PROGRESSIVISM

About 1890s - 1920

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I. Who was a Progressive Reformer?

-Came from all classes, Regions, races.

-Spearheaded by Middle-ClassWomen, 1890s.

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WHAT WAS

-A collection of various reform communities;

-United citizens in many political, professional, and religious organizations; and

-Might be local, statewide, or national in scope.

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1- Reform state, local & federal government to improve public welfare

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-College-educated, M-C women-Activisms in “Women’s Sphere” -kindergartens, nurseries, English classes, American cooking, etc.

-First Social Scientists & Social Workers

-Bldg codes, safety codes, stats & analysis reports

Hull House, 1889, Jane Addams

Example of Progressive Reform & Gov’t.

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…and her college friend Ellen Gates Starr: Two idealistic young women set out to improve the lot of Chicago's immigrant poor.

Outside the dilapidated mansion: immigrants packed in sweatshops, sleeping in cramped tenements, where smallpox ran rampant and children amused themselves by fishing for rats beneath the wooden sidewalks.

29-y.o. Jane Addams

•Social Worker•Feminist•Internationalist

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Addams: 1860-1935

•founding member, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)•charter member, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

•Chair, American Woman’s Peace Party•Co-founder, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

•Author, Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922); asst. to Hoover delivering relief supplies and medicine to women & children in enemy nations

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Addams’ funeral

HullHouse

She was accused of being a socialist, anarchist and communist

1931: Nobel Peace Prize

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Hull-House & Chicago firsts: first public baths, first public playground, first public kitchen, first college extension courses, first public swimming pool, and first gymnasium for the public.

Hull-House residents conducted investigations of family income, school truancy, sanitation, tuberculosis, cocaine distribution, infant mortality

•The settlement ran a kindergarten and nursery, and a music school

•Hull-House residents •taught English and citizenship •organized the Immigrants’ Protective League (to assist immigrants with legal problems) •helped organize labor unions (at a time when middle- and upper-class Americans opposed such organizations)

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(1869-1970), physician and reformer. •Founder - field of occupational health

•America's first & foremost specialist in industrial toxicology

•MD, University of Michigan, 1893

•Interest in industrial diseases at Chicago's Hull-House, where she lived full- or part-time from 1897 to 1935.

HAMILTON, ALICEExample of Progressive Reform & Gov’t.

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Through Hull-House, Hamilton became a member of the Illinois Commission on Occupational Diseases.

1910: she conducted pioneering survey of lead poisoning that demonstrated shockingly high injury and mortality rates and prompted passage of the state's first industrial disease law.

Working for U.S. Department of Labor, Hamilton documented the prevalence of poisoning (typically denied by manufacturers) in the lead and munitions industries.

In the absence of federal regulations, she assumed personal responsibility for persuading owners to improve plant conditions and also alerted medical colleagues and the public to the dangers of industrial diseases. 11

Hamilton joined Harvard's new industrial hygiene program in 1919; she was Harvard's first woman professor.

There she found new ways to protect workers' health. She prodded the U.S. surgeon general and other authorities to take up the broader problem of controlling industrial diseases.

In her nineties, she protested the Vietnam War. To the end she retained the faith in progress that she had shared with a generation of reformers.

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2-Middle-class needed more control over explosive growth of cities and immigrants:

Over scenes like this . . .

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BattleAlley

ca.1900

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3-Eliminate political corruption to “fix” society.

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-Problems due to massive immigration: -crowded cities, tenements, disease.

-(fears of the immigrants themselves)

-Business/profits valued over common good -working conditions, worker welfare -consumer welfare

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Middle Class feared-Power of big businesses

-business monopolies made goods more expensive and less the way consumers needed them.

-that products were tainted (milk, meat) -dirt, fillers, “TB infected clothes” from sweatshops, etc.

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(1) Anger about excesses of Industrial growth

And

Urban growth and crowding“tenaments”

Like this . . .Like this . . .19

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