About The Progressive Era, Social Movements, and Reforms

The Muckrakers

Muckrakers produced a new kind of journalism in America in the early 1900s. They provided detailed accounts of situations caused by unequal social conditions and worked to expose and raise awareness of corruption, abuses of power, and social issues. Muckraking grew out of the trend of “yellow journalism” that developed in the 1880s and 1890s. Yellow journalism sensationalized news accounts in order to attract readers and boost circulation. The public’s taste for gripping accounts of the news was evident by the time McClure’s was founded. McClure’s Magazine, founded by Samuel McClure in 1893, started off with a purpose: to publish new fiction, as well as articles that were well researched and written. The price was set at fifteen cents an issue, about half of the price of other magazines. In addition to its famous muckraking articles, McClure’s also published work by Willa Cather, Mark Twain, O. Henry, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Ida Tarbell

Ida Tarbell’s father was a small, independent oil producer in Pennsylvania who started as a builder of oil storage tanks. He eventually got into oil production and refining. When Ida was fourteen, John D. Rockefeller went to small oil producers in Pennsylvania and Ohio and pressured them to sell their businesses to him, or his company, Standard Oil, would crush them. Tarbell was hired at McClure’s Magazine in 1894. Although she wrote many other articles, she is best known for her series on the Standard Oil Company, in which she exposed the company’s unethical business practices. After leaving McClure’s, Tarbell gave public lectures and speeches in support of women’s rights (although later she opposed the women’s suffrage movement) and lent support to workers’ strikes.

Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair grew up observing poverty in the New York neighborhoods where his family lived. He was troubled by the wealth gap he witnessed. As a reporter, Sinclair conducted an undercover investigation of the Chicago stockyards in 1904. His experience led him to write his most famous work, The Jungle. Published as a serial in 1905 and then as a novel in 1906, The Jungle tells the story of immigrants employed in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. Sinclair hoped to draw attention to the plight of immigrants and how they were exploited in the nation’s factories, but it was the book’s vivid descriptions of spoiled and contaminated meat that riveted the public. According to Sinclair, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Sales of meat dropped sharply, and a push for food safety laws emerged. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act, which not only sought to remedy the unsanitary methods described in Sinclair’s book but also opened the door for Congress to regulate other food and drugs.

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901. Roosevelt described the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” a place from which he could exhort Americans to act and to follow his lead. He urged the country to take a role in international affairs, and at home, he worked to control abuses by big business.

1

USH_TG_V2C2_WTNK.indd 1 24/06/21 11:29 AM A passionate outdoorsman and hunter, Roosevelt loved nature. His presidency was characterized by a dramatic increase in land conservation. Under pressure from Roosevelt, Congress established the Forest Service in 1905 for the purpose of managing government-owned land. In doing so, Congress made sure that certain land would be protected and available for public enjoyment rather than used for private commercial enterprises. The federal government designated approximately 194 million acres as public land under Roosevelt, about five times more than any other president before him. Roosevelt championed progressive causes such as political reform, business regulation, consumer protections, and conservation throughout his political career and continued to do so during his presidency. As a progressive Republican, Roosevelt came into conflict with conservative members of his party. Although his term ended in 1909, Roosevelt continued to be involved in politics. He went so far as to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1912. When his campaign for the Republican nomination failed, Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party. Both Roosevelt and Republican William Howard Taft ultimately lost to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

Black Americans

Ida B. Wells and the Red Record

Racial tensions grew throughout the country after the Civil War. Lynching—when a person is executed by a mob, often by hanging, for an alleged crime with or without a trial—was used to terrorize Black Americans and other people of color. From 1882 to 1968, at least 3,466 Black Americans were lynched. Ida B. Wells became one of the most prominent leaders in the fight against racial violence. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade began in 1892 after a mob lynched three of her friends. She started investigating the number of and circumstances surrounding lynchings in the South, publishing her findings in articles for Memphis Free Speech and a pamphlet called Southern Horrors. Wells also gave lectures on the subject and published a detailed study, A Red Record, in 1895. In response to her work, a mob destroyed the Memphis Free Speech office and threatened to kill Wells, forcing her to leave Memphis. Undeterred, Wells continued writing and lecturing about lynching. She also fought segregation in the South and discrimination in the North and was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Two Approaches to Race Relations

Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856 in Virginia. After emancipation, he and his family moved to West Virginia, where nine-year-old Washington worked in a coal mine and salt furnace. In 1872, he enrolled in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Washington worked as a janitor to pay for his education and graduated from Hampton in 1875. Washington was selected to head a new vocational school for Black Americans, the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, in 1881. He gained national prominence as the head of Tuskegee. Washington campaigned vigorously for funds for the school. In doing so, he gained much influence among white and Black Americans. In his 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition, Washington put forth his vision of racial progress through economic advancement. He stressed the importance of economic independence and believed that Black Americans could become economically independent through craft and industrial training. He also advocated a tactic of accommodation, whereby Black Americans would temporarily drop efforts to win civil rights and fight segregation in order to focus on education and advancement in trades and agriculture.

2

USH_TG_V2C2_WTNK.indd 2 24/06/21 11:29 AM Eventually, Washington believed, Black Americans’ economic success and rise to a respectable middle-class position would gain respect from white people, leading to a breakdown of race divisions and eventual civil rights.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, W. E. B. Du Bois was a sociologist, historian, author, editor, and activist. Du Bois was one of the founders of the NAACP and worked as editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis. Du Bois published his groundbreaking book, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. In the book, Du Bois explores the experience of being Black in early 1900s America. He explains Black Americans’ experiences of dual identity, invisibility, and injustice. Additionally, he criticizes Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of accommodation. Du Bois contends that white Americans would never willingly grant Black Americans rights. Black Americans would have to fight for their rights as they always had, and accommodation would only solidify discrimination. Like Washington, Du Bois valued education, but he favored a classical liberal arts education rather than the vocational trade training advocated by Washington. The two men had at least one idea in common, though. Du Bois, like Washington, advocated for Black economic independence as a means to battle Black poverty and alleviate some of the problems of segregation, as long as it went hand in hand with political and legal enfranchisement.

Women’s Suffrage

The suffrage movement developed out of the abolitionist movement. After the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed without the inclusion of women, women’s suffrage activists turned their full attention to securing the right to vote. In the late 1800s, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) spearheaded national- and state-level efforts to win the vote. In 1890, both groups merged to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The group focused on garnering enough support for women’s suffrage in state legislatures to influence the ratification of an amendment to the Constitution. To achieve this end, NAWSA campaigned for the support of upper-class, educated, and influential members of society, a move that alienated not only Black and poor women but also more radical members of the suffrage movement. When NAWSA’s strategy had failed to make any legal headway by 1910, an associated organization called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage fought for a federal strategy versus a state-by-state strategy. Led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, this group eventually left NAWSA to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and focus on more militant means of direct action. After the split, NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt changed course to follow a strategy of direct action by members to create support for a federal amendment. This strategy included pressuring President Woodrow Wilson to push for a women’s suffrage amendment. The NWP employed even more militant strategies, including marches, protests, and civil disobedience. In an attempt to pressure President Wilson, the NWP staged multiple protests in front of the White House in 1916 and 1917. However, the United States’ entrance into World War I resulted in a crackdown on demonstrations. Police arrested hundreds of women’s suffrage picketers throughout the summer of 1917 and threatened months-long jail sentences. Undeterred, Alice Paul continued to lead protests outside the White House and, consequently, suffered several arrests for her activism. By 1918, the tide was turning in favor of a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. In 1919, the amendment passed both houses of Congress and was sent to the states for ratification. In 1920, Tennessee voted narrowly to ratify the amendment. It was the thirty-sixth state to do so, giving the amendment the necessary two-thirds majority needed to become part of the Constitution. 3

USH_TG_V2C2_WTNK.indd 3 24/06/21 11:29 AM Eugene Debs and Socialism

Eugene Debs went to work at age fourteen in railroad shops and advanced to the position of locomotive fireman. He began his career as an organizer in 1875, when he assisted in forming the Terre Haute Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. In 1893, Debs was elected president of the American Railway Union (ARU) and set about organizing railway workers across the country. The ARU’s first major win came with a strike against the Great Northern Railway, which led to higher wages for workers. Debs was later arrested and jailed when the ARU conducted a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. In prison, Debs read and was profoundly influenced by a wide variety of radical views. Out of prison, he threw his support behind the populist movement and worked for William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaign in 1896. After Bryan’s defeat, Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America and unsuccessfully ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate five times. During this time period, Debs also formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an explicitly socialist union.

Reformers

Jane Addams

Jane Addams was born in 1860, less than a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. She died in 1935. She became known as the “Mother of Social Work” for her pioneering efforts to address the problems people suffered because of poverty and lack of opportunity. Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, with her fellow reformer Ellen Gates Starr. The house was named after its builder, Charles Hull. Addams and Starr renovated the original building. Eventually, Hull House added twelve more buildings. It also opened a nearby playground and a camp in Wisconsin. Addams and Starr were joined in their efforts by a number of other women, including Florence Kelley and Alice Hamilton. Addams and her colleagues also worked to change child labor laws. Addams worked with the NAACP, campaigned for women’s suffrage, and was a pacifist leader. She was a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, the Women’s Peace Party, and the International Congress of Women. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis was born in Denmark in 1849 and immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty-one. He lived there until his death in 1914. After a rough start to his new life in America, he found work as a reporter. Assigned to work as a police reporter in New York’s Lower East Side, he discovered that in some tenements, one in ten infants died. Riis found that words could not adequately describe what he saw in the tenements, so he taught himself photography. He spent years photographing New York’s slums, saloons, tenements, and streets. His stark images presented a harsh look at poverty that the public often ignored. In 1890, he published How the Other Half Lives. Riis’s book told the stories of the cramped tenements of New York and provided gripping photos that had been produced with the new technology of the flashbulb. The book was a major success and led to new laws regulating and improving tenements. Theodore Roosevelt responded to Riis’s book by saying, “I have read your book, and I have come to help.”

4

USH_TG_V2C2_WTNK.indd 4 24/06/21 11:29 AM Dorothea Dix

At the time that Dorothea Dix began her crusade to help people with mental illness, they were usually housed in jails, prisons, and poorhouses. In 1821, Dix, a teacher, founded her own school in Boston. In the next decade, she published a number of books dealing with education and religious themes. In 1841, she was asked to teach Sunday school in a jail in Cambridge. There, she saw firsthand the way people with mental illness were treated. The revelation motivated Dix to visit jails and prisons around Massachusetts, and she found them no better than the one in Cambridge. Those with mental illness were confined in cells with prisoners, without proper food, clothing, or sanitary facilities. They were sometimes chained and beaten. Dix reported to the Massachusetts legislature on her two-year investigation and won support to have the state-run mental hospital expanded. She then took her crusade to other states and found similar conditions. For forty years, Dix worked to help the mentally ill. She persuaded legislators in many U.S. states and in Canada to build or upgrade state-operated hospitals for the mentally ill.

Horace Mann

Horace Mann, a largely self-taught lawyer and legislator, served as the first secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education from 1837 to 1848. During that time, he did much to promote public education, establishing state-supported colleges to train teachers and setting up school districts under a statewide system of public education. Mann also lobbied for better pay for teachers. He wanted to standardize the age for compulsory school attendance, place students in graded classrooms, and use the same grade-level textbooks across the state. But most importantly, Mann and his supporters advocated public education as the “great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery.” They saw public education as a means to create a harmonious and homogeneous society of hardworking citizens who would support the values, beliefs, and loyalties of America. Mann’s philosophy appealed to the middle class in the North, and interest in public education soon spread from Massachusetts to other Northern states. The Midwest, which had been settled under the Northwest Ordinance requiring the establishment of schools, already supported education. Public education in the South did not take hold until the 1850s because of the scarcity of towns.

5

USH_TG_V2C2_WTNK.indd 5 24/06/21 11:29 AM