welcome back to the second um part of our lecture on the progressive era from around 1900 to after world war ii in 1920. now let's focus on social justice and labor reform issues this is parallel and complementary to the previous reforms that we discussed in the economic sphere the focus now is on the working poor those who aren't working the jobless as well as the homeless and again the movement was led by educated women middle class upper middle class who were not employed and they were the ones spearheading this entire movement one of the major reforms of this era which was a continuation of efforts in previous decades was to limit the consumption of alcohol the feeling was that excessive consumption of alcohol by men was threatening the social progress in all other areas and the stability of families and led to great amounts of domestic violence with a significant number of men getting drunk and beating their their wives and unlike now there was really not much legal recourse to it also men would get into fights in bars and you know may not come home alive many women were concerned that on payday the men would go to bars invite many of their friends for free drinks and come home with much less money particularly working-class men didn't make much to begin with and um women felt that that money should be used to support the family and not for the men to have a good night night out on the town the first really significant organization this time period was the women's christian temperance union you notice it's christian which is consistent with the entire progressive movement here and it's for temperance temperance as the word suggests is to temper or limit the consumption of alcohol so at first they were not talking about total prohibition on the consumption of alcohol but rather encouraging men to just have one beer or you know one whiskey instead of an excessive number well this clearly didn't work and so very quickly they moved to total prohibition on on alcohol this was their symbol for the women's christian temperance union this is one of my favorite photographs these women are protesting against alcohol with a sign that says lips that touch liquor shall not touch ours and they would go many women would carry these signs and go parading around in the cities women founded what was called the anti-saloon league a saloon is like a form of a bar and they wanted to close them so rather militant women these were wealthy educated women would often go into bars saloons women were not allowed in but they'd walk in with axes and they'd take their axes and destroy the bottles of whiskey another liquor and at that time the saloons or elegant bars had beautiful mirrors behind the bar and they'd take their axes and break the mirrors and walk out uh many of the men were just sitting or standing there with their mouths open because these were the wives of leading industrialists or very wealthy men some of the women were arrested but it became a real real cause now finally in 1917 congress approved prohibition which actually did not i will look at this later in the course prohibit the consumption of alcohol it only prohibited the manufacturing transportation or sale of alcohol and later shortly thereafter congress approved an amendment to the constitution which after it was approved or ratified by three quarters of the states became the 18th amendment to the constitution and we'll see later in the course of course when prohibition ended in the early 1930s another amendment was passed to the constitution to um nullify the 18th amendment i think it's very important to note that there was actually no need to amend the united states constitution on this issue the constitution of course mentioned nothing about alcohol liquor constitution did not give people the right to consume liquor did not mention liquor or alcohol in any way shape or form however people felt so strongly about this issue the feeling was well the constitution is so important for the united states and so by enacting an amendment to the constitution it will institutionalize prohibition make it more permanent but it wasn't needed because the law passed by congress in 1917 the volstead act had the legal force to do exactly the same thing and in fact the constitutional amendment was just window dressing i might note that in our times and you know since then since this time many many people have advocated amending the constitution for their favorite cause even though it does not require an amendment uh they're because there were supreme court cases many cases or whatever issues that come to mind are gay marriage which of course was dealt with by the supreme court people both for and against gay marriage have strongly advocated having constitutional amendments um the state their views other other ones are abortion obviously a hot button issue on both sides and you know there's clearly nothing in the constitution that needs to be amended there was a famous supreme court decision we'll see later in the course in the 1970s roe versus wade there were some others and people either for or against those supreme court decisions want to try and in effect make it more permanent by putting it in the constitution so this is the first time we've seen really a constitutional amendment that wasn't needed to achieve its goals now previous constitutional amendments we've seen were needed and some subsequent ones were needed for instance the constitution sets the voting age at 21 and when during the vietnam war it was decided that the voting age should be reduced to 18 because 18 19 and 20 year olds were fighting in vietnam some losing their lives others coming home in wheelchairs or whatever and they didn't have the right to vote well that did require a constitutional amendment to actually amend or change the constitution this is a photo of the time obviously these are federal government agents enforcing the ban on during prohibition on alcohol and by taking barrels of beer and throwing them down the drain we'll see more on this when we get to the 1920s now looking labor this was really some of the most significant social reform that was implemented and it was virtually all implemented at the state level by state laws or some cases by city or municipal legislation in 1900 there were 2 million children aged 10 to 15 working in the cities now they weren't largely in factories but they could be in stores or somewhere else now you have to recognize there were many many more women should be more children uh no one has a real figure working on farms and that's been traditional the whole family would go out in the harvest or the children would help with you know whatever on the farm but the progressive era focused on the cities the urban areas the medium-sized and large-sized cities now by 1910 most states not the federal government had implemented laws against child labor and the states limited hours for both children and women the belief was for women that too many hours would exhaust the women they were called the quote weaker sex in physical terms and therefore the feeling was their hours had to be limited many years before they actually limited the working hours for men in 1911 new york city had a tragic fire in the triangle shirt factory i'm sorry factories misspelled the factory and that was a sweatshop a sweatshop is as the name suggests where a lot of people are crammed together working hard and you know sweating well 146 people died they were virtually all teenage girls young immigrants and the reason they couldn't escape is the owner had locked the doors because he feared that the workers would sneak out with with clothes um steel so you know all the fire what we call today fire escapes were locked and so they could search the women when they left well this outraged virtually everybody and so it led to a multitude of both city and state laws dealing with fire safety and then that was expanded to working conditions and also child labor this is a photograph after the triangle of fire and the banner on the left says ladies waste and dressmakers union local 25 we mourn our loss and the one on the right says we mourn our loss united hebrew trades of new york and it's interesting you can see in the upper left hand corner the name of a store it's english at the bottom and then larger in hebrew because new york city at this time uh had many many ethnic neighborhoods it still has some with it many more at that time now major reform at this time was so-called progressive income tax progressive has a very technical meaning in economics and that's what it means here yes it was passed during the progressive era so that makes it kind of modern et cetera but a progressive income tax is one in which the rate of taxation increases with income for instance and i'm just making these numbers up let's assume your income is 50 000 a year your federal income tax rate might be 15 i'm not sure if that's accurate but 15 which means for every additional dollar you earn you pay 15 cents in additional income tax but then under a progressive income tax system let's so the person makes 50 000 a year is paying for each additional dollar 15 or 15 cents but let's say your income is 200 000 a year the tax rate is i think it's 35 percent which means you earn an additional dollar you pay 35 35 cents rather of that additional dollar it's progressive and the theory is if you don't make much money you the worker or employee need to keep more of that money for housing food you know clothing etc etc where people at higher income levels don't need so much additional money for the necessities of life and actually in the 1960s the highest tax income tax in the united states on wealthy people was up in this i think 70 or 80 percent it's lower now but so that's called progressive income tax the idea was to redistribute wealth through the tax rates and also lower the tariffs on imports now in 1913 the 16th amendment to the constitution was adopted and that provided for an income tax there was no federal income tax before 1913. i could hear some of you going yay well there wasn't where did the federal government get its money well it needed a lot less money relative to today because the federal government was much smaller in many many ways but it got its money through two ways one was through tariffs which are taxes on imports so the tariff was very very important and we looked at it well in the earlier course a lot on political aspects but it was a great source of revenue and the federal government earned money by selling land because the federal government essentially owned the west everything that it acquired and it sold that land but by they had sort of run out of land to sell by 1913 the government was increasing in size and scope and it needed more money now the top rate when it was established was only seven percent for the wealthiest which meant 99 of americans virtually all paid no income tax okay no tax because their income was too low so the threshold was pretty high um today i don't remember what the threshold is i should have a tax table in front of me right now but i believe if you make if you're single if you make fif 15 or thousand dollars a year you don't pay any federal income tax and i think if you have a spouse and a couple kids it goes up to thirty or forty thousand a year the idea is you don't have a lot of money to spare now the next point sales tax is not progressive it's not progressive in the economic sense forget what progressive means in today's politics or what it meant in the progressive era it's not progressive because if you go out and buy a cheap used car for 500 it might not even run for that let's say a thousand dollars you pay exactly the same sales tax as someone who goes out and buys a top-of-the-line mercedes-benz or tesla and i think in the houston area that's eight or eight point two five percent sales tax so you pay the same so it's not progressive you go to the grocery store there's no sales tax on unprocessed food like meat or vegetables and things you know things like that but if you buy a box of cereal that is processed and you will pay sales tax on that so if you're rather poor you're paying the same sales tax on that box of cereal which may be your dinner as the wealthy person who's blind so it's not progressive again this is has a very specific economic meaning the opposite of it is regressive in economic terms so you may well have learned this in economics class i hope you did something like the sales tax is regressive because it's the same rate no matter what you pay what no matter what your income is and the now the estate tax we have today it kicks in at a fairly high level most of us aren't concerned about it but if you've built up a business or you have a lot of money and you leave your money in an inheritance to someone they pay very high federal income tax and most states have a state estate tax the idea being to redistribute wealth this is a very hot political issue but that is considered progressive in economic terms okay let's move on to health and medicine and particularly food food and medicine in the health area now the muckrack raking journalists as we saw before exposed abuses and one of the best examples is upton sinclair's novel the jungle there's an excerpt of this in one of the e-reader articles be sure you read it and be sure you know for the exam who upton sinclair is in the name of his book it's a novel it's a story of an immigrant family in chicago illinois where the man jurgis works in a meatpacking plant now upton sinclair wrote this novel not to expose the terrible meat that people were eating but rather the poor lives of the immigrants how the immigrants had a really tough life with capitalism and he wrote it hoping that people would read it and give workers more rights and in fact he was a socialist personally and so he didn't write it to expose the dirty meat people were eating however everybody read the book and i think you'll have the same reaction after you read the um the excerpt of you know like five pages in the e-read article people are saying oh my god that's what's in the meat because you get the meat from the butcher stop-in and it looks fine and up to sinclair talked about how they put rat poison around the uh meat packing plant where what they did to meat packing plant is the cows would come in on refrigerated rail cars and they'd cut up the cows and mix the meat and make hamburger meat or cut the cut the slices and sell it and then ship it out and refrigerate rail cars well for like making hamburgers or sausages he said workers would pick up the dead rats who the rats were dead because they'd eaten poison and just throw them into the big mixers so could you imagine being home eating a hamburger and reading this and you know people were just disgusted or the sausages many many many americans ate sausage for breakfast then the standard breakfast at this time was eggs and meat and potatoes or something it wasn't a bowl of cereal or a yogurt or you know a bagel something like that and it said that present theodor roosevelt was president when this book came out and he started reading it over breakfast and he was physically sick and became a proponent so people read this they couldn't believe the unsanitary conditions and so it led to congress passing the meat inspection act of 1906 which required federal government to inspect all meat plants and all meat sold this is still in effect and to ensure the safety for people because you have no idea what's in your hamburger meat it led also to the broader pure food and drug act of 1906 which covers more than meat and it also covers pharmaceutical today we call pharmaceuticals or drugs and this of course is administered by the food and drug administration fda and what they do nowadays is obviously the fda looks at the safety of drugs as well as the the efficacy if they're really efficient because until this time people were selling all kinds of elixirs they'd call them and they were bottles and you know it was going to cure this same bottle you take a a cup of it it was going to cure everything from acne to dandruff to body odor to you name it and so what people would do is they would drink it not knowing it was like 70 or 80 percent uh liquor you know with flavoring in it and that made them feel better and many of them had uh narcotic drugs in them many of them had derivatives of cocaine or or some other um opiate in them and so people felt better they thought this is good um but they uh it really had no medical value and of course some people were dying from those ingredients this is just the first edition of the jungle showing the cover this is one of the meat plants in chicago at the time and the carcass of the animal would come down and it's really it's an assembly line and henry ford modeled his assembly line for cars on these meat packing plants because the carcass com and each man would cut off a bit of it or do something this is president roosevelt this is a cartoon at the time it says a nauseating job but it must be done and what you have is he's holding a rake remember the phrase muck raker and the rake says investigation and down below it says meat scandal and the small print down below if you can't read it says president roosevelt takes hold of the investigating muckrake himself in the packinghouse scandal so here's our activist president roosevelt himself obviously he's not going out with a physical rate of doing this but you know he's a powerful president so the u.s department of agriculture was empowered by congress to inspect meat and this is still done today and they would look go into a meat packing plant and they'd look at the meat and you can see in the back it says u.s condemned if they found these are people who if they found something in the meat that was diseased or whatever they would not allow it to be sold and these were the early stamps that they'd put on condemned meat next time you're in the supermarket please go to the meet section where they'll sell and particularly you'll see it with stakes take a look at the stakes and they all have it says usda us department of agriculture and it has the grade of the meat the most expensive steak is the meat with the most fat the white fat it's called marbling and why is that the most effective because anyone who's barbecued a steak knows the more fat in the steak when you put it on it becomes juicier and it's considered more delicious obviously it's not as healthy for you with all the fat but it certainly is delicious my view but you'll see they have ratings and it's like usda prime choice i forgot what the others are and so the department of agriculture has set up standards you just can't say this is a prime steak it has to meet the standard for a certain you know percentage of fat but um this is taken very very seriously now is this relevant today well of course it is we just talked about the steaks but what happened recently here in texas um bluebell ice cream which is sort of iconic of texas uh i think it was like five or six years ago the federal government closed their plants because several people died from their ice cream it had a bacteria called listeria which survives when it's frozen and the blue bell factory including the one in brenham has others was not properly cleaned and maintained and so listeria got into the ice cream and it particularly got into ice cream that was sold to some nursing homes and elderly people ate the listeria bacteria and i think three or five died and many other people were sick so bluebell was closed and i you know it was my favorite ice cream at the time i was quite upset but you know that was the role of the uh food and drug administration fda then they sent someone bought bluebell ice cream an investor it almost went bankrupt it did go bankrupt and then um you know now the fda has more routine inspections of bluebell factories but the same thing the fda approves medicine it's a big political issue nowadays because it takes so long to approve a new medication because they have to do all kinds of trials um to make sure it's safe and then to make sure it actually does what it's supposed to do next time you get a prescription medication you know it comes with a little pamphlet inside that we all toss in the trash we'll open that up and it will show the trials they give what's called a placebo or like a pill with sugar in it to some patients others get the medicine neither the patient nor the doctor knows which pill the person's getting and they do studies to see if it actually does what it's supposed to do and they also of course look at the side effects so that's a very important process and of course every government does this every government around the world now does this just finally environmental conservation i mentioned earlier theodore roosevelt was a real naturalist he had been a rancher he loved nature uh he was from very wealthy family so he had a lot of time we didn't have to work and he just traveled around and observed nature including going to south america now he strongly opposed logging and mining without regulations and started having the federal government regulate logging and mining to make it more sustainable he also got congress to improve approve the national park system which of course we still have many wildlife refugees refuse refugees rather bird sanctuaries and national monuments including the grand canyon uh theodore roosevelt had visited the grand canyon he drafted down part of it and you know he was very dynamic and he got congress to set up the national park system now as i mentioned at the beginning in the first part the progressives was a white movement and it was really concerned about the welfare of whites um and it really you know today's term you know we'd say it was very very racist the people as they viewed it did not include blacks indians and some immigrant groups particularly catholics because catholics as we've seen before were considered papis his primary loyalty was to the pope in vatican city and not the united states and finally what is the legacy of the progressive era what's a huge legacy on the political side great increase in direct democracy to more direct democracy in our republican form of government which is based of course on republican rome we have direct election of u.s senators starting in 1913. we have initiative recall we have much much more much cleaner democracy we have primaries to determine candidates for the political parties a major expansion of federal state and local power sort of one of the themes i see of american history is you know from the constitution was of course written at a time when so-called founding fathers wanted to limit the power of a new central government they'd of course first set up the articles of confederation which in had virtually no power or authority of the federal government and then it turned out that that wasn't working it wasn't practical and they set up the constitution and essentially to limit to the absolute minimum the power of the national government and of course the 10th amendment to the constitution which you studied i think in the earlier history course specifically gives to the states and and the people any power is not expressly given to the federal government and the the bill of rights is a series of limits on the federal government but since then there's been a steady steady steady increase for better or worse depending on your own viewpoint in uh the power of the particularly the federal government also state and local governments and what we see in the progressive area is a significant expansion of power at all three levels and we'll see significantly more power go to the federal government when we get to the 1930s and the depression and so what it did is ended the traditional lazy fair idea the government had no wealth no role whatsoever in protecting the public welfare that that should be left to churches or philanthropic groups of wealthy people and the lazy fair idea that you know the government should not regulate the economy it should be totally laissez-faire okay well thank you very much and in the next class we'll look at the origins and u.s involvement in the first world war