Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History The Progressive Era 20240713

Teaches a class on the progressive era. She talks about how politicians and reform groups in the early 20th century attempted to improve social and Economic Conditions. Our goal today is to think about what progressivism was and to think about what i think its core dialectic was, the tension between democracy and efficiency. These were both ideals that people from a Broad Spectrum of political backgrounds in the progressive era believed were important, and they believed they were not incompatible, but you can see some ways in which they were fundamentally at some tension. Again, throughout class today, be thinking about democracy versus efficiency. So the central question for historians of the early 20th century is, what is progressivism . A famous article that came out in 1982 was entitled, in search of progressivism, which i think aptly summed up the way historians were rummaging around, knowing that the progressive era existed but quibbling about what counted as progressivism, who counted, when it started, when it ended. Some people limit only to the Political Party that it was named for. Others define it much more broadly. So for me in this class, this is how im going to define progressivism. In the broadest sense, progressivism was the way a whole generation of americans defined themselves politically and how they addressed the problems of the new century in what i think we can all agree begins to look like modern america. Theyre interested in reforming a messy society that is newameno keep the old. Im defining it as lasting from approximately 1890 through world war i. Before i subjected you all to this lecture today, i consulted with my colleague, michael kaixian, whom many of you know as an expert on populism, who also teaches on socialism. He teaches this class as well. I asked him what he thought, made sure i got rid of any howlers in my lecture. Luckily, there were none, and this is what he wrote to me, and i think this is actually worth kind of talking about the ways we all basically are on the same pauj, but we sort of argue about the edges. The chronology of the progressive era is debate nl. Beginning in 1890, the sherman act, and the beginning of jane adams remarkable settlement house in chicago, called hull house, which well talk about on thursday. In nals and state politics, there were no people we would consider progressive in power until 1900. If William Jennings bryan had won that election in 1896, that would have been different. Thats him speaking. Of course, the chronological scope you favor depends on what you think mattered most. And its worth noting, he also pointed out to me, that many populists became progressives, and thats something im going to talk to you about, and some of you already recognized that already, you know, spoiler alert, were going to talk about how wilsons new freedom plan included many things that the populist party had proposed in the 1890s, but also many of them actually became socialists in places that we dont think of as bastions of socialism today, like texas and oklahoma and western states. What historians do largely agree on is that the high mark of the progressive era was in 1912. The election, the fourway election between taft, woodrow wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, who decided to come out of retirement, come back from african safari, and run as the head of the Progressive Party, also known as the bull moose party, as well as the fourth major candidate that year was eugene debs, a socialist whose readings you read today about how he came through the Labor Movement to consider himself a socialist. He pulled 6 of the votes in that 1912 election, almost a million votes. Now, again, i think everybody across that spectrum would have defined themselves in some sense as a progressive. So again, lets put some more fine notes on our definition of progressive. Progressivism. Progressivism was a commitment to some sort of reform in society. Often using local, state, or federal governmental means. I think too often in u. S. History classes, we talk about kind of the federal level of progressivism. It turns into that discussion of wilson versus roosevelt. I want to tell you that its really starting at the grassroots in cities and states and territories and moving upward to the federal level. It was a form of perfectionism by which i mean the belief that society could be perfected using proper principles. And in this sense, i think its a mood as much as a method. Theres no one way of doing things if you consider yourself a progressive. But it is a kind of mood or attitude toward change and reform in society and politics, right . And that is one in which you believe that things can be improved and in that sense, as im going to talk about, through the rest of the lectureture, theres some pessimism, some worry and concern, but theres also incredible confidence and optimism that society and politics and economics and democracy can be improved and maybe even perfected, and here we have, again, that tension between democracy and efficiency. Now, lets be honest. I wrote the first version of this lecture many, many years ago. History changes but not that fast. And i have got to tell you, this is the first year that i have actually assigned a portion of Woodrow Wilsons new freedom plan, and i could not have invented a document better suited for the themes that i want to stress today. Right . What does he compare liberty to . Yall suddenly got shy. Yes. An engine, a machine, right . And this is perfect for all you mathy, sciency, mechanically people, right inthis is the perfect metaphor for the way that people think about government and politics in the early 20th century, right . The machine doesnt work well with friction, right . He wants to reduce the friction. The more efficient the machine is, the better. Liberty for the several parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, he says. And you can see his optimism even his might i say egoism as a professor, right . His optimism, human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of Human Interest and human activities and human energies. Because the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order. In other words, hes saying the governments job, quite literally, is to get under the hood and tinker with the machine to get it running right. And here again, we see also from a cultural perspective, right, i love this document so much. We get back to machines. Right . Technology, railroads, right . Its not an accident that efficiency is a concept that becomes enormously fascinating to people in the early 20th century. Efficiency in both its industrial and its social components. Okay. So heres some key words if you need to come back to them in class. But oh, i forgot to tell you, of course i didnt start with the song because you knew i was going to screw it up so i decided to 86 it, but well come back to music on thursday. Okay. So let me move forward and tell you before i get into the weeds about what progressivism looks like in this time period, to give you a sense of the absolute incredible wide range of things, efforts, reforms, causes, that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. So weve got Civil Service reform, cleaning up bureaucracy. Conservation movement, which i know some of you are particularly interested in, and we wont daly there today, but certainly, your reading emphasizes the ways in which again, conservation as a kind of efficiency in fact is a famous way many historians have written about the conservation movement. Clean milk campaigns. Making sure that children who drink milk, that their mom purposed from a dairy, that its clean and unadulterated. Womens suffrage. Theres a reason why that word is singular. They thought of women in a particular way. Public education, reinvigorated since the reskruconstruction er particularly at the local level. The expansion of public kindergartens, the establishment of some public high schools. Campaign finance reform, trying to keep out those corrupts Railroad Owners from politics. Not successful, but a worthy effort. Public utility regulation. The origin of modern Public Utilities that are either a private corporation thats licensed to a municipality or a state, or ones that are actually publicly owned and operated. Regulation of food and drugs. I know many of you took a. P. U. S. History. The fda originates in this time period under Theodore Roosevelt. The regulation of railroads which is actually kind of an opening salvo of the progressive era. Temperance or prohibition, the outlawing of alcohol. Social work, the modern field of social work then as now dominated by women. Antiprostitution and antipornography campaigns in what was called the white slavery movement, saving women from what today we would call sex trafficking. The campaign for legal Birth Control, which was the comstock act of the late 19th century, discussing, disseminating any information about Birth Control illegal. Election reform, which ill talk about particularly on the state level in just a few minutes. So okay, maybe i put these sort of im making some judgments, some of these im seeing as positives because i put at the bottom, but also, coercive control of welfare clients, forcing to strip immigrants of their culture in the name of assimilation. Voter disfranchisement in the name of clean government. Segregation in the south as a sign of efficiency. Prohibition and later eugenics. I know i whipped through that really quickly. Thats fine. No worries. We dont have to get into all of the details and some of these ill return to, but were talking about from clean milk to voter initiatives. Were talking about from kindergarten to funding higher ed. From kindergarten to the first page programs in the United States. A really wide variety of things. And you can see in the examples i have noted here, again, this relationship a little bit between democracy and efficiency. And wilson talks about this in terms of liberty. That Liberty Works best in an efficient capacity. Right . And you could see just in a random example of clean milk, which was a Campaign Many women reformers campaigned for, because companies adulterated milk with chemicals to make it seem like it would last longer and keep it white, and it poisoned children. Liberty would say were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies. Right . Efficiency would say, ah, maybe our society would work better if children didnt die from adulterated milk, right . You can see thats a one tiny example, but actually something that was very important to people in the early 20th century. Okay. Why these two obsessions with democracy and efficiency . Could these be compatible . Where does this come from . Okay, so what i want to talk about is the way in which and we can go back to the slides here. Oops, thats a different computer. Okay. What i want to talk about is the way that what we talk about as progressiveism as a National Movement, actually bubbles up more from the grassroots even though it comes to be known as this thing that is kind of a government by experts. Its a National Movement built from regional movements. So what you have simplified, you know i like geography. Midwestern and northeastern urban concerns. The concern about urbanization, overcrowding, immigration, industrialization. Right . Political machines, political corruption. You have on the one hand that great mass of demands for change, concerns, the rise of political figures like Theodore Roosevelt. Those meet up with the more rural and agrarian concerns of southern and western populism. Populism, it may not seem so today as much to us now where we generalize rural america, a few of you are from more rural places. The midwestern corn, you know, commodity culture was a very different kind of agrarian economy than the souths cottonbased sharecropping vestiges of jim crow. Yet, they found enough common cause briefly to unite in populism that didnt last, right . But part of it was about this feeling of the rural places being left behind. Some of the political electoral success of the progressive era in the early 20th century was that these midwestern and northeastern urban concerns were able to find in some cases common cause with these folks that had been former populists. Particularly around issues like regulating interstate commerce, regulating the railroads, starting to talk about conservation. In fact, after 1900, populism and progressivism basically merge as professor kaixians comments suggested. Populists essentially become progressives except for those who stay yet more radical and join the socialist party. Intellectually, theyre inspired by social gospel theory. You read an example of that today, right . A rather i dont want to say aggressive but assertive campaign by many religious leaders predominantly protestant, though there were some reform jews active in this movement as well who said we need to realize that we cant be just focused on the after life and the spiritual life. We also have to think about life here on earth. Right . So bush talks what it means to think about jesus work today here and now. Right . And that social gospel theory also informs this progressive work. Woodrow wilson comes from an entire family of ministers. Right . Most of these folks definitely feel a sense of christian mission. This is wedded to the invention of new social science. Disciplines like sociology, political science, economics, history, their first professional associations emerge in this time period. The first ph. D. Programs in social sciences that are literally creating experts, right . Open at places like johns hopkins, the ivy leagues, schools like the university of wisconsin and michigan. University of california, those giant Public Research institutions alongside the kind of old stalwart prestige institutions, and new upstarts like hopkins and university of chicago, which are designed to create these graduate programs like europe has. And the idea is that theyre going to produce not just, you know, pointy headed professors like me but experts that are going to go out and solve social problems, find the answers, find the efficient answer. Right . Woodrow wilson has a ph. D. From johns hopkins. Hes the president of princeton before he becomes the governor of new jersey and the president of the United States. Okay, so whats bothering them . And well review this, and you, i think, know what many of these things are. We can talk about a few of their motivations in terms of fears. Fears of new capitalism, as Companies Grow larger and larger and capitalism becomes more and more impersonal, im talking really fast, i want to step back and have you think about that. Think about a 19th century world where your neighbor might have chickens in her yard, right, to sell eggs, and you know her. Right, and her eggs arent going to be rotten because she doesnt want to rip you off because you have a facetoface relationship. Or youre a farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. You know that operator. Youre not selling at a fixed rate across hundreds of miles on the southern pacific railroad, right . Where you have to pay a certain rate. You cant negotiate. You dont know who your seller is. I think we take for granted global capitalisms impersonal nature. When you all get things from amazon prime, youre not thinking about who is pulling it off the warehouse shelf and putting it in a box and putting the label on and sending it to you like people were used to facetoface transaction. This was threatening. This was a real change, right . And they feared that the outsized power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The Runaway Railroad industry, as i mentioned, was just one example. The journalists called muck rackers were reviewing the devious methods of companies, writing long exposes in popular magazines, and this reflected both the real changes that are happening in american capitalism as well as the anxieties that those produce in americans. Speaking of anxieties in americans, fear of new americans. That is fear of new immigrants. And well talk about this in much more detail in the coming weeks. Cities are filling with people. Many americans have deep discomfort about immigration even though many of them are the children of immigrants themselves. New immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe constitute an unprecedented wave of new arrivals from about 1882 to 1920. 18 to 24 million new immigrants come to the United States in this exact same time period were calling the progressive era. Okay. At its peak, they represent almost 15 of the American Population, a figure we have never exceeded. We came very close in 2007 before the recession. But those are sort of parallels. Think, i dont need to tell you what a hot issue immigration is right now, which actually our numbers are way down from a decade ago, but in that sense, from the standpoint of the proportion of the American Population who were immigrants, similar. Different places though. Theyre from southern and Eastern Europe. But theyre also often feared in the same ways. They are predominantly catholic or eastern orthodox or jewish. They seem unassimilable. Theyre very poor. They tend to congregate in urban places in a country thats Still Believes itself to be of rural origin. Africanamericans are starting to move in what will become the great migration. Migrating like ida b. Wells did from the rural south to the urban south, to the urban north. Close to 2 million africanamericans move from the south to north between 1890s and 1910. Many northern whites are confronted with mixed populations for the first time. The transition of africanamericans to urban life is difficult. They are predominantly rural people. Not used to city life, facing obviously segregation in the north as well as the south. Horrible overcrowded conditions, pitiful public health, lack of utilities like safe water, sewer, and electric faced many city residents, and theres a little bit of a chicken egg debate among more privileged americans. Are these new immigrants and africanamericans from the south the cause of the poor conditions or are the poor conditions thus producing the inequalities that are evident for all americans to see . And this is really kind of a central question in the progressive era, right . Which eventually in spite of all the prejudice i would argue comes to what we could call, and its not going to not going to mean what you think it is environmentalism, and what i mean by that is the belief that ones environment shapes their outcome. So if you can improve the environment, you will improve the quality of americans, right . I dont know why im on clean milk today, okay. That would be a perfect example, right . Urban dwellers who dont have their own cow to milk to have fresh, clean milk from the farm and have to buy milk, theyre going to have Poor Health Outcomes if they dont have good nutritious food, right . Is the problem the poor city dweller . Is the problem the conditions that theyre dealing with . Now, remember what i talked about how the ideal, when we talked about Andrew Carnegie and rockefeller and the gospel of wealth, and we talked about the fact that this recognition of class difference as a fundamental feature of American Society was profoundly threatening to many people and many, not coincidentally, middle and upper class folks rejected the idea that there would be permanent class distinctions in the u. S. And one of the things they worried about, did they worry about the, you know, economic inequality, yes, but they worried about whether a democracy could function with those kinds of entrenched seemingly irreparable differences, right . They worried about the state of democracy. Would all of these new citizens know how to operate in a democracy . Would they be good citizens, right . Im going to use the example of president Theodore Roosevelt the month before the 1912 election, just so i can clarify for you. Hes not currently president , right . He ascends to the presidency with mckinleys assassination. He serves out his terms, and then he says, well, im going to hand the baton to taft, whod been his vice president. Taft runs, serves one term from 1908 to 1912, roosevelt gets super annoyed that taft is far more conservative. Theodore roosevelt wants to move faster on progressive movements, right . And hes frustrated with taft. He says, screw it, im going to run against this guy that i anointed to be the next president im going to start a new party, im going to endorse womens suffrage. I im going to ask jane adams, the most famous woman in america, if you dont know who she is, look her up, im going to ask her to nominate me at the nominating convention. So hes in milwaukee, a hot bed of socialism, republican progressive politics. Wisconsins where the la fall ets come from, the university of wisconsin has invented this wonderful thing called the wisconsin idea which is the picture of progressivism, right . It is the idea that the university, the Public University should be in the service of the state, right . Its going to produce experts and answers and solve social problems. So hes in milwaukee. This is a place he thinks he can get a lot of progressive votes, hes giving a Campaign Speech and an angry saloon keeper, its not hard to find a saloon keeper in milwaukee, tries to assassinate him. His speech is so thick and it is so long that it protects him from the bullet, and hes like, oh, im fine, and he gives the speech. True story. Heres one of the things he says in the speech. No, friends, what we progressives are trying to do is enroll rich or poor, whatever their social or industrial position, to stand together for the most elementary rights of good citizenship, those elementary rights which are the foundation of good citizenship in this Great Republic of ours. Eventually reformers begin to look to local and federal government for solutions theyre afraid of Class Division as i mentioned, right . The major strikes starting with 1877 and the great uprising, the railroad strike, the 1880s, haymarket massacre, 1890, American Railway union, and the pollman strike, early 1900s, a coal strike that Theodore Roosevelt helps hammer out an agreement to. Many americans see the United States splitting into two camps, labor and capital, labor organizing is accelerating. Union membership in 1911 on the eve of this 1912 election is five times what it had been in 1897, right . Think about that. That would be like trust me, this didnt happen. That would be like if since 2004 the number of Labor Union Members multiplied by five times. New immigrants are creating low wage labor competition, right . Theres no minimum wage. Its a race to the bottom. They and africanamericans often work as strike breakers fueling divisions among Industrial Workers who are trying to organize. Manufacturers and employers openly try to pit one immigrant group against another so that they cant organize, right . Or africanamericans against whites as we talked about in mill work in the south. Okay. So 60 years ago, a very famous historian named richard hofstadter, my husband actually does know who richard hoff ststr is for the record, he says history famous or famous famous. Richard hofstadter is history famous. He argued that the progressives were worried about status anxiety. Basically that they were middle and upper clasp wasps who felt frightened by their place in a changing world. It was a deeply psychological interpretation that reflected the popularity of freudianism at the time, right, because remember we talk about historyography, we know that he exaggerated in these folks were as much optimistic as they were anxious about status. This missed the fact that many catholic, jewish and working class immigrant organizers shared many of the same goals as progressives. But having said all that, i think its still a useful way to think about the phenomenon of progressivism, right . That on the one hand theres this general insecurity about the state of society, and about how its enormous social problems can be solved. Theres this reck nix ognition fundamental change in the economy, a kind of sobering realization that industrial capitalism is here to stay, at least it is in 1912. Its a different story in 2019, right, but also this kind of optimism of like we can do something about this, right . This isnt existential paralyzing fear. This is weve got a problem. Lets roll up our sleeves, get some doctoral degrees, and solve it. By the way, they didnt see those as antithetical ideas, right . Okay so the bottom line is that progressive reform appealed to those who had something to lose, right . Including their status in society. Their fearful but not hopeless, right . Maybe that seems like a contradiction. But again, what i want to emphasize if theres one thing they share its this enormous confidence that social and Economic Conditions can be improved, maybe even solved, and you can see that in wilsons, you know, fascination with making this machine of liberty be as frictionless as possible. Now, this may reflect a politics professors lack of knowledge about engineering and friction, but nevertheless, he is bringing book knowledge to this problem assuming that we can solve the problems of democracy. Ill give you another example, just put it this way. Woodrow wilson and Theodore Roosevelt are very different kinds of people and i suspect you all know that, right . Who is more confident than Theodore Roosevelt. Hes got a big stick, right . I mean, this guy there is nothing that wont stop him, right . He runs right over his vice president. Hes anointed to be president. He starts a new Political Party. Hes like the kid that never gets picked at recess, and then he reinvents himself as a south dakota rancher, right . He is very confident. He really shows, i think, this progressive idealism and confidence, right . And for him, of course, that comes from a position of privilege. Like, dont tell Theodore Roosevelt he cant do something, he cant fix this great nation, right . That is born and bred into him. Women, though, one of my favorite things about teaching the progressive era is that this isnt one of these deals where the famous history famous womens history professor gerda learner said theres an early stage of womens history called add women and stir, like your pot of history doesnt have any women in it, just throw them in like chocolate chips. Its slightly better but its still the same thing, right . You cannot understand the progressive era unless you include women from top to bottom. Women were central to this reorganizing of liberty, freedom, democracy, and efficiency, right . You know im going to bring up clean milk again. I think its the wisconsin thing, right . Its not the men who are all about this. Its the women, right . This is the height of the womens suffrage movement, which well talk about in much more detail on thursday, right . But even beyond womens suffrage, right, women are involved in prohibition, which were going to end with, right . Theyre attending higher institutions of Higher Education in unprecedented numbers. Theyre going to graduate school. Theyre getting ph. D. S, of course this is mostly middle and upper class white women, middle class and upper class black women as well, although their numbers are much smaller. In fact, they are much more likely to have careers than white middle and upper class women partly because their husbands cant often make a living that the family can afford to live on. Women reflect and capitalize on this confidence. Women are newly confident in the progressive era, right . They believe they have the power to make change. They are appearing in public forums. Jane adams is nominating roosevelt as the Progressive Party nominee. They also have confidence in the ability of the government to solve social problems. They share with progressive era men this idea, wait for it, that bureaucracy is a good thing. They believe in bureaucracy. In fact, they want more of it. Wilsons proposal to make liberty more efficient is through bureaucracy. They dont think thats a paradox. They believe in Good Government, right . Okay. That brings me to the last big picture point i want to make. Progressives are not radicals. Its important to recognize that progressivism was a form im sorry, was a set of reform movements, not radical movements, right . In effect, in a certain sense progressivism was actually conservative in the sense that progressives wanted to perfect something they think already existed, right . They were ultimately optimists and perfectionists that believed you could Perfect Society with enough planning and careful organization, right . We can see that many progressives saw progressivism as a way to stem radicalism, right, to cut increasingly popular radical movements off at the knees by decreasing their need by solving the obvious social problems that socialists, anarchists and communists were beginning to name and address, right . So roosevelt and wilson, although they disagree on many things are saying lets regulate, not have a revolution, right . We recognize that railroads are a problem. We recognize that workers probably need an eighthour day. We dont think that we have to give up the whole thing to cynicalists, we think we can tinker at the margins and fix this. Even eugene debs, a good example, in 1908 he runs from prison where hed been jailed because of actions to do with his with the strike he was involved in and inflammatory statements he supposedly made, but even hes not staging a revolution. Hes running for president , right . Even that, thats not you know, hes not bombing people like what maybe happened at hay market. Hes part of the system, too. I brought up senator albert beverage from indiana, the proponent of imperialism who was an important voice for roosevelt in the senate when roosevelt was president , and he said this about Theodore Roosevelt. He said that Theodore Roosevelts brilliance was indifferentiating that species of anarchism which we popularly term boll she vichl, isolating radicalism from that form of normal progress called liberalism. So i guess in modern terms, we would call this a liberal, not a radical, prepared to call roosevelt a liberal, that might be albert beverages view, i think you see the analogy there. By making urban life cleaner and safer and more organized, the appeal of radicals like anarchists and socialists who were increasingly powerful and popular in this period would be diminished. That was the goal, right . All right. The progressive era contained such a wide range of different moves and causes it would be impossible to discuss even a portion of them. This is one of the most studied eras in American History, precisely because its so complex and internally contradictory, so today what i want to do is just offer you a couple of examples of what i would call economic and political progressivism, and im going to emphasize the way that political progressivism comes out of municipalities and states first, and then im going to end with prohibition because i think prohibition really is emblema c emblematic. Its in some ways the quintessential progressive reform. Its an excellent bridge to talking about women and immigrants on thursday, right . It involves both of them in important ways, and i think its also the quintessential progressive reform that weve forgotten about because its so deeply unfashionable, right . As i speak to college students, as ive referenced milwaukee several times, right . So it wasnt popular there, ill tell you that. So i want to i want to re well, i dont know if i want to rehabilitate it. That might be too big a task, but i want to resuscitate its centrality to the progressive era because i think it sheds lights on sort of the pros and cons of progressive causes. Okay. So lets talk about economic and political progressivism. The two i want to talk about in particular, the two laws that i think excuse me exemplify the antitrust movement, which begins economic progressivism are the interstate commerce act and the sherman antitrust act. Okay. These both come out of the populist movement, right . They reflect an antimonopoly tradition, and we havent talked a lot about antimonopolyism. I mentioned it briefly when i talked about populists, but i think its fair to say that in the late 19th century, monopoly was one of the central concerns of the american people, and it touched on many of the things ive already mentioned to you, the idea that some people have an unfair advantage over others, the diminishing of the importance and power of the individual, right . And the increasingly abstract nature of industrial capitalism, right . Monopoly offended 19th century americans in a way that was deeply fundamental because they saw themselves as a nation of individualism and that individualism was central to freedom and democracy, right . And so while we might say, oh, that was freedom of business or what have you, they saw monopoly not just in the increasing combinations of American Business but in the political power that those folks had, even in things like the vice trade, so this campaign against what i call white slavery, sex trafficking. The reformers, most of whom were sort of municipal republican politicians and women reformers, the reformers most active in this movement believed there was a vice monopoly. They saw some sort of secretive cabal that was organizing white slavery around the world, right . Whisking women unwilling across International Lines for this International Sex syndicate. The reality is it was not as organized as they thought, but i think its very, very telling that they when they saw a problem, they feared monopoly, right . Thats where the kind of general ability in a nonpartisan way to address trusts come from. Now, trusts dont go away, right . And anybody who studies American Business now knows that its bigger than ever, but this effort to dismantle what people saw as unfair business combinations comes out of that antimonopoly tradition. Okay. So the really kind of landmark example or piece of legislation is the interstate commerce act which passes in 1877. This comes out of many state attempts to regulate railroads. You all emily and i talked about it, you did a terrific job of talking about plessy v. Ferguson last week. I know in my section we talked about it was not an accident this happened on a railroad, right, in that case it was a state law that plessy was challenging, but many states like nebraska that had strong populous support tried to pass laws to regulate railroads and railroad rates in their states, and the Supreme Court overruled those laws, overturned them saying railroads engage in interstate commerce and any regulation of them has to be at the federal level. So Congress Responds and passes the interstate commerce act, which is really a watershed moment because it means that the federal government for the first time is turning toward what we would now call a regulatory state, right . And the interstate Commerce Commission becomes a model for this hybrid of executive and legislative and Judicial Branch in a commission, okay . What do i mean by that. The interstate commerce act created a fiveperson commission to regulate railroads. Okay . This commission was thus removed from some of the winds of politics that the legislative branch might be, for example, right . So these are appointed positions that can decide things like railroad rates, solve railroad disputes. This is an expansion of executive power that we now think is normal but was really a turning point. Okay. It had many weaknesses. It couldnt proactively regulate. It relied on lawsuits to bring actions, so you had to have the wherewithal to actually bring a suit to the icc if you wanted to challenge something, which obviously favored big business over small. Railroad attorneys whom i mentioned to you were the First Corporate attorneys in the United States could tie up these cases for years. Even if the icc in its early years was weak, it created, right, it created this precedent for this dominant form of regulatory government, the independent appointed commission, right . And i bet you can think of a whole bunch of independent appointed commissions. I wrote a book about one, you might have thought, for example, of the 9 11 commission, right, which is in some ways the most recent and famous example of a precedent set by the icc. Ill give you an example of how in the weeds the icc could get, though. I literally just found this out two weeks ago. I went to a workshop on jewish genealogy and i didnt even use genealogical sites for this. I googled my great grandfathers name, and i found out that he was involved in a case that he and his Business Partner took to the interstate Commerce Commission in i want to say 1919 in which you want to talk about small potatoes, they had an argument with the topeka at economyson railroad, they were junk dealers. They owned a company that sold secondhand scrap iron and metal, these are not titans of industry. They sued the railroad over what they thought was an unfair rate for used beer bottles. Holy cow, im noting a theme today. Anyway, they went to the icc, and they said this railroad is charging us too much for these truckloads of used beer bottles that we bought, and they won the case, and they got a refund of like 127 from the railroad for their multiple carloads of used beer bottles. I actually didnt even know that when i started talking to you guys about populism and the railroad. I literally just found this out. I think its a perfect example of like, whoa, the federal government is regulating this guys used beer bottle purchase for a junk dealer in el paso, texas. Thats the precedent for the sherman antitrust act. Theres monopolies in oil, tobacco, steel, sugar industries, weve talked about a lot of those. The situation grows worse, right, with the series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1880s saying that legally speaking a corporation is a person under the 14th amendment. It means that corporations are not be denied life, liberty or property without due process of the law, and this invalidates many of the state monopoly laws as i mentioned to you. In response, Congress Passes the sherman antitrust act. It makes any, quote, restraint of trade or commerce in interstate commerce illegal. Not unlike the ica, its enforced with fines and lawsuits, although these are suits that can be brought by public district attorneys. Its used against clear monopolies and cartels, that is secret agreements that engage in weight fixing, so this is actually the kind of thing although it was an icc matter because it was a railroad, that my great grandfather would have complained about. He would have said, you know what, the southern pacific and the topeka atchison they fix things. I dont have a place. You could call that a cartel or a secret agreement. Its supposed to outlaw that. Its not effective against holding companies. Theyre not able to prosecute these companies that are sort of Shell Companies that own a bunch of different companies. But its in this context, right, how many of you have heard of Theodore Roosevelt as the trust buster . Yes, kind of famous, right . He comes down in history as the trust buster during this presidency beginning in 1902. You probably also heard because this is an old, you know, old saw in u. S. History classes that he wasnt really all that antitrust. There were plenty of corporations and corporate bearance that he liked, but he supported the Sherman Trust act as a good tool to attack what he called bad trusts. Roosevelt had his idea of good trusts and bad trusts and he used this tool and this is indicative, right, of sort of the power and danger of these new executive power tools if you will used the sherman antitrust act to create a Regulatory Commission to pursue corporations using that he thought were using bad or unfair methods. In his inaugural address, roosevelt made a powerful plea for the right of the federal government to intervene in unfair practices and curb capitalist abuses, classic ex example of reform, not revolution. In practice antitrust laws could definitely backfire at least from the standpoint of the people who had first championed them because just as the 14th amendment could protect corporations as persons, antitrust laws could be used against things like farmers coops and labor unions, so you could use the sherman antitrust act to go after one of these farmers cooperatives that pop ewe list minded farmers created so they could negotiate for better rates and prices for their commodities, right . Well, that was a trust sometimes in the eyes of the law, right . Similarly, if a Labor Union Organized a boycott, the target of their boycott could go to the sherman could go and argue that this is that this was a violation of the sherman antitrust act. Again, this theme, right . This is reform, not revolution. Roosevelt wants to make the market safe for individuals, not dismantle it. Okay. So those are some examples of economic reform, which with respect to this question of monopoly, were also seen as political reforms, right . These werent deeply kebtconnec in peoples minds, right . Making the world safer for individuals and industrial capitalism was analogous to the ways that progressives wanted the individual to retain their power in increasingly large and abstract democracy. Okay . So let me turn to some political refor reforms. So progressives champion a bunch of reforms that are aimed at creating direct democracy. What does that mean . It means bringing political decisions straight to the people rather than to intermediaries like political machines and state legislatures. Here is an example with political reform that we see the very direct influence of the populists on the progressive era, right . The populists who believe that farmers who were the salt of the earth, the bedrock of the nation had lost political power, right . They wanted to see power return to the individuals. Okay. So progressive reformers really hated political machines. Someone take a stab at what a political machine is. Im sure many of you have studied this in class, yeah. Its like a collective of basically powerful usually men and they kind of choose who they want to sort of run the city, what the not, and they get people elected and they do it through intimidation tactics. Those are the bosses, and the machine, note the analogy with the machine, right, theyre literally called machines. Im telling you people were really into machines in the late 19th century, right . So its this group of powerful basically rainmakers, right, kingpins who offer a kind of quid pro quo for voters who then become the cogs in the machine, right . Ill make sure that you get a free turkey on thanksgiving if you vote for my candidate, right . Ill build a big, big courthouse that goes 100 times over budget, but ill make sure you and your cousin get jobs on it, right . Most political machines were democratic. The most famous was tammany hall in new york city. There were absolutely some republican political machines on the municipal level. It depended on the city and the situation. Political machines as hopelessly corrupt, this idea of a direct quid pro quo enraged them, right . Defenders said, actually, so this was one of the defenses of tammany hall, actually, we take all these new immigrants this is mid19th century all these irish immigrants fresh off the boat. Theyve never had democracy, right, theyve never had a full belly. Theyve been in ancient european feudalism. We show them what it means to be an american citizen. We show them how the voting process works. We get them involved. We get them jobs. We get them to the ballots. Right . Were teaching them about the american political system right . The reformers say thats shenanigans. Its not the goal of politics to have this direct quid pro quo. Were supposed to have Good Government. Its supposed to be about these abstract ideals, and so you start to see these attacks that are increasingly effective on the political machines, and this is often a fairly regional activity. On the federal level, it comes in the version of the pendleton act of 1883, which creates Civil Service reform, right . Says instead of us just filling the federal bureaucracy which by the way, in 1883 is quite small, right . Instead of filling it with a but them of political hacks through machine politics, they have to pass the Civil Service exam to show that they are objectively qualified for the job. You can imagine these exams can be very discriminatory in the same way you hear about s. A. T. S and racial and class discrimination. These might ask for book learning that wasnt necessary for being a Railway Clerk or pass a Civil Service exam to have some kind of job that doesnt require that kind of knowledge, right . So many immigrants and working classes resented this process. Thats the federal version, which in fairness is a reaction to the assassination of president James Garfield by a deranged office seeker, a gee se guy seeking a job whos mentally ill and shoots him, and this is one of the political responses. But on the municipal and state level, there are other efforts as well. The australian ballot, the secret ballot, this is meant to curb political machine influence because then if you vote secretly, if no one knows what your vote is, you dont owe the political box anything. In the era when you went to vote in the political saloon and there was one box for the democrats and one for the republicans, if your political boss saw you put your ballot in the wrong box, you were out a turkey at thanksgiving, right . But more seriously, probably a job. At large elections, eliminating ward government. The machine system was base ond a coalition of powerful neighborhood or ward bosses. Many urban reformers campaigned at large for elections. Rather than in washington d. C. Kr we have eight wards and each of them have members of the city council, at large elections eliminated those different wards to eliminate that kind of small political favor. What is one of the consequences, though, of eliminating ward elections in a diverse city . Yes. Okay. So you dont have a small constituency that you address. What are some demographic realities of that as well . Whos from okay. Yeah. Wealthier people will probably dominate. Who else . Lets say you have a city thats majority white but three wards are predominantly immigrant. If you eliminate wards yes. Minorities go unrecognized. Thats exactly right. So the idea was so, for example, ill use chicago as an example in the 18th century, a hive of machine politics, right . Chicago is renowned for the corruption in City Government, right . In this time period especially, but i will say this, Chicago City Council had africanamerican aldermen at the turn of the century. Why . Because it had ward politics and the south side elected its own alderman, right . That would not have been the case without ward politics, so that was sort of the two sides to that story. At large elections vastly reduced immigrant participation. This became a huge issue in the Civil Rights Movement and many cities that had at large elections switched back to or established ward elections for the first time. Another example of taking power from the people to make democracy more efficient was City Government by experts. So a lot of this happens on the municipal level. So this is City Governments that have a city manager or a Commission Style government. These are much more common in the midwest, south, and west for this reason. Their City Governments are newer. Many of these places were established, incorporated during the progressive era, right . We talk about people being born digital now, they were born progressive. Okay . The quintessential example so heres our trust guy. Oh, you knew i was going to do this out of order. The quintessential example is galveston, texas, in 1900, devastating hurricane killed between 6 and 12,000 people, literally wiped out the city council and the mayor. Reformers said, well, this is sad, but its also a great opportunity. We can try out this newfangled idea that reformers have of commissioned government where we actually just have this commission, a board of appointed commissioners that act like a city manager and run the city. They eliminated africanamerican aldermen by changing this political system. They appointed experts to run the commission, and so in 1900, galveston creates the first commissioned government with hundreds of towns in the south and the west following. Almost half of american towns and cities today have a commissioner or city manager government, so a city manager government is a model in which you may have an elected mayor, but theyre called a weak mayor, i mean, not to their face. Its a weak mayor system, right, where they have limited powers and the daytoday functioning of the City Government is done by an sorry, by an appointed, paid city manager. The west, as i mentioned, was a laboratory for these reforms. Because the west is literally building its towns and states during this period, right . Arizona, new mexico, and oklahoma are territories at the beginning of the progressive era, and the west uses at large elections, parttime mayor, commission and city manager models. My hometown, tempe, arizona, has a city manager that was incorporated during the progressive era. Ill give you an example of how this works. I love this example because its a great civics lesson. My High School Government teacher taught at the high school for 35 years. He was an alum. He was also the mayor. He taught the 0 to 5th hour and skipped his prep because he had a halftime job as mayor. The city mayor ran the city, his fulltime job was teaching High School Government and then in the afternoons he went to city hall and he was the mayor, and he could do that because it was a city manager system. It also was nonpartisan elections. This was another progressive reform. You can see how that also can potentially eliminate the power of war in politics. Right . It cant organize around Party Elections and choosing primary nominees, right . The idea is that Good Government is Good Government. It shouldnt matter what party. Many of these towns had nonpartisan elections. He went on to become a member of congress. Its a very mr. Smith goes to washington story. One of the most popular and controversial Progressive Political reforms was a set of methods to bring voting to the people, and that was a set of efforts, again, which predominated in the west and still do, the Initiative Referendum and recall. Okay, im sure we have people from california here and maybe someone from colorado. Anyone want to take a stab at what the Initiative Referendum and recall are . Yes. Im not for sure, but im from colorado. So recalling is taking an elected official out of office by the people. Referendum is not an initiative but something thats voted on by the people and put into law and then initiative is something brought by the people. You got it, your colorado High School Government teachers would be so pleased. Thats exactly right, and im glad youre from colorado, which is an exemplar of this model, right . The initiative is you run around and get ballot signatures from x many voters. You get it on the next ballot. You vote the public votes for it, right . Up or down, right . This is a classic direct democracy, right . You dont see the authority of passing a new law to the legislature. You literally let the voters decide, right . Referendum is Legislature Passes a law. Its unpopular or theyre nervous about it, they pitch it back to the people to give it a yea or nay. Same thing, pretty direct democracy, right . Recall election only some states have this, right . And it is the ability to recall an elected official in rare cases i gave this example of arizona. You can even recall judges. It almost never happens. Im not sure its ever happened, actually, but in any case, right, the recall is a way that the people have a way to discipline in direct democracy. If someone is not representing the peoples interest, they can recall them, right . So the intention was that these things would bring politics closer to the people. The evidence over a century is that probably in some cases the opposite has happened, right, that these kinds of elections are especially vulnerable to special interests and large campaigns that can sway the outcome, right . Did not turn out exactly as the reformers had wished. Okay. I want to present to you as i promised that i would the south that jim crow was jim crow as progressivism can fit into this model, although it might seem strange to say so. You might see the way in which those state constitutions starting with the mississippi plan of 1890 and moving through the late 19th century represented the triiumph of whie supremacists who valued Efficient Government over democratic government, right . Remember how they saw reconstruction. They saw it as corruption, right, fueled by uneducated, unprepared voters, new voters, formerly enslaved people, right . Rather than saying lets make better citizens of our citizenry, they said lets remove those citizens from the voting population, right . In this sense, like i said, jim crow was in some ways the ultimate expression of Good Government and efficiency. If this is southern, you know, southern leaders talking, not me, if we make sure people are literate, right, that theyve paid their poll taxes so theyre responsible and upstanding, right, if they come from a tradition of upright Good Government and their grandfathers could vote, notice how race is lurking but not vocalized. Then well have a more Efficient Government, right, a more efficient system. You couldnt get a more naked example of efficiency winning over democracy, and at least in my class we talked briefly about how many poor white voters were disenfranchised in the state of louisiana, after jim crow went into effect. This wasnt true in every Southern State but in louisiana which was profoundly dominated by a small elite, they did not view that as an accident, right . That was fine to eliminate poor white voters along with black voters in the jim crow era. To them that was better efficiency in democracy. Okay. Weve made it all the way to the end. And im going to finish on time. I know, its hard to believe. Its a good thing its recorded for posterity. Talking about the south is a good place to mention the quintessential progressive reform prohibition. Prohibition was the National Really interNational Movement to eliminate alcohol as a part of peoples regular lives. Why you might ask did anyone want prohibition much less get it ratified as an amendment to the constitution . Why did people want prohibition and who want it hed it . Yes. A lot of married women would have husbands who went to the saloons and abandon them and their children and spending a lot of money on alcohol. It was causing women a lot of problems. And then youd have people like kari nation who would hatchet up saloons. Ill show you thata clip of next week. It sounds like an exaggeration and sounds like a spoof and sounds like a parody and theres some wonderful early 20th century Motion Pictures that are indeed spoofs of this. Theyre very sexist, right, theyre also a little funny of women tearing up saloons and men having to take care of babies because women have become political organizers and men sneaking drinks while theyre babysitting their children. Ha ha, very funny, but it was rooted in a very real social problem. People drank far more even than they do today. Alcoholism was a serious problem, right . People missed work because of it. They lost jobs. They spent their incomes on it. Domestic violence was rampant, often fueled by alcohol abuse, right. It was in a very real way a kind of antisee dent to Metoo Movement that this was in one sense one portion of the popularity of prohibition was the idea that it would improve women and childrens lives, right . Francis willard who was the famous president , famous, famous, leader of the womens christian temperance movement, one woman, woman singular, thats a white middle class woman, adopted advocacy for womens suffrage after getting involved in the Prohibition Movement because she saw it as a tool for social reform, right . Well talk about this more, but theres two camps in the womens suffrage campaign, right . The camp that dated all the way to 1848 and the declaration of sentiments and Elizabeth Katie stanton and susan b. Anthonys early version where they said we should have the right to vote because we are equal, we are citizens and its our natural right, right . And remember we talked about this, there were some women who practiced civil disobedience after the 14th amendment and they just tried to go vote, they said it covers me. Im just going to go do it. That begins to evolve by the late 19th and early 20th century to women are special and more righteous and more morally pure, which fits in perfectly. This is a genius tactic, right . Fits in perfectly with progressive era reform saying we will clean up government. We will make it more efficient because we are not corrupt, right . And its folks who are advocating that, they say some nasty things that well talk about on thursday, but like Frances Willard, theyre saying its not so much that i think that i should have the vote because women and men are equal, though i think Frances Willard probably would have said that, but she says we need it to make these necessary changes in society, right . And she saw prohibition as just one of all kinds of reforms to cure social ills in the 20th century, and thats why her motto was do everything. For her and for millions of other women who come to support the vote and men, took into consideration rig men too, theres a reason roosevelt endorses womens suffrage, they see it as an instrument for change as much as a change itself. They assume, by the way, that women will vote differently than men will, which they turn out to be mostly wrong about in the early period. Im not talking about the 21st century. Okay. So weve talked about one major motivation for prohibition. Whats another . Ooeantiimmigrant sentiments the native born protestants, many dont allow most of them dont drink or dont drink publicly. They associate political corruption, debauchery, poverty, urbanization, with catholic mostly catholic, eastern orthodox immigrants and heavy drinking, saloon culture, right . So many people rightfully see this as a campaign against immigrants as well. Ive chosen to end with prohibition for two reasons, right, and you already guessed what they were. The first is that it was often targeted against immigrants, the second is that it was a movement that was not female only but whose success and size is unimaginable without womens participation and leadership and in this sense, i think as i mention at the beginning of class, its indicative of the progressive era in general, and while i always say that women belong in history, they are essential to understanding the progressive era. So on thursday we will turn to more details about immigration and womens lives in the early 20th century. Thanks. Tonight on American History tv beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, from our lectures in history series, university of nevada las vegas professor Michael Green teaches a class on Abraham Lincoln and the 1860 president ial election. Watch American History tv tonight and over the weekend on cspan3. With the federal government at work in d. C. And throughout the country, use the congressional directory for Contact Information for members of congress, governors, and federal agencies. Order your copy online today at cspanstore. Org. Up next on lectures in history, karen markoe of State University of new York Maritime College teaches a class on the 1920s. She talks about politics, prohibition and organized crime as well as popular music and sports during that decade. Okay. Well, good morning, everybody. Today were going to discuss the jazz age,le