01:512:205 Lecture 29: Chapter 29
18 May 2018
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Chapter 29: Progressivism and the Republican
Roosevelt, 1901-1912
Progressive Roots
• There were nearly 76 million Americans in 1900; a reform movement right
convulsed the ethnically and racially mixed American people after the
twentieth century had dawned
• The roots of the new reformist wave went back the Green Labor party and
Populists and to the mounting unrest as grasping industrialists concentrated
more and more power in fewer hands
• Progressive theorists—society could no longer afford the luxury of laissez-
faire policy
• Populists branded the bloated trusts with the stigma of corruption and
wrongdoing
• Henry Lloyd charged into the Standard Oil Company with Wealth Against
Commonwealth
• Thorstein Veblen assailed the new rich in The Theory of the Leisure
Class (1899, 1894 ↑)
• Jacob Riis shocked middle-class with How the Other Half Lives, an account of
the NY slums
• Theodore Dreiser battered promoters and profiteers in The Financier and The
Titan
• Socialists began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box
• Messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism (using
religious doctrine)
• Feminists added social justice to suffrage on list of needed reforms (Jane
Addams, Lillian Wald)
•
Raking Muck with the Muckrakers
• By 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American
publishers
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find more resources at oneclass.com
• A group of aggressive ten- and fifteen-cent magazines surged to the front;
editors financed extensive research and encouraged writing by reports
branded muckrakers by Roosevelt
• Lincoln Steffens unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and
municipal government and Ida Tarbell published a devastating factual expose
of the Standard Oil Company
• Muckrakers roasted the beef trust, the money trust, the railroad barons, and
corrupt fortunes
• Thomas Lawson, a speculator, laid bare the practices o his accomplices in
Frenzied Finance
• David G. Phillips wrote The Treason of the Senate—senators represented
companies not people
• The most effective fire of the muckrakers was directed at social evils—
prostitution, slums, industrial accidents, subjugation of American blacks, and
abuses of child labor
• The muckrakers signified much about the nature of the progressive reform
movement
• To right social wrongs, they counted on publicity and an aroused public
conscience
Political Progressivism
• Progressive reformers were mainly middle-class men and women felt
pressure from new giant corporations, restless immigrant hordes, and the
aggressive labor unions
• The progressives sought two goals: to use state power to curb the trusts and
to stem the socialist threat by generally improving the common person’s
conditions of life and labor
• Progressivism was less a minority movement and more a majority mood
• An objective was to regain the power that had slipped from the people into
those interests
• They favored the initiative so that voters could directly propose legislation
themselves, referendum, which would place laws on the ballot for final
approval by the people, and recall, which would enable voters to remove
faithless elected officials
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find more resources at oneclass.com
• Rooting out graft became a prime goal of earnest progressives—the secret
Australian ballot was being introduced more widely in the states to counteract
boss rule
• Direct election of U.S. senators became a favorite goal of progressives—
Millionaires’ Club
• Partly as a result of such pressures from state legislatures, the Seventeenth
Amendment to the Constitution (1913) established the direct election of United
States senators
• Woman suffrage received powerful new support from the progressives early in
the 1900s
• Political reforms believed that women’s votes would elevate the political tone
• Many states, especially the liberal ones in the West, gradually extended the
vote to women
Progressivism in the Cities and States
• Frustrated by inefficiency and corruption of government many localities
followed example of Galveston, Texas—in 1901 it had appointed expert-
staffed commissions to manage urban affairs
• Urban reforms likewise attacked slumlords, juvenile delinquency, and wide-
open prostitution
• Progressivism bubbled up to the state level, notably in Wisconsin, which
tested new reform
• Governor Robert La Follette wrested considerable control from the crooked
corporations and returned it to the people—he perfected a scheme for
regulating public utilities
• States marched steadily toward the progressive camp, as they undertook to
regulate railroads and trusts, chiefly through public utilities commissions—
Oregon and California followed
Progressive Women
• A crucial focus for women’s activism was the settlement house movement—
door to public life
• They exposed middle-class women to problems in cities: poverty, corruption,
and conditions
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Commonwealth: thorstein veblen assailed the new rich in the theory of the leisure. Class (1899, 1894 : jacob riis shocked middle-class with how the other half lives, an account of the ny slums, theodore dreiser battered promoters and profiteers in the financier and the. Titan: socialists began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box, messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism (using religious doctrine, feminists added social justice to suffrage on list of needed reforms (jane. Amendment to the constitution (1913) established the direct election of united. League, the national consumers league, and federal agencies children"s. Temperance union (wctu) founded by frances e. williard, who allied with the anti-saloon league: some states passed (cid:1688)dry(cid:1689) laws, which controlled, restricted, or abolished alcohol, eighteenth amendment in 1919 floored, temporarily, demon rum and alcohol. In 1902, a crippling strike broke out in the anthracite coal mines of.
