Transcript James L. Roark * Michael P. Johnson Patricia Cline Cohen * Sarah

James L. Roark • Michael P. Johnson
Patricia Cline Cohen • Sarah Stage
Susan M. Hartmann
The American Promise
A History of the United States
Fifth Edition
CHAPTER 21
Progressivism from the Grass Roots to
the White House,
1890-1916
Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's
I. Grassroots Progressivism
A. Civilizing the City
1. The settlement house movement-Hull House
2. The social gospel
3. The social purity movement
4. Temperance
5. Progressive attitudes
I. Grassroots Progressivism
B. Progressives and the Working Class
1. The Women’s Trade Union League
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brought together women workers and middle-class
“allies” in order to organize working women into unions
under the auspices of the AFL.
2. The uprising of twenty thousand
3. The Triangle fire
• in 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company killed
146 workers and injured scores more; owners escaped
conviction for negligence when authorities determined fire
had been started by a careless smoker.
•
4. Protective legislation
advocates of protective legislation won a major victory in
1908 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Muller v.
Oregon, to uphold an Oregon law that limited the hours
women could work to ten a day.
5. The National Consumers League
II. Progressivism: Theory and Practice
A. Reform Darwinism and Social Engineering
1. Challenging social Darwinism
2. Efficiency and expertise
3. Scientific management
• Frederick Winslow Taylor epitomized the movement toward
scientific management; pioneered “systemized shop
management”; aimed to elevate productivity and efficiency;
advocated piecework, quotas, and pay incentives for
productivity; alienated workers but gained converts among
corporate managers and progressives
B. Progressive Government: City and State
1. Thomas Loftin Johnson in Cleveland
• fought for fair taxation and municipal ownership of street
railways and public utilities; he called for greater
democracy through the use of the initiative, referendum,
and recall—devices that allowed the voters to have a direct
say in legislative and judicial matters.
2. Robert M. La Follette in Wisconsin
3. Hiram Johnson in California
• as governor, introduced the direct primary; supported the
initiative, referendum, and recall; strengthened the state’s
railroad commission; supported conservation; and signed
an employer’s liability law.
III. Progressivism Finds a President:
Theodore Roosevelt
A. The Square Deal
1. Roosevelt’s rise to power
2. Trust busting
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used the Sherman Antitrust Act to go after some of the nation’s largest
corporations, including Northern Securities Company, which held a
monopoly on railroad traffic in the Northwest; in 1904, the Supreme
Court upheld the Sherman Act and called for the dissolution of Northern
Securities; put Wall Street on notice that the president was willing to use
the power of the government to control business; Roosevelt went on to
use the Sherman Act against forty-three trusts; punished the “bad
trusts,” which broke the law, and left the “good” ones alone; exerted the
moral and political authority of the executive.
3. Mediating labor disputes
1902, 147,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania went on strike; strike
dragged on for the summer, and coal prices increased
Roosevelt invited representatives from both sides to Washington in
October
when management refused to negotiate with representatives from United
Mine Workers, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines and run them
with federal troops
4. The election of 1904 and the Square Deal
III. Progressivism Finds a President:
Theodore Roosevelt
B. Roosevelt the Reformer
1. Mandate for reform
2. The Hepburn Act
•
the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) real power to set rates and prevent discriminatory
practices; worked skillfully behind the scenes to ensure the passage of the Hepburn Act in
1906; the act gave the ICC power to set rates subject to court review
3. Muckraking
•
muckraking journalism, a term Roosevelt coined, had been of enormous help in securing
progressive legislation, including the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
4. Economic panic in 1907
C. Roosevelt and Conservation
1. Conserving natural resources
•
more than quadrupled the number of acres of land in government reserves and fought western
cattle barons, lumber kings, mining interests, and powerful leaders in Congress; Roosevelt
placed the nation’s conservation policy in the hands of scientifically trained experts like chief
forester Gifford Pinchot; Pinchot preached conservation—the efficient, managed use of natural
resources; contrasted with preservation; preservationists such as John Muir, founder of the
Sierra Club, believed the wilderness needed to be protected from all commercial exploitation;
Roosevelt understood the need for both.
•
2. Congressional backlash
Antiquities Act of 1906 gave the president unchecked power to protect significant federal lands;
Roosevelt did not hesitate to use that power, creating 18 national monuments, 6 national parks,
and 150 national forests; in 1907, Congress put the brakes on Roosevelt’s environmental
efforts by passing a law limiting his power to create forest reserves in six western states; in the
days leading up to the law’s enactment, Roosevelt saved 16 million acres from development by
creating twenty-one new reserves and enlarging eleven more.
III. Progressivism Finds a President:
Theodore Roosevelt
D. The Big Stick
1. Foreign policy and executive power
2. The Panama Canal
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Roosevelt jealously guarded the Monroe Doctrine’s American sphere of influence, and
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his proprietary attitude toward the Western Hemisphere became further evident in his
Panama Canal dealings
Columbia wouldn’t sell the land to the United States; New York investors prompted
Panamanians to stage a successful uprising
the United States recognized the new government and purchased the land for $10
million.
3. The Roosevelt Corollary
The United States would not intervene in Latin America as long as nations conducted
their affairs with “decency”
in effect, made the United States the policeman of the Western Hemisphere and served
notice to the European powers to keep out.
4. A rising force in world affairs
5. Brokering peace with Japan
earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his role in negotiating an end to the RussoJapanese War;
arranged the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” in 1907, which allowed the Japanese to save
face by voluntarily restricting immigration to the United States; to demonstrate
America’s naval power and to counter Japan’s growing bellicosity, Roosevelt dispatched
the Great White Fleet, sixteen of the navy’s most up-to-date battleships, on a “goodwill”
mission around the world
American relations with Japan improved, and in the 1908 Root-Takahira agreement, the
two nations pledged to maintain the Open Door and support the status quo in the
Pacific.
III. Progressivism Finds a President:
Theodore Roosevelt
E. The Troubled Presidency of William Howard Taft
1. A lawyer with no feel for politics
2. The tariff issue
3. Alienating Roosevelt
• ; fired Gifford Pinchot and alienated Roosevelt; by late summer 1910, after returning
from abroad, Roosevelt had taken sides with the progressive insurgents in his party;
beginning to sound more and more like a candidate.
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4. Progressive reform in Congress
the Democrats swept the congressional elections of 1910; the new Democratic majority
in the House, working with progressive Republicans in the Senate, achieved a number
of key reforms; included legislation to regulate mine and railroad safety, to create a
Children’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, and to establish an eight-hour workday
for federal workers; the Congress sent to the states the Sixteenth Amendment, which
provided for a modest graduated income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, which
called for the direct election of senators; Taft sat on the sidelines.
5. Dollar diplomacy
championed “dollar diplomacy,” naively believing he could substitute “dollars for
bullets”; in the Caribbean, he provoked anti-American feeling by attempting to force
commercial treaties on Nicaragua and Honduras, and by dispatching the U.S. Marines
to Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic in 1912, pursuant to the Roosevelt Corollary;
6. Roosevelt’s criticism
final breach between Taft and Roosevelt came in 1911, when Taft’s attorney general
filed an antitrust suit against U.S. Steel, citing Roosevelt’s agreement with the Morgan
interests in the 1907 acquisition of Tennessee Coal and Iron.
IV. Woodrow Wilson and Progressivism at High Tide
A. Progressive Insurgency and the Election of 1912
1. The Republican primaries
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1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination; but for all
his popularity, he had lost control of the party machine, and Taft refused
to step aside; Roosevelt ran in thirteen primaries and won 278 delegates
to Taft’s 48, but Taft’s bosses refused to seat the Roosevelt delegates at
the Chicago convention; Taft won nomination on the first ballot.
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2. The Bull Moose Party
planks called for woman suffrage, presidential primaries, conservation of
natural resources, a minimum wage for women, an end to child labor,
workers’ compensation, social security, and a federal income tax;
nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.
3. Four Progressives
Democrats were delighted at the split in the Republican ranks; smelled
victory and nominated Woodrow Wilson; voters in 1912 chose from four
candidates who claimed to be progressives—Taft, Roosevelt, Woodrow
Wilson, and the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs.
4. “The new nationalism” versus “The new freedom”
Wilson’s New Freedom, based on the Democratic principles of limited
government and states’ rights, promised to use antitrust legislation to get
rid of big corporations and give small businesses and farmers better
opportunities. Wilson and Roosevelt fought it out, but in the end, the
Republican vote was split while the Democrats remained united; Wilson
won a decisive victory in the electoral college; Taft received only eight
electoral votes.
IV. Woodrow Wilson and
Progressivism at High Tide
B. Wilson’s Reforms: Tariff, Banking, and the Trusts
1. The Underwood Tariff
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lowered rates by 15 percent; to compensate for lost revenue, the House approved a
moderate federal income tax.
2. The Federal Reserve Act
Wilson was concerned about J. P. Morgan and Company’s control of 341 directorships in
112 corporations and control of more than $22 billion in assets
; the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was the most significant domestic legislation of
Wilson’s presidency
established a national banking system privately controlled but regulated and supervised
by a Federal Reserve Board appointed by the president
gave the nation its first efficient banking and currency system, provided for a greater
degree of government control over banking, and made currency more elastic and credit
adequate for the needs of business and agriculture.
3. The Clayton Act and the FTC
4. A mission fulfilled?
C. Wilson, Reluctant Progressive
1. “Special privileges to none”
2. About face in 1916
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appointed progressive Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, threw his support behind
legislation to obtain rural credits for farmers, supported workers’ compensation and the
Keating-Owen child-labor law, and encouraged Congress to establish an eight-hour day
on the railroads
reform, along with his pledge to keep the country out of World War I, helped him win
reelection in 1916.
V. The Limits of Progressive Reform
A. Radical Alternatives
1. The Socialist Party
2. The Industrial Workers of the World
• nicknamed the Wobblies; union dedicated to organizing the
most destitute segment of the workforce, the unskilled workers
disdained by Samuel Gompers’s AFL; unhesitatingly advocated
direct action, sabotage, and the general strike—tactics designed
to trigger a workers’ uprising.
3. Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement
• Sanger and her followers saw birth control not only as a sexual
and medical reform, but also as a means to alter social and
political power relationships and to alleviate human misery
• birth control became linked with freedom of speech when
Margaret Sanger’s feminist journal, the Woman Rebel, was
confiscated by the Post Office for violating social purity laws
• opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New
York; police shut it down after ten days
• the birth control movement would become less radical after
World War I; but in its infancy, it was part of a radical vision for
reforming the world that made common cause with the socialists
and the IWW in challenging the limits of progressive reform.
V. The Limits of Progressive Reform
B. Progressivism for White Men Only
1. Woman suffrage
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Alice Paul launched an effort to lobby for a federal amendment to give
women the vote; in 1916, she founded the militant National Woman’s
Party (NWP), which became the radical voice of the suffrage movement;
advocated direct action such as mass marches and civil disobedience.
2. Racism in the South and West
3. The Atlanta Compromise
progressives preached the disfranchisement of black voters as “reform”
and also witnessed the rise of Jim Crow legislation to segregate public
facilities; in the face of this growing repression, Booker T. Washington,
the preeminent black leader of the day, urged caution and restraint;
introduced the “Atlanta Compromise,” an accommodationist policy that
appealed to whites
4. Constitutional racism
5. The rise of W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP
major race riot in Atlanta left 250 African Americans dead; W.E.B. Du
Bois was Washington’s foremost critic; urged blacks to fight for civil
rights and racial justice; in 1905, founded the Niagara Movement calling
for universal male suffrage, civil rights, and a black intellectual elite; in
1909, the Niagara movement helped found the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a coalition of blacks and
whites that sought legal and political rights for African Americans through
the courts.