The Progressives

Progress = Change

Out to save the world!

Reforms Progressives were out to fix!

The Progressive Era marks the end of the Gilded Age with its graft and corruption. Considered to be from roughly 1890 to World War I

The Muckrakers were the investigative journalists of their day. Exposing evil in business, society and politics became a flourishing business.

Important Muckrakers wrote for magazines that were newly popular to the time.

Some of these articles were later made into books, such as Lincoln Steffens’ Shame of the Cities

His book was about the corruption of local city governments.

SHAME OF THE CITIES

Ida B. Tarbell Muckraker Ida Tarbell made it

her life’s work to expose the business practices of the Standard Oil company.

Based on the following quote, was she for or against Standard Oil Co.

Ida Tarbell Quote: “Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Co. in the board rooms of Wall Street banks. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, by ruthless ... efficiency of organization”.

Upton Sinclair

Muckraker Upton Sinclair was a socialist, who wanted to improve the plight of the working class in America.

Socialist thinking is that everyone should be equal, not having a social hierarchy.

He wrote The Jungle for that purpose to expose the evils of the meat-packing plants and to tell the story of the plight of the working class

Sinclair said, “I aimed at America’s heart and hit its stomach”.

Quote: "It is a sound, a sound made up of ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first-it sunk into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble." Chapter 2, pg. 29

The book exposed the filth in the meat packing industry and the unsavory ingredients of some canned meats.

Quote : "They use everything about the hog except the squeal." Chapter 3, pg. 38

“There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit”

Quote: "It is an elemental odor, raw and crude; it is rich, almost rancid, sensual and strong." Chapter 2, pg. 28

Our Health Today

What about now?

Surely the food is better now, because we have made laws and programs, Right?

Let’s Take a ride and look at our foods today

Like Chocolate?

How about chocolate?

According to FDA regulations, Chocolate may contain as many as 60 insect fragments per 100 grams (about a pound).

Peanut butter! Surely not the peanut butter!!!!!

Peanut butter can have 50 insect fragments per 100 grams (as much as 620 in the 40-ounce jar of super chunk) or one rodent hair per 100 grams.

Tomato juice is good, or, I could have had a V-8, I like that.

Like some tomato juice?

100 grams (about 16 ounces) of tomato juice can contain two Drosophila maggots, five eggs and one maggot, OR, ten eggs and no maggot at all.

Well, then, we can just drink orange juice!

Or Can We?

Stay Healthy, Have Some OJ!!!

250 milliliters (about a cup) of orange juice is allowed to contain ten fruit fly eggs, but only two maggots.

X 10

Theodore Roosevelt

As a reader and activist was so sickened by Sinclair’s book “The Jungle” that as president he used his progressive attitude to pass various legislations to improve the safety and sanitary conditions of the meat-packing and drug company industries. Formed the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Video

Progressive Reforms

Muckraking was directed at social ills like-

Child Labor:Progressives workedTowards a movementto end child labor and to get the youth into aneducational setting to becomemore literate. In addition, too Injuries and deaths had been occurring in the sweat shops and industries.

Jane Adams Hull House

Settlement Houses for the inner-city slums

Ida B. Wells

Subjugation of African-Americans

Looked to change attitudes and treatment of African-Americans in the United States through writing.

Jacob Riis published a book of his photographs called How the Other Half Lives in which he depicted lives of poverty.

photos by Jacob Riis

Progressive Presidents: Teddy Roosevelt

1. Big Stick Diplomacy

2. Square Deal

3. Panama Canal

4. Conservation

5. Nobel Peace prize for helping end Russo-Japanese war.

Panama CanalPanama Canal

Progressive constitutional amendments-

16th – allowed a progressive income tax. To make money the government could now legally tax the money workers make.

Should the government be able to tax a workers income?

OPINIONS!!!

17th amendment – allowed direct election of senators. This allowed the populace to vote for the Senators who represent them, instead of the state legislatures within a state.

18th amendment – prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation and consumption of alcohol

19th Amendment– women’s suffrage, or voting

rights.

Key Suffragettes:

Susan B. Anthony Carrie Chapman Catt Alice Paul Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Limits of progressivism-

did little for unorganized labor

some were imperialists

some were anti-immigration

did little for tenant and migrant workers

William Howard Taft

and Woodrow Wilson

2. Political Corruption

6. working conditions and the plight of labor

3. Monopolies and Trusts