Solved by verified expert:Please read the textbook about Chapter 18&19, then choose the best answer to match the question.1.Maternalist reforms and Louis Brandeis’s arguments on behalf of women in Muller v. Oregon illustrated what attitude among progressive reformers?They illustrated a strong sense among progressive reformers that women needed to embrace their traditional roles as wives and mothersThey illustrated the fact that most progressive reformers believed in equal treatment of men and women in the workplaceThey illustrated the progressive belief that all women should seek higher education in order to join the middle classThey illustrated an ambiguity among progressives, who wanted to empower and protect women at different times2.One of the great accomplishments of the progressive movement under President Woodrow Wilson that fulfilled a demand of the Populists from the 1890s wasThe creation of a federal old age pension systemThe abolishment of all protective tariffsThe nationalization of the railroadsThe creation of a federal agency to regulate monetary policy and control the banking system3.Which of the following was one of President Woodrow Wilson’s major justifications for U.S. entry into the First World War:Austria’s brutal warfare against RussiaGermany’s submarine warfare on the AtlanticThe devastating air attacks Germany launched against BritainThe horrifying impact of the British sea blockade on Germany4.The Fourteen Points, President Wilson’s vision for peace after the First World War, included:A program to liberate all colonized countries from foreign domination with financial compensationA world organization that would prevent wars in the futureA set of secret treaties between the western allies that would prepare them for future wars in advanceThe development of new weapons that would make America invulnerable to future attacks5.The Espionage Act of 1917Allowed the government to censor the press during wartimeCreated internment camps for all German Americans for the duration of the First World WarMade it a crime to make statements that could be interpreted as interfering with the war effortMade espionage a crime punishable by death during wartime6.When African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North during the First World War they encounteredA more tolerant atmosphere and equal access to industrial jobsDiscrimination and sometimes outbreaks of mass violence against themDiscrimination from employers on the one hand, but solidarity from labor unions on the other handUnequal pay and suspicion from many whites, but no segregation in housing or other overt discrimination
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Chapter18
I
t was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fire broke out at the Triangle
Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building in
the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly
young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’
blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the
blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owner’s way, it was
later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire
department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only
to the sixth floor. Onlookers watched in horror as girls leaped from the upper stories. By
the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found
inside the building.
The Triangle fire was not the worst fire disaster in American history (seven years earlier,
over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York
Harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. In its wake, efforts to
organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory
inspec- tion laws and fire safety codes.
Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during
the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era.
These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought
an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded
rapidly—by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in
rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban
landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in
combating social inequality.
The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a
broad, loosely defined political movement of indi- viduals and groups who hoped to bring
about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included
forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in
economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers.
Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations
who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who
believed that aca- demic research would help to solve social problems, and members of
an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big
business.
FOCUS QUESTIONS
Why was the city such a central element in Progres- sive America?
How did the labor and women’s movements expand the meanings of American freedom?
In what ways did Progres- sivism include both demo- cratic and antidemocratic impulses?
How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
544 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reform- ers addressed issues
of American freedom in varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the expansion of
political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman
suffrage, the use of politi- cal power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve
democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary
citizens more influence on legislation. It witnessed the flowering of understandings of
freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination. At the same
time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those
deemed fit to exer- cise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the
1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born
Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully
“Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political
decision making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate.
Even as the idea of freedom expanded, freedom’s boundaries contracted in Progressive
America.
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER
SOCIETY
Farms and Cities
The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing
industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the continued expansion of the
consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total
output rose by about 85 per- cent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities
grew together. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million
claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than
in the previous forty years combined. Irrigation trans- formed the Imperial Valley of
California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming.
But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new massconsumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population
exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them
Economic growth
Growth of the cities
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 545
New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhattan Island
were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty-three of the states.
The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant
families in New York’s down- town tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets.
Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row.
According to one esti- mate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled
40 percent of all financial and industrial capital in the United States.
TABLE 18.1 Rise of the City, 1880–
1920
POPULATION YEAR (PERCENTAGE)
1880 20% 1890 28 1900 38 1910 50 1920 68
WITH 100,000+ POPULATION
12 15 18 21 26
URBAN NUMBER OF CITIES
The Muckrakers
Lewis Hine used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers such as this young spinner in a southern
cotton factory.
Some observers saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional
American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen
worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent
social inequality. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national
magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities (1904) by
Lincoln Steffens showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political
corruption. Theodore Roosevelt disparaged such writing as “muckraking,” the use of
journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.
Major novelists took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Perhaps the era’s most
influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose description of
unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led
directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of
1906.
Immigration as a Global Process
If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cities, it was their immigrant character.
The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had
begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and
the outbreak of World
546 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 million immigrants came to the United States, the
majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era
immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by
industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture.
During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be
virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War I and then by legislation), perhaps 40
million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the
Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Millions
of persons migrated to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, mainly from India and
China.
Numerous causes inspired this massive uprooting of population. Rural southern and
eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and
illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Political turmoil at home, like
the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration.
Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in
New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing
immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to immigrants who passed
through Ellis Island.
At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the
West. After the exclusion of immi- grants from China in the late nineteenth century,
approximately 72,000 Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in
California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. Between 1910
and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as
the main entry point for immigrants from Asia. Far larger was Mexican immigration.
Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that
country’s popula- tion) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few
European countries.
By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest
percentage in the country’s history.
Worldwide migration
Causes of emigration
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 547
The Immigrant Quest for Freedom
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the
United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law,
could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated
from the oppressive social hierarchies of their homelands. “America is a free country,”
one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent
abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale
immigration reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom and
prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Although some of the new
immigrants, espe- cially Jews fleeing religious persecution in the Russian empire, thought
of themselves as permanent emigrants,
the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land.
Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only
temporarily in the United States.
The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops,
theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues.
Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impoverished regions
from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working
conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European
immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, whereas native-born workers dominated
skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly
paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic
mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”
Consumer Freedom
Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new
meaning to American freedom. During the Progressive era, large downtown department
stores, neighborhood chain stores, and retail mail-order houses made available to
consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s
factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sew- ing
machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players.
The rise of mass consumption
548 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consump- tion. Amusement
parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. By 1910, 25
million Americans per week, mostly working- class urban residents, were attending
“nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower
than that of vaudeville shows.
The Working Woman
The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places
of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles
were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fire revealed, more
and more women were working for wages. Immigrant women were largely confined to
low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs
available expanded enormously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were
office workers or telephone operators. Female work was no longer con- fined to young,
unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working
for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands. The working
woman—immigrant and native, working- class and professional—became a symbol of
female emancipation. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive
statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New
York.
The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remark- ably similar battles
within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously
“free” children, especially daughters.
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 549
Contemporaries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of
fashion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on
clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who
tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as
old-fashioned and not sufficiently “American.”
The Rise of Fordism
If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed
the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary
Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small
automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he
introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to
navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads.
Park, Michigan, adopted the
In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland
method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were
brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to
expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised
wages at his factory to the unheard-of level of five dollars per day (more than double the
pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers.
When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages,
Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American
factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000
Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916.
The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called
Fordism.
The Promise of Abundance
As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equip- ment, etc.) to
consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often
by linking goods with the idea of freedom.
550 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of
Liberty as a sales device. Economic abun- dance would eventually come to define the
“American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods.
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living wage” and
an “American standard of liv- ing”—that offered a new language for criti- cizing the
inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s
influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that
enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute”
right of citizenship. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s
powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic
life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and
repudiated competitive individu- alism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good
society. For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a
central place in descriptions of American society and its future.
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM
The immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize indus- trial capitalism
and find common ground in a society still racked by labor conflict and experiencing
massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive
marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large
corpo- ration and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentra- tion of
wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the
economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded
self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused with
new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth
century.
An advertisement for Palmolive soap illustrates how companies marketed goods to consumers by creating anxiety
and invoking exotic images. The accompanying text promises
“a perfect skin” and includes an imagined image of Cleopatra, claiming that the soap embodies “ancient beauty
arts.” By 1915, Palmolive was the best-selling soap in the world.
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 551
Industrial Freedom
In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most
poorly paid factory workers but from better-off employees as well. Large firms in the
automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over
the work process. Efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called
“scientific management.” Through scientific study, Taylor believed, the “one best way”
of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to
obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw
the erosion of their traditional influence over the work process as a loss of freedom.
These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial
democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center
of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was
widely believed to lie at the root of the much-discussed “labor problem.” Many
Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering
workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis,
an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the
Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essen- tial principle of
freedom—the right of …
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