PROGRESSIVISM

ARE THESE 2 QUOTES CONTRADICTORY?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...The one absolutely certain way of bringing the nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.          

Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

The Progressive Era:

I.           Origins

A. Populism:

Farmers' Alliance

Omaha Platform:

--inflationary currency policy

--graduated income tax

--direct government ownership of railroad and telegraph industries

--redistribution of railroad owned lands

B. Hull House—1889

   Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/10870.html

II.       A New Mindset:

Progressivism Defined:

Progressivism was a series of movements designed to combat the ills of industrialism. Some progressives also wanted to control the behavior of the working classes.

Stanley Schultz, Univ. of Wisconsin:

·       Government should be more active

·       Social problems are susceptible to government legislation and action

·       Throw money at the problem

·       The world is “perfectible”

III.   Progressive Movements:

A.               Anti-Trust

Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890

“Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.”

B.               Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives

To help prepare you to deal effectively with this book for the midterm, find as many specific examples (page numbers) as you can.

Let’s start with the pictures. Which photograph was most compelling?

According to Riis, what is the cause of crime?

How does Riis deal with race? What impact does race have on poverty in this book?

Based on your reading, define poverty.

What is the role of government in the slums?

According to Riis, what should be the role of government in the slums?

C.               Anti-Lynching (Ida B. Wells-Barnett)

D.              Good Government Movement

--17^th Amendment=direct election of senators

--referendums and recalls

E.                Consumer Protection: The Jungle

Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

IV. Progressivism in Practice:

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FIRE OF 1911

A. The ILGWU Strike:

          B. Fire on the Factory Floor

          C. Reporters and the Visibility of Triangle

               1. "Love Affair in Mid-Air"

               2. Mortillalo and Zito

D. The Public Response

I.           Progressivism Abroad:

A. Foreign Policy Community

          --T.R., Henry Cabot Lodge

          --“large policy”

     B. Capitalism

     C. "Yellow" Journalism

        Pulitzer: New York World

Hearst: New York Journal

Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)

  

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

II.       More Progressivism in Practice:

THE JUNGLE EXCERPT

Excerpts From The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Section 1-Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss- crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails, – they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the "hoisters," as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham's architects had not built the killing room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor, – for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting, – sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!
Section 2-There was meat that was taken out of pickle and would often be found sour, and  they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant – a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor – a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade – there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes – they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them – that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"
Section 3-Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. 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 glycerin, 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 gelatin 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.

INDUSTRIALISM

Today, we discuss industrialism in the U.S.

Try to name an area of your life not now impacted by industrialism.

“This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times…It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879

Why does such wretched poverty often seem to accompany vast economic growth?

The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:

How much growth was there?

Handout:  1860 vs. 1900

1.        Write your name on the back of the handout.

Look at the numbers, but do not say anything to your neighbor. Do, however, write extensively on the paper. Write down any idea that comes to mind, connecting them to the fact that spurred the thought. Circle. Draw lines. Write. Fill the page with your ideas.

Do this first part without conferring with your neighbor.

2.        Pass the paper to someone in a row far far away.

3.         With the paper now in front of you, choose a couple of the ideas that you think are most compelling or brilliant. Comment on them, asking questions, expanding the conclusions of the original author, or remarking in any way that you think will push the conversation on paper forward.

4.        Pass the paper again…continue the conversation.

5. Get the thing back to the original author.

The Age of Unparalleled Industrial Expansion:

I. Why was there such vast growth so rapidly in the U.S.?

1.  War: Why would war encourage industrial growth?

Example #1: Morrill Act (1862)

Example #2: Railroads:

                     1860: 30,000 miles of r.r.

                     1864: Congress grants 131 million acres

                     1910: 240,000 miles of railway

2.         Resources:     land, raw materials, people,

ideas=booooooom!

…in 1800 it took 56 man-hours per acre to raise wheat.

…in 1900, it required only 15 man-hours per acre.

                     1864: 872,000 tons of iron and steel

1919: more than 24 million tons

        

                     1860: 20 million tons of coal

1910: 500 million tons of coal

                     1860: 500,000 barrels of petroleum

1910: 209 million barrels of petroleum

3. Integration:

         a. Horizontal Integration:

--monopolize one part of the productive process

Example: meatpacking plants

b. Vertical Integration:

--monopolize all elements of productive process

        

Example: Andrew Carnegie: mining iron ore, own blast furnaces (factories), own shops, own ships, own railroad and rail lines

4. Mindset:

a. Small Government is Best:

                     Laissez faire: “let it do”

                     Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

                                 “the invisible hand”

b. Aggressive Business Mentality:

The Robber Barons

         Notable examples:

ü  John D. Rockefeller

ü  Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie: “It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”

ü  J.P. Morgan

ü  Jay Gould: “Mephistopheles of Wall

Street”

                                             (bribed Grant’s brother in law for gold

secrets)

ü  Cornelius Van Derbilt:

(steamships and railroads: $100 million)

Gentlemen:

You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.

                                             Sincerely,

                                                         CVD

c. Justifying the New World:

How do you justify the world when fabulous wealth and wretched poverty exist so closely together?

         William Graham Sumner:

Social Darwinism

The product of all that wealth so quickly is the NEW CITY:

The New Impoverished City

Rapid Urbanization:

1860:   25 million Americans lived in rural areas

6.2 million in what the Bureau of the Census

called "urban territory" (2500 or more)

1910: 42 million of the 92 million in urban areas

Tenement Buildings:

1879 NYC law declared that every room must have a window and every floor must have a bathroom

Contamination:

         1877-Philadelphia: 82,000 privies

        

         Boston Harbor was “one vast cesspool, a threat to all

the towns it washed.”

Crime-Filled:

         Murder Rate: 1266 in 1881

 7340 in 1898

(an increase of 25 per million people, to 107 per million people)

Women in Workforce:

         1/7^th of the Paid workforce

         (2.6 million of the 17.4 million)         

                     500,000 married, yet they were paid less than

men, especially after 1900 when the “family wage” idea spread.

Immigration:

Newspaper in 1900: "It is well known that nearly every foreigner…goes armed. Some carry revolvers, while many others hide huge ugly knives upon their person."

Senator William Bruce (Maryland):

Immigrants are “indigestible lumps in

the national stomach.”

         1890-1900: 3.5 million

         1900-1910: 7 million

                     Ellis Island:

“Such an impulse toward better things there certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor, is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day. The Italian scavenger of our time is fast graduating into exclusive control of the corner fruit-stands, while his black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry in which a few years ago he was an intruder.” 

Jacob Riis on social fluidity

Children Working in the cotton mills (Tennessee Valley)

"They were children only in age…little, solemn pygmy people, whom poverty had canned up and compressed…the juices of childhood had been pressed our…no talking in the mill…no singing…they were more dead than alive when at seven o clock, the Steam Beast uttered the last volcanic howl which said they might go home…in a speechless, haggard, over-worked procession."

What if you do not want to justify the disparity between rich and poor? What could you do?
II. Progressivism: