Several
of the concerns targeted for reform by the Progressives
were direct or indirect results of the great wave of immigration
and industrialization around the turn of the century. In
the single decade from 1900 to 1910, 8.8 million immigrants
entered the United States, many of whom came from nations,
ethnic groups and religions that contrasted with the traditional
dominance of American immigrants
Ellis
Island (left) and immigrants arriving for processing. Images
Source: Library of Congress
from
the countries of Western Europe. Immigrants from southeastern
Europe provided cheap labor to support the rapid growth
of major industrial centers and settled in densely-populated
urban enclaves. Political parties and bosses used the voting
base offered by these immigrants to pursue their own goals,
often by aiding immigrant families with practical assistance
in jobs, housing or other benefits. The poor housing, sanitation
and health care, as well as the extensive exploitation of
child labor in both factories and at home, prevalent in
most immigrant communities also became a focus for reformers.
Children
at work in factory (Image Source: Wisconsin
Department of Workforce Development) and at home (Image
Source: Barnard
Electronic Archive and Teaching Laboratory)
Progressive
leaders attacked the political and economic system for allowing
these conditions to continue, and often organized their
own private relief programs to provide assistance through
churches, charities and other private organizations direct
relief programs.
....A
visitor of the relief society found Rosina aged thirteen
years, helping her mother and father in the work of finishing
trousers. Since the arrival of the family in the United
States seven years before, neither Rosina nor Vincenza
had attended school, and neither could read or write.
With the father ill of tuberculosis, Vincenza no longer
able to work, and four younger children, aged eleven,
seven, five and two years, to be cared for. Rosina, who
had helped to support the family since she was six years
old, was now the chief wage earner. Her brother, Giuseppe,
aged eleven years helped in the sewing after school hours.
But at the price of four cents a pair, for "felling"
seams, finishing linings, and sewing buttons trousers,
all the workers in the family,-father, mother and two
children, by united effort, could not earn more than four
or five dollars a week.
When the relief society aided
the family, Vincenza was sent to a hospital, and Rosina
for the first time in her life began to go to school.
But she continued to sew at home after school hours. A
later entry in the society's records reports that "Rosina
and Giuseppe were busy at work finishing. Rosina said
that she went to school regularly all day sessions, and
that she and her brother helped at finishing after school."
All that the law could do for
Rosina was to add school work to the ceaseless toil in
which she had spent her days since early childhood. In
her work at home from the time she was six years old for
a manufacturer of clothing no provision of the labor law
was violated. After her eighth birthday, her work at home,
in that it prevented her attending school, caused a violation
of the compulsory education law. But the work in itself,
so long as the family lived in a licensed tenement, was
never at any time illegal until Vincenza developed tuberculosis.
Nor was this and the danger to the public health from
the presence of a communicable disease in the home workroom
prevented by the Department of Labor or the Board of Health.....
Account
of Child Labor in New York City Tenements from Mary Van
Kleeck, Charities and the Commons, January 18, 1908
Source:
TenantNet
Concerns
over abuses by business and the "robber barons"
who exploited labor and the lack of government regulation
of the marketplace also was a prevailing theme of those
seeking reform. The sharp rise in economic activity spurred
by industrialization and cheap labor contributed to concentrations
of economic power among large national corporations and
the formation of huge "trusts" as companies sought
to eliminate their prime competitors. Between 1897 and 1904,
4,227 firms merged to form 257 corporations, with the largest
merger consolidating nine steel companies to create the
U.S. Steel Corp. controlled by Andrew Carnegie. By 1904,
318 companies controlled about 40 percent of the nation's
manufacturing output. A single firm produced over half the
output in 78 industries. See The
Progressive Era, Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History.
Many
Progressives came from the traditional upper and middle-class
establishment, and were offended by the emergence of a class
of government and political professionals who threatened
their own views of democratic ideals and social justice.
To some Progressives, their religious beliefs and views
of their social responsibilities as privileged members of
society demanded that they act to improve working and living
conditions for the less fortunate. To others, the need to
address the economic and social problems was motivated in
part by self-interest. Without the reforms that were implemented,
more radical and potentially violent change may have disrupted
or destroyed the economic and social class structure such
as would occur in Russia in 1916. Fear of the expansion
of Socialism and Marxism provoked many in the upper class
to support more moderate reform efforts as a means to ease
the growing tensions between rich and poor and head off
more extreme threats to their privileged role in society.
Progressive,
"muckraking" journalists also played key parts
in highlighting specific economic and social ills that led
to government action. Jacob
Riis exposed the poor living conditions of the tenement
slums in How
the Other Half Lives (1890), which led to significant
legislation establishing minimum safety and housing standards
in tenements. In The
Shame of the Cities
(1904), Lincoln Steffens
exposed the rampant political corruption in the party machines
of Chicago and New York, arguing that the political machines
served the interests of businessmen who sought government
contracts, franchises, charters, and special privileges.
The
Jungle, published by Upton
Sinclair in 1906, traced an immigrant family's exploitation
and the unsanitary practices prevalent in Chicago's meat
packing industry. The outrage provoked by the novel contributed
to the enactment of the Pure
Food and Drug Act and the Meat
Inspection Act in 1906, the first legislation of its
kind to set minimum standards for food and drug production.
Now, the typical American citizen
is the business man. The typical business man is a bad
citizen; he is busy. If he is a "big business man"
and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics,
oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him buying
boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis,
originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses
in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating
good government with corruption funds in New York. He
is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is
the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if
he would neglect politics. But he is not the business
man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen,
the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one
that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When
his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far
that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he
looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he
may hurry back to the shop.
Excerpt
from Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities
Source:
History
122, Northern Virginia Community College
Theodore
Roosevelt Image Source: The
College of New Jersey
Theodore
Roosevelt, who
assumed the presidency in 1901 at the age of 42 following
the assassination of President William
McKinley, is the most dominant personality of the Progressive
Era. A
member of a wealthy, aristocratic Dutch family, Roosevelt
broke sharply from the pro-business policies of of his own
Republican Party and targeted monopolistic business practices
for reform. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create a Bureau
of Corporations to investigate and regulate big business,
then brought an anti-trust suit against J.P. Morgan's Northern
Securities Company, a railroad trust controlled by the
Wall Street financier, with the United States Supreme Court
upholding the dissolution of the trust in the case of Northern
Securities Co. v. United States issued in 1904.
During Roosevelt's Administration, over 40 major corporations
were sued for antitrust or price-fixing violations.
Roosevelt
greatly expanded the powers of the government within the
economy, often by endorsing new power for organized labor
to organize and exert leverage against employers. By supporting
labor in the settlement of the Anthracite
Coal Strike of 1902, Roosevelt became the first president
to assume such a direct role in intervening in labor disputes,
including the threatened use of the U.S. Army to seize the
coal mines and operate them until the owners agreed to arbitration
to settle the strike. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908,
succeeded by his vice president and hand-picked successor,
William
Howard Taft. Roosevelt later split with Taft, however,
claiming that the Republican Administration had departed
from the progressive course to align itself again with big
business interests. When Roosevelt failed to defeat Taft
in securing the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt
ran an independent campaign under the Progressive
Party, popularly known as the
"Bull Moose" party after Roosevelt's boast
that he was "fit as a Bull Moose" to run for the
presidency, but the division of the Republican vote insured
the victory of the Democratic ticket headed by New Jersey
Governor Woodrow
Wilson. See
Woodrow Wilson and the Election of 1912.
The
Progressive Era also saw increasing conflicts within the
labor movement, as the earlier unions based on workers in
crafts and skilled trades competed with those oriented toward
those employed in the factories of the new industrialized
economy. The new industrial unions also advocated more radical
economic and social reform; in 1905, the Industrial
Workers of the World was founded in Chicago wiith cooperation
from members of the Socialist Labor Party/Socialist Trades
& Labor Alliance, Socialist Party of America, Western
Federation of Miners and others from labor interests with
progressive political agendas. The industrial unions also
introduced more aggressive, and sometimes violent, practices
to bolster their organizing or negotiating positions. In
1906, the IWW coordinated
the first sit-in strike when miners at the General Electric
plant in Schenectady, New York, refused to leave the workplace
and in the next year federal troops were sent in to crush
the strike
of miners belonging to the IWW in Goldfield, Nevada. In
1913, the Paterson
Silk Strike in New Jersey started with a spontaneous
walkout at Doherty and Company, the largest mill in what
was then the world center of silk manufacturing, after the
company owners introduced new looms that allowed a worker
who had previously tended one or two looms to work three
or four simultaneously. The strike spread to other mills
in the city as workers feared for their jobs if employers
could produce more silk with less labor; eventually, the
stike idled some 25,000 workers and shut down the textile
mills for six months. By its end, two workers had been killed
by private detectives hired by the mill owners and over
3,000 strikers had been arrested.
The life of a strike depends
upon constant activities. In Paterson, as in all IWW strikes,
there were mass picketing, daily mass meetings, children’s
meetings, the sending of many children to New York and
New Jersey cities, and the unique Sunday gatherings. These
were held in the afternoon in the little town of Haledon,
just over the city line from Paterson. The mayor was a
Socialist who welcomed us. A striker’s family lived
there in a two-story house. There was a balcony on the
second floor, facing the street, opposite a large green
field. It was a natural platform and amphitheatre. Sunday
after Sunday, as the days became pleasanter, we spoke
there to enormous crowds of thousands of people–the
strikers and their families, workers from other Paterson
industries, people from nearby New Jersey cities, delegations
from New York of trade unionists, students and others.
Visitors came from all over America and from foreign countries.
People who saw these Haledon meetings never forgot them....
A touching episode occurred
in one of our children’s meetings. I was speaking
in simple language about the conditions of silk workers–why
their parents had to strike. I spoke of how little they
were paid for weaving the beautiful silk, like the Lawrence
workers who made the fine warm woolen cloth. Yet the textile
workers do not wear either woolen or silk, while the rich
people wear both. I asked: "Do you wear silk?"
They answered in a lively chorus. "No!" I asked:
Does your mother wear silk?" Again there was a loud
"No!" But a child’s voice interrupted,
making a statement. This is what he said: "My mother
has a silk dress. My father spoiled the cloth and had
to bring it home." The silk worker had to pay for
the piece he spoiled and only then did his wife get a
silk dress!
Account
of Paterson Silk Strike excerpted from Elizabeth Gurley
Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography (New York, 1955)
Source:
New
Jersey Women's History, Rutgers University, Scholarly
Communications Center
These
violent confrontations, and the illustration of the potential
of labor-instigated revolutionary change demonstrated by
the Russian Revolution of 1917, aided the elements of the
labor movement and the politicians who sought more moderate
reforms in the workplace.
Reform
of the electoral process, which increasingly had become
controlled by political machines and bosses, was another
priority of the progressive agenda. The most famous of these
machines, the Tammany
Hall Democratic organization headed by William
M. "Boss" Tweed in New York City, predated
the Progressive Era, with Tweed brought down in 1871 and
imprisoned following revelations of extensive corruption
by the New York Times and the devastating cartoons of Thomas
Nast published in Harper's
Weekly, but the Tammany organization and similar machines
in other areas continued to flourish well past Tweed's death
in prison in 1878.
Everybody is talkin' these days
about Tammany men growin'
rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the
distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft.
There's all the difference in the world between the two.
Yes, many
of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself.
I've made a
big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every
day, but
I've not gone in for dishonest graft-blackmailin' gamblers,
saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.-and neither has
any of the
men who have made big fortunes in politics.
There's an honest graft, and
I'm an example of how it works. I
might sum up the whole thing by sayin': "I seen my
opportunities
and I took 'em."
Just let me explain by examples.
My party's in power in the city,
and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements.
Well, I'm
tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park
at a certain
place.
I see my opportunity and I take
it. I go to that place and I buy up
all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board
of this or
that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get
my land,
which nobody cared particular for before.
Ain't it perfectly honest to
charge a good price and make a profit
on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well,
that's
honest graft.
George
Washington Plunkitt, quoted
in William
Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall Source: Project
Gutenberg
Progressives
like Wisconsin Governor and Senator Robert
M. La Follette sought to weaken the control of political
machines, which often aligned themselves with the interests
of big business, and promote wider citizen participation
in the electoral process. In several states, particularly
in the West, progressive reformers advocated forms of direct
democracy, such as authorizing citizen groups through "Initiative
and Referendum" to propose new laws or to review the
actions of legislatures by obtaining sufficient citizen
signatures on petitions to allow voter referenda on specific
issues. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to
amend its constitution to provide for popular initiative
and referendum for enacting and rejecting statewide legislation.
See South
Dakota Secretary of State. Progressives also successfully
lobbied for the direct election of U.S. senators by the
voters enacted through the 17th
Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1913, replacing
the former system by which members of the Senate were elected
by each state legislature. Reformers in many states also
pushed through systems to allow for the recall of elected
officials.
Women
also played critical roles in the reform movement, advocating
not only their own interest in securing the right to vote
but also a wide range of other progressive social issues.
The long struggle for women's suffrage began well before
the Civil War. In 1848, the first woman's rights convention
was organized by
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York. Twenty years
later, Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony founded their women's rights newspaper, the
Revolution, in New York City. The movement had its first
real successes, however, after the turn of the century,
when in 1912 suffrage referendums were approved in Arizona,
Kansas, and Oregon. Finally, on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitutution was ratified by
Tennessee, granting women the franchise throughout the country.
See
History of Women's Suffrage, The
Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership, Universityof
Rochester
In addition
to the right to vote, women also were leaders in other reform
causes. Many women formed or joined associations pursuing
political reform on specific issues and sometimes providing
other social welfare services, such as the "settlement
houses" that sought to provide immigrant families with
various services, including guidance on proper moral behavior.
The abuse of alcohol was the focus of the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union, which succeeded in lobbying
for the 18th
Amendment to the Constitution mandating the prohibition
of the sale of alcohol. The Nineteenth Amendment is adopted
and the women of the United States are finally enfranchised.
Other associations in which women activists were prominent
included the Women's
Trade Union League and the National
Consumers' League, which worked to educate the public
on issues of wages, hours, and working conditions, including
through its "white label" awarded to employers
whose labor practices met with the NCL's approval for fairness
and safety.
While
the Progressive reform agenda initiated under Theodore Roosevelt
following Democrat Woodrow
Wilson's election in 1912, Wilson increasingly was forced,
however, to divert attention from domestic issues toward
the deteriorating international situation that ultimately
would bring the U.S. into World War I. See
Woodrow Wilson and the Election of 1912. Progressive
principles were evident, however, in the moralism that Wilson
brought to the larger issues of world conflict and human
rights, such as his idealistic call for the creation of
a world body to mediate and prevent future wars. See After
Wilson failed to gain the Senate's approval of of the League
of Nations, progressive ideas lost favor as more pragmatic
interests took hold both domestically and internationally
during the prosperity of the early 1920s.
Resources
The
Progressive Era: 1900-1918 >> PBS.org
TR,
the Story of Theodore Roosevelt
>> PBS.org
TR:
An American Lion >>
HistoryChannel.com
"Boss"
Tweed and the Tammany Hall Machine >>
David Wiles, University of Albany
American
Labor Museum
Educational
Tools
The
Progressive Era, The United States 1900-1920 >>
Henry J. Sage, Northern Virginia Community College
The
Progressive Era >> Gilder
Lehrman Institute of American History
TR,
The Story of Theodore Roosevelt:Teacher's Guide >>
PBS.org
The
Progressive Movement in the 20th Century >> Nebraska
Studies
America
in the Progressive Era >> Robert
Bannister, Swarthmore College
Progressive
Movement and the 1920s >> George
Burson, Aspen School District
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