

      1890-1900: 3.5 million

      1900-1910: 7 million

                  Ellis Island:

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.” 

Jacob Riis on social fluidity

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE OF 1911

A. The ILGWU Strike:

                  B. Fire on the Factory Floor

                  C. Reporters and the Visibility of Triangle

                              1. "Love Affair in Mid-Air"

                              2. Mortillalo and Zito

D. The Public Response

V.             Progressivism Abroad:

A. Foreign Policy Community

                  --T.R., Henry Cabot Lodge

                  --“large policy”

      B. Capitalism

      C. "Yellow" Journalism

                  Pulitzer: New York World

Hearst: New York Journal

Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)

     

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

VI.           More Progressivism in Practice:

INDUSTRIALISM AND THE NEW CITY OUTLINE

Which of the following two quotes better represents what you believe?

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” (A.C.)

                                                         --or--                                                  

         “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” (B.S.)

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.

“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?

The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:

I. Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1.  War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:

                     1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.

                     1864: Congress grants 131 million acres

                     1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2.         Resources:     land, raw materials, people,

ideas=booooooom!

…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.

…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.

                     1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel

1919: more than 24 million tons

        

                     1860: 20 million tons of coal

1910: 500 million tons of coal

                     1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum

1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum

3. Integration:

         a. Horizontal Integration:

--monopolize one part of the productive process

Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:

--monopolize all elements of productive process

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail line.

4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:

                     Laissez faire: “let it do”

                     Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

                                 “the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:

The Robber Barons

         Notable examples:

ü  John D. Rockefeller

ü  Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

ü  J.P. Morgan

ü  Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall

Street”

                                             (bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold

secrets)

ü  Cornelius Van Derbilt:

(steamships and railroads: $100 million)

Gentlemen:

You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.

                                             Sincerely,

                                                         CVD

II. The New Impoverished City

1. Rapid Urbanization:

1860:   25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census

called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas

2. Tenement Buildings:

1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

3. Contamination:

         1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

        

         Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all

the towns it washed.”

4. Crime-Filled:

         Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881

 7340 in 1898

(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

5. Women in Workforce:

         1/7^th of the Paid workforce

         (2.6 million of the 17.4 million)         

                     500,000 married, yet they were paid less than

men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

6. Immigration:

         1890-1900: 3.5 million

         1900-1910: 7 million

Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):

Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in

the national stomach.”

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.” 

Jacob Riis on social fluidity

                     Ellis Island:

7. Child Labor:

         1900: 700,000 10 and 15 year olds in workforce.

         --Monongah, West Virginia, 1907:

                                             Martin Honick

Prior to the disaster, Fairmont citizens regularly criticized miners. One Fairmont man wrote that miners in Monongah were "possibly the lowest grade of European workmen that can be imported" (Roberts 1904, 13). Relations were especially difficult, according to McAteer, between “immigrants and ‘native’ peoples” (70). One newspaper in Worthington, a town near Monongah, warned that “a lot of Italians from Monongah have been committing depredations on the farms in the vicinity…those who suffer from their petty thieving propose to resort to the shot gun in the future” (Ibid.). Others in the region shared this disdain for the miners of West Virginia. One report pondered, “We have often wondered what kind of animals they have digging coal in West Virginia…Their ignorance must be more dense, their prejudice more bitter and their blindness more intense than that of any other body of miners we have ever heard tell of” (Corbin 1981, 25).

Genevieve McDonnell, a Fairmont resident, agreed and expressed this sentiment in her poem, "To Stricken Monongah," published in the Fairmont Times on December 14^th: "We are coming, O Monongah, to thy vigil--feast of woe. We have leveled all the barriers of caste.” If anything, life in Fairmont before the Monongah explosion accentuated class differences. Before the explosion, most residents of Fairmont derided the miners and their families. But this poet mused, “Our souls will blend with your souls to the last, in a fellowship of anguish we are marshaling to thy aid." Residents of Fairmont had never before discussed such an egalitarian, heartfelt outreach to the miners in Monongah. Another Fairmont man, in the Fairmont Times on December 9^th, captured perfectly this newfound solidarity: "We are all akin today, miner, business man, boss, official, stockholder, citizen, all brothers in a kindred sorrow." Noting all masculine roles, this man recognized an affiliation between men that symbolically broke down class divisions. As he wrote, they were now “all akin.” The loss of male life caused residents of Fairmont to, in the words of another contributor, "forget their personal differences, growing out of business and personal strife, and set about to do some act of kindness." Following this major disaster, stark class and ethnic boundaries that normally separated Fairmont from Monongah blurred. The dynamic public response overrode previous public distinctions of wealth and ethnicity. As one Fairmont man insisted in his letter to the Fairmont Times, "Monongah's sorrow was a common sorrow."

Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)

"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession."

III. Justifying the New World:

Living in this time, you would have to respond to the poverty.

Two of those responses are here:

1. SOCIAL DARWINISM:

         William Graham Sumner:

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?

2. Progressivism:

RECONSTRUCTION OUTLINE

At the end of a war,

…what must be reconstructed?

…what are the biggest obstacles to repairing a broken Union?

Political Reconstruction

     A. PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

              1. Lincoln

              2. Johnson

     B. CONGRESSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION

              1. RADICALS IN CONGRESS

Thaddeus Stevens & Charles Sumner

“The foundations of their institutions

must be broken up and re-laid, or all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain.” (Stevens)

                                         Frederick Douglass (1865):

"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."

              2. MODERATES IN CONGRESS

Wade-Davis Bill (ironclad oath)

 --passed Congress at end of 1864:

--sent to the President.

What are his options?

              3. Freedmen's Bureau

     C. JOHNSON'S “RESTORATION”

              --Black Codes

     D. RADICALS STRIKE BACK

              1. First Civil Rights Bill

              2. First Reconstruction Acts

              3. 14th Amendment

              4. Tenure of Office Act

              5. Fifteenth Amendment

     E.      The Compromise of 1877

                       1. Hayes versus Tilden

2. The “End” of Reconstruction

The Souls of Black Folk (1901) W.E.B. DuBois:

"For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods...he may not leave the plantation of his birth...in the whole rural South the black farmers are...bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis...The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."