Progressive
movement in 1896-7920 plays more successful and social-promoted role compared
with the populists’ achievements. Progressives who came from the Upper Classes
and the new urban middle classes shared the same understanding of society and
the Gospel of Wealth. They believe that businesses should be free as long as
they played fairly. While populists wanted to destroy the entire industrialization,
Progressives wanted to reform the worst abuses of industrialization in order to
gain a win-win situation. This is the advanced opinion of the time as we can
see today.
Firstly, progressive
movements have more valuable goals of the time. They aim at three aspects: 1. Progressives
object corruption in any form. They shared the muckrakers’ interest in
supervising monopolies like Standard Oil to regulate private power.2.They want
to kill political corruption. They attacked political machines and tried to
streamline the political process for a better efficiency. 3. Progressives hoped
to capture the successes of America’s largest corporations by applying the scientific
management techniques to organize private reform movements and government.
In education, Progressives
relied on the expertise of business leaders like Andrew Carnegie, John D.
Rockefeller, H. J. Heinz (of tomato sauce and ketchup fame), attorney Samuel T.
C. Dodd and the man who invented the Standard Oil trust in 1887. They reorganized
the school board of Chicago and successfully applied their business techniques
to make the Chicago Schools better institutions.
Also, Theodore
Roosevelt’s "New Nationalism" brought change and hope to this
country. President Roosevelt maintained a high-water level of the early
progressive movement. His administration fundamentally changed the way
government operated. Rather than accepting the laissez-faire or pro-business
path set by the Gospel of Wealth, Roosevelt believed that government must
become more responsive to the demands from common people. This switch from
favoring corporations to favoring popular sentiments became the defining spirit
of the "New Nationalism". Moreover, government help had crushed the
1877 railroad strike and the 1892 Homestead strike. The "Square Deal"
ended the anti-union alliance of business and government.
Progressivism reformed
the worst abuses of industrialization. Populism may have highlighted the need
for urban and industrial reform, but the Populists never accomplished any of
their goals. It took Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt to successfully regulate
the railroads under new legislation like the Hepburn Act and aggressive
prosecutions like the Northern Securities case.
Populism failed
because it tried to solve people’s complaints at the local level. Change in
industrializing America had occurred at the national level. Carrie Nation’s axe
wielding Anti-Saloon League accomplished nothing through neighborhood violence.
When Progressives tackled temperance, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
successfully banned the use of alcohol throughout the country.
Populism failed to
stop political corruption. Grangers feared a railroad led conspiracy against
the small farm, but they did not change the way government operated. Farmers
complained about the bribes that covered the Credit Mobilier scandal, but they
never changed the culture of corruption. Progressive business leaders like
Rockefeller and Dodd routed corruption from the halls of the Chicago School
system. They applied the principles of scientific management to make government
efficient.
ID
hints
Jacob Riis was a muckraking
photographer who took pictures of immigrant living conditions in New York City
around 1890. He tried to expose the poor living conditions in the hope of
generating reform. His book "How the Other Half Lived" shocked
Americans with the first look at life inside tenements.
Munn v. Illinois, was a United States
Supreme Court case dealing with corporate rates and agriculture. This case
allowed states to regulate certain businesses within their borders, including
railroads, and is commonly regarded as a milestone in the growth of federal
government regulation.
Samuel Gompers was American cigar
maker who became a labor union leader and a key figure in American labor
history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL), He promoted harmony
among the different craft unions that comprised the AFL, trying to minimize
jurisdictional battles.
Crédit Mobilier, an American railroad
construction company setup by the Union Pacific Railroad to build the First
Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. Crédit Mobilier of America scandal of
1872, the exposed deception by the Union Pacific of over charging construction
costs to taxpayers and manipulating the share prices of Crédit Mobilier of
America.
Lester F. Ward was an American sociologist
who served as the first president of the American Sociological Association.
Ward is most often remembered for his relentless attack on the theories of
laissez-faire and survival of the fittest that totally dominated socio/economic
thought in the United States after the Civil War. He was also a strong advocate
for equal rights for women and even theorized that women were naturally
superior to men, much to the scorn of mainstream sociologists.
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth
control activist, sex educator. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened
the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned
Parenthood. Sanger's efforts contributed to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court
case which legalized contraception in the United States. Sanger is a frequent
target of criticism by opponents of birth control and has also been criticized
for supporting eugenics, but remains an iconic figure in the American
reproductive rights movement.
bimetallism is a monetary
standard in which the value of the monetary unit is defined as equivalent both
to a certain quantity of gold and to a certain quantity of silver; Inflation
and debt issues were tied to the adoption of the gold standard in 1873 and
1893. When Alexander Hamilton established the parameters for the American money
supply, he fixed the exchange rate between silver and gold at 16 ounces of
silver to 1 ounce of gold. This ratio reflected the actual ratio of silver to
gold in the United States.
The
Knights of Labor
was one of the most important American labor organizations of the 1880s. The
Knights promoted the social and cultural uplift of the workingman, rejected
Socialism and radicalism, demanded the eight-hour day, and promoted the producers
ethic of republicanism. In some cases it
acted as a labor union, negotiating with employers, but it was never well
organized, and after a rapid expansion in the mid-1880s, it suddenly lost its
new members and became a small operation again.
The Open Door Policy is a concept in
foreign affairs, which usually refers to the policy in 1899 allowing multiple
Imperial powers access to China, with none of them in control of that country.
The Open Door policy allowed the U.S. to benefit commercially from an empire
without enduring the unwanted White Man’s Burden. The Open Door Policy is the
birth of Liberal-Capitalism.
Yellow journalism, is a type of
journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and
instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may
include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By
extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry
any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.
The Jungle is a 1906 novel
written by American journalist, muckraker, and politician Upton Sinclair.
Sinclair wrote the novel with the intent to portray the lives of immigrants in
the United States. However, readers were more concerned with the large portion
of the book pertaining to the bad practices and corruption of the American
meatpacking industry during the early 20th century, and the book is now often
interpreted and taught as a journalist's account of the poor working conditions
in the industry.
Scientific management, was a theory of
management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. Its main objective was
improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the
earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to
management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s
and 1890s within the manufacturing industries.
The Gospel of Wealth, developed to defend
the successes of early industrialists and to limit the scope of reform. The
ideology rested on Social Darwinism’s belief in survival of the fittest and the
Laissez-Faire belief in a perfectly free market. This two ideas meant that
businessmen should be able to create and dispose of their wealth however they
saw fit.
Social Darwinism is an ideology of society
that seeks to apply biological concepts of Darwinism or of evolutionary theory
to sociology and politics, often with the assumption that conflict between
groups in society leads to social progress as superior groups outcompete
inferior ones.
The Corporate Consolidation
Movement
Industrialists took advantage of the emerging national marketplace by building
larger and larger corporations. Growth
often came at the expense of defeated competitors whose ruined businesses were
folded into emerging national enterprises like Standard Oil. As corporations grew, traditional management
methods proved ineffective. Corporations
became too large for their owners to oversee every aspect of the business,
especially when parts of that company were scattered across the United
States. With the rapid cycles of booms
and busts between 1880 and 1900, businessmen sought new and more effective ways
to control and predict the unstable economy.
This movement occurred in several different phases.
2.
As it evolved, American imperialism developed along the lines of
Liberal-Capitalism. This ideology pushes the U.S. political economy outward to
the rest of the world. Liberalism reflected the American understanding of
democracy. Capitalism meant the creation of a free trade world economy. Free
trade meant that U.S. goods should be permitted to trade on at least an equal
footing with all other countries. Sometimes, free trade meant that American
interests should be accorded special treatment. Consequently, Americans sought
to build a world order based on democratic governments that supported free
trade. Liberal-Capitalism became the backbone of U.S. foreign policy throughout
the 20th Century.
At
the end of the U.S. Civil War, America was an isolationist nation. American’s
wanted little to do with the rest of the world. The United States revealed its geographic separation from the rest of
the world created by the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. This physical distance
from the rest of the world supported a moral separation from the world. This
country was to be a beacon of democracy, righteousness and justice for the rest
of the world. This divine mission meant avoiding the evils of European
imperialism like colonies and the White Man’s burden. This divine mission kept
the U.S. from acquiring an empire during the 1870s and 1880s.
By
the end of the 19th Century, America’s "splendid isolation" was
challenged by industrialization. Business leaders increasingly saw foreign
trade a necessary element for American economic prosperity. Urban reformers
began to see imperialism and global expansion as a solution to the crowded
filthy cities.
A.
Intellectual
Social
Darwinism.
Social
Darwinism expanded the limits of Manifest Destiny. O’Sullivan’s expression
applied only to the land mass of North America. Social Darwinism expanded the
ranks of the so-called "savage" peoples.
In
the new Industrial era, Americas excuse rested on the new scientific
justification for racism...Social Darwinism. If the Indians were excluded from
America’s divine destiny, then other Europeans like Spaniards and Italians as
well as non-Europeans such as Asians, Pacific Islanders and Africans were
excluded from America’s industrial destiny
"The White Man’s Burden"
In
support of British conquest of India and Africa. American’s quickly made this
sentiment their own. American imperialism was rationally discussed as a
divinely ordained fate to over spread the blessings of liberty and democracy to
all of the "savage" races of the world in order to fulfill the
"White Man’s Burden".
B.
Psychological/Emotional
1.
The Frontier Thesis
In
1893, Frederick Jackson Turner published his famous study of American
Democracy. Turner argued that liberty depended upon the ability of Americans to
move out into the frontier. The Frontier Thesis provided a bleak outlook for
America. The Columbian Exposition of the same year heralded the triumph of
industrial society over America’s traditional agrarian past. It symbolically
announced the closing of the frontier. Consequently, Turner’s thesis was meant
as a warning against the collapse of American democracy.
C.
Economic
1.
Panics
As
the U.S. economy industrialized, it experienced more frequent and severe
depressions. These panics were caused by overproduction. Businesses produced
far more goods than the economy could absorb. Increased competition caused
businesses to lower the cost of their goods. This caused spiraling price cuts
that drove companies out of business. New markets could have developed if it
had not been for a shortage of money. America’s reliance on fixed gold supplies
prevented inflation and crushed economic growth. As a result, the U.S. economy
entered a rapid cycle of booms from 1893 to 1897. Expansion and contraction
followed each other in 9 month periods. Business leaders looked to foreign
trade as an outlet for surpluses and a solution the boom and bust cycle.
2.
Trade
Business
interest in overseas trade coincided with growth of exports. In 1870, overseas
trade earned only $390 million. Foreign trade earned $1.4 billion by 1900.
Although it accounted for less than 10% of America’s Gross National Product,
trade eliminated a critical surplus. Growing trade profits and rapid panics
attracted political support for overseas trade.
3.
Albert Beveridge
Indiana
Senator Beveridge championed overseas trade. He was among the first to draw the
connection between surplus production and economic panics. Beveridge argued
that U.S. industry was so popular that its future health depended upon having
access to the entire world marketplace.
D.
Military
1.
Alfred Mahan The Influence of Sea Power
Admiral
Mahan’s study of British imperialism shaped the course of overseas expansion.
He noted that Britain’s rise to world dominance was made possible by a powerful
navy. British maritime policy maintained a navy that was twice the combined
size of the next two largest navies in the world. The military side of this
navy kept sea lanes open for Britain immense merchant fleet. This observation
led Mahan to conclude that military power and commercial prowess were
inseparable.
2.
Mahan’s Program
Mahan
recommended an ambitious program of territorial acquisition to fulfill
America’s dream of becoming a world power. His most ambitious plan foresaw the
construction of a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific ocean. A canal
somewhere in central America promised to cut travel time from New York to
California by as much as 2 months. Mahan thought the canal might provide enough
maritime mobility to avoid the costly construction of a two ocean navy. In the
context of the day, the canal was a necessary element to balance America’s
political
