hi everybody um i just wanted to give you a brief overview about um progressive reform and particularly looking at um the efforts by progressive reformers to deal with those labor issues that we saw during the gilded age the progressive reform period is really complicated and really diverse and a lot of reformers are doing a lot of different things but we're just going to focus on these efforts to help workers and and kind of change the economy change how capitalism functions in the united states so progressives challenge that idea of laissez faire capitalism or laissez-faire liberalism that we talked about during the gilded age this idea that the government should just you know stay out of the economy um and if you remember we talked about how in the gilded age the government would intervene on behalf of businesses to break up strikes to you know reinforce and support corporate capitalism and so what the progressive reformers want to do is say hey the local governments the state governments even the federal government should have broader powers and they should be using these powers to actually help regular citizens to help corporations or i'm sorry to help workers and to push back against corporations um and so they're challenging the concentration of power and wealth that we see during the gilded age where you have monopolies and wealthy industrialists and all of those people tend to um you know with wealth comes political power and so these middle class working class reformers are saying no no the government should work differently for us so what is progressivism who who are these progressives um and the reason we use this term progressive to describe this this era is because that's the term that the reformers were using to describe themselves um and so we as historians are using their language um and so again the the reform is really broad you have you know this is the time where you get people trying to make sure we have clean you know food clean meat um clean milk clean water um they're also worried about like vice so there is an effort to like shut down horse racing tracks and they're concerned that movie theaters are somehow illicit um and they're trying to help immigrants but often in ways that we wouldn't think to be particularly progressive like they decide oh the reason you're impoverished is because you're eating the wrong things and so they try to go in they they actually set up these like after school programs for little girls and they try to teach them to go tell their moms like not to cook sausage and um not to eat pasta and instead you know to um you know eat boiled meat and potatoes um of course how you eat does not affect whether or not you are poor um but when we look at this whole group of people we can see that that even across all this broad range of reform there's certain principles that they believe in and those things together are what end up characterizing um the progressive era so what are these principles um one is this real faith and progress they think they can make society a better place um they use a lot of words like civilization and increasing civilization and so they think like if you can do these reforms we can improve society um and so in some ways they're a little naive they don't have the sense that there can be unintended consequences but they really believe that um you can make social progress against emphasis on social reform that you can address things like poverty you can address things like the labor unrest you can address things like how to help immigrants you know in as they come to this new society this new country that that those things are possible um a vast number of these reformers are educated middle class people and this is where women middle class women take on a huge role in progressive reform because this is coming on the heels of um higher education for women so a lot of women getting you know bachelor's degrees law degrees master's in social work degrees this is when sociology as a field emerges um and there are some women who end up with phds often they have to travel to places like switzerland to get those degrees and when they come back to the us no one will hire them um because they're women and so they take this sort of passion that they have for social reform and their educational skills and they apply it to this reform work um which is a you know it's a wide variety of things um that being said there are labor unions and working-class people also involved in these reforms and these reform efforts um but we see a lot of the um organizations that really push for this tend to be middle class organizations and so they really believe in this combination of government science and experts they think if we get these social science experts or lawyers or whoever whoever they are they can go out and really study the problem and gather all this data and figure out you know what's going on and come up with a plan with policies based on this data and increasingly they argue the best place to put these policies in place like the best vehicle for reform is in fact government and so when we look at this period most of the reform work is happening on the local and the state level there is some federal reform you know this is when we get the food and drug administration um but what we'll see when we move to the new deal is a lot of this progressive error reform that's happening on the state and local level gets moved into the federal government in the 30s and so [Music] when we look across the country you will see that a lot of the same kinds of reforms are happening in different states and that's because these reformers do talk to each other and they'll have you know annual meetings where people from across the country will come and talk about what their priorities should be for the year and they have model legislation that they share and they share strategies so there is a kind of uniformity in terms of what's going on but the actual work is really done on this state and local level okay um so for these reformers that are worried about the economy and worried about workers um we see them doing this in a variety of ways um one of the early ways to do this is through something called settlement houses and the most famous settlement house in the united states is whole house in chicago which is founded by jane adams and adams was one of those middle class women with an education and a desire to do good um she had traveled to europe to london and saw a settlement house there called toynbee house and this was run by male students who were attending college in london and what they did was they went and lived amongst the poor and the idea here is you go live amongst the people you're trying to help so that the reform or the aid is a kind of interactive process that you can see what people need they can tell you what they need rather than kind of going in studying leaving and then like imposing reforms from on far and so jane adams um buys a sort of decaying old mansion um on the south side of chicago that's what hull house is and she and a number of other women move into this house there are men involved in this but whole house becomes this kind of predominantly sort of female space and a lot of the women who get their start at whole house end up in roosevelt's administration in the 30s and so hall house does a whole variety of things they um what they call day nurseries they essentially have child care for workers um they have a hot meal service so if you've worked 10 12 14 hours you know in your workplace you can stop by hall house on the way home and get a hot nutritious meal for your family um they have a nurse on staff they have female doctors available they hold free well baby checkups for people in the community um they build the first um playground for children in chicago um they have spaces for community activities they have like what they call literary societies which we would call book clubs today um they have musical groups so if you play the violin or something they put together kind of ensembles and they would perform for people in the community they have space for a union organizing so if you were trying to organize a factory um you could meet with the union organizer and the workers and strategize around that without having you know the employers looking on um they do a whole variety of things oh they have english classes and then they also have classes free help you study to pass the citizenship test so if you want to learn english and become a citizen they provide those those resources um and increasingly adams and other people in these sort of settlement houses and other reformers realize that a lot of what's harmful for workers are the lack of services that cities are providing um so one of the things that adams notices and that's really common in the 19th century is that wealthier areas of the city that pay more in taxes get more services and better services than the poor areas of in cities and so what adams notices for example is that the garbage is not picked up regularly in the poor parts of the city so on the south side where she's living versus on the north shore where wealthier families live and so she actually pushes to get the position of garbage collector like inspector like the person who runs the garbage service in chicago that had been what we call a patronage position so if you donated money to the mayor in his mayoral race he would give you this position in return and you wouldn't have to do much work and you'd draw a salary um so she pushes to make that an elected position and then she runs and wins as garbage inspector and so her whole deal is to make sure that the garbage is picked up because that's a public health issue no matter where you live in the city and so it's those kinds of things when we expand what these cities are doing it's often a lot of services that we would expect cities to do like you know street lights and traffic lights and police and fire department services and water and you know now electricity and schools sort of all these things that we would we just expect cities to do these are the things that these progressive reformers are pushing city governments to actually provide and the last thing that they do is reformers increasingly realize like union organizing takes a really long time um like we saw these strikes and other things can be broken up by the government and by violence and so they increasingly turn to legislation as a way of regulating the industries and employment conditions and hopefully wages and hours and things like that and so we start to see efforts across the country to put in place hours laws so working saying you can't work more than 8 or 10 hours a day trying to increase workplace safety so things today that are governed by osha or cal osha um to try to make the workplaces safer um and so we see this in particular kind of coming to a head through the triangle shirtwaist fire which is this really terrible fire and basically industrial disaster that happens in 1911 in march new york city um prior to the fire the year before um garment industry workers went out on strike to try to gain union recognition and improvement in working conditions and wages and hours um the strike failed um although the workers do gain some concessions and um a year later this fire breaks out in the triangle shirtwaist factory um and it's a terrible loss of life something like 146 people end up dying in the fire um some die of smoke inhalation they're burned to death others people jump from the eighth ninth floor windows to their death in the streets below um and it really what it does it really highlights the need for these reforms and so out of that tragedy um new york state writes a series of laws that regulate the workplace and become really sort of model legislation for the rest of the country in terms of how to regulate this um one of the things however all these reformers run into is the court system and so what we see is that the supreme court starts to strike down legislation that's aimed at protecting all workers and only allowing legislation that will protect female workers um and so in the next couple sections of this module we'll take a close look at the mueller v oregon decision and also you can watch a documentary about the triangle shirtwaist factory that really um not only looks at the fire but looks at the conditions leading to the accident and the sort of political results after so i will see you soon bye