U.S. History 2

The Progressive Movement Characters and Key Terms.html

Unit 3: leading the way:  the progressive movement, 1890-1920

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"The Progressive Movement": Characters and Key Terms

Characters

Keep this list of major characters in mind in order to follow the action more easily.  Click on each person or Key Term to see his/her/its corresponding description and/or definition. You can also click the "Show All" button to expand all characters and descriptions at once.   Muckrakers were journalists who wrote about issues of concerns to progressives. With the goal of motivating their readers to action, they exposed political corruption, challenged the power of corporations, or brought attention to social problems such as poverty. Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, used photography to bring the problems of urban poverty to the attention of his middle-class audience. His work How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) documented the squalid, crowded conditions in lower-Manhattan tenements and streets.La Follette, a progressive-minded Wisconsin governor (1901-1906), advocated the “Wisconsin idea,” the belief that voters should control government and that educated specialists in areas like law, economics, and social science would make government more efficient. He then served in the U.S. Senate from 1906 until his death in 1925.Hine was a photographer hired by the National Child Labor Committee to document and publicize child labor.Debs was a labor activist turned politician. He was the Socialist Party presidential candidate five times and had his best showing in 1912, the peak of socialist influence in the U.S., when he garnered 6% of the vote.Washington was the most important black leader at the end of the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in 1856, he founded the Tuskegee Institute, emphasizing manual and industrial training. He advocated slow progress for blacks through economic self-improvement rather than lawsuits or agitation, a position embodied in his “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895. Du Bois emerged in the early twentieth century as a black leader with a vision much different from Booker T. Washington. Du Bois, born to poor parents in Massachusetts in 1868, attended Fisk and Harvard Universities. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois attacked Washington’s philosophies, arguing that black Americans deserved immediate civil and political rights as well as access to all levels of education. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).Roosevelt had a reputation as a trustbuster, and he did go after some large corporations, breaking up, for example, the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company. Roosevelt distinguished, however, between “good” trusts and “bad” trusts, believing that large-scale enterprise created efficiencies that could lower costs and be good for the public.

Key Terms

This phrase refers roughly to the period 1890 to 1920. Primarily, progressivism encompassed a collection of responses to the problems emerging from rapid industrialization and urbanization. Progressive movements tended to begin at the grassroots level and gradually gained traction at the state and national level. Although progressivism refers to a disparate collection of impulses and movements, as a whole, it shares certain tendencies and characteristics. Progressives tended to be white and middle-class. They believed in democracy and the government’s power to change society for the better. They had faith in efficiency, expertise, science, and technology. A progressive-era reform in which voters themselves – rather than party insiders - chose which candidate to run for office. Governor Robert La Follette convinced the Wisconsin legislature to institute the first direct primary in the U.S. Initiative, referendum, and recall are all examples of state-level, progressive-era democratic reforms designed to allow the voice of the people to be heard more clearly. The initiative allowed voters to enact legislation by petitioning to have it put on a state-wide ballot. Referendum allowed voters to accept or reject – through the ballot – a piece of legislation, and recall allowed voters to remove a public official from office.Seventeenth Amendment was another effort by progressives toward truer democracy. This amendment, ratified in 1913, allowed voters to vote directly for their Senator, replacing the previous indirect process in which voters chose state legislators who in turn voted for U.S. Senators.Part of the “good government” movement that sought to eradicate corrupt city machines. Pioneered in Galveston, Texas after a 1900 hurricane devastated the city. City commissions were composed of experts, each of whom oversaw a city department.The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defense system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, first announced by President Reagan in 1983. Because parts of the defensive system that Reagan advocated would be based in space, the proposed system was dubbed “Star Wars.”Part of the “good government” movement that sought to eradicate corrupt city machines. In this form of government, first adopted by Staunton, Virginia in 1908, an elected city council appoints a non-partisan, highly qualified manager to oversee municipal operations.Pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor, “Taylorism” or scientific management broke factory processes down with an eye to efficiency, so that individual workers performed small, repetitive tasks to create uninterrupted flow of production.Originating in England, Jane Addams and others brought the idea to the United States. Addams founded Hull House in a poor, immigrant neighborhood in Chicago in 1889. Progressives – usually white, middle-class women – lived in settlement houses with the goal of uplifting immigrants through their example.Epitomized the progressive impulse of “public motherhood,” that is white, middle-class women publicly asserting their influence in areas traditionally of concern to women and mothers. Founded in 1904, they worked to raise awareness of child labor, but had limited achievements.A 1911 fire in this factory led to the deaths of 146 workers, mostly young women. The fire catalyzed safety reforms in New York, legislation that became a model for other states.In 1919, the climax of the prohibition movement, this amendment forbade the “manufacture, sale, or transportation” of intoxicating liquors. Progressives believed prohibition would help many of their goals, including moral uplift and efficiency in the workplace and government. Founded in 1905, the IWW advocated a strategy that organized all workers, regardless of skill, race, or gender, into one big industrial union. This stood in contrast to the craft-union approach of the American Federation of Labor, which organized skilled workers by craft.Formed in 1890 from a merger of two suffrage organizations, NAWSA pursued a strategy of pushing for suffrage at the state level, believing this would pressure national leaders to support suffrage as well. It was the most mainstream and nationally visible suffrage organization.A suffrage organization, was founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in 1913. Drawing on the example of British suffragettes, they pursued a more radical strategy than NAWSA by engaging in direct protest to call attention to their cause. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the NWP focused on an equal rights amendment to the Constitution.The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, giving women the right to vote. Women’s efforts in World War I as well as ongoing pressure from suffragists helped convince President Woodrow Wilson to support woman suffrage. A phrase used frequently by Theodore Roosevelt and the name historians subsequently gave his domestic program. Broadly, Roosevelt’s Square Deal emphasized compromise between labor and bosses, conservation of public land, control of corporations, and consumer protection.Upton Sinclair, a socialist, wrote this hoping to gain sympathy for the plight of workers. Readers – and President Theodore Roosevelt – were more outraged by unsanitary conditions in the meat industry, which spurred the passage of the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts (both 1906).The Forestry Service emerged under Theodore Roosevelt to manage public lands for future use.gave the Interstate Commerce Commission increased power to regulate railroads, outlawing rebates (Elkins) and allowing the ICC to set maximum rates (Hepburn). The Progressive Party was a political party founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 after he became unhappy with the direction of the Republican Party and lost its nomination for president. Roosevelt ran on a platform he called New Nationalism, which called for an expansive government that could its power for the public interest.Democratic presidential nominee Woodrow Wilson’s platform in 1912. He opposed bigness in both government and business, emphasizing small business and fair competition with little government interference. Substantially lowered or eliminated tariffs on imports, while reintroducing a federal income tax.Passed during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, this act removed power over interest rates from the hands of private bankers. The new system created twelve privately owned regional reserve banks regulated by a presidentially appointed Federal Reserve Board. The Board, known informally as the Fed, regulated the interest rate at which reserve banks loaned or distributed money to other banks around the country. This system is still in use today.