Progressivism and its

Roots8.1

Lets talk about all of the social problems we have

talked about…

Progressivism was the organized reaction to the

problems that industrialization brought.

Progressivism• This was a movement that swept through

America trying to improve the country.• Progressivism tried to improve many things:

1. The working conditions of factories2. Child labor laws3. Fix the governmental control of the economy4. Help women gain the right to vote5. Election of politicians6. Prohibition

The Progressive Movement: 1890-1920•Progressivism was not so much an organized movement as it was a general spirit of reform embraced by Americans with diverse goals and backgrounds during the early twentieth century (1890-20). •Progressives sought the advancement of humanity •Progressives sought advancement through the liberation of human energies and potential from both the fading restraints of past ages and the new restraints imposed by modern industrialism.• Progressivism was, thus, both forward-looking and backward-looking in its outlook.

"I belong to a class who have been robbed, exploited, and plundered down through many long centuries, and because I belong to that class I have an instinct to go and break the chains."

Mary "Mother" Jones, Labor Organizer 1830-1930

The Rich vs. the Poor

Remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?

Child Labor Issues

The Muckrakers• This was a group of journalists aimed at

investigating both governmental and industrial corruption.

• The Muckrakers would help pass a law directly electing Senators rather than them being chosen by the House of Representatives. (17th Amendment!)

• They gave pictures and voices to those being taken advantage of by the social system.

The Muckrakers• While cautioning about possible pitfalls of keeping one's attention

ever trained downward, "on the muck," Roosevelt emphasized the social benefit of investigative muckraking reporting, saying:“There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

The Muckrakers1. Ida Tarbell

-McClure’s magazine-attacked Standard Oil

2. Lincoln Steffens-McClure’s magazine -attacked urban politics/vote stealing

3. Charles Edward -Everybody’s Magazine -attacked the beef industry

4. Jacob Riis-Published a collection of pictures about the poor living conditions of immigrants.

Ida TarbellLincoln Steffens

Jacob Riis

The Suffrage Movement• The word suffrage

means the right to vote.

• All men had this right…but women did not.

• This movement was to basically help gain women the right to vote.

Not everyone thought women should vote

The Suffrage Movement part 2

• The two main organizations and their leaders: 1.National Woman Suffrage Association

Led by: Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony

2.American Woman Suffrage Association Led by: Lucy Stone &Julia Ward Howe

• These two groups would join together and form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton with Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony“Universal manhood suffrage, by establishing an aristocracy of sex, imposes upon the women of this nation a more absolute and cruel despotism than monarchy; in that, woman finds a political master in her father, husband, brother, son. The aristocracies of the old world are based upon birth, wealth, refinement, education, nobility, brave deeds of chivalry; in this nation, on sex alone; exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.”

• National Woman Suffrage Association

The Suffrage Movement part 3

• These radical women would start protests, picket the White House, lay down to block sidewalks, chain themselves to lampposts, and go on hunger strikes in jail if arrested.

• Susan B. Anthony picked the lady to take her place to the the NAWSA…her name was Carrie Chapman Catt

• Carrie Champan Catt would help get the 19th Amendment for women’s rights.

• August 26, 1920 the 19th Amendment went into effect giving women the right to vote.

Meat Inspection Act• The Meat Inspection Act required federal

inspection before being sold and set standards on cleanliness in the processing plants.

*This was important due to the unclean conditions of processing plants.*Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The

Jungle which was about this topic.

• Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”• There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way

back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one-- there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage--but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound…

Pure Food and Drug Act• The Pure Food and Drug Act did

not allow the people to make and sell drugs that were not properly labeled and inspected.* This was important due to the high amount of street vendors trying to sell medicine like “Snake Oil” that really didn’t cure anything.

* The Snake Oil was not really snake oil at all. It was mostly alcohol, colored water, and sugar. It was believed to cure everything.