{"id":49,"date":"2025-04-07T16:18:55","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T16:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/?post_type=chapter&p=49"},"modified":"2026-04-27T19:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T19:15:58","slug":"20-the-progressive-era","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/chapter\/20-the-progressive-era\/","title":{"raw":"The Progressive Era","rendered":"The Progressive Era"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_195\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"936\"] From an undated William Jennings Bryan campaign print, \u201cShall the People Rule?\u201d Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n
I. Introduction<\/h1>\r\n\u201cNever in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,\u201d Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel<\/em>, his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States. He wrote, \u201cThe swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.\u201d[footnote]Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 104. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe many problems associated with the Gilded Age\u2014the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism\u2014confronted Americans. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age.\r\n\r\nWidespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Americans had many different ideas about how the country\u2019s development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Reformers sought to clean up politics; Black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights; women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large; and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces, and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Whatever their goals, reform<\/em> became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name.\r\n
II. Mobilizing for Reform<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n \t
Muckrakers<\/strong> - Journalists who exposed corruption, dangerous work conditions, and social injustices in the early 20th century. They were seen as \u201cstirring up the muck\u201d to reveal the negatives of U.S. industrial growth.<\/li>\r\n \t
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) <\/strong>- A New York fire that killed 146 workers (majority women) because of inadequate safety protocols. This tragedy resulted in increased demands for labor and safety reforms.<\/li>\r\n \t
Hull House (1889) <\/strong> - a pioneering settlement house in Chicago, dedicated to serving the needs of newly arrived European immigrants.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory<\/strong> in Manhattan caught fire. The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks (the managers who held the keys saved themselves, but left over two hundred women behind). A rickety fire ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. Women lined the rooftop and windows of the ten-story building and jumped, landing in a \u201cmangled, bloody pulp.\u201d Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. Among the onlookers, \u201cwomen were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.\u201d By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died.[footnote]Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York: Free Press, 1979.).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_196\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"968\"] Policemen place the bodies of workers who were burned alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into coffins. Photographs like this made real the atrocities that could result from unsafe working conditions. March 25, 1911. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Remembering their workers\u2019 \u201cchief value,\u201d the owners of the factory decided that a viable fire escape and unlocked doors were too expensive and called in the city police to break up the strike. After the 1911 fire, reporter Bill Shepherd reflected, \u201cI looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.\u201d[footnote]Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1962), 20. [\/footnote]\u00a0Former Triangle worker and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman said, \u201cThis is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers . . . the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 144.[\/footnote] After the fire, Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges. They were acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation. The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that saw workers\u2019 deaths answered with little punishment of the business owners responsible for such dangerous conditions. But as such tragedies mounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequality grew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for this new modern order.\r\n\r\nEvents such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire<\/strong> convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform.\r\n\r\nReformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation\u2019s poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order. Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption\u2014labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as \u201cmuckrakers<\/strong>\u201d\u2014aroused public demands for reform. Magazines such as McClure\u2019s<\/em> detailed political corruption and economic malfeasance. The muckrakers<\/strong> confirmed Americans\u2019 suspicions about runaway wealth and political corruption. Ray Stannard Baker, a journalist whose reports on U.S. Steel exposed the underbelly of the new corporate capitalism, wrote, \u201cI think I can understand now why these exposure articles took such a hold upon the American people. It was because the country, for years, had been swept by the agitation of soap-box orators, prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.\u201d[footnote]Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: Scribner, 1945), 183.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nJournalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice. In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives<\/em>, a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city\u2019s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis\u2019s book led to housing reform in New York and other cities and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty.[footnote]Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner, 1890).[\/footnote] In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle<\/em>, a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the stockyards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production. The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. \u201cThe slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors,\u201d wrote Sinclair, \u201clike some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.\u201d[footnote]Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906), 40.[\/footnote] Sinclair\u2019s expos\u00e9 led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act<\/strong> and Pure Food and Drug Act<\/strong> in 1906.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_197\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"976\"] Jacob Riis, \u201cHome of an Italian Ragpicker.\u201d ca. 1888-1889. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nOf course, it was not only journalists who raised questions about American society. One of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy\u2019s 1888 Looking Backward, <\/em>was a national sensation. In it, a man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find society radically altered. Poverty and disease and competition gave way as new industrial armies cooperated to build a utopia of social harmony and economic prosperity. Bellamy\u2019s vision of a reformed society enthralled readers, inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs, and pushed many young readers onto the road to reform.[footnote]Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000\u20131887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888).[\/footnote]\u00a0It led countless Americans to question the realities of American life in the nineteenth century:\r\n
\u201cI am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men, children upon parents.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 368.[\/footnote]<\/blockquote>\r\nBut Americans were urged to action not only by books and magazines but by preachers and theologians, too. Confronted by both the benefits and the ravages of industrialization, many Americans asked themselves, \u201cWhat Would Jesus Do?\u201d In 1896, Charles Sheldon, a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, published In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?<\/em> The novel told the story of Henry Maxwell, a pastor in a small Midwestern town one day confronted by an unemployed migrant who criticized his congregation\u2019s lack of concern for the poor and downtrodden. Moved by the man\u2019s plight, Maxwell preached a series of sermons in which he asked his congregation: \u201cWould it not be true, think you, that if every Christian in America did as Jesus would do, society itself, the business world, yes, the very political system under which our commercial and government activity is carried on, would be so changed that human suffering would be reduced to a minimum?\u201d[footnote]Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps: \u201cWhat Would Jesus Do?\u201d (Chicago: Advance, 1896), 273.[\/footnote] Sheldon\u2019s novel became a best seller, not only because of its story but because the book\u2019s plot connected with a new movement transforming American religion: the social gospel<\/strong>.\r\n\r\nThe social gospel<\/strong> emerged within Protestant Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century. It emphasized the need for Christians to be concerned for the salvation of society, and not simply individual souls. Instead of just caring for family or fellow church members, social gospel advocates encouraged Christians to engage society; challenge social, political, and economic structures; and help those less fortunate than themselves. Responding to the developments of the industrial revolution in America and the increasing concentration of people in urban spaces, with its attendant social and economic problems, some social gospelers went so far as to advocate a form of Christian socialism, but all urged Americans to confront the sins of their society.\r\n\r\nOne of the most notable advocates of the social gospel was Walter Rauschenbusch. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1886 Rauschenbusch accepted the pastorate of a German Baptist church in the Hell\u2019s Kitchen section of New York City, where he confronted rampant crime and stark poverty, problems not adequately addressed by the political leaders of the city. Rauschenbusch joined with fellow reformers to elect a new mayoral candidate, but he also realized that a new theological framework had to reflect his interest in society and its problems. He revived Jesus\u2019s phrase, \u201cthe Kingdom of God,\u201d claiming that it encompassed every aspect of life and made every part of society a purview of the proper Christian. Like Charles Sheldon\u2019s fictional Rev. Maxwell, Rauschenbusch believed that every Christian, whether they were a businessperson, a politician, or a stay-at-home parent, should ask themselves what they could do to enact the kingdom of God on Earth.[footnote]Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1917). [\/footnote]\r\n
\u201cThe social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring men under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 5.[\/footnote]<\/blockquote>\r\nGlaring blind spots persisted within the proposals of most social gospel advocates. As men, they often ignored the plight of women, and thus most refused to support women\u2019s suffrage. Many were also silent on the plight of African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed minority groups. However, the writings of Rauschenbusch and other social gospel proponents had a profound influence on twentieth-century American life. Most immediately, they fueled progressive reform. But they also inspired future activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., who envisioned a \u201cbeloved community\u201d that resembled Rauschenbusch\u2019s \u201cKingdom of God.\u201d\r\n
\r\n
Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t
How did Americans respond to the realization of the negative sides of U.S. industrial growth?<\/li>\r\n \t
How did the press play a large role in this change?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
III. Women's Movements<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n \t
Women's Suffrage (1920)\u00a0<\/strong> - A reform movement culminating in the 19th Amendment and granting women the right to vote.<\/li>\r\n \t
National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) (1890) <\/strong>- A new organization formed by merging the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). This became the largest women\u2019s suffrage organization in the U.S. and was key in the passage of the 19th Amendment.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_198\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"959\"] Suffragists campaigned tirelessly for the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century, taking to the streets in public displays like this 1915 pre-election parade in New York City. During this one event, 20,000 women defied the gender norms that tried to relegate them to the private sphere and deny them the vote. 1915. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nReform opened new possibilities for women\u2019s activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women\u2019s suffrage<\/strong>. Much energy for women\u2019s work came from female \u201cclubs,\u201d social organizations devoted to various purposes. Some focused on intellectual development; others emphasized philanthropic activities. Increasingly, these organizations looked outward, to their communities and to the place of women in the larger political sphere.\r\n\r\nWomen\u2019s clubs flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1890s women formed national women\u2019s club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women\u2019s rights were the General Federation of Women\u2019s Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896), both of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were biracial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy midnineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters.\r\n\r\nBlack women produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all Black Americans as well as equal rights for all women. Black abolitionist\u00a0Mary Jane Richardson Jones organized Black women in Chicago around settlement work, moral uplift, and suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who had also worked for abolition and suffrage, worked with club women in Boston and organized, in 1895, the\u00a0First National Conference of the Colored Women of America. The following year, Mary Church Terrell and other black activists formed the National Association of Colored Women, later known as the\u00a0National Association of Colored Women\u2019s Clubs. These leagues of service-oriented women\u2019s organizations provided powerful networks to organize and amplify Black women\u2019s efforts not only to secure suffrage but to challenge discrimination and uplift Black communities across the United States.[footnote]See, for instance, Anne Firor Scott, \u201cMost Invisible of All: Black Women\u2019s Voluntary Associations,\u201d The Journal of Southern History<\/i>. 56 (January, 1990), 3\u201322. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nOther women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life. And still others worked as moral vigilantes. The fearsome Carrie A. Nation, an imposing woman who believed she worked God\u2019s will, won headlines for destroying saloons. In Wichita, Kansas, on December 27, 1900, Nation took a hatchet and broke bottles and bars at the luxurious Carey Hotel. Arrested and charged with causing $3,000 in damages, Nation spent a month in jail before the county dismissed the charges on account of \u201ca delusion to such an extent as to be practically irresponsible.\u201d But Nation\u2019s \u201chatchetation\u201d drew national attention. Describing herself as \u201ca bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn\u2019t like,\u201d she continued her assaults, and days later she smashed two more Wichita bars.[footnote]John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993), 147.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nFew women followed in Nation\u2019s footsteps, and many more worked within more reputable organizations. Nation, for instance, had founded a chapter of the Woman\u2019s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but the organization\u2019s leaders described her as \u201cunwomanly and unchristian.\u201d The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combating the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a \u201cdo everything\u201d policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women\u2019s rights. WCTU women worked to alleviate urban poverty, pursued prison reform, championed the eight-hour workday, pushed for child labor laws, advocated \u201chome protection,\u201d and fought for numerous other progressive causes.\u00a0Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.\r\n\r\nMany American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The 1912 Anti-Saloon League Yearbook<\/em>, for instance, presented charts indicating comparable increases in alcohol consumption alongside rising divorce rates. The WCTU called alcohol a \u201chome wrecker.\u201d More insidiously, perhaps, reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants, necessarily maligning America\u2019s immigrants, Catholics, and working classes in their crusade against liquor. Still, reformers believed that the abolition of \u201cstrong drink\u201d would bring about social progress, obviate the need for prisons and insane asylums, save women and children from domestic abuse, and usher in a more just, progressive society.\r\n\r\nPowerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, Addams lost her mother by age two and lived under the attentive care of her father. At seventeen, she left home to attend Rockford Female Seminary. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked on a multiyear \u201cgrand tour\u201d of Europe. She found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. After visiting London\u2019s Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House<\/strong> in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr.[footnote]Toynbee Hall was the first settlement house. It was built in 1884 by Samuel Barnett as a place for Oxford students to live while at the same time working in the house\u2019s poor neighborhood. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 64\u201365; Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). [\/footnote]\r\n
The Settlement \u2026 is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other \u2026 It must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.[footnote]Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House<\/strong> (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 125\u2013126.[\/footnote]<\/blockquote>\r\nHull House workers provided for their neighbors by running a nursery and a kindergarten, administering classes for parents and clubs for children, and organizing social and cultural events for the community. Reformer Florence Kelley, who stayed at Hull House from 1891 to 1899, convinced Addams to move into the realm of social reform.[footnote]Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 77.[\/footnote] Hull House began exposing conditions in local sweatshops and advocated for the organization of workers. She called the conditions caused by urban poverty and industrialization a \u201csocial crime.\u201d Hull House workers surveyed their community and produced statistics on poverty, disease, and living conditions. Addams began pressuring politicians. Together Kelley and Addams petitioned legislators to pass antisweatshop legislation that limited the hours of work for women and children to eight per day. Yet Addams was an upper-class white Protestant woman who, like many reformers, refused to embrace more radical policies. While Addams called labor organizing a \u201csocial obligation,\u201d she also warned the labor movement against the \u201cconstant temptation towards class warfare.\u201d Addams, like many reformers, favored cooperation between rich and poor and bosses and workers, whether cooperation was a realistic possibility or not.[footnote]Jane Addams, \u201cThe Settlement as a Factor in the Labor Movement,\u201d reprinted in Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 145, 149. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAddams became a kind of celebrity. In 1912, she became the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention when she seconded the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as the Progressive Party\u2019s candidate for president. Her campaigns for social reform and women\u2019s rights won headlines and her voice became ubiquitous in progressive politics.[footnote]Kathryn Kish Sklar, \u201c\u2018Some of Us Who Deal with the Social Fabric\u2019: Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice, 1907\u20131919,\u201d Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2, no. 1 (January 2003).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAddams\u2019s advocacy grew beyond domestic concerns. Beginning with her work in the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War, Addams increasingly began to see militarism as a drain on resources better spent on social reform. In 1907 she wrote Newer Ideals of Peace<\/em>, a book that would become for many a philosophical foundation of pacifism. Addams emerged as a prominent opponent of America\u2019s entry into World War I. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.[footnote]Karen Manners Smith, \u201cNew Paths to Power: 1890\u20131920,\u201d in No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States, ed. Nancy Cott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 392.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIt would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women\u2014and, occasionally, men\u2014had pushed for women\u2019s suffrage. Suffragists\u2019 hard work resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_199\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"983\"] Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women\u2019s suffrage<\/strong>. 1917. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-31799).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWomen\u2019s suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women\u2019s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils. By the 1890s, for example, the WCTU, then the largest women\u2019s organization in America, endorsed suffrage. An alliance of working-class and middle- and upper-class women organized the Women\u2019s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 and campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Woman Suffrage Association<\/strong>, a leading suffrage organization composed largely of middle- and upper-class women. WTUL members viewed the vote as a way to further their economic interests and to foster a new sense of respect for working-class women. \u201cWhat the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,\u201d said Rose Schneiderman, a WTUL leader, during a 1912 speech. \u201cThe worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.\u201d[footnote]Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women\u2019s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (New York: Routledge, 1983), 32.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMany suffragists adopted a much crueler message. Some, even outside the South, argued that white women\u2019s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy. Many white American women argued that enfranchising white upper- and middle-class women would counteract Black voters. These arguments even stretched into international politics. But whether the message advocated gender equality, class politics, or white supremacy, the suffrage campaign was winning.\r\n\r\nThe final push for women\u2019s suffrage came on the eve of World War I. Determined to win the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association<\/strong> developed a dual strategy that focused on the passage of state voting rights laws and on the ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, a new, more militant, suffrage organization emerged on the scene. Led by Alice Paul, the National Woman\u2019s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Woman\u2019s Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women.[footnote]Ellen Carol Dubois, Women\u2019s Suffrage and Women\u2019s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIn January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women\u2019s suffrage amendment, and two years later women\u2019s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by the promise of change but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began; the United States was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.\r\n
IV. Targeting the Trusts<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n \t
Social Gospel\u00a0<\/strong> - Movement among Protestants to apply Christian ethics to social problems like poverty.<\/li>\r\n \t
New Nationalism <\/strong>- Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s 1910 platform for regulating large corporations and promoting social justice.<\/li>\r\n \t
New Freedom <\/strong> - Woodrow Wilson\u2019s 1912 agenda to expand government\u2019s role in ensuring economic fairness.<\/li>\r\n \t
Pure Food and Drug Act <\/strong> - 1906 law enacted after Upton Sinclair\u2019s The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in food processing.<\/li>\r\n \t
Meat Inspection Act <\/strong> - Companion legislation to ensure sanitary conditions in slaughterhouses and meatpacking.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nIn one of the defining books of the Progressive Era, The Promise of American Life<\/em>, Herbert Croly argued that because \u201cthe corrupt politician has usurped too much of the power which should be exercised by the people,\u201d the \u201cmillionaire and the trust have appropriated too many of the economic opportunities formerly enjoyed by the people.\u201d Croly and other reformers believed that wealth inequality eroded democracy and reformers had to win back for the people the power usurped by the moneyed trusts. But what exactly were these \u201ctrusts,\u201d and why did it suddenly seem so important to reform them?[footnote]Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 145.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a trust was a monopoly or cartel associated with the large corporations of the Gilded and Progressive Eras who entered into agreements\u2014legal or otherwise\u2014or consolidations to exercise exclusive control over a specific product or industry under the control of a single entity. Certain types of monopolies, specifically for intellectual property like copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, are protected under the Constitution \u201cto promote the progress of science and useful arts,\u201d but for powerful entities to control entire national markets was something wholly new, and, for many Americans, wholly unsettling.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_200\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"975\"] An illustration shows a \u201cStandard Oil\u201d storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a statehouse, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House\u2014President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a trustbuster. Udo Keppler, \u201cNext!\u201d 1904. Library of Congress (LC-USZCN4-122).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves. The Second Industrial Revolution, made possible by available natural resources, growth in the labor supply through immigration, increasing capital, new legal economic entities, novel production strategies, and a growing national market, was commonly asserted to be the natural product of the federal government\u2019s laissez faire, or \u201chands off,\u201d economic policy. An unregulated business climate, the argument went, allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie\u2019s Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil Company. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first used vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.\r\n\r\nBetween 1897 and 1904, over four thousand companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. As one historian wrote, \u201cBy 1904 a total of 318 trusts held 40% of US manufacturing assets and boasted a capitalization of $7 billion, seven times bigger than the US national debt.\u201d[footnote]Kevin P. Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 307.[\/footnote] With the twentieth century came the age of monopoly. Mergers and the aggressive business policies of wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller earned them the epithet robber barons<\/em>. Their cutthroat stifling of economic competition, mistreatment of workers, and corruption of politics sparked an opposition that pushed for regulations to rein in the power of monopolies. The great corporations became a major target of reformers.\r\n\r\nBig business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in a single state. They might ship goods across state lines or to other countries, but they typically had offices and factories in just one state. Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. In the Midwest, farmers formed a network of organizations that were part political pressure group, part social club, and part mutual aid society. Together they pushed for so-called Granger laws that regulated railroads and other new companies. Railroads and others opposed these regulations because they restrained profits and because of the difficulty of meeting the standards of each state\u2019s separate regulatory laws. In 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in a series of rulings, finding in cases such as Munn v. Illinois<\/em> and Stone v. Wisconsin<\/em> that railroads and other companies of such size necessarily affected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states. In Munn<\/em>, the court declared, \u201cProperty does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devoted his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created.\u201d[footnote]Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nLater rulings, however, conceded that only the federal government could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. And as more and more power and capital and market share flowed to the great corporations, the onus of regulation passed to the federal government. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. It stated that a \u201ctrust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal\u201d and that those who \u201cmonopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce . . . shall be deemed guilty.\u201d[footnote]Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.[\/footnote] The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that \u201cunreasonably\u201d stifled free trade. The courts seized on the law\u2019s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions. Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.\r\n\r\nAggression against the trusts\u2014and the progressive vogue for \u201ctrust busting\u201d\u2014took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt\u2019s youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation.\u201d[footnote]The writer Henry Adams said that he \u201cshowed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter\u2014the quality that medieval theology assigned to God\u2014he was pure act.\u201d Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 413.[\/footnote] Roosevelt was by no means antibusiness. Instead, he envisioned his presidency as a mediator between opposing forces, such as between labor unions and corporate executives. Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts. Roosevelt also used his own moral judgment to determine which monopolies he would pursue. Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation as a trust buster was wildly exaggerated, he was the first major national politician to go after the trusts. \u201cThe great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,\u201d he said, \u201care the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.\u201d[footnote]Theodore Roosevelt, Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902\u20131904, 15.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHis first target was the Northern Securities Company, a \u201cholding\u201d trust in which several wealthy bankers, most famously J. P. Morgan, used to hold controlling shares in all the major railroad companies in the American Northwest. Holding trusts had emerged as a way to circumvent the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: by controlling the majority of shares, rather than the principal, Morgan and his collaborators tried to claim that it was not a monopoly. Roosevelt\u2019s administration sued and won in court, and in 1904 the Northern Securities Company was ordered to disband into separate competitive companies. Two years later, in 1906, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act, allowing the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate best practices and set reasonable rates for the railroads.\r\n\r\nRoosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt\u2019s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world\u2019s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.\r\n\r\nTrust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt\u2019s return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive or \u201cBull Moose\u201d Party. Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism<\/strong> program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom<\/strong> agenda neither trust busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances. Yet once he won the election, Wilson edged nearer to Roosevelt\u2019s position, signing the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers and price discrimination and protecting labor\u2019s access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting. Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act, ensuring at least some measure of implementation.[footnote]The historiography on American progressive politics is vast. See, for instance, Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870\u20131920 (New York: Free Press, 2003).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhile the three presidents\u2014Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson\u2014pushed the development and enforcement of antitrust law, their commitments were uneven, and trust busting itself manifested the political pressure put on politicians by the workers, farmers, and progressive writers who so strongly drew attention to the ramifications of trusts and corporate capital on the lives of everyday Americans.\r\n
\r\n
Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t
How did the growing divide between wealthy and poor contribute to the calls for governmental and economic change?<\/li>\r\n \t
Why did the government and the wealthy suddenly become interested in government regulation and the protection of the people?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
V. Progressive Environmentalism<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n \t
Preservation vs. Conservation <\/strong> - A Progressive Era debate with preservationists arguing for protecting nature and keeping it untouched. Conservationists supported sustainable use of natural resources to benefit society.<\/li>\r\n \t
John Muir & Sierra Club <\/strong>- John Muir was a conservationist who created the Sierra Club in 1892 to advocate for preservation and appreciation of nature.<\/li>\r\n \t
Theodore Roosevelt, the National Park System, and historical landmarks <\/strong> - During his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt established five new national parks and passed the Antiquities Act in 1906, which allowed presidents to declare landmarks and structures as national monuments.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe potential scope of environmental destruction wrought by industrial capitalism was unparalleled in human history. Professional bison hunting expeditions nearly eradicated an entire species, industrialized logging companies denuded whole forests, and chemical plants polluted an entire region\u2019s water supply. As American development and industrialization marched westward, reformers embraced environmental protections.\r\n\r\nHistorians often cite preservation<\/strong> and conservation<\/strong> as two competing strategies that dueled for supremacy among environmental reformers during the Progressive Era. The tensions between these two approaches crystalized in the debate over a proposed dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California. The fight revolved around the provision of water for San Francisco. Engineers identified the location where the Tuolumne River ran through Hetch Hetchy as an ideal site for a reservoir. The project had been suggested in the 1880s but picked up momentum in the early twentieth century. But the valley was located inside Yosemite National Park. (Yosemite was designated a national park in 1890, though the land had been set aside earlier in a grant approved by President Lincoln in 1864.) The debate over Hetch Hetchy revealed two distinct positions on the value of the valley and on the purpose of public lands.\r\n\r\nJohn Muir<\/strong>, a naturalist, a writer, and founder of the Sierra Club<\/strong>, invoked the \u201cGod of the Mountains\u201d in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition. Gifford Pinchot, arguably the father of American forestry and a key player in the federal management of national forests, meanwhile emphasized what he understood to be the purpose of conservation: \u201cto take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people.\u201d Muir took a wider view of what the people needed, writing that \u201ceverybody needs beauty as well as bread.\u201d[footnote]Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 167\u2013168, 171, 165.[\/footnote] These dueling arguments revealed the key differences in environmental thought: Muir, on the side of the preservationists, advocated setting aside pristine lands for their aesthetic and spiritual value, for those who could take his advice to \u201c[get] in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth.\u201d[footnote]John Muir<\/strong>, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901).[\/footnote] Pinchot, on the other hand, led the charge for conservation, a kind of environmental utilitarianism that emphasized the efficient use of available resources, through planning and control and \u201cthe prevention of waste.\u201d[footnote]Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday Page, 1910), 44.[\/footnote] In Hetch Hetchy, conservation won out. Congress approved the project in 1913. The dam was built and the valley flooded for the benefit of San Francisco residents.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_202\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"914\"] The image on the top shows the Hetch Hetchy Valley before it was dammed. The bottom photograph, taken almost a century later, shows the obvious difference after damming, with the submergence of the valley floor under the reservoir waters. Photograph of the Hetch Hetchy Valley before damming, from the Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1908. Wikimedia; Daniel Mayer (photographer), May 2002. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life and as a welcome respite from the challenges of modernity (at least, for those who had the means to escape), the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the \u201cgreatest good for the greatest number\u201d was very nearly the catchphrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation\u2019s financial interests. For example, many states instituted game laws to regulate hunting and protect wildlife, but laws could be entirely unbalanced. In Pennsylvania, local game laws included requiring firearm permits for noncitizens, barred hunting on Sundays, and banned the shooting of songbirds. These laws disproportionately affected Italian immigrants, critics said, as Italians often hunted songbirds for subsistence, worked in mines for low wages every day but Sunday, and were too poor to purchase permits or to pay the fines levied against them when game wardens caught them breaking these new laws. Other laws, for example, offered up resources to businesses at costs prohibitive to all but the wealthiest companies and individuals, or with regulatory requirements that could be met only by companies with extensive resources.\r\n\r\nBut Progressive Era environmentalism addressed more than the management of American public lands. After all, reformers addressing issues facing the urban poor were also doing environmental work. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both worksite hazards and occupational and bodily harm. The progressives\u2019 commitment to the provision of public services at the municipal level meant more coordination and oversight in matters of public health, waste management, and even playgrounds and city parks. Their work focused on the intersection of communities and their material environments, highlighting the urgency of urban environmental concerns.\r\n\r\nWhile reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities. The Country Life movement, spearheaded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, sought to support agrarian families and encourage young people to stay in their communities and run family farms. Early-twentieth-century educational reforms included a commitment to environmentalism at the elementary level. Led by Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, the nature study movement took students outside to experience natural processes and to help them develop observational skills and an appreciation for the natural world.\r\n\r\nOther examples highlight the interconnectedness of urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature. Passenger pigeons were actively hunted, prepared at New York\u2019s finest restaurants and in the humblest of farm kitchens. Some hunted them for pay; others shot them in competitions at sporting clubs. And then they were gone, their ubiquity giving way only to nostalgia. Many Americans took notice at the great extinction of a species that had perhaps numbered in the billions and then was eradicated. Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers\u2014even whole birds\u2014on ladies\u2019 hats. Upper- and middle-class women made up the lion\u2019s share of the membership of these societies. They used their social standing to fight for birds. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines. Examining how women mobilized contemporary notions of womanhood in the service of protecting birds reveals a tangle of cultural and economic processes. Such examples also reveal the range of ideas, policies, and practices wrapped up in figuring out what\u2014and who\u2014American nature should be for.\r\n
\r\n
Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \t
What are the positives and negatives of preservation vs conservation?<\/li>\r\n \t
Why do we see the preservation\/conservation movement arise during this period of industrialization?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VI. Jim Crow and African American Life<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Key Concepts & Terms<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n \t
Jim\u202fCrow Laws\u00a0<\/strong> - State and local laws passed in the late 1800s to enforce segregation and attempt to make African Americans second class citizens. These laws stripped African Americans of their constitutional rights, introduced segregation, and resulted in violence and lynchings throughout the United States.<\/li>\r\n \t
Lynching <\/strong>- The extrajudicial killing of an individual outside the legal system.<\/li>\r\n \t
Disfranchisement <\/strong> - Initiatives by southern states to strip black citizens of their right to vote using tactics like poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and complex registration rules.<\/li>\r\n \t
Atlanta Compromise <\/strong> - An 1895 speech by Booker\u202fT. Washington at the Cotton States and International Exposition. He urged African Americans to \u201ccast down your bucket where you are\u201d and pursue vocational training in the South. He also stressed not violently resisting segregation in hopes it would arrive once African Americans pursued economic opportunity and obtained civil trust. This passive approach received extreme criticism from critics like W.E.B. Du\u202fBois.<\/li>\r\n \t
Great Migration <\/strong>- A mass movement of African Americans from the early to mid-1900s from southern states to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. African American goals were to escape racial oppression and seek better economic opportunity.<\/li>\r\n \t
Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) <\/strong>- A Supreme Court decision that ruled segregation did not violate the United States Constitution and in the eyes of white Southerners justified Jim Crow for the next sixty years.<\/li>\r\n \t
NAACP (1909) <\/strong>- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a civil rights organization created by WEB DuBois and others to combat Jim Crow and eliminate racial discrimination.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nAmerica\u2019s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era. In fact, in all too many ways, reform removed African Americans ever farther from American public life. In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of \u201cnegro domination\u201d and of Black men violating white women. The region\u2019s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching<\/strong> as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms\u2014disenfranchisement and segregation. Just as reformers would clean up politics by taming city political machines, white southerners would \u201cpurify\u201d the ballot box by restricting Black voting, and they would prevent racial strife by legislating the social separation of the races. The strongest supporters of such measures in the South were progressive Democrats and former Populists, both of whom saw in these reforms a way to eliminate the racial demagoguery that conservative Democratic party leaders had so effectively wielded. Leaders in both the North and South embraced and proclaimed the reunion of the sections on the basis of white supremacy. As the nation took up the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d to uplift the world\u2019s racially inferior peoples, the North looked to the South as an example of how to manage nonwhite populations. The South had become the nation\u2019s racial vanguard.[footnote]Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement<\/strong> in the South, 1888\u20131908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe question was how to accomplish disfranchisement<\/strong>. The Fifteenth Amendment clearly prohibited states from denying any citizen the right to vote on the basis of race. In 1890, a Mississippi state newspaper called on politicians to devise \u201csome legal defensible substitute for the abhorrent and evil methods on which white supremacy lies.\u201d[footnote]Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 147.[\/footnote] The state\u2019s Democratic Party responded with a new state constitution designed to purge corruption at the ballot box through disenfranchisement. African Americans hoping to vote in Mississippi would have to jump through a series of hurdles designed with the explicit purpose of excluding them from political power. The state first established a poll tax, which required voters to pay for the privilege of voting. Second, it stripped suffrage from those convicted of petty crimes most common among the state\u2019s African Americans. Next, the state required voters to pass a literacy test. Local voting officials, who were themselves part of the local party machine, were responsible for judging whether voters were able to read and understand a section of the Constitution. In order to protect illiterate whites from exclusion, the so-called \u201cunderstanding clause\u201d allowed a voter to qualify if they could adequately explain the meaning of a section that was read to them. In practice these rules were systematically abused to the point where local election officials effectively wielded the power to permit and deny suffrage at will. The disenfranchisement laws effectively moved electoral conflict from the ballot box, where public attention was greatest, to the voting registrar, where supposedly color-blind laws allowed local party officials to deny the ballot without the appearance of fraud.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nBetween 1895 and 1908, the rest of the states in the South approved new constitutions including these disenfranchisement tools. Six southern states also added a grandfather clause, which bestowed suffrage on anyone whose grandfather was eligible to vote in 1867. This ensured that whites who would have been otherwise excluded through mechanisms such as poll taxes or literacy tests would still be eligible, at least until grandfather clauses were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915. Finally, each southern state adopted an all-white primary and excluded Black Americans from the Democratic primary, the only political contests that mattered across much of the South.[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nFor all the legal double-talk, the purpose of these laws was plain. James Kimble Vardaman, later governor of Mississippi, boasted that \u201cthere is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi\u2019s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ignorant\u2014but the nigger.\u201d[footnote]Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow<\/strong> (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 43. [\/footnote] These technically color-blind tools did their work well. In 1900 Alabama had 121,159 literate Black men of voting age. Only 3,742 were registered to vote. Louisiana had 130,000 Black voters in the contentious election of 1896. Only 5,320 voted in 1900. Black people were clearly the target of these laws, but that did not prevent some whites from being disenfranchised as well. Louisiana dropped 80,000 white voters over the same period. Most politically engaged southern whites considered this a price worth paying to prevent the alleged fraud that plagued the region\u2019s elections.[footnote]Perman, Struggle for Mastery, 147. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nAt the same time that the South\u2019s Democratic leaders were adopting the tools to disenfranchise the region\u2019s Black voters, these same legislatures were constructing a system of racial segregation even more pernicious. While it built on earlier practice, segregation was primarily a modern and urban system of enforcing racial subordination and deference. In rural areas, white and Black southerners negotiated the meaning of racial difference within the context of personal relationships of kinship and patronage. An African American who broke the local community\u2019s racial norms could expect swift personal sanction that often included violence. The crop lien and convict lease systems were the most important legal tools of racial control in the rural South. Maintaining white supremacy there did not require segregation. Maintaining white supremacy within the city, however, was a different matter altogether. As the region\u2019s railroad networks and cities expanded, so too did the anonymity and therefore freedom of southern Black people. Southern cities were becoming a center of Black middle-class life that was an implicit threat to racial hierarchies. White southerners created the system of segregation as a way to maintain white supremacy in restaurants, theaters, public restrooms, schools, water fountains, train cars, and hospitals. Segregation inscribed the superiority of whites and the deference of Black people into the very geography of public spaces.\r\n\r\nAs with disenfranchisement, segregation violated a plain reading of the Constitution\u2014in this case the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the Supreme Court intervened, ruling in the Civil Rights Cases<\/em> (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only prevented discrimination directly by states. It did not prevent discrimination by individuals, businesses, or other entities. Southern states exploited this interpretation with the first legal segregation of railroad cars in 1888. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1896, New Orleans resident Homer Plessy<\/strong> challenged the constitutionality of Louisiana\u2019s segregation of streetcars. The court ruled against Plessy and, in the process, established the legal principle of separate but equal. Racially segregated facilities were legal provided they were equivalent. In practice this was almost never the case. The court\u2019s majority defended its position with logic that reflected the racial assumptions of the day. \u201cIf one race be inferior to the other socially,\u201d the court explained, \u201cthe Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.\u201d Justice John Harlan, the lone dissenter, countered, \u201cOur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.\u201d Harlan went on to warn that the court\u2019s decision would \u201cpermit the seeds of race hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.\u201d[footnote]Plessy v. Ferguson<\/strong>, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).[\/footnote] In their rush to fulfill Harlan\u2019s prophecy, southern whites codified and enforced the segregation of public spaces.\r\n\r\nSegregation was built on a fiction\u2014that there could be a white South socially and culturally distinct from African Americans. Its legal basis rested on the constitutional fallacy of \u201cseparate but equal.\u201d Southern whites erected a bulwark of white supremacy that would last for nearly sixty years. Segregation and disenfranchisement in the South rejected Black citizenship and relegated Black social and cultural life to segregated spaces. African Americans lived divided lives, acting the part whites demanded of them in public, while maintaining their own world apart from whites. This segregated world provided a measure of independence for the region\u2019s growing Black middle class, yet at the cost of poisoning the relationship between Black and white. Segregation and disenfranchisement created entrenched structures of racism that completed the total rejection of the promises of Reconstruction.\r\n\r\nAnd yet many Black Americans of the Progressive Era fought back. Just as activists such as Ida Wells worked against southern lynching, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of Black Americans.\r\n\r\nBorn into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many Black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, located in Alabama. Washington envisioned that Tuskegee\u2019s contribution to Black life would come through industrial education and vocational training. He believed that such skills would help African Americans accomplish economic independence while developing a sense of self-worth and pride of accomplishment, even while living within the putrid confines of Jim Crow. Washington poured his life into Tuskegee, and thereby connected with leading white philanthropic interests. Individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, for instance, financially assisted Washington and his educational ventures.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_203\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"520\"] The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, \u201cWASHINGTON BOOKER T,\u201d between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWashington became a leading spokesperson for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass\u2019s death in early 1895. Washington\u2019s famous \u201cAtlanta Compromise<\/strong>\u201d speech from that same year encouraged Black Americans to \u201ccast your bucket down\u201d to improve life\u2019s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court\u2019s Plessy <\/em>v. Ferguson<\/em> decision that legalized segregation under the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, \u201cIn all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.\u201d[footnote]Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 221\u2013222.[\/footnote]\u00a0Washington was both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America\u2019s unjust racial hierarchy; his public advocacy of a conciliatory posture toward white supremacy concealed the efforts to which he went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery<\/em> (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in Black journalism, working to fund and support Black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois\u2019s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.\r\n\r\nSpeaking decades later, Du Bois said Washington had, in his 1895 \u201cCompromise\u201d speech, \u201cimplicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.\u201d Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk<\/em>, but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. \u201cI admired much about him,\u201d Du Bois admitted. \u201cWashington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.\u201d[footnote]Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 297 n. 28.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nDu Bois\u2019s criticism reveals the politicized context of the Black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to Black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. He was raised by a hardworking and independent mother; his New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois\u2019s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life\u2019s work to study what he called the \u201cNegro problem,\u201d the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the<\/em> problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois\u2019s educational path trended back North. He attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard, and in 1895, he became the first Black American to receive a PhD there.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_204\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"459\"] \u201cW.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,\u201d 1919. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDu Bois became one of America\u2019s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois\u2019s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only in his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> (1903) and Darkwater<\/em> (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate Black personhood and<\/em> attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead-up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring, the NAACP<\/strong>. Du Bois\u2019s main work with the NAACP<\/strong> lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis<\/em>, one of America\u2019s leading Black publications. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged Black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.\r\n
\u201cWe refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults. . . . Any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency or prejudice . . . discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, color of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. . . . Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty.\u201d[footnote]W. E. B. DuBois, \u201cNiagara\u2019s Declaration of Principles, 1905,\u201d Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, https:\/\/glc.yale.edu\/niagaras-declaration-principles-1905, accessed June 15, 2018.[\/footnote]<\/blockquote>\r\nW. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made a tremendous historical impact and left a notable historical legacy. They were reared under markedly different circumstances, and thus their early life experiences and even personal temperaments oriented both leaders\u2019 lives and outlooks in decidedly different ways. Du Bois\u2019s confrontational voice boldly targeted white supremacy. He believed in the power of social science to arrest the reach of white supremacy. Washington advocated incremental change for longer-term gain. He contended that economic self-sufficiency would pay off at a future date. Four years after Du Bois directly spoke out against Washington in the chapter \u201cOf Mr. Booker T. Washington\u201d in Souls of Black Folk<\/em>, the two men shared the same lectern at Philadelphia Divinity School to address matters of race, history, and culture in the American South. Although their philosophies often differed, both men inspired others to demand that America live up to its democratic creed.\r\n
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Check for Understanding<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n
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How did Americans respond to the realization of the negative sides of U.S. industrial growth?<\/li>\r\n \t
How did the press play a large role in this change?<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
VII. Conclusion<\/h1>\r\nIndustrial capitalism unleashed powerful forces in American life. Along with wealth, technological innovation, and rising standards of living, a host of social problems unsettled many who turned to reform politics to set the world right again. The Progressive Era signaled that a turning point had been reached for many Americans who were suddenly willing to confront the age\u2019s problems with national political solutions. Reformers sought to bring order to chaos, to bring efficiency to inefficiency, and to bring justice to injustice. Causes varied, constituencies shifted, and the tangible effects of so much energy was difficult to measure, but the Progressive Era signaled a bursting of long-simmering tensions and introduced new patterns in the relationship between American society, American culture, and American politics.","rendered":"From an undated William Jennings Bryan campaign print, \u201cShall the People Rule?\u201d Library of Congress.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
I. Introduction<\/h1>\n
\u201cNever in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,\u201d Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel<\/em>, his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States. He wrote, \u201cThe swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.2-300x206.jpg\")
Policemen place the bodies of workers who were burned alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into coffins. Photographs like this made real the atrocities that could result from unsafe working conditions. March 25, 1911. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Remembering their workers\u2019 \u201cchief value,\u201d the owners of the factory decided that a viable fire escape and unlocked doors were too expensive and called in the city police to break up the strike. After the 1911 fire, reporter Bill Shepherd reflected, \u201cI looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.\u201d[footnote]Leon Stein, The Triangle Fire (Ithaca, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1962), 20. [\/footnote]\u00a0Former Triangle worker and labor organizer Rose Schneiderman said, \u201cThis is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers . . . the life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred! There are so many of us for one job, it matters little if 140-odd are burned to death.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 144.[\/footnote] After the fire, Triangle owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were brought up on manslaughter charges. They were acquitted after less than two hours of deliberation. The outcome continued a trend in the industrializing economy that saw workers\u2019 deaths answered with little punishment of the business owners responsible for such dangerous conditions. But as such tragedies mounted and working and living conditions worsened and inequality grew, it became increasingly difficult to develop justifications for this new modern order.\r\n\r\nEvents such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire<\/strong> convinced many Americans of the need for reform, but the energies of activists were needed to spread a new commitment to political activism and government interference in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, religious leaders, and activists all raised their voices to push Americans toward reform.\r\n\r\nReformers turned to books and mass-circulation magazines to publicize the plight of the nation\u2019s poor and the many corruptions endemic to the new industrial order. Journalists who exposed business practices, poverty, and corruption\u2014labeled by Theodore Roosevelt as \u201cmuckrakers<\/strong>\u201d\u2014aroused public demands for reform. Magazines such as McClure\u2019s<\/em> detailed political corruption and economic malfeasance. The muckrakers<\/strong> confirmed Americans\u2019 suspicions about runaway wealth and political corruption. Ray Stannard Baker, a journalist whose reports on U.S. Steel exposed the underbelly of the new corporate capitalism, wrote, \u201cI think I can understand now why these exposure articles took such a hold upon the American people. It was because the country, for years, had been swept by the agitation of soap-box orators, prophets crying in the wilderness, and political campaigns based upon charges of corruption and privilege which everyone believed or suspected had some basis of truth, but which were largely unsubstantiated.\u201d[footnote]Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle: The Autobiography of Ray Stannard Baker (New York: Scribner, 1945), 183.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nJournalists shaped popular perceptions of Gilded Age injustice. In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives<\/em>, a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city\u2019s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis\u2019s book led to housing reform in New York and other cities and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty.[footnote]Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Scribner, 1890).[\/footnote] In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle<\/em>, a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the stockyards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production. The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. \u201cThe slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors,\u201d wrote Sinclair, \u201clike some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.\u201d[footnote]Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, 1906), 40.[\/footnote] Sinclair\u2019s expos\u00e9 led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act<\/strong> and Pure Food and Drug Act<\/strong> in 1906.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_197\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"976\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.3-300x230.jpg\")
Jacob Riis, \u201cHome of an Italian Ragpicker.\u201d ca. 1888-1889. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nOf course, it was not only journalists who raised questions about American society. One of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy\u2019s 1888 Looking Backward, <\/em>was a national sensation. In it, a man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find society radically altered. Poverty and disease and competition gave way as new industrial armies cooperated to build a utopia of social harmony and economic prosperity. Bellamy\u2019s vision of a reformed society enthralled readers, inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs, and pushed many young readers onto the road to reform.[footnote]Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000\u20131887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888).[\/footnote]\u00a0It led countless Americans to question the realities of American life in the nineteenth century:\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.4-300x203.jpg\")
Suffragists campaigned tirelessly for the vote in the first two decades of the twentieth century, taking to the streets in public displays like this 1915 pre-election parade in New York City. During this one event, 20,000 women defied the gender norms that tried to relegate them to the private sphere and deny them the vote. 1915. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nReform opened new possibilities for women\u2019s activism in American public life and gave new impetus to the long campaign for women\u2019s suffrage<\/strong>. Much energy for women\u2019s work came from female \u201cclubs,\u201d social organizations devoted to various purposes. Some focused on intellectual development; others emphasized philanthropic activities. Increasingly, these organizations looked outward, to their communities and to the place of women in the larger political sphere.\r\n\r\nWomen\u2019s clubs flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1890s women formed national women\u2019s club federations. Particularly significant in campaigns for suffrage and women\u2019s rights were the General Federation of Women\u2019s Clubs (formed in New York City in 1890) and the National Association of Colored Women (organized in Washington, D.C., in 1896), both of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were biracial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy midnineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters.\r\n\r\nBlack women produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all Black Americans as well as equal rights for all women. Black abolitionist\u00a0Mary Jane Richardson Jones organized Black women in Chicago around settlement work, moral uplift, and suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who had also worked for abolition and suffrage, worked with club women in Boston and organized, in 1895, the\u00a0First National Conference of the Colored Women of America. The following year, Mary Church Terrell and other black activists formed the National Association of Colored Women, later known as the\u00a0National Association of Colored Women\u2019s Clubs. These leagues of service-oriented women\u2019s organizations provided powerful networks to organize and amplify Black women\u2019s efforts not only to secure suffrage but to challenge discrimination and uplift Black communities across the United States.[footnote]See, for instance, Anne Firor Scott, \u201cMost Invisible of All: Black Women\u2019s Voluntary Associations,\u201d The Journal of Southern History<\/i>. 56 (January, 1990), 3\u201322. [\/footnote]\r\n\r\nOther women worked through churches and moral reform organizations to clean up American life. And still others worked as moral vigilantes. The fearsome Carrie A. Nation, an imposing woman who believed she worked God\u2019s will, won headlines for destroying saloons. In Wichita, Kansas, on December 27, 1900, Nation took a hatchet and broke bottles and bars at the luxurious Carey Hotel. Arrested and charged with causing $3,000 in damages, Nation spent a month in jail before the county dismissed the charges on account of \u201ca delusion to such an extent as to be practically irresponsible.\u201d But Nation\u2019s \u201chatchetation\u201d drew national attention. Describing herself as \u201ca bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn\u2019t like,\u201d she continued her assaults, and days later she smashed two more Wichita bars.[footnote]John Kobler, Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1993), 147.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nFew women followed in Nation\u2019s footsteps, and many more worked within more reputable organizations. Nation, for instance, had founded a chapter of the Woman\u2019s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), but the organization\u2019s leaders described her as \u201cunwomanly and unchristian.\u201d The WCTU was founded in 1874 as a modest temperance organization devoted to combating the evils of drunkenness. But then, from 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard invigorated the organization by transforming it into a national political organization, embracing a \u201cdo everything\u201d policy that adopted any and all reasonable reforms that would improve social welfare and advance women\u2019s rights. WCTU women worked to alleviate urban poverty, pursued prison reform, championed the eight-hour workday, pushed for child labor laws, advocated \u201chome protection,\u201d and fought for numerous other progressive causes.\u00a0Temperance, and then the full prohibition of alcohol, however, always loomed large.\r\n\r\nMany American reformers associated alcohol with nearly every social ill. Alcohol was blamed for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The 1912 Anti-Saloon League Yearbook<\/em>, for instance, presented charts indicating comparable increases in alcohol consumption alongside rising divorce rates. The WCTU called alcohol a \u201chome wrecker.\u201d More insidiously, perhaps, reformers also associated alcohol with cities and immigrants, necessarily maligning America\u2019s immigrants, Catholics, and working classes in their crusade against liquor. Still, reformers believed that the abolition of \u201cstrong drink\u201d would bring about social progress, obviate the need for prisons and insane asylums, save women and children from domestic abuse, and usher in a more just, progressive society.\r\n\r\nPowerful female activists emerged out of the club movement and temperance campaigns. Perhaps no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. Born in Cedarville, Illinois, in 1860, Addams lost her mother by age two and lived under the attentive care of her father. At seventeen, she left home to attend Rockford Female Seminary. An idealist, Addams sought the means to make the world a better place. She believed that well-educated women of means, such as herself, lacked practical strategies for engaging everyday reform. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked on a multiyear \u201cgrand tour\u201d of Europe. She found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. After visiting London\u2019s Toynbee Hall in 1887, Addams returned to the United States and in 1889 founded Hull House<\/strong> in Chicago with her longtime confidant and companion Ellen Gates Starr.[footnote]Toynbee Hall was the first settlement house. It was built in 1884 by Samuel Barnett as a place for Oxford students to live while at the same time working in the house\u2019s poor neighborhood. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 64\u201365; Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). [\/footnote]\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.5-300x169.jpg\")
Women protested silently in front of the White House for over two years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Here, women represent their colleges as they picket the White House in support of women\u2019s suffrage<\/strong>. 1917. Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-31799).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWomen\u2019s suffrage was typically entwined with a wide range of reform efforts. Many suffragists argued that women\u2019s votes were necessary to clean up politics and combat social evils. By the 1890s, for example, the WCTU, then the largest women\u2019s organization in America, endorsed suffrage. An alliance of working-class and middle- and upper-class women organized the Women\u2019s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903 and campaigned for the vote alongside the National American Woman Suffrage Association<\/strong>, a leading suffrage organization composed largely of middle- and upper-class women. WTUL members viewed the vote as a way to further their economic interests and to foster a new sense of respect for working-class women. \u201cWhat the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist,\u201d said Rose Schneiderman, a WTUL leader, during a 1912 speech. \u201cThe worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.\u201d[footnote]Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women\u2019s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (New York: Routledge, 1983), 32.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nMany suffragists adopted a much crueler message. Some, even outside the South, argued that white women\u2019s votes were necessary to maintain white supremacy. Many white American women argued that enfranchising white upper- and middle-class women would counteract Black voters. These arguments even stretched into international politics. But whether the message advocated gender equality, class politics, or white supremacy, the suffrage campaign was winning.\r\n\r\nThe final push for women\u2019s suffrage came on the eve of World War I. Determined to win the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association<\/strong> developed a dual strategy that focused on the passage of state voting rights laws and on the ratification of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, a new, more militant, suffrage organization emerged on the scene. Led by Alice Paul, the National Woman\u2019s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Woman\u2019s Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women.[footnote]Ellen Carol Dubois, Women\u2019s Suffrage and Women\u2019s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIn January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women\u2019s suffrage amendment, and two years later women\u2019s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by the promise of change but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began; the United States was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.6-300x169.jpg\")
An illustration shows a \u201cStandard Oil\u201d storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a statehouse, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House. The only building not yet within reach of the octopus is the White House\u2014President Teddy Roosevelt had won a reputation as a trustbuster. Udo Keppler, \u201cNext!\u201d 1904. Library of Congress (LC-USZCN4-122).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe rapid industrialization, technological advancement, and urban growth of the 1870s and 1880s triggered major changes in the way businesses structured themselves. The Second Industrial Revolution, made possible by available natural resources, growth in the labor supply through immigration, increasing capital, new legal economic entities, novel production strategies, and a growing national market, was commonly asserted to be the natural product of the federal government\u2019s laissez faire, or \u201chands off,\u201d economic policy. An unregulated business climate, the argument went, allowed for the growth of major trusts, most notably Andrew Carnegie\u2019s Carnegie Steel (later consolidated with other producers as U.S. Steel) and John D. Rockefeller\u2019s Standard Oil Company. Each displayed the vertical and horizontal integration strategies common to the new trusts: Carnegie first used vertical integration by controlling every phase of business (raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution), and Rockefeller adhered to horizontal integration by buying out competing refineries. Once dominant in a market, critics alleged, the trusts could artificially inflate prices, bully rivals, and bribe politicians.\r\n\r\nBetween 1897 and 1904, over four thousand companies were consolidated down into 257 corporate firms. As one historian wrote, \u201cBy 1904 a total of 318 trusts held 40% of US manufacturing assets and boasted a capitalization of $7 billion, seven times bigger than the US national debt.\u201d[footnote]Kevin P. Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 307.[\/footnote] With the twentieth century came the age of monopoly. Mergers and the aggressive business policies of wealthy men such as Carnegie and Rockefeller earned them the epithet robber barons<\/em>. Their cutthroat stifling of economic competition, mistreatment of workers, and corruption of politics sparked an opposition that pushed for regulations to rein in the power of monopolies. The great corporations became a major target of reformers.\r\n\r\nBig business, whether in meatpacking, railroads, telegraph lines, oil, or steel, posed new problems for the American legal system. Before the Civil War, most businesses operated in a single state. They might ship goods across state lines or to other countries, but they typically had offices and factories in just one state. Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. But extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations. In the Midwest, farmers formed a network of organizations that were part political pressure group, part social club, and part mutual aid society. Together they pushed for so-called Granger laws that regulated railroads and other new companies. Railroads and others opposed these regulations because they restrained profits and because of the difficulty of meeting the standards of each state\u2019s separate regulatory laws. In 1877, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld these laws in a series of rulings, finding in cases such as Munn v. Illinois<\/em> and Stone v. Wisconsin<\/em> that railroads and other companies of such size necessarily affected the public interest and could thus be regulated by individual states. In Munn<\/em>, the court declared, \u201cProperty does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devoted his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the common good, to the extent of the interest he has thus created.\u201d[footnote]Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113 (1877).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nLater rulings, however, conceded that only the federal government could constitutionally regulate interstate commerce and the new national businesses operating it. And as more and more power and capital and market share flowed to the great corporations, the onus of regulation passed to the federal government. In 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which established the Interstate Commerce Commission to stop discriminatory and predatory pricing practices. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. It stated that a \u201ctrust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal\u201d and that those who \u201cmonopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce . . . shall be deemed guilty.\u201d[footnote]Interstate Commerce Act of 1887.[\/footnote] The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that \u201cunreasonably\u201d stifled free trade. The courts seized on the law\u2019s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions. Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.\r\n\r\nAggression against the trusts\u2014and the progressive vogue for \u201ctrust busting\u201d\u2014took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt\u2019s youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation.\u201d[footnote]The writer Henry Adams said that he \u201cshowed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter\u2014the quality that medieval theology assigned to God\u2014he was pure act.\u201d Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 413.[\/footnote] Roosevelt was by no means antibusiness. Instead, he envisioned his presidency as a mediator between opposing forces, such as between labor unions and corporate executives. Despite his own wealthy background, Roosevelt pushed for antitrust legislation and regulations, arguing that the courts could not be relied on to break up the trusts. Roosevelt also used his own moral judgment to determine which monopolies he would pursue. Roosevelt believed that there were good and bad trusts, necessary monopolies and corrupt ones. Although his reputation as a trust buster was wildly exaggerated, he was the first major national politician to go after the trusts. \u201cThe great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts,\u201d he said, \u201care the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown.\u201d[footnote]Theodore Roosevelt, Addresses and Presidential Messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902\u20131904, 15.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHis first target was the Northern Securities Company, a \u201cholding\u201d trust in which several wealthy bankers, most famously J. P. Morgan, used to hold controlling shares in all the major railroad companies in the American Northwest. Holding trusts had emerged as a way to circumvent the Sherman Anti-Trust Act: by controlling the majority of shares, rather than the principal, Morgan and his collaborators tried to claim that it was not a monopoly. Roosevelt\u2019s administration sued and won in court, and in 1904 the Northern Securities Company was ordered to disband into separate competitive companies. Two years later, in 1906, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act, allowing the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate best practices and set reasonable rates for the railroads.\r\n\r\nRoosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt\u2019s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world\u2019s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.\r\n\r\nTrust busting and the handling of monopolies dominated the election of 1912. When the Republican Party spurned Roosevelt\u2019s return to politics and renominated the incumbent Taft, Roosevelt left and formed his own coalition, the Progressive or \u201cBull Moose\u201d Party. Whereas Taft took an all-encompassing view on the illegality of monopolies, Roosevelt adopted a New Nationalism<\/strong> program, which once again emphasized the regulation of already existing corporations or the expansion of federal power over the economy. In contrast, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee, emphasized in his New Freedom<\/strong> agenda neither trust busting nor federal regulation but rather small-business incentives so that individual companies could increase their competitive chances. Yet once he won the election, Wilson edged nearer to Roosevelt\u2019s position, signing the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers and price discrimination and protecting labor\u2019s access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting. Congress further created the Federal Trade Commission to enforce the Clayton Act, ensuring at least some measure of implementation.[footnote]The historiography on American progressive politics is vast. See, for instance, Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870\u20131920 (New York: Free Press, 2003).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhile the three presidents\u2014Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson\u2014pushed the development and enforcement of antitrust law, their commitments were uneven, and trust busting itself manifested the political pressure put on politicians by the workers, farmers, and progressive writers who so strongly drew attention to the ramifications of trusts and corporate capital on the lives of everyday Americans.\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.7-300x214.jpg\")
\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_202\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"914\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.8-300x88.jpg\")
The image on the top shows the Hetch Hetchy Valley before it was dammed. The bottom photograph, taken almost a century later, shows the obvious difference after damming, with the submergence of the valley floor under the reservoir waters. Photograph of the Hetch Hetchy Valley before damming, from the Sierra Club Bulletin, January 1908. Wikimedia; Daniel Mayer (photographer), May 2002. Wikimedia.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWhile preservation was often articulated as an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized way of life and as a welcome respite from the challenges of modernity (at least, for those who had the means to escape), the conservationists were more closely aligned with broader trends in American society. Although the \u201cgreatest good for the greatest number\u201d was very nearly the catchphrase of conservation, conservationist policies most often benefited the nation\u2019s financial interests. For example, many states instituted game laws to regulate hunting and protect wildlife, but laws could be entirely unbalanced. In Pennsylvania, local game laws included requiring firearm permits for noncitizens, barred hunting on Sundays, and banned the shooting of songbirds. These laws disproportionately affected Italian immigrants, critics said, as Italians often hunted songbirds for subsistence, worked in mines for low wages every day but Sunday, and were too poor to purchase permits or to pay the fines levied against them when game wardens caught them breaking these new laws. Other laws, for example, offered up resources to businesses at costs prohibitive to all but the wealthiest companies and individuals, or with regulatory requirements that could be met only by companies with extensive resources.\r\n\r\nBut Progressive Era environmentalism addressed more than the management of American public lands. After all, reformers addressing issues facing the urban poor were also doing environmental work. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both worksite hazards and occupational and bodily harm. The progressives\u2019 commitment to the provision of public services at the municipal level meant more coordination and oversight in matters of public health, waste management, and even playgrounds and city parks. Their work focused on the intersection of communities and their material environments, highlighting the urgency of urban environmental concerns.\r\n\r\nWhile reform movements focused their attention on the urban poor, other efforts targeted rural communities. The Country Life movement, spearheaded by Liberty Hyde Bailey, sought to support agrarian families and encourage young people to stay in their communities and run family farms. Early-twentieth-century educational reforms included a commitment to environmentalism at the elementary level. Led by Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, the nature study movement took students outside to experience natural processes and to help them develop observational skills and an appreciation for the natural world.\r\n\r\nOther examples highlight the interconnectedness of urban and rural communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extinction of the North American passenger pigeon reveals the complexity of Progressive Era relationships between people and nature. Passenger pigeons were actively hunted, prepared at New York\u2019s finest restaurants and in the humblest of farm kitchens. Some hunted them for pay; others shot them in competitions at sporting clubs. And then they were gone, their ubiquity giving way only to nostalgia. Many Americans took notice at the great extinction of a species that had perhaps numbered in the billions and then was eradicated. Women in Audubon Society chapters organized against the fashion of wearing feathers\u2014even whole birds\u2014on ladies\u2019 hats. Upper- and middle-class women made up the lion\u2019s share of the membership of these societies. They used their social standing to fight for birds. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines. Examining how women mobilized contemporary notions of womanhood in the service of protecting birds reveals a tangle of cultural and economic processes. Such examples also reveal the range of ideas, policies, and practices wrapped up in figuring out what\u2014and who\u2014American nature should be for.\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.9-245x300.jpg\")
The strategies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois differed, but their desire remained the same: better lives for African Americans. Harris & Ewing, \u201cWASHINGTON BOOKER T,\u201d between 1905 and 1915. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWashington became a leading spokesperson for Black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly after Frederick Douglass\u2019s death in early 1895. Washington\u2019s famous \u201cAtlanta Compromise<\/strong>\u201d speech from that same year encouraged Black Americans to \u201ccast your bucket down\u201d to improve life\u2019s lot under segregation. In the same speech, delivered one year before the Supreme Court\u2019s Plessy <\/em>v. Ferguson<\/em> decision that legalized segregation under the \u201cseparate but equal\u201d doctrine, Washington said to white Americans, \u201cIn all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.\u201d[footnote]Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1901), 221\u2013222.[\/footnote]\u00a0Washington was both praised as a race leader and pilloried as an accommodationist to America\u2019s unjust racial hierarchy; his public advocacy of a conciliatory posture toward white supremacy concealed the efforts to which he went to assist African Americans in the legal and economic quest for racial justice. In addition to founding Tuskegee, Washington also published a handful of influential books, including the autobiography Up from Slavery<\/em> (1901). Like Du Bois, Washington was also active in Black journalism, working to fund and support Black newspaper publications, most of which sought to counter Du Bois\u2019s growing influence. Washington died in 1915, during World War I, of ill health in Tuskegee, Alabama.\r\n\r\nSpeaking decades later, Du Bois said Washington had, in his 1895 \u201cCompromise\u201d speech, \u201cimplicitly abandoned all political and social rights. . . . I never thought Washington was a bad man . . . I believed him to be sincere, though wrong.\u201d Du Bois would directly attack Washington in his classic 1903 The Souls of Black Folk<\/em>, but at the turn of the century he could never escape the shadow of his longtime rival. \u201cI admired much about him,\u201d Du Bois admitted. \u201cWashington . . . died in 1915. A lot of people think I died at the same time.\u201d[footnote]Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 297 n. 28.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nDu Bois\u2019s criticism reveals the politicized context of the Black freedom struggle and exposes the many positions available to Black activists. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, Du Bois entered the world as a free person of color three years after the Civil War ended. He was raised by a hardworking and independent mother; his New England childhood alerted him to the reality of race even as it invested the emerging thinker with an abiding faith in the power of education. Du Bois graduated at the top of his high school class and attended Fisk University. Du Bois\u2019s sojourn to the South in 1880s left a distinct impression that would guide his life\u2019s work to study what he called the \u201cNegro problem,\u201d the systemic racial and economic discrimination that Du Bois prophetically pronounced would be the<\/em> problem of the twentieth century. After Fisk, Du Bois\u2019s educational path trended back North. He attended Harvard, earned his second degree, crossed the Atlantic for graduate work in Germany, and circulated back to Harvard, and in 1895, he became the first Black American to receive a PhD there.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_204\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"459\"]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.10-241x300.jpg\")
\u201cW.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois,\u201d 1919. Library of Congress.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDu Bois became one of America\u2019s foremost intellectual leaders on questions of social justice by producing scholarship that underscored the humanity of African Americans. Du Bois\u2019s work as an intellectual, scholar, and college professor began during the Progressive Era, a time in American history marked by rapid social and cultural change as well as complex global political conflicts and developments. Du Bois addressed these domestic and international concerns not only in his classrooms at Wilberforce University in Ohio and Atlanta University in Georgia but also in a number of his early publications on the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Black life in urban Philadelphia. The most well-known of these early works included The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> (1903) and Darkwater<\/em> (1920). In these books, Du Bois combined incisive historical analysis with engaging literary drama to validate Black personhood and<\/em> attack the inhumanity of white supremacy, particularly in the lead-up to and during World War I. In addition to publications and teaching, Du Bois set his sights on political organizing for civil rights, first with the Niagara Movement and later with its offspring, the NAACP<\/strong>. Du Bois\u2019s main work with the NAACP<\/strong> lasted from 1909 to 1934 as editor of The Crisis<\/em>, one of America\u2019s leading Black publications. Du Bois attacked Washington and urged Black Americans to concede to nothing, to make no compromises and advocate for equal rights under the law. Throughout his early career, he pushed for civil rights legislation, launched legal challenges against discrimination, organized protests against injustice, and applied his capacity for clear research and sharp prose to expose the racial sins of Progressive Era America.\r\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/americanyawp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/229\/2025\/04\/20.1-300x169.jpg\")