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AMERICAN
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• 2 MHEonline.com
CONTENTS
PREFACE xvii
AP U.S. HISTORY COURSE AND EXAM xxiii
AP CORRELATIONS xxvii
TO THE AP U.S. HISTORY STUDENT xxxii
1
THE COLLISION OF
CULTURES 1
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 2
AMERICA BEFORE
COLUMBUS 2
The Peoples of the Precontact
Americas 2
The Growth of Civilizations:
The South 3
The Civilizations of the North 3
Tribal Cultures 7
EUROPE LOOKS WESTWARD 7
Commerce and Nationalism 8
Christopher Columbus 9
The Conquistadores 12
Spanish America 15
Northern Outposts 17
The Empire at High Tide 17
Biological and Cultural Exchanges
Africa and America 20
2
18
iv •
32
TRANSPLANTATIONS AND
BORDERLANDS 34
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 35
THE EARLY CHESAPEAKE 35
Colonists and Natives 35
Reorganization and
Expansion 36
THE GROWTH OF NEW ENGLAND 41
Plymouth Plantation 41
The Puritan Experiment 43
The Expansion of New England 45
Settlers and Natives 46
The Pequot War, King Philip’s War, and
the Technology of Battle 47
THE RESTORATION COLONIES 49
The English Civil War 49
The Carolinas 49
New Netherland, New York, and New Jersey 51
The Quaker Colonies 52
THE ARRIVAL OF THE ENGLISH 21
The Commercial Incentive 21
The Religious Incentive 23
The English in Ireland 27
The French and the Dutch in America 29
The First English Settlements 30
Roanoke 30
AP Debating the Past
Why Do Historians So Often Differ? 8
AP Debating the Past
The American Population before Columbus 10
AP America in the World
The Atlantic Context of Early American History 22
AP America in the World
Mercantilism and Colonial Commerce 26
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
Tobacco 37
Expansion 38
Exchanges of Agricultural Technology 38
Maryland and the Calverts 39
Turbulent Virginia 40
Bacon’s Rebellion 41
BORDERLANDS AND MIDDLE GROUNDS 53
The Caribbean Islands 54
Masters and Slaves in the Caribbean 55
The Southwestern Borderlands 56
The Southeastern Borderlands 57
The Founding of Georgia 57
Middle Grounds 60
THE EVOLUTION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE 60
The Drive for Reorganization 60
The Dominion of New England 62
The “Glorious Revolution” 62
AP Debating the Past
Native Americans and the “Middle Ground” 58
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
3
63
SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN
PROVINCIAL AMERICA 65
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 66
THE COLONIAL
POPULATION 66
Indentured Servitude 66
Birth and Death 68
Medicine in the Colonies 69
Women and Families in the Chesapeake 69
Women and Families in New England 71
The Beginnings of Slavery in British America 71
Changing Sources of European Immigration 74
THE COLONIAL ECONOMIES 76
The Southern Economy 77
Northern Economic and Technological Life 78
The Extent and Limits of Technology 80
The Rise of Colonial Commerce 80
The Rise of Consumerism 81
CONTENTS
PATTERNS OF SOCIETY 82
The Plantation 83
Plantation Slavery 84
The Puritan Community 85
The Witchcraft Phenomenon 86
Cities 87
Inequality 88
AWAKENINGS AND ENLIGHTENMENTS 89
The Pattern of Religions 89
The Great Awakening 90
The Enlightenment 91
Education 92
The Spread of Science 94
Concepts of Law and Politics 95
AP Debating the Past
The Origins of Slavery 72
AP Debating the Past
The Witchcraft Trials 90
Patterns of Popular Culture
Colonial Almanacs 92
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
4
96
THE EMPIRE IN
TRANSITION 98
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 99
LOOSENING TIES 99
A Tradition of Neglect 99
The Colonies Divided 100
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE
CONTINENT 101
New France and the Iroquois Nation 101
Anglo-French Conflicts 102
The Great War for the Empire 103
THE NEW IMPERIALISM 107
Burdens of Empire 107
The British and the Tribes 109
The Colonial Response 110
STIRRINGS OF REVOLT 112
The Stamp Act Crisis 112
Internal Rebellions 114
The Townshend Program 114
The Boston Massacre 115
The Philosophy of Revolt 117
The Tea Excitement 118
COOPERATION AND WAR 122
New Sources of Authority 122
Lexington and Concord 124
AP America in the World
The First Global War 104
AP Consider the Source
Tea Parties 120
Patterns of Popular Culture
Taverns in Revolutionary Massachusetts 122
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
5
126
THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION 128
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 129
THE STATES UNITED 129
Defining American War
Aims 129
The Decision for
Independence 130
Responses to
Independence 131
Mobilizing for War 131
THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE 133
The First Phase: New England 133
The Second Phase: The Mid-Atlantic Region 135
The Iroquois and the British 138
Securing Aid from Abroad 139
The Final Phase: The South 140
Winning the Peace 143
WAR AND SOCIETY 143
Loyalists and Minorities 143
The War and Slavery 145
Native Americans and the Revolution 146
Women’s Rights and Women’s Roles 147
The War Economy 149
THE CREATION OF STATE GOVERNMENTS 150
The Assumptions of Republicanism 150
The First State Constitutions 150
Revising State Governments 150
Toleration and Slavery 151
THE SEARCH FOR A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT 151
The Confederation 151
Diplomatic Failures 152
The Confederation and the Northwest 153
Indians and the Western Lands 155
Debts, Taxes, and Daniel Shays 155
AP Debating the Past
The American Revolution 132
AP America in the World
The Age of Revolutions 144
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
6
156
THE CONSTITUTION AND
THE NEW REPUBLIC 159
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 160
FRAMING A NEW GOVERNMENT 160
Advocates of Centralization 160
A Divided Convention 162
•
v
vi
•
CONTENTS
“Peaceable Coercion” 204
The “Indian Problem” and the British 205
Tecumseh and the Prophet 206
Florida and War Fever 207
Compromise 163
The Constitution of 1787 164
The Limits of the
Constitution 166
Federalists and Antifederalists 167
Completing the Structure 168
THE WAR OF 1812 208
Battles with the Tribes 208
Battles with the British 208
The Revolt of New England 210
The Peace Settlement 210
AP Consider the Source
Religious Revivals 186
AP America in the World
The Global Industrial Revolution 192
Patterns of Popular Culture
Horse Racing in Early America 196
FEDERALISTS AND
REPUBLICANS 169
Hamilton and the Federalists 169
Enacting the Federalist
Program 170
The Republican Opposition 171
ESTABLISHING NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY 172
Securing the Frontier 172
Native Americans and the New Nation 172
Maintaining Neutrality 173
Jay’s Treaty and Pinckney’s Treaty 174
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
THE DOWNFALL OF THE FEDERALISTS 174
The Election of 1796 175
The Quasi War with France 175
Repression and Protest 176
The “Revolution” of 1800 177
AP Debating the Past
The Meaning of the Constitution 164
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
7
8
178
THE JEFFERSONIAN ERA
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 181
THE RISE OF CULTURAL
NATIONALISM 181
Patterns of Education 181
Medicine and Science 183
Cultural Aspirations in the
New Nation 183
Religious Skepticism 184
The Second Great Awakening 185
180
211
VARIETIES OF AMERICAN
NATIONALISM 214
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 215
BUILDING A NATIONAL
MARKET 215
Banking, Currency, and
Protection 215
Transportation 216
EXPANDING WESTWARD 218
The Great Migrations 218
The Plantation System in the Southwest 218
Trade and Trapping in the Far West 219
Eastern Images of the West 220
THE “ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS” 220
The End of the First Party System 220
John Quincy Adams and Florida 221
The Panic of 1819 222
STIRRINGS OF INDUSTRIALISM 188
Technology in America 188
Transportation Innovations 189
The Rising Cities 191
SECTIONALISM AND NATIONALISM 222
The Missouri Compromise 222
Marshall and the Court 222
The Court and the Tribes 224
The Latin American Revolution and the Monroe
Doctrine 224
JEFFERSON THE PRESIDENT 192
The Federal City and the “People’s President” 193
Dollars and Ships 195
Conflict with the Courts 195
THE REVIVAL OF OPPOSITION 225
The “Corrupt Bargain” 226
The Second President Adams 226
Jackson Triumphant 227
DOUBLING THE NATIONAL DOMAIN 197
Jefferson and Napoleon 197
The Louisiana Purchase 199
Lewis and Clark Explore the West 200
The Burr Conspiracy 201
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
EXPANSION AND WAR 202
Conflict on the Seas 202
Impressment 203
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 230
THE RISE OF MASS POLITICS 230
The Emergence of Andrew Jackson 230
9
227
JACKSONIAN AMERICA
229
CONTENTS
Expanding
Democracy 231
Tocqueville and Democracy
in America 232
The Legitimization of
Party 233
“President of the Common
Man” 234
COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 268
The Expansion of Business, 1820–1840 268
The Emergence of the Factory 269
Advances in Technology 269
“OUR FEDERAL UNION” 235
Calhoun and Nullification 235
The Rise of Van Buren 236
The Webster-Hayne Debate 236
The Nullification Crisis 237
THE REMOVAL OF THE INDIANS 238
White Attitudes Toward the Tribes 238
The Black Hawk War 239
The “Five Civilized Tribes” 239
Trails of Tears 240
The Meaning of Removal 241
JACKSON AND THE BANK WAR 242
Biddle’s Institution 242
The “Monster” Destroyed 243
The Taney Court 243
THE CHANGING FACE OF AMERICAN POLITICS 244
Democrats and Whigs 245
Van Buren and the Panic of 1837 246
The Log Cabin Campaign 247
The Frustration of the Whigs 248
Whig Diplomacy 249
AP Debating the Past
The “Age of Jackson” 234
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Penny Press 250
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
10
252
AMERICA’S ECONOMIC
REVOLUTION 254
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 255
THE CHANGING AMERICAN
POPULATION 255
The American Population,
1820–1840 255
Immigration and
Urban Growth,
1840–1860 256
The Rise of Nativism 259
TRANSPORTATION, COMMUNICATIONS, AND
TECHNOLOGY 262
The Canal Age 263
The Early Railroads 265
The Triumph of the Rails 266
Innovations in Communications and
Journalism 266
MEN AND WOMEN AT WORK 270
Recruiting a Native Workforce 270
The Immigrant Workforce 276
The Factory System and the Artisan Tradition 277
Fighting for Control 278
“Free Labor” 278
PATTERNS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 279
The Rich and the Poor 279
Social Mobility 281
Middle-Class Life 281
The Changing Family 282
Women and the “Cult of Domesticity” 282
Leisure Activities 287
THE AGRICULTURAL NORTH 288
Northeastern Agriculture 288
The Old Northwest 288
Rural Life 290
AP Consider the Source
Nativism and Anti-Immigration Sentiment 260
AP Consider the Source
Rules for Employees 272
AP Consider the Source
Family Time 284
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
11
290
COTTON, SLAVERY, AND
THE OLD SOUTH 293
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 294
THE COTTON ECONOMY 294
The Rise of King Cotton 294
Southern Trade and
Industry 295
Sources of Southern
Difference 298
WHITE SOCIETY IN THE SOUTH 298
The Planter Class 298
“Honor” 300
The “Southern Lady” 300
The Plain Folk 301
SLAVERY: THE “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” 303
Varieties of Slavery 303
Life under Slavery 303
Slavery in the Cities 305
Free African Americans 306
The Slave Trade 307
Slave Resistance 308
THE CULTURE OF SLAVERY 310
Language and Music 310
•
vii
viii
•
CONTENTS
Americans in Texas 342
Tensions between the United States
and Mexico 342
Oregon 343
Westward Migration 344
Life on the Trail 344
African American Religion 311
The Slave Family 312
AP Debating the Past
The Character of Slavery 306
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Slaves’ Music 310
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
12
EXPANSION AND WAR 346
The Democrats and Expansion 346
The Southwest and California 347
The Mexican War 348
312
ANTEBELLUM CULTURE
AND REFORM 314
THE SECTIONAL DEBATE 351
Slavery and the Territories 351
The California Gold Rush 351
Rising Sectional Tensions 353
The Compromise of 1850 353
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 315
THE ROMANTIC IMPULSE 315
Nationalism and Romanticism
in American
Painting 315
Literature and the Quest for
Liberation 316
Literature in the Antebellum South 317
The Transcendentalists 317
The Defense of Nature 318
Visions of Utopia 318
Redefining Gender Roles 319
The Mormons 320
THE CRISES OF THE 1850S 354
The Uneasy Truce 354
“Young America” 355
Slavery, Railroads, and the West 355
The Kansas-Nebraska Controversy 355
“Bleeding Kansas” 356
The Free-Soil Ideology 357
The Pro-Slavery Argument 358
Buchanan and Depression 358
The Dred Scott Decision 358
Deadlock over Kansas 359
The Emergence of Lincoln 359
John Brown’s Raid 360
The Election of Lincoln 360
REMAKING SOCIETY 321
Revivalism, Morality, and Order 321
The Temperance Crusade 322
Health Fads and Phrenology 323
Medical Science 324
Reforming Education 325
Rehabilitation 326
The Indian Reservation 326
The Emergence of Feminism 327
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
14
THE CRUSADE AGAINST SLAVERY 330
Early Opposition to Slavery 330
Garrison and Abolitionism 331
Black Abolitionists 331
Anti-Abolitionism 332
Abolitionism Divided 333
AP Consider the Source
The Rise of Feminism 328
AP America in the World
The Abolition of Slavery 334
Patterns of Popular Culture
Sentimental Novels 336
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
13
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 340
LOOKING WESTWARD 340
Manifest Destiny 340
THE CIVIL WAR
364
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 365
THE SECESSION CRISIS 365
The Withdrawal of the
South 365
The Failure of Compromise 366
Fort Sumter 366
The Opposing Sides 368
336
THE IMPENDING CRISIS
361
339
THE MOBILIZATION OF
THE NORTH 368
Economic Measures 368
Raising the Union Armies 370
Wartime Politics 370
The Politics of Emancipation 372
African Americans and the Union Cause 376
The War and Economic Development 377
Women, Nursing, and the War 377
THE MOBILIZATION OF THE SOUTH 378
The Confederate Government 378
Money and Manpower 378
States’ Rights versus Centralization 379
Economic and Social Effects of the War 380
CONTENTS
STRATEGY AND DIPLOMACY 381
The Commanders 381
The Role of Sea Power 382
Europe and the Disunited States 383
The American West and the War 384
THE COURSE OF BATTLE 385
The Technology of Battle 385
The Opening Clashes, 1861 387
The Western Theater 388
The Virginia Front, 1862 388
The Progress of War 391
1863: Year of Decision 392
The Last Stage, 1864–1865 394
AP Debating the Past
The Causes of the Civil War 372
AP Consider the Source
Wartime Oratory 374
Patterns of Popular Culture
Baseball and the Civil War 384
AP America in the World
The Consolidation of Nations 386
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
15
397
RECONSTRUCTION AND
THE NEW SOUTH 399
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 400
THE PROBLEMS OF
PEACEMAKING 400
The Aftermath of War and
Emancipation 400
Competing Notions of
Freedom 401
Issues of Reconstruction 402
Plans for Reconstruction 403
The Death of Lincoln 403
Johnson and “Restoration” 404
RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION 404
The Black Codes 405
The Fourteenth Amendment 405
The Congressional Plan 405
The Impeachment of the President 407
THE SOUTH IN RECONSTRUCTION 407
The Reconstruction Governments 407
Education 408
Landownership and Tenancy 409
The Crop-Lien System 410
The African American Family in
Freedom 412
THE GRANT ADMINISTRATION 412
The Soldier President 412
The Grant Scandals 412
The Greenback Question 413
Republican Diplomacy 413
THE ABANDONMENT OF
RECONSTRUCTION 414
The Southern States “Redeemed” 414
The Ku Klux Klan Acts 414
Waning Northern Commitment 414
The Compromise of 1877 415
The Legacies of Reconstruction 417
THE NEW SOUTH 418
The “Redeemers” 418
Industrialization and the “New South” 419
Tenants and Sharecroppers 420
African Americans and the New South 421
The Birth of Jim Crow 422
AP Debating the Past
Reconstruction 416
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Minstrel Show 420
AP Consider the Source
Remembering Black History 426
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
16
428
THE CONQUEST OF
THE FAR WEST 430
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 431
THE SOCIETIES OF THE
FAR WEST 431
The Western Tribes 431
Hispanic New Mexico 433
Hispanic California and
Texas 434
The Chinese Migration 434
Anti-Chinese Sentiments 436
Migration from the East 437
THE CHANGING WESTERN ECONOMY 438
Labor in the West 439
The Arrival of the Miners 439
The Cattle Kingdom 441
THE ROMANCE OF THE WEST 443
The Western Landscape 443
The Cowboy Culture 443
The Idea of the Frontier 443
Frederick Jackson Turner 445
The Loss of Utopia 445
THE DISPERSAL OF THE TRIBES 447
White Tribal Policies 447
The Indian Wars 449
The Dawes Act 452
THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE WESTERN
FARMER 453
Farming on the Plains 453
Commercial Agriculture 455
The Farmers’ Grievances 455
The Agrarian Malaise 455
•
ix
x
•
CONTENTS
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Wild West Show 444
AP Debating the Past
The “Frontier” and the West 446
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
17
The Ethnic City 490
Assimilation 491
Exclusion 492
456
INDUSTRIAL SUPREMACY
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 459
SOURCES OF INDUSTRIAL
GROWTH 459
Industrial Technologies 459
The Airplane and the
Automobile 461
Research and Development 462
The Science of Production 462
Railroad Expansion 463
The Corporation 464
Consolidating Corporate
America 465
The Trust and the Holding Company 466
STRAINS OF URBAN LIFE 497
Fire and Disease 497
Environmental Degradation 498
Urban Poverty 498
Crime and Violence 499
The Machine and the Boss 499
THE RISE OF MASS CONSUMPTION 500
Patterns of Income and Consumption 500
Chain Stores and Mail-Order Houses 501
Department Stores 501
Women as Consumers 502
LEISURE IN THE CONSUMER SOCIETY 502
Redefining Leisure 502
Spectator Sports 503
Music and Theater 506
The Movies 507
Working-Class Leisure 507
The Fourth of July 507
Mass Communications 508
CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS 467
The “Self-Made Man” 467
Survival of the Fittest 471
The Gospel of Wealth 471
Alternative Visions 472
The Problems of Monopoly 473
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS IN THE NEW
ECONOMY 475
The Immigrant Workforce 476
Wages and Working Conditions 476
Women and Children at Work 477
The Struggle to Unionize 478
The Great Railroad Strike 479
The Knights of Labor 480
The AFL 480
The Homestead Strike 481
The Pullman Strike 482
Sources of Labor Weakness 483
AP Consider the Source
Philanthropy 468
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Novels of Horatio Alger 472
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Novels of Louisa May Alcott 474
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
18
HIGH CULTURE IN THE AGE OF
THE CITY 508
The Literature of Urban America 508
Art in the Age of the City 509
The Impact of Darwinism 509
Toward Universal Schooling 510
Education for Women 511
AP America in the World
Global Migrations 490
Patterns of Popular Culture
Coney Island 504
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
19
483
THE AGE OF THE CITY
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 487
THE URBANIZATION OF AMERICA 487
The Lure of the City 487
Migrations 488
458
THE URBAN LANDSCAPE 494
The Creation of Public
Space 494
Housing the Well-to-Do 495
Housing Workers and the
Poor 495
Urban Transportation 496
The “Skyscraper” 497
486
512
FROM CRISIS TO EMPIRE
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 515
THE POLITICS OF EQUILIBRIUM 515
The National Government 516
Presidents and Patronage 516
Cleveland, Harrison, and the Tariff 517
New Public Issues 517
THE AGRARIAN REVOLT 520
The Grangers 520
The Farmers’ Alliances 521
514
CONTENTS
The Populist Constituency 523
Populist Ideas 523
THE ASSAULT ON THE PARTIES 560
Early Attacks 560
Municipal Reform 561
New Forms of Governance 561
Statehouse Progressivism 562
Parties and Interest Groups 563
THE CRISIS OF THE 1890S 524
The Panic of 1893 524
The Silver Question 525
“A CROSS OF GOLD” 527
The Emergence of Bryan 528
The Conservative Victory 529
McKinley and Recovery 530
SOURCES OF PROGRESSIVE REFORM 564
Labor, the Machine, and Reform 564
Western Progressives 565
African Americans and Reform 565
STIRRINGS OF IMPERIALISM 531
The New Manifest Destiny 532
Hemispheric Hegemony 533
Hawaii and Samoa 534
CRUSADE FOR SOCIAL ORDER AND REFORM 566
The Temperance Crusade 567
Immigration Restriction 568
CHALLENGING THE CAPITALIST ORDER 568
The Dream of Socialism 568
Decentralization and Regulation 570
WAR WITH SPAIN 538
Controversy over Cuba 538
“A Splendid Little War” 539
Seizing the Philippines 539
The Battle for Cuba 542
Puerto Rico and the United States 543
The Debate over the Philippines 543
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE MODERN
PRESIDENCY 570
The Accidental President 571
Government, Capital, and Labor 571
The “Square Deal” 574
Roosevelt and Conservation 574
Roosevelt and Preservation 575
The Hetch Hetchy Controversy 575
The Panic of 1907 576
THE REPUBLIC AS EMPIRE 545
Governing the Colonies 545
The Philippine War 545
The Open Door 547
A Modern Military System 548
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Chautauquas 524
AP Debating the Past
Populism 528
AP America in the World
Imperialism 534
Patterns of Popular Culture
Yellow Journalism 536
AP Consider the Source
Memorializing National History 540
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
20
549
THE PROGRESSIVES
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 552
THE PROGRESSIVE IMPULSE 552
Varieties of Progressivism 552
The Muckrakers 552
The Social Gospel 553
The Settlement House
Movement 553
The Allure of Expertise 554
The Professions 555
Women and the Professions 555
WOMEN AND REFORM 556
The “New Woman” 556
The Clubwomen 557
Woman Suffrage 559
THE TROUBLED SUCCESSION 577
Taft and the Progressives 577
The Return of Roosevelt 578
Spreading Insurgency 578
Roosevelt versus Taft 578
551
WOODROW WILSON AND THE NEW FREEDOM 579
Woodrow Wilson 579
The Scholar as President 579
Retreat and Advance 580
AP Debating the Past
Progressivism 556
AP America in the World
Social Democracy 562
AP Consider the Source
Dedicated to Conserving America 572
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
21
581
AMERICA AND THE
GREAT WAR 583
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 584
THE “BIG STICK”: AMERICA AND
THE WORLD,
1901–1917 584
Roosevelt and “Civilization” 584
Protecting the “Open Door” in
Asia 584
The Iron-Fisted Neighbor 585
The Panama Canal 586
•
xi
xii •
CONTENTS
Taft and “Dollar Diplomacy” 587
Diplomacy and Morality 587
THE ROAD TO WAR 589
The Collapse of the European Peace 589
Wilson’s Neutrality 589
Preparedness versus Pacifism 590
A War for Democracy 590
“WAR WITHOUT STINT” 591
Entering the War 591
The American Expeditionary Force 592
The Military Struggle 593
The New Technology of Warfare 594
THE WAR AND AMERICAN SOCIETY 596
Organizing the Economy for War 596
Labor and the War 596
Economic and Social Results of the War 597
THE FUTILE SEARCH FOR SOCIAL UNITY 599
The Peace Movement 599
Selling the War and Suppressing Dissent 599
THE SEARCH FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER 603
The Fourteen Points 603
Early Obstacles 603
The Paris Peace Conference 604
The Ratification Battle 605
Wilson’s Ordeal 605
A SOCIETY IN TURMOIL 606
Industry and Labor 606
The Demands of African Americans 607
The Red Scare 609
Refuting the Red Scare 611
The Retreat from Idealism 611
AP Consider the Source
Race, Gender, and Military Service 600
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
22
612
THE “NEW ERA”
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 615
THE NEW ECONOMY 615
Technology and Economic
Growth 615
Economic Organization 616
Labor in the New Era 617
Women and Minorities in the
Workforce 617
The “American Plan” 621
Agricultural Technology and the
Plight of the Farmer 621
THE NEW CULTURE 622
Consumerism 622
Advertising 622
The Movies and Broadcasting 623
Modernist Religion 624
Professional Women 624
614
Changing Ideas of Motherhood 624
The “Flapper”: Image and Reality 625
Pressing for Women’s Rights 626
Education and Youth 627
The Disenchanted 627
The Harlem Renaissance 630
A CONFLICT OF CULTURES 631
Prohibition 631
Nativism and the Klan 631
Religious Fundamentalism 634
The Democrats’ Ordeal 635
REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT 635
Harding and Coolidge 635
Government and Business 637
AP Consider the Source
Communications Technology 618
AP America in the World
The Cinema 626
Patterns of Popular Culture
Dance Halls 628
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
23
637
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 640
THE COMING OF THE GREAT
DEPRESSION 640
The Great Crash 640
Causes of the Depression 641
Progress of the Depression 643
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN HARD
TIMES 643
Unemployment and Relief 644
African Americans and the
Depression 645
Mexican Americans in Depression America 646
Asian Americans in Hard Times 648
Women and the Workplace in the
Great Depression 648
Depression Families 649
THE DEPRESSION AND AMERICAN CULTURE 649
Depression Values 649
Artists and Intellectuals in the Great Depression 650
Radio 650
Movies in the New Era 651
Popular Literature and Journalism 653
The Popular Front and the Left 654
THE UNHAPPY PRESIDENCY OF
HERBERT HOOVER 655
The Hoover Program 656
Popular Protest 657
The Election of 1932 658
The “Interregnum” 658
AP Debating the Past
Causes of the Great Depression 642
639
CONTENTS
AP America in the World
The Global Depression 644
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Films of Frank Capra 652
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
24
ISOLATIONISM AND
INTERNATIONALISM 690
Depression Diplomacy 691
America and the Soviet Union 691
The Good Neighbor Policy 691
The Rise of Isolationism 692
The Failure of Munich 694
659
THE NEW DEAL
661
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 662
LAUNCHING THE NEW
DEAL 662
Restoring Confidence 662
Agricultural Adjustment 663
Industrial Recovery 663
Regional Planning 667
Currency, Banks, and the Stock
Market 668
The Growth of Federal Relief 668
THE NEW DEAL IN TRANSITION 669
Critics of the New Deal 669
The “Second New Deal” 670
Labor Militancy 671
Organizing Battles 671
Social Security 672
New Directions in Relief 673
The 1936 “Referendum” 673
THE NEW DEAL IN DISARRAY 675
The Court Fight 675
Retrenchment and Recession 676
LIMITS AND LEGACIES OF THE NEW DEAL 678
The Idea of the “Broker State” 679
African Americans and the New Deal 679
The New Deal and the “Indian Problem” 681
Women and the New Deal 682
The New Deal in the West and the South 683
The New Deal and the National Economy 683
The New Deal and American Politics 684
AP Consider the Source
Banking Crises 664
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Golden Age of Comic Books 676
AP Debating the Past
The New Deal 680
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
25
684
THE GLOBAL CRISIS,
1921–1941 686
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 687
THE DIPLOMACY OF THE NEW ERA 687
Replacing the League 687
Debts and Diplomacy 688
Hoover and the World Crisis 689
FROM NEUTRALITY TO
INTERVENTION 695
Neutrality Tested 695
The Third-Term Campaign 698
Neutrality Abandoned 699
The Road to Pearl Harbor 699
AP America in the World
The Sino-Japanese War, 1931–1941 692
Patterns of Popular Culture
Orson Welles and the “War of the Worlds” 696
AP Debating the Past
The Question of Pearl Harbor 700
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
26
702
AMERICA IN A WORLD
AT WAR 704
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 705
WAR ON TWO FRONTS 705
Containing the Japanese 705
Holding Off the Germans 706
America and the Holocaust 708
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN
WARTIME 709
Prosperity 709
The War and the West 712
Labor and the War 712
Stabilizing the Boom 712
Mobilizing Production 713
Wartime Science and Technology 713
African Americans and the War 715
Native Americans and the War 716
Mexican American War Workers 716
Women and Children at War 716
Wartime Life and Culture 718
The Internment of Japanese
Americans 720
Chinese Americans and the War 721
The Retreat from Reform 721
THE DEFEAT OF THE AXIS 722
The Liberation of France 722
The Pacific Offensive 724
The Manhattan Project 726
Atomic Warfare 727
AP Consider the Source
The Face of the Enemy 710
Patterns of Popular Culture
Life: The Great Magazine 718
•
xiii
xiv
•
CONTENTS
THE EXPLOSION OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY 758
Medical Breakthroughs 758
Pesticides 759
Postwar Electronic Research 759
Postwar Computer
Technology 760
Bombs, Rockets, and Missiles 760
The Space Program 761
AP Debating the Past
The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb 728
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
27
730
THE COLD WAR
732
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 733
ORIGINS OF THE COLD
WAR 733
Sources of Soviet-American
Tension 733
Wartime Diplomacy 734
Yalta 734
PEOPLE OF PLENTY 762
The Consumer Culture 762
The Landscape and the Automobile 763
The Suburban Nation 763
The Suburban Family 764
The Birth of Television 764
Travel, Outdoor Recreation, and Environmentalism 765
Organized Society and Its Detractors 766
The Beats and the Restless Culture of Youth 767
Rock ’n’ Roll 768
THE COLLAPSE OF THE PEACE 735
The Failure of Potsdam 735
The China Problem 735
The Containment Doctrine 736
The Marshall Plan 737
Mobilization at Home 738
The Road to NATO 739
Reevaluating Cold War Policy 740
The Conservative Opposition to Containment 740
THE “OTHER AMERICA” 770
On the Margins of the Affluent Society 770
Rural Poverty 770
The Inner Cities 771
AMERICAN SOCIETY AND POLITICS AFTER THE WAR 741
The Problems of Reconversion 741
The Fair Deal Rejected 742
The Election of 1948 742
The Fair Deal Revived 744
The Nuclear Age 744
THE KOREAN WAR 745
The Divided Peninsula 745
From Invasion to Stalemate 745
Limited Mobilization 746
28
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
29
750
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 754
“THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE” 754
Sources of Economic Growth 754
The Rise of the Modern West 755
The New Economics 755
Capital and Labor 756
EISENHOWER REPUBLICANISM 774
“What Was Good for . . . General Motors” 774
The Survival of the Welfare State 774
The Decline of McCarthyism 775
EISENHOWER, DULLES, AND THE COLD WAR 775
Dulles and “Massive Retaliation” 775
France, America, and Vietnam 776
Cold War Crises 776
Europe and the Soviet Union 778
The U-2 Crisis 778
Patterns of Popular Culture
On the Road 756
Patterns of Popular Culture
Lucy and Desi 768
THE CRUSADE AGAINST SUBVERSION 747
HUAC and Alger Hiss 748
The Federal Loyalty Program and the
Rosenberg Case 748
McCarthyism 749
The Republican Revival 749
AP Debating the Past
Origins of the Cold War 736
AP Debating the Past
“McCarthyism” 750
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
THE RISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 772
The Brown Decision and “Massive Resistance” 772
The Expanding Movement 773
Causes of the Civil Rights Movement 773
753
779
CIVIL RIGHTS, VIETNAM,
AND THE ORDEAL OF
LIBERALISM 781
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 782
EXPANDING THE LIBERAL STATE 782
John Kennedy 782
Lyndon Johnson 783
The Assault on Poverty 784
Cities, Schools, and Immigration 784
Legacies of the Great Society 785
CONTENTS
THE BATTLE FOR RACIAL
EQUALITY 786
Expanding Protests 786
A National Commitment 787
The Battle for Voting Rights 787
The Changing Movement 788
Urban Violence 789
Black Power 790
Malcolm X 791
“FLEXIBLE RESPONSE” AND THE
COLD WAR 792
Diversifying Foreign Policy 792
Confrontations with the
Soviet Union 793
Johnson and the World 793
THE AGONY OF VIETNAM 793
The First Indochina War 794
Geneva and the Two Vietnams 795
America and Diem 795
From Aid to Intervention 796
The Quagmire 798
The War at Home 799
THE TRAUMAS OF 1968 801
The Tet Offensive 801
The Political Challenge 802
The King and Kennedy Assassinations 803
The Conservative Response 804
AP Debating the Past
The Civil Rights Movement 788
AP Debating the Past
The Vietnam Commitment 794
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Folk-Music Revival 798
AP America in the World
1968 802
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
805
ENVIRONMENTALISM IN A TURBULENT SOCIETY 821
The New Science of Ecology 821
Environmental Advocacy 822
Environmental Degradation 822
Earth Day and Beyond 823
NIXON, KISSINGER, AND THE WAR 824
Vietnamization 824
Escalation 825
“Peace with Honor” 826
Defeat in Indochina 826
NIXON, KISSINGER, AND THE WORLD 827
China and the Soviet Union 827
The Problems of Multipolarity 827
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS UNDER NIXON 828
Domestic Initiatives 828
From the Warren Court to the Nixon Court 828
The Election of 1972 829
The Troubled Economy 830
Inequality 832
The Nixon Response 832
THE WATERGATE CRISIS 832
The Scandals 832
The Fall of Richard Nixon 833
Patterns of Popular Culture
Rock Music in the Sixties 810
AP America in the World
The End of Colonialism 824
AP Debating the Past
Watergate 830
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
31
834
FROM THE “AGE OF LIMITS”
TO THE AGE OF REAGAN 837
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS 808
THE YOUTH CULTURE 808
The New Left 808
The Counterculture 811
THE MOBILIZATION OF
MINORITIES 813
Seeds of Indian Militancy 813
The Indian Civil Rights
Movement 815
Latino Activism 816
Gay Liberation 817
THE RISE OF THE NEW AMERICAN
RIGHT 841
The Sunbelt and Its Politics 842
The Politics of Religion 842
The “New Right” 844
The Tax Revolt 845
The Campaign of 1980 845
THE NEW FEMINISM 818
The Rebirth 819
Women’s Liberation 819
THE “REAGAN REVOLUTION” 846
The Reagan Coalition 846
Reagan in the White House 846
THE CRISIS OF
AUTHORITY 807
xv
Expanding Achievements 820
The Abortion Controversy 821
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 838
POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY AFTER
WATERGATE 838
The Ford Custodianship 838
The Trials of Jimmy Carter 839
Human Rights and National
Interests 840
The Year of the Hostages 840
30
•
xvi
•
CONTENTS
“Supply-Side” Economics 846
The Fiscal Crisis 847
Reagan and the World 848
The Election of 1984 849
AMERICA AND THE WANING OF THE COLD WAR 850
The Fall of the Soviet Union 850
Reagan and Gorbachev 850
The Fading of the Reagan Revolution 851
The Election of 1988 851
The First Bush Presidency 851
The First Gulf War 852
The Election of 1992 853
Patterns of Popular Culture
The Mall 842
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
32
854
THE AGE OF
GLOBALIZATION
856
AP CONNECTING
CONCEPTS 857
A RESURGENCE OF
PARTISANSHIP 857
Launching the Clinton
Presidency 857
The Republican
Resurgence 858
The Election of 1996 858
Clinton Triumphant and Embattled 859
The Election of 2000 859
The Second Bush Presidency 860
The Election of 2004 860
THE ECONOMIC BOOM 861
From “Stagflation” to Growth 861
The Two-Tiered Economy 862
Globalization 862
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE
NEW ECONOMY 862
The Digital Revolution 862
The Internet 863
Breakthroughs in Genetics 863
A CHANGING SOCIETY 863
A Shifting Population 863
African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era 865
Modern Plagues: Drugs and AIDS 866
A CONTESTED CULTURE 866
Battles over Feminism and Abortion 866
The Growth of Environmentalism 867
THE PERILS OF GLOBALIZATION 867
Opposing the “New World Order” 868
Defending Orthodoxy 870
The Rise of Terrorism 870
The War on Terrorism 872
The Iraq War 872
TURBULENT POLITICS 875
The Unraveling of the Bush Presidency 876
The Election of 2008 and the Financial Crisis 876
The Obama Presidency 877
Patterns of Popular Culture
Rap 868
AP Debating the Past
Women’s History 870
AP America in the World
The Global Environmental Movement 874
AP END-OF-CHAPTER REVIEW
880
APPENDIXES A-1
GLOSSARY OF AP TERMINOLOGY
CREDITS C-1
INDEX I-1
A-16
20
THE PROGRESSIVES
AP
HISTORICAL THINKING
1. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways were
progressives able to make the American political system
more democratic at the national, state, and local levels?
2. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways did the
progressive movement improve life for average Americans
through the regulation of big business?
3. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways were
progressives able to enact social welfare legislation?
4. Contextualization Analyze the sources of support for
progressive reform and the reasons for that support.
5. Contextualization Analyze the role of women in the
progressive movement, reforms they sought to attain, and
their relative success in realizing those goals.
6. Comparison Compare and contrast the views of big
business and conservationists on the use of natural
resources.
7. Comparison Compare and contrast New Nationalism with
New Freedom.
8. Comparison Compare the positions of Booker T. Washington
and W.E.B. Du Bois on how to best attain equal rights for
African Americans.
Key Concept Correlations
Analyze the ways the historical developments you learn about in this chapter
connect to one or more of these key concepts in AP U.S. History coursework.
6.3.I.C A number of artists and critics, including agrarians, utopians,
socialists, and advocates of the Social Gospel, championed alternative visions for the economy and U.S. society.
6.3.II.B Many women sought greater equality with men, often joining
voluntary organizations, going to college, promoting social and political
reform, and, like Jane Addams, working in settlement houses to help immigrants adapt to U.S. language and customs.
7.1.II.A Some Progressive Era journalists attacked what they saw as
political corruption, social injustice, and economic inequality, while reformers, often from the middle and upper classes and including many women,
worked to effect social changes in cities and among immigrant populations.
7.1.II.B On the national level, Progressives sought federal legislation
that they believed would effectively regulate the economy, expand democracy, and generate moral reform. Progressive amendments to the
Constitution dealt with issues such as prohibition and woman suffrage.
“VOTES FOR WOMEN,” BY B. M. BOYE This
striking poster was the prize-winning entry in a 1911 contest
sponsored by the College Equal Suffrage League of
Northern California. (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University)
7.1.II.C Preservationists and conservationists both supported the establishment of national parks while advocating different government responses to the
overuse of natural resources.
7.1.II.D The Progressives were divided over many issues. Some
Progressives supported Southern segregation, while others ignored its presence. Some Progressives advocated expanding popular participation in government, while others called for greater reliance on professional and technical
experts to make government more efficient. Progressives also disagreed
about immigration restriction.
Thematic Learning Objectives
CUL-1.0, 2.0, 3.0; NAT-2.0; POL-1.0, 2.0, 3.0; GEO-1.0
AP CONNECTING CONCEPTS
CHAPTER 20 discusses the progressive reform movement and the beliefs and philosophies that drove
the impulse. It discusses the strategies of reformers for realizing their agenda, as well as their relative success.
The chapter deals extensively with the positive contributions of women to general social reform and to specific
issues of interest, such as prohibition and suffrage. As you study the chapter, you should also focus on the
political agendas of Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, particularly on comparing and
contrasting the ideas of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom. Pay close attention also to the
discussion of diverse views concerning environmental protection. As you read, evaluate the following ideas:
• Progressives pressured government to take a more active role in democratizing the political system,
reining in the power of big business, and enacting social welfare legislation.
• The middle class, women, and journalists played prominent roles in initiating progressive reforms.
THE PROGRESSIVE IMPULSE
Progressivism was, first, an optimistic vision. Progressives believed, as their name
implies, in the idea of progress. They believed that society was capable of improvement and that continued growth and advancement were the nation’s destiny.
But progressives believed, too, that growth and progress could not continue to occur recklessly,
as they had in the late nineteenth century. The “natural laws” of the marketplace, and the doctrines of laissez faire and Social Darwinism that celebrated those laws, were not sufficient. Direct,
purposeful human intervention in social and economic affairs was, they argued, essential to ordering and bettering society.
Belief in
Progress
Varieties of Progressivism
Progressives did not always agree on the form their intervention should take, and the result was
a variety of reform impulses that sometimes seemed to have little in common. One powerful
impulse was the spirit of “antimonopoly,” the fear of concentrated power and the urge to limit
“AntimonoPoly” and disperse authority and wealth. This vaguely populist impulse appealed
not only to many workers and farmers but to some middle-class Americans
as well. And it encouraged government to regulate or break up trusts at both the state and
national level.
Another progressive impulse was a belief in the importance of social cohesion: the belief that
individuals are part of a great web of social relationships, that each person’s welfare is dependent
on the welfare of society as a whole. That assumption produced a concern about the “victims” of
industrialization and other people who had difficult lives.
Still another impulse was a deep faith in knowledge—in the possibilities of applying to society
the principles of natural and social sciences. Many reformers believed that knowledge was more
important than anything else as a vehicle for making society more equitable
fAith in
and humane. Most progressives believed, too, that a modernized government
Knowledge
could—and must—play an important role in the process of improving and stabilizing society. Modern life was too complex to be left in the hands of party bosses, untrained
amateurs, and antiquated institutions.
The Muckrakers
Among the first people to articulate the new spirit of reform were crusading journalists who
began to direct public attention toward social, economic, and political injustices. They became
known as the “muckrakers,” after Theodore Roosevelt accused one of them of raking up muck
552 •
THE PROGRESSIVES
through his writings. They were committed to exposing
scandal, corruption, and injustice to public view.
At first, their major targets were the trusts and particularly
the railroads, which the muckrakers considered powerful and
deeply corrupt. Exposés of the great corpoidA tArBell
rate organizations began to appear as early as
And lincoln
the 1860s, when Charles Francis Adams Jr.
steffens
and others uncovered corruption among
the railroad barons. One of the most notable muckrakers was
the journalist Ida Tarbell’s enormous study of the Standard Oil
trust (published first in magazines and then as a two-volume
book in 1904). By the turn of the century, many muckrakers
were turning their attention to government, particularly to
the urban political machines. The most influential, perhaps,
was Lincoln Steffens, a reporter for McClure’s magazine and the
author of a famous book based on his articles, The Shame of the
Cities (1904). His portraits of “machine government” and “boss
rule”; his exposure of “boodlers” in cities as diverse as St. Louis,
Minneapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, and
New York; his tone of studied moral outrage—all helped arouse
sentiment for urban political reform. The alternative to leaving
government in the hands of corrupt party leaders, the muckrakers argued, was for the people themselves to take a greater
interest in public life.
The muckrakers reached the peak of their influence in the
first decade of the twentieth century. By presenting social
problems to the public with indignation and moral fervor,
they helped inspire other Americans to take action.
The Social Gospel
The growing outrage at social and economic injustice helped
produce many reformers committed to the pursuit of what
came to be known as “social justice.” (Social justice is a term
widely used around the world to describe a kind of justice
that goes beyond the individual, seeking justice for society
as a whole. Advocates of social justice are likely to believe in
an egalitarian society and support for poor and oppressed
people.) That impulse helped create the rise of what became
known as the “Social Gospel.” By the early twentieth century, it had become a powerful movement within American
Protestantism (and, to a lesser extent, within American
Catholicism and Judaism). It was chiefly concerned with
redeeming the nation’s cities.
The Salvation Army, which began in England but soon spread
to the United States, was one example of the fusion of religion
with reform. A Christian social welfare organization with a
vaguely military structure, by 1900 it had recruited 3,000 “officers” and 20,000 “privates” and was offering both material aid
and spiritual service to the urban poor. In addition, many ministers, priests, and rabbis left traditional parish work to serve in
the troubled cities. Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1898), the
story of a young minister who abandoned a comfortable post to
work among the needy, sold more than 15 million copies. It was
one of the most successful novels of the era.
•
553
Walter Rauschenbusch, a Protestant theologian from
Rochester, New York, published a series of influential discourses on the possibilities for human salvation through
Christian reform. To him, the message of Darwinism was not
the survival of the fittest. He believed,
fAther John
rather, that all individuals should work to
ryAn
ensure a humanitarian evolution of the
social fabric. Some American Catholics seized on the 1893
publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (New
Things) as justification for their own crusade for social justice.
Catholic liberals such as Father John A. Ryan took to heart the
pope’s warning that “a small number of very rich men have
been able to lay upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than slavery itself.” For decades, he worked to expand the
scope of Catholic social welfare organizations.
The Settlement House Movement
An element of much progressive thought was the belief in the
influence of the environment on individual development.
Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner had argued
that people’s fortunes reflected their inherent “fitness” for survival. Progressive theorists disagreed. Ignorance, poverty, even
criminality, they argued, were not the result of inherent
genetic failings or of the workings of providence; they were,
rather, the effects of an unhealthy environment. To elevate the
distressed, therefore, required an improvement of the conditions in which they lived.
Nothing produced more distress, many urban reformers
believed, than crowded immigrant neighborhoods, which
publicists such as Jacob Riis were exposing through vivid
photographs and lurid descriptions. One
JAne AddAms
response to the problems of such commuAnd hull
nities, borrowed from England, was the
house
settlement house. The most famous, and
one of the first, was Hull House, which
opened in 1889 in Chicago as a result of the efforts of the
social worker Jane Addams. It became a model for more than
400 similar institutions throughout the nation. Staffed by
members of the educated middle class, settlement houses
sought to help immigrant families adapt to the language and
customs of their new country. Settlement houses avoided
the condescension and moral disapproval of earlier philanthropic efforts. But they generally embraced a belief that
middle-class Americans had a responsibility to impart their
own values to immigrants and to teach them how to create
middle-class lifestyles.
Young college women (mostly unmarried) were important
participants in the settlement house movement. Working in a
settlement house, which was a protected site that served
mostly women, was consistent with the widespread assumption that women needed to be sheltered from difficult environments. The clean and well-tended buildings that settlement
houses created were not only a model for immigrant women,
but an appropriate site for elite women as well.
554
•
CHAPTER 20
“THE BOSSES OF THE SENATE” (1889), BY JOSEPH KEPPLER Keppler was a popular political cartoonist of the late nineteenth century who shared the growing concern about the
power of the trusts—portrayed here as bloated, almost reptilian figures standing menacingly over the members of the U.S. Senate, to whose chamber the “people’s entrance” is “closed.” (© The Granger
Collection, New York)
The settlement houses helped create another important
element of progressive reform: the profession of social work.
Workers at Hull House, for example, maintained a close
relationship with the University of Chicago’s pioneering work
in the field of sociology. A growing number of programs for
the professional training of social workers began to appear in
the nation’s leading universities, partly in response to the
activities of the settlements.
The Allure of Expertise
As the emergence of the social work profession suggests, progressives involved in humanitarian efforts placed a high value
on knowledge and expertise. Even nonscientific problems,
they believed, could be analyzed and solved scientifically.
Many reformers came to believe that only enlightened experts
and well-designed bureaucracies could create the stability and
order America needed.
Some reformers even spoke of the creation of a new civilization, in which the expertise of scientists and engineers could
be brought to bear on the problems of the economy and
society. The social scientist Thorstein Veblen, for example,
proposed a new economic system in which power would
reside in the hands of highly trained engineers. Only they, he
argued, could fully understand the “machine process” by
which modern society must be governed.
The Professions
The late nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in the
number of Americans engaged in administrative and professional tasks. Industries needed managers, technicians, and
accountants as well as workers. Cities required commercial,
medical, legal, and educational services. New technology
required scientists and engineers, who, in turn, required institutions and instructors to train them. By the turn of the century, those performing these services had come to constitute a
distinct social group—what some historians have called a new
middle class.
The new middle class placed a high value on education
and individual accomplishment. By the early twentieth century, its millions of members were building organizations and
THE PROGRESSIVES
•
555
establishing standards to secure their position in
society. The idea of professionalism had been a
frail one in America even as late as 1880. When
every patent-medicine salesman could claim to
be a doctor, when every frustrated politician
could set up shop as a lawyer, when anyone
who could read and write could pose as a
teacher, a professional label by itself carried little weight. There were, of course, skilled and
responsible doctors, lawyers, teachers, and others; but they had no way of controlling or distinguishing themselves clearly from the amateurs,
charlatans, and incompetents who presumed to
practice their trades. As the demand for professional services increased, so did the pressures
for reform.
Among the first to respond was the medical
profession. In 1901, doctors who considered
themselves trained profesAmericAn
sionals reorganized the
medicAl
American Medical AssociaAssociAtion
THE INFANT WELFARE SOCIETY, CHICAGO The Infant Welfare Society was one of many “helping”
tion into a national profesorganizations in Chicago and other large cities—many of them closely tied to the settlement houses—that strove to help
sional society. By 1920, nearly two-thirds of all
immigrants adapt to American life and create safe and healthy living conditions. Here, a volunteer helps an immigrant
American doctors were members. The AMA
mother learn to bathe her baby. (The Library of Congress (LC-DIG-npcc-33267))
quickly called for strict, scientific standards for
admission to the practice of medicine, with docto keep the numbers down, to ensure that demand would
tors themselves serving as protectors of the standards. State
remain
high.
governments responded by passing new laws requiring the
licensing of all physicians. By 1900, medical education at a
few medical schools—notably Johns Hopkins in Baltimore
Women and the Professions
(founded in 1893)—compared favorably with that in the leadBoth by custom and by active barriers of law and prejudice,
ing institutions of Europe. Doctors such as William H. Welch
American women found themselves excluded from most of the
at Hopkins revolutionized the teaching of medicine by
emerging professions. But a substantial number of middle-class
moving students out of the classrooms and into laboratories
women—particularly those emerging from the new women’s
and clinics.
colleges and coeducational state universities—entered profesThere was similar movement in other professions. By
sional careers nevertheless.
1916, lawyers in all forty-eight states had established profesA few women managed to establish themselves as physisional bar associations. The nation’s law schools accordingly
cians,
lawyers, engineers, scientists, and corporate managers in
expanded greatly. Businessmen supported the creation of
the early 1900s. Several leading medical
schools of business administration and created their own
femAleschools admitted women, and in 1900
national organizations: the National Association of
dominAted
about 5 percent of all American physicians
Manufacturers in 1895 and the United States Chamber of
Professions
were female (a proportion that remained
Commerce in 1912. Even farmers, long
unchanged
until
the
1960s). Most, however, turned by necesnAtionAl
the symbol of the romantic spirit of
AssociAtion of
sity
to
those
“helping”
professions that society considered
individualism, responded to the new
mAnufActurers
vaguely
domestic
and
thus
suitable for women: settlement
order by forming, through the National
houses,
social
work,
and
most
important, teaching. Indeed, in
Farm Bureau Federation, a network of
the
late
nineteenth
century,
more
than two-thirds of all gramagricultural organizations designed to spread scientific
mar
school
teachers
were
women,
and
perhaps 90 percent of all
farming methods.
professional
women
were
teachers.
For
educated black women,
While removing the untrained and incompetent, the
in
particular,
the
existence
of
segregated
schools in the South
admission requirements also protected those already in the
created
a
substantial
market
for
African
American
teachers.
professions from excessive competition and lent prestige and
Women
also
dominated
other
professional
activities.
status to their trades. Some professionals used their entrance
Nursing
had
become
primarily
a
women’s
field
during
and
requirements to exclude blacks, women, immigrants, and
after
the
Civil
War.
By
the
early
twentieth
century,
it
was
other “undesirables” from their ranks. Others used them simply
AP DEBATING THE PAST
Progressivism
UNTIL of progressivism. It was just what progressives themselves said it was: a move-
the early 1950s, most historians generally agreed on the central characteristics
ment by the “people” to curb the power of the “special interests.”
George Mowry challenged this traditional view in The California Progressives (1951). He
described the reform movement in California not as a people’s protest, but, rather, as an effort by a
small and privileged group of business and professional men to limit the power of large new corporations and labor unions. Richard Hofstadter expanded on this idea in The Age of Reform (1955),
describing progressives throughout the country as people suffering from “status anxiety”—old, formerly influential, upper-middle-class families seeking to restore their fading prestige by challenging
the powerful new institutions that had begun to displace them.
The Mowry-Hofstadter thesis provoked new challenges and new interpretations of the meaning
of progressivism. Gabriel Kolko, in The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), rejected the MowryHofstadter idea that progressivism represented the efforts of a displaced elite. Progressivism, he
argued, was an effort to regulate business undertaken, not by the “people” or “displaced elites,” but by
corporate leaders, who saw in government supervision a way to protect themselves from competition.
Martin Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988) is a more sophisticated
version of a similar argument.
A more moderate challenge to the “psychological” interpretation of progressivism came from
historians embracing a new “organizational” view of history. In The Search for Order, 1877–1920
(1967), Robert Wiebe presented progressivism as a response to dislocations in American life brought
on by rapid changes in the economy. Economic power had moved to large, national organizations,
while social and political life remained centered primarily in local communities. The result was widespread disorder and unrest. Progressivism, Wiebe argued, was the effort of a “new middle class”—a
class tied to the emerging national economy—to stabilize and enhance their position in society by
creating national institutions suitable for the new national economy.
Some historians continued to argue that progressivism was a movement of the people against the
special interests. J. Joseph Huthmacher argued in 1962 that much of the force behind progressivism
came from members of the working class, especially immigrants, who pressed for such reforms as
adopting professional standards. And many women entered
academia—often receiving advanced degrees at such predominantly male institutions as the University of Chicago, MIT, or
Columbia, and finding professional opportunities in the new
and expanding women’s colleges.
WOMEN AND REFORM
The prominence of women in reform movements is one of the
most striking features of progressivism. In most states in the
early twentieth century, women could not vote. They almost
never held public office. They had footKey role of
holds in only a few (and usually primarily
women in
female) professions and lived in a culture
reform cAuses in which most people, male and female,
556 •
workmen’s compensation and wage and hour laws. John
Buenker, in Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform
(1973), claimed that political machines and urban “bosses”
were important sources of reform energy and helped
create twentieth-century liberalism.
Other historians writing in the 1970s and 1980s
attempted to link reform to some of the broad processes of political change that had created the public
battles of the era. Richard L. McCormick’s From
Realignment to Reform (1981), a study of political
change in New York State, argued that the crucial
change in this era was the decline of the political parties
and the rise of interest groups working for particular
social and economic goals.
Many historians see progressivism as rooted in gender and have focused on the role of women (and the
vast network of voluntary associations they created) in
shaping and promoting progressive reform. Historians
Kathryn Sklar, Linda Gordon, Ruth Rosen, and Elaine
Tyler May, among others, argued that some progressive battles were part of an effort by women to protect
their interests within the domestic sphere in the face of
jarring challenges from the new industrial world. This
protective urge drew women reformers to such issues
as temperance, divorce, prostitution, and the regulation
of female and child labor. Other women worked to
expand their own roles in the public world. Progressivism
cannot be understood, historians of women contend,
believed that women were not suited for the public world.
What, then, explains the prominent role so many women
played in the reform activities of the period?
The “New Woman”
The phenomenon of the “new woman,” widely remarked upon
at the time, was a product of social and economic changes that
affected the private world as much as the
socioeconomic
origins of the public one, even if such changes affected
mostly middle-class people. By the end of
new womAn
the nineteenth century, almost all
income-producing activity had moved out of the home and into
the factory or the office. At the same time, children were beginning school at earlier ages and spending more time there. For
many wives and mothers who did not work for wages, the home
McGerr, in A Fierce Discontent (2003), and Alan Dawley,
in Changing the World (2003), have characterized progressivism as a fundamentally moral undertaking. McGerr
viewed it as an effort by the middle class to create order
and stability, whereas Dawley saw it as an effort by
groups on the left to attack social injustice.
Given the range of disagreement over the nature of
the progressive movement, it is hardly surprising that
some historians have despaired of finding any coherent
definition for the term. Peter Filene, for one, suggested
in 1970 that the concept of progressivism as a “movement” had outlived its usefulness. But Daniel Rodgers, in
an important 1982 article, “In Search of Progressivism,”
disagreed. The very diversity of progressivism, he
argued, accounted both for its enormous impact on its
time and for its capacity to reveal to us today the “noise
and tumult” of an age of rapid social change.
•
AP
ARGUMENTATION AND
INTERPRETATION
Questions assume cumulative content knowledge from
this chapter and previous chapters.
(© Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)
without understanding the role of women and the importance of issues involving the family and the
private world within it.
Other historians have sought to place progressivism in a broader context. Daniel Rodgers’s Atlantic
Crossings (1998) is a study of how European reforms influenced American progressives. Both Michael
was no longer an all-consuming place. Technological innovations
such as running water, electricity, and eventually household
appliances made housework less onerous (even if higher standards of cleanliness counterbalanced many of these gains).
Declining family size also changed the lives of many women.
Middle-class white women in the late nineteenth century had
fewer children than their mothers and grandmothers had
borne. They also lived longer. Many women thus now spent
fewer years with young children in the home and lived more
years after their children were grown.
Some educated women shunned marriage, believing that
only by remaining single could they play the roles they envisioned in the public world. Single women were among the
most prominent female reformers of the time: Jane Addams
and Lillian Wald in the settlement house movement, Frances
Willard in the temperance movement, Anna Howard Shaw in
1. Identify five interpretations concerning the progressive
era made by historians. For each, provide one piece of
historical evidence that supports the argument.
2. Identify the interpretations that view progressivism
through a psychological lens. Identify the arguments that
view progressivism through a gender lens. Identify the
arguments that view progressivism through an
organizational lens.
3. With which historian’s interpretation do you most
agree? Explain why, supporting your argument with
historical evidence.
the suffrage movement, and many others. Some of these
women lived alone. Others lived with other women, often in
long-term relationships—some of them
“Boston
quietly romantic—that were known at the
Marriages”
time as “Boston marriages.” The divorce
rate also rose rapidly in the late nineteenth century, from
one divorce for every twenty-one marriages in 1880 to one in
nine by 1916; women initiated the majority of them.
The Clubwomen
Among the most visible signs of the increasing public roles of
women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
were the women’s clubs, which proliferated rapidly beginning
in the 1880s and 1890s and became the vanguard of many
important reforms.
•
557
558 •
CHAPTER 20
The women’s clubs began largely as cultural organizations
to provide middle- and upper-class women with an outlet for
their intellectual energies. In 1892, when women formed the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs to
gfwc
coordinate the activities of local organizations, there were more than 100,000 members in nearly 500
clubs. By 1917, there were over 1 million.
By the early twentieth century, the clubs were becoming
less concerned with cultural activities and more concerned
with contributing to social betterment. Because many club
members were from wealthy families, some organizations had
substantial funds at their disposal to make their influence
felt. And ironically, because women could not vote, the clubs
had a nonpartisan image that made them difficult for politicians to dismiss.
Black women occasionally joined clubs dominated by whites.
But most such clubs excluded blacks, and so African Americans
formed clubs of their own. Some of them affiliated with the
General Federation, but most became part of the independent
National Association of Colored Women. Some black clubs also
took positions on issues of particular concern to African
Americans, such as lynching and aspects of segregation.
The women’s club movement seldom raised overt challenges
to prevailing assumptions about the proper role of women in
society. Few clubwomen were willing to accept the arguments
of such committed feminists as Charlotte
A PuBlic
Perkins Gilman, who in her 1898 book,
sPAce for
Women and Economics, argued that the trawomen
ditional definition of gender roles was
exploitive and obsolete. Instead, the club movement allowed
women to define a space for themselves in the public world
without openly challenging the existing, male-dominated order.
Much of what the clubs did was uncontroversial: planting trees; supporting schools, libraries, and settlement
houses; building hospitals and parks. But clubwomen were
also an important force in winning passage of state (and
ultimately federal) laws that regulated the conditions of
woman and child labor, established government inspection
THE COLORED WOMEN’S LEAGUE OF WASHINGTON, D.C. The women’s club movement spread widely through American life and produced a number of organizations through which
African American women gathered to improve social and political conditions. The Colored Women’s League of Washington, D.C., members of which appear in this 1894 photograph, was founded in 1892
by Sara Fleetwood, a registered nurse who was the wife of Christian Fleetwood, one of the first African American soldiers to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism in the Civil War.
The league she founded was committed to “racial uplift,” and it consisted mostly of teachers, who created nurseries for the infants of women who worked and evening schools for adults. Members of the
League are shown here gathered on the steps of Frederick Douglass’s home on Capitol Hill. Sara Fleetwood is in the second row on the far right. (The Library of Congress)
THE PROGRESSIVES
of workplaces, regulated the food and drug industries,
reformed policies toward the Indian tribes, applied new
standards to urban housing, and, perhaps most notably,
outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol. They were
instrumental in pressuring state legislatures in most states
to provide “mother’s pensions” to widowed or abandoned
mothers with small children—a system that ultimately
became absorbed into the Social Security system. In 1912,
they pressured Congress into establishing the Children’s
Bureau in the Labor Department, an agency directed to
develop policies to protect children.
In many of these efforts, the clubwomen formed alliances
with other women’s groups, such as the Women’s Trade Union
League (WTUL), founded in 1903 by
women’s
female union members and upper-class
trAde union
reformers. It was committed to persuading
leAgue
women to join unions. In addition to working on behalf of protective legislation for women, WTUL members held public meetings on behalf of female workers, raised
money to support strikes, marched on picket lines, and bailed
striking women out of jail.
Woman Suffrage
Perhaps the largest single reform movement of the progressive
era, indeed one of the largest in American history, was the
fight for woman suffrage.
It is sometimes difficult for today’s Americans to understand
why the suffrage issue could have become
rAdicAl
the source of such enormous controversy.
chAllenge of
But at the time, suffrage seemed to many of
women’s
its critics a very radical demand, in part
suffrAge
because of the rationale some of its early
•
559
supporters used to advance it. Throughout the late nineteenth
century, many suffrage advocates presented their views in
terms of “natural rights,” arguing that women deserved the
same rights as men—including, first and foremost, the right to
vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, wrote in 1892 of
woman as “the arbiter of her own destiny . . . if we are to consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must
have the same rights as all other members.” This was an argument that boldly challenged the views of the many men and
women who believed that society required a distinctive female
“sphere” in which women would serve first and foremost as
wives and mothers. And so a powerful antisuffrage movement
emerged, dominated by men but with the active support of
many women. Opponents railed against the threat suffrage
posed to the “natural order” of civilization. Antisuffragists, many
of them women, associated suffrage with divorce (not without
some reason, since many suffrage advocates also supported
making it easier for women to obtain a divorce). They linked
suffrage with promiscuity, immorality, and neglect of children.
In the first years of the twentieth century, the suffrage
movement began to overcome this opposition and win some
substantial victories, in part because suffragists were becoming
better organized and more politically sophisticated than their
opponents. Under the leadership of Anna Howard Shaw, a
Boston social worker, and Carrie Chapman Catt, a journalist
from Iowa, membership in the National
nAwsA
American Woman Suffrage Association
(NAWSA) grew from about 13,000 in 1893 to over 2 million
in 1917. The movement gained strength because many of its
most prominent leaders began to justify suffrage in “safer,” less
threatening ways. Suffrage, some supporters began to argue,
would not challenge the “separate sphere” in which women
resided. It was, they claimed, precisely because women occupied
SHIRTWAIST WORKERS ON STRIKE The Women’s
Trade Union League was notable for bringing educated, middleclass women together with workers in efforts to improve factory
and labor conditions. These picketing women are workers in the
“Ladies Tailors” garment factory in New York. (The Library of
Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-04507))
560 •
CHAPTER 20
SUFFRAGE PAGEANT, 1913 On March 3, 1913—the day
before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as president—more than
5,000 supporters of woman suffrage staged a parade in Washington,
D.C., that overshadowed Wilson’s own arrival there. Crowds estimated
at over half a million watched the parade, not all of them admirers of
the woman suffrage movement, and some of the onlookers attacked
the marchers. The police did nothing to stop the attacks. This
photograph depicts a suffragist, Florence Noyes, costumed as Liberty,
posing in front of the U.S. Treasury Building, part of a pageant
accompanying the parade. Woman suffrage was one of the most
important and impassioned reform movements of the progressive
era. (The Library of Congress)
a distinct sphere—because as mothers and wives and homemakers they had special experiences and special sensitivities
to bring to public life—that woman suffrage could make such
an important contribution to politics.
In particular, many suffragists argued that enfranchising
women would help the temperance movement, by giving its
largest group of supporters a political voice. Some suffrage
advocates claimed that once women had the vote, war would
become a thing of the past, since women would—by their
calming, maternal influence—help curb the belligerence of
men. That was one reason why World War I gave a final,
decisive push to the movement for suffrage.
Suffrage also attracted support for other, less optimistic reasons. Many middle-class people found perconservAtive
suasive the argument that if blacks,
Arguments
immigrants, and other “base” groups had
for suffrAge
access to the franchise, then it was a matter
not only of justice but of common sense to allow educated,
“well-born” women to vote.
The principal triumphs of the suffrage movement began
in 1910, when Washington became the first state in fourteen years to extend suffrage to women.
nineteenth
California followed a year later, and four
Amendment
other western states in 1912. In 1913,
Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi to
embrace woman suffrage. And in 1917 and 1918, New York
and Michigan—two of the most populous states in the
Union—gave women the vote. By 1919, thirty-nine states had
granted women the right to vote in at least some elections;
fifteen had allowed them full participation. In 1920, finally,
suffragists won ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment,
which guaranteed political rights to women throughout
the nation.
To some feminists, however, the victory seemed less than
complete. Alice Paul, head of the militant National Woman’s
Party (founded in 1916), never accepted the relatively
conservative “separate sphere” justification for suffrage. She
argued that the Nineteenth Amendment alone would not be
sufficient to protect women’s rights. Women needed more:
a constitutional amendment that would provide clear, legal
protection for their rights and would prohibit all discrimination on the basis of sex. But Alice Paul’s argument found
limited favor even among many of the most important leaders
of the recently triumphant suffrage crusade.
THE ASSAULT
ON THE PARTIES
Sooner or later, most progressive goals required the involvement of government. Only government, reformers agreed,
could effectively counter the many powerful private interests
that threatened the nation. But American government at the
dawn of the new century was, progressives believed, poorly
adapted to perform their ambitious tasks. At
reforming
every level, political institutions were outgovernment
moded, inefficient, and corrupt. Before progressives could reform society effectively, they would have to
reform government itself. Many reformers believed the first
step must be an assault on the dominant role the political parties played in the life of the state.
Early Attacks
Attacks on party dominance had been frequent in the
late nineteenth century. Greenbackism and Populism, for
example, had been efforts to break the hammerlock with
which the Republicans and Democrats controlled public life.
The Independent Republicans (or mugwumps) had also
attempted to challenge the grip of partisanship.
THE PROGRESSIVES
These early assaults enjoyed some success. In the 1880s and
1890s, for example, most states adopted the secret ballot. Prior
to that, the political parties themselves had printed ballots (or
“tickets”), with the names of the party’s candidates, and no
others. They distributed the tickets to their supporters, who
then simply went to the polls to deposit them in the ballot
box. The old system had made it possible for bosses to monitor
the voting behavior of their constituents; it had also made it
difficult for voters to “split” their tickets—to vote for candidates
of different parties for different offices. The new secret ballot—
printed by the government and distributed at the polls to be
filled out and deposited in secret—helped chip away at the
power of the parties over voters.
Municipal Reform
Many progressives, such as Lincoln Steffens, believed the
impact of party rule was most damaging in the cities. Municipal
government therefore became one of the first targets of those
working for political reform.
The muckrakers struck a responsive chord among a powerful group of urban, middle-class progressives. For several
decades after the Civil War, “respectable” citizens of the
nation’s large cities had avoided participation in municipal
government. Viewing politics as a debased and demeaning
activity, they shrank from contact with the “vulgar” elements
who were coming to dominate public life.
middle-clAss
By the end of the century,
Progressives
however, a new generation of
activists—some of them members of old aristocratic
families, others a part of the new middle class—
were taking a growing interest in government.
These activists faced a formidable array of opponents. In addition to challenging the powerful city
bosses and their entrenched political organizations, they were attacking a large group of special
interests: saloon owners, brothel keepers, and, perhaps most significantly, those businessmen who
had established lucrative relationships with the
urban political machines and who viewed reform
as a threat to their profits. Finally, there was the
great constituency of urban working people, many
of them recent immigrants, to whom the machines
were a source of needed jobs and services.
Gradually, however, the reformers gained in political strength.
•
561
council were replaced by an elected, nonpartisan commission. In
1907, Des Moines, Iowa, adopted its own version of the commission plan, and other cities followed.
Another approach to municipal reform was the city-manager
plan, by which elected officials hired an outside expert—often
a professionally trained business manager or engineer—to take
city-mAnAger charge of the city government. The city
manager would presumably remain
PlAn
untainted by the corrupting influence of
politics. By the end of the progressive era in the early 1920s,
almost 400 cities were operating under commissions, and
another 45 employed city managers.
In most urban areas, the enemies of partnership had to settle for less absolute victories. Some cities made the election of
mayors nonpartisan (so that the parties could not choose the
candidates) or moved them to years when no presidential or
congressional races were in progress (to reduce the influence
of the large turnouts that party organizations produced).
Reformers tried to make city councilors run at large, to limit
the influence of ward leaders and district bosses. They tried to
strengthen the power of the mayor at the expense of the city
council, on the assumption that reformers were more likely to
succeed in getting a sympathetic mayor elected than they
were to win control of the entire council.
Some of the most successful reformers emerged from conventional political structures that progressives came to control.
New Forms of Governance
One of the first major successes came in Galveston,
Texas, where the old city government proved unable
to deal with the effects of a
commission
destructive tidal wave in 1900.
PlAn
Capitalizing on public dismay,
reformers, many of them local businessmen, won
approval of a new city charter. The mayor and
TOM JOHNSON As sentiment for municipal reform grew in intensity in the late nineteenth century, it became
possible for progressive mayors committed to ending “boss rule” to win election over machine candidates in some of
America’s largest cities. One of the most prominent was Tom Johnson, the reform mayor of Cleveland. Johnson
made a fortune in the steel and streetcar business and then entered politics, partly as a result of reading Henry
George’s Poverty and Progress. He became mayor in 1901 and in his four terms waged strenuous battles against
party bosses and corporate interests. He won many fights, but he lost what he considered his most important one:
the struggle for municipal ownership of public utilities. (© Western Reserve Historical Society)
AP
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
Social Democracy WOR-1.0
ENORMOUS
energy, enthusiasm, and organization drove the reform
efforts in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, much of it a result of social crises and political movements in the United States. But the “age
of reform,” as some scholars have called it, was not just an American phenomenon. It was part of a
wave of social experimentation that was occurring through much of the industrial world.
Several industrializing nations—the United States, Britain, Germany, and France—adopted the
term “progressivism” for their efforts, but the term that most broadly defined the new reform energies
was “social democracy.” Social democrats in many countries shared a belief in the betterment of
society, not through religion or inherited ideology, but through the accumulation of knowledge. They
favored improving the social condition of all people through economic reforms and government programs of social protection. And they believed that these changes could come through peaceful political change, rather than through radicalism or revolution. Political parties committed to these goals
emerged in several countries: the Labour Party in Britain, Social Democratic parties in various
European nations, and the short-lived Progressive Party in the United States. Intellectuals, academics,
and government officials across the world shared the knowledge they were accumulating and
observed social programs. An important moment in the growth of social democracy were the many
Paris expositions of 1889 and 1900. Their symbol was the famous Eiffel Tower, and their meaning
for many progressives was the possibilities of progress through industrial innovation. Not only tourists, but progressive experts as well, visited the Paris expositions; and they held meetings while they
were there to share their visions of the future.
At the turn of the century, American reformers visited Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and the
Netherlands, observing the reforms in progress there, while European reformers visited the United
States. Reformers from both the United States and Europe were also fascinated by the advanced social
experiments in Australia and, especially, New Zealand—which the American reformer Henry Demarest
Lloyd once called “the political brain of the modern world.” New Zealand’s dramatic experiments in factory regulation, woman suffrage, old-age pensions, progressive taxation, and labor arbitration gradually
found counterparts in many other nations. William Allen White, a progressive journalist from Kansas,
said of this time: “We were parts of one another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations . . . [all] fighting a common cause.”
Tom Johnson, the celebrated reform mayor of Cleveland, waged
a long war against the powerful streetcar
tom Johnson
interests in his city, fighting to lower streetcar fares to 3 cents, and ultimately to impose municipal ownership on certain basic utilities. After Johnson’s defeat and death,
his talented aide Newton D. Baker won election as mayor and
helped maintain Cleveland’s reputation as the best-governed
city in America. Hazen Pingree of Detroit, Samuel “Golden Rule”
Jones of Toledo, and other mayors effectively challenged local
party bosses to bring the spirit of reform into city government.
Statehouse Progressivism
The assault on boss rule in the cities did not, however, always
produce results. Consequently, many progressives turned to
state government as an agent for reform. They looked with
particular scorn on state legislatures, whose ill-paid, undistinguished members, they believed, were generally incompetent,
often corrupt, and totally controlled by party bosses. Reformers
562 •
(© Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Social democracy—or, as it was sometimes called in
the United States and elsewhere, social justice or the
Social Gospel—was responsible for many public programs. Germany began a system of social insurance for
its citizens in the 1880s while undertaking a massive
began looking for ways to circumvent the boss-controlled
legislatures by increasing the power of the electorate.
Two of the most important changes were innovations first
proposed by Populists in the 1890s: the initiative and the
referendum. The initiative allowed reforminitiAtive And
ers to circumvent state legislatures by
referendum
submitting new legislation directly to the
voters in general elections. The referendum provided a method
by which actions of the legislature could be returned to the
electorate for approval. By 1918, more than twenty states had
enacted one or both of these reforms.
Similarly, the direct primary and the recall were efforts to
limit the power of party and improve the quality of elected
officials. The primary election was an
direct
attempt to take the selection of candidates
PrimAry And
away from the bosses and give it to the peorecAll
ple. (In the South, it was also an effort to
limit black voting—since primary voting, many white southerners
believed, would be easier to control than general elections.) The
THE PROGRESSIVES
study of society that produced more than 140 volumes of “social investigation” of almost every aspect of the nation’s life. French reformers
pressed in the 1890s for factory regulation, assistance to the elderly,
and progressive taxation. Britain pioneered the settlement houses in
working-class areas of London—a movement that soon spread to the
United States as well—and, like the United States, witnessed growing
challenges to the power of monopolies at both the local and national
level.
In many countries, social democrats felt pressure from the rising
worldwide labor movement and from the rise of socialist parties in
many industrial countries. Strikes, sometimes violent, were common in
France, Germany, Britain, and the United States in the late nineteenth
century. The more militant workers became, the more unions grew.
Social democrats did not always welcome the rise of militant labor
movements, but they took them seriously and tried to use them to
support their own reform efforts.
The politics of social democracy represented a great shift in the
character of public life all over the industrial world. Instead of battles
over the privileges of aristocrats or the power of monarchs, reformers
now focused on the social problems of ordinary people and attempted
to improve their lot. “The politics of the future are social politics,” the
British reformer Joseph Chamberlain said in the 1880s, referring to
efforts to deal with the problems of ordinary citizens. That belief was
fueling progressive efforts across the world in the years that Americans
have come to call the “progressive era.”
•
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, AND EVALUATE
1. What is social democracy? How does it differ from socialism?
2. What progressive era reforms in American social and political
life can be seen in other nations as well?
3. Social democratic political parties continue to exist in many
countries throughout the world. Why was the Progressive
Party in the United States so short-lived?
recall gave voters the right to remove a public official from
office at a special election, which could be called after a sufficient
number of citizens had signed a petition. By 1915, every state
in the nation had instituted primary elections for at least some
offices. The recall encountered more strenuous opposition, but
a few states (such as California) adopted it as well.
Other reform measures attempted to clean up the legislatures
themselves. Between 1903 and 1908, twelve states passed laws
restricting lobbying by business interests in state legislatures. In
those same years, twenty-two states banned campaign contributions by corporations, and twenty-four states forbade public officials to accept free passes from railroads. Many states also struggled
successfully to create systems of workmen’s compensation for
workers injured on the job. And starting in 1911, reformers successfully created pensions for widows with dependent children.
Reform efforts proved most effective in states that elevated vigorous and committed politicians to positions of
leadership. In New York, Governor Charles Evans Hughes
exploited progressive sentiment to create a commission to
•
563
regulate public utilities. In California, Governor Hiram
Johnson limited the political power of the Southern Pacific
Railroad. In New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton
University president elected governor in 1910, used executive leadership to win reforms designed to end New Jersey’s
widely denounced position as the “mother of trusts.”
The most celebrated state-level reformer was Robert M. La
Follette of Wisconsin. Elected governor in 1900, he helped
turn his state into what reformers across the
roBert lA
nation described as a “laboratory of progresfollette
sivism.” Under his leadership the Wisconsin
progressives won approval of direct primaries, initiatives, and
referendums. They regulated railroads and utilities. They passed
laws to regulate the workplace and provide compensation for
laborers injured on the job. They instituted graduated taxes on
inherited fortunes, and they nearly doubled state levies on railroads and other corporate interests. La Follette used his personal magnetism to widen public awareness of progressive
goals. Reform was the responsibility not simply of politicians,
he argued, but of newspapers, citizens’ groups, educational
institutions, and business and professional organizations as well.
Parties and Interest Groups
The reformers did not, of course, eliminate parties from
American political life. But they did contribute to a decline in
party influence. Evidence of their impact
decline of
came from, among other things, the decline
PArty
in voter turnout. In the late nineteenth
influence
century, up to 81 percent of eligible voters
routinely turned out for national elections because of the
ROBERT LA FOLLETTE CAMPAIGNING IN WISCONSIN After three terms as
governor of Wisconsin, La Follette began a long career in the U.S. Senate in 1906, during which
he worked uncompromisingly for advanced progressive reforms—so uncompromisingly, in fact,
that he was often almost completely isolated. He titled a chapter of his autobiography “Alone in
the Senate.” La Follette had a greater impact on his own state, whose politics he and his sons
dominated for nearly forty years and where he was able to win passage of many reforms that
the federal government resisted. (The Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ggbain-06406))
564
•
CHAPTER 20
strength of party loyalty. In the early twentieth century, while
turnout remained high by today’s standards, the figure declined
markedly as parties grew weaker. In the presidential election
of 1900, 73 percent of the electorate voted. By 1912, that figure had declined to about 59 percent. Never again did voter
turnout reach as high as 70 percent.
Why did voter turnout decline in these years? The secret
ballot was one reason. Party bosses had less ability to get voters to the polls. Illiterate voters had trouble reading the new
ballots. Party bosses lost much of their authority and were
unable to mobilize voters as successfully as they had in the
past. But perhaps the most important reason for the decline of
party rule (and voter turnout) was that other power centers
were beginning to replace them. They have become known as
“interest groups.” Beginning late in the nineteenth century
and accelerating rapidly in the twentieth, new organizations
emerged outside the party system: professional organizations,
trade associations representing businesses and industries, labor
organizations, farm lobbies, and many others. Social workers,
the settlement house movement, women’s clubs, and others
learned to operate as interest groups to advance their demands.
SOURCES OF
PROGRESSIVE REFORM
nation’s oldest and most notorious city machine. Its astute
leader, Charles Francis Murphy, began in the early years of the
century to fuse the techniques of boss rule with some of the
concerns of social reformers. Tammany began to use its political
power on behalf of legislation to improve working conditions,
protect child laborers, and eliminate the worst abuses of the
industrial economy.
In 1911, a terrible fire swept through the factory of the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City; 146 workers,
most of them women, died. Many of them
triAngle
had been trapped inside the burning buildshirtwAist
ing because management had locked the
fire
emergency exits to prevent malingering.
For the next three years, a state commission studied not only
the background of the fire but also the general condition of
the industrial workplace. It was responding to intense public
pressure from women’s groups and New York City labor
unions—and to quiet pressure from Tammany Hall. By 1914,
the commission had issued a series of reports calling for major
reforms in the conditions of modern labor. The report itself
was a classic progressive document, based on the testimony of
experts, filled with statistics and technical data.
Yet, when its recommendations reached the New York
legislature, its most effective supporters were not middle-class
progressives but two Tammany Democrats from working-class
backgrounds: Senator Robert F. Wagner and Assemblyman
Alfred E. Smith. With the support of Murphy and the backing
Middle-class reformers, most of them from the East, dominated
the public image and much of the substance of
progressivism in the late nineteenth and early
Percentage
twentieth centuries. But they were not alone in
81.8
79.3
79.4 77.5 79.3
seeking to improve social conditions. Working74.7
73.2
class Americans, African Americans, westerners,
and even party bosses also played crucial roles in
advancing some of the important reforms of the era.
65.2
65.4
58.8
Labor, the Machine, and Reform
Although the American Federation of Labor, and its
leader Samuel Gompers, remained largely aloof from
many of the reform efforts of the time (reflecting
Gompers’s firm belief that workers should not rely on
government to improve their lot), some unions
played important roles in reform battles. Between
1911 and 1913, thanks to political pressure from
labor groups such as the newly formed Union Labor
Party, California passed a child-labor law, a workmen’s
compensation law, and a limitation on working hours
for women. Union pressures contributed to the passage of similar laws in many other states as well.
One result of the assault on the parties was a
change in the party organizations themselves, which
attempted to adapt to the new realities so as to preserve their influence. They sometimes allowed their
machines to become vehicles of social reform. One
example was New York City’s Tammany Hall, the
61.6
49.2
1876 1880 1884 1888 1892 1896 1900 1904
1908 1912
1916 1920
Year
VOTER PARTICIPATION IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, 1876–1920 One of the striking
developments of early-twentieth-century politics was the significant decline in popular participation in politics. This
chart shows the steady downward progression of voter turnout in presidential elections from 1876 to 1920. Turnout
remained high by modern standards (except for the aberrant election of 1920, in which turnout dropped sharply
because women had recently received the vote but had not yet begun to participate in elections in large numbers).
But from an average rate of participation of about 79 percent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, turnout
dropped to an average of about 65 percent between 1900 and 1916.
• What were some of the reasons for this decline?
THE PROGRESSIVES
of other Tammany legislators, they steered through a series
of pioneering labor laws that imposed strict regulations
on factory owners and established effective mechanisms for
enforcement.
Western Progressives
The American West produced some of the most notable progressive leaders of the time: Hiram Johnson of California, George
Norris of Nebraska, William Borah of Idaho, and others—almost
all of whom spent at least some of their political careers in the
U.S. Senate. For western states, the most important target of
reform energies was not state or local governments, which had
relatively little power, but the federal government, which exercised a kind of authority in the West that it had never possessed in the East. That was in part because some of the most
important issues to the future of the West required action
above the state level. Disputes over water, for example, almost
always involved rivers and streams that crossed state lines. The
•
565
question of which states had the rights to the waters of the
Colorado River created a political battle that no state government could resolve; the federal government had to arbitrate.
More significant, perhaps, the federal government exercised
enormous power over the lands and resources of the western
states and provided substantial subsidies to the region in the
form of land grants and support for railroad and water projects.
Huge areas of the West remained (and still remain) public
lands, controlled by Washington—a far greater proportion than
in any states east of the Mississippi. Much of the growth of the
West was (and continues to be) a result of federally funded
dams and water projects.
African Americans and Reform
One social question that received little attention from white
progressives was race. But among African Americans themselves, the progressive era produced some significant challenges
to existing racial norms.
VICTIMS OF THE TRIANGLE FIRE, 1911 In this bleak photograph, victims of the fire in the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company are laid out on the sidewalk near the building, as police
and passersby look up at the scene of the blaze. The tragedy of the Triangle Fire galvanized New York legislators into passing laws to protect women workers. (© The Granger Collection, New York)
566 •
CHAPTER 20
African Americans faced greater obstacles than any other
group in challenging their own oppressed status and seeking
reform. Thus it was not surprising, perhaps, that so many embraced
the message of Booker T. Washington in the late nineteenth century, to “put down your bucket where you are,” to work for
immediate self-improvement rather than long-range social change.
Not all African Americans, however, were content with this
approach. And by the turn of the century a powerful challenge
was emerging—a challenge to the philosophy of Washington but,
more important, to the entire structure of race relations. The chief
spokesman for this new approach was W. E. B. Du Bois.
Du Bois, unlike Washington, had never known slavery. Born in
Massachusetts, educated at Fisk University in Nashville and at
Harvard, he grew to maturity with a more
w. e. B. du
expansive view than Washington of the goals
Bois
of his race and the responsibilities of white
society to eliminate prejudice and injustice. In The Souls of Black
Folk (1903), he launched an open attack on the philosophy of
Washington, accusing him of encouraging white efforts to impose
segregation and of limiting the aspirations of his race. “Is it possible
and probable,” he asked, “that nine millions of men can make
effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meager
chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason
give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No.”
Rather than content themselves with education at the trade
and agricultural schools, Du Bois advocated, talented blacks
should accept nothing less than a full university education. They
should aspire to the professions. They should, above all, fight for
their civil rights, not simply wait for them to be granted as a
reward for patient striving. In 1905, Du Bois and a group of his
supporters met at Niagara Falls—on the Canadian side of the border because no hotel on the American side of the Falls would
have them—and launched what became
nAAcP
known as the Niagara Movement. Four years
founded
later, after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois,
they joined with white progressives sympathetic to their cause to
form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). Whites held most of the offices at first, but Du
Bois, its director of publicity and research, was the guiding spirit.
In the ensuing years, the new organization led the drive for equal
rights, using as its principal weapon lawsuits in the federal courts.
Within less than a decade, the NAACP had begun to win
some important victories. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the
Supreme Court supported its position that the grandfather clause
in an Oklahoma law was unconstitutional. (The statute denied
the vote to any citizen whose ancestors had not been enfranchised in 1860.) In Buchanan v. Worley (1917), the Court struck
down a Louisville, Kentucky, law requiring residential segregation. The NAACP established itself, particularly after Booker T.
Washington’s death in 1915, as one of the nation’s leading black
organizations, a position it would maintain for many years.
Among the many issues that engaged the NAACP and other
African American organizations was the phenomenon of lynching in the South. Du Bois was an outspoken critic of lynching and
an advocate of a federal law making it illegal (since state courts
THE YOUNG W. E. B. DU BOIS This formal photograph of W. E. B. Du Bois was taken
in 1899, when he was thirty-one years old and a professor at Atlanta University. He had just
published The Philadelphia Negro, a classic sociological study of an urban community, which
startled many readers with its description of the complex class system among African
Americans in the city. (© Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
in the South routinely refused to prosecute lynchers). But the
most determined opponents of lynching were southern women.
They included white women such as Jessie Daniel Ames. The
most effective crusader was a black woman, Ida Wells Barnett,
who worked both on her own (at great personal risk) and with
such organizations as the National Association of Colored Women
and the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church to
try to discredit lynching and challenge segregation.
CRUSADE FOR SOCIAL
ORDER AND REFORM
Reformers directed many of their energies at the political
process. But they also crusaded on behalf of what they considered moral issues. There were campaigns to eliminate alcohol
THE PROGRESSIVES
from national life, to curb prostitution, to limit divorce, and to
restrict immigration. Proponents of each of those reforms
believed that success would help regenerate society as a whole.
The Temperance Crusade
Many progressives considered the elimination of alcohol from
American life a necessary step in restoring order to society.
Scarce wages vanished as workers spent hours in the saloons.
Drunkenness spawned violence, and occasionally murder,
within urban families. Working-class wives and mothers hoped
through temperance to reform male behavior and thus improve
women’s lives. Employers, too, regarded alcohol as an impediment to industrial efficiency; workers often missed time on
the job because of drunkenness or came to the factory intoxicated. Critics of economic privilege denounced the liquor
industry as one of the nation’s most sinister trusts. And political reformers, who (correctly) looked on the saloon as one of
the central institutions of the urban machine, saw an attack on
drinking as part of an attack on the bosses. Out of such sentiments emerged the temperance movement.
Temperance had been a major reform movement before
the Civil War, mobilizing large numbers of people in a
crusade with strong evangelical overtones.
wctu
In 1873, the movement developed new
strength. Temperance advocates formed the Women’s Christian
TOTAL IMMIGRATION, 1900–1920 Emigration to the United States
reached the highest level in the nation’s history to that point in the first fifteen
years of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there was no five-year
period when as many as 3 million immigrants arrived in America. In the first
fifteen years of the twentieth century, more than 3 million newcomers arrived in
every five-year period—and in one of them, as this chart reveals, the number
reached almost 5 million. (The Library of Congress (3a38144u))
4.46
3.83
• Why did the flow of immigrants drop so sharply in the period
1916–1920?
1.28
1.28
1901–
1905
1906–
1910
1911–
1915
Year
567
Temperance Union (WCTU), led after 1879 by Frances
Willard. By 1911, it had 245,000 members and had become
the single largest women’s organization in American history
to that point. In 1893, the Anti-Saloon League joined the
temperance movement and, along with the WCTU, began to
press for a specific legislative solution: the legal abolition
of saloons. Gradually, that demand grew to include the
complete prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages.
Despite substantial opposition from immigrant and
working-class voters, pressure for prohibition grew steadily
through the first decades of the new century. By 1916, nineteen states had passed prohibition laws.
eighteenth
But since the consumption of alcohol was
Amendment
actually increasing in many unregulated
areas, temperance advocates were beginning to advocate a
national prohibition law. America’s entry into World War I,
and the moral fervor it unleashed, provided the last push to
the advocates of prohibition. In 1917, with the support of rural
fundamentalists who opposed alcohol on moral and religious
grounds, progressive advocates of prohibition steered through
Congress a constitutional amendment embodying their
demands. Two years later, after ratification by every state in
the nation except Connecticut and Rhode Island (bastions of
Catholic immigrants), the Eighteenth Amendment became
law, to take effect in January 1920.
4.96
Total immigration during
five-year periods (in millions)
•
1916–
1920
568 •
CHAPTER 20
Immigration Restriction
Virtually all reformers agreed that the growing immigrant population had created social problems, but there was wide disagreement on how best to respond. Some progressives believed
that the proper approach was to help the new residents adapt
to American society. Others argued that efforts at assimilation
had failed and that the only solution was to limit the flow of
new arrivals.
In the first decades of the century, pressure grew to close
the nation’s gates. New scholarly theories, appealing to the
progressive respect for expertise, argued
eugenics And
that the introduction of immigrants into
nAtivism
American society was polluting the nation’s
racial stock. Among the theories created to support this argument was eugenics, the science of altering the reproductive
processes of plants and animals to produce new hybrids or
breeds. In the early twentieth century, there was an effort,
funded by the Carnegie Foundation, to turn eugenics into
a method of altering human reproduction as well. But the
eugenics movement when applied to humans was not an
effort to “breed” new people, an effort for which no scientific
tools existed. It was, rather, an effort to grade races and ethnic
groups according to their genetic qualities. Eugenicists
advocated the forced sterilization of the mentally retarded,
criminals, and others. But they also spread the belief that
human inequalities were hereditary and that immigration was
contributing to the multiplication of the unfit. Skillful publicists such as Madison Grant, whose The Passing of the Great
Race (1916) established him as the nation’s most effective
nativist, warned of the dangers of racial “mongrelization” and
of the importance of protecting the purity of Anglo-Saxon and
other Nordic stock from pollution by eastern Europeans, Latin
Americans, and Asians.
A special federal commission of “experts,” chaired by
Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont, issued a study
filled with statistics and scholarly testimony. It argued that
the newer immigrant groups—largely southern and eastern
Europeans—had proven themselves less assimilable than
earlier immigrants. Immigration, the report implied, should
be restricted by nationality. Many people who rejected
these racial arguments nevertheless supported limiting
immigration as a way to solve such urban problems as overcrowding, unemployment, strained social services, and
social unrest.
The combination of these concerns gradually won for the
nativists the support of some of the nation’s leading progressives,
among them former president Theodore Roosevelt. Powerful
opponents—employers who saw immigration as a source of
cheap labor, immigrants themselves, and their political representatives—managed to block the restriction movement for a
time. But by the beginning of World War I (which effectively
blocked immigration temporarily), the nativist tide was gaining strength.
All others
German
Asian
4%
4%
6%
CHALLENGING THE
CAPITALIST ORDER
Italian
Canadian
22%
6%
Other
Northwestern
European
AustroHungarian
18%
Russian and
Baltic States
22%
18%
SOURCES OF IMMIGRATION, 1900–1920 At least as striking as the increase in
immigration in the early twentieth century was the change in its sources. In the nineteenth
century, the vast majority of immigrants to the United States had come from northern and
western Europe (especially Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia). Now, as this chart
shows, the major sources were southern and eastern Europe, with over 60 percent coming
from Italy, Russia, and the eastern European regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
• What impact did these changing sources have on attitudes toward immigration in
the United States?
If there was one issue that overshadowed, and helped to
shape, all others in the minds of reformers, it was the character of the dramatically growing modern industrial economy.
Most of the problems that concerned progressives could be
traced back, directly or indirectly, to the growing power and
influence—and also, reformers believed, corruption—of corporate America. So it is not surprising that prominent among
progressive concerns was reshaping or reforming the behavior
of the capitalist world.
The Dream of Socialism
At no time in the history of the United States to that point,
and seldom after, did radical critiques of the capitalist system
attract more support than in the period 1900–1914. Although
never a force to rival or even seriously
eugene deBs
threaten the two major parties, the Socialist
Party of America grew during these years into a force of
considerable strength. In the election of 1900, it had attracted
the support of fewer than 100,000 voters; in 1912, its durable
leader and perennial presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs,
received nearly 1 million ballots. Strongest in urban immigrant
THE PROGRESSIVES
•
569
MAY DAY, 1908 The American Socialist Party staged this vast rally in New York City’s Union Square to celebrate May Day in 1908. The Second Socialist International had designated May Day
as the official holiday for radical labor in 1899. (© Corbis)
communities, particularly among Germans and Jews, it also
attracted the loyalties of a substantial number of Protestant
farmers in the South and Midwest. Socialists won election to
over 1,000 state and local offices. And they had the support at
times of such intellectuals as Lincoln Steffens, the crusader
against municipal corruption, and Walter Lippmann, the
brilliant young journalist and social critic. Florence Kelley,
Frances Willard, and other women reformers were attracted to
socialism, too, in part because of its support for pacifism and
labor organizing.
Virtually all socialists agreed on the need for basic structural
changes in the economy, but they differed widely on the
extent of those changes and the tactics necessary to achieve
them. Some socialists endorsed the radical goals of European
Marxists; others envisioned a moderate reform that would
allow small-scale private enterprise to survive but would
nationalize major industries. Some believed
“woBBlies”
in working for reform through electoral
politics; others favored militant direct action. Among the militants was the radical labor union the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW), known to opponents as the “Wobblies”
(a nickname of unknown origin). Under the leadership of
William (“Big Bill”) Haywood, the IWW advocated a single
union for all workers and abolition of the “wage slave” system;
it rejected political action in favor of strikes—especially the
general strike. The Wobblies were widely believed to have
been responsible for the dynamiting of railroad lines and
power stations and other acts of terror in the first years of the
twentieth century.
The IWW was one of the few labor organizations of the
time to champion the cause of unskilled workers and had particular strength in the West—where a large group of migratory
laborers (miners, timbermen, and others) found it very difficult
to organize or sustain conventional unions. In 1917, a strike by
IWW timber workers in Washington and Idaho shut down
production in the industry. That brought down upon the
union the wrath of the federal government, which had just
begun mobilizing for war and needed timber for war production. Federal authorities imprisoned the leaders of the union,
and state governments between 1917 and 1919 passed a series
of laws that outlawed the IWW. The organization survived for
a time but never fully recovered.
570
•
CHAPTER 20
LOUIS BRANDEIS Brandeis graduated from Harvard Law School in 1877 with the best
academic record of any student in the school’s previous or subsequent history. His success in
his Boston law practice was such that by the early twentieth century he was able to spend much
of his time in unpaid work for public causes. His investigations of monopoly power soon made
him a major figure in the emerging progressive movement. Woodrow Wilson nominated him for
the U.S. Supreme Court in January 1916. He was one of the few nominees in the Court’s history
never to have held prior public office, and he was the first Jew ever to have been nominated.
The appointment aroused five months of bitter controversy in the Senate before Brandeis was
finally confirmed. For the next twenty years, he was one of the Court’s most powerful
members—all the while lobbying behind the scenes on behalf of the many political causes
(preeminent among them Zionism, the founding of a Jewish state) to which he remained
committed. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Moderate socialists who advocated peaceful change through
political struggle dominated the Socialist Party. They emphasized a gradual education of the public to
sociAlism’s
the need for change and patient efforts
demise
within the system to enact it. But World
War I dramatically weakened the socialists. They had refused
to support the war effort, and a growing wave of antiradicalism
subjected them to enormous harassment and persecution.
Decentralization and Regulation
Most progressives retained a faith in the possibilities of reform
within a capitalist system. Rather than nationalize basic industries, many reformers hoped to restore the economy to a “more
human” scale. Few envisioned a return to a society of small,
local enterprises; some consolidation, they recognized, was
inevitable. They did, however, argue that the federal
government should work to break up the largest combinations
and enforce a balance between the need for bigness and the
need for competition.
This viewpoint came to be identified particularly closely
with Louis D. Brandeis, a brilliant lawyer and later justice of
the Supreme Court, who wrote widely (most notably in his
1913 book, Other People’s Money) about the “curse of bigness.”
Brandeis and his supporters opposed bigness in part because
they considered it inefficient. But their opposition had a moral
the ProBlem of basis as well. Bigness was a threat not just
to efficiency but to freedom as well. It
corPorAte
limited the ability of individuals to
centrAlizAtion
control their own destinies. It encouraged abuses of power. Government must, Brandeis insisted,
regulate competition in such a way as to ensure that large
combinations did not emerge.
Other progressives were less enthusiastic about the virtues
of competition. More important to them was efficiency, which
they believed economic concentration encouraged. What government should do, they argued, was not to fight “bigness,”
but to guard against abuses of power by
“good
large institutions. It should distinguish
trusts” And
between “good trusts” and “bad trusts,”
“BAd trusts”
encouraging the good while disciplining
the bad. Since economic consolidation was destined to remain
a permanent feature of American society, continuing oversight
by a strong, modernized government was essential. One of the
most influential spokesmen for this emerging “nationalist”
position was Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book, The Promise of
American Life, became an influential progressive document.
Increasingly, the attention of nationalists such as Croly
focused on some form of coordination of the industrial economy. Society must act, Walter Lippmann wrote in a notable
1914 book, Drift and Mastery, “to introduce plan where there
has been clash, and purpose into the jungles of disordered
growth.” To some nationalists, that meant businesses themselves learning new ways of cooperation and self-regulation.
To others, the solution was for government to play a more
active role in regulating and planning economic life. One of
those who came to endorse that position (although not fully
until after 1910) was Theodore Roosevelt, who once said: “We
should enter upon a course of supervision, control, and regulation of those great corporations.” Roosevelt became for a time
the most powerful symbol of the reform impulse at the
national level.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND
THE MODERN PRESIDENCY
“Presidents in general are not lovable,” the famous writer and
columnist Walter Lippmann, who had known many, said near
the end of his life. “They’ve had to do too much to get where
they are. But there was one President who was lovable—Teddy
Roosevelt—and I loved him.”
THE PROGRESSIVES
•
571
Lippmann was not alone. To a generation of progressive
reformers, Theodore Roosevelt was more than an admired public figure; he was an idol. No president before, and few since,
had attracted such attention and devotion. Yet, for all his popularity among reformers, Roosevelt was in many respects
decidedly conservative. He earned his extraordinary popularity less because of the extent of the reforms he championed
than because he brought to his office a broad conception of its
powers and invested the presidency with something of its
modern status as the center of national political life.
The Accidental President
When President William McKinley suddenly died in
September 1901, the victim of an assassination, Roosevelt
(who had been elected vice president less than a year before)
was only forty-two years old, the youngest man ever to assume
the presidency. “I told William McKinley that it was a mistake
to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia,” party boss Mark
Hanna was reported to have exclaimed. “Now look, that
damned cowboy is President of the United States!”
Roosevelt’s reputation as a wild man was a result less of the
substance of his early political career than of its style. As a
young member of the New York legislaroosevelt’s
ture, he had displayed an energy seldom
BAcKground
seen in that lethargic body. As a rancher in
the Dakota Badlands (where he retired briefly after the sudden
death of his first wife), he had helped capture outlaws. As New
York City police commissioner, he had been a flamboyant battler against crime and vice. As assistant secretary of the navy,
he had been a bold proponent of American expansion. As commander of the Rough Riders, he had led a heroic, if militarily
useless, charge in the battle of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the
Spanish-American War.
But Roosevelt as president rarely rebelled against the leaders of his party. He became, rather, a champion of cautious,
moderate change. Reform, he believed, was a vehicle less for
remaking American society than for protecting it against radical challenges.
Government, Capital, and Labor
Roosevelt allied himself with those progressives who urged
regulation (but not destruction) of the trusts. At the heart of
Roosevelt’s policy was his desire to win
roosevelt’s
for government the power to investigate
vision of
federAl Power the activities of corporations and publicize the results. The new Department of
Commerce and Labor, established in 1903 (later to be divided
into two separate departments), was to assist in this task
through its investigatory arm, the Bureau of Corporations.
Although Roosevelt was not a trustbuster at heart, he made
a few highly publicized efforts to break up combinations. In
1902, he ordered the Justice Department to invoke the Sherman
Antitrust Act against a great new railroad monopoly in the
Northwest, the Northern Securities Company, a $400 million
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT To a generation of progressive reformers,
Theodore Roosevelt was an idol. No president before, and few since, had attracted such attention
and devotion from the American people. (The Library of Congress (LC-DIG_ppmsca-37602))
enterprise pieced together by J. P. Morgan and others. To
Morgan, accustomed to a warm, supportive
northern
relationship with Republican administrasecurities
tions, the action was baffling. He told the
comPAny
president, “If we have done anything wrong,
send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” Roosevelt
proceeded with the case nonetheless, and in 1904 the Supreme
Court ruled that the Northern Securities Company must be
dissolved. Although he filed more than forty additional antitrust suits during the remainder of his presidency, Roosevelt
had no serious commitment to reverse the prevailing trend
toward economic concentration.
A similar commitment to establishing the government as an
impartial regulatory mechanism shaped Roosevelt’s policy
toward labor. In the past, federal intervention in industrial disputes had almost always meant action on behalf of employers.
Roosevelt was willing to consider labor’s position as well. When
a bitter 1902 strike by the United Mine Workers endangered
coal supplies for the coming winter, Roosevelt asked both the
operators and the miners to accept impartial federal arbitration.
When the mine owners balked, Roosevelt threatened to send
federal troops to seize the mines. The operators finally relented.
Arbitrators awarded the strikers a 10 percent wage increase and
a nine-hour day, although no recognition of their union—less
than they had wanted but more than they would likely have
AP CONSIDER THE SOURCE
DEDICATED TO CONSERVING AMERICA
A
LEADER IN AMERICA’S CONSERVATION
MOVEMENT, naturalist John Muir (1838–1914) was
born in Scotland and grew up in Wisconsin. He went to California in 1868 and spent several years in the
American West exploring the land and studying the trees, forests, and glaciers of the area before settling permanently in California in 1880. He campaigned for the establishment of Yosemite National Park, a goal achieved in
1890. Through his friendship with President Theodore Roosevelt, he persuaded the president to greatly increase
the amount of protected public land. As a dedicated conservationist, Muir wrote articles attempting to rouse the
public to the need to protect public lands. In addition to the public lands he helped protect and preserve, Muir
created another lasting legacy—the Sierra Club, an organization that he co-founded and that is still thriving today.
The two source documents below are thus both connected to John Muir. The first is an excerpt from his
book Our National Parks. The second is a reprinting of the Sierra Club’s current stated purposes and goals.
OUR NATIONAL PARKS—1901
from chAPter 1, “the wild PArKs
of the west,” By John muir
And
forest reservAtions
The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain
parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from
the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix
and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing and roaming,
some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil’s spinning in all-day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers
to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is
fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in
general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns. . . .
When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are glad to see how much of even
the most destructible kind is still unspoiled. Looking at our continent as scenery when it was all wild, lying between
beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, the starry rocks beneath it, to compare its sides, the East and the West, would be
like comparing the sides of a rainbow. But it is no longer equally beautiful. . . . [T]he continent’s outer beauty is fast passing away, especially the plant part of it, the most destructible and most universally charming of all.
Only thirty years ago, the great Central Valley of California, five hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, was one bed
of golden and purple flowers. Now it is ploughed and pastured out of existence, gone forever,—scarce a memory of it left
in fence corners and along the bluffs of the streams. . . . The same fate, sooner or later, is awaiting them all, unless awakening public opinion comes forward to stop it. . . .
The Grand Cañon Reserve of Arizona, of nearly two million acres, or the most interesting part of it, as well as the
Rainier region, should be made into a national park, on account of their supreme grandeur and beauty. . . . No matter how
far you have wandered hitherto, or how many famous gorges and valleys you have seen, this one, the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado, will seem as novel to you, as unearthly in the color and grandeur and quantity of its architecture, as if you had
found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other cañons in
our fire-moulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world. . . .
Source: Library of Congress, Materials from the General Collection and Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress.
572
•
SIERRA CLUB—2006
sierrA cluB PurPoses
And
goAls
The purposes of the Sierra Club are to explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; to practice and promote
the responsible use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources; to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the
quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.
Ideal Goals—for Environment and Society
• To sustain natural life-support systems, avoid impairing them, and avoid irreversible damage to them.
• To facilitate species survival; to maintain genetic diversity; to avoid hastened extinction of species; to protect prime
natural habitat.
• To establish and protect natural reserves, including representative natural areas, wilderness areas in each biome, displays
of natural phenomena, and habitats for rare and endangered species.
• To control human population growth and impacts; to limit human population numbers and habitat needs within
Earth’s carrying capacity; to avoid needless human consumption of resources; to plan and control land use, with environmental impact assessment and safeguards, and rehabilitation of damaged sites.
• To learn more about the facts, interrelationships, and principles of the Earth’s ecosystems, and the place and impact of
humans in them; to understand the consequences of human activities within the biosphere.
• To develop responsible and appropriate technology matched to end-uses; to introduce sophisticated technology gradually after careful assessment and with precautionary monitoring.
• To control pollution of the biosphere; to minimize waste residuals with special care of hazardous materials; to use the
best available control technology at sources; and to recycle wastes.
• To manage resources soundly; to avoid waste with long-term plans; to sustain the yield of living resources and maintain their
productivity and breeding stocks; to prolong availability of nonliving resources such as fossil fuels, minerals, and water.
• To impart a sense of social responsibility among consumers, developers, and public authorities concerning environmental protection; to regulate threats to public health; to avoid private degradation of public resources; to minimize
impacts on innocent parties and future generations.
As the Sierra Club prepares for its second century, we offer to America and the world our vision of humanity living in
harmony with nature. We dedicate ourselves to achieving this vision as we reaffirm our passionate commitment to
explore, enjoy, and protect the Earth.
(From the Current Articles of Incorporation & Bylaws, June 20, 1981, updated July 13, 2006. Excerpted from, Sierra Club Goals Pamphlet,
1985–1989. Reproduced from sierraclub.org with permission of the Sierra Club. ©2006 Sierra Club. All Rights Reserved.)
AP
TEST PRACTICE
Questions assume cumulative content knowledge from this chapter and previous chapters.
1. Which of the following groups would most agree with the excerpt from
Our National Parks?
(A) Southern romantic aristocrats
(B) Western settlers in the 19th century
(C) Those who championed ideas of self-reliance and self-realization in
the mid-19th century
(D) Protestant evangelists
2. Which best describes how Muir’s argument in Our National Parks
reflects the economic and social history of the time?
(A) Muir is responding to a sense of societal disorder due to develop-
ments of his time, such as rapid industrialization.
(B) Muir is responding to a sense of political injustice, due to the
relationship between government and big business at the time.
(C) Muir is responding to the social critiques of the power of
monopolies to do as they please.
(D) Muir is responding to the demands of farmers to increase arable
lands through irrigation projects.
3. Which progressive value does the Sierra Club’s statement of purposes
and goals best reflect?
(A) A strong belief in the ideal of spiritual self-improvement
(B) A strong belief in the role of government in regulating use of
environmental resources
(C) A strong belief in the role of purposeful human action in bettering a
society
(D) A strong belief in social justice
•
573
574
•
CHAPTER 20
BOYS IN THE MINES These young boys, covered
in grime and no more than twelve years old, pose for the
noted photographer Lewis Hine outside the coal mine in
Pennsylvania where they separated coal from slate in
coal breakers. The rugged conditions endured by mine
workers were one cause of the great strike of 1902, in
which Theodore Roosevelt intervened. (The Library of
Congress)
won without Roosevelt’s intervention. Roosevelt viewed
himself as no more the champion of labor than as a champion of
management. On several occasions, he ordered federal troops to
intervene in strikes on behalf of employers.
The “Square Deal”
During Roosevelt’s first years as president, he was principally
concerned with winning reelection, which required that he
not antagonize the conservative Republican Old Guard. By
skillfully dispensing patronage to conservatives and progressives alike, and by winning the support of northern businessmen while making adroit gestures to reformers, Roosevelt had
neutralized his opposition within the party by early 1904. He
won its presidential nomination with ease. And in the general
election, where he faced a dull conservative Democrat, Alton
B. Parker, he captured over 57 percent of the popular vote and
lost no states outside the South.
During the 1904 campaign, Roosevelt boasted that he had
worked in the anthracite coal strike to provide everyone
with a “square deal.” One of his first targets after the election
was the powerful railroad industry. The
hePBurn Act
Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), had been
an early effort to regulate the industry; but over the years,
the courts had sharply limited its influence. Roosevelt asked
Congress for legislation to increase the government’s power
to oversee railroad rates. The Hepburn Railroad Regulation
Act of 1906 sought to restore some regulatory authority to
the government, although the bill was so cautious that it
satisfied few progressives.
Roosevelt also pressured Congress to enact the Pure Food and
Drug Act, which restricted the sale of dangerous or ineffective
medicines. When Upton Sinclair’s powerful novel The Jungle
appeared in 1906, featuring appalling
Pure food
descriptions of conditions in the meatpackAnd drug Act
ing industry, Roosevelt pushed for passage of
the Meat Inspection Act, which helped eliminate many diseases
once transmitted in impure meat. Starting in 1907, he proposed,
but mostly failed to achieve, even more stringent reforms: an
eight-hour workday, broader compensation for victims of industrial accidents, inheritance and income taxes, regulation of the
stock market, and others. He also started openly to criticize conservatives in Congress and the judiciary who were obstructing
these programs. The result was a widening gulf between the
president and the conservative wing of his party.
Roosevelt and Conservation
Roosevelt’s aggressive policies on behalf of conservation contributed to that gulf. Using executive powers, he restricted
private development on millions of acres of undeveloped
government land—most of it in the West—by adding them to
the previously modest national forest system. When
conservatives in Congress restricted his authority over public
lands in 1907, Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot,
seized all the forests and many of the water power sites still in
the public domain before the bill became law.
Roosevelt was the first president to take an active interest
in the new and struggling American conservation movement.
In the early twentieth century, the idea of preserving the
natural world for ecological reasons was not well established.
Instead, many people who considered themselves “conservationists”—such as Pinchot, the first director of the National
Forest Service (which he helped to create)—promoted policies
to protect land for carefully managed development.
THE PROGRESSIVES
The Old Guard eagerly supported another important aspect of
Roosevelt’s natural resource policy: public reclamation and irrigation projects. In 1902, the president backed
federAl Aid
the National Reclamation Act, better known
to the west
as the Newlands Act (named for its sponsor,
Nevada senator Francis Newlands). The Newlands Act provided
federal funds for the construction of dams, reservoirs, and canals
in the West—projects that would open new lands for cultivation
and (years later) provide cheap electric power.
Roosevelt and Preservation
Despite his sympathy with Pinchot’s vision of conservation,
Roosevelt also shared some of the concerns of the naturalists—
those within the conservation movement committed to protecting the natural beauty of the land and the health of its
wildlife from human intrusion. Early in his presidency,
Roosevelt even spent four days camping in the Sierras with
Mount
Rainier
(1899)
Redwood
(1968)
Zion
(1919)
Kings
Canyon
(1940)
Grand
Canyon
(1919)
Mesa
Verde
(1906)
Hawaii
Volcanoes
(1916)
0
200 mi
500
Wind Cave
(1903)
Kobuk
Valley
Mammoth Cave
(1921)
Platt
(1906)
(1981)
Great Smoky
Mountains
(1926)
Hot
Springs
(1921)
Guadalupe
Mountains
(1966)
Big Bend
(1935)
Gates of
the Arctic
Denali
Mt. McKinley
(1917)
500 mi
Lake Clark
(1981)
1000 km
Katmai
(1981)
4000 km
Shenandoah
(1926)
Carlsbad Caverns
(1923)
Haleakala (1960)
0
Acadia
(1919)
Bryce
Canyon Capitol Reef
(1924)
(1971)
Canyonlands
(1964)
Petrified
Forest
(1962)
200
National Forests
Rocky
Arches Mountain
(1971)
(1915)
Yosemite
(1890)
Sequoia
(1890)
National Parks (date established)
(North Unit)
Theodore Roosevelt
(1947)
(South Unit)
Grand Teton
(1929)
Lassen
Volcanic
(1916)
0
The contending views of the early conservation movement
came to a head beginning in 1906 in a sensational controversy
over the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park.
Hetch Hetchy (a name derived from a local Indian term
Voyageurs
(1971)
Yellowstone
(1872)
Crater Lake
(1902)
0
The Hetch Hetchy Controversy
Isle Royale
(1931)
Glacier
(1910)
575
John Muir, the nation’s leading preservationist and the founder
of the Sierra Club.
Roosevelt added significantly to the still-young National
Park System, whose purpose was to protect public land from
any exploitation or development. Congress had created the
first national park—Yellowstone, in Wyoming, in 1872—and
had authorized others in the 1890s: Yosemite and Sequoia in
California, and Mount Rainier in Washington State. Roosevelt
added land to several existing parks and also created new ones:
Crater Lake in Oregon, Mesa Verde in Utah, Platt in Oklahoma,
and Wind Cave in South Dakota.
North Cascades (1968)
Olympic
(1938)
•
WrangelSt. Elias
(1917)
0
Kenai
Fjords
(1918)
Glacier
Bay
(1925)
0
500 mi
500
Everglades
(1934)
1000 km
ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL PARKS AND FORESTS This map illustrates the steady growth throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the systems of national
parks and national forests in the United States. Although Theodore Roosevelt is widely and correctly remembered as a great champion of national parks and forests, the greatest expansions of these
systems occurred after his presidency. Note, for example, how many new areas were added in the 1920s.
• What is the difference between national parks and national forests?
576
•
CHAPTER 20
meaning “grassy meadows”) was a spectacular, high-walled valley popular with naturalists. But many residents of San
Francisco, worried about finding enough water to serve their
growing population, saw Hetch Hetchy as an ideal place for a
dam, which would create a large reservoir for the city—a plan
that Muir and other naturalists furiously opposed.
In 1906, San Francisco suffered a devastating earthquake and
fire. Widespread sympathy for the city strengthened the case for
the dam; and Theodore Roosevelt—who had initially expressed
some sympathy for Muir’s position—turned the decision over to
Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot had no interest in Muir’s aesthetic and
spiritual arguments. He approved construction of the dam.
For over a decade, a battle raged between naturalists and
the advocates of the dam, a battle that consumed the energies of John Muir for the rest of his life
comPeting
conservAtionist and that eventually, many people
believed, led to his death. “Dam Hetch
visions
Hetchy!” Muir once said. “As well dam
for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no
holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
To Pinchot, there was no question that the needs of the city
were more important than the claims of preservation. Muir
helped place a referendum question on the ballot in 1908,
certain that the residents of the city would oppose the project “as soon as light is cast upon it.” Instead, San Franciscans
approved the dam by a huge margin. Although there were
many more delays in succeeding years, construction of the
dam finally began after World War I.
This setback for the naturalists was not, however, a total
defeat. The fight against Hetch Hetchy helped mobilize a new
ROOSEVELT AND MUIR IN
YOSEMITE John Muir, founder and leader
of the Sierra Club, considered Theodore
Roosevelt a friend and ally—a relationship
cemented by a four-day camping trip the two
men took together in Yosemite National Park in
1903. Roosevelt was indeed a friend to the
national park and national forest systems and
added considerable acreage to both. Among
other things, he expanded Yosemite (at Muir’s
request). But unlike Muir, Roosevelt was also
committed to economic development. As a
result, he was not always a reliable ally of the
most committed preservationists. (© Bettmann/
Corbis)
coalition of people committed to preservation, not “rational
use,” of wilderness.
The Panic of 1907
Despite the flurry of reforms Roosevelt was able to enact, the
government still had relatively little control over the industrial economy. That became clear in 1907, when a serious
panic and recession began.
Conservatives blamed Roosevelt’s “mad” economic policies
for the disaster. And while the president naturally (and correctly) disagreed, he nevertheless acted
tennessee
coAl And iron quickly to reassure business leaders that he
would not interfere with their recovery
comPAny
efforts. J. P. Morgan, in a spectacular display
of his financial power, helped construct a pool of the assets of
several important New York banks to prop up shaky financial
institutions. The key to the arrangement, Morgan told the
president, was the purchase by U.S. Steel of the shares of the
Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, currently held by a threatened New York bank. He would, he insisted, need assurances
that the purchase would not prompt antitrust action. Roosevelt
tacitly agreed, and the Morgan plan proceeded. Whether or
not as a result, the panic soon subsided.
Roosevelt loved being president. As his years in office produced increasing political successes, as his public popularity
continued to rise, more and more observers began to assume
that he would run for reelection in 1908, despite the longstanding tradition of presidents serving no more than two terms.
But the Panic of 1907, combined with Roosevelt’s growing
THE PROGRESSIVES
•
577
“radicalism” during his second term, so alienated conservatives
in his own party that he might have had difficulty winning the
Republican nomination. In 1904, moreover, he had made a
public promise to step down four years later. And so in 1909,
Roosevelt, fifty years old, retired from public life—briefly.
THE TROUBLED SUCCESSION
William Howard Taft, who assumed the presidency in 1909,
had been Theodore Roosevelt’s most trusted lieutenant and
his handpicked successor; progressive reformers believed him
to be one of their own. But Taft had also been a restrained and
moderate jurist, a man with a punctilious
williAm
howArd tAft regard for legal process; conservatives
expected him to abandon Roosevelt’s
aggressive use of presidential powers. By seeming acceptable
to almost everyone, Taft easily won election to the White
House in 1908. He received his party’s nomination virtually
uncontested. His victory in the general election in November—
over William Jennings Bryan, running for the Democrats for
the third time—was a foregone conclusion.
Four years later, however, Taft would leave office the most
decisively defeated president of the twentieth century, his
party deeply divided and the government in the hands of a
Democratic administration for the first time in twenty years.
Taft and the Progressives
Taft’s first problem arose in the opening months of the new
administration, when he called Congress into special session to
lower protective tariff rates, an old progresPAyne-Aldrich
sive demand. But the president made no
tAriff
effort to overcome the opposition of the
congressional Old Guard, arguing that to do so would violate
the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. The result
was the feeble Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which reduced tariff rates
scarcely at all and in some areas raised them. Progressives
resented the president’s passivity.
Taft may not have been a champion of reform, but neither
was he a consistent opponent of change. In 1912, he supported and signed legislation to create a federal Children’s
Bureau to investigate “all matters pertaining to the welfare of
children and child life.” Julia Lathrop, the first chief of the
bureau, was a veteran of Hull House and a close associate of
Jane Addams. She helped make the Children’s Bureau a force
for progressive change not just in federal policy, but also in
state and local governments.
But a sensational controversy broke out late in 1909 that
helped put an end to Taft’s popularity with reformers. Many
progressives had been unhappy when Taft replaced Roosevelt’s
secretary of the interior, James R. Garfield, an aggressive
conservationist, with Richard A. Ballinger, a conservative corporate lawyer. Suspicion of Ballinger grew when he attempted
to invalidate Roosevelt’s removal of nearly 1 million acres of
forests and mineral reserves from private development.
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT Taft could be a jovial companion in small groups, but his
public image was of a dull, stolid man who stood in sharp and unfortunate contrast to his
dynamic predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Taft also suffered public ridicule for his enormous
size. He weighed as much as 350 pounds at times, and wide publicity accompanied his
installation of an oversized bathtub in the White House. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
In the midst of this mounting concern, Louis Glavis, an
Interior Department investigator, charged Ballinger with having
once connived to turn over valuable public
BAllingercoal lands in Alaska to a private syndicate
Pinchot
for personal profit. Glavis took the evidence
disPute
to Gifford Pinchot, still head of the Forest
Service and a critic of Ballinger’s policies. Pinchot took the
charges to the president. Taft investigated them and decided
they were groundless. But Pinchot was not satisfied, particularly
after Taft fired Glavis for his part in the episode. He leaked the
story to the press and asked Congress to investigate the scandal.
The president discharged him for insubordination. The congressional committee appointed to study the controversy, dominated by Old Guard Republicans, exonerated Ballinger. But
progressives throughout the country supported Pinchot. The
controversy aroused as much public passion as any dispute of its
time; and when it was over, Taft had alienated the supporters of
Roosevelt completely and, it seemed, irrevocably.
578
•
CHAPTER 20
The Return of Roosevelt
During most of these controversies, Theodore Roosevelt was far
away: on a long hunting safari in Africa and an extended tour of
Europe. To the American public, however, Roosevelt remained a
formidable presence thanks to intensive newspaper coverage of
his every move abroad. His return to New York in the spring of
1910 was a major public event. Roosevelt insisted that he had no
plans to reenter politics, but within a month he announced that
he would embark on a national speaking tour before the end of
the summer. Furious with Taft, he was becoming convinced that
he alone was capable of reuniting the Republican Party.
The real signal of Roosevelt’s decision to assume leadership of
Republican reformers came in a speech he gave on September 1,
1910, in Osawatomie, Kansas. In it he out“new
lined a set of principles, which he labeled
nAtionAlism”
the “New Nationalism,” that made clear he
had moved a considerable way from the cautious conservatism
of the first years of his presidency. He argued that social justice
was possible only through the vigorous efforts of a strong federal
government whose executive acted as the “steward of the public welfare.” Those who thought primarily of property rights and
personal profit “must now give way to the advocate of human
welfare.” He supported graduated income and inheritance taxes,
workers’ compensation for industrial accidents, regulation of the
labor of women and children, tariff revision, and firmer regulation of corporations.
Spreading Insurgency
The congressional elections of 1910 provided further evidence of
how far the progressive revolt had spread. In primary elections,
conservative Republicans suffered defeat after defeat while almost
all the progressive incumbents were reelected. In the general
ROOSEVELT AT OSAWATOMIE
Roosevelt’s famous speech at Osawatomie,
Kansas, in 1910 was the most radical of his
career and openly marked his break with the Taft
administration and the Republican leadership.
“The essence of any struggle for liberty,” he told
his largely conservative audience, “has always
been, and must always be to take from some one
man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or
wealth, or position or immunity, which has not
been earned by service to his or their
fellows.” (© The Granger Collection, New York)
election, the Democrats, who were now offering progressive candidates of their own, won control of the House of Representatives
for the first time in sixteen years and gained strength in the
Senate. But Roosevelt still denied any presidential ambitions and
claimed that his real purpose was to pressure Taft to return to
progressive policies. Two events, however, changed his mind. The
first, on October 27, 1911, was the announcement by the administration of a suit against U.S. Steel, which charged, among other
things, that the 1907 acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron
Company had been illegal. Roosevelt had approved that acquisition in the midst of the 1907 panic, and he was enraged by the
implication that he had acted improperly.
Roosevelt was still reluctant to become a candidate for
president because Senator Robert La Follette, the great
Wisconsin progressive, had been working since 1911 to secure
the presidential nomination for himself. But La Follette’s candidacy stumbled in February 1912 when, exhausted, and
distraught over the illness of a daughter, he appeared to suffer
a nervous breakdown during a speech in Philadelphia. Roosevelt
announced his candidacy on February 22.
Roosevelt versus Taft
La Follette retained some diehard support. But for all practical
purposes, the campaign for the Republican nomination had
now become a battle between Roosevelt and Taft. Roosevelt
scored overwhelming victories in all thirteen presidential
primaries. Taft, however, remained the choice of most party
leaders, who controlled the nominating process.
The battle for the nomination at the Chicago convention
revolved around an unusually large number of contested
delegates: 254 in all. Roosevelt needed fewer than half the
disputed seats to clinch the nomination. But the Republican
National Committee, controlled by the Old Guard, awarded all
THE PROGRESSIVES
but 19 of them to Taft. At a rally the night before the convention opened, Roosevelt addressed 5,000 cheering supporters.
“We stand at Armageddon,” he told the roaring crowd, “and
we battle for the Lord.” The next day, he led his supporters out
of the convention, and out of the party. The convention then
quietly nominated Taft on the first ballot.
Roosevelt summoned his supporters back to Chicago in
August for another convention, this one to launch the new
Progressive Party and nominate himself as its
the
presidential candidate. Roosevelt approached
Progressive
the battle feeling, as he put it, “fit as a bull
PArty
moose” (thus giving his new party an enduring nickname).
The “Bull Moose” party was notable for its strong
commitment to a wide range of progressive causes that had
grown in popularity over the previous two decades. The party
advocated additional regulation of industry and trusts,
sweeping reforms of many areas of government, compensation
by the government for workers injured on the job, pensions
for the elderly and for widows with children, and (alone among
the major parties) woman suffrage. The delegates left the
party’s convention filled with hope and excitement.
Roosevelt himself, however, entered the fall campaign
aware that his cause was almost hopeless, partly because many
of the insurgents who had supported him during the primaries
refused to follow him out of the Republican Party. His
pessimism was also a result of the man the Democrats had
nominated for president.
WOODROW WILSON AND
THE NEW FREEDOM
The 1912 presidential contest was not simply one between conservatives and reformers. It was also one between two brands of
progressivism. And it matched the two most important national
leaders of the early twentieth century in unequal contest.
Woodrow Wilson
Reform sentiment had been gaining strength within the
Democratic as well as the Republican Party in the first years of
the century. At the 1912 Democratic National Convention in
Baltimore in June, Champ Clark, the conservative Speaker of
the House, was unable to assemble the two-thirds majority
necessary for nomination because of progressive opposition.
Finally, on the forty-sixth ballot, Woodrow Wilson, the governor
of New Jersey and the only genuinely progressive candidate in
the race, emerged as the party’s nominee.
Wilson had risen to political prominence by an unusual
path. He had been a professor of political science at Princeton
until 1902, when he was named president
wilson’s “new
of the university. Elected governor of New
freedom”
Jersey in 1910, he demonstrated a commitment to reform. During his two years in the statehouse, he
earned a national reputation for winning passage of progressive
•
579
legislation. As a presidential candidate in 1912, Wilson presented a progressive program that came to be called the “New
Freedom.” Roosevelt’s New Nationalism advocated accepting
economic concentration and using government to regulate
and control it. But Wilson seemed to side with those who (like
Louis Brandeis) believed that bigness was both unjust and
inefficient, that the proper response to monopoly was not to
regulate it but to destroy it.
The 1912 presidential campaign was an anticlimax. William
Howard Taft, resigned to defeat, barely campaigned. Roosevelt
campaigned energetically (until a gunshot wound from a
would-be assassin forced him to the sidelines during the last
weeks before the election), but he failed to draw any significant
numbers of Democratic progressives away from Wilson. In
November, Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote; Wilson
held on to most Democrats and won. He polled only 42 percent
of the vote, compared with 27 percent for Roosevelt, 23 percent for Taft, and 6 percent for the socialist Eugene V. Debs. But
in the electoral college, Wilson won 435 of the 531 votes.
Roosevelt had carried only six states, Taft two, Debs none.
The Scholar as President
Wilson was a bold and forceful president. He exerted firm
control over his cabinet, and he delegated real authority only
to those whose loyalty to him was beyond question. His most
powerful adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, was an intelligent
and ambitious Texan who held no office and whose only claim
to authority was his personal intimacy with the president.
In legislative matters, Wilson skillfully welded together a coalition that would support his program. Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress made his task easier.
lowering the
Wilson’s first triumph as president was the
tAriff
fulfillment of an old Democratic (and progressive) goal: a substantial lowering of the protective tariff. The
Underwood-Simmons Tariff provided cuts substantial enough,
progressives believed, to introduce real competition into
American markets and thus to help break the power of trusts. To
make up for the loss of revenue under the new tariff, Congress
approved a graduated income tax, which the recently adopted
Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution now permitted. This
first modern income tax imposed a 1 percent tax on individuals
and corporations earning more than $4,000 a year, with rates
ranging up to 6 percent on annual incomes over $500,000.
Wilson held Congress in session through the summer
to work on a major reform of the American banking system:
the Federal Reserve Act, which Congress passed and the president signed on December 23, 1913. It created twelve regional
banks, each to be owned and controlled by
federAl
the individual banks of its district. The
reserve Act
regional Federal Reserve banks would hold
a certain percentage of the assets of their member banks in
reserve; they would use those reserves to support loans to
private banks at an interest (or “discount”) rate that the Federal
Reserve system would set; they would issue a new type of
paper currency—Federal Reserve notes—that would become
580
•
CHAPTER 20
7
4
5
4
2
3
13
13
8
4
11
12
5
3
3
6
5
6
10
10
3
20
45
15
29 15 24
18
13
12
9
10 12
38
8 12
44
14
3
8
18
5
7
12
14
9
10
6
Candidate (Party)
Electoral Vote
Woodrow Wilson
(Democratic)
435
Theodore Roosevelt
(Progressive/Bull Moose)
William H. Taft
(Republican)
Eugene V. Debs
(Socialist)
Other parties
(Prohibition; Socialist Labor)
Popular Vote (%)
6,293,454
(41.9)
—
4,119,538
(27.4)
3,484,980
(23.2)
900,672
(6.0)
—
235,025
88
8
58.8% of electorate voting
WOODROW WILSON Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States, was a
Virginian (the first southerner to be elected president since before the Civil War), a professor
of political science and later president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and
known as a brilliant progressive. His election to the presidency brought the first Democrat to the
White House since 1896. (The Library of Congress (3a21763v))
the nation’s basic medium of trade and would be backed by
the government. Most important, they would be able to shift
funds quickly to troubled areas—to meet increased demands
for credit or to protect imperiled banks. Supervising and regulating the entire system was a national Federal Reserve Board,
whose members were appointed by the president. Nearly half
the nation’s banking resources were represented in the system
within a year, and 80 percent by the late 1920s.
In 1914, turning to the central issue of his 1912 campaign,
Wilson proposed two measures to deal with the problem of
monopoly. In the process he revealed how his own approach to
the issue was beginning to change. There was a proposal to create
a federal agency through which the government would help business police itself—a regulatory commission of the type Roosevelt
had advocated in 1912. There were also proposals to strengthen
the government’s ability to break up trusts—a decentralizing
approach characteristic of Wilson’s 1912 campaign. The two measures took shape as the Federal Trade Commission Act and the
Clayton Antitrust Act. The Federal Trade Commission Act created
a regulatory agency that would help businesses determine in
advance whether their actions would be acceptable to the government. The agency would also have authority to launch prosecutions against “unfair trade practices,” and it would have wide
power to investigate corporate behavior. Wilson signed the
Federal Trade Commission Bill happily. But he seemed to lose
ELECTION OF 1912 The election of 1912 was one of the most unusual in American
history because of the dramatic schism within the Republican Party. Two Republican
presidents—William Howard Taft, the incumbent, and Theodore Roosevelt, his predecessor—ran
against each other in 1912, opening the way for a victory by the Democratic candidate,
Woodrow Wilson, who won with only about 42 percent of the popular vote. A fourth candidate,
the socialist Eugene V. Debs, received a significant 6 percent of the vote.
• What events caused the schism between Taft and Roosevelt?
interest in the Clayton Antitrust Bill and did little to protect it
from conservative assaults, which greatly weakened it. The future,
he had apparently decided, lay with government supervision.
Retreat and Advance
By the fall of 1914, Wilson believed that the program of the New
Freedom was essentially complete and that agitation for reform
would now subside. He refused to support the movement for
national woman suffrage. Deferring to southern Democrats, and
reflecting his own southern background, he condoned the reimposition of segregation in the agencies of the federal government
(in contrast to Roosevelt, who had ordered the elimination of
many such barriers). When congressional progressives attempted
to enlist his support for new reform legislation, Wilson dismissed
their proposals as unconstitutional or unnecessary.
The congressional elections of 1914, however, shattered
the president’s complacency. Democrats suffered major losses
in Congress, and voters who in 1912 had supported the
Progressive Party began returning to the Republicans. Wilson
would not be able to rely on a divided opposition when he ran
for reelection in 1916. By the end of 1915, therefore, Wilson
THE PROGRESSIVES
had begun to support a second flurry of reforms. In January
1916, he appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court,
making him not only the first Jew but also the most progressive justice to serve there. Later, he supported a measure to
make it easier for farmers to receive credit and one creating
a system of workers’ compensation for federal employees.
Wilson was sponsoring measures that expanded the powers
of the national government in important ways. In 1916, for
example, he supported the Keating-Owen Act, the first federal
law regulating child labor. The measure
child-lABor
prohibited the shipment of goods produced
lAws
by underage children across state lines,
thus giving an expanded importance to the constitutional
•
581
clause assigning Congress the task of regulating interstate
commerce. The president similarly supported measures that
used federal taxing authority as a vehicle for legislating social
change. After the Court struck down Keating-Owen, a new
law attempted to achieve the same goal by imposing a heavy
tax on the products of child labor. (The Court later struck it
down too.) And the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 demonstrated
another way in which the federal government could influence
local behavior; it offered matching federal grants to support
agricultural extension education. Over time, these innovative
uses of government overcame most of the constitutional
objections and became the foundation of a long-term growth
in federal power over the economy.
AP CONNECTING THEMES
Chapter 20 emphasized the goals, successes, and limitations of
the progressive movement. Review the role of women in instituting social reforms and consider how their participation in
progressive reform efforts broadened opportunities and to
what degree ideas concerning the “cult of domesticity” were
affected. Also, you should now be familiar with the role of
muckrakers in promoting reform, as well as knowing about
geographical divisions and the bases for support or emphasis
on various types of reform. Chapter 20 discussed Theodore
Roosevelt’s actions regarding corporate trusts and environmental conservation. Also discussed was the unusual election
of 1912 and the factors that led Woodrow Wilson to be
elected president. Compare Wilson’s New Freedom program
to Roosevelt’s New Nationalism program. Lastly, the chapter
compared the respective views of Booker T. Washington and
W.E.B. Du Bois on achieving racial equality. Think about how
the progressive movement played a role in assisting certain
minorities in their struggles for equal rights.
The following themes have heightened importance in
Chapter 20. You should now be able to do the following for
each listed theme:
Culture and Society: Explain the ways in which class consciousness was accentuated during the progressive era and
explain changes in the perception of gender roles.
Work, Exchange, and Technology: Explain the consequences of economic hardship on both the domestic and international scenes. Also, be able to explain the changing view
toward big business on the part of the federal government.
Politics and Power: Discuss the degree to which the progressive
movement was successful in making the government more
responsible to the people at the national, state, and local levels.
Geography and the Environment: Describe the debate
over conservation of resources versus preservation of resources.
Politics and Power: Explain how concepts about the legitimate role of the federal government in looking out for the welfare of its citizens changed during the progressive era.
**Additional note: You should be able to contrast the reform
movements of the progressive era with those of the Jacksonian
era. Additionally, in looking ahead, you should ultimately be
able to compare and contrast the progressive era with other
eras of reform such as the New Deal and the Great Society.
AP SUGGESTED STUDY
PEOPLE/PLACES/EVENTS As you study these items, think about how they demonstrate or relate to key concepts and historical
themes from this chapter and previous chapters.
Alice PAul 560
“BAd trusts” 570
“Bull moose” PArty 579
elizABeth cAdy stAnton 559
eugene deBs 568
eugenics 568
fAther John ryAn 553
federAl reserve Act 579
gifford Pinchot 574
“good trusts” 570
hetch hetchy 575
hull house 553
idA tArBell 553
interstAte commerce Act 574
iww (“woBBlies”) 569
JAne AddAms 553
lincoln steffens 553
louis BrAndeis 570
mucKrAKers 552
municiPAl reforms 561
nAAcP 566
nAtionAl AmericAn womAn
suffrAge AssociAtion
(nAwsA) 559
new freedom 579
newlAnds Act 575
new nAtionAlism 578
PAnic of 1907 576
ProfessionAl AssociAtions 555
ProhiBition 567
Pure food And drug Act 574
referendum 562
roBert lA follette 563
settlement houses 553
sierrA cluB 575
sociAl gosPel 553
582 •
CHAPTER 20
sociAl worK 553
tAmmAny hAll 564
the “new womAn” 556
thorstein veBlen 554
triAngle shirtwAist comPAny
fire 564
w.e.B. du Bois 566
western Progressives 565
women’s christiAn temPerAnce
union 567
womAn’s cluB movement 558
AP TEST PRACTICE
Questions assume cumulative content knowledge from this chapter and previous chapters.
MULTIPLE CHOICE Use the photograph on page 555 and
your knowledge of U.S. history to answer questions 1–2.
1. The subject matter of the photograph most reflects which
5. Answer a, b, and c.
a) For ONE of the areas below, briefly explain its
influence on progressive ideals.
progressive belief?
• Enlightenment
(A) The progressive belief in participation in municipal
• Second Great Awakening
government
(B) The progressive belief in the “natural laws” of the
marketplace
(C) The progressive belief in individual accomplishment
and professionalism
(D) The progressive belief in the influence of the environ-
ment on human individual development
2. During which earlier period in American history was there
a similar concern for social welfare for the underprivileged
of different ethnic backgrounds?
• Early 19th-century Romanticism
b) Provide ONE example of an event or development to
support your explanation.
c) Briefly explain why ONE of the other options is not
as useful to explaining influences leading to the
development of progressivism at the turn of the
20th century.
6. Use the political cartoon on page 554 to answer a, b, and c.
a) Briefly explain the opinion expressed by the artist about
ONE of the following:
(A) 17th century Puritan New England
• Monopolies
(B) 18th century Enlightenment period
• Senators
(C) Post Second Great Awakening secular movements
(D) Post-Civil War western towns
SHORT ANSWER Use your knowledge of U.S. history to
answer questions 3–6.
3. Answer a, b, and c.
a) Briefly explain ONE example of a variety of progressive
reform.
b) Briefly explain a SECOND example of a variety of
progressive reform.
c) Briefly explain ONE example of a commonality in
philosophy, motives, or goals between the varieties of
movement you identified above.
4. Answer a, b, and c.
a) For ONE of the groups below, identify a political, social,
or economic issue it tackled in the progressive era.
• Labor
• Political Parties
• African Americans
b) Briefly explain ONE example of a success or advance-
ment the group achieved regarding the issue.
c) Briefly explain ONE development that would support an
argument that the success or advancement was limited.
• Public opinion
b) Briefly explain ONE development from 1889 to 1910
that might give some validity to its claim.
c) Briefly explain ONE way in which this political issue
was reformed between 1889 and 1910.
LONG ESSAY For each question below, develop a thoughtful
and thorough historical argument that answers the question.
Begin your essay with a thesis statement and support it with
relevant historical evidence.
7. Evaluate the extent to which the reform movements of
the progressive era of the early 20th century were a continuation as well as a departure from the reform movements of the 1820s and 1830s in regard to their
philosophies, goals, and motivations.
8. Some historians have argued that the progressive era was
a turning point in the women’s rights movement. Support,
modify, or refute this interpretation, providing specific
evidence to justify your answer.
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20 THE PROGRESSIVES
AP
H I S TO R I CA L TH I N KI N G
1. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways were
progressives able to make the American political system
more democratic at the national, state, and local levels?
2. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways did the
progressive movement improve life for average Americans
through the regulation of big business?
3. Argumentation To what degree and in what ways were
progressives able to enact social welfare legislation?
4. Contextualization Analyze the sources of support for
progressive reform and the reasons for that support.
The new AP® Edition of Alan Brinkley’s American History © 2017 fully addresses the revised AP
United States History Curriculum and provides students with the guidance and support they need
to master the key concepts, themes, historical thinking skills, and the new AP US History Exam.
5. Contextualization Analyze the role of women in the
progressive movement, reforms they sought to attain, and
their relative success in realizing those goals.
6. Comparison Compare and contrast the views of big
business and conservationists on the use of natural
resources.
7. Comparison Compare and contrast New Nationalism with
New Freedom.
8. Comparison Compare the positions of Booker T. Washington
and W.E.B. Du Bois on how to best attain equal rights for
African Americans.
Key Concept Correlations
Our AP Test Practice questions match the rigor and complexity of the questions on the newly
revised exam and the themes and key concepts are fully integrated into the core text.
The transition to the new curriculum is made easy for teachers and students with the new AP
Edition, new AP Teacher Manual, and new AP Test Banks, and new AP Source Library. .
Analyze the ways the historical developments you learn about in this chapter
connect to one or more of these key concepts in AP U.S History coursework..
6.3.I.C A number of artists and critics, including agrarians, utopians,
socialists, and advocates of the Social Gospel, championed alternative visions for the economy and U.S. society.
6.3.II.B Many women sought greater equality with men, often joining
voluntary organizations, going to college, promoting social and political
reform, and, like Jane Addams, working in settlement houses to help immigrants adapt to U.S. language and customs.
7.1.II. A Some Progressive Era journalists attacked what they saw as
political corruption, social injustice, and economic inequality, while reformers, often from the middle and upper classes and including many women,
worked to effect social changes in cities and among immigrant populations.
7.1.II.B On the national level, Progressives sought federal legislation
that they believed would effectively regulate the economy, expand democracy, and generate moral reform. Progressive amendments to the
Constitution dealt with issues such as prohibition and woman suffrage.
“VOTES FOR WOMEN,” BY B. M. BOYE This
striking poster was the prize-winning entry in a 1911 contest
sponsored by the College Equal Suffrage League of
Northern California. (The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute,
Harvard University)
7.1.II.C Preservationists and conservationists both supported the establishment of national parks while advocating different government responses to the
overuse of natural resources.
7.1.II.D The Progressives were divided over many issues. Some
Progressives supported Southern segregation, while others ignored its presence. Some Progressives advocated expanding popular participation in government, while others called for greater reliance on professional and technical
experts to make government more efficient. Progressives also disagreed
about immigration restriction.
Thematic Learning Objectives
CUL-1.0, 2.0, 3.0; NAT-2.0; POL-1.0, 2.0, 3.0; GEO-1.0
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