Download Industrialization and the Progressive Response

Industrialization
and the
Progressive
Response
Anything bolded and underlined is something
you definitely need to know
Workers

Millions of workers were needed:




Production in factories
Acquisition of raw materials
Transportation of goods
Women and African Americans met with especially fierce
inequality

1891 – 7400 Southern blacks have industrial jobs

Remember – there were 4million freed slaves in 1865…

Unskilled labor had dirty, disgusting jobs

Women and children worked too – out of necessity
Owner opinion of labor

Employees were inputs into the product
6
days a week, many hours, bad conditions, little pay
– no humane considerations

Owners felt no responsibility

Company towns – paid in scrips
 Similar
to sharecropping
How to combat such injustice?

Knights of Labor
 Open
to workers traditionally excluded from other
unions
 Women, men, skilled, and unskilled, and later, African
Americans too…

BUT NEVER CHINESE WORKERS
 Fits in with Chinese Exclusion Act – prejudice – need
based entry
 Mother

Jones – labor leader
KOL were looking for



8 hour days
Equal pay for equal work
End child labor
Great Upheaval
Workers needed rights – huge wage cuts
 In response, 1886 – 1500 strikes involving
400,000 workers


Chicago workers – Haymarket Square –
organized by anarchists -met with violence
when a bomb exploded
How did companies fight back?

Blacklists

Yellow dog contracts

Lockouts

Strikebreakers
In response to the Knights’ cause

American Federation of Labor (AFL)
was created
 Restricted

to skilled labor
Disassociate themselves with the trouble makers
 Samuel
Gompers (the guy from the Triangle
Shirtwaist factory packet)
Famous Strikes

Homestead
– lockout / strikebreakers (“Detectives”)
- violence
 Strike

Pullman
 Company
town prices went up, wages went
down, workers boycotted, trains were hooked
up to mail cars, fed gov forced boycotts end!
Rural Progressivism

Problems farmers faced:
 Overproduction
shrank profits and demand, prices
continue to drop
 Families
bought more land to produce more (to make
more money) but dropped prices even more
 Families
 Bank
could not pay loans
repossessed their land
Why were the farmers mad?

Everyone got something good out of the
deal except the farmers:
 Cheap
food
 Eastern
 Which
banks made out quite well
led to the creation of the …
Grange movement

Farmers attempted to organize to help
themselves – formed “cooperatives” – tried
to increase profit

Interstate Commerce Act
stopped RR from giving rebates
 Created the Interstate Commerce Commission

 Random note – because of trains we have time
zones…
Question of Money

Farmers wanted more paper money (wanted
inflation) - easier for debts

Bankers wanted money backed by the gold
standard – made repayment better for them –
no inflation

Eventually ended up passing a law that was
semi-helpful to farmers
Outcome of these Rural happenings was
the Populist Party (populism)

Farmers, labor leaders, reformers
Graduated income tax
Bank regulation
Government ownership of RR and
communication mediums
Immigration restrictions

William Jennings Bryan – key representative




Progressive Movement


Increasing gap between rich and poor
Progressives were the urban populists
 Publicized

the ills of industrial society!!!
Wanted to:




Focus on urban problems
Unsafe working conditions
Bad sanitation
Corrupt political machines
Progressive Ideals

Social justice – federal graduated income
tax

Different view of social darwinism
Reforms

Inspired by mass-circulation journals:
 Cosmopolitan

magazine
Muckrakers – realism!!!
Tarbell – The History of Standard Oil
 Jacob Riis – How the Other Half Lives
 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
 Ida

Seeking to solve some of the major social
problems of the era
Reforming the workplace

Considerations paid to:



Hours
Wages (national minimum wage – 1938)
Who was working?

Laws were passed but they were hard to enforce

Argument against laws:

“used 14th Amendment – “prohibits states from depriving any
person of life, liberty, pr property without process of law” – it was
unfair to take away their livelihoods
Fighting for reform:

AFL (still)
 Growing
in power
 Fighting for closed shops (not open)

International Workers of the World
(Woblies)
– very radical – many did not like!
 Bill Haywood
 Socialist
Societal Reforms

Book publishing, movie production, baseball

City planning

Prohibition - 18th amendment – repealed in 1933

Women’s suffrage (19th Amendment) 1920 (we’ll
come back to this)
Race Related Reforms

W.E.B. DuBois

National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People

American Indian progressives

Jane Addams too
By the way

Tomorrow’s registration day – take a look at the classes
available to you – we went over them the other day in
class

HW Tonight: Read excerpt from Jane Addams - you must
read this and come in with it marked

Might also want to take a look at the notes you have
taken on some of our most recent studies. Tomorrow
would be a good day for a short quiz

Don’t forget janosco’s reading of daisy miller either