introduction to American History
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1104_AmericanHistoryComb_9e_19.pptxChapter 19: Society and Culture in the Progressive Era
Introduction to American History Combined
Ninth Edition, by Farmer © 2019
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Learning Objectives
Explain the factors leading to the growth of cities in the Progressive Era.
Discuss the rise of mass culture and explain how popular culture influenced people’s lives during the Progressive Era.
Explain how muckraking journalism attacked political and social problems of the era.
Evaluate the influence of women’s suffrage on American politics and society in the Progressive Era.
Describe how the birth control movement challenged traditional values and how conservatives reacted to it.
Introduction to American History Combined
Ninth Edition, by Farmer © 2019
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Learning Objectives (Continued)
Evaluate the Prohibition Movement and explain its effects on society in the United States.
Describe the emergence of the new social sciences on American education.
Evaluate the effect of progressive education on schooling in the United States.
Differentiate between the old style and new style of religious beliefs emerging during the Progressive era.
Introduction to American History Combined
Ninth Edition, by Farmer © 2019
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19.1 Progressivism
Popular response to the excesses of the Gilded Age included the following ideas:
Order is essential to progress.
Growth should not be allowed to occur randomly.
Government is a tool for providing more orderly growth and justice.
Natural laws of the marketplace are insufficient for justice and the good of the whole.
Government policies should seek the good of the whole.
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19.2a Flight from the Farm
City population grew seven times larger between 1860 and 1910.
Rural areas declined.
Births exceeded deaths.
Farmer output increased, but there was a surplus of agricultural workers.
Quality of rural life declined.
Tenancy increased to 37 percent.
In the South 500,000 whites were infected with hookworm.
Malaria killed many.
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19.2b The New Immigrants: Problems and Achievements
Wave of “new immigrants” continued to rise until World War I.
Italians, Jews, and Slavs arrived.
Most took menial jobs.
All immigrants suffered from discrimination.
Progressives equated race with culture, not genetics.
A literacy test was vetoed four times by three different presidents.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.2c The Leo Frank Case
Leo Frank was a Jewish man who was accused of murdering a fourteen-year-old girl in Marietta, Georgia.
He was eventually lynched for her murder, although she wrote a statement that accused an unnamed black man of her rape and murder.
The Frank lynching occurred at a time of racist theories that argued that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were superior to other races.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.2d Education and Social Mobility
Education provided the broadest avenue of social mobility.
Urban Jews led the way.
Private schools used a quota system for Jews and women.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.2e The Modern City
Neighborhoods became more stratified.
This was generally an era of renaissance for cities.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.3a The Growth of Spectator Sports
Baseball, boxing, and football became popular and provided a way out of small towns and big factories for players.
In boxing, Jack Johnson’s victories led to race riots.
Baseball was the national pastime.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.3b Motion Pictures
They supported traditional moral values.
They also provided humor and cynicism (bumbling cops, etc.).
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.3c Popular Reading
Taste in reading matter was similar to that in movies, though less cynical.
Mass-produced magazines were hugely popular.
Most popular reading material was singularly innocent and unsophisticated.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.3d Music
Technology, mass distribution, and increases in per capita income affected America’s musical patterns.
Phonograph: Most people preferred listening to playing.
Dance craze
Ragtime: Scott Joplin, Sheldon Brooks
W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues”
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.3e Journalism
A new aspect of the new urban culture was “yellow” journalism.
Sensationalism sold papers.
Pulitzer and Hearst incorporated sensationalism.
The New York Times appealed to the better educated.
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19.3f Muckraking
The rise of investigative reporting was important to the emerging progressive movement.
A group of journalists known as “muckrakers” focused on government and business improprieties.
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19.4a Architecture
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 favored Roman-style grandeur, and it sparked a “city-beautiful” movement.
Wright aimed to harmonize buildings with their natural surroundings.
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19.4b Painting
New innovations in the art world
The “Ashcan-school” emphasized realism and social protest.
Postimpressionism at New York Armory Show (1913) was severely criticized.
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19.4c The Novel
Trend toward realism
Willa Cather, Edith Wharton
Jack London and Frank Norris promoted social Darwinism in their novels.
Theodore Dreiser highlighted a tension between determinism and free will.
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19.4d Poetry
The early 1900s were a productive period for American poetry.
Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote about search for God in a dark world.
Vachel Lindsey wrote about common people.
Edward Lee Masters published Spoon River Anthology, the moral shabbiness of small-town life (1915).
Carl Sandberg and Robert Frost both appeared for the first time.
Imagists: Ezra Pound and Amy Powell asserted poets should recreate pure images; T.S. Eliot published in 1915.
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19.5a Women and Women’s Suffrage
Divorce increased to 1 in 9 by 1916.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman called for emancipation from domestic duties.
Women reformers influenced legislation.
Alice Paul led pickets at the White House for right to vote.
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19.5a Women and Women’s Suffrage (Continued)
Protestant fundamentalists opposed women’s suffrage as a violation of the natural place, designed by God, for women.
Protestant fundamentalists argued that women’s suffrage would lead to divorce and destruction of the family.
Carrie Chapman Catt led National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Women’s vote would create a more compassionate society.
It would clean out corruption and assure prohibition.
Radicals said it would end male domination.
Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919.
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19.5b Margaret Sanger and Birth Control
The women’s movement engulfed the movement for birth control.
Comstock Laws of 1873 prevented sending information on contraception through the mail.
Margaret Sanger opened a birth control clinic in 1916.
Smaller families would reduce the cost of living.
Eugenicists took up the cause.
“More children from the fit, less from the unfit.”
Churches opposed birth control.
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19.5c The Triumph of National Prohibition
Prohibition aimed at securing family values.
Many Anti-Saloon League members were urban.
Alcoholism was a major problem.
Science and religion supported abstinence.
Protestant fundamentalists linked alcohol and nativism.
Women favored prohibition for sober husbands.
WWI produced a moral crusade and alcohol was a casualty.
The Eighteenth Amendment banned intoxicating beverages (January 1920).
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19.6a Technology and Business
Technology and scientific management were chief among the forces that drove the change of the Progressive Era.
Henry Ford’s assembly line, just-in-time technology, and the $5 day
Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk
Cars, telephones, scientific management
New methods made robots out of many workers.
Wages increased, as did productivity.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.6b Modernizing the Government
Most Americans felt the government had not advanced at the same pace as industry.
Professionals—engineers, social scientists, and so forth—were hired to manage urban areas.
Merit-based civil service programs diminished the “spoils system.”
Electoral reforms were instituted.
Secret ballot
Ballot initiatives
Referendum
Recall elections
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19.7a Psychology and Economics
Psychology of the period greatly influenced Progressive thought.
Instinct school:
Humans ruled by instincts rather than reason or morality.
Behaviorist model:
Stimulus and response- only what can be seen can be measured
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19.7b The New History
Historical profession became modernized.
It was influenced by German methodology.
The work of Charles Beard was highly influential.
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19.8a Public Education
Schools were transformed because the professions demanded higher education.
Schools were in terrible shape with wide disparities in spending because of reliance on property taxes.
No state provided adequate education for education of blacks.
Vocational schools floundered, and instruction could not keep up with changes in workforce and economy.
John Dewey
Subject matter should be adapted to the needs of the students.
Students learn by doing.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.8b Higher Education
Colleges and universities were influenced by deepening of knowledge.
Enrollment doubled.
Scholarship flourished.
Specialization led to separation between the humanities and sciences.
Law schools abandoned theory and turned out “trained technicians.”
Medical care for the poor was the worst in industrialized world; doctors became businessmen.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.9a Protestantism
Religion was also affected by Progressive Era.
Modernism was an attempt to reconcile science and religion.
Rural communities rejected modernism and turned to fundamentalism: “To make money honestly is to preach the gospel.” (Russell Conwell, Baptist)
Smaller groups stressed “social gospel.” (Methodists)
George Herron, Congregationalist, wrote that the U.S. was “a nation governed by men of eminent Christian character gone mad with the spoils of unrighteousness.”
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19.9b Catholicism
The Catholic church was not affected by Modernism unlike the Protestant churches.
Membership and parochial education grew rapidly.
Father John A. Ryan: “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.”
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.9c Judaism
Developments within the Jewish community paralleled those within Protestantism.
Jews bestowed a disproportionately large contribution to American cultural and intellectual life.
Jews supported humanitarian aspects of progressivism with a strength out of proportion to their numbers.
Introduction to American History Combined
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19.9d Political Thought
Croly challenged the idea that the freedom to pursue individual gain led to progress.
People must create a community loyal to an ideal—a nation that would fulfill a nation’s great promise.
Introduction to American History Combined
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