US History 2
Mickey Scout
� T h e P r o g r e s s i v e E r a 1 9 0 0 – 1 9 1 6
18
F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S • Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
• How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
• In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses?
• How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
It was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fi re broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three fl oors of a ten-story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’ blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owners’ way, it was later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fi re department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only to the sixth fl oor. As the fi re raged, onlookers watched in horror as girls leapt from the upper stories. By the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was typical of manufacturing in the nation’s largest city, a beehive of industrial production in small, crowded
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682 Ch . 18 : THE PROGRESS IVE ERA
factories. New York was home to 30,000 manufacturing establish- ments with more than 600,000 employees—more industrial workers than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Triangle had already played a key role in the era’s labor history. When 200 of its work- ers tried to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by fi ring them. This incident helped to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909—the Uprising of the 20,000. Among the strikers’ demands was better safety in clothing factories. The impover- ished immigrants forged an alliance with middle- and upper-class female supporters, including mem- bers of the Women’s Trade Union League, which had been founded in 1903 to help bring women workers into unions. Alva Belmont, the
ex-wife of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, contributed several of her cars to a parade in support of the striking workers. By the time the walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more than 300 fi rms. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them.
The Triangle fi re was not the worst fi re disaster in American history (seven years earlier, over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York Harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. More than twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would refer to it in a press conference as an example of why the government needed to regulate industry. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory inspection laws and fi re safety codes.
Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era. These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded rapidly—by 1920, for the
City of Ambition, 1910, by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, captures the stark beauty of New York City’s new skyscrapers. Photo © 2013 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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fi rst time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in combating social inequality. The fi re and its aftermath also highlighted how traditional gender roles were changing as women took on new responsibili- ties in the workplace and in the making of public policy.
The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defi ned political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about signifi cant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organiza- tions who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business.
Everywhere in early-twentieth-century America the signs of economic and political consolidation were apparent—in the power of a small director- ate of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, the manipulation of democracy by corrupt political machines, and the rise of new systems of managerial control in workplaces. In these circumstances, wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book The Progressive Movement, “the individual could not hope to compete. . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.”
As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reformers responded to the perception of declining freedom in varied, contradic- tory ways. The era saw the expansion of political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman suffrage, the use of political power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary citizens more infl uence on legislation. It witnessed the fl owering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfi llment and personal self-determination—the ability to participate fully in the ever-expanding consumer marketplace and, especially for women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered the province of men. At the same time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those deemed fi t to exercise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the 1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political decision
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making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate. Even as the idea of freedom expanded, freedom’s boundaries contracted in Progressive America.
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY
FARMS AND CITIES
he Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the con- tinued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices recovered from their low point during the depression of
the 1890s, American agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 mil- lion claims for free government land were fi led under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the previous forty years combined. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 mil- lion people, and Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed the Imperial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming.
But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass-consumer society. Throughout the industrialized world, the number of great cities multiplied. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhat- tan Island were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty- three of the states. Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighborhood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India.
The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s fi nancial fi rm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all fi nancial and industrial capital in the United States. Alongside such wealth, reported the Commission on Industrial Relations, established by Congress in 1912, more than one-third of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers lived in “actual poverty.”
cT
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685Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
The city captured the imagination of artists, writers, and reformers. The glories of the American landscape had been the focal point of nineteenth- century painters (exemplifi ed by the Hudson River school, which produced canvases celebrating the wonders of nature). The city and its daily life now became their preoccupation. Painters like George W. Bellows and John Sloan and photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen captured the electric lights, crowded bars and theaters, and soaring skyscrapers of the urban landscape. With its youthful, exuberant energies, the city seemed an expression of modernity itself.
THE MUCKRAKERS
Others saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fi fteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality. A new generation of journal- ists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens (published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901–1902 and in book form in 1904) showed how party bosses and business leaders profi ted from political corruption. McClure’s also hired Ida Tarbell to expose the arrogance and economic machinations of John D. Rock- efeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in two volumes in 1904, her History of the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what Theodore Roo- sevelt disparaged as “muckraking”—the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.
Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Theo- dore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a young woman’s moral corruption in Chi- cago’s harsh urban environment. Perhaps the era’s most infl uential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose descrip- tion of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public
A photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers, of a young spinner in a southern cotton factory.
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outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
IMMIGRATION AS A
GLOBAL PROCESS
If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cit- ies, it was their immigrant character. The “new immi- gration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 mil- lion immigrants came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agricul- ture. Poles emigrated not only to Pittsburgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Ital- ians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States. As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year.
During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be virtually cut off, fi rst by the outbreak of World War I and
C H R O NO LO G Y
1889 Hull House founded
1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics
1901 Socialist Party founded in United States
President McKinley assassi- nated
1902 President Theodore Roosevelt assists in coal strike
1903 Women’s Trade Union League founded
Ford Motor Company estab- lished
1904 Northern Securities dissolved
1905 Industrial Workers of the World established
1906 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Meat Inspection Act
Pure Food and Drug Act
Hepburn Act
1908 Muller v. Oregon
1909 Uprising of the 20,000
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire
Society of American Indians founded
1912 Children’s Bureau established
Theodore Roosevelt organizes the Progressive Party
1913 Sixteenth Amendment
Seventeenth Amendment
Federal Reserve established
1914 Ludlow Massacre
Federal Trade Commission established
Clayton Act
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687Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
then by legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. This population fl ow formed one part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world, much of which took place in Asia. Millions of persons migrated to Southeast Asia and the South Pacifi c, mainly from India and China. Millions more moved from Rus- sia and northern Asia to Manchuria, Siberia, and Central Asia.
Numerous causes inspired this massive uprooting of population. Rural southern and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining econo- mies. Political turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration. Not all of these immigrants could be classifi ed as “free laborers,” however. Large numbers of Chinese, Mexican, and Italian migrants, including many who came to the United States, were bound to long-term labor contracts. These contracts were signed with labor agents, who then provided the workers to American employers. But all the areas attracting immigrants were frontiers of one kind or another—agricultural, mining, or industrial—with expanding job opportunities.
Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to an immigrant who passed through Ellis Island. The less fortunate, who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or in other ways undesirable, were sent home.
At the same time, an infl ux of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fi elds and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown to 72,000. Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia.
Far larger was Mexican immigration. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that country’s population) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European countries. Many Mexicans entered through El Paso, Texas, the main south- ern gateway into the United States. Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino migrant workers.
By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country’s history. More than 40 percent of New York City’s population had been born abroad. In Chicago and smaller industrial
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cities like Providence, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the fi gure exceeded 30 percent. Although many newcomers moved west to take part in the expansion of farming, most clustered in industrial centers. By 1910, nearly three-fi fths of the workers in the twenty leading manufacturing and mining industries were foreign-born.
THE IMMIGRANT QUEST FOR FREEDOM
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law, could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated from the oppressive social hierar- chies of their homelands. “America is a free country,” one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale immigra- tion reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom
An illustration in the 1912 publication The New Immigration depicts the various “types” entering the United States.
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689Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
and prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Freedom, they added, was largely an economic ambi- tion—a desire to escape from “hope- less poverty” and achieve a standard of living impossible at home. While some of the new immigrants, espe- cially Jews fl eeing religious persecu- tion in the Russian empire, thought of themselves as permanent emigrants, the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land. Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only tempo- rarily in the United States. In 1908, a year of economic downturn in the United States, more Italians left the country than entered.
The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops, theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues. As early as 1900, more than 1,000 foreign-language newspapers were published in the United States. Churches were pillars of these immigrant communities. In New York’s East Harlem, even anti-clerical Italian immigrants, who resented the close alliance in Italy between the Catholic Church and the oppressive state, participated eagerly in the annual festival of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel. After Italian-Americans scat- tered to the suburbs, they continued to return each year to reenact the festival.
Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impover- ished regions from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, while native-born workers dominated skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”
CONSUMER FREEDOM
Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new meaning to American freedom. There was, of course, nothing unusual in the idea that the promise of American life lay, in part, in the
Table 18.1 I M M I G R A N T S A N D
T H E I R C H I L D R E N A S
P E R C E N TA G E O F P O P U L AT I O N ,
T E N M A J O R C I T I E S , 19 2 0
City Percentage
New York City 76%
Cleveland 72
Boston 72
Chicago 71
Detroit 65
San Francisco 64
Minneapolis 63
Pittsburgh 59
Seattle 55
Los Angeles 45
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enjoyment by the masses of citizens of goods available in other countries only to the well-to-do. Not until the Progressive era, however, did the advent of large downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents make available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players. Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy, which would not fully come into its own until after World War II. But it was in Progressive America that the promise of mass consumption became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism.
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption. Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the cen- tury was vaudeville, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into vaudeville shows. As the movies became longer and involved more sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly working-class urban residents, were attending “nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose fi ve-cent admis- sion charge was far lower than at vaudeville shows.
THE WORKING WOMAN
The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fi re revealed, more and more women were working for wages. Black women still worked primarily as domestics or in southern cotton fi elds. Immigrant women were largely confi ned to low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enor- mously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were offi ce workers or telephone operators, and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job category of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confi ned to young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands.
The working woman—immigrant and native, working-class and professional—became a symbol of female emancipation. Women faced special
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691Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abraham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New York.
The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her infl uential book Women and Eco- nomics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not fulfi llment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of the word.
The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. Contempo- raries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fash- ion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as old-fashioned and not suffi ciently “American.” Immi- grant parents found it very diffi cult to adapt to what one Mexican mother called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls with freedom, they want it too.”
THE RISE OF FORDISM
If any individual exemplifi ed the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing fi rms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models
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like the Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsman- ship, Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.
In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of fi ve dollars per day (more than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing as the wages, however: assembly-line work was monotonous (the worker repeated the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detectives to prevent unionization. When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profi ts by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well
The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around 1915.
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693Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism.
THE PROMISE OF ABUNDANCE
As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equipment, etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty as a sales device. The department-store magnate Edward Filene called consumerism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to defi ne the “American way of life,” in which personal fulfi llment was to be found through acquiring material goods.
The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fi ght for higher wages. The argument that monopolistic corporations artifi cially raised prices at the expense of consumers became a weapon against the trusts. “Consumers’ consciousness,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who emerged in these years as one of the nation’s most infl uential social commentators, was growing rapidly, with the “high cost of living” as its rallying cry.
AN AMERICAN STANDARD OF LIV ING
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new language for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s infl uential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute” right of citizenship. Ryan had grown up in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor, and the Populists. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society. Ryan’s insistence that economic relationships should be governed by moral standards had a power- ful infl uence on social thought among American Catholics.
The popularity of the idea of an American standard of living refl ected, in part, the emergence of a mass-consumption society during the Progressive era. For the fi rst time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a
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central place in descriptions of American society and its future. In the Gilded Age, social theorists like Henry George had wondered why economic progress produced both increased wealth and abject misery. The Progressive generation was strongly infl uenced by the more optimistic writings of Simon W. Patten, a prophet of prosperity. Patten announced the end of the “reign of want” and the advent of a society of abundance and leisure. In the dawning “new civiliza- tion,” he proclaimed, Americans would enjoy economic equality in a world in which “every one is independent and free.”
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM
For most Americans, however, Patten’s “new civilization” lay far in the future. The more immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize industrial capitalism and fi nd common ground in a society still racked by labor confl ict and experiencing massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large corporation and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentration of wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfi llment and unimpeded self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused with new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth century. The “old democracy,” wrote Walter Weyl, associ- ate editor of The New Republic, a weekly magazine that became the “bible” of Progressive intellectuals, provided no answer to the problems of a world in which the “chief restrictions upon liberty” were economic, not political.
INDUSTRIAL FREEDOM
In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most poorly paid factory workers but from better-off employees as well. Large fi rms in the automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over the work process. Effi ciency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called “scientifi c management”—a program that sought to streamline production and boost profi ts by systematically control- ling costs and work practices. Through scientifi c study, the “one best way” of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw the erosion of their traditional infl uence over the work process as a loss of freedom. “Men and women,” complained Samuel Gompers, whose American Federation of Labor (AFL) represented such skilled workers, “cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates.”
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695 How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
The great increase in the number of white-collar workers—the army of salespeople, bookkeepers, salaried professionals, and corporate managers that sprang up with the new system of management—also undermined the experi- ence of personal autonomy. For although they enjoyed far higher social status and incomes than manual workers, many, wrote one commentator, were the kind of individuals who “under former conditions, would have been . . . man- aging their own businesses,” not working for someone else.
These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was widely believed to lie at the root of the much- discussed “labor problem.” Since in an industrial age the prospect of managing one’s own business seemed increasingly remote, many Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis, an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essential principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between “political liberty” and “industrial slavery,” Brandeis insisted, was America’s foremost social problem. Workers deserved a voice not only in establishing wages and working conditions but also in making such managerial decisions as the relocation of factories, layoffs, and the distribu- tion of profi ts.
THE SOCIALIST PRESENCE
Economic freedom was also a rallying cry of American socialism, which reached its greatest infl uence during the Progressive era. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party brought together surviving late-nineteenth-century radi- cals such as Populists and followers of Edward Bellamy, with a portion of the labor movement. The party called for immediate reforms such as free college education, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public owner- ship of railroads and factories. It was the task of socialism, said western labor leader John O’Neill, to “gather together the shards of liberty”—the fragments of the American heritage of freedom—scattered by a government controlled by capitalist millionaires.
By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, pub- lished hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of Labor, and had elected scores of local offi cials. Socialism fl ourished in diverse communities throughout the country. On the Lower East Side of New York City, it arose from the economic exploitation of immigrant workers and Judaism’s tradition of social reform. Here, a vibrant
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socialist culture developed, complete with Yiddish-language newspapers and theaters, as well as large public meetings and street demonstrations. In 1914, the district elected socialist Meyer London to Congress. Another center of social- ist strength was Milwaukee, where Victor Berger, a German-born teacher and newspaper editor, mobilized local AFL unions into a potent political force that elected Emil Seidel mayor in 1910. Seidel’s administration provided aid to the unemployed, forced the police to rec- ognize the rights of strikers, and won the respect of middle-class residents for its honesty and freedom from machine domination. Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas like Oklahoma, and in the mining regions of Idaho and Montana.
THE GOSPEL OF DEBS
No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ide- als of equality, self-government, and freedom than Eugene V. Debs, the railroad union leader who, as noted in the previous chapter, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894. For two decades, Debs criss-crossed the country preach- ing that control of the economy by a democratic government held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic freedom.” As a champion of the downtrodden, Debs managed to bridge the cultural divide among New York’s Jewish immigrants, prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals attracted to the socialist ideal. “While there is a lower class,” proclaimed Debs, “I am in it, . . . while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Throughout the Atlantic world of the early twentieth century, socialism was a rising presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes for presi- dent (6 percent of the total) in 1912. In that year, the socialist Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly newspaper in the country, and socialist Max Hayes polled one-third of the vote when he challenged Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the AFL. In western Europe, socialism experienced even more pronounced growth. In the last elections before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, socialists in France, Germany, and Scandinavia won between one-sixth and one-third of
Roller skaters with socialist leafl ets during a New York City strike in 1916. A “scab” is a worker who crosses the picket line during a strike.
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697 How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
the vote. “Socialism is coming,” declared the Appeal to Reason. “It is coming like a prairie fi re and nothing can stop it.”
AFL AND IW W
Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive America. The labor strife of the Gilded Age continued into the early twentieth century. Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federa- tion of Labor saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, it sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. AFL president Gompers joined with George Perkins of the J. P. Morgan fi nan- cial empire and Mark Hanna, who had engineered McKinley’s election, in the National Civic Federation, which accepted the right of collective bargaining for “responsible” unions. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension plans for long-term workers. Most employers nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority, and resisted them stubbornly.
The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers— skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-born. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary policies formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part advocate of a workers’ revolution that would seize the means of produc- tion and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding principle, extending “a fraternal hand to every wage-worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland, or trade.” The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—the immigrant factory-labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. The IWW’s most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who had worked in western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics “the most dangerous man in America,” Haywood became a national fi gure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former anti-union governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, Haywood was found not guilty.
THE NEW IMMIGRANTS ON STRIKE
The Uprising of the 20,000 in New York’s garment industry, mentioned earlier, was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers that placed labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis
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ization of democratic life brings inevitable change to our daughters as well as to our sons. . . . One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. . . .
Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the home and family relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of individual and race, we need not fear it. It does not involve a change in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it. But it does involve the exercise of human faculty in women, in social service and exchange rather than in domestic service solely. . . . [Today], when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing . . . free- dom, the woman in marrying becomes the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. . . . When women stand free as economic agents, they will [achieve a] much better fulfi lment of their duties as wives and mothers and [contribute] to the vast improvement in health and happiness of the human race.
Women and Economics, by the prolific feminist social critic and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, influenced the new generation of women aspiring to greater independence. It insisted that how people earned a living shaped their entire lives, and that therefore women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom.
It is not motherhood that keeps the house- wife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men. . . . A truer spirit is the increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the beg- gary of their position. More and more do fathers give their daughters, and husbands their wives, a defi nite allowance,—a separate bank account,—something . . . all their own.
The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change has come. . . . The radical change in the economic position of women is advanc- ing upon us. . . . The growing individual-
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman ,
Women and Economics (1898)
�
V O I C E S O F F R E E D O M
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From John Mitchell , “The Workingman’s Conception of
Industr ial Liberty” (1910)
During the Progressive era, the idea of “industrial liberty” moved to the center of political discussion. Progres- sive reformers and labor leaders like John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, condemned the prevailing idea of liberty of contract in favor of a broader definition of economic freedom.
While the Declaration of Independence established civil and political liberty, it did not, as you all know, establish industrial liberty. . . . Liberty means more than the right to choose the fi eld of one’s employ- ment. He is not a free man whose family must buy food today with the money that is earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to work unduly long hours and for wages so low that he can not provide the necessities of life for himself and his family; who must live in a crowded tenement and see his children go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before their bodies are developed and their minds trained. To have freedom a man must be free from the harrowing fear of hunger and want; he must be in such a position that by the exercise of reasonable frugality he can provide his family with all of the necessities and the reasonable com- forts of life. He must be able to educate his children and to provide against sickness, accident, and old age. . . .
A number of years ago the legislatures of several coal producing States enacted laws requiring employers to pay the wages of their workmen in lawful money of the United States and to cease the practice of
paying wages in merchandise. From time immemorial it had been the custom of coal companies to conduct general supply stores, and the workingmen were required, as a condition of employment, to accept products in lieu of money in return for services rendered. This system was a great hardship to the workmen. . . . The question of the constitutionality of this legislation was carried into the courts and by the highest tribunal it was declared to be an invasion of the workman’s liberty to deny him the right to accept merchandise in lieu of money as payment of his wages. . . . [This is] typical of hundreds of instances in which laws that have been enacted for the protection of the workingmen have been declared by the courts to be unconstitu- tional, on the grounds that they invaded the liberty of the working people. . . . Is it not natural that the workingmen should feel that they are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them? May they not exclaim, with Madame Roland [of the French Revolution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”
QUESTIONS
1. What does Gilman see as the main obstacles to freedom for women?
2. What does Mitchell believe will be necessary to establish “industrial liberty”?
3. How do the authors differ in their view of the relationship of the family to individual freedom?
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of unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. The IWW did not originate these confrontations but was sometimes called in by local unionists to solidify the strikers. IWW organizers printed leafl ets, posters, and banners in multiple languages and insisted that each nationality enjoy representation on the committee coordinating a walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant communities to persuade local religious lead- ers, shopkeepers, and offi ceholders to support the strikes.
The labor confl ict that had the greatest impact on public consciousness took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-fi ve nationalities. They worked six days per week and earned an average of sixteen cents per hour. When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fi fty-four-hour limit to the workweek, employers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those who had been laboring longer hours. Workers spontaneously went on strike, and called on the IWW for assistance.
In February, Haywood and a group of women strikers devised the idea of sending strikers’ children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist families in New York City agreed to take them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and half-starved, marching up Fifth
Striking New York City garment workers carrying signs in multiple languages, 1913.
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701
Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the strikers. “I have worked in the slums of New York,” wrote one observer, “but I have never found children who were so uniformly ill-nourished, ill-fed, and ill-clothed.” A few days later, city offi cials ordered that no more youngsters could leave Lawrence. When a group of mothers and children gathered at the railroad sta- tion in defi ance of the order, club-wielding police drove them away, producing outraged headlines around the world. The governor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled on the workers’ terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan to the labor movement: “We want bread and roses, too”—a declaration that workers sought not only higher wages but the opportunity to enjoy the fi ner things of life.
Another highly publicized labor uprising took place in New Orleans, where a 1907 strike of 10,000 black and white dockworkers prevented employers’ efforts to eliminate their unions and reduce their wages. This was a remark- able expression of interracial solidarity at a time when segregation had become the norm throughout the South. Other strikes proved less successful. A six-month walkout of 25,000 silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 failed despite publicity generated by the Paterson pageant, in which the strik- ers reenacted highlights of their struggle before a sympathetic audience at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
A strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company was also unsuccessful. Mostly recent immigrants from Europe and Mexico, the strikers demanded recognition of the United Mine Workers of America, wage increases, an eight-hour workday, and the right to shop and live in places not owned by the company. When the walkout began, in September 1913, the mine owners evicted 11,000 strikers and their families from company housing. They moved into tent colonies, which armed militia units soon surrounded. On April 20, 1914, the militia attacked the largest tent city, at Ludlow, and burned it to the ground, killing an estimated twenty to thirty men, women, and chil- dren. Seven months after the Ludlow Massacre, the strike was called off.
LABOR AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
The fi ery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of eighty-three had been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers, later told a New York audi- ence that the union “had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayo- nets.” Yet the struggle of workers for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made free speech a signifi cant public issue in the early twentieth century. By and large, the courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth-century America.
State courts in the Progressive era regularly issued injunctions prohibiting strikers from speaking, picketing, or distributing literature during labor
How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
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disputes. Like the abolitionists before them, the labor movement, in the name of freedom, demanded the right to assemble, organize, and spread their views. The investigations of the Commission on Industrial Relations revealed the absence of free speech in many factory communities, with labor organizers prohibited from speaking freely under threat of either violence from private police or suppression by local authorities. “I don’t think we live in a free coun- try or enjoy civil liberties,” Clarence Darrow told the commission.
The IWW’s battle for civil liberties breathed new meaning into the idea of freedom of expression. Lacking union halls, its organizers relied on songs, street theater, impromptu organizing meetings, and street corner gatherings to spread their message and attract support. In response to IWW activities, offi cials in Los Angeles, Spokane, Denver, and more than a dozen other cities limited or prohibited outdoor meetings. To arouse popular support, the IWW fi lled the jails with members who defi ed local law by speaking in public. Sometimes, prisoners were brutally treated, as in Spokane, where three died and hundreds were hospitalized after being jailed for violating a local law requiring prior approval of the content of public speeches. In nearly all the free-speech fi ghts, however, the IWW eventually forced local offi cials to give way. “Whether they agree or disagree with its methods or aims,” wrote one journalist, “all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for . . . [keeping] alight the fi res of freedom.”
THE NEW FEMINISM
During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” fi rst entered the political vocabulary. One organization, the Feminist Alliance, constructed apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home. In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question “What is Feminism?” The meeting was sponsored by Heterodoxy, a women’s club located in Greenwich Village that brought together female professionals, academics, and reformers. Femi- nism, said one speaker, meant women’s emancipation “both as a human being and a sex-being.” Feminists’ forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the discussion of personal freedom.
Heterodoxy was part of a new radical “bohemia” (a social circle of artists, writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices). Its defi nition of feminism merged issues like the vote and greater economic opportunities with open discussion of sexuality. In New York’s Greenwich Village and counterparts in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, a “lyrical left” came into being in the prewar years. Its members formed discussion clubs, attended experimental theaters, and published magazines. They confi dently expected
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703 How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
to preside over the emancipation of the human spirit from the prejudices of the nineteenth century.
One symbol of the new era was Isadora Duncan, who brought from Califor- nia a new, expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of traditional technique and costume. “I beheld the dance I had always dreamed of,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton on seeing a Duncan performance, “satisfying every sense as a fl ower does, or a phrase of Mozart’s.” Another sign of artistic revolution was the Armory Show of 1913, an exhibition that exposed New Yorkers to new cubist paintings from Europe by artists previously unknown in the United States, like Pablo Picasso.
The lyrical left made freedom the key to its vision of society. At the famed salon in heiress Mabel Dodge’s New York living room, a remarkable array of talented radicals gathered to discuss with equal passion labor unrest, modern trends in the arts, and sexual liberation. Although many Progressives frequented the Dodge salon, there was a world of difference between the exuberant individualism of the lyrical left and most Progressives’ preoccupa- tion with order and effi ciency. “What [women] are really after,” explained Crystal Eastman, is “freedom.” A graduate of New York University Law School, Eastman had taken a leading role both in the suffrage movement and in investigating industrial accidents. But her defi nition of freedom went beyond the vote, beyond “industrial democracy,” to encompass emotional and sexual self-determination.
THE RISE OF PERSONAL FREEDOM
During the Progressive era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex o’clock” in America. The founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, lectured at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, and discovered that his writings on infantile sexuality, repression, and the irrational sources of human behavior were widely known “even in prudish America.” Issues of intimate personal relations previously confi ned to private discussion blazed forth in popular magazines and public debates.
For the generation of women who adopted the word “feminism” to express their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression and reproductive choice emerged as critical defi nitions of women’s emancipation. Greenwich Village became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance attracted many homosexuals to the area, and although organized demands for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important element of the Village’s lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond bohemia; they fl ourished among the young, unmarried, self-supporting women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft-proclaimed personal independence.
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THE BIRTH-CONTROL MOVEMENT
The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to changing sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” generally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman’s husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. Emma Goldman, who had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen, toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive devices. “I demand freedom for both sexes,” she proclaimed, “freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Goldman constantly ran afoul of the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or “obscene” statements or simply to keep her from speaking.
By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish-American
Mothers with baby carriages wait outside Margaret Sanger’s birth-control clinic in Browns- ville, Brooklyn, 1916.
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705 How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?
working-class family, placed the issue of birth control at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York socialist newspaper. Postal offi cials barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The next issue of The Call included a blank page with the headline: “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U. S. Post Offi ce.”
By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal, The Woman Rebel. “No woman can call herself free,” she proclaimed, “who does not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn and began distribut- ing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison. Few Progressives rallied to her defense. But for a time, the birth-control issue became a crossroads where the paths of labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected. The IWW and Socialist Party distributed Sanger’s writings. Like the IWW free- speech fi ghts and Goldman’s persistent battle for the right to lecture, Sanger’s travail was part of a rich history of dissent in the Progressive era that helped to focus enlightened opinion on the ways local authorities and national obscen- ity legislation set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression. Slowly, laws banning birth control began to change. But since access was determined by individual states, even when some liberalized their laws, birth control remained unavailable in many other states.
NATIVE AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM
Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the fi rst step toward remedying injustice. Because many of the society’s leaders had been educated at government-sponsored boarding schools, the society united Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan-Indian public space independent of white control.
Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been captured as a child by members of a neighbor- ing tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to Chicago. There Montezuma attended school and eventually obtained a medical degree.
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In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signal- ing”), that condemned federal paternalism toward the Indians and called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Convinced that outsiders exerted too much power over life on the reservations, he insisted that self-determina- tion was the only way for Indians to escape poverty and marginalization: “We must free ourselves. . . . We must be independent.” But he also demanded that Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans. Montezuma’s writings had little infl uence at the time on govern- ment policy, but Indian activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism.
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM
EFFECTIVE FREEDOM
Progressivism was an international movement. In the early twentieth cen- tury, cities throughout the world experienced similar social strains arising from rapid industrialization and urban growth. In 1850, London and Paris were the only cities whose population exceeded 1 million. By 1900, there were twelve—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States, and others in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Facing similar social problems, reformers across the globe exchanged ideas and envisioned new social policies. Sun Yat- Sen, the Chinese leader, was infl uenced by the writings of Henry George and Edward Bellamy. The mayor of Osaka, Japan, called for a new “social economy” that replaced competition with cooperation.
As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old age pen- sions, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation of workplace safety, American reformers came to believe they had much to learn from the Old World. The term “social legislation,” meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of working-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States.
Progressives believed that the modern era required a fundamental rethink- ing of the functions of political authority, whether the aim was to combat the power of the giant corporations, protect consumers, civilize the marketplace, or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace. Drawing on the reform pro- grams of the Gilded Age and the example of European legislation, Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious government. Even in South Carolina, with its strong tradition of belief in local autonomy, Governor Richard I. Manning urged his constituents to modify their view of government as “a threat to individual liberty,” to see it instead as “a means for solving the ills of the body politic.”
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707In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses?
Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful gov- ernment posed a threat to freedom, because their understanding of freedom was itself in fl ux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, was far different from the “highly formal and limited concept of liberty” as protection from outside restraint. Freedom was a positive, not a negative, concept—the “power to do specifi c things.” As such, it depended on “the distribution of powers that exists at a given time.” Thus, freedom inevitably became a political question. “Freedom,” wrote Dewey’s brilliant young admirer, the writer Randolph Bourne, “means a democratic cooperation in determining the ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a country.”
STATE AND LOCAL REFORMS
Throughout the Western world, social legislation proliferated in the early twentieth century. In the United States, with a political structure more decen- tralized than in European countries, state and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures. In cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of government to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public control of “natural monopolies” like gas and water works, and improve public transportation. They raised property taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities.
Gilded Age mayors Hazen Pingree and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled the business interests that had dominated city government, forcing gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a municipal power plant. Jones had instituted an eight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897 to 1905, he founded night schools and free kindergartens, built new parks, and supported the right of workers to unionize.
Since state legislatures defi ned the powers of city government, urban Progressives often carried their campaigns to the state level. Pingree became governor of Michigan in 1896, in which post he continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests. Hiram Johnson, who as public pros- ecutor had secured the conviction for bribery of San Francisco political boss Abraham Ruef, was elected governor of California in 1910. Having promised to “kick the Southern Pacifi c [Railroad] out of politics,” he secured passage of the Public Utilities Act, one of the country’s strongest railroad-regulation measures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women.
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The most infl uential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M. La Follette, who made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” After serving as a Republican member of Congress, La Follette became convinced that an alliance of railroad and lumber companies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he instituted a series of measures known as the Wis- consin Idea, including nominations of candidates for offi ce through primary elections rather than by political bosses, the taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin.
PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY
“We are far from free,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us.” Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society. Alarmed by the upsurge in violent class confl ict and the unre- stricted power of corporations, they believed that political reforms could help to create a unifi ed “people” devoted to greater democracy and social reconciliation. Yet increasing the responsibilities of government made it all the more impor- tant to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not.
The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the political process, many seemingly contradictory in purpose. The electorate was simul- taneously expanded and contracted, empowered and removed from direct infl uence on many functions of government. Democracy was enhanced by the Seventeenth Amendment—which provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures—by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary elections among party members to select candidates for offi ce. Several states, including California under Hiram Johnson, adopted the initiative and referendum (the former allowed voters to propose legislation, the latter to vote directly on it) and the recall, by which offi cials could be removed from offi ce by popular vote. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising women— the largest expansion of democracy in American history.
But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation, most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a process, as noted in Chapter 17, supported by many white southern Progres- sives as a way of ending election fraud. To make city government more honest and effi cient, many localities replaced elected mayors with appointed nonpar- tisan commissions or city managers—a change that insulated offi cials from machine domination but also from popular control. New literacy tests and resi- dency and registration requirements, common in northern as well as southern states, limited the right to vote among the poor. Taken as a whole, the electoral
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709In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses?
changes of the Progressive era represented a signifi cant reversal of the idea that voting was an inherent right of American citizenship. And, as will be noted in the next chapter, most white Progressives proved remarkably indifferent to the plight of African-Americans. In the eyes of many Progressives, the “fi tness” of voters, not their absolute numbers, defi ned a functioning democracy.
GOVERNMENT BY EXPERT
“He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” The writer H. L. Mencken’s quip about Theodore Roosevelt came uncomfortably close to the mark for many Progressive advocates of an empowered state. Most Progressive thinkers were highly uncomfortable with the real world of poli- tics, which seemed to revolve around the pursuit of narrow class, ethnic, and regional interests. Robert M. La Follette’s reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his administration refl ected a larger Progressive faith in expertise. The government could best exercise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impartial experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry.
This impulse toward order, effi ciency, and centralized management—all in the name of social justice—was an important theme of Progressive reform. The title of Walter Lippmann’s infl uential 1914 work of social commentary, Drift and Mastery, posed the stark alternatives facing the nation. “Drift” meant continuing to operate according to the outmoded belief in individual autonomy. “Mastery” required applying scientifi c inquiry to modern social problems. The new generation of educated professionals, Lippmann believed, could be trusted more fully than ordinary citizens to solve America’s deep social problems. Political freedom was less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualifi ed persons devising the best public policies.
JANE ADDAMS AND HULL HOUSE
But alongside this elitist politics, Progressivism also included a more demo- cratic vision of the activist state. As much as any other group, organized women reformers spoke for the more democratic side of Progressivism. Still barred from voting and holding offi ce in most states, women nonetheless became central to the political history of the Progressive era. Women chal- lenged the barriers that excluded them from formal political participation and developed a democratic, grassroots vision of Progressive government. In so doing, they placed on the political agenda new understandings of female freedom. The immediate catalyst was a growing awareness among women reformers of the plight of poor immigrant communities and the emergence of the condition of women and child laborers as a major focus of public concern.
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The era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams, who had been born in 1860, the daughter of an Illinois businessman. After graduating from college, Addams, who never married, resented the prevailing expectation that a woman’s life should be governed by what she called the “family claim”—the obligation to devote herself to parents, husband, and children. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago, a “settlement house” devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. Hull House was modeled on Toynbee Hall, which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working-class neighbor- hood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor from afar, settlement-house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settlement houses had been established in cities throughout the country.
“SPEARHEADS FOR REFORM”
Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were more than 80,000 college-educated women in the United States. Many found a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor families in the growing cities. The efforts of middle-class women to uplift the poor, and of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity of politics toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that even well-organized social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of inadequate housing, income, and health. Government action was essential. Hull House instigated an array of reforms in Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere, including stronger building and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and safer labor conditions, and the right of labor to organize.
Female activism spread throughout the country. Ironically, the exclusion of blacks from jobs in southern textile mills strengthened the region’s move- ment against child labor. Reformers portrayed child labor as a menace to white supremacy, depriving white children of educations they would need as adult members of the dominant race. These reformers devoted little attention to the condition of black children. Women’s groups in Alabama were instrumental in the passage of a 1903 state law restricting child labor. By 1915, every south- ern state had followed suit. But with textile mill owners determined to employ children and many poor families dependent on their earnings, these laws were enforced only sporadically.
The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” They produced prominent Progressive fi gures like Julia Lathrop, the fi rst woman to head a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 to investigate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests). Florence
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Kelley, the daughter of Civil War–era Radical Republican congressman Wil- liam D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s power as consumers as a force for social change. In the Gilded Age, the writer Helen Campbell had brilliantly exposed the contradiction of a market econ- omy in which fashionable women wore clothing produced by poor women in wretched sweatshops. “Emancipation on the one side,” she pointedly observed, “has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other.” A generation later, under Kelley’s leadership, the National Consumers’ League became the nation’s leading advocate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. Freedom of choice in the marketplace, Kelley insisted, enabled socially conscious consumers to “unite with wage earners” by refusing to purchase goods produced under exploitative conditions.
THE CAMPAIGN FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE
After 1900, the campaign for women’s suffrage moved beyond the mostly elite membership of the 1890s to engage a broad coalition ranging from middle- class members of women’s clubs to unionists, socialists, and settlement-house
Visiting nurse on a New York City rooftop, 1908. Efforts to uplift the immigrant poor offered new opportunities for professional employment to many women during the Progressive era.
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workers. For the fi rst time, it became a mass movement. Membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew from 13,000 in 1893 to more than 2 million by 1917. The group campaigned throughout the country for the right to vote and began to enjoy some success. By 1900, more than half the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues, and Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full women’s suffrage.
Cynics charged that Wyoming legislators used suffrage to attract more female migrants to their predominantly male state, while Utah hoped to enhance the political power of husbands in polygamous marriages banned by law but still practiced by some Mormons. In Colorado and Idaho, however, the success of referendums in the 1890s refl ected the power of the Populist Party, a strong supporter of votes for women. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the fi rst state east of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections.
These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere, were conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effec- tive use of the techniques of advertising, publicity, and mass entertainment characteristic of modern consumer society. California’s successful 1911 cam- paign utilized automobile parades, numerous billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage buttons and badges. Nonetheless, state campaigns were diffi cult, expensive, and usually unsuccessful. The movement increasingly focused its attention on securing a national constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.
MATERNALIST REFORM
Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Many of the era’s experiments in public policy arose from the conviction that the state had an obligation to protect women and children. Female reformers helped to launch a mass movement for direct government action to improve the liv- ing standards of poor mothers and children. Laws providing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. The pensions tended to be less than generous, and local eligibility requirements opened the door to unequal treatment (white widows benefi ted the most, single mothers were widely discriminated against, and black women were almost entirely excluded). “Maternalist” reforms like mothers’ pensions rested on the assumption that the govern- ment should encourage women’s capacity for bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same time. Both
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feminists and believers in conventional domestic roles supported such mea- sures. The former hoped that these laws would subvert women’s dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen traditional families and the mother-child bond.
Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did in fact work outside the home, but defi ned them as a dependent group (like children) in need of state protection in ways male workers were not. In 1908, in the landmark case of Muller v. Oregon, Louis D. Brandeis fi led a famous brief citing scientifi c and sociological studies to demonstrate that because women had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear chil- dren gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Persuaded by Brandeis’s argument, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women.
Thus, three years after the notorious Lochner decision invalidating a New York law limiting the working hours of male bakers (discussed in Chapter 16), the Court created the fi rst large breach in “liberty of contract” doctrine. But the cost was high: at the very time that women in unprecedented numbers were entering the labor market and earning college degrees, Brandeis’s brief and the Court’s opinion solidifi ed the view of women workers as weak, depen- dent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men. By 1917, thirty states had enacted laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers. Many women derived great benefi t from these laws; others saw them as an infringement on their freedom.
While the maternalist agenda built gender inequality into the early foun- dations of the welfare state, the very use of government to regulate working conditions called into question basic assumptions concerning liberty of contract. Although not all reformers were willing to take the step, it was easy to extend the idea of protecting women and children to demand that govern- ment better the living and working conditions of men as well, by insuring them against the impact of unemployment, old age, ill health, and disability. Brandeis himself insisted that government should concern itself with the health, income, and future prospects of all its citizens.
THE IDEA OF ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP
Brandeis envisioned a different welfare state from that of the maternalist reformers, one rooted less in the idea of healthy motherhood than in the notion of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and protection against unemployment and work-related accidents. For him, the right to assistance derived from citizenship itself, not some special service to
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the nation (as in the case of mothers) or upstanding character (which had long differentiated the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor).
This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By 1913, twenty-two states had enacted workmen’s compensation laws to ben- efi t workers, male or female, injured on the job. This legislation was the fi rst wedge that opened the way for broader programs of social insurance. To avoid the stigma of depending on governmental assistance, contributions from workers’ own wages funded these programs in part, thus distinguishing them from charity dispensed by local authorities to the poor. But state minimum wage laws and most laws regulating working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection, but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen as degrading. The establishment of a standard of living and working conditions beneath which no American should be allowed to fall would await the coming of the New Deal.
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS
Despite the ferment of Progressivism on the city and state levels, the most striking political development of the early twentieth century was the rise of the national state. The process of nationalization was occurring throughout American life. National corporations dominated the economy; national organizations like the American Medical Association came into being to raise the incomes and respect of professions. The process was even refl ected in the consolidation of local baseball teams into the American and National Leagues and the advent in 1903 of the World Series. Only energetic national government, Progressives believed, could create the social conditions of freedom.
Despite creative experiments in social policy at the city and state levels, the tradition of localism seemed to most Progressives an impediment to a renewed sense of national purpose. Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of industrial democracy were national problems that demanded national solu- tions. The democratic national state, wrote New Republic editor Herbert Croly, offered an alternative to control of Americans’ lives by narrow interests that manipulated politics or by the all-powerful corporations. Croly proposed a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve the “Jeffersonian ends” of democratic self-determination and individual freedom, he insisted, the country needed to employ the “Hamiltonian means” of government inter- vention in the economy. Each in his own way, the Progressive presidents— Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—tried to address this challenge.
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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKin- ley while the president visited the Pan- American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the age of forty-two, Vice Presi- dent Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to hold the offi ce of president. Roosevelt was an impetuous, energetic individual with a penchant for what he called the “strenuous life” of manly adventure. In many ways, he became the model for the twentieth- century president, an offi cial actively and continuously engaged in domestic and foreign affairs. (The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be dis- cussed in the next chapter.) Roosevelt regarded the president as “the steward of the public welfare.” He moved aggressively to set the political agenda.
When the British writer H. G. Wells visited the United States soon after the turn of the century, he found that “the steady trend towards concentration” had become “the cardinal topic of thought and discussion in the American mind.” Roosevelt’s program, which he called the Square Deal, attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel and Standard Oil, served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy fi nanciers interested only in profi t, and had no right to exist.
Soon after assuming offi ce, Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company. Created by fi nancier J. P. Morgan, this “holding company” owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacifi c. Morgan was outraged. “Wall Street is paralyzed,” quipped one newspa- per, “at the thought that a President of the United States should sink to enforce the law.” In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement.
ROOSEVELT AND ECONOMIC REGULATION
Roosevelt also believed that the president should be an honest broker in labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with employers as his predecessors had usually done. When a strike paralyzed the West Virginia
President Theodore Roosevelt addressing a crowd in Evanston, Illinois, in 1902.
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and Pennsylvania coalfi elds in 1902, he summoned union and management leaders to the White House. By threatening a federal takeover of the mines, he persuaded the owners to allow the dispute to be settled by a commission he himself would appoint.
Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt pushed for more direct federal regulation of the economy. Appealing to the public for support, he condemned the misuse of the “vast power conferred by vast wealth.” He proposed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, which the Supreme Court had essentially limited to collecting economic statistics. By this time, journalistic exposés, labor unrest, and the agitation of Progressive reformers had created signifi cant public support for Roosevelt’s regulatory program. In 1906, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads’ business records and to set reasonable rates, a signifi cant step in the development of fed- eral intervention in the corporate economy. That year, as has been noted, also saw the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established a federal agency to police the quality and labeling of food and drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act. Many businessmen supported these measures, recognizing that they would benefi t from greater public confi dence in the quality and safety of their products. But they were alarmed by Roosevelt’s calls for federal inheritance and income taxes and the regulation of all interstate businesses.
JOHN MUIR AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF NATURE
If the United States lagged behind Europe in many areas of social policy, it led the way in the conservation of natural resources. The fi rst national park, Yellowstone in Wyoming, was created by Congress in 1872, partly to preserve an area of remarkable natural beauty and partly at the urging of the Northern Pacifi c Railroad, which was anxious to promote western tourism. In the 1890s, the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir organized the Sierra Club to help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging by timber companies.
Muir’s love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings. Nearly blinded in an accident in an Indianapolis machine shop where he worked in his twen- ties, he found in the restoration of his sight an inspiration to appreciate God’s creation. He called forests “God’s fi rst temples,” and wrote that “in God’s wilder- ness lies the hope of the world.” In nature, he believed, men could experience directly the presence of God. Muir’s outlook blended evangelical Protestantism with a romantic view of nature inspired by the Transcendentalists of the pre–Civil War era—like Henry David Thoreau, he lamented the intrusions of civilization on the natural environment. But unlike the Transcendentalists, Muir developed a broad following. As more and more Americans lived in cities,
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717How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
they came to see nature less as something to conquer and more as a place for recreation and personal growth. Muir’s spiritual understanding of nature resonated with these urbanites.
THE CONSERVATION MOVEMENT
In the 1890s, Congress authorized the president to withdraw “forest reserves” from economic development, a restriction on economic freedom in the name of a greater social good. But it was under Theodore Roosevelt that conservation became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoorsman who built a ranch in North Dakota in the 1880s, Roosevelt moved to preserve parts of the natural environment from economic exploitation.
Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks. The creation of parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier required the removal of Indians who hunted and fi shed there as well as the reintroduction of animals that had previously disap- peared. City dwellers who visited the national parks did not realize that these were to a considerable extent artifi cially created and managed environments, not primordial nature.
In some ways, conservation was a typical Progressive reform. Manned by experts, the government could stand above political and economic battles, serving the public good while preventing “special interests” from causing irreparable damage to the environment. The aim was less to end the eco- nomic utilization of natural resources than to develop responsible, scientifi c plans for their use. Pinchot halted timber companies’ reckless assault on the nation’s forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that development and conserva- tion could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated. Conservation also refl ected the Progressive thrust toward effi ciency and control—in this case, control of nature itself.
In the view of Progressive conservationists, the West’s scarcest resource— water—cried out for regulation. Governments at all levels moved to control the power of western rivers, building dams and irrigation projects to regularize their fl ow, prevent waste, and provide water for large-scale agri- culture and urban development. With such projects came political confl ict, as cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco battled with rural areas for access to water. After secretly buying up large tracts of land in the Owens Valley east of the city, for example, the city of Los Angeles constructed a major aqueduct between 1908 and 1913, over the vigorous objections of the valley’s residents. By the 1920s, so much water had been diverted to the city
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that the once thriving farming and ranching businesses of Owens Valley could no longer operate.
TAFT IN OFFICE
Having served nearly eight years as president, Roosevelt did not run again in 1908. His chosen successor was William Howard Taft, a federal judge from Ohio who had served as governor of the Philippines after the Spanish- American War. Taft defeated William Jennings Bryan, making his third unsuccessful race for the White House. Taft’s inaugural address expressed the Progressive view of the state: “The scope of a modern government . . . has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old ‘laissez-faire’ school of political writers.”
Although temperamentally more conservative than Roosevelt, Taft pur- sued antitrust policy even more aggressively. He persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (one of Roosevelt’s “good” trusts) in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, producing, and refi ning companies. The government also won a case against American Tobacco, which the Court ordered to end pricing policies that were driving smaller fi rms out of business. In these decisions, the justices announced a new standard for judging large corporations—the “rule of reason”—which in effect implemented Roosevelt’s old distinction between good and bad trusts. Big businesses were not, in and of themselves, antitrust violators, unless they engaged in policies that stifl ed competition.
Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which autho- rized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). It was ratifi ed shortly before he left offi ce. A 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a “communistic threat to property.” The movement to resurrect the income tax united southern and western farmers who wished to reduce government dependence on revenue from the tariff, which they believed discriminated against nonindustrial states, and Progressives who believed that taxation should be based on the ability to pay. A key step in the modernization of the federal government, the income tax provided a reliable and fl exible source of revenue for a national state whose powers, responsibilities, and expenditures were growing rapidly.
Despite these accomplishments, Taft seemed to gravitate toward the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Only a few months after taking offi ce, he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, which reduced rates on imported goods but not nearly as much as reformers wished. Taft’s rift with
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Progressives grew deeper when Richard A. Ballinger, the new secretary of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in forest reserves. Ballinger decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger of colluding with business interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the Roosevelt administration. When Taft fi red Pinchot in 1910, the breach with party Progressives became irreparable. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomina- tion. Defeated, Roosevelt launched an independent campaign as the head of the new Progressive Party.
THE ELECTION OF 1912
All the crosscurrents of Progressive-era thinking about what McClure’s Maga- zine called “the problem of the relation of the State and the corporation” came together in the presidential campaign of 1912. The four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom in the age of big business. At one end of the political spectrum stood Taft, who stressed that economic individualism could remain the founda- tion of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs
Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, speaking in Chicago during the 1912 presidential campaign.
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cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Debs. Relatively few Americans supported the Socialist Party’s goal of abolishing the “capitalistic system” altogether, but its immediate demands—including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter working hours and a minimum wage—summarized forward-looking Progressive thought.
But it was the battle between Wilson and Roosevelt over the role of the fed- eral government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public atten- tion in 1912. The two represented competing strands of Progressivism. Both believed government action necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing the government’s power and the inevitability of economic concentration. Though representing a party thor- oughly steeped in states’ rights and laissez-faire ideology, Wilson was deeply imbued with Progressive ideas. “Freedom today,” he declared, “is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” As governor of New Jersey, Wilson had presided over the implementation of a system of workmen’s compensation and state regulation of utilities and railroads.
NEW FREEDOM AND NEW NATIONALISM
Strongly infl uenced by Louis D. Brandeis, with whom he consulted frequently during the campaign, Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market competition and freeing government from domination by big business. Wilson feared big government as much as he feared the power of the corporations. The New Freedom, as he called his program, envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses—creating, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that corpo- rations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that proved remarkably accurate.
To Roosevelt’s supporters, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era; his pro- gram, they argued, served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the inevitability of economic concentration and the interests of professionals, consumers, and labor. Wilson and Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness.” What the nation actually needed, Walter Lippmann countered, was frank acceptance of the benefi ts of bigness, coupled with the intervention of government to counteract its abuses. Lippmann was expressing the core of the New Nationalism, Roosevelt’s program of 1912. Only the “controlling and directing power of the government,” Roosevelt insisted, could restore
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721How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
“the liberty of the oppressed.” He called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.
The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice. Drafted by a group of settlement-house activists, labor reform- ers, and social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for all workers, and a national system of social insurance covering unemployment, medical care, and old age. Described by Roosevelt as the “most important document” since the end of the Civil War, the platform brought together many of the streams of thought and political experiences that fl owed into Progressivism. Roosevelt’s campaign helped to give freedom a modern social and economic content and established an agenda that would defi ne political liberalism for much of the twentieth century.
WILSON ’S FIRST TERM
The Republican split ensured a sweeping victory for Wilson, who won about 42 percent of the popular vote, although Roosevelt humiliated Taft by win- ning about 27 percent to the president’s 23 percent. In offi ce, Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader. He established an offi ce at the Capitol so that he could confer regularly with members of Congress about pending legis- lation, and he was the fi rst president to hold regular press conferences in order to infl uence public opinion directly and continuously. He delivered messages personally to Congress rather than sending them in written form like all his predecessors since John Adams.
With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his version of Progressivism. The fi rst signifi cant measure of his presidency was the Underwood Tariff, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost revenue, imposed a graduated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans. There followed the Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issuing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the Keating- Owen Act outlawing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce (the Supreme Court would later declare it unconstitutional), the Adamson Act establishing an eight-hour workday on the nation’s railroads, and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist subtreasury plan, which extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses.
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722 T H E PRO GR E S SI V E PR E SI DE N T SCh . 18 : THE PROGRESS IVE ERA
THE EXPANDING ROLE OF GOVERNMENT
Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in tune with Roosevelt’s New Nation- alism than the New Freedom of 1912. He abandoned the idea of aggressive trust-busting in favor of greater government supervision of the economy. Wilson presided over the creation of two powerful new public agencies. In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and infl uence interest rates so as to promote economic growth. The law was a delayed response to the Panic of 1907, when the failure of several fi nancial companies threatened a general collapse of the banking system. With the federal government lacking a modern central bank, it had been left to J. P. Morgan to assemble the funds to prop up threat- ened fi nancial institutions. Morgan’s actions highlighted the fact that in the absence of federal regulation of banking, power over fi nance rested entirely in private hands.
A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities such as price-fi xing and monopolistic practices. Both the Federal Reserve and FTC were welcomed by many business leaders as a means of restoring order to the economic marketplace and warding off more radical measures for curbing corporate power. But they refl ected the remarkable expansion of the federal role in the economy during the Progressive era.
By 1916, the social ferment and political mobilizations of the Progressive era had given birth to a new American state. With new laws, administrative agencies, and independent commissions, government at the local, state, and national levels had assumed the authority to protect and advance “industrial freedom.” Government had established rules for labor relations, business behavior, and fi nancial policy, protected citizens from market abuses, and acted as a broker among the groups whose confl icts threatened to destroy social harmony. But a storm was already engulfi ng Europe that would test the Progressive faith in empowered government as the protector of American freedom.
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723
C h a p t e r R e v i e w
R E V I E W Q U E S T I O N S 1. Identify the main groups and ideas that drove the Progressive
movement.
2. Explain how immigration to the United States in this period was part of a global movement of peoples.
3. Describe how Fordism transformed American industrial and consumer society.
4. Socialism was a rising force across the globe in the early twentieth century. How successful was the movement in the United States?
5. Explain why the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) grew so rapidly and aroused so much opposition.
6. How did immigrants adjust to life in America? What institutions or activities became important to their adjustment, and why?
7. What did Progressive-era feminists want to change in society, and how did their actions help to spearhead broader reforms?
8. How did ideas of women’s roles, shared by maternalist reform- ers, lead to an expansion of activism by and rights for women?
9. How did each Progressive-era president view the role of the federal government?
10. Pick a Progressive-era reform (a movement, specific legislation, and organization) and describe how it shows how Progressives could work for both the expansion of democracy and restric- tions on it.
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K E Y T E R M S muckrakers (p. 685)
child labor (p. 685)
Ellis Island and Angel Island (p. 687)
Fordism (p. 691)
American standard of living (p. 693)
Rerum Novarum (p. 693)
“scientific management” (p. 694)
Industrial Workers of the World (p. 697)
collective bargaining (p. 697)
“New Feminism” (p. 702)
birth-control movement (p. 704)
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724 Ch . 18 : THE PROGRESS IVE ERA
Society of American Indians (p. 705)
social legislation (p. 706)
Seventeenth Amendment (p. 708)
maternalist reform (p. 712)
Muller v. Oregon (p. 713)
workmen’s compensation laws (p. 714)
Pure Food and Drug Act (p. 716)
Conservation Movement (p. 716)
Sixteenth Amendment (p. 718)
New Freedom and New Nationalism (p. 720)
Federal Trade Commission (p. 722)
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