US History since 1877
By:
James Ross-Nazzal
US History since 1877
By:
James Ross-Nazzal
Online:
CONNEXIONS
Rice University, Houston, Texas
©2008 James Ross-Nazzal
This selection and arrangement of content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Table of Contents
1 Progressive Era (Part I)..................................................................... 1
2 The Progressive Era (Part II) ............................................................. 15
3 The Great War (Part I)....................................................................25
4 Great War (Part II)........................................................................2 7
Index ......................................................................................... 39
Attributions ..................................................................................40
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Chapter 1
Progressive Era (Part 1)1
Dakota Territory was booming in 1881 when John Henry and Emma Smith DeVoe moved from their home
in Washington, Illinois, in large measure due to the extension of the railroad. The railroad brought settlers,
many of whom were Civil War veterans, widows, or orphans, to the region to make their fortunes in gold,
while others came on the promise of free, fertile land in central Dakota. The DeVoes came because John
Henry had accepted a position with the railroad.
The young couple settled in the newly established town of Huron. Gambling dens and saloons thrived in
the town, and men frequently discharged their weapons in the city limits and engaged in drunken scuffles.
Women filed complaints against men who had seduced them with promises of marriage, but then-after illicit
love affairs-refused to marry them. Houses of prostitution openly operated on the main thoroughfares, which
were nothing but wide dirt paths dotted with animal waste and human refuse.
Given their interest in prohibition as well as their affiliation with the Baptists, ties between the Dakota
Baptist Convention and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were solid, and so over the
next few years, the DeVoes served as Christian soldiers working to create a city dedicated to the social
mores they subscribed to: prohibition and the elimination of gambling halls, saloons, and brothels in town.
Troubled by the lack of morals in their new community, Emma and John Henry helped to establish many of
Huron's voluntary groups, including Huron's literary association. Volunteerism was all the rage out West in
the decades following the Civil War.
Likeminded reformers joined the organization such as Edwin G. Wheeler, the owner of a drug store and
deacon of the First Baptist Church. They and other Huronites established the association for the purpose of
keeping "young people away from the haunts whose influence destroys mind, body, and soul," in other words
working class forms of leisure-bars, billiard rooms, and gambling dens. The Dakota Huronite, whose
editors supported prohibition, praised the organizations for their efforts saying, "It will at least remove the
excuse of those who spend their time in places of ill repute, that there is no place else to go."
These Gilded Age moral reform efforts, although more aligned in philosophy with American reform
movements of the early nineteenth century, opened the door and paved the way for Emma to become
involved with other, broader political campaigns in Dakota Territory and eventually as a major organizer
for the National American Woman's Suffrage Association and a central figure in western states passing
legislation that allowed women the right to vote. The story of the DeVoes demonstrates a turning point
in U.S history when Americans' focus on moral reform takes a new approach and a new focus that we call
today Progressivism.
No time period in American history is possibly as misunderstood, convoluted, and nebulous, yet important
to clearly understand to better appreciate the economic, political, and social liberties of American society in
the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the Progressive Era. Neither a national movement, nor
a singular ideology, or a coherent time frame, the Progressive Era usually falls under the umbrellic Gilded
Age at its earliest roots by the rise of agrarian reform measures in the 1870s and, at its demise, the end of
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CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
the Woodrow Wilson administration shortly after "the war to make the world safe for democracy." Yet the
Progressive seeds will bloom in the 1940s and again in the 1960s under the presidencies of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
As with other "modern" periods, ages, or times, the Progressive Era traces its roots back to the rough
and tumble alleys of thoroughfares of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York where, before the Civil War,
burgeoning American factories and ever-increasing immigration created an entrenched working class and a
major gang problem (especially in New York). In the first half of the nineteenth century, morally-charged,
upper class women silently protested in front of saloons or created urban political parties with the hopes
of codifying what they considered anti-social behaviors (not unlike the efforts of the DeVoes in the 1880s).
They demanded changes to public and private morality that tended to smack more of social control and
less of progressive assistance to the newly arrived immigrants. Nonetheless, what makes the Progressive Era
different from previous periods of U.S. history where moral reformers demanded changes to public behavior,
was the inherent belief in the use of evangelism, education, and native-born American political, economic,
and social ideals to both identify problems as well as to divine solutions. In a word, while earlier reformers
used the rod of morality to control behavior, Progressive reformers used academia and their belief in the
inherent superiority of American strategies as the fulcrum from which all meaningful change will turn.
Progressive reformers also tended to see the United States on an evolutionary path. Charles Darwin's
ideas on biological change over time began to be applied to society. Known as Social Darwinism, learned
Americans tried to figure out why some people failed in life while others succeeded. Why were some poor
while others rich? Why were some sickly while others healthy? What caused sin, vice, and malfeasance? The
answer was evolution: some groups of people were more evolved than others. The highest stage of evolution
on a nation scale was the United States: American religious ideas, American economic theory, American
political theory, and American culture were all evolved beyond those of European, African, Asian, and Latin
American politics, cultures, religions, and societies.
In the late nineteenth century, some Americans will conclude that Americans had a special, God-given
mission to spread American social, political, economic, and religious ideas to those who were not as advanced,
even in the face of physical hardship. This became known as the "White Man's Burden," from a poem written
by an English proponent of the duty of civilized peoples to help those who are less civilized.
An example of American display in this belief that nations evolve was evidenced in a major theme of the
1904 World's Fair in St. Louis: classification. William McGee, one of the directors of the fair, created an
exhibit that was a literal walk through national evolution. Beginning with the most uncivilized society, as
McGee defined "civilization," and ending at the most advanced of societies (spoiler alert - the U.S.), McGee
strove "to represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to
civic organization, from egoism to altruism."
The tour began with a walk through the Igorot Village. The Igorots were scantly clad peoples living in the
Philippines who were head hunters and ate dogs. Fair directors supplied dogs to the people, although there
were rumors that the Igorot snuck off the fair grounds and procured dogs from the near-by neighborhoods.
Then came European civilization but the most highly advanced, evolved, and perfected society was the
United States, which was the last stop of the exhibit. The exhibit also included a few freshly painted, steel
battleships that were moored in an artificial lake created specifically to demonstrate the new American naval
power initially proposed by Teddy Roosevelt when he worked in the Department of the Navy. The Igorot,
American Indians, Africans, and other peoples were hired to live, work, and be on display throughout the
fair's run. This exhibit was a physical example of the "truth" that societies evolve-maybe not progressive
as we use the word today but certainly progressive for the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
Americans.
What did it mean to be a "Progressive"?
The Progressives shared some common traits. First, they tended to have Evangelical backgrounds or
experiences. Following the Civil War there developed a swell among Protestants that they were the true
leaders of this country (politically, socially, and economically) and thus only they could speak in the best
interests of this country, as they professed those best interests to be. This idea led to action, specifically
young men (and sometimes women) being sent out around the country and around the world to spread
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American ideas on politics, society, and the economy through what they believed to be the driving force
behind the success of the United States, which of course was Protestantism. Unlike pre-Civil War forms of
evangelism that focused on traditional religious preaching (Mark 16:15 "Go ye into all into the world, and
preach the gospel to every creature"), Progressive Era evangelism included political, social, and economic
evangelism.
Many Progressive reforms had backgrounds in religious evangelicalism. Today, many American religious
groups send out their own to profess their particular versions of "Truth" with the hopes of converting others
to their belief system. Mormons might spend two years evangelizing, so too do Jehovah Witnesses knock
of their neighbors' doors. Some evangelize through the media, such as Rick Warren and his wildly popular
book The Purpose Driven Life. Possibly this nation's most-known evangelical preacher is Billy Graham.
Domestic and foreign missionaries published magazines, such as The Heathen Women's Friend; they
established offices throughout the American West, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and Latin America. And,
even claimed the United States on behalf of God such as William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army)
when in the early spring of 1880 Booth established a missionary outpost in New York where his followers
began preaching to the homeless of the largest city in this country. Evangeline Booth, a daughter of the
founder, became an American citizen and led the Salvation Army in the United States for three decades
(1904-1934). The Salvation Army had the twin tenets of religious salvation through Jesus Christ with a
combination of Methodism and a whiff of millennialism and social salvation in which the group tried to
rid the world of poverty. It is the second of these goals that this English organization will affect American
Progressive reformers and ideas, such as Jane Addams and the Settlement House Movement (see below).
Interestingly enough, the rise of evangelism paralleled the dramatic increase in the number of Roman
Catholics in this country. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Roman Catholics doubled
in numbers causing more than mere concern among the native-born Protestants. Some of this nation's
most popular evangelicals included Dwight Moody who preached an exceptionally pessimistic view of human
history and Washington Gladden who, out of step with most Americans in the late nineteenth century, called
for the federal government to take an increasingly active role in protecting unions and the working class.
A second trait common among those who hoisted the Progressive banner was a grounding in social sci-
ences. Before the Civil War, academic pursuits were exceptionally limited in both the numbers of Americans
who could afford to attend colleges as well as the curriculum offered at those institutions. Many universi-
ties offered students what they considered to be a well-rounded education grounded in the classics such as
Latin, Ancient history, and Renaissance art. After the Civil War, more universities began allowing women
to attend and so too did their curricula change to include classes in "new" disciplines such as anthropology,
political science, sociology, psychology. The need for people with educational backgrounds in engineering
became evident as this nation's railroad system spread further west and connected more communities than
ever before. As more family-owned, mom-and-pop shops or general stores became gobbled up by national
corporations such as the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), International Business Machines (IBM), or
Standard Oil, industrial leaders such as John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie in-
creasingly demanded employees who had educational backgrounds in business, as opposed to Medieval art,
for example.
With the sheer lack of anything resembling a business program, Rockefeller used his own money to create
an institution tasked with training business leaders. His school, the University of Chicago, also created a
new, advanced program for the study of business called the Masters in Business Administration, or MBA.
Before the Civil War, the only school that offered degrees in engineering was the U.S. Military Academy at
West Point.
These new fields of study had one thing in common: they all examined human behavior (sociology) or
overcoming obstacles (such as in engineering). The study of human behavior usually focuses on the negative
or abhorrent thus once you study the rules to how societies are ordered, you begin to identify problems and
then you get to apply your knowledge gained in university study on how to solve those problems. The spread
of both engineering schools, as well as institutions that offered programs in business, resulted in the idea
that the world (or at least the United States) could be categorized, evaluated, assessed, and proper measures
applied to fix problems or to surmount obstacles.
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CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
In other words, the development of social sciences and engineering programs and their application to
society was strikingly similar to the Enlightenment, which hit the British colonies in North America during
the first half of the eighteenth century just before the American War for Independence. And not unlike the
Enlightenment that produced physical spaces to showcase "modern" ideas and inventions (such as universities,
libraries, and even fairs), Progressive era accomplishments too were celebrated in public spaces.
Colossal, year-long extravaganzas to publicize and draw attention to accomplishments, shine light on new
ideas, and demonstrate American technological advances was evidenced in the world fairs that were iconic
glimpses of everything new, bright, right, and wrong in the Progressive era. At the Chicago fair in 1893,
which drew an estimated crowd of over 27 million people, visitors marveled at the scientific and technological
advances to include a massive lighted tower supplied to the fair by a fledging company calling itself General
Electric (GE).
Visitors experienced many products for the first time that we take for granted today such as movies
(courtesy of Thomas Edison), pancake-in-a-box kit (the retro house-slave-inspired look of "Aunt Jemima"),
the automatic dishwasher (invented by Josephine Cochrane), and two flavors of a new kind of candy (Juicy
Fruit and Spearmint) called gum unveiled by a Chicago candy maker, William Wrigley, Jr. Visitors also
tasted for the first time shredded wheat and diet soda. They rode the first ferris wheel (invented by a fellow
aptly named Ferris). They marveled at the vertical file (a business necessity), and they conserved their
calories by riding on moveable sidewalks, as opposed to having to use the old fashioned form of locomotion
walking. American progress was showcased indeed!
Once the principles of science and technology were understood, then those principles could be applied
to solve society's problems. In the case of GE, the problem was human beings tended to have difficulties
seeing in the dark, and candle, oil, or gas lights were not terribly efficient nor overtly powerful, hence the
development of electric light (thanks in large measure to the work of Thomas Edison). Many of the inventions
and products demonstrated at the Chicago fair suggested that the American pace of life was speeding up (you
no longer had time to mix flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder hence the invention of Aunt Jemima) and
that American pockets were getting deeper (buying "store bought" food products were not as cost effective
as making the food yourself).
Nevertheless, although newly minted college graduates characterize the Progressive era, a college ed-
ucation was something that most Americans could not afford to pursue and was not necessary to obtain
meaningful work. By 1900, only about 4 percent of Americans of traditional college ages were attending
college. Those who could afford the cost and were accepted (most universities refused to matriculate women)
tended to put their college educations to work for their communities through progressive reform such as Jane
Addams and other social Progressives.
These Progressives were true-blue believers in the American society, politics, religion, and especially
American capitalism. They were not Marxists, Communists, or anarchists. They were people who had an
opportunity to gain formal education beyond the scope of what would pass today for a high school education,
and that education tended to emphasize new intellectual fields. Those new intellectual fields tended to focus
on society's problems and how to fix those problems.
For example, after decades of dawn to dusk work on his Wisconsin farm, Hamlin Garland decided that
college was the way through which he would elevate his life. He became a famous novelist using his own
background as the basis for his publications, thus shedding light on the backbreaking, hand-to-mouth life
style of American farmers, who Thomas Jefferson called "God's chosen people." A free-born black woman,
Lucie Stanton Day, wanted to enlighten the plight of her people while also working to help them get off the
farms so she obtained a college degree and moved to Mississippi where she spent the rest of her life teaching
freed slaves. A young Sioux named Ohiyesa earned a medical degree from Boston University, changed his
name to Dr. Charles Eastman, and married a white reformer named Elaine Goodale. The couple moved to
Pine Ridge where they worked for the Sioux and fought for Indian rights.
What these Progressives had in common was the belief in the elevating power of education as well as their
interest to give back to their communities. Most of the Progressive era reformers were not as involved with
education as these examples might suggest, nonetheless the Progressive Era is characterized as identifying
problems, using certain tools to address those problems, and applying corrective actions to put an end to
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those problems.
There were two basic, and sometimes opposing, views on how Progressive reform should take place:
reform from within or reform from without. In the former, Progressives tended to believe that problems
were local, and thus solutions (and actors) needed to be local. This grassroots, volunteer mentality was
exceptionally widespread in wake of massive westward migration following the Civil War. An example of
this type of Progressive reform was the Settlement House movement, led by a young college graduate, Jane
Addams. Other Progressive reformers believed that problems could be best identified when viewed from
above and thus solutions tended to be thorough when applied by those on high. An example of this top-
down approach was President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt did not necessarily disagree with the problems
that folks such as Addams identified; he just believed that he, as president, was in the best place and at the
right time to fix those problems. There were various types of Progressive reform to include reforming the
ills of society (such as tackling issues of poverty, immorality, or disease), addressing human foibles (such as
alcoholism, gambling, or drug addiction), addressing inequalities in American life (such as women's right to
vote or own property), and altering American foreign policy (which was addressed in the previous chapter).
This chapter examines domestic Progressive reform.
SOCIAL PROGRESSIVES
Women, more so than men, were typically the leaders of social reform activities during the Progressive
Era. Many Americans considered women to be inherently more moral than men. Also women were seen
as the domestic leaders of their households. Thus, women would use their God-given moral superiority as
well as their inherent abilities in domesticity to clean up, reform, and fix their cities. Women used such
domestic phraseology as "municipal housekeeping" to justify their new roles in the public arena. Women
simply applied their inherent abilities of caring for their families against the backdrop of sin and corruption
in cities.
A good example of municipal housekeeping was the work of the National Housewives Alliance (NHA).
The NHA called upon Americans to boycott all meat until the federal government agreed to inspect and
certify the safety of the American meat industry. "Eat no meat. Buy no meat. Eat fresh vegetables" read one
banner in a 1906 NHA protest in Maryland. As women were the ones in each home that made and served
delicious, nutritious, and safe food, then women's involvement in cleaning up the unsanitary conditions of
the meat packing industry (evidenced by the 1906 Upton Sinclair novel entitled The Jungle) seemed to be
a natural extension of their womanly duties. Interestingly enough, Sinclair's message in his novel was lost
on most Americans who came away from the book believing that government needed to clean up the meat
industry. Instead, Sinclair's main point was to shed light on the plight of immigrant laborers who were
frequently abused, taken advantage of, and generally treated unequally in the meat packing industry.
Overwhelmingly, the mechanism through which women sought reform was federal, state, and local legis-
lation. Thus, one characteristic of the Progressive era was a change in American ideals on the relationship
between the government and the governed. Gone were the days of the early Gilded Age in which the federal
government ran rough shot, uncontested, over Americans by sending out federal troops to put an end to
strikes, consistently looked the other way when corporations gobbled up competition usually through vio-
lence, or allowed medicine based on opiates to be openly distributed. In other words, the problems of the
Gilded Age, in the eyes of these Progressive reformers, were too unyielding for anyone but a government to
tackle.
An example of success in getting the federal government to tackle these issues by regulating the industries
that had, until the early twentieth century, been self-regulating was the Pure Food and Drug Act. Initially
passed to assure American consumers about the ingredients advertised in their favorite medicines, this act
led American consumer groups, political activists, and federal legislators to widen the scope to include
outlawing ingredients and food handling practices that the federal government deemed as unsafe for human
consumption.
Of course this change in the idea of the responsibilities of the federal government might not have happened
through external pressures alone. Harvey Wiley, a chemist in the Bureau of Agriculture, published reports on
adulterated food and medicine. Nonetheless, Wiley's work inside the administration of President Theodore
Roosevelt was not acted upon until women's groups and publications (such as the Ladies Home Journal and
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CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
Collier's) picked up the baton of change by reporting how narcotics are typically used as the main active
ingredient in so-called natural medicinal products, such as the wildly popular Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable
Compound.
Wiley believed that some chemical preservatives were safe and even necessary to ensure a healthy food
supply. Thus, in 1902 he initiated an experiment called the "Hygienic Table" in which young male volunteers
would knowingly eat small amounts of preservatives to prove their safety. Dubbed the "Poison Squad" by
the press, these experiments went on for five years. As a true Progressive, Wiley believed that the producers
of chemically altered food must prove the safety of their products and that all products must be clearly
labeled so that American consumers could make fully knowledgeable choices. Wiley's ideas would eventually
become law in the United States.
Ultimately, one of the changes to American society that resulted from the popular press's disclosures of
unsafe, unsanitary food handling practices, the struggle within and without the federal government to get
the Pure Food and Drug Act passed, and the push to enhance the scope of the act in the years leading up
to World War I was that Americans began to see themselves as active consumers. Prior to the Progressive
Era, many Americans upheld the Jeffersonian twin tenets of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. You
grew your own food, you made your own clothes and what you could not grow and what you could not
make, you simply did without. Also, Americans viewed government action as a negative thing, which meant
that many Americans opposed the establishment of professional, public police forces in their cities, as those
police forces were of course armed representatives of "the government." There was no federal or state agency
to ensure the safety of anything Americans consumed, put on their bodies, or used in every day life. There
were no tough, smart lawyers waiting to sue the pants of your employer when you became injured on the
job or sue the drug manufacturers when your child died of consuming medicine laced with opiates. If you
succeeded in life, you had yourself to thank. If you failed in life, you had yourself to blame.
However, the Progressive Era forced Americans to begin to look differently at their relationship to gov-
ernment, as well as their expectations from government. At stake were American ideals on liberty. No longer
was it apparent that success or failure was necessarily in your own hands or of your own making. The playing
field was horribly askew, and thus Americans, more than ever and in increasingly larger numbers, turned to
their state and federal governments for assurances that their food and medicines were safe.
Of course, not all American politicians supported this new role for the federal government. Senator Albert
Beveridge (R-IN), a supporter of the U.S. war in the Philippines on the grounds that the United States must
advance all of America's blessings to those poor, tired, huddled masses, feared that unless we helped them
in their county, they would simply come to the United States seeking help. He declared the Pure Food and
Drug Act to be "the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted."
Success and failure are relative terms. Nonetheless, one reason why many of the Progressive ideas failed
to achieve lasting results was because of the simplistic beliefs held by Progressives. For example, if women
had the right to vote then they, as being more moral than men, would clean up politics. And, if they
got rid of alcohol then gambling, divorce, and other social problems would necessarily disappear, as the
Progressives believed that alcohol consumption was the root cause of so many problems in American society.
In other words, maybe the Progressives tendency of embracing a single-villain theory was out of step with
the complexities of humanity.
Temperance
One of the most iconic Progressive era reforms was the temperance movement. Like so many other reforms
based on Gilded Age/Victorian morality, temperance roots had been firmly planted in the Washington
Societies of the early nineteenth century. What makes these Progressive reformers different from earlier
progressive reformers was those who supported a ban on alcohol created and maintained an effective, national
organization. "Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things
that are foul," is what Frances Williard believed.
Created, in part, by Francis Willard in 1874 who held its presidency from 1879 until her premature death
in 1898, the Women Christian's Temperance Union (WCTU) urged state and federal politicians to ban the
sale of alcohol. Like many other Progressive reformers, Willard was an educated person. She was a past
president of Northwestern Female College, later accepting academic administrative positions at Northwestern
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University. She also worked for the Chicago Daily Post.
The WCTU spurred the creation of like organizations, such as the Anti-Saloon League, as well as strong-
headed individuals such as the axe-wielding Carrie Nation. Protestant ministers used their pulpits on Sundays
to preach the evils of alcohol. The antebellum novel, Ten Nights in a Barroom, by Timothy Shay Arthur
became a national hit in the 1880s. The book examined how alcohol affected a small town family (as well
as the small town). No big surprise here: drunk family members kill each other, a little girl pleads with
her father to stop drinking (which he eventually does, but only on his daughter's death bed; she dies after
getting hit in the head by a thrown glass when she entered the saloon to plead with her father to come home)
and in the end the whole town votes to close the saloon and outlaw liquor forever! The book's popularity
led to a silent film in 1913, a remake in 1922, and a talkie in 1931. The 1913 version was produced in part
by the WCTU and was an early example of the effects of that new medium called motion pictures.
By 1916, twenty-one states had gone dry. Three years later, Americans altered the U.S. Constitution by
adding the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating
liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory
subject to the jurisdiction thereof." There were major problems with the amendment, such as: What does
"intoxicating" mean? What does "liquor" mean? Who will be in charge of enforcing this amendment? And,
while the WCTU fought for decades to make it illegal for Americans to consume alcohol, the Eighteenth
Amendment did not make it illegal to drink-only to make it, sell it, or transport it.
Shortly after Congress adopted the Eighteenth Amendment, the ambiguity of the amendment became
apparent. Thus, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act (popularly referred to as the Volstead Act
after one of its supporters, Andrew Volstead). This act defined alcohol, placed jurisdiction for the enforcement
of the Eighteenth Amendment squarely on the shoulders of the federal government and although it was still
not against the law to consume alcohol, it was illegal to "possess" alcohol.
The fight over prohibition is a microcosm of a shift in American culture. Alcohol consumption had been
viewed as more than merely socially unacceptable throughout the late nineteenth century, regardless of the
fact that for Americans, alcohol was the safest beverage (unlike water or milk, no know pathogens can exist
in alcohol). Native-born Americans saw alcohol has a moral evil that was becoming further entrenched in
American life as a result of the American immigrant culture of those "new immigrants" (Catholics and Jews
from eastern, southern, and central Europe). Likewise, alcohol was the root of all evil propelling American
families on the road to financial and moral ruin.
The Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act failed to end alcoholism, the break up of families, and
the disintegration of American souls. Will Rogers summed it up nicely when he said, "Why don't they pass
a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition
did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth."
Prohibition of alcohol is a good example at how the Progressives were not always progressive: prohibition
was an old idea and the Progressives were unable to surmise the potential effect of their actions: organized
crime figures, bootleggers, and corrupt politicians fought each other for control of liquor distribution. Un-
scrupulous amateur brewers and distillers added methanol, ethanol, and other chemicals designed to quicken
the fermentation process as well as to raise the alcohol level. Of course such chemicals were toxic and had
been used as an alternative fuel sources since 1900. Prohibition wrought the same pain and suffering that
the Progressive reformers were trying to remove by prohibiting the consumption of alcohol.
Labor Legislation
In 1912, Congress created the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR) with grudgingly acceptance
from President William Taft. Taft was unable to get the Democratic-controlled Congress to allow his
appointments, thus the real work of the CIR did not begin in earnest until the election of President Woodrow
Wilson, a Democrat. Tasked with enquiring "into the general condition of labor in the principal industries
of the United States, including agriculture, and especially in those which are carried on in corporate forms.
..into the growth of associations of employers and of wage earners and the effect of such associations upon
the relations between employers and employees," and chaired by Frank Walsh, the committee held hearings
for over five months. The CIR consisted of members from labor, agriculture, and industry.
Unable to speak with one voice, the commission ultimately issued three separate reports, reflecting the
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CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
three divergent positions of the committee members. Nonetheless, the reports were certainly neither shocking
nor did they issue anything new or unknown to American labor. For decades American workers were routinely
underpaid, fined for breaking a wide assortment of rules (such as laughing while at work), and shot by private
armies, state militias, or even federal troops when workers went on strike. These matters were well known
to American workers and were reported in the numerous papers that resulted from the commission's work.
It would have taken the twin punch of a massive domestic economic crisis paralleled by an unprecedented
international crisis to push federal decision-makers to protect American workers against abuse they had been
experiencing since the creation of the first mill in the 1780s.
If any one group benefited from the Progressive era reforms, it possibly could have been children. Amer-
icans during the Gilded Age looked upon children rather differently than Americans view children today.
Throughout most of U.S. history, children were simply short, young, adults. Children were an integral part
of the household income regardless if the family lived on a farm or worked in a factory. In fact, in some
career fields children were typically hired over adults, such as in mining, where their smaller, more nimble
hands were beneficial. Children were also paid less than their adult counterparts and thus many factories
tended to hire children as a way of increasing their profits.
We even look upon children differently today in regards to sex. The age of consent in many states was
12, and some even as low as 10, during the Gilded Age. Having consensual sex with a twelve-year-old today
is not only socially repulsive but criminal as well.
Thus, not surprisingly, some reform revolved around the health and welfare of children. Women such
as Florence Kelley (graduated from Cornell University) worked with state legislatures to enact policies that
would prohibit children from working in dangerous settings, such as in mines. She helped launch the National
Consumer League-an organization dedicated to socially responsible consumerism and alleviating the plight
of overworked and underpaid factory workers. Yet, her first success was in regards to child labor in factories.
Due in part to her work with Addams as well as her work with the future Supreme Court justice Louis
Brandeis in persuading the Supreme Court to support legislation curbing the number of hours women were
allowed to work outside of the home, Kelley fought to both legally define a "child" and then to prohibit
children from working the same hours and under the same conditions as adults. Towards the end of the
nineteenth century, the Illinois state legislature passed the nation's first child labor law prohibiting children
(defined as under 14) from working in factories. Illinois' Progressive governor, John Altgeld, appointed
Kelley as the state's first female factory inspector, ensuring that all state laws were indeed being applied in
Illinois' factories.
In the legal system, children and adults tended to be treated as equals. Children, upon being found
guilty of committing crimes, would be sentenced to serve their penalties in the same institutions that housed
adult criminals. Thus came the juvenile court system in which social workers, lawyers and judges would be
trained in and work with only juveniles. Children got their own jails. These reforms spread from the local,
to the state, and eventually to the federal government.
During the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the role of the federal government expanded to include
protecting children as evidenced by the creation of the Children's Bureau in 1912 within the Department
of Labor. Reports from the Children's Bureau, helped push through the Keating-Owen Act in 1916. This
act prohibited the interstate commerce of commercial goods made by children. The act defined a child as a
person no older than thirteen. Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this early attempt to
define and protect children thus ending effective legislation until the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.
Settlement House Movement
So much of the Progressive Era reform was intimately connected to the massive waves of new immigrants
and thus in one way the Progressive Era may be examined through the lens of fear: Native-born Americans
feared the influx of European immigrants who came to this country without any history of democratic tra-
dition, without any history of capitalism, with religious affiliations that caused many Americans to question
the loyalty of these new immigrants, and with entrenched ideas of the acceptance of alcohol at a time when
many Americans began to succeed in passing laws and changing minds regarding the consumption of alcohol.
According to the census of 1900, 25 percent of the people living in the United States were foreign-born (in
the early twenty-first century, the percentage of foreign-born is closer to 5 percent). Thus, you might wonder
9
just how much of this reform was truly "progressive" to help these immigrants and how much of this reform
was about controlling this ever-increasing influx of tired, poor, huddled masses?
One reform that was clearly connected to the new immigrants was the Settlement House Movement. One
of the latest and greatest paths of study after the Civil War was that of Social Work. As many Americans
viewed women as naturally more moral than men, as many Americans believed that women's God-given roles
revolved around care-giving, and because women successfully entered the public arena in the years following
the Civil War by using domestic housekeeping phraseology, it is not surprising that more women then men
entered the field of Social work. Graduate students in social work at Smith College located in Northampton,
Massachusetts (established in 1871) identified what they believed to be a problem in their part of the state:
homelessness. In 1886 students rounded up homeless women, almost all of whom were foreign-born, and
housed them in property bought by the college. They then put their social work training to the test. This
fieldwork was so wildly popular that it spread from college campus to college campus and shortly was known
as the College Settlement Movement.
By 1910, more than 400 of these settlement homes existed. The largest and possibly the most well known
of these operations was located on Hull Street in Chicago. Created by a Progressive reformer who worked with
Florence Kelley and others to enact protective legislation for children, Jane Addams developed her simple
idea into a massive structure that provided training, education, and career opportunities for homeless, single-
women and their children. Known as Hull House, Adams provided for the immigrant homeless of Chicago to
include dressing like an American, cooking like an American, and introducing them to American past times
such as the relatively new game of basketball. These women's children also received assistance in a new
kind of educational opportunity called a kindergarten. "Kindergarten," or in English "a garden of children,"
was, ironically, imported to the U.S. by German immigrants. Possibly due to Adams connections with the
WCTU, women at Hull House were also instructed on the evils of alcohol.
Again, the line between assistance and social control was fine and the type of assistance that poor,
immigrant women and their children received at Hull House certainly smacked of control. Hull House,
ostensibly, helped immigrants in their transition from foreign ways to American ways. The Progressive
reformers introduced these poor, tired, huddled masses to American democracy, American capitalism, and
of course English.
INFLUENCING CHANGE OR
CONTROLLING SOCIETY?
By the early twentieth century, it seemed that these new immigrants were here to stay. Besides, factory
owners seemed to need these laborers and thus a constant flow of immigrants might have been the lynchpin
in transforming the America from an agricultural-based economy to an industrial-based economy in the
decades between the failure of the Cook banking empire and the Great War. Paralleling the largest influx
of immigration was the rise of another Progressive Era movement known as Americanization. Although
the work of anti-immigration groups continued throughout the twentieth century (such as the American
Protective Association, whose members attempted to prevent non-English speaking people from entering the
United States), others sought to help immigrants succeed.
Better Movie Movement
Many of these immigrants enjoyed spending what little free time and extra money they might have
accumulated on the new American cultural phenomenon known as the movies. There were no rating system,
no rules, regulations, or policies that Hollywood was forced to follow. Instead, movie companies eventually
developed and loosely adhered to their own list of dos and don'ts but not until after the Supreme Court
ruling Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio (1915) declared that motion pictures were
not covered by the First Amendment, which meant that communities could (and did) pass laws prohibiting
certain films from being shown in their theaters. No formal self-censorship codes were in place until 1930
and then the Production Code, as it was called, was not enforced until 1934.
Possibly because movies were relatively inexpensive, many native-born working poor and immigrants were
attracted to theaters. In reaction to the lack of regulation combined with the particular crowd of people to be
found in movie theaters, Progressive reforms (who were typically middle and upper class professionals) tried
to compel state and federal governments to develop and impose an external ratings system upon Hollywood.
10
CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
This was one area in which reformers failed. Unable to rally governmental support, Progressive groups, such
as the WCTU, simply made or produced their own movies. Ten Nights in a Barroom, The Tobacco Plague,
and Safeguarding the Nation were all part of the "Better Movie Movement." These films attempted to
demonstrate how alcohol, smoking, and a weak military had an adverse affect upon this nation. What were
really nothing more than long public service announcements, these movies, nonetheless, did not successfully
make a change to American cultural ideas. Even in the 1930s "message movies" permeated American movie
theaters. Films such as Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness are cult classics today but were serious attempts
by a coalition of Hollywood and the federal government to curb American's interest in opiates and marijuana.
Medicine
One of the successes of the Progressive era was the professionalization of the medical field. In the late
nineteenth century, Americans successfully stopped the proliferation of patent medicines. Advertised as
all natural, effective, and safe remedies for whatever ailed you, patent medicines were usually ineffective,
dangerous, poisonous, or addictive drugs based on alcohol or opiates and if you consume enough of either,
your troubles, albeit temporarily, just might be abated.
Still, in 1900 all you truly needed to be a medical doctor was a sign stating "the doctor is in." And many
of these doctors had no more medical training than did Lucy in the famous Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoons.
While there were plenty of medical schools (such as the newly built Johns Hopkins or the 250-year-old Yale),
you did not need a medical degree, or any degree, to work as a medical doctor.
One change to all of this quackery was the development of antiseptics by a British fellow named Lister. A
result of external pressure from Progressive reforms and internal pressure from trained medical professionals,
the American Medical Association (AMA) was formed in 1902 as a national organization. (The AMA traces
its origins to the 1840s but does not become an effective, national organization until the Progressive Era.)
In order to practice medicine in the United States you now had to belong to the AMA. In order to belong
to the AMA you had to have obtained an undergraduate degree from an accredited institution and then
successfully completed an approved medical degree.
In 1906 the AMA investigated 160 medical schools and rated them for their academic rigor. The report
was published in 1910 and in 1912 the AMA began to undertake some of the report's recommendations.
Not all Americans benefited from this professionalization of the medical corps. As most medical schools
prohibited women and African Americans from attending, there were very few women and African American
doctors after 1902. In addition, most poor and rural women tended to see untrained female medical practi-
tioners while most black people sought medical assistance from black medical practitioners. Because these
uncertified, unqualified, and untrained women and black doctors were prohibited from practicing medicine
after 1902, many people in the United States lost access to even the most meager type of medical care upon
the creation of the AMA.
Country Life Movement
The United States slowly transformed itself from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial
society. According to the census of 1900, for the first time in U.S. history the majority of Americans
considered themselves to be urban dwellers rather than rural inhabitants. Throughout this transformation,
so too developed the idea that an urban lifestyle was more economically viable than a rural lifestyle. And
by the early twentieth century, some Americans equated rural America with poverty and decay and urban
America with wealth and progress. A good example of this urban-rural split was evidenced in a 1908
report issued by outgoing president Theodore Roosevelt. A rural existence lacked modern necessities such
as electricity, factory-made farm equipment (such as John Deere's latest steel plow or Cyrus McCormick's
mechanical reaper), and a fully equipped kitchen. In regards to the later, Christine Frederick toured the rural
South and West, introducing American women to modern conveniences such as dishwashers (introduced at
the 1893 Chicago Fair), iceboxes, and new stoves. Frederick was not so much of a Progressive reformer who
worked to bring rural women better management over their households, but rather Frederick worked for the
big national corporations, such as Sears, J.C. Penny, and Montgomery Ward. She was a salesperson first
and foremost but wrapped her sales pitches in the flag of Progressive reform.
Frederick did introduce "scientific management" to women all over this country both personally as well
as through the pages of women's magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal. In 1912 she wrote a four-part
11
article entitled "The New Housekeeping: How it Helps the Woman Who Does Her Own Work." In it, she
offered advice on how to set up the washboard, sink, and table to their optimal heights for women to most
effectively complete their work. Scientific management of the kitchen meant not only a place for everything
but also the best place for every kitchen gadget, tool, and utensil:
A young bride recently showed me her new kitchen. "Isn't it a beauty?" she exclaimed. It certainly had
modern appliances of every kind, but her stove was in a recess of the kitchen at one end and her pantry was
twenty feet away at the opposite end. Every time she wanted to use a frying pan she had to walk twenty
feet to get it, and after using it she had to walk twenty feet to put it away.
This question of arrangement and the placing of tables and tools must be considered if the worker is to
obtain the highest efficiency.
Frederick was no "Dear Abby" or Julia Child. Rather, she furthered the use of modern inventions in
their most meaningful manner in order to help women embrace their God-given role as a domestic. Her
promotion and advertising of American consumer culture, although seemingly new in the early twentieth
century, certainly foreshadowed the consumer craze of the post-World War II generations.
Prostitution
Progressive reformers connected physical illness with sin to push to end such diseases as syphilis. Syphilis
was a rather common disease but by the late nineteenth century, many Americans saw the spread of this
sexually transmitted disease as a morality issue: to have syphilis indicated a morally weak person. "Intol-
erable" was a common response to the widespread nature of this and similar diseases. Because this disease
spread through sexual contact (unlike the popular misconceptions that syphilis is spread by shaking hands,
using dirty toilet seats, or door knobs) many reformers began to attack what they believed to be the root of
the syphilis epidemic: prostitutes.
Without wondering how prostitutes contracted the disease in order to spread it to their customers,
Progressive reformers pushed local and state politicians to criminalize the sale of sex. Interestingly, it
became illegal for women to work as prostitutes, but it was not illegal for men to engage prostitutes'
offerings, suggesting that the movement to stamp out sin and disease was based on the idea that women
originated both the sin and thus the disease (a modern-day application of the Eve-Apple myth).
Jane Addams denounced the codification of prostitution, believing instead that government should exam-
ine the root causes of prostitution. Women only become prostitutes, Addams argued, because all respectable
career options did not pay as much as prostitution. It was not unusual for immigrant women working in a
New York City factory six days a week to make between $4 and $20 a month. Official government reports
placed the average American woman's wage at $6.67 per week.
Prostitutes made in a few minutes what it would take her factory-colleague weeks to make. For example,
streetwalkers earned between $1 and $5 dollars per trick. An early-twentieth century investigation authored
by the 61st Congress (1909-1911) entitled The Summary Report on the Condition of Women and Children
Wage Earners in the United States, concluded that prostitutes who worked in private homes or brothels
typically earned $20 a day while the owners of the brothels averaged $50,000 a year. Thus, if women could
secure careers that paid them as much as prostitution, no woman would ever elect to become a prostitute,
Addams theorized. To successfully end prostitution, Addams suggested that working women be paid the
equivalent of their prostitute colleagues. If a telephone operator made as much as a prostitute, then women
would swell the telephone operator ranks, thus ending prostitution, thus ending the spread of syphilis.
Needless to say, there was never a meaningful attempt to elevate the pay of working women to the level
earned by prostitutes. Ultimately, prostitution was driven underground where criminal elements increasingly
controlled the trade.
Woman Suffrage
In the decades following the Civil War, American women sought two parallel tracks in their attempt to
achieve political equality. Some sought to amend the Constitution, allowing all women across the country to
engage their right to vote through the efforts of the National Women's Suffrage Association. Others believed
that changes to society must come from within the borders of states and worked among state legislatures
to pass laws allowing women the right to vote within their state elections, such as the American Women's
Suffrage Association. Before the end of the nineteenth century, these two groups came together and formed
12
CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
the National American Women's Suffrage Association (NASWA). They worked to get women the right to
vote simultaneously at the state level and at the national level.
Of all the Progressive era reforms, there was possibly no more difficult fight than for women's political
equality. Women were prohibited from owning property through the Civil War. Women were, in some
localities, allowed to vote in local board of education elections during the Gilded Age. Women authors of
the late nineteenth century mirrored many of the ideas of equality first penned by the English author Mary
Wollstonecraft in the years following the American War for Independence.
After the Civil War, thousands of Americans toured the world and upon their return hundreds wrote
travel books: linear narratives of what they saw, usually injected American-Christian superiority and calls
for help to reform the "heathen" all over the world, to include elevating the status of women. Palestine was
a particularly important destination for American women travelers in the nineteenth century. These women
tended to demonstrate to their readers the superiority of Protestant women by spreading rumors about
Muslims. Some, such as Lucia A. Palmer, believed that Muslims were naturally bloodthirsty creatures who
literally killed Christians, just for fun:
The Mohammedan hates the Christian, and when he wishes to amuse himself, he takes a holiday and kills
off a few hundred or a few thousand in Bulgaria, Palestine, or Armenia, in whichever country he chooses to
hunt. Then the Christian world raises its hands in horror, and hold meetings, and dispatches to the Turkish
government long demands and commands . . . and the Moslem answers by slaughtering more Christians.
Their published travel writings suggest that many of these average American women supported suffrage
as a social equalizer for the poor, tired, and downtrodden women of the Islamic Middle East. For example,
when an American traveler named Kate Kraft was in Egypt, she called for a Woman's Rights Convention
because Egyptian women, unlike their American counterparts, were doing nothing to secure their right to
vote.
Some women wrote, believing that publication was the manner through which women could add their
voice to the public discussions on the major issues of their time. Another American traveler named Mary
Barney, for example, believed that women should write about politics and government as a way of becoming
active in a political climate in which women were prevented from partaking any active roles because they
were not allowed to vote. One of the most important authors during the Progressive era was Charlotte
Perkins Gillman. Gillman examined a wide assortment of gender equality issues in her works, such as The
Yellow Wallpaper.
The Civil War-era suffrage leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were replaced
by younger, slightly more aggressive, and almost always formally educated women such as Carrie Chapman
Catt and Reverend Olympia Brown from Wisconsin. Yet, one of this country's more influential suffrage
supporters was the relatively unknown Emma Smith DeVoe.
DeVoe traveled the West from Illinois to Washington giving speeches and entertaining the crowds with
Civil War-related songs, suggesting that proper northerners and Republicans support women's right to
vote while southerners and Democrats do not. Unlike the unflinching, stark, dowdy perception that many
Americans held of Susan B. Anthony who remained unmarried and who dressed in a black dress and always
had her hair pulled back in a severe bun, DeVoe was described as "womanly" for how she dressed (in the
modern style), how she kept her hair, the fact that she was married, and the fact that DeVoe seemed to not
preach to the crowds but rather to urge them to do the right thing by supporting women's right to vote. She
was a central reason behind the successful Washington campaign of 1912 and the eventual passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920. Unlike many of her Progressive colleagues, DeVoe's devotion
to women's political rights did not end in 1920. Rather, she would continue her work to help women more
efficiently wield the vote by creating the League of Women Voters.
Environmentalism
The Progressive era is possibly most associated with the idea of launching the modern American con-
servation movement. Americans walked a fine line between the Jeffersonian ideal of living as independent
yeoman farmers and gaining the wealth that came from urban living and industrialization. During the
pre-Civil War industrial era, Americans worried about maintaining a balance between pristine lands of an
agricultural-based economy and the inevitable ecological damage of an industrial-based economy. That was
13
the paradox of industry. As Alexander De Tocqueville wrote, "from the filthy sewer, pure gold flows."
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln recognized Yosemite Valley as a "public park" in the
1864 Yosemite Act, creating the federal precedent for the inevitable creation of a national park system. After
the Civil War some people tried to bring examples of the Jeffersonian ideal to the Hamiltonian reality of
urban life, such as Frederick Law Olmstead, who created a green space in the middle of New York City. He
called this space "Central Park," and helped to launch a national movement to build parks in urban centers.
The federal government picked up the baton in 1872 by creating the first national park: Yellowstone. By
1890 national parks reached the west coast with the establishment of Yosemite National Park, which is
known as one of this nation's first "wilderness parks" in part due to its 1200 square miles of rugged, pristine
terrain. The Forest Reserves law of 1891 proscribed the president with the power to "withdraw and reserve
public lands wholly or in part covered by timber or undergrowth" in order to be used for the good of all
Americans.
These acts of Congress did not denote the authority tasked with administering the reserved lands and
thus in 1897 Congress passed the Forest Management Act providing the Department of the Interior with the
authority to regulate the use of reserved lands. The Bureau of Reclamation was created in 1902 to deal with
the reality of water issues west of the Mississippi, in which the water tables were considerably lower than
east of the Mississippi River. The federal government managed irrigation and other projects designed to best
help Americans successfully settle the West. Once the irrigation projects were completed then the federal
government would once again open the lands for settlement under the provisions of the 1863 Homestead Act.
In 1903 the federal government created the first national wildlife refuge, located in Florida, to help preserve
and protect indigenous species. Two years later Congress created the U.S. Forest Service (originally under
the Department of the Interior) and tasked that organization to manage the lands placed under reserve by
the aptly named Reserve law of 1891. (Later the federal government will adopt the phrase "national forests"
in place of "national reserves.") Finally, Congress created the National Park Service in 1916, tasked with the
management of all national parks (such as Mount Rainier in Washington, established in 1899), battlefields
(such as Bear Paw Battlefield near Chinook, Montana), and monuments (such as the Alibates Flint Quarries
in Texas).
"Conservation movement" and Hech-Hechy
(1890-1910).
One of the lesser-known events during the Progressive era was known as the "Conservation movement."
In its infancy, and certainly viewed with more "progressive" twenty-first century eyes, the conservation
movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries might appear to be backward. Probably the
two most important names attached to this reform were President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of
the Interior, Gifford Pinchot.
Pinchot began his federal career as the head of the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agri-
culture in 1898. Roosevelt, being quite concerned about conservation and the West, appointed Pinchot to
investigate reports of the federal government leasing federal lands to ranchers. In 1904, Pinchot's influence
in the Roosevelt administration resulted in Pinchot wrestling control of the national forests away from the
Department of the Interior. A few years later Pinchot's attempt to gain control of all national parks, monu-
ments, forests, and battlefields failed, and in the backlash a new, permanent oversight of the National Parks
Service was created under the auspices of the Department of the Interior.
The Roosevelt-Pinchot team's most prolific battle was over the damming (and the potential consequences)
of a strip of land in California known as Hetch Hetchy. Following the 1906 earthquake, the city of San
Francisco sought to dam part of Yosemite in order to create a man-made lake to be used as a fresh water
supply. Roosevelt and Pinchot favored the project, while people such as John Muir (who created the Sierra
Club in 1892) opposed destroying what he equated as a natural cathedral or temple. Interestingly enough,
both Pinchot and Roosevelt were friends with Muir earlier in their careers. The federal government won and
an act of Congress authorized the construction of a dam that partially flooded the Yosemite Valley.
The creation of Yosemite National Park and the flooding of the valley did not happen without its critics, to
include the untold numbers of Americans and Indians who relied on game, water, and timber from Yosemite
for their survival. Many of those people refused to adhere to artificial lines drawn in maps and thus they
14 CHAPTER 1. PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART I)
continued to hunt game on the park, fell trees on the park, and seek their fresh water sources from within
the park. The US military was initially tasked with the park's security but by 1916 the federal government
created the National Park Service to manage all aspects of these national resources, to include keeping people
from hunting or taking other resources from within the boundaries of the park.
End of Part I
Chapter 2
The Progressive Era (Part II)'
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS AND
POLITICAL PROGRESSIVISM
Overwhelmingly, Progressives held an evangelical zeal (and many had backgrounds in evangelical move-
ments) in their beliefs that not only were they able to identify problems but that they had the tools necessary
to fix those problems. Progressives, however, differed on whom would lead the reform: reform from below
(volunteer or community-led) or reform from above (government-led). Not surprisingly, some American
presidents believed that problems were best identified and then corrected by themselves. Traditionally, the
Progressive era American presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, his handpicked successor William Howard
Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
TEDDY ROOSEVELT:
The First Progressive President
The Roosevelt family was one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the United States. Being able to
trace his ancestry in this country back to the Mayflower, Roosevelt belonged to an elite group of American
families. His aristocratic background propelled him through Harvard. After a brief career in the New York
legislature he became the second in charge of the Department of the Navy in 1897.
Roosevelt was a bold, brash, and at times larger-than-life figure who lived what he called the "manly
life" (daily exercise, engaging in sports, and being active on the world's stage). Not without reservation, the
Republican leadership offered the vice presidency to Roosevelt in 1898, following his brief yet wildly advertised
stint in a private military unit during the Spanish-American War. Leon Czolgosz elevated Roosevelt to the
presidency when, in 1901, he assassinated President William McKinley.
Roosevelt's progressive ideas had their genesis while serving the people of New York. Roosevelt believed
that he, as president, was best suited to both identify and then apply corrective measures. Thus he was
not a fan of the new journalists who researched, wrote, and published exposes against abuses in American
industries such as oil, alcohol, and dairy. One of these "muckrakers," as Roosevelt called those who dug in
the dirt of business practices, was a woman named Ida Tarbell. Tarbell worked for what was arguably the
most well known investigative magazine of its time-McClure's. The magazine published articles exposing
problems in the dairy industry (thousands of infants and elderly people died each year of contaminated
milk), but Tarbell's work on Standard Oil set the bar for investigative reporting. Tarbell discovered that the
Rockefeller family's rise to the top had less to do with a Puritan work ethic and more to do with corruption,
bullying, and outright monopolizing the industry. Tarbell's work led the federal government's dismantling
of Standard Oil and winning the nickname "trust buster" for Roosevelt.
Roosevelt did not believe that all monopolies were inherently bad. Rather, and in step with many U.S.
decision-makers and federal judges, if monopolies produced a good product at a fair price, Roosevelt et al
tended to leave them alone. What Roosevelt did believe in was the inherent power of the federal government
to even the playing field, thus he supported federal laws that regulated business, such as the Hepburn Bill.
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CHAPTER 2. THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART II)
Roosevelt also believed in the power of the president (or at least the power of himself as president) to
become personally involved in regulating industry and he did so in the 1902 Anthracite coal strike and the
Northern Securities investigation two years later.
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT:
Dollar Diplomacy
Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor to lead the Republican Party as well as the nation. As
a president, Taft did not as much as continue Roosevelt's policies in regards to the economy, business
regulation, and foreign policy than he developed what was seen at that time as possibly something new.
Taft supported the idea that American political, social, religious, and economic strategies would be most
effectively spread throughout the world by American businesses as the tip of his spear.
Under the presidency of Taft, the U.S. began loaning large sums of money to Latin American countries,
such as Nicaragua, in order to grease the wheels, so to speak, for American companies to control local
production, such as the infamous American agriculture company United Fruit. Today Taft would fit in,
philosophically, with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer, Dick Chaney and others known as Neo-Cons in the
early twenty-first century. On the domestic side of his presidency, Taft was involved with issues pertaining
to alcohol, labor and business regulation, conservation, race and immigration.
Taft never officially identified his position on the government's role regarding the regulation of the alcohol
industry, however as president Taft did veto a congressional measure that prohibited interstate commerce
of alcohol into states that had prohibited the consumption of alcohol within their borders, such as Georgia,
Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kansas. Known as the Webb Act, Congress
overrode Taft's veto. It is difficult to say with any certainty if Taft's veto supported the idea that the federal
government should not be involved in matters of the states or if he believed that the federal government
should not be involved in regulating the liquor industry.
Roosevelt's personal mediation of the Anthracite coal strike would not be repeated during Taft's admin-
istration. Rather, Taft allowed courts to decide issues pertaining to labor yet he tended to use the power
of the executive branch to enforce the Sherman Act. Ironically, this nation's "Trust Buster" was Taft, who
filed more suits against American monopolies than his predecessor, who was given that nickname as a result
of his administration's fight to break up Standard Oil. Standard Oil was to Roosevelt as U.S. Steel was to
Taft. Taft's attempts to break up U.S. Steel (a corporation established when Andrew Carnegie sold nearly
all of his U.S. holdings to men such as Charles Schwab, John David Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan) were as
successful as the break up of Standard Oil. While Taft won a few legal battles, Schwab, Rockefeller, and
Morgan continued to enjoy nearly unchecked power, authority and wealth as Taft's one-term administration
came to a close in 1912.
Taft's history in the Progressive conservation movement is even less effective than his dealings with
labor or big business. The president fired Teddy Roosevelt's right-hand man in the conservation movement,
Gifford Pinchot, ultimately costing the Republicans needed votes among environmental and conservative-
minded western voters. However, Taft tended to hold true to the notion that the federal government's roles in
regulating the environment must be severely limited, instead wanting states to take the lead in conservation.
Taft, adhering to a hands-off policy established by the Rutherford B. Hays in 1877 and possibly due
to his belief in the inherent power of state governments, typically refused to get involved in racial matters
such as segregation or lynchings. Although just before leaving office in 1913, Taft vetoed a resolution that
would have allowed the federal government to prohibit entrance to the U.S. for any immigrant who failed
to demonstrate a basic literacy in English. Taft's record on progressive domestic affairs is scant, at best,
in part due to his unpopularity at home. Typically, when American presidents are incapable of forwarding
meaningful domestic agendas, they tend to become more involved in foreign ventures, where presidents wield
more power and are outside of the direct control of the legislative branch of the government.
WOODROW WILSON:
The Crusader President
The Progressive era president most closely associated with establishing the relationship between the
federal government and the economy as well as creating the now widespread American belief in the necessity
of the federal government to control the U.S. economy was Woodrow Wilson.
17
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, as demonstrated in the Taft's administration's inability to effectively
regulate monopolies, was narrowly applied by the court to the extent that only monopolies that were illegally
established could be confronted by the federal government. To close this loophole, Congress passed and
Wilson signed into law the Clayton Act. Wilson, when campaigning in 1912, promised Americans that as
president he would more aggressively than his predecessors attack all constraint of trade in order to create
an open market. (In 1917 Wilson called for the creation of an international economic system unconstrained
by even tariffs.) The Clayton Act fell short of Wilson's election-year promises. Instead of forging a stronger
weapon, the Clayton Act merely enacted more harsh penalties for corporations that were found guilty of
breaking the Sherman Act.
Wilson was successful, however, in getting legislation passed that would assist American workers. In
1914, and by the Progressive Wisconsin Republican "Fighting" Bob La Follette, the La Follette-Peters Act
limited women garment workers in Washington D.C. to working eight hours per day. In 1915 La Follette's
Seaman's Act tried to help American sailors by restricting their working hours and enhancing their working
conditions. The Adamson Act prohibited American rail workers from working more than eight hours per
day. The first measure was adopted in order to protect the traditionally-viewed job of women as caregivers
and homemakers, while the other two acts were passed for safety reasons. Wilson supported the adoption of
these measures.
Wilson also supported the expansion of the scope and depth of the federal government in very particular
instances, such as when he signed into law the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The piece of Progressive
legislation, authored by Representative Carter Glass (D-VA) and Senator Robert Owen (D-OK), provided
"for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting
commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other
purposes." Interestingly enough, Wilson did not support the legislation on the idea that a singular, federally-
regulated currency would help consumers, but rather the adoption of the act would benefit business. Unlike
popular myth, the Federal Reserve was not under the complete control of the federal government but rather
consisted of a coalition of federal and private banks. Private banks that joined the Federal Reserve system
were granted certain perks, such as access to low-interest loans. The Act did have its critics, such as
Representative (R-MN) Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. who called the Federal Reserve "the most gigantic trust
on earth . . . [and] . . . the worst legislative crime of the ages." Lindbergh will be better known for being
the father of the first person to cross the Atlantic by airplane: Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., who was also a
supporter of Nazi Germany during the 1940s.
Finally, Wilson oversaw the passage of four amendments to the U.S. Constitution during his two terms.
The Sixteenth Amendment authorized the federal government to adopt and collect a national income tax.
The Seventeenth Amendment provided for the direct and popular election of U.S. Senators. The Eighteenth
Amendment, aka Prohibition, made it illegal to do just about anything with alcohol, except to consume it.
And, the Nineteenth Amendment allowed universal suffrage.
THE DISINHERITED:
PROGRESSIVISM'S LIMITS
Progressive reformers certainly were unable to effect positive change for all Americans and in all aspects
of life, liberty, and happiness. There were three groups of Americans who typically did not realize change or
were not the focus of Progressive reformers: Blacks, Indians, and Women.
African Americans
Reconstruction resulted in new rights, liberties, and opportunities for the black people throughout the
United States. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment provided for equal
treatment of all citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment provided for universal male suffrage. However, those
rights existed on paper but not in practice. Most of the civil rights groups and legislation of the 1870s was
disbanded, declared unconstitutional, or severely limited in interpretation, such as the 1875 Civil Rights
Acts in which the Supreme Court declared that federal laws regarding equal treatment applied to states,
thus it was not illegal or unconstitutional for individuals to discriminate, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Segregation was codified in the decades following the Civil War. Across the South "Black Codes" created
two socio-legal systems: one for white people and one for black people. Blacks were typically prohibited from
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CHAPTER 2. THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART II)
living within city limits, thus they were forced to live outside the white populations. Blacks and whites were
prohibited from working together, from traveling together, or from taking advantage of the same educational
opportunities.
Black men were disenfranchised through the use of poll taxes or literacy tests. If you could not pay
the tax or could not pass the literacy examination, then you were prohibited from voting. Overwhelmingly,
blacks were the targets of these new laws.
The Supreme Court declared the constitutionality of many southern laws that created separate living
areas, work areas, and educational opportunities for white and black citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896,
established the "separate but equal" clause of the U.S. Constitution when the Supreme Court sided with
the state of Louisiana, which had laws prohibiting blacks and whites from traveling on the same trains.
As Justice Henry Brown wrote, "The object of the [Fourteenth A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce
the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been
intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality,
or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." In other words, states were not
discriminating if states provided for separate facilities in regards to non-political matters based on racial
ideas because of the Supreme Court's use of the term "equal." For Americans today, "equal" means the same.
For the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century, "equal" meant similar but not the same. For example,
today your professors are prohibited from mandating exams based on race or gender (all female students
will take one exam while all male students take another exam), yet for Progressive era Americans you were
being treated equally as long as both groups were allowed access to educational opportunities.
Progressive presidents tended to ignore the plight of African Americans as well as their calls for equality.
Roosevelt did invite Booker T. Washington to a White House dinner. A Memphis newspaper called Roo-
sevelt's decision to eat with a black man a "damnable outrage." Roosevelt, like his progressive presidential
colleagues, tended to emphasize his connections to the South, even going so far as to send flowers to the
widow of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Wilson was from the South (born in Virginia). As
president, Wilson hosted a White House screening of the film Birth of a Nation, which was based on the novel
"The Klansmen," in which the Klan was shown to be heroes to the South and protectors of southern women's
purity while also portraying blacks as alcohol-fueled, sex-crazed, people unwilling, unable, and uninterested
in working for a living.
Another reason why Progressive reforms failed to reach most African Americans was the popularly-held
notion of "White Man's Burden." Rudyard Kipling, a British subject who was born and worked in imperial
India, wrote often acknowledging the trials and tribulations of the British imperial system, however, his
poem while also extolling the necessity of Britain's empire because of the good being performed around the
world in bringing western political, social, economic, and very importantly, religious ideas to the heathens
of the world. He penned this 1899 poem, entitled "White Man's Burden" in part, to give support to the
American efforts in the Philippines, as if to poetically assure Americans that their cause was just and noble:
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.
Overwhelmingly, Progressive reformers did not look upon African Americans as needing tutelage, rather
they looked upon the need of bringing American political, social, economic, and religious ideas to the less-
fortunate around the world, such as in the Philippines. Senator Albert Beveridge (R-Ind) articulated the
necessity of the United States being active in helping to civilize the Philippine people arguing that unless
the U.S. helped them to develop western ideas and practices over there, those people might migrate to the
United States. Beveridge also believed in the special mission of the United States, evidence by his 1898
speech entitled "March of the Flag" when he asked, "Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than
19
a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue
their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed
reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the
hearts of all mankind?"
During the Progressive Era, American decision-makers' attentions were certainly not focused on the
plight of minorities. One sad reality of the federal government turning their backs towards the newly-freed
citizens in 1877 was lynching. The episodes of lynchings throughout the South increased ach decade. In the
wake of the Great War, blacks began to be lynched in increasing numbers in the North and in the West.
Those who participated in these murders typically held no fear of arrest or incarceration as many of the
perpetrators had their photograph taken next to the dead black people. These photos were then sold as
souvenirs throughout the United States.
Lynchings were extrajudicial punishment and thus were, by definition, murder. However, almost no one
was arrested for these murders. Local and state officials turned blind eyes, and at times were even complicit
in the lynchings. Thus, American reformers, such as Ida B. Wells, sought help from the federal government.
After the death of three close friends by the hands of a white mob, and after no support from the local
police, Wells wrote: "The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the
Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can
do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to
ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is
therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and
property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused
by white persons."
Wells tried, unsuccessfully, to get the U.S. Congress to make lynching a federal crime. She did succeed,
however, in helping black women by founding the National Association of Colored Women as well as helping
all black people through the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). She worked tirelessly for a wide range of reform movements including woman suffrage. Nonethe-
less, she is most known for her work regarding lynching, publishing many works to include an 1895 book
entitled The Red Record. Following World War II President Harry S. Truman supported legislation to make
lynching a federal crime. He too was unsuccessful. Interestingly enough, while most Progressive reform
bypassed African Americans, the reality of marginalized black male voters might have been one reason why
so many black women such as Ida B. Wells became active in so many Progressive Era movements.
Native Americans
Throughout Reconstruction, U.S. policy towards Native Americans typically resulted in their marginal-
ization. Believing in his invincibility, General George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry to their ultimate
demise in the early summer of 1876 in an area of the Dakota Territory known as Greasy Grass by the Lakota
Sioux. The "Battle of Little Bighorn," as Americans referred to the first successful plains Indians assault on
U.S. forces since the Blackhawk Wars of the early nineteenth century, launched the career of Ruth Custer as
a professional widow and refocused American might to remove the "Indian threat" from the West (especially
in areas were Americans discovered huge quantities of gold, such as in the Black Hills region of the Dakota
Territory). American pursuit of the various Sioux Indians ended in December 1890 when several hundred
women and children were gunned down by elements of the new 7th Cavalry (Custer's old unit) using cannons
and the new Gatling gun, which fired hundreds of rounds per minute. Forced upon the reservation, the U.S
.government concluded the "Indian Wars," which began during the early colonial period.
Yet the reservation system seemed to run counter to American ideas on life, liberty, and property owner-
ship since the Indians were prohibited from private ownership on the reservations and of course the Homestead
Act (1862) did not apply to Indians. Senator Dawes introduced a new way of organizing the reservations
along the ideas of American life, liberty, and property rights.
The Dawes-Severalty Act cut the reservations into homesteads. Indians were allowed to privately own
their own homesteads, provided that they did not engage in any "Indian" activities. In fact, Indians were
allowed to become American citizens, provided that they "adopted the habits of civilized life." To help the
Indians adopt said "civilized life" and to evolve into proper Americans, Indian schools began all over the
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CHAPTER 2. THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART II)
country with the financial support of the U.S. government and under the control, typically, of Christian
missionary organizations. One of the most well-known of these schools was located in Pennsylvania, the
Carlisle School, established by an Army officer named Richard Pratt who spent some of his early military
career attempting to educate Indian prisoners. The Carlisle school came into existence because Pratt was
unsuccessful in placing any of his released students into traditional universities. Not unlike blacks or women,
most American universities refused to accept Indians as students.
Regardless if it was at the Carlisle school or any one of the over 150 similar schools throughout the
United States by 1900, Indian children were removed from their tribal-familial surroundings and taken to
these schools where they would be dressed like Americans, have their hair cut like Americans, and be taught
like Americans with the hope that upon graduation these folks who resembled Indians but acted, spoke, and
thought like Americans would return to their tribal-familial lands and lead the continued Americanization
of their people. Some Carlisle graduates went on to prosper such as a Sioux named Ohiyesa who eventually
earned a degree in medicine from the Catholic-run Boston University, completed his transformation by
adopting a new name: Charles Eastman and marrying a white woman and the two spent their lives working
to help alleviate the plight of Indians throughout the United States. Another Carlisle graduate, Reginald
Oshkosh, used the tools he developed to successfully help his people (the Menomonee tribe in Wisconsin)
prevent the state and federal governments from illegally seizing tribal lands.
Again, was this more about helping these people or more about controlling these people? Overall,
Progressive reformers tended to most ignore the plight (and fate) of Native Americans. In 1924, Indians
were recognized as citizens and granted all rights and privileges of citizenship(three years after women were
granted the right to vote). Most remain on ancestral lands today.
Women
One might be surprised to see the inclusion of women as a marginalized group akin to Indians and African
Americans. On one hand, women during the Progressive Era successfully gained rights that put them on an
equal political playing field with men and women certainly were exceptionally active in leading many of the
Progressive reform movements, especially in regards to social programs. Nonetheless, not unlike the Gilded
Age, if you scratched the golden surface of women's accomplishments, you would see the dross of how the
Progressive Era affected women.
One of the largest reform movements to target women focused on the home. Traditional Victorian homes
were too large, nebulous, and ineffectively designed. To help women, some reformers, such as Marion Talbot,
called for families to leave their family-unfriendly homes and move into apartments that would be easier for
women to clean and manage. Cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing were no longer tasks to be performed
without thought or preparation. Instead, housewives could benefit from a more scientific approach to their
God-given duties. In response to the scientific management movement "home economics" courses were offered
in colleges so that middle-class women could learn how to properly manage all facets of their future husbands'
homes. And while you might conclude that women's participation in college was necessarily beneficial, in
this case these college classes were designed and offered to further entrench sexual division of labor. Women
were in charge of governing their homes, and men were in charge of governing the world.
Still, some reformers believed that women's natural jobs in managing the household would necessarily
prepare them for responsibilities in public life, as argued by Ellen Richards, a home economics professor at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Richards was an exception, however because after marrying a
colleague at MIT, she did not resign her post. The reality for most American women was that marriage
signaled the end of their professional life and the beginning of their life as a housewife and mother.
Of course women participated in the household income by working outside of the home. Factory work
was relatively easy to secure, but the hours were long, the health and safety of the employees were typically
not concerns of their employers, and the pay was low. Nevertheless, women (especially immigrants) easily
found jobs in textile factories. In an era that lacked any sort of meaningful federal, state, or local regulation
or oversight of industries, workers were occasionally injured and even killed. Possibly no better example of
such was the fire that engulfed the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911.
Located in New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company employed women, men, and children. To
ensure that the workers did not leave their shifts prematurely, duck out for unofficial breaks, or otherwise
21
engage in activities that slowed down production, the owner of the factory nailed the windows shut. The
doors were locked and many entrance ways were blocked by a steel security gate. Unable to safely escape
when a fire broke out among the three floors of a ten-story building, many workers broke windows opened
and took a leap of faith -only to meet their certain demise upon slamming into the sidewalks below. Not
unlike those who jumped from the Twin Towers ninety years later, the New Yorkers were shocked as person
after person jumped to their deaths. According to a New York Times eyewitness, "one poor little creature
jumped. There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crasjed through it, wrecking
it and breaking her body nto a thousand piece."
Approximately 146 people perished -some from jumping to their death, others from being burned alive,
while others died from smoke inhalation. One result of the fire and deaths was the creation of the New
York State Factory Commission. Tasked with regulating the health and safety issues of factory workers,
the Commission was chaired by Robert Wagner, co-chaired by Al Smith, and Frances Perkins was the chief
Investigator. Wagner and Smith will play very important roles regarding labor during the presidency of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the later will become the first female Cabinet member).
Finally, there was the "servant girl problem." Young women (and overwhelming immigrants) took domes-
tic housekeeping jobs for wealthy families throughout the U.S. These workers were typically the first ones
up and the last ones to bed in their households. They worked at least six days a week and were typically
given part of Sundays off to attend church. They cleaned the homes, cooked the families' food, and watched
over the children. They did the laundry and the shopping and served the family and guests. Upper-class
families who typically hired these women tended not to embrace the notion that there existed any problem
with these young girls working 16 hours a day, six days a week. Regardless of the physical, verbal and sexual
abuse that these servant girls routinely experienced, middle-class reformers were unable to effect any relevant
change partly due to the fact that these servant girls worked in private homes and usually out of the public
eye. For some, the servant girl problem was more comical than serious. In 1905 a silent film entitled "The
Servant Girl Problem" demonstrated how a bumbling servant girl caused havoc in an American household.
One year later the Bostonian social reformer Edward Filene (owner of Filene's department stores) published
an article in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, arguing that servant girls'
working conditions were not as bad as women working in factories or even department stores. Filene argued
that working conditions worsened in conjunction with jobs that lacked skills. Thus, as working in factories
took the least amount of skill, working conditions for women were worse in factories. You had to be skillful,
a la Christine Frederick, to work as a servant girl so the plight of "servant girls" would be passed over by
Progressive reformers.
Emma Smith DeVoe, an example of a Progressive era reformer and in the mold of her fellow reformers,
did not quit when women were granted the right to vote in her new home state of Washington in 1910.
DeVoe believed that women still lacked political rights, and in 1911 she helped create the National Council
of Women Voters, the forerunner for today's League of Women Voters. Rising to the position of president,
DeVoe worked tirelessly for the adoption of women's suffrage and was present when Washington voted in
support of the Nineteenth Amendment on March 23, 1920. DeVoe died in 1927 at the age of 79. Announcing
her death, a Seattle-area newspaper called DeVoe a "Mother of Woman Suffrage."
CONCLUSION
The Progressive Era can be seen as the culmination of decades upon decades of attempts to change, alter,
or otherwise address "problems" in American society. The seeds of every Progressive Era reform movement
were planted between the Revolution and the Civil War from racial and gender equality to moral reform.
Some few view these reforms as attempts to improve or better American society. Others view Progressive
reforms as social control of the massive immigrates. What separates help and control? A better question
might be why did the Progressive era happen when it did? First, Progressive Era reformers moderately
attacked much of the success and excess of the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts, Hills, and Carnegies left a wake
of socio-economic disruption that American farmers attempted, but initially failed, to address. Thus, some
people might look at the Progressive Era as a completion of many of the ideas of the Populists.
Second, the reader needs to consider the Jeffersonian ideal of independent, rural farmers versus the
Hamiltonian idea on factory working urbanites. As the U.S. economy shifted from an agriculture-based to
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CHAPTER 2. THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART II)
an industrial-based economy, massive changes effected this country. Many of those changes, such as over-
crowding, health and safety issues, and social services inherent to city life had not been addressed. Americans
also needed to change their ideas on the role of government. Typically, Americans had viewed government
as the antithesis to their liberties, however, an industrial-based economy demanded more government inter-
vention and thus Americans had to wrestle with the results of industrialism.
Finally, U.S. presidents supported moderate change. Teddy Roosevelt believed there were differences
between good and bad monopolies, and thus one new role of the federal government was to protect Amer-
ican consumers from those bad monopolies. Wilson saw the necessity of change to the American financial
institutions as a necessity of successful industrialization.
The role of immigration cannot be over estimated in the Progressive Era. Ever since Haymarket, Amer-
icans connected labor unions with anarchism and socialism. Socialists, who were overwhelmingly connected
to central European immigrants (particularly Germans) were a growing and important body of voters in the
U.S. during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Native-born Americans might have viewed their
calls for change to be more extreme than those ideas that Americans farmers had promoted in the years
immediately following the Civil War. Ideas of American Progressive reformers, who had a tendency of being
Protestant, and who believed in the inherent value of American democracy and American capitalism, seemed
much more moderate than the ideas of German Socialists. Those Muckrakers might be publishing explosive
essays on Standard Oil or the American meat and dairy industries, but at least they were not lobbing actual
bombs, unlike anarchists during the World War I era.
The best question might be when and why did the Progressive Era end? The New Deal can easily
be examined as a continuation of the Progressive Era and the Great Society legislation of the Johnson
administration a continuation of the presidencies of Roosevelt and Truman. In other words, the Progressive
baton was picked up by future presidents. Progressive reform even blossomed during the presidency of
Richard Nixon - the creation of the Department of Energy to deal with the oil embargo and the creation of
the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as Nixon's support for the Clean Air Bill and the Clean Water
Bill. Although examples of progressive social, economic, political, and religious achievements will certainly
be evident throughout the twentieth century, the beginning of the end of the Progressive Era, as we define
it, begins in the next chapter.
Chronology
1889 Jane Addams founds Hull House in Chicago
1901 U. S. Steel Corporation founded first billion dollar corporation.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth; Tammany Hall
overthrown
1896 Wabash vs Illinois-U. S. Supreme Court
outlawed state regulation of interstate commerce
1898 Spanish-American War
1899 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
1900 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) founded; Carrie
Chapman Catt becomes president of National American Woman Suffrage Movement
1901 McKinley assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president; Colonial war fought in Philippines
1902 Roosevelt mediates coal strike; Roosevelt orders attorney
general to bring suit to dissolve Northern Securities; Jane Addams,
Democracy and Social Ethics
1903 Maria Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils
W. E. B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folks
Revolution organized in Panama
1. Roosevelt elected president; Northern Securities Case resolved; Lincoln
Steffens, The Shame of the Cities; Ida Tarbell, History the Standard Oil Company; John Moody, The Truth
About Trusts;
23
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine
1905 International Workers of the World (IWW) organized; Pinchot
head of the U. S. Forest Service; Roosevelt mediates Russo-
Japanese War settlement; At Roosevelt's urging San Francisco desegregates schools
1906 David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate; Hepburn Act to regulate
railroads; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle; Pure Food and Drug Act; Meat Inspection
Act; Roosevelt wins Nobel Peace Prize
1908 William Howard Taft elected president
1909 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded;
Ballinger controversy
1910 Push for woman suffrage increases with several new states granting women the right to vote; Mann-
Elkins Act empowered; Interstate Commerce Commission
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire; Standard Oil dissolved
1912 Three way election - GOP (Taft), Progressives (T. Roosevelt), and Democrats (Wilson). Wilson
elected; U. S. troops in Mexico
1913 Pujo Committee; Federal Reserve Act;
Sixteenth Amendment-income tax
Seventeenth Amendment-direct election of senators; 30,000 march in New
York for woman's suffrage
1914 Clayton Anti-trust Act; Completion of Panama Canal; Federal Trade Commission
Act
1915 Congressional Union founded to push for woman suffrage
1916 Federal Farm Loan Act; Wilson re-elected;
Margaret Higgins Sanger opens birth control clinic
1918 Jeanette Rankin introduced suffrage amendment that passed the House
1919 Eighteenth Amendment-prohibition
1920 Nineteenth Amendment-woman's suffrage
SUGGESTED READINGS
John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore
(1983).
Robert Morse Crunden, Ministers of Reform; The Progressives' Achievement in
American Civilization, 1889-1920 (1984).
David B. Danbom, "The World of Hope": Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical
Public Life. (1987).
Noralee Frankel and Nancy F. Dye, (eds.) Gender, Class, Race and Reform in the
Progressive Era (1991).
Elizabeth Frost and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, Women's Suffrage in America, An
Eyewitness Report (1995).
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Byran to F.D.R. (1955).
Harold Howland, Theodore Roosevelt (1921).
William O'Neill, The Progressive Years: America Comes of Age (1975).
John Lugton Safford, Pragmatism and the Progressive Movement in the United States:
The Origins of the New Social Sciences (1987).
Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider, American Women in the Progressive Era,
1900-1920 (1994).
Mildred I. Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: An Exploratory Study of an American
Black Woman, 1893-1930 (1990).
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynching: Southern Horrors, A Red Record Mob Rule in New
Orleans (1991).
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (ed)., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman
Suffrage Movement (1995).
24 CHAPTER 2. THE PROGRESSIVE ERA (PART II)
Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform (1962).
Chapter 3
The Great War (Part I)'
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26 CHAPTER 3. THE GREAT WAR (PART I)
Chapter 4
Great War (Part 11)'
Curbing Dissent at Home
The Spirit of '76 was envisioned as another patriotic movie. Set during the American Revolution, the
idea behind the movie was that the colonists were unprepared to battle let alone win in a war against the
largest, best military in the world. In the end, Americans were victorious and thus the message of the movie
was that we were unprepared before yet we did what was necessary to win and we are unprepared now yet
we will again do what is necessary to beat down the proud. The director of the movie, Robert Goldstein
(a Jewish American of German descent) portrayed the British as not only the enemy (which they were) but
unfortunately for him also decided to portray British acts of brutality (which there were many). It was an
ill-fated decision for Goldstein because when the movie came out (1917) the British were our allies and thus
portraying our allies in unfavorable light brought not only ridicule upon Goldstein, but also his arrest and
imprisonment. He was arrested for and found guilt of breaking the 1918 Sedition Act by showing the two
war-time allies (Great Britain and the US) fighting against one another. Wilson will cut short his ten-year
sentence with a presidential pardon after serving 18 months in prison.
One of the first victims of nearly every US war is the First Amendment. Luckily, it is a resilient piece
of work and thus will bounce back. The Alien Act (1917) and the Sedition Act temporarily trumped
American's rights to religious freedom, speak freely, publish freely, or to freely petition the government. The
Espionage Act made it a crime to pass information with the intent of harming the success of American armed
forces. Eugene Debs (labor leader, Socialist, perennial presidential candidate) was arrested for making an
anti-American speech. He was tried and found guilty under the Espionage Act, even thought the Act did
not specifically prohibit speaking against the government. Thus, to shore up the Espionage Act, Congress
passed the Sedition Act which expressly prohibited speaking, writing, publishing or allowing to speak, write
or publish anything against the federal government, the US war effort, or its allies or "incite insubordination,
disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States" to include interfering
with recruitment operations.
The Attorney General, Thomas Gregory, instructed the Postmaster General, Albert Burleson, to censure
and if necessary discontinue delivering any anti-American or pro-German mail (letters, magazines, and
newspapers). Gregory supported the work of the American Protective League's (APL). The APL curbed
dissent at home by compelling German-Americans to sign a pledge of allegiance. The APL also conducted
extra-governmental surveillance on pro-German activities and organizations (such as unions).
Gregory and Burleson targeted thousands of suspected enemies of the state to include such prominent
Socialists as Eugene Debs, Mary Harris Jones (aka "Mother Jones), Emma Goldstein and Max Eastman
because of their use of the US mail to distribute what Gregory and Burleson considered to be un-American
literature. Besides Socialist newspapers such as The Call, Burleson prohibited the delivery of what he
considered to be anti-British publications such as The Irish World and The Gaelic American.
Anti-German fervor during the Great War resulted in the renaming of German (or German-sounding)
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CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
food. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage. Frankfurters became hot dogs, and Salisbury Steak turned into
meat loaf. The American Defense Society (an organization established to protect the US in the wake of
the Lusitania sinking), with President Teddy Roosevelt as its honorary president, petitioned Congress to
prohibit the study of German in all public schools. They also called for compulsory military training for all
men between 18 and 21, and for "greater activity in the internment of enemy aliens and sympathizers."
Extralegal organizations, such as the Wisconsin Loyalty League sought to control their relatively large
German population as well as their own elected officials who questioned the war. For example, Wisconsin
Senator Bob LaFollette, a Progressive Democrat, decried American entry into the war on the basis that
the US had indeed been breaking international law by shipping explosives on civilian ships (such as the
Lusitania) and thus going to war to protect neutral rights was absurd. Ex-president Teddy Roosevelt called
LaFollette a "shadow Hun" and "the most sinister enemy of democracy in the United States."
Wisconsin voters from the industrial southeast part of the state seemed to side with LaFollette because
the voters of Milwaukee, the state's largest city, elected a string of Socialist mayors to include Emil Seidel
(1910-1916) and the longest sitting Socialist politician on US history, Daniel Hoan (1916-1940). They also
sent this nation's first Socialist congressman to the US House of Representatives: Victor Berger (1910-1912,
1918-1920, 1922-1928). Wisconsin voters seemed to be out of step with the majority of American leader such
as Gregory. "May God have mercy on [dissenters]," said the US Attorney General, "for they need expect
none from an outraged people and an avenging government."
In early September, Congress passed a bill that required all German-language newspapers published in
the United States to print an English translation "of any comment respecting the Government of the United
States, or of any nation with which Germany is at war, its policies, international relations, the state or
conduct of the war, or any matter relating thereto," according to Senator William King (D-Utah) in his
attempt to rid this country of newspapers that spread, as he called it, "the blackest treason."
In 1919, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Charles
Schenck was one of the leaders of the Socialist Party of America and as such oversaw the distribution of
pamphlets, to include tens of thousands sent to men of draft age, urging them to not serve if drafted arguing
that the draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment. In a unanimous decision, the thrice-wounded Civil War
veteran Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, stated "[w]hen a nation is at war many things that might
be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as
men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right." In other words,
the needs of the state supersede the needs of the individual and thus dissent was codified.
Armistice did not end anti-German hysteria. While most Americans were celebrating the end of the war,
38 "dangerous enemy aliens" were rounded up in New York and were sent to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia for
undetermined lengths of time, to include three officers of the Bayer Company (a German pharmaceutical
firm known for its aspirin that opened a branch office in the United States in the early twentieth century).
The Home Front
In 1914, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which created the Cooperative Extension Service in
order to develop more effective agricultural and animal husbandry classes, programs, and use in and of land
grant institutions such as Washington State University, Texas Agriculture & Mining, and the University of
Wisconsin. Yet the Act also mandated land grant universities to share their knowledge with non-students
(hence the "Extension" part of the title).
Once the US openly joined the war, Congress worked to ensure that Americans at home and abroad
had sufficient resources and thus Congress adopted the Fuel and Food Control Act in 1917. The Fuel
Administration controlled the production, distribution, and price of fuels (oil, gas, and coal, for example)
and was led by Dr. Harry A. Garfield -son of and witness to the assassination of President James B. Garfield
in 1881. Like many of the men whom Wilson surrounded himself, Garfield was an academic serving as a
professor at Princeton (when Wilson presided as the college's president) and as the president of Williams
College in Massachusetts.
Although Garfield was a Republican, Wilson and Garfield were connected as academics as well as Progres-
sive thinkers who believed in the transformative nature of the human spirit. According to Garfield, academia
was the place were "cultivated men, earnest and seeking by all ways to advance the cause of civilization."
29
And thus, as Wilson's Secretary of War Newton Baker said, "The President had unlimited confidence in
Garfield." Unlike Garfield's colleagues on Wilson's Cabinet and heading various war time organizations,
Garfield did not seek absolute power within the organization he led nor throughout American society.
At a meeting of the Academy of Political Science, Garfield offered a justification for the Fuel Adminis-
tration's existence as well as assurances that under his watch the Fuel Administration will not nationalize
the fuel industry. In his speech entitled "Task of the Fuel Administration," the gap between the fuel needs
of a country at war compared to the needs of the US in 1916 would be largely met through conservation,
he argued. In an example of the government-academic cooperation that will be a characteristic of American
society ever since World War II, Garfield turned to scientists and mathematicians in academia to resolve
some of the issues pertaining to fuel conservation.
Using the authority of the 1917 Act, President Wilson issued Executive Order 2679A, creating the US
Food Administration. Headed by future president Herbert Hoover, the Food Administration was tasked with
assuring the supply, distribution, and conservation of food during the war, facilitating transportation of food,
preventing monopolies and hoarding, and maintaining governmental power over foods by using voluntary
agreements and a licensing system. In trying to get Americans to conserve what they have and to use less
of what can be grown or made, Hoover promoted "Meatless Mondays" and "Wheatless Wednesdays."
The Food Administration asked Americans to grow their own vegetables (called "Victory Gardens") and
to pledge to follow the call to preserve, consume less, and grow more in order to ensure that sufficient
meat, wheat, fats, and sugars make it to the US troops and American allies. The Milwaukee Journal, the
largest daily in Wisconsin, proclaimed that 100% of their citizens took the pledge to eat less and preserve
more. Wisconsin had more German immigrants than any other state. Wisconsin also had an active Socialist
movement and thus it was psychologically important for the owners of that newspaper to advertise a claim
that was more than merely improbable. The publishers of Good Housekeeping urged its readers to support
the government efforts believing that:
"its large circle of earnest, patriotic women readers will respond gladly to a call to service at home. It
is a tremendous task-this one of conservation and elimination of waste. Every woman is urged to do her
part. It can best be done through close cooperation with the government. Enlist now and pledge yourself to
do your share."
Finally, the War Industries Board (WIB), created in the mid-summer of 1917, was another federal agency
tasked with ensuring that Americans at home and abroad had access to acceptably priced merchandise and
equipment. The WIB was led by Bernard Baruch, a friend of Wilson's in academia and business. A graduate
of City College of New York, Baruch made his first million by his thirtieth birthday (1900) as a Wall Street
trader and financier. Baruch was a major financial donor as well as unpaid adviser to the Democratic Party
for most of his adult life. As part of Wilson's "War Cabinet," Baruch worked closely with Hoover. While
Hoover's emphasis was on agriculture, Baruch focused on American industry. The WIB was ordered into
a series of divisions that oversaw all aspects of war needs from distribution of raw resources to control of
prices on the finished goods to include chemical, steel, textile, rubber, and leather goods.
Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, created the National War Labor Board (NWLB) in 1918. While
the WIB consisted of military personnel and public servants, the NWLB was composed of civilians, mainly
from labor unions, industrial management, and the general public. This group was tasked with settling labor
issues, disputes, and other issues that otherwise might negatively affect this country's wartime production.
Wartime Diplomacy
Woodrow Wilson envisioned a quick war. A combination of coordination among the US and its allies in
food production, equipment needs, and communications was facilitated by the various government programs
and agencies that fell under the rubric of Wilson's War Cabinet such as the War Industries Board, the Fuel
Administration, and the Food Administration. International "cooperation" among the Allies was evident
through the creation of the Supreme War Council. The US representative to this group was Wilson's Army
Chief of Staff, Tasker H. Bliss. Initially, the Council was tasked with coordinating allied military action.
Ultimately, the Council will prove to be more effective as a space where the allies discussed diplomatic
endeavors to include how to bring an end to the war, and what should be included in the peace treaty.
Wilson's outlined his goals for how the war will end as well as for how Europe (and the world) will be rebuilt
30
CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
in a speech he gave on January 8th, 1918.
Those ideas came from the work of academics: a group of men that Wilson called "The Inquiry." Meeting
in secret at the offices of the American Geographic Society in New York City, these scholars researched and
discussed various post-war options for Europe. The Inquiry is very much the forerunner to today's Think
Tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Pew Research Center. "We are skimming the cream of the
younger and more imaginative scholars," declared Walter Lippmann, the 28-year-old Harvard graduate who
recruited the scholars and managed the Inquiry in its formative phase. "What we are on the lookout for is
genius-sheer, startling genius, and nothing else will do."
The suggestions, ideas, and conclusions of the Inquiry culminated in fourteen particular ideas that Wilson
publicly unveiled in early January of 1918 in what is called the "Fourteen Points Address." Reminding the
joint session of Congress that the US got involved in the war not only to protect American liberties at home
but also to spread American liberties throughout the world, Wilson envisioned a world "made fit and safe
to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to
live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by other peoples of the
world as against force and selfish aggression."
Wilson called for international trade unrestricted by law or tariffs, an end to secret treaties and military
alliances, and an end to colonialism. The world would be made safe through vigilant international coop-
eration. As he described it in the final of his fourteen points, "A general association of nations must be
formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence
and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."
England and France (the two allies who fought the longest and sacrificed more in both material and
human lives) did not great Wilson's ideas for a new world order with open arms. For example, Arthur
Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary and one-time Prime Minister, seemed to be uninterested in any sort
of negotiated settlement, instead calling for Germany to provide England and France with "unconditional
restoration and reparation" of all taken, plundered, and destroyed lands. Neither did the Belgian Prime
Minister accept Wilson's extensive plan. Baron Charles de Broqueville merely demanded "reparation for
damages and guarantees against repetition of the aggression." Earlier, Wilson had called for "peace without
victory" which meant that the Allies did not need to crush Germany. The Inquiry and Wilson might have
underestimated the Allies' desire to punish Germany and so Wilson was out of step with his European
counterparts regarding diplomatic goals.
The Peace to End All Peace
Russia had quit the war prematurely and had thus signed its own peace treaty with Germany. Known as
Brest-Litovsk, Russia essentially ceded lands (such as the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland, the Caucasus
Mountains and Poland) to Germany in exchange for the removal of German troops from Russian soil.
However, six days before the Armistice, German officials repudiated the March 3rd, 1918 treaty.
With communists in charge of Russia, only England, France, Italy, and the US met to decide the fate of
the Central Powers. Even though the Cold War would not begin for decades, the seeds of that twentieth-
century conflict were planted at Versailles. Although the western powers wished to crush Germany, they
could not leave Germany in such a state as to allow the Russian Revolution to spread west. For example,
Germany was forced to give back some of Russia's losses as a result of Brest-Litovsk and the League of
Nations in turn created the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia (important speed bumps in the
mind of Soviet leaders to slow down the next German invasion) however American, British, and other Allies
kept troops in Germany through the mid 1920s thus ensuring that the Communist army and its agents would
not be able to move into the beaten, battered, and considerably smaller Germany.
Versailles will also acknowledge the German repudiation of Brest-Litovsk, but also does nothing to directly
help Russia adjudicate, mediate, or guarantee any economic reimbursement from Germany, except to state
that "[t]he Allied and Associated Powers formally reserve the rights of Russia to obtain from Germany
restitution and reparation based on the principles of the present Treaty" (Part III, Section XIV, Article
116). In other words, Russia is on its own to negotiate with Germany.
Wilson took nearly all of the members of the Inquiry, plus his closest friend and unofficial adviser, Col.
Edmund House to France. Wilson also ignored leading Democratic and Republic senators and thus no one
31
should be shocked to find out that the US Senate will never pass the treaty Wilson helped create in Versailles.
The Republicans controlled the Senate, yet Wilson refused to consider adding the Senate's Foreign Relations
Committee chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge, to the American group that went to France.
Wilson's second problem in Versailles was the Allies. France and England had no interest in discussing,
analyzing or negotiating anything: they sought to carve up Germany and its colonies like a group of hunters
carving up a bear after a successful hunt. With the massive destruction to property and lives in England
and France, the allies were not willing to embrace Wilson's "peace without victory" philosophy. The Allies
blamed Germany for starting the war and for all damage and deaths during the war. Parts of Germany
will be carved away and given to France, such as the coal-rich eastern parts of Germany (the Saar Valley).
Germany will lose all of their colonies and Germany itself (or what's left of Germany) will be an occupied
nation until 1926 -the year that Germany is allowed membership into the League of Nations.
Wilson's final problem in Versailles was his health. He had become physically exhausted in large measure
because he decided to lead the US delegation. Some speculate that Wilson even suffered up to three strokes
before he was elected president in 1912. Nonetheless, Wilson was determined to see his vision for a world
"safe for democracy" come true and thus Wilson told a reporter who inquired into the president's health,
"I do not want to do anything foolhardy, but the League of Nations is now in its crisis, and if it fails, I
hate to think what will happen to the world ... I cannot put my personal safety, my health, in the balance
against my duty - I must go." Wilson embarked on a cross-country speaking tour as he attempted to whip
up support for the Treaty in general and the League of Nations in particular. Wilson suffered a massive
stroke in the early fall of 1919. He would not be seen in public for six months.
The Treaty of Versailles was a disaster and set the stage for World War II. Some historians look at the
1920s not as a period between world wars but rather as a lull in one great war that began in August of 1914
with a series of war declarations and ended in August of 1945 with the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy
on Japan.
Treaty Fight at Home
President Wilson's decision to personally lead the US delegation to Versailles while also refusing to even
keep senatorial leaders of his own party aware of the negotiations resulted in a contest back at home regarding
foreign policy. While a fight between the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government
regarding foreign policy was not new, such a fight was also very rare. Nonetheless, ever since the Spanish-
American War, culminating with the passage of the War Powers Act of 1973, US presidents and senators
have been arguing over which branch of the federal government ultimately controls US foreign policy.
The treaty to end the war and to bring to a conclusion all of the issues and problems (as the victors of
the war saw those issues and problems) was signed by all parties on June 28th, 1919. Known as the Treaty of
Versailles, the treaty is divided into sixteen sections, containing a total of 440 articles. France gained control
of some of Germany's more productive coal fields, England seized German colonies in Africa and in Asia;
France and England claimed the frontier of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East to include Palestine
and Syria, and Germany was forced to disarm. The Treaty also demanded Germany to pay for all costs of
the war, and approximately two thousand German politicians and military officers will be tried on a variety
of crimes, mainly due to submarine warfare as the Allies viewed that as less military and more criminal in
nature.
The US Senate had a difficult time getting past the first section of the Treaty, entitled "The Covenant
of the League of Nations." The tenth article of this section describes the collective nature of the League in
so much that an attack against any one member will be considered an attack against all members and thus
"[t]he Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial
integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League." The common understanding of
this clause was that if any member nation is attacked from a foreign power, then all member nations will
mobilize their armed forces to aid in the defense of the attacked member state. Of course the underlying
belief is that no country would dare attack any member of the League because such an attack would result
in the full force of all member armed forces against the aggressor.
The Senate found Article 10 of the Covenant of the League of Nations to be exceptionally troubling
because as they understood it, the US -as a member of the League -would be obligated to enter into every
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CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
war that involves a foreign attack against any member nation. In other words, the US Senate's authority
under Article I, Section VIII of the US Constitution to declare war would be trumped by any tyrant, king,
or madman who invaded a member state. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 16, if any member of
the League attacked any other member, then all members were required to immediately end all trade and
financial relations. The US went to war, in part, over the idea of neutral rights however if the US joined the
League, the trade policy of the US could be determined not by the leaders of this country, but by the treaty
requirements of the League of Nations.
Thirty-nine Senators openly rejected this attack on their Constitutional authority in a letter to include the
Senator from Massachusetts, a leading Republican politician, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge did not reject the whole treaty, he just held reservations on Article
10 and thus Lodge was known as a "Reservationist." Democrats such as William Jennings Bryan supported
this position.
The Republican William Borah served the people of Idaho in the US Senate from 1907 until his death
in 1940. Known as the "Irreconcilables" senators such as Borah rejected the League, in any form, because
of the old Washingtonian-Jeffersonian concern over entangling alliances. Borah spoke for two hours against
the Treaty of Versailles in what one colleague called "one of the Senate's oratorical masterpieces." He began
his attacks against supporting colonialism by reminding the audience of President-elect Abraham Lincoln's
advice to a friend of his in Washington, DC regarding discussions with Confederates on the issues of war:
"Entertain no compromise; have none of it."
Before the Allies completed their work in Versailles, the US had entered its second year of fighting in
Russia. Russia prematurely quit the allied cause in large measure because the czar lost control of his country
as a result of a revolution. By 1918 it was clear that communists had taken control of Russia and thus in
1918, the United States (along with Great Britain and other western nations) invaded Russia. By Labor
Day, 1918, American troops took control of the Russian port town Vladivostok. Under the command of
General William Graves, nearly 8,000 American troops protected the local railroad and supported Czech
troops also fighting against the Russian communists. About 4,000 US troops fought under British command
directly against communist forces in what was known as the Polar Bear Expedition. The United States
actively participated in the Russian civil war until 1920.
One year and one week after the Guns of August fell silent, the US Senate voted to reject the Treaty
of Versailles, US troops occupied and fought in various parts of Russia, President Wilson was recovering
from his latest stroke, Americans were dying from a new illness (see below), and elements of the US Army
were stationed throughout the country, such as on street corners in Omaha, Nebraska. The Treaty fight just
might have been the least important thing on the minds of Americans.
Wartime Amendments
The Great War will indeed play a role in the adoption of two changes to the US Constitution. Although
both changes had been looming on the cultural-political horizon since long before the Civil War, people
and events during the Great War will propel this nation's leaders to try two kinds of changes. One will be
temporary and the other will be permanent.
The push to end the availability of alcohol in the United States picked up steam in the years leading
up to the US entry into World War I. As more and more states tried to codify the making, selling, and
consumption of alcohol, some wondered if states had the power to do so and thus in 1913 Congress passed
the Webb-Kenyon Act to help states enforce their prohibition laws in light of a Supreme Court decision that
struck down dry states' attempts to prohibit the importation of alcohol. In 1917, the Supreme Court ruled
that no one had "a right" to alcohol, thus aligning the Judicial Branch with the Legislative Branch.
By New Years Day, 1916, eighteen states had gone "dry." Leading the anti-prohibition charge was August
Busch, president of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. Busch wanted to make it a crime to drink to excess,
and pledged to work aggressively with the federal and state governments to address the issues of the day.
He even announced that his company was developing a nearly alcohol free beer (less than one-quarter of one
percent of alcohol) and was spending $3,00,000 to build a new plant in St. Louis specifically to make and
distribute this new product.
Shortly after the US officially entered the war but seven months before Congress passed the Eighteenth
33
Amendment, Dr. Irving Fischer (professor of Public Economy at Yale and adviser to Woodrow Wilson)
called for either the immediate end of the war or the immediate acceptance of prohibition. The world needed
bread, the member of the Council of National Defense reported. He said the US was on the verge of a "food
crisis" and taking into consideration all of the food stuffs, energy, and manpower used to make alcohol, the US
could instead produce 11,000,000 one-pound loaves of bread daily. "We shall be wise to adopt [Prohibition]
before we have food riots on our hands" and he curbed his argument with patriotism: "The nation demands
that [anti-prohibitionists] put love of country above love of whisky."
One month before Congress adopted the Eighteenth Amendment and sent it off to the states for ratifica-
tion, the Anti-Saloon League reported that making, selling, and consuming alcohol only aided the German
war effort and questioned the loyalty of Americans of German descent. According to Wayne Wheeler, counsel
for the League, trafficking in alcohol was how anti-American groups finance their "promotion of German ide-
als and German Kultur." "We cannot serve two masters," he said. "America must come first if we are loyal."
Thus, alcohol becomes a symbol of your allegiance during the war. One hundred and forty-four years earlier,
England slapped a tax on tea and thus tea became a symbol of your allegiance. Those who consumed the
taxed good supported England, while those who switched to coffee (an untaxed beverage) were considered
loyal to the cause of the American colonists.
Once Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment and sent it off to the states for ratification, the
American Medical Association announced their support of Prohibition, likening alcohol to slavery and arguing
that the future for the US if it continues to drink can be seen in Germany and likens that country "to a
man suffering from the final stages of 'a horrible disease, leading to insanity, with delusions of grandeur and
magnificence." Medical, social, and religious groups lined up in support of the Eighteenth Amendment.
In early January of 1919, Nebraska ratified the Eighteenth Amendment making it part of the Constitution.
A small news item in the New York Times noted the passing of this nation's oldest brewery, established in
1844. "The Pabst Brewing Company . . . passed out of existence today." Near beer, or nearly alcohol-free
beer, was produced and distributed in an early attempt to keep the brewery industry afloat. The report
concluded, "Milwaukee does not take kindly to near beer." Neither did the rest of this country.
Wars and national emergencies tend to change this country -sometimes for the better and sometimes not.
The adoption of Prohibition is a good example of the former, while the passage of universal suffrage is a good
example of the former. If all you knew about the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was from watching
the 1976 ABC Schoolhouse Rock episode entitled "Sufferin' Till Suffrage," you would think that a bunch of
happy, upbeat, women sporting red bell-bottom jeans, white boots, and blue t-shirts with a lone white star
(note the obvious flag theme) pranced into election booths simply by singing: "Oh we were sufferin', Until
suffrage, Not a woman here could vote, No matter what age. Then the 19th Amendment struck down that
restrictive rule."
American women (and some men) had been trying to, and over time achieved varying degrees of voting
rights for women. Generally speaking, women gained the right to vote in school board elections first, then
municipal elections, and sometimes even in state or territory-wide campaigns. Of course, sometimes the
Supreme Court removed women's right to vote, such as in 1887 when the Court struck down an 1883 vote
in the territory of Washington that granted full suffrage to women. By the Great War, women in Utah,
Colorado, Washington, California, Alaska, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and Montana have the same
political rights as men while women in Illinois are allowed to vote only in presidential elections and white
women could vote in primary elections in Arkansas. Five Midwestern states grant full suffrage to women in
1917 while Rhode Island endorsed partial voting rights. New York became the first eastern state to provide
its female citizens with the same electoral rights as their male citizens. Yet, President Wilson was unable or
unwilling to ride the wave of woman suffrage (not the singular, monolithic use of the noun) as they called it.
Counter to the popular belief that American suffrage suffragists called off their suffrage work in order to
fully support the war efforts not unlike their British counterparts, the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA) affirmed their mission in 1917. Carrie Chapman Catt called a meeting of the Executive
Council days after Secretary of State Robert Lansing announced that US was breaking diplomatic relations
with Germany. The reason for the meeting was to decide is the NAWSA would follow in the footsteps of
British suffragettes or if American suffrage supporters will continue to work in support of universal suffrage.
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CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
The seventy-six members in attendance votes overwhelmingly (63 to 13) to continue to work for universal
suffrage while also supporting the federal government if indeed the US went to war against Germany.
Many women did not support Catt's twin goals, such as pacifists who believed that Catt was selling out
the peaceful message inherent to women in order to further the goals of the NAWSA. Others believed that
Catt and the NAWSA had not gone far enough, such as Alice Paul.
Alice Paul's ideas on how to achieve the right to vote diverged from national leaders of the NAWSA
such as Catt and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw or regional leaders such as Emma Smith Devoe. Catt, Shaw,
DeVoe, and others asked for the right to vote. They were non-partisan. They used "womanly" tactics such
as deferring, being demure, and dressing in the latest fashions. The womanly tactics served DeVoe well when
she successfully facilitated full suffrage for women of Washington. Paul, on the other hand, demanded the
right to vote, blamed those in power (the Democrats during the war) for preventing women to realize the
right to vote, and embraced what were considered "militant" tactics. Paul's militancy included loud protests,
interrupting speeches of politicians, unfurling banners questioning political leaders' judgments, chaining her
to fences, allowing her to be arrested, and going on a hunger strike.
Paul even created and co-led (with Lucy Burns) her own suffrage organization called the National
Woman's Party (NWP). Her target was Wilson and to a lesser extent Catt. "We want to convict Wilson of
evading us," Paul wrote to Burns and Paul questioned Catt's nonpartisanship. Paul also laid the blame of a
lack of equal political rights at the feet of the Democrats in general and thus against Wilson in particular.
Paul's first attempt to win the right to vote was under the banner of the Congressional Union (CU). The
CU believed the best way to obtain the right to vote was through a Constitutional Amendment. Three years
later, Catt announced her "Winning Strategy" which included support of a Constitutional amendment.
The suffrage bill was not moving through the Legislative Branch as quickly as Paul had wished and thus
to bring attention to this fact she led a small march/protest of a few dozen members of the NWP. The event
took place at Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House on August 13, 1918. This was not the
first time that the NWP marched in front of the White House nor was it the first time that the women were
attacked by police. Earlier, plainclothes policemen (reportedly members of the Secret Service) broke up a
NWP demonstration in front of the Russian embassy and tore up their banners and posters, some of which
called into question Wilson's support for democracy by referring to him as "Kaiser Wilson." Paul and many
others will be arrested.
Paul and other NWP members will be repeatedly arrested as the war waged on, and at the August
1918 protest, police were so violent that they broke fingers and wrists on some of the women. Thirty-eight
were arrested. They were booked and released, then they went back to Lafayette Square and resumed their
protest, thus they were arrested again. "We will continue to protest as long as our disenfranchisement exists,"
proclaimed Paul. "Oppression and abuse at the hands of the law merely emphasized the great need of women
for political power." Refusing to eat, forced to sleep on concrete floors, urinate and defecate in communal
pots, housed along side black women, and jailed along side prostitutes carrying syphilis, many of these middle
class white reformers were shocked, as too as the American public who were served story after story in New
York and Washington area newspapers.
Paul would be arrested in October and sentenced to seven months in jail. She would even be sent to a
psychiatric hospital to determine if her actions were the result of some mental or organic disorder. Although
she would be found sane, in November another group of NWP protestors joined Paul in prison. The sadistic
superintendent, Alexander Whitaker, had the women thrown down stairs, threatened with sexual abuse,
and had the women moved from cell to cell by being dragged by their hair. Dorothy Day was beaten by a
group of guards. Alice Consu, who suffered a concussion by the hands of the guards, spent her first night
in prison vomiting. The next Paul et al began a hunger strike. The superintendent responded by having
the women tied down and forced fed by inserting tubes down their throats. Paul referred to these tactics as
"administrative terrorism." Letters and telegrams poured into the offices of Congressmen, Senators, and of
course the Oval Office. Newspapers carried daily stories and Alice Paul's sister, Helen, freely gave interviews
in which she questions Wilson's patriotism and humanity. After weeks of constant pressure, Wilson pardoned
all the women and ordered their immediate release. Wilson was still unprepared to support suffrage however.
His December message to Congress omitted any reference to the issue, later claiming that his messages to
35
Congress were focused on war matters, not social matters. Yet shortly after the state of New York voted
in support of suffrage, Wilson began pressuring members of Congress to vote in support of the federal
amendment. The vote could not have been any closer: 274 to 136, the precise number of votes required
to continue the process. Wilson, meanwhile, refused to publicly support the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment until the fall of 1918 when he connected suffrage at home with his desire to make the world safe
for democracy as evidenced in his Fourteen Points Address of January 1918. "If we reject measures like this,"
Wilson said of woman suffrage, the world will no longer believe in the civilizing mission of the United States.
However, Wilson ultimately couched his support for granting women equal political status as a reward for
their war work.
Wrath of God - Black Scare, Red Scare, Influenza
With the fighting in Europe and over the League of Nations behind them, Americans went back to old
fashion fighting: against other races and against foreign ideas. As the African-Americans who served this
nation during the Great War returned home, some believed that they would be treated as equal members
of American society now that they finally proved their worth on the battle field. Others returned home and
demanded that the US treat them as equal citizens after experiencing no racism from their French hosts.
Simultaneously, white troops returning home noticed the increase in blacks among what were predominately
white northern cities such as New York, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago. The unemployment rate rose, many
black factory workers did not want to give up their new jobs and many white military veterans demanded
that blacks be fired in order to give the whites their jobs back.
Armed black and white men attacked each other. Throughout the country massive race riots exploded in
the summer of 1919. In Chicago white gangs attacked black neighborhoods. The National Guard eventually
ended the attacks and counter attacks that resulted in the death of at least 38 people, nearly 500 wounded,
and the destruction of hundreds of homes and businesses. A similar even unfolded in the nation's capital,
resulting in nearly 200 casualties.
What made the riots in Washington, DC particularly disturbing was that many white US military per-
sonal, freshly back from defending the liberty of England and France, turned against their own countrymen,
women, and children. A few years later, whites in Tulsa attempted to remove all blacks from their town.
The NAACP investigated the incident and reported that the prime reason why whites attacked blacks was
because of the fear of "radicalism" among black residents. When questioned closely, the NAACP discovered
that by "radical" white citizens of Tulsa meant that black citizens were refusing to follow the Jim Crow era
codification of racism and "were asking that the Federal constitutional guaranties of "'life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness' be given regardless of color."
Although race riots will decline as the 1920s ramble on, lynchings will increase to include lynchings of
blacks in northern towns such in Duluth, Minnesota when three black men will be lynched on suspicion of
rape: Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. Ray Stannard Baker, a reporter, author, biographer
of Wilson as well as Wilson's press secretary at the Versailles peace conference and once said that "Every
argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape." Even outside of the
South, whites justified rape on the suspected grounds that the lynched person had raped or tried to rape
and that the victim was a white woman.
Walter White, a writer and the Executive Secretary of the NAACP published an article in The Crisis in
which he outlined the reasons for these race riots, to include the attitudes of African-American veterans:
These men, with their new outlook on life, injected the same spirit of independence into their companions,
a thing that is true of many other sections of America. One of the greatest surprises to many of those who
came down to "clean out the niggers" is that these same "niggers" fought back. Colored men saw their own
kind being killed, heard of many more and believed that their lives and liberty were at stake. In such a spirit
most of the fighting was done.
Racial tension, violence, and death during the "Black Scare" of the 1920s are but precursors to the racial
tension, violence, and death that will characterize the civil rights movement following World War II and
culminating with forced bussing of the 1970s.
Simultaneously, Americans attacked (real and imagined) Socialists, Communists, and those who sympa-
thized with Socialists or Communists. Sometimes those attacked fought back. Unions, union activists, and
36
CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
eastern Europeans in general (especially Poles and Germans) had been intimately linked with Socialism and
Communism ever since the Haymarket Square incident in 1886. Unions had typically been viewed in this
country as un-American because of the collective nature of unionism seemed to counter the individualistic
nature of the United States.
In February of 1919, labor leaders throughout Seattle worked together to hold a city-wide strike. This
"general strike," as they called it, was in protest to a lack of raises. Part of the WIB's role during the war was
to work with labor organizations to keep the salaries low in order for businesses to make more war-related
stuff. Workers were told they were being patriotic by participating in these war time wage controls. Many
workers believed, and some were even led to believe, that once the war was over then wages would naturally
rise.
Shipyard workers were refused a pay raise in 1919 and thus the Metal Trades Council union alliance
declared a strike and closed the yards. Most of the city's unions voted to strike in support of the shipyard
workers. Seattle shut down as more and more businesses were unable to operate (a port town relies heavily
on the use of its ports). By February 11th, the strike had ended as a result of pressure labor leaders felt
from the stationing of thousands of federal troops, state police, and armed volunteers throughout the city.
Most workers had returned to their jobs (expect those from the shipyards who originated the strike) yet
local police decided to use the general strike as a justification for attacking a pro-communist union, the
International Workers of the World as well as the headquarters of the Socialist Party in Seattle. The strike
was a failure for the unions because neither public opinion, nor local media, politicians, even the leaders of
the University of Washington supported their tactics of trying to shut down the city. Although the general
strike in Seattle ended without almost no violence, a "Red Scare" swept across the United States.
Strikes happened in nearly every major city and local politicians reacted with the use of violence. The
American Legion, an organization founded by military veterans in 1919, reported that it had evidence that
communists were to lead a revolution following May Day parades (the first of May was a European day of
celebrating workers although in the US anarchists, socialists, and communists used "May Day" to remember
the Haymarket Square incident).
"Reds Planning to Overthrow U.S. on May Day" American newspapers warned in April on 1919. Package
bombs addressed to prominent Americans were discovered in various US post offices and Boston newspapers
informed the public of a "Bolshevik plot" to over throw this country under the banner headline "REDS PLAN
MAY DAY MURDERS".
The federal government responded to this (real or imagined) fear of a communist takeover by expelling
suspected "alien radicals" such as Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and more than 500 others. Many
states, such as California, adopted loyalty oaths in which you had to pledge to protect the state and the
federal government if you wished to secure certain state jobs. Many of those arrested were denied bail,
denied trial by jury, and in some cases there was no evidence against them except the word of the arresting
authority. In reaction to this attack on Americans' civil rights (especially the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth
amendments), progressive reformers such as Helen Gurley Flynn helped create the American Civil Liberties
Union.
In June of 1919, several bombs went off nearly at the same time throughout the Northeast and in
Washington, DC. One in particular was set off in a carriage parked outside the home of the US Attorney
General, A. Mitchell Palmer. At this time President Wilson was still recovering from his latest stroke and
thus Palmer, working on his own, created a new national intelligence unit called the General Intelligence
Division (GID) and hired a young attorney named Herbert Hoover to lead the GID. During the summer
and fall of 1919, and using the broad powers of the Alien and Espionage Acts, Palmer ordered a series of
attacks against suspected internal enemies. Known as the "Palmer Raids," thousands of suspected radicals
were arrested and held without bail.
One possible reaction to these raids was a massive bombing of Wall Street. On September 16th, 1920,
a horse-drawn carriage parked near the entrance of the J.P. Morgan bank. Nearly forty people were killed
and 400 were injured. "The horrible slaughter and maiming of men and women," wrote the New York Call,
"was a calamity that almost stills the beating of the heart of the people." "There was no objective except
general terrorism," wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The bomb was not directed against any particular
37
person or property. It was directed against a public, anyone who happened to be near or any property in
the neighborhood." The Washington Post labeled it an "act of war." This 1920 attack will be the worst act
of terrorism witnessed in New York for another 81 years.
Even elected officials were not safe during this "Red Scare." Sam DeWitt was elected to the New York
state assembly was expelled because he was a Socialist. The voters of Wisconsin elected Victor Berger to
represent them in Washington, DC on the Socialist ticket. Berger was refused admittance into Congress and
he was expelled from the national capital. The Washington Post applauded the Senate's decision calling it
an "impressive demonstration of Americanism." Berger will be re-elected but will still be barred from taking
his seat Washington, DC.
The political fear of the "Red Scare" following World War II is but a small example of the aligning of
the political universe following World War II when the bipolar world of the Cold War will be the driving
characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century.
Soldiers returning from western Europe will bring back stories, medals, souvenirs, and influenza, which
Americans will call the Spanish Flu in large measure because Spain will be the place where most Americans
soldiers were kept before retuning to the US. The disease inflected approximately 28% of the US population.
Worldwide deaths averaged 30 million people, or, ten times as many people died from the 1918 influenza
pandemic (which probably was born in the trenches and incubated in the overcrowded port towns of Spain
while troops waited for ships to take them back home) than from fighting in the trenches during the Great
War. 1918 saw the end of the Great War and before the first anniversary of the Armistice, 675,000 Americans
will die from influenza.
Conclusion
The "War to End all War", the "War to Make the World Safe for Democracy", the "Great War", and
eventually "World War I" were all phrases used to describe the hostilities that erupted throughout Europe
and the Middle East between 1914 and 1918. When the war came to an end millions of people were dead,
Germany was an occupied nation, American troops were still fighting in Russia and National Guardsmen
had been deployed around this country in wake of the racial and political violence. Americans rejected being
a player on the international stage, influenza ravaged the world, and American literature and art seemed to
reflect this era of death and misery.
The Versailles meeting among American, Italian, French, and British leaders certainly did not settle any
of the big questions that Wilson posed in his January 1918 address. Most of the colonial holdings of the
Ottoman Empire, Austria, and Germany were redistributed among Great Britain, France, and Italy. One
group of people known as the Kurds desperately clung to Wilson's idea on "self determination." They tried
to carve a country for themselves out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire. They
called their country Kurdistan and the League of Nations turned to the United States to tutor the country's
political, economic, and social leaders. The US refused and Kurdistan was consumed among Turkey, Iran,
Iraq, and Syria, not unlike how the world was consumed by the flu. Since the Great War, the Kurds have
been but the fuzzy, yellow tennis ball being smacked around in a game in geo-political mixed doubles among
the governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. We are still dealing with the Kurdish question today.
Palestine was a backwater province of the Ottoman Empire yet Palestinians sought independence and
they were not willing to change one master (Istanbul) for another (England). A young Arab military leader
named Faisal traveled to Versailles in the hopes of being able to convince the Allies to allow Palestine to
become an independent country. The allies refused, Palestine was taken by England. We are still dealing
with the question of Palestine today both in terms of billions of US dollars each year, the cost of the Israeli
occupation, and in the loss of lives.
A young Vietnam nationalist leader named Ho Chi Minh traveled to Versailles in the hopes of meeting
with President Wilson. Minh wanted the help of the US to transform his country from a colonial holding
of France into an independent nation based on the political and economic example of the United States.
Wilson refused to help and ultimately over one million American troops will be sent to fight against Ho Chi
Minh's forces resulting in the over 60,000 American deaths and nearly 400,000 wounded Americans.
Right around the corner is the "Roaring '20s". Just how can such a depressed and dejected nation
seemingly bounce back into a decade of dancing, music, and never-ending celebration? They don't. Just like
38 CHAPTER 4. GREAT WAR (PART II)
the War to End all War failed in its titular objective, the Roaring 20s were certainly not roaring for those
in the center of the decade-long social, political, and economic hurricane as you will see.
INDEX
39
Index of Keywords and Terms
Keywords are listed by the section with that keyword (page numbers are in parentheses). Keywords
do not necessarily appear in the text of the page. They are merely associated with that section. Ex.
apples, j 1.1 (1) Terms are referenced by the page they appear on. Ex. apples, 1
1
A
1914-1918, @3(25), @ 4(27)
Albert Beveridge, @ 1(1) , @ 2(15)
B Bess Wallace Truman, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Booker T. Washington, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
C Carrie Chapman Catt, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Claude Kitchin, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Conservation movement, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
E Eighteen Amendment, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Equal Rights Amendment, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Eugene Bullard, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
F Florence Kelley, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Frank Woodruff Buckles, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
G George Creel, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
George M. Cohan, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Great War, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
H Harry Truman, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Hello Girls, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
I Ida B. Wells, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
International Ladies Garment Workers Union,
@ 1(1), @ 2(15)
International Workers of the World, @ 1(1),
S 2(15)
James Reese Europe, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Jane Addams, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Jeanette Rankin, @ 1(1), @ 2(15), @ 3(25),
@ 4(27)
L Lusitania, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
N National American Woman's Suffrage
Association, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Neutrality, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Nineteenth Amendment, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
P Progressive Era, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
S Seventeenth Amendment, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Sixteenth Amendment, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Suffrage, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Sussex Pledge, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
T Teddy Roosevelt, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Temperance, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
U U-boats, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
Upton Sinclair, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
W W.E.B. DuBois, @ 1(1), @ 2(15), @ 3(25),
j 4(27)
William Howard Taft, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
Woodrow Wilson, @ 1(1), @ 2(15), @ 3(25),
@ 4(27)
World War I, @ 3(25), @ 4(27)
J Jacob Riis, @ 1(1), @ 2(15)
40
ATTRIBUTIONS
Attributions
Collection: US History since 1877
Edited by: James Ross-Nazzal
URL: http://cnx.org/content/col10669/1.2/
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0k
Module: "Progressive Era (Part I)"
By: James Ross-Nazzal
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m19717/1.1/
Pages: 1-14
Copyright: James Ross-Nazzal
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0k
Module: "The Progressive Era (Part II)"
By: James Ross-Nazzal
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m19715/1.1/
Pages: 15-24
Copyright: James Ross-Nazzal
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0k
Module: "The Great War (Part I)"
By: James Ross-Nazzal
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m19718/1.1/
Page: 25
Copyright: James Ross-Nazzal
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0k
Module: "Great War (Part II)"
By: James Ross-Nazzal
URL: http://cnx.org/content/m19719/1.1/
Pages: 27-38
Copyright: James Ross-Nazzal
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0k
US History since 1877
This is a textbook to be used for the second part of the US history survey course (US after 1877).
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