Time Period #7 HW Assignments 1898 to 1916 [Module A]

Transcription

1 1 The History of America Act VI [1890 to 1916] Module A Homework Assignments An increasingly pluralistic United States faced profound domestic and global challenges, debated the proper degree of government activism, and sought to define its international role. Creating a Culture of Reform during Progressive Movement [ ] America s transformation into a diverse, urban, affluent was accompanied by extraordinary publicspiritedness as reformers--frightened by class conflict and the breakdown of gender relations embarked on a crusade to remake other Americans in their own image. American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 Progressive Roots ( ); Political Progressivism ( ) Podcast Notes: Teddy Roosevelt's 'Doomed' War On New York Vice (8:14) Reading: Politics and Pollution

2 2 Muckrakers: Exposing Scandal and Inspiring Reform The birth of investigative journalism in America has its roots in the turn of the century, news reporting and monthly magazines collaborations to creating a new kind of serialized exposés of corporate, labor, and political corruption. American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 Raking Muck with the Muckrakers ( ) Podcast Notes: NPR Impact of Sinclair's 'The Jungle' on Food Safety (5:00) Reading Notes: The Jungle and the Progressive Era by Robert W. Cherny

3 3 The Jungle and the Progressive Era by Robert W. Cherny The publication of Upton Sinclair s 1906 novel The Jungle produced an immediate and powerful effect on Americans and on federal policy, but Sinclair had hoped to achieve a very different result. At the time he began working on the novel, he had completed his studies at Columbia University and was trying to develop a career as an author. He had been born in Baltimore in 1878, but his family had moved to the Bronx in Though he came from a prominent family, his own parents had little money, and he paid for his university studies by writing dime novels and short stories. While at Columbia, he also became a convert to socialism. At the time, journalists had begun to play an important role in exposing wrongdoing. Around 1902, magazine publishers discovered that their sales soared when they featured exposés of political corruption, corporate misconduct, or other offenses. McClure s Magazine led the way, in October 1902, with a series by Lincoln Steffens that revealed corruption in city governments. In January 1903, McClure s carried Steffens s installment on Minneapolis, launched a new series by Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, and featured an article on corruption in labor unions. McClure s sales boomed, and other publications quickly commissioned exposés of their own. In 1904, the leading socialist weekly in the country, the Appeal to Reason, offered Sinclair $500 (equivalent to about $11,500 in 2008) to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry. Upon arriving in his hotel in Chicago, Sinclair is said to have announced, I am Upton Sinclair, and I have come to write the Uncle Tom s Cabin of the labor movement. For seven weeks, he prowled the streets of Packingtown, the residential district next to the stockyards and packing plants. He donned overalls, posed as a worker, and slipped into the packing plants to gain firsthand knowledge of the work. He sought out social workers, police officers, physicians, and others who could tell him about life and work in Packingtown. Local socialists introduced him to other people who were knowledgeable about the community and the work. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, and wrote for nine months. The book he produced, The Jungle, followed a fictional family of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago. From an opening chapter that recounts the joyous wedding of the main character, Jurgis Rudkus, Sinclair traced the family s experience with work in Packingtown. In the process, he exposed in disgusting detail the inner workings of the meatpacking industry: They were regular alchemists at Durham s; they advertised a mushroom-catsup, and the men who made it did not know what a mushroom looked like. They advertised potted chicken... the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any.

4 4 They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was potted game and potted grouse, potted ham, and deviled ham de-vyled, as the men called it. De-vyled ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Sinclair described the afflictions of packinghouse workers, from severed fingers to tuberculosis and blood poisoning. He wrote of men who fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough left of them 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! And he told of scheming real-estate salesmen and crooked politicians. At the center of the story, Sinclair recounts the destruction of Jurgis s family because of the corrupt, exploitative, and oppressive nature of work and life in Packingtown. Finally Jurgis is left alone, stripped of all dignity. One evening, he wanders into a meeting hall to escape the cold, hears a speech on socialism, and becomes an ardent convert to that cause. The final section of the novel features arguments for socialism, in the form of speeches that Jurgis hears. The book ends with a socialist orator s impassioned appeal to Organize! Organize! Organize! so that Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS! Sinclair s work broke with the mold established by previous exposés in two ways. First, his was a work of fiction that followed one family over a period of years and, in the process, detailed unsanitary food preparation, exploitation of workers, sleazy real-estate practices, political corruption, and much more. Second, where many previous authors had suggested that the reform of the abuses they described could be accomplished by the election of honest men, Sinclair had a larger goal: the rejection of capitalism and the victory of socialism. He intended that his readers would recognize that the horrors portrayed in his book were the result of corporate greed and exploitation and that the meatpacking industry was but a microcosm of capitalism that the jungle was actually industrial capitalism. In the serialized version, he stated: the place which is here called The Jungle is not Packingtown, nor is it Chicago, nor is it Illinois, nor is it the United States it is Civilization. In late February 1905, the Appeal to Reason began to publish Sinclair s work as a serial, one chapter per week, and the paper s sales boomed to 175,000 per issue. Between April and October, the complete version also appeared in four installments in a small, socialist quarterly magazine called One-Hoss Philosophy. The novel drew praise from prominent Socialists, including the best-selling novelist Jack London. But Sinclair wanted his work to reach the widest possible audience. Just as Steffens s and Tarbell s works had appeared as books, so Sinclair intended his novel to be a book. He first approached

5 5 Macmillan, the publisher of his previous novel, a Civil War story called Manassas. Though initially interested, Macmillan eventually backed off. According to Sinclair, five other publishers did the same. As he went to publisher after publisher, he was also revising the version that had appeared in serial form, trimming it, removing duplicative material, modifying the final chapters, improving his use of Lithuanian phrases, and modifying material that might have invited a lawsuit for libel. Discouraged about finding a publisher, he finally asked the readers of the Appeal to Reason to contribute funds to enable him to publish it himself. Just as he was about to begin his self-publishing venture, he received an acceptance from Doubleday, Page and Company. Like other publishers, Doubleday had been concerned for the possibility of legal liability if the packing companies were to sue. Their offer to publish was contingent on their ability to verify the truth of Sinclair s descriptions of the packing plants. One of their editors went to Chicago and interviewed a former governmental meat inspector, who confirmed that Sinclair s version was not exaggerated. Not satisfied, the editor secured an inspector s badge and prowled through the vast packing plants. His conclusion: things were as bad as Sinclair had reported, maybe worse. The book was released on January 25, 1906, and created an international sensation, selling 25,000 copies in six weeks. It has never been out of print and was made into a movie in The stir created by The Jungle quickly reached all the way to the White House. The nation s leading political humorist, Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote in the character of a Chicago saloonkeeper named Mr. Dooley, imagined the reaction of President Theodore Roosevelt: Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an idly turnin over th pages iv th new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr m th table, an cryin : I m pizened, began throwin sausages out iv th window.... Since thin th Prisidint, like th rest iv us, has become a viggytaryan. In fact, Roosevelt behaved quite differently. His first reaction was to consult with the Agriculture Department, which reported that meatpacking was carefully inspected and meat was safe to eat. Roosevelt then wrote to Frank Doubleday, berating him for publishing such an obnoxious book. Doubleday replied that his company had confirmed Sinclair s descriptions. Roosevelt launched his own investigation, which confirmed, in Roosevelt s words, that the method of handling and preparing food products is uncleanly and dangerous to health, but he announced only that he had the report and did not release its contents. Congress at the time was considering a pure-food-and-drug bill, the result of a series of earlier exposés of patent medicines and impure foods as well as continued lobbying by Harvey Wiley of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Agriculture Department and pressure from such groups as the American Medical Association. Roosevelt himself, in his 1905 message to Congress, had recommended action on the subject. However, conservative opposition to any regulation combined with opposition from drug and food-processing

6 6 companies seemed likely to defeat the bill. The public outcry created by The Jungle changed the dynamic in Congress. The Senate approved the pure-food-and-drugs bill in late February by a vote of 63 to 4. However, the pure-food-and-drugs bill included no provision for meat inspection. Accordingly, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, a progressive Republican, proposed legislation requiring federal inspection of all meat that moved in interstate commerce and directing the Department of Agriculture to regulate conditions in the packinghouses. Beveridge described his bill as the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted. Roosevelt, still withholding his report, threatened to release it unless the Senate took action on Beveridge s bill. The Senate approved the bill. The meat packers now joined other food-processing companies in focusing on the House of Representatives, where both bills now lay. When powerful House members sought to dilute the Beveridge bill, Roosevelt released the report, which, he proclaimed, clearly demonstrated that conditions in the stockyards were revolting. The strategy did not work. Opposition continued. Finally a compromise emerged Beveridge s bill had provided that a fee would be assessed on every animal slaughtered, to pay for the inspection and regulation, but the compromise specified that the costs would be borne by the federal government; Beveridge had wanted a date to be stamped on all canned meat, but the compromise omitted any requirement for dating. Nonetheless, Beveridge and Roosevelt agreed that the compromise was better than no regulation at all. Roosevelt signed both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act into law on June 30, He described those two laws, together with a bill to regulate railroad rates, as marking a noteworthy advance in the policy of securing Federal supervision and control over corporations. Historians have agreed with Roosevelt s analysis, citing the three bills passed in 1906 as major early steps in the development of federal regulation of a wide range of economic activity. Though less than six months had passed from Doubleday s publication of The Jungle to the signing of the Meat Inspection Act, Sinclair was disappointed that his book had produced only a federal law regulating meatpackers and not a surge of popular support for socialism. I aimed at the public s heart, he famously observed, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. Though the book failed to create a surge of converts to socialism, it was very good for Upton Sinclair, who, at the age of twenty-eight, catapulted into international prominence. Sinclair s career as an author was both long and productive. By the time of his death in 1968, he had written more than ninety books, with translations into nearly fifty languages, and had won a Pulitzer Prize. He had dabbled in politics as a Socialist until 1934, when he changed his party registration and won the Democratic nomination for governor of California. His campaign was based on a program he called EPIC (End Poverty in California), but he lost when his Republican opponent mounted a highly sophisticated, media-based negative campaign that some scholars have seen as the origins of modern media-driven campaigns.

7 7 Theodore Roosevelt remained unhappy with the constant journalistic exposés. In the midst of the controversy over meatpacking, on April 14, 1906, he gave a speech that has become known as The Man with the Muck-Rake. In that speech, he discussed journalists who specialized in exposés: In Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake [manure rake] in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. In Pilgrim s Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Roosevelt intended his speech as a rebuke to those, as he said, who engaged in gross and reckless assaults on character, and not to those who engaged in the 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. However, it was the metaphor of the Man with the Muck-rake that captured public attention. Though Roosevelt intended his comparison as an insult, the title muckraker was taken up by many journalists as a badge of honor. The modern Food and Drug Administration dates to the regulatory functions assigned to the Bureau of Chemistry of the Agriculture Department by the Pure Food and Drug Act of In 1938, Congress significantly expanded the regulatory functions of the 1906 law and extended FDA s authority over processed foods. In 1990 Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required food products, including processed meat, to provide basic nutritional information. Today, though many manufacturers now include dates on their food products, there is still no agreed upon standard for the dating of food products. And today the media still carries occasional stories of contaminated food products, both meat and vegetables, that have caused sickness and even death, or of the discovery in the food chain of an animal infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad-cow disease. Robert W. Cherny is Professor of History at San Francisco State University. His books include California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression(2011) with co-editors Mary Ann Irwin and Ann Marie Wilson; American Labor and the Cold War: Unions, Politics, and Postwar Political Culture (2004) with co-editors William Issel and Keiran Taylor; and American Politics in the Gilded Age, (1997).

8 8 Laboratories of Democracy: Progressives in Government Reform governors from New York to Wisconsin and the Federal Government attack corruption, corporate greed, poor living and working conditions, alcohol, and women s suffrage in an attempt to make governments more responsive to the needs of the people. American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 Progressivism in the Cities and States (661) Podcast Notes: Reading Notes: Progressivism and the Wisconsin Idea by State Historical Society of Wisconsin

9 9 Progressivism and the Wisconsin Idea State Historical Society of Wisconsin In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Wisconsin leaders began to seek new answers to problems caused by an increasingly industrial and technological society. To a people born and raised mostly on farms, the explosive growth of cities, rising importance of large-scale industry, transformation of the workforce by new immigrants and rigid class stratification, and the overall speed of daily life brought uncertainty and confusion. In other states social movements such as the Greenback Party and Populist Party tried to address these changes, but little was accomplished in Wisconsin until after the year 1900 when "Progressives" gained control of the Republican Party. The Republicans were the party of Lincoln and the Union Army, and in the decades following the Civil War, they held a virtual monopoly on state government by organizing and satisfying the needs of Civil War veterans. Until the 1890s, a few party leaders tightly controlled Wisconsin's legislative agenda. At the same time, the rise of big business after 1870 had concentrated economic power in the hands of a few privileged individuals. These two groups, party leaders and business leaders, often overlapped, personally and pragmatically, as the interests and actions of government and business converged. Progressive Republicans, in contrast, believed that the business of government was to serve the people. They sought to restrict the power of corporations when it interfered with the needs of individual citizens. The Progressive Movement appealed to citizens who wanted honest government and moderate economic reforms that would expand democracy and improve public morality. In their crusade for reform on a state and national level, Progressive Republicans were led by Robert La Follette, Wisconsin's governor from 1901 to 1906, and U.S. Senator from 1906 to In Wisconsin, La Follette developed the techniques and ideas that made him a nationwide symbol of Progressive reform and made the state an emblem of progressive experimentation. The Wisconsin Idea, as it came to be called, was that efficient government required control of institutions by the voters rather than special interests, and that the involvement of specialists in law, economics, and social and natural sciences would produce the most effective government. Faculty from the University of Wisconsin, therefore, played a significant part in Progressive reform efforts, helping legislators draft laws and serving as experts on governmental commissions. While advocating for more scientific and efficient government, many of these specialists were equally persistent in their efforts to expand educational opportunities. University President Charles Van Hise, for example, sought to extend the services of the University throughout the state by means of a new Extension Division. The state's Legislative Reference Library, led by Charles McCarthy, was a similar product of the impulse toward educational opportunity and access. Created in 1901, the Legislative Reference Bureau (or LRB, as it came to be known) assisted legislators in their

10 10 search for facts on which to which to base improved laws. Providing legislators with fast service from trained research talent, McCarthy's LRB added a bill-drafting service in 1907 that was emulated in countries around the globe. Although he was widely associated with the Progressive Movement, by no means were all of Wisconsin's progressive achievements the work of La Follette himself. Wisconsin's Progressive movement began as a small faction within the Republican Party that grew in strength by drawing support from a variety of constituencies. There were even factions within factions, each with leaders who were influential in enlisting different groups of citizens to Progressive causes. The complex program associated with Wisconsin progressive reform therefore required the efforts and support of many politicians and interest groups. Germans and organized labor, who had not supported the Progressive movement in its early years, became important later as the composition of the movement changed. What did the Progressive Movement accomplish in Wisconsin? During James Davidson's terms as governor, from 1906 to 1911, considerable progressive legislation was enacted, including laws proving for state control of corporation stock issues, an extension of the power of the railroad commission to regulate transportation, a fixing of railroad fares, and stricter regulation of insurance companies. The most important and influential progressive legislation, however, was passed during the next (1911) session, under the governorship of Francis McGovern. The 1911 legislature created a model workers' compensation law to protect people injured on the job. It passed laws to regulate factory safety, encouraged the formation of cooperatives, established a state income tax, formed a state life insurance fund, limited working hours for women and children, and passed forest and waterpower conservation acts. While La Follette was the most powerful Progressive political leader in Wisconsin, he was never able to gain complete control over the state's Republican Party or even Wisconsin Progressives. The opening decades of the 20th century were a time of contentious political strife and debate, and not everyone agreed about the goals and strategies of the Progressive program. Progressivism appealed to voters who favored orderly change, rather than a fundamental shift in the economic and social order. Many of the reforms were moderate and thus acceptable to a large number of people who might not otherwise have supported the movement, such as businessmen. Other Wisconsin citizens viewed Progressive reforms as excessive state interference, while many others wanted more sweeping changes such as those advocated by the Socialist Party. By the 1930s, when depression and unemployment dominated American public life, the assumptions of the Wisconsin Progressives had penetrated deeply into national politics. Much of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation was drafted by Wisconsin citizens, such as Edwin Witte (author of the 1935 Social Security act), who had been trained by Progressive Wisconsin economics professor John R. Commons. In fact, the momentum of La Follette and his allies rippled down through the decades into John Kennedy's "New

11 11 Frontier" and Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programs. [Source: The History of Wisconsin vol. 4 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin); Kasparek, Jon, Bobbie Malone and Erica Schock. Wisconsin History Highlights: Delving into the Past (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2004); McCarthy, Charles. The Wisconsin Idea. Wisconsin Electronic Reader (online at

12 12 Women at War: Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era [ ] Revealing the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, women challenged welfare and labor legislation and the relationship between family and community and the ways in which African American, immigrant, and working-class women contributed to progressive reform in early twentiethcentury America; American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 pages Progressive Women ( ) Podcast Notes: Remembering The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (2:52) Reading Notes: Women and the Progressive Movement by Miriam Cohen

13 13 Women and the Progressive Movement by Miriam Cohen At the end of the nineteenth century, American politicians, journalists, professionals, and volunteers mobilized on behalf of reforms meant to deal with a variety of social problems associated with industrialization. Woman activists, mainly from middling and prosperous social backgrounds, emphasized the special contribution that women could make in tackling these problems. With issues of public health and safety, child labor, and women s work under dangerous conditions so prominent, who better than women to address them? Focusing on issues that appealed to women as wives and mothers, and promoting the notion that women were particularly good at addressing such concerns, the female activists practiced what women s historians call maternalist politics. By emphasizing traditional traits, female social reformers between 1890 and World War I created new spaces for themselves in local and then national government even before they had the right to vote. They carved out new opportunities for paid labor in professions like social work and public health. Maternalists also stressed the special needs of poor women and children in order to build support for America s early welfare state.[1] Regardless of sex, activists did not always value the same reforms, nor did they always agree on the nature of the problems, but as part of the progressive movement, their concerns shared some basic characteristics. Historian Daniel Rodgers argues that progressives drew on three distinct clusters of ideas. One was the deep distrust of growing corporate monopoly, the second involved the increasing conviction that in order to progress as a society, the commitment to individualism had to be tempered with an appreciation of our social bonds. Progressives also believed that modern techniques of social planning and efficiency would offer solutions to the social problems at hand. Their ideas did not add up to a coherent ideology, but, as Rodgers notes, they tended to focus discontent on unregulated individual power. [2] As the nineteenth century closed, periodic economic downturns served as wake-up calls to the dangers of relying solely on the workings of the free market to ensure the general prosperity. Concerns about social problems were not new for women. Since the antebellum era, middle-class white and black women engaged in various forms of civic activity related to the social and moral welfare of those less fortunate. Temperance, abolition, and moral reform activities dominated women s politics before the Civil War. By the 1870s, women were broadening their influence, working in national organizations such as the Woman s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Young Women s Christian Association (YWCA), which helped single women in America s cities. During the Progressive era, a moral-reform agenda motivated many women; such organizations as the WCTU, for example, intensified their activities on behalf of a national ban on alcohol and against prostitution. But it was after 1890 that the issues surrounding social welfare took on their greatest

14 14 urgency. The Panic of 1893, along with the increasing concerns about industrialization the growing slums across American cities, the influx of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the increase in labor strife contributed to that sense of urgency. Within a decade, vast networks of middle-class and wealthy women were energetically addressing how these social programs affected women and children. Encouraged by the national General Federation of Women s Clubs (GFWC), local women s clubs turned to learning about and then addressing the crises of the urbanizing society. Excluded by the GFWC, hundreds of African American women s clubs affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) focused on family welfare among black Americans who were dealing with both poverty and racism. The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), dominated by prosperous German-Jewish women, sprang into action in the 1890s as well, to work with the newly arrived eastern European Jewish community. The National Congress of Mothers (later the Parent Teacher Association) emerged in 1897 to address the needs of the American family and the mother s crucial role in fulfilling those needs. Activist women throughout the country, from Boston in the East, to Seattle in the West, and Memphis in the South, focused on improving public schools, especially in poor neighborhoods.[3] Responding to the problems associated with urban industrial life, American woman reformers looked to their counterparts in Europe who were struggling with similar issues. One such initiative, which caught on with American women who visited England in the 1880s, was Toynbee Hall, a settlement house located in London s poverty-stricken East End. The efforts of the men at Toynbee to reach across the class divide inspired Jane Addams, who founded Chicago s Hull House in 1889, as well as a group of Smith College graduates who founded the College Settlement House in New York around the same time.[4] The settlement house movement soon took hold throughout the country. Located in urban, poor, often immigrant communities, the houses were residences for young middle-class and prosperous women, and some men, who wished not merely to minister to the poor and then go home, but to live among them, to be their neighbors, to participate with them in bettering their communities. Their poorer neighbors did not live in the settlement houses but spent time there, participating in various clubs and classes, including kindergarten and day nurseries for children. Settlement houses also sent volunteers out into the community. Truly pioneers in the area of public health, their visiting nurses taught hygiene and health care to poor immigrant households. Settlement house workers and other woman reformers also campaigned for public milk stations in an effort to reduce infant mortality.

15 15 Most settlement houses identified themselves with Protestant Christianity, and indeed, in response, Catholic and Jewish activists founded their own institutions. However, both Lillian Wald, head of the famous Henry Street Settlement in New York, and Addams, among others, ran secular institutions. Taking up residence in settlement houses attracted women who wished to carve out non-traditional lifestyles, where they could be among their close companions and devote themselves to what they saw as meaningful lives. By the mid-1890s, the core community of Hull House consisted of Jane Addams, the most celebrated female social reformer of her day; Florence Kelley, Illinois s first State Factory Investigator, who would later move to New York to become the head of the National Consumers League (NCL); Dr. Alice Hamilton, America s founder of industrial medicine; and Julia Lathrop, a pioneer in the field of child welfare who was to become the first woman to head a federal agency when she became director of the newly founded US Children s Bureau in Historian Kathryn Sklar writes of the Hull House community that the women found what others could not provide for them, dear friendship, livelihood, contact with the real world, and a chance to change it. [5] Only a small group of women actually took up residence at the settlement house, but many women in cities and towns throughout the country worked as volunteers for these establishments, including the young Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked at the Riverside Settlement in New York City before her marriage to Franklin. Beyond the settlement houses, women worked hard on a variety of social initiatives. One of the most important involved efforts to improve working conditions in America s factories, particularly in those trades, such as garments and textiles, that employed so much immigrant labor at low wages. The National Consumers League and the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), both dominated by women, launched campaigns across the country, calling on state governments to institute protective labor laws that would end very long work hours for women and the labor of children and young adolescents. They also demanded that state government provide factory inspectors to see that the new laws were enforced. Some progressive women believed that rather than campaigning on behalf of poor women, they could best offer help by encouraging the efforts of working women to empower themselves through collective bargaining. Unionizing women was an especially difficult challenge because the larger society viewed them as marginal workers, rather than critical breadwinners who needed to support themselves or help support their families. The National Women s Trade Union League (WTUL), with branches in a number of cities, was an organization of wealthy and working-class women who came together to aid the efforts of women who were already working with their male co-workers in the garment and textile unions.

16 16 While many did philanthropic work on behalf of poor families, in this new era women also called for state participation in granting financial relief to the needy. To help one group of poor families single mothers forced to raise children without male incomes they campaigned on behalf of state aid to widowed mothers. Given the high male mortality due to work accidents and poor job conditions, the growing numbers of young, very poor widowed mothers was a major social problem. By the early twentieth century, many family welfare experts were convinced that if at all possible, poor children of widowed mothers should be kept at home, rather than placed in orphanages, which had been the custom in the nineteenth century. In the second decade of the twentieth century, mothers pension leagues campaigning across the country were remarkably successful. By 1920, the vast majority of states had enacted some sort of mothers pension program. These state-funded initiatives were the precursors to the Aid to Dependent Children Program, which became federal law during the New Deal as part of the Social Security Act. Mothers pension campaigns exemplify how advocates for expanding social welfare appealed to the maternalist sensibilities of middle-class audiences. In writing in 1916 about the activities of their Propaganda Committee, Sophia Loeb of the Allegheny County Mothers Pension League, campaigning for mothers pensions in the Greater Pittsburgh area, reported on the first-ever public celebration of Mother s Day in the United States, noting that the gathering of 1,100 was unique in the fact that not only was tribute paid to Motherhood in speech and flower, but Mother was honored in a more practical way by trying to assist the mothers less fortunate, in their struggle to help her children under her own roof. [6] Reforming the juvenile justice system was another way to limit the institutionalization of poor children. Prior to the Progressive era, children arrested for a whole host of crimes, including truancy and shoplifting, could end up tried as adults and placed in adult jails. Yet, increasingly, middle-class and prosperous Americans were adopting the view that children, including poor children, should be viewed not as miniature adults, but as human beings who needed proper teaching and nurturing in order to grow into responsible adults; such nurturing would preferably be done by parents, not outside institutions. In 1899, Hull House reformers such as Julia Lathrop and Louise DeKoven Bowen persuaded Illinois lawmakers to institute the first juvenile court; unlike the adult courts, it could exercise greater flexibility in sentencing and it could concentrate on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Soon after, such courts were instituted in cities across the United States.[7] Whether campaigning for mothers pensions, protective labor legislation, public health programs, or the establishment of the juvenile justice system, progressive maternalists stressed that these initiatives would help women become better mothers. They advocated specific programs because of their traditional convictions regarding gender roles and family life, with men as successful breadwinners and women proper domestic caretakers, but their approach was also strategic. Women knew that their participation in the political arena flew in the face of conventional norms; concentrating on issues

17 17 already associated with women s traditional roles lessened the impact of their challenge. Some woman activists, however, did challenge aspects of traditional gender norms. The writer and renowned lecturer Charlotte Perkins Gilman also believed in women s special attributes, but she questioned the very organization of society based on the private household, arguing that both housekeeping and childcare could be done better in collective settings, which would free women to pursue other occupations. Other activists, unlike the social progressives, promoted a new embrace of women s sexuality, some advocating free love. Margaret Sanger campaigned for access to safe, inexpensive contraception in order that women could assert more control over their health and the way they chose to mother. Because Gilman, Sanger, and the free-love advocates promoted women s autonomy, we often associate them with the emerging feminist movement that was to become so important later in the twentieth century. But scholars have recently argued that the progressive social reformers can also be named feminists, specifically social feminists, because they were committed to increasing women s social and political rights even as they used arguments about women s special needs and attributes to achieve their goals. Thus, the progressive women promoted women s suffrage; many worked vigorously on behalf of the cause and belonged to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the dominant pro-suffrage organization of the day. In arguing for women s suffrage in the Ladies Home Journal in 1910, Jane Addams appealed to her middle-class readers by pointing out that women in modern society no longer performed the functions of producing for their families all the goods that they would consume at home; if they cared about the health and safety of their own families the food they ate, the water they drank, the diseases they might catch they ought to care about the conditions all around them, and they ought to want the ability to vote on these public concerns.[8] Moreover, social feminists did not always emphasize women s special role as mothers when arguing on behalf of the vote. As pragmatic activists, they adopted more than one strategy to achieve reforms. Like men, their politics were multifaceted and were shaped by a variety of concerns. To achieve their ends, they worked with various reform coalitions and they often tailored their rhetoric to strengthen those coalitions. And though they believed that women had a special affinity for social welfare work, progressive women did not rely on the notion that women had a natural sympathy for the poor. Tackling the social problems of the day, they believed, required hardheaded research. A colony of efficient and intelligent women, Florence Kelley wrote of her colleagues at Hull House in 1892.[9] Three years later, the women of Hull House published the famous detailed survey of social conditions in Chicago, Hull House Maps and Papers, now considered a major work in the early history of American social science. Women conducted detailed social investigations as part of their campaigns on behalf of

18 18 protective labor legislation. And at the Children s Bureau, Lathrop campaigned on behalf of public health initiatives for infant and maternal care and against child labor by first launching major investigations of the conditions that she wanted government to address. A conviction that knowledge about social conditions would lead to social change, implemented through modern scientific methods, was a hallmark of progressive social reformers, both male and female, but for woman researchers, the determination to study social problems opened up new opportunities to forge a place in the emerging social sciences. Women often founded and developed the first graduate schools of social work. In turn, the professionalization of social work provided women with a number of professional opportunities, not only as teachers in graduate training programs. As the new fields of child and family welfare were taken up by local, state, and ultimately, the national government, social feminists argued successfully that women ought to perform these jobs. In 1919, the Children s Bureau under Lathrop employed 150 women and only 19 men.[10] Women also took jobs in the US Women s Bureau, founded in the aftermath of World War I to attend to the needs of working women. In 1914, Congress funded educational extension programs in rural areas, which included home economics. Working for the United States Department of Agriculture as home economists, women provided information on new household technologies and worked to spread the new home economics education out to the countryside.[11] In rendering professional advice to poor mothers, advocating the use of modern housekeeping and nutritional and medical practices, and promoting the supervision of families in the juvenile court, the progressive women surely exhibited class biases. Progressive reformers were often too sure they knew what was best for the poor. But more so than most reformers of the day, women like Lathrop, Kelley, and Adams had an appreciation for the real problems faced by the poor; Lathrop, specifically, had a special respect for the hard work of mothers, especially poor mothers. Convinced that poverty and inadequate services, not character defects, were responsible for disease, malnutrition, delinquency, and premature death among poor families, Lathrop and her staff at the Children s Bureau worked tirelessly to prove it to others. The genuine efforts of social feminists to reach across class lines were born of their belief that shared experiences among women, and shared ideals, could erase class differences. Yet immigrant women, living with families that were often struggling just to make ends meet, often had priorities that differed from the more prosperous women seeking to help them. As a labor activist from the working class, Leonora O Reilly worked with elite women in a variety of reform organizations, formed close friendships with wealthy women, and was a founder of the New York WTUL, yet at various times she complained about upper-class condescension.[12] The class divide existed among women within minority groups as well. Newly arrived Russian Jewish women often resented what they perceived to be condescension on the part of the women of the NCJW, even though the wealthier women did provide critical help for immigrants. Similarly, the commitment to uplift on the part of black women in the NACW meant providing essential social services

19 19 to their poorer sisters, but the more prosperous women often had difficulty understanding and appreciating some of the concerns of poorer women. If class prevented women from uniting, reaching across racial lines was even more problematic. While white women could be patronizing when it came to immigrants, their attitude toward African American mothers could be even more troubling, and steeped in assumptions about the superiority of all European cultures. Many progressive women assumed that European immigrants could learn modern values regarding good mothers, but most believed black Americans could not. Since settlement houses were largely segregated, black women could not and did not rely on white settlement houses, founding their own, such as the Frederick Douglass Center in Chicago, developed by the activists Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fannie Williams, and white reformer Celia Parker Woolley. In 1897, Victoria Earl Matthews established New York City s White Rose Mission, the first black settlement run exclusively by African Americans.[13] Black women, like their white counterparts, also pushed women s suffrage, only to find that the suffrage organizations such as NAWSA were at best indifferent regarding the issue of black access to suffrage and at worst, hostile. Most white reformers were limited by the prejudices of their day, but some of the most prominent stood out for their broader vision of equal rights. Florence Kelley and Jane Addams were strong supporters of African American suffrage; although they both had been active members of NAWSA, they publicly protested the organization s endorsement of a states rights position on the question of whether or not black Americans should be given equal access to the ballot box. Kelley, Adams, and Lathrop were early and active members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The decade that followed World War I saw the demobilization of most progressive initiatives. Efforts to enhance government responsibility for social welfare took a back seat to nativist campaigns and moves to decrease the power of trade unions while increasing the ability of American corporations to operate unimpeded by government regulations. By the middle of the 1920s most of the progressive women s organizations and their members were facing well-publicized accusations that they were part of a vast radical conspiracy that was determined to bring a communist government to the United States, just as the Bolsheviks had recently done in Russia. Yet the achievements of the earlier decades had long-term effects that outlasted the postwar backlash. A younger generation of women remained employed in government agencies such as the Children s Bureau and the Women s Bureau. In 1933, three years into America s greatest economic depression, the issues of social welfare moved front and center on the national agenda. When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency that March, progressive women who had actively supported his candidacy and worked hard to get out the vote were in a position to demand they be given even greater roles in the federal government. The appointment of Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, the first woman to head a federal cabinet department, was evidence of their political power.

20 20 A former head of the New York Consumers League, former industrial commissioner for New York State, and former state labor commissioner for New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt, Perkins, and the progressive women around her and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, would now work successfully to implement national legislation on child labor, income supports for needy Americans, and a whole host of issues that had long been at the heart of their political agenda. Miriam Cohen is the Evalyn Clark Professor of History at Vassar and author of Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City (1993). She is the author of numerous articles on the history of American social welfare and is currently working on a biography of Julia Lathrop, forthcoming from Westview Press.

21 21 Theodore Roosevelt's Bully Pulpit During a tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air, Theodore Roosevelt pushes the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 pages TR s Square Deal for Labor ( ) TR Corrals the Corporations ( ) Caring for the Consumer ( ) Earth Control ( ) Podcast Notes: NPR Teddy Roosevelt's 'Bully Pulpit' Isn't The Platform It Once Was (7:14)

22 22 William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative President Taft's vision of a vigorous federal role in promoting the public interest inspired his progressive policies on tariff reform, conservation of natural resources, labor, federal administration, and antitrust enforcement proving to be much more than a mere interlude between the progressive presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson American Pageant Notes: Chapter #28 pages Taft: A Round Peg in Square Hole (675) The Dollar Goes Abroad as a Diplomat ( ) Taft the Trustbuster (676) Podcast Notes: Reading: William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative by Jonathan Lurie

23 23 William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative by Jonathan Lurie William Howard Taft, the only American to serve in the highest office in the executive branch and the highest in the federal judiciary, had a career as remarkable as it is neglected. After getting his start in Republican machine politics as a federal collector of revenue "[l]ike every well-trained Ohio man, I always had my plate the right side up when offices were falling" he spent the rest of his life in one eminent public office after another. He was an assistant prosecutor in Ohio, Ohio Superior Court Judge, Solicitor General of the United States, U.S. Judge for the Sixth Circuit, president of the Philippine Commission under William McKinley, first U.S. civil governor of the Philippines, secretary of war, president of the United States, co-chairman of the National War Labor Board during World War I, and, finally, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the eight years between leaving the White House and his confirmation to the Supreme Court, he was a professor at Yale Law School and president of the American Bar Association. Despite this extraordinary résumé, Taft has received scant scholarly attention since his death in 1930, less than five weeks after retiring from the Court. Besides Lewis Gould's recent The William Howard Taft Presidency (2009; which replaced Paolo E. Coletta's The Presidency of William Howard Taft [1973] in the American Presidents series published by Times Books), there are only two other treatments of his term as chief executive: Donald Anderson's 1973 William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency, and Henry Pringle's 1939 biography, the only comprehensive treatment of Taft's life and political work. Alpheus Mason's 1964 book, William Howard Taft: Chief Justice, is the only thorough account of Taft's tenure on the Supreme Court. His jurisprudence has received scattered attention in the law reviews, much of it by Yale Law School Dean Robert Post (from whom a book on the subject is supposed to be forthcoming). The exception to this trend has been the plentiful work on Taft's administrative reforms of the Supreme Court. Our modern federal judiciary centrally organized from the Chief Justice down to the Circuit and District Courts, with nearly plenary discretion over the cases it hears, even the marble temple that houses the Supreme Court is substantially the result of Taft's institutional vision and lobbying efforts as Chief. Jonathan Lurie's new book, William Howard Taft: The Travails of a Progressive Conservative, is a welcome addition to the long-overdue reevaluation of this remarkable political life. Lurie, an accomplished legal and constitutional historian, takes as his starting point a 1916 letter in which "Taft described himself as a believer in progressive conservatism.'" Because of Taft's reputation as an unremarkable politician of the conservative and traditionalist Right, Lurie found this self-characterization fascinating, and his book is an attempt to investigate what Taft may have meant by it. Lurie surveys Taft's life from childhood through his appointment by Warren G. Harding to the Supreme Court in 1921, with particular focus on the personal and political falling-out with Theodore Roosevelt during the latter half of Taft's presidency.