The Progressive Era: ACCOUNTABILITY and A VOICE for the people (but not ALL the people..!)
• Roots: fight against corruption in gov't, civil service reform, corrupt political machines, lobbyists
• Regulate and control BIG BUSINESS: Grange, Populists, etc.
• Settlement house workers and Urban Reformers
• Idea that people must be more socially­minded and economy must be more carefully organized!
• 1896 return to prosperity made people more TOLERANT of reform
• Hofstadter's "status revolution"
MUCKRAKERS ATTACK!
Henry D. Lloyd, attacked Standard Oil in Wealth Against Commonwealth. "Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty." Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities
Ida Tarbell
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The "Progressive Mind"
• conscious of the people
• gov't must be more RESPONSIVE
• laissez­faire OBSOLETE
• Flaws of movement? OVERSIMPLIFIED, often at war with themselves! • Examples of contradictions?
"Radical" Progressives
Eugene Debs, Socialist Party
Sigmund Freud and "psychoanalysis"
"Bohemian" thinkers like Isadora Duncan
"Wobblies" founded by "Big Bill" Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debs, "Mother" Mary Jones, Lucy Parsons, and others
Alfred Stieglitz
Creative Writers like Ezra Pound developed an optimistic tone! (HOWEVER, Pound will later sympathize with fascists?!?!)
Margaret Sanger
“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian. “
~Emma Goldman (1869­1940)
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Political Reform: CITIES first
city manager system, Dayton, OH
Sam "Golden Rule" Jones, Toledo
Tom L. Johnson, Cleveland
"gas and water socialism"
Hazen Pingree, Detroit
Political Reform: The STATES
1902: Oregon experiments with INITIATIVE
Referendum
Recall
Bob LaFollette and the "Wisconsin Idea"
• direct primary, corrupt practices act, laws limiting campaign expenditures and lobbying.
• used commissions to handle RR regulation, tax assessment, conservation, highway construction
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http://www.csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/exhibits/show/collinwoodschoolfire/before
The Courts: Use of 14th Amendment to protect "liberty?"
Triangle Shirtwaist • Lochner v. NY (10 Fire Disaster, hour workday for 1911, serves as a bakers)
horrific WAKE­UP • Hammer v. Dagenhart CALL
(federal child labor law)
• Adkins v. Children's Collinwood School Hospital (minimum wage Fire, 1904
law for women)
CONSUMER'S LEAGUE: "investigate, agitate, legislate!"
• Louis Brandeis and "Brandeis Brief"
Frances Perkins, Consumer's League
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Major areas of POLITICAL REFORM?
• 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments all considered PROGRESSIVE reforms
• Reforms of the House? Limiting power of Speaker! • Challenged system set up by "Czar" Thomas Reed in 1890s
Speaker of House, Thomas Reed
Women's Suffrage Movement
• Failures of 14th and 15th Amendments?
• American Women's Suffrage Association
• E.C. Stanton, S.B. Anthony
• "held back by Victorian ideals"
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Becomes National Women's Suffrage Association: Stanton, Anthony, and later Carrie Chapman Catt
More RADICAL Congressional Union: Alice Paul, Alva Belmont: Pickets White House
Alice Paul
Lucy Burns
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