Oh hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now we've been going through Unit 7 of the AP U.S. History curriculum and in this video we're going to talk about the Progressive Era. So if you will progress forward to get your brain cows milked, I will gladly take up the task.
Let's get to it. Now to cover the entire Progressive Era in one video is a monumental task because there was so much going on during this period, so let's focus our efforts with the following task. Let's compare the goals and effects of the Progressive Reform Movement. Alright, that's doable. Let's go.
So first, who were the progressives? Well, they were a very diverse lot who didn't always agree on every issue. But in general, they worked on issues like the growing power of big business or uncertainties in the economy that erupted especially as a result of the Panic of 1893. They worked on issues like the increasingly violent conflicts between labor groups and their employers. And they also wanted to...
break control that political machines exercised over urban residents. Also, they wanted to take on Jim Crow segregation in the South and secure the right of women to vote and deal with the problem of alcohol and on and on and on. And the people who called themselves progressives were as diverse as their causes.
You had Protestant church leaders and feminists and labor union leaders and African Americans. As I said, they didn't always agree on what causes were the most important. But what truly bound all these diverse groups and causes together was this. they all agreed that society on some level was deteriorating and that the only cure was significant government intervention.
And that's going to be important for you to remember, because progressives believed that true societal change would not occur from grassroots efforts, although they did their fair share of grassroots campaigning, in the end, if society was going to be corrected and save the government must get involved in a vigorous and invasive manner. Okay, now let's jump into some of the various sectors of progressivism. First were the Progressive Era Journalists, through whose work many of the major social justice issues of the day became public knowledge.
They were a new breed of investigative journalists who sought to expose the rotten underbelly of American corruption. Teddy Roosevelt dubbed them muckrakers, which was a reference to a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who neglected his salvation in order to focus on raking up the muck on the ground. So the title was not a compliment. However, these journalists embraced the moniker and they proudly raked the muck of American corruption for all to see.
Now maybe one of the best known works of the muckrakers was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. This was a story that exposed the unsanitary conditions of the meat packing industry, and he has these vivid stomach-turning images of workers' thumbs dropping into ground meat and rats all over the factory, and a great cacophony of squealing and slaughtered pigs. It's truly awful to read.
Ida Tarbell is another muckraker you ought to know, and she published a devastating expose on John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Jacob Ries was a photojournalist whose book How the Other Half Lives exposed the unsanitary and disease-ridden living conditions of the poor and working class who lived in New York's tenement. And so for all the journalists I mentioned and the many more that I didn't, their goal was simply to shine a light on the corruption in their society. And they hoped that such exposure would influence the people to put pressure on those in the halls of power to make change. Okay, moving on to another major issue for progressives, the expansion of democracy.
In order to challenge the influence of political bosses, like for example in Tammany Hall, progressives wanted to put more of the voting power back into the hands of the people. And one way they sought to do this was through the secret ballot. In other words, that the voting could be done in secret.
And you may wonder... Isn't that how voting is done? Well, not prior to this. Like, one of the reasons these political bosses were able to keep power is that they doled out their favors to members of the community, and they did so in exchange for their votes. And when these folks came to vote, it was done in the plain sight of the bosses, so of course they had to make good on their promise.
So, in response to this particular form of corruption, the secret ballot was introduced to cut off much of the power of urban political machines. And along the lines of putting voting power back into the hands of the people, progressives also pushed for the direct election of senators. Now, if you remember your constitution, you'll recall that constitutionally, senators are elected by state legislatures.
But this had become problematic in the Gilded Age, when many senators happily got in the pockets of millionaires and big business interests. In other words, the senators who were in office were not there because the people wanted them there, but because big business owners wanted them there. And so to correct for this, progressives actually got themselves a constitutional amendment. passed, namely the 17th Amendment in 1913, which transferred the responsibility of electing senators from the state legislatures into the hands of the people. As a side note, since we're talking about constitutional amendments, let me mention two more the progressives fought for and got passed during this period.
First was the 18th Amendment, which established American prohibition It was largely women who fought for this, and under the leadership of groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the American Temperance Society, the 18th Amendment was passed which forbade the manufacture and sale of alcohol, which they assumed would correct a lot of societal ills. But, you know, not so much, and we'll get to that in a later video. The third progressive amendment was the 19th Amendment, which was ratified in 1920 and officially recognized women's right to vote.
Okay, another way progressives fought to expand democracy was through legislative reforms like the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall. These were all answers to a basic question. problem which went like this.
Once a politician was elected, they could decide if they wanted to to ignore the will of the people. So the initiative meant that voters could require legislators to consider a bill that they chose to ignore. In this way, the people themselves are saying, this needs to be a law. The referendum meant that voters themselves could vote on the adoption of proposed laws. And later, Later in the Progressive Era, many states enacted referenda on things like women's suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol.
And finally, the recall was established as a way to remove corrupt politicians before their term was complete. So you can see that through all of these measures, there was a stark contrast between the Progressive Era and the Gilded Age. In the Gilded Age, the people were left helpless in the face of big business interests, and the government was in many ways beholden to their interests. But in the Progressive Era, the people received their power back.
So expanding democracy is one way some progressives tried to right society. others thought everything would be made right if only the government was more efficient. And here's where I introduce you to Frederick Taylor. Now, he published a book in 1909 advocating what he called scientific management, and the idea was to make factory work more efficient. And so Taylor went to factories with a stopwatch and timed every little detail of a person's workflow and came back to the management of the factory and gave his recommendations for saving time and thus increasing productivity and earning more profit.
Well, this worked marvelously, and some progressives began to wonder if such an approach could cut down on wasted government energy as well if it was entrusted to the hands of experts and scientific managers. Now, other progressives, specifically black progressives, were also working to achieve social justice among the races. You might remember back in 1896, as a result of the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, that racial segregation was the law of the land. The decision that was handed down said that the separation was legal as long as the separate facilities were equal.
Now, That did not turn out to be the case. In any example of racially segregated public facilities, the black facilities were always far below their white counterparts in terms of quality. And so to address these societal inequalities, and to do something about the problem of Southern lynching of black people, two organizations were founded to do the work. Now there were more, of course, but these are two of the most prominent.
First was the Niagara Movement. It was led by W.E.B. Du Bois, who organized this group with other black intellectuals who met frequently to plan protests and other acts that would secure rights for the black population. Second was the NAACP, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and two of their main aims were to abolish all forms of segregation and expand educational opportunities for black children.
And although there were many real racial injustices these folks worked to correct, they mainly did it on their own. Like the Black Plight barely made it onto the progressive agenda writ large. Now let's look at progressivism on the national stage.
A lot of what I've mentioned already, the constitutional amendments being accepted, was really going on regionally. But America elected a string of progressivist presidents during this period, and they brought that platform to the national stage, and here we're only going to consider one of them. Teddy Roosevelt became president because William McKinley went ahead and got himself assassinated, and when it came time for him to run on his own merits, he was elected handily. He ran on a program called a square deal, and during the Gilded Age, presidents consistently sided with the interests of big business.
And when the anthracite coal strike occurred in the beginning of Roosevelt's presidency, he invited both the business leaders and the miners to the White House and proved that he would take neither side. Instead, he worked for a square deal for both, and this posture he applied to many other domestic issues. Roosevelt also took up the role of trust. Buster, and in that role he began enforcing the limp Sherman Anti-Trust Act and began breaking up monopolistic businesses.
But Roosevelt was not indiscriminate in this endeavor. He actually did distinguish between good trusts who became monopolies through honest practices and bad trusts who became monopolies by behaving like turds. He also took up the cause of consumer protection.
As Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle made its way across the nation, there was a great outcry from the people about all the thumbs in their meat, and so Roosevelt led Congress to pass two laws. First was the Pure Food and Drug Act, which assured consumers that their meat was thumbless, and second was the Meat Inspection Act, which assured consumers that meatpacking plants would conform to a minimum standard of sanitation. And finally, Roosevelt took up the cause of conservation. Due to the rise of industry, America's forests and natural resources were disappeared.
disappearing, and so Roosevelt used the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 to reserve 150 million acres of unspoiled land. And thus the preservationists and the conservationists were very happy. Alright, well thanks for watching. If you need more Unit 7 help, then this playlist right here is for you.
And if you need help getting an A in your class and a 5 in your exam in May, the review packet is right here. And finally, if this video helped you and you want me to keep making them, then go ahead and subscribe and I shall keep making them. Heimler out.