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42 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Progressives
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new crusaders of the new century of 1900 who waged war on many evils, notably monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice. Large, diverse army and widely deployed but had single battle cry: “Strengthen the State.”
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Henry Demarest Lloyd
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in 1894 charged headlong into the Standard Oil Company with his book Wealth Against Commonwealth
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Thorstein Veblen
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assailed the new rich with his prickly pen in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899; a savage attack on “predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption.”
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Jacob Riis
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Danish immigrant, reporter for the New York Sun shocked middle-class Americans in 1890 with How the Other Half Lives. His account was a damning indictment of the dirt, disease, vice, and misery of the rat-gnawed human rookeries known as New York Slums. The book deeply influenced a future New York City police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.
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Theodore Dreiser
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used his blunt prose to batter promoters and profiteers in The Financier 1912 and The Titan 1914.
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Socialists
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many were European immigrants inspired by the strong movement for state socialism in the old world, began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box.
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The Social Gospel
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High-minded messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism based in Christian teachings. They used religious doctrine to demand better housing and living conditions for the urban poor.
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Muckrakers
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branded “muckrakers” by Roosevelt in 1906. Enterprising editors financed extensive research on dirt on the public and encouraged pugnacious writing led by bright reporters who were nicknamed muckrakers because Roosevelt annoyed by their excess of zeal compared the mudslinging magazine dirt-diggers to the figure in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress who was so intent on raking manure that he could not see the celestial crown dangling overhead. Despite presidential scolding, these muckrakers boomed circulation and some of their most scandalous exposures were published as best-selling books.
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Lincoln Steffens
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1902 brilliant New York reporter launched series of articles in Mclure’s titled “The Shame of the Cities”. He fearlessly unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government.
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Ida Tarbell
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followed Steffens in the same magazine. She was a pioneering journalist who published a devastating but factual expose' of the Standard Oil Company. Fearing legal reprisals the muckraking magazines went to great pains and expense to check their material -- paying as much as three thousand dollars to verify a single Tarbell article.
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Thomas Lawson
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erratic speculator who had himself made $50 million on the stock market laid bare the practices of his accomplices in “frenzied Finance” This series of articles appearing in 1905-1906 rocketed the circulation of Everbody’s. Lawson, by fouling his own nest, made many enemies among his rich associates, and he died a poor man.
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Ray Stannard Baker
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Following the Color Line 1908 spotlighted the sorry subjugation of America’s 9 million blacks of whom 90% still lived in the South and one third were illiterate.
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Initiative
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one of the first objectives of progressives was to regain the power that had slipped from the hands of the people into those of the “interests.” These ardent reformers pushed for direct primary elections so as to undercut power-hungry party bosses. They favored “imitative” so that voters could directly propose legislation themselves, thus bypassing the boss-bought state legislatures.
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Referendum
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progressives also agitated for referendum because this device would place laws on the ballot for the final approval by the people, especially laws that had been railroaded through a compliant legislature by free-spending agents of big business.
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Recall
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would enable the voters to remove faithless elected officials particularly those who had been bribed by bosses or lobbyists.
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Australian Ballot
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secret ballot was likewise introduced more widely in the states to counteract boss rule. Bribery was less feasible when bribers could not tell if they were getting their money’s worth from the bribed.
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Seventeenth Amendment (1913)
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established the direct election of U.S. senators.
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Robert La Follette
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governor of the stated pompadoured Robert M. “fighting bob” la follette was an undersized but overbearing crusader who emerged as the most militant of the progressive republican leaders after a desperate fight with entrenched monopoly he reached the governor’s chair in 1901. routing the lumber and railroad “interests” he wrested considerable control from the crooked corporations and returned it to the people. He also perfected a scheme for regulating public utilities while laboring in close association with experts on the faculty of the state university at Madison.
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Hiram Johnson
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California made giant boot strides un him toward the progressive camp as they undertook to regulate railroads and trusts chiefly through public utilities commissions. Hiram was elected republican governor in 1910 and this dynamic prosecutor of grafters helped break the dominant grip of the Southern Pacific Railroad on California Politics and then like La Follette set up a political machine of his own.
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Charles Evans Huges
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the able and audacious reformist Republican governor of New York had earlier gained national fame as an investigator of malpractices by gas and insurance companies and by the coal trust.
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Florence Kelly (National Consumers’ League)
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a former resident of Jane Addams’s Hull House became the state of Illinois’s first chief factory inspector and one of the nation’s leading advocates for improved factory conditions. In 1899 Kelley took control of the newly founded National Consumers League which mobilized female consumers to pressure for laws safeguarding women and children in the workplace.
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Louis Brandeis
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in the landmark case Muller v. Oregon 1908 crusading attorney Louis persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the constitutionality of laws protecting women workers by presenting evidence of the harmful effects of factory labor on women’s weaker bodies. Although this argument calling for special protection for women seemed discriminatory by later standards and closed many “male” jobs to women, progressives at the time hailed Brandeis’s achievement as a triumph over existing legal doctrine, which afforded employers total control over the workplace. The American welfare state that emerged from female activism forces more on protecting women and children than on granting benefits to everyone as was the case in much of western Europe, with its stronger labor movements.
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Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911)
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demonstrated the truth that laws regulating factories were worthless if not enforced. Locked doors and other flagrant violations of the fire code turned the factory into a death trap. One hundred forty six workers most of them young immigrant women were incinerated or leapt from eighth and ninth story windows to their deaths. Lashed by the public outcry the New York legislature passed much stronger laws regulating the hours and conditions of sweatshop toil.
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Frances Willard & WCTU
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Antiliquor campaigners received powerful support from militant organizations notably the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The Founder Willard who would fall to her knees in prayer on saloon floors mobilized nearly 1 million women to “make the world homelike” and built the WCU into the largest organization of women in the world. She found a vigorous ally in the Anti-Saloon league, which was aggressive, well organized and well financed.
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Square Deal
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Roosevelt was touched by the progressive movement at home and feared the “public interest” was being submerged in seas of indifference. He demanded the “Square Deal” for capital, labor, and the public at large. Broadly speaking, the president’s program embraced three C’s: Control of the corporations, consumer protection, and conservation of natural resources. The Square Deal for labor received its acid test in 1902 when a crippling strike broke out in the anthracite coalmines of Pennsylvania.
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Anthracite Coal Strike
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Some 140,000 besooted workers many of them illiterate immigrants had long been frightfully expoloted and accident plagued. They demanded among other improvements a 20 percent increase in pay and a reduction of the working day from ten to nine hours. Unsympathetic mine owners, confident that a chilled public would react against the miners, refused to arbitrate or even negotiate. One of their spokesmen, multimillionaire George F. Baer reflected the high-and-mighty attitude of certain ungenerous employers. Workers he wrote would be cared for “not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.” As coal supplies dwindled down factories and schools were forced to shut down because of the cold and Roosevelt firs summoned representatives to his office but they were really stupid and stubborn so he took his big stick and threatened to seize the mines and operate them with federal troops which made them bow down and a comprise decision ultimately gave the miners a 10 percent pay boost and a working day of nine hours, but their union was not officially recognized as a bargaining agent.
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Elkins Act 9 (1903)
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spurred by the former-cowboy president (the book is so witty. Not) congress passed effective railroad legislation beginning with this act. This curb was aimed primarily at the rebate evil. Heavy fines could now be imposed both on the railroads that gave rebates and on the shippers that accepted them.
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Hepburn Act (1904)
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this act was still more effective. Free passes, with their hint of bribery, were severely restricted. The once-infantile Commerce Commission was expanded and its reach was extended to include express companies sleeping-car companies and pipelines. For the first time, the commission was given real molars when it was authorized on complaint of shippers to nullify existing rates and stipulate maximum rates.
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Trusts
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had come to be a fighting word in the progressive era. Roosevelt believed that these industrial behemoths with their efficient means of production had arrived to stay. He concluded that thee were “good” trusts with public consciences and “bad” trusts which lusted greedily for power. He was determined to respond to the popular outcry against the trusts but was also determined not to throw out the baby with the bathwater by indiscriminately smashing all large businesses. (really weird metaphor¡¦)
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Northern Securities Case (1904)
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Roosevelt as a trustbuster, first burst into the headlines in 1902 with an attack on this company, a railroad holding company organized by financial titan J.P. Morgan and empire builder James J. Hill who sought to achieve a virtual monopoly of the railroads in the Northwest and Roosevelt was therefore challenging the most regal potentates of the industrial aristocracy. The railway promoters appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 1904 upheld Roosevelt’s antitrust suit and ordered the North Company to be dissolved. This decision jolted Wall Street and angered big business but greatly enhanced Roosevelt’s reputation as a trust smasher.
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Upton Sinclair
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wrote sensational novel The Jungle published in 1906. Sinclair intended his revolting tract to focus attention on the plight of the workers in the big canning factories but instead he appalled the public with his description of disgustingly unsanitary food products. As he put it, he aimed for the nation’s heart but his its stomach. The book described in noxious detail the filth, disease, and putrefaction in Chicago’s damp, ill-ventilated slaughterhouses. Many readers including Roosevelt were so sickened that for a time they fount meat unpalatable. The president was moved by the loathsome mess in Chicago to appoint a special investigating commission whose cold-blooded report almost outdid Sinclair’s novel. It related how piles of poisoned rats, rope ends, splinters, and other debris were scooped up and canned as potted ham.
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Meat Inspection Act 1906
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Backed by a nauseated public, Roosevelt duced Congress to pass this act that decreed that the preparation of meat shipped over state lines would be subject to federal inspection from corral to can. Although the largest packers resisted certain features of the act, they accepted it as an opportunity to drive their smaller fly-by-night competitors out of business.
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Pure Food and Drug Act 1906
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was designed to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of foods and pharmaceuticals.
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Gifford Pinchot
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dedicated conversationalist was head of the federal Division of Forestry had broken important ground before him. Believed that “wilderness was waste” Wanted to use the nation’s natural endowment intelligently.
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Newlands Act 1902
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thirst of the desert sill unslaked congress responded to the whip of the rough riders by passing this act. Washington was authorized to collect money from the sale of public lands in the sun-baked western states and then use these funds for the development of irrigation projects. Settlers repaid the cost of reclamation from their now-productive soil and the money was put into a revolving fun to finance more such enterprises.
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John Muir
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preservationist of the Sierra Club, Hetch Hetchy (the preservationists lost a major battle in 1913 when the federal government allowed the city of San Francisco to build a damn for its municipal water supply in the spectacular high-walled Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park) was a “temple” of nature that should be held inviolable by the civilizing hand of humanity.
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Panic of 1907
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short but punishing panic descended on Wall Street. The financial flurry featured frightened “runs” on banks, suicides, and criminal indictments against speculators. The financial world hastened to blame Roosevelt for the storm. It cried that this “quack” had unsettled industry with this boat-rocking tactics. Conservatives damned him as “Theodore the Meddler” and branded the current distress the “Roosevelt Panic.” The hot-tempered president angrily lashed back at his critics when he accused “certain malefactors of great wealth” of having deliberately engineered the monetary crisis to force the government to relax its assaults on trusts. Fortunately the panic of 1907 paved the way for long-overdue fiscal reforms.
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William Howard Taft
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secretary of war and a mild progressive chosen by Roosevelt to carry out “his polices.” At first was loved by everyone: “Everybody loves a fat man.” He had been a trusted administrator under Roosevelt -- in the Philippines, at home, and in Cuba where he had served capably as a troubleshooter. BUT he suffered from lethal political handicaps. He had none of the arts of a dashing political leader and none of Teddy’s zest. Recoiling from the clamor of controversy he generally adopted an attitude of passivity towards Congress. He was a poor judge of public opinion and his candor made him a chronic victim of “foot-in-mouth” disease.
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Eugene V Debs (election of 1908)
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amassed many votes from the Socialists. He was the hero of the Pullman strike of 1894.
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Dollar Diplomacy
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though ordinarily lethargic, Taft bestirred himself to use the level of American investments to boost American political interests abroad, an approach to foreign policy that his critics announced as “dollar diplomacy.” Washington warmly encouraged Wall Street bankers to sluice their surplus dollars into foreign areas of strategic concern to the United States, especially in the Far East and in the regions critical to the security of the Panama Canal. By preempting investors from rival powers such as Germany, New York bankers would thus strengthen American defenses and foreign polices, while bringing further prosperity to their homeland -- and to themselves.
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Payne - Alrich Tariff (1909)
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Taft signed it betraying his campaign promises and outraging the progressive wing of his party, heavily drawn from the Midwest. It basically lowered the barriers of the formidable protective tariff helped along by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich where only items such as hides, sea moss, and canary bird seed were left on the duty-free list.
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Progessive vs the Old Guard (1912)
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Basically Taft was a dedicated conservationist but when Pinchot objected Ballinger’s opening of public lands in Montana and Alaska to corporate development he dismissed it on the narrow grounds of insubordination and the whole rift grew between him and the former president. The reformist wing of the Republican Party was now up in arms while Taft was being pushed increasingly into the embrace of the stand-pat Old Guard. By the spring of 1910 the Grand Old Party was split wide open. In 1911 the National Progressive Republican League was formed led by La Follette. Roosevelt was restless that Taft was hand in glove with the hated Old Guard discarding “his polices” so he accepted the Republican nomination and seized the Progressive Banner from La Follette.
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