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. So again, throughout class today be thinking about democracy versus efficiency. So the central question for historians of the early 20th century what is progressivism . A famous article that came out in 1982 was entitled in search of progressism, which i think aptly summed up the way that the historians were rummaging around, knowing that the progressive era existed but quibbling about what counted as progressive his. Who counted, when it started. 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 new and fundamental ways while trying to keep some aspects of the old. On defining the progressive era as lasting from approximately 1890 through world war i. Before i subjected you all to this lecture today i consulted with my colleague who many of you know is an expert on populism and wrote a phenomenal biography on William Jennings bryant. He teaches this class as well and i asked the professor what he thought, made sure i got rid of any howlers in the 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 that we all basically are on the same page but we sort of argue about the edges. The chronology of the era is debatable. Beginning in 1890 takes in the sherman act which well talk about today and the beginning of jane adams remarkable settlement house in chicago. But in the national and state politics theres no people wed consider progressive in power until 1900. If were going to define it that way, wed push it up a little bit. If William Jennings bryant 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 the me that many populists became progressives and you recognize that already. You know, spoiler alert well talk about how wilsons new freedom plan included many things that the populist party had proposed and many became socialists in places we dont think of 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 learned about how he came through the Labor Movement to consider himself a socialist. He pulled 6 of the votes in the is 1912 election, almost a million votes. 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. It 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 the discussion of wilson versus roosevelt. I want to tell you its really starting at the grass roots 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 towards change and reform and society in politics, right . 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 lecture, theres some pessimism, theres 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 got to tell you this is the first year that i have actually assigned a portion of wilsons new freedom plan and i could not have invented a document better suited for the themes i want to stress today. What does he compare liberty to . You all suddenly got shy. Yes . An engine, a machine, right . And this is perfect for all of you mathy, sciency, mechanically people, right . This 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. 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. You can see his optimism, even his might i say egoism as a professor, right . His optimism, human interests and human activities and human energies because the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order. In other words, he is 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 from the culture perspective, right, i love the 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 id screw it up so i decided to 86 that, 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, effects, reforms, causes, that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. So we have got Civil Service reform. Cleaning up bureaucracy. Conservation movement which i know youre interested in and we wont dally there today, but certainly your reading emphasizes in the way that theres a famous way that many have written about the conservation movement. Clean milk campaigns, children who drink milk their mom purchased is inadulterated. Womens suffrage, well talk about that on thursday. Public education. Reinvigorated since the reconstruction era. The expansion of public kindergartens and the establishment of the first public high schools. Campaign finance reform, trying to keep out those corrupt 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 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 is under roosevelt. The regulation of the railroads which is an opening salvo of the progressive era. Municipal ownership of the utilities. Temperance, the outlawing of alcohol. The modern field of social work dominated by women. Antiprostitution and antipornography campaigns in what is called the white slavery movement. You can see a strong moral element and protective element to this campaign. The campaign for legal Birth Control which was the com stack act which made discussing any information about Birth Control illegal. Election reform which ill take about on the state level in a few minutes. So okay, maybe i put these sort of im making some judgments, some of these im seeing as po positives but also coercive control of the clients. 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. Those are illustrative. We dont have to get into the details and some ill return to you, but i want to say were talking about from clean milk to voter initiatives. We are talking about from kindergarten to funding higher ed. From kindergarten to first ph. D. 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. Right . 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 that 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. Well, liberty will say were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies, right . Efficiency would say, maybe our society would work better if children didnt die from adulterated milk, right . So you can see thats a one tiny example but actually something 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 . So what i want to talk about is the way in which we can go back to the slides here. Thats a different computer, okay. What i want to talk about is the way that what we talk about progressiveism bubbles up from the grass roots even its known as a government by experts. Its a National Movement built for regional movements. So what you have simplified i like geography. The concerns 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 a Theodore Roosevelt. Those meet up with the more rural and agrarian concerns of southern and western populism. Populism i would may not seem so much to us today and we generalize rural america, a few of you are from rural places. The midwestern corn you know, commodity culture was a very different kind of agrarian economy than the souths cotton based sharecropping vestiges of jim crow. Yet, they found enough common cause briefly to unite in populism that didnt last, right . This feeling of the rural places being left behind. Some of the political, electoral success of the progressive era in the early 20th sempblry was that these midwestern and northeastern urban concerns were able to find, in some cases, common cause with these folks that had been former populous. Particularly around issues like regulating interstate commerce. Regulating the railroads. Starting to talk about conservation. In fact, after is the 00, populism and progressives merged. Except for those who stay more radical and join the socialist party. Intellect intellectually, theyre inspired by social gospel theory. You read an example of that today. A rather, i dont want to say aggressive, but assertive campaign by many religious leaders, predominantly protestant, who said we need to realize that we cant be just focused on the afterlife, right, and the spiritual life. We also have to think about life here on earth, right . So rosh talks about what it means to think about jesus work today here and now, right . And that social gospel theory also informs this progressive work, right . Woodrow wilson comes from an entire family of ministers. 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. First professional associations emerged. Theyre creating expert rs right, opened at places like johns hopkins, the Ivy League Schools like the university of wisconsin, whoop whoop, university of california. Those giant Public Research institutions alongside the 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 problems. Wo Woodrow Wilson has a phd from johns hopkins. So what bothered him . Well review this and i think you know what many of these things are. We can talk about a few of their motivations in e teterms of fea. Fears of new capitalism as Companies Grow larger and large rer and it grows more impersonal. Im talking like this. 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 the rip you off because you have a facetoface relationship, right . Or youre a farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. You know the operate or. 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 youre seller is. Right. I think we take for granted global capitalisms in person, right . When you all get things from amazon prime, youre not thinking about whos pulling it off the warehouse shelf and putting it in a box and putting that label on and sending it to you. This was threatening. This was a real change, right . And they feared that the outsized power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The run away Railroad Industry as i mentioned was just one example. The journalists called muckrakers were revealing the dooefous methods of armor meats and standard oil, writing long exposes in popular magazines. And this reflected both the real changes, right, 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. Well talk about this in much more detail in the coming weeks. The 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 new arrivals from 1882 to 1982. 18 to 24 million new immigrants come United States in this exact same time period were calling the depressive era, okay. At its peak, they represent almost 15 of the American Population. A figure we have never exceeded, but came very close in 2007 before the recession. But those are are sort of paralle parallels. Do i need to tell you what a hot issue immigration is right now, and actually, our numbers are way down from a decade ago. But in that sense from the standpoint of a proportion of the American Population who were immigrant, similar. Different places. 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 unassemble. Theyre very poor. They tend to congregate in urban places in a country that Still Believes itself to be a rural origin. Americans are starting to move in what will become the great migration. Migrating like ida b. Wells do to the urban north. Close to 2 million africanamericans moved from the south to north between 1890s and 1910. Many northers are confronted with mixed populations for the very first time. The transition of africanamericans to urban life is difficult. They are predocument. Com nantly 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, suer and electric. And 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 . Right . 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, t not going to be what you think it is, environmentalism. 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. That would be a perfect example. Urban dwellers that 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. They dont have good, nutritious food. Is the problem the poor city dweller, the conditions theyre dealing with . Now, remember what i talked about how the ideal when we talked about Andrew Carnegie and rockefeller, gospel of wealth, we talked about the fact that this recognition of class difference as a fundamental future 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 things they worried about, did they worry about the you know, economic inequality, yes, but they worried about whether a democracy could function those kinds of entrenched, seemingly irreparable differences. They worried about the state of democracy. Would all of these new citizens now how to operate in a state of 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. He ascends to the presidency with mckinleys assassination. He serves out his terms then says im going to hand the baton to taft, who had been his Vice President. Taft runs. Serves one term from 1908 to 1912. Roosevelt gets super annoyed that taft is far more conservative. Roosevelt wants to move faster on progressives. Right . And hes frustrated with taft a, so he says you know what, screw it, im going to run against this guy that i anointed to be the next president. Im going to start a new party. This is chutzpah, right . Im going to start a new party, endorse womens suffrage. Im going to ask jane adams, 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 congress vengs. So hes in milwaukee, wisconsin, besides the hometown of my husband, a hot bed of social progressive politics. The university of wisconsin, did i mention that, has invented this wonderful thing called the wisconsin idea. The picture of progressives. The idea that the university, the Public University should be in the service of the state. Its going to produce experts and answers and solve social problems. So hes in milwaukee. A place he thinks he can get a lot of votes. Hes giving a Campaign Speech and an angry saloon keeper. Not hard to find a saloon keeper in milwaukee, tries to assassinate him. His speech is so thick, it is so long, that it protects him from the bullet. And hes like, oh, im fine, and he gives a speech. True story. Heres one of the things he says in the speech. Now, friends, what we progressives are trying to do is to enroll rich or poor, whatever their social position, to stand together for the most elementary rights of good citizenship. Those elementary rights, which are the foundation of good citizenship in the Great Republic of ours. Eventually, reformers can begin to look to local and federal government for solutions. Theyre afraid of class division, as i mentioned. Right. The major strikes, the rail yro strike. The 1880s. Hey market massacre, right . 1890s. The pullman strike that eugene debs emerges as a leader. Early 1900s, a coal strike that roosevelt helps hammer out an agreement to. Many americans as i mentioned, see the United States splitting into two camps. Labor and capital. Its accelerating. Leadership on the eve of this 1912 election is five times what it had been. Think about that. That would be like trust me, this didnt happen. That would be like since 2004, the number of Labor Union Members multiplied by five times. Theyre creating low wage labor competition. The its race to the bottom. Fuelling divisions among Industrial Workers who are trying to organize. Manufacturers and employers openly tried to pit one immigrant group against the other so they cant organize. Or africanamericans against white as we talked about in the south. So 60 years ago, a very famous historian american named richard hoff stetter. When ever i say somebody ceas famous, he says history famous or famous famous. He argued 60 yearses that thaeg the americans were worried about status and society. It reflected the popularity of freudianism at the time. Remember, we talked about his tor yog fi cant help but absorb the moment in which its created. This fact that many catholic, jewish and working class immigrant workers shared many of the same goals a as progressives, but having said all that, i think its a useful way to talk about the phenomenon. That theres this general insecurity about the state of society. And about how its enormous social problems can be solved, theres this recognition of a 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 is an exten shl par lisaly fear. This is weve got a problem. Lets roll up our sleeve, get some doctoral degrees and solve it. By the way, they didnt see those as 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. So, theyre fearful, but not hopeless, right . Maybe that seems like a contradiction, but again, what i want to emphasize is if theres one thing they share, its that enormous confident that social and Economic Conditions can be improved, maybe even solved and you can see that in wilsons fascination with making this machine of liberty being as frictionless as possible. Now, this may reflect a politics professors lack of knowledge. Never theless, hes bringing knowledge that we can solve the problems of democracy. I suspect you know that, right . Who is more confident that roosevelt . Hes got a big stick. Right . There is nothing that wont stop him, right . He runs over his Vice President and he starts a new political par party. He reenvicinities 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 roosevelt e he cant do something, he cant fix this great nation, right . That is born and bred in him. Women though, one of my favorite things about teaching the the progressive era is this isnt one of these deals where the famous history famous womens history professor said well, theres an early stage of women, a add women and stir. Like your pot of history doesnt have any women in it. Just throw them in like chocolate chips. Slightly better, but still the same thing. 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, women are involved in prohibition, which were going to end with, right . Theyre attend iing higher institutions of Higher Education in unprecedented numbers. Theyre going to graduate school. Theyre getting p hrhds. Mitd l class and black women, theyre 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 confident in the progressive era. Right . They believe they have the power to make changes. They are appearing in public. Jane adams is nominating roosevelt at the Progressive Party no, maminee. 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 progressi progressiveism was a form, im sorry, a set of reform moveme movements. Not radical movements. In fact, in a sense sense, it was actually conservative. In the sense that progressives wanted to perfect something they think already existed, right . They were ultimately optimists. We can see many progressives saw it as a way to stem radicalism, right . To cut increasingly popular radical movements off at the knees by decreasing their need by solving obvious social problems that socialists, anarchists and communists were beginning to name and address, right . So, roosevelt and wilson, although they disadwreeed on many thing, 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 thing. Even eugene debs, he runs five times for president. He runs five times from prison where hes been jailed for actions to do with the strike he was involved in. Inflammatory statements he supposedly made. But even he, hes not staging a revolution. Heis oning for president , righ . Even that, hes not bombing people like what maybe happened at hey market. Tohes 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 in the when roosevelt was president. And he said this about roosevelt. He said that Theodore Roosevelts brilliance was in differentiating that species of so isolating radicalism from that form of normal progress called liberalism. So, i guess in modern term, we woul cawould cal that a liberal not a radic. Not sure im ready to call him a liberal, but i think you see the analogy there. By making capitalism safe for the individual and less monopolistic, but making urban life safer, cleaner 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 contains such a wide range of different movements and it would be impossible to discuss even a portion of them. This is one of the most studies eras of American History, precisely because its so complex and contradictory. So today, what i want to do is just offer you a couple of examples of what i would call economic and political progressi progressiveism and i want to emphasize how it comes out of municipalities and states first, then end with prohibition because i think prohibition really is emblematic. Its in some ways, the quintessential progressive reform. Its an excellent brinl 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, ill tell you that. I want to resuscitate its centrality to the progressive era, because i think it sheds light on the pros and cons of progressive causes. Okay. Lets talk about economic and political progressivism. The two i want to talk about in particular, the two laws that i think excuse me, xem fi are the interstate commerce act and the sherman antitrust act a. These come out of the pop list movement. They reflect an antimonopoly tradition. And we havent talked a lot about anti monopolyism. It was one of the central concerns of the American People and touched on many of things ive mentioned to you. The idea that some people have an unfair advantage over others. The diminishing of the importance in of the individual, right . And the increasingly abstract nature of capitalism. Monopoly offend eed 19th centur 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 . So while we might say that was freedom of business or what have you, they saw monopoly not just in increasing combinations of American Business, but in a political power those folks had. Even in things like the trade. This campaign against what i call white slavery. Sex trafficking. The reformers, most of whom were public politicians a and women reformers, the reformers most active in this movement believed there was a vice monopoly. They saw a secretive kai that was organizing white slavery around the world. Whisking women unwilling across state lines for this International Sex syndicate. It was it was not as organized d as we thought, but i think its very, very telling that they, when they saw a problem, they feared monopoly, right . And thats where the kind of general ability in a nonpartisan way to address trusts come from. Now, trusts dont go away. And anybody who studies American Business now knows that its bigger than effort, but this effort to dismantle what people saw as unfair business combinations comes out of that anti monopoly tradition, okay. So the really really landmark example or piece of legislation is interstate commerce act which passes in 1887. Froms this koms out of many state attempts to eliminate railroads. Emily and i talked about it. You did a terrific job talking about plessy versus ferguson last week and we both wish we had more time to talk aboutful we feel like we had much more to say. In my section, this was not an accident that happened on railroad. In that case, it was a state law that plessy was challenging, but many states like, especially states like nebraska that have strong populous support tried to pass laws to regulate railroads and rates in their states and the Supreme Court overruled those laws. Overturned them saying railroads engage in commerce. They respond and passes the 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 and the interstate Commerce Commission becomes a model for this hybrid of executive and legislative and Judicial Branch in a commission. 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, right . This is an expansion of power we think is normal, but was really a turning point. Okay. It had many weaknesses. It couldnt proactively regulate. It relid on lawsuits to bring actions, so you had to have the where with all to bring a suit to the icc if you wanted to challenge something, which obviously favored big business over small. Railroad attorneys were the First Corporate attorneys in these cases, could tie up these cases for years, but even if the icc in its early years was weak, it create d this president for this dominant form of regulatory government. The independent appointed commission. I bet you can think of a whole bunch of independent appointed commissions. I wrote a book about one. You might have thought the 9 11 commission, right . Which is in some ways, the most cent and famous example of a precedent set by the icc. I went to a workshop and googled by great grandfathers name and 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 maul potatoes. They had an ora argument with t topeka santa fe railroad. They were junk dealers. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. They owned a company that sold second hand scrap iron and metal. Not titan of industry. They sue d the railroad over wht they thought was an unfair rate for used beer bottles. Holy cow. Any way. They went to the icc and said this railroad is charging us too much for these truckloads of used beer bottles that we bought and they won the case and got a refund of like 127 from the railroad for their multiple carloads of used beer bottles. I didnt know that when i started to talking to you guys about populism and the railroad, but i was like, whoa, the federal government is regulating these used beer bottles for a junk dealer in el paso, texas. Okay. So thats the precedent for the sherman antitrust act. Situation grows worse 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 proappripriations cant be denied. Life, liberty and property without due process of the law and this values many of those laws as i mentioned to you. It makes any quote restraint of trade r or commerce in interstate commerce illegal. Not unlike the ica, its enforced with fines and lawsuits, although these are suits that can brought by public district attorneys. Its used against clear monopolies and cartels. That is secret agreements that engage in rate fixing, so this is actually the kind of thing, although it was an icc matter because of the railroad, that a my great grandfather would have complained about. He would have said the southern pacific and toe pepeka acheson,y fix rates. You could call that a cartel or a secret agreement. Its not effective against holding companies. Theyre not supposed 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 . Kind of famous, right . He comes down in history as the trust buster during this presidency beginning in 1902. You probably also heard, this is at all old saw in u. S. History, he wasnt really all that antitrust. There were plenty of corporations that he liked. But he supported the sherman antitrust act as a good tool to attack bad trusts, right . So roosevelt had this idea of good trusts and bad and he used this tool and this is indicative 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 corporation that is 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 capitalist abuses. Classic example of reform, not revolution. In practice, antitrust laws could backfire at least from the standpoint of the people who had first championed them because just as the 14th amendment could protect corporations as person, 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 list minded farmers created so they could negotiate for better rates and better prices for their xhcommodities. Right . Well, that fs a trust, sometimes in the eyes of the law. Similarly, if a Labor Union Organized a boycott, the target of their boycott could go and argue that this is, that this was a violation of the Sherman Trust act, but again, this is reform, not revolution. Roosevelt wants to 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 farms. These r were deeply connected in peoples minds. Analogous to the ways progressives wanted to attain their power in increasedlyingly large and abstract democracy. So let me turn to some political reforms. So progressives champion a bunch of reforms that are deem 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. Heres an example with political reform that we see the very direct influence of the populists on the progressive era. Those who believe that farmers, 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 they really hated political machines. Someone take a stab at what a political machine is . Im sure you studied this in class. Collective. Basically powerful, usually men, and they kind of choose who they want to run the city and they do it through intimidation tactics through voting and what not. And the machine, note the analogy with the machine, right . Theyre literally called machines. People are really into machines in the late 19th century, right . Absolutely. So its this group of powerful basically rainmaker, kingpins, who offer a kind of quid pro quo for voters, who then become the cause in the machine. Right . Ill make sure that you get a free turkey on thanksgiving if you vote for my candidate. 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. And most famous was tammy hall in new york city. There were absolutely some republican political machines on a municipal level that depended on the city and the situation. This idea of a direct quid pro quo enraged them, right . Defenders said, actually, so this is one of the defenses of tammy hall. Actually, we take all these new immigrants, mid 19th century. Fresh off the boat. Theyve never had democracy. Never had a full belly. Theyve been in ancient european futilism. We show them what it mean to be americans. We get them jobs. To the ballots. Were teaching them about the american political system. Thats shenanigans, its not the goal of politics to have this direct quid pro quo. Were supposed to have Good Government. 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. Says instead of just filling the federal bureaucracy, which, by the way, in 1883, was quite small. Instead of filling it with a bunch of political hacks that you did a favor for them and youre going to get a job, they passed the Civil Service exam to show that they are objectively qualified. You can imagine these could be discriminatory in the same way you hear about s. A. T. S and racial and class discrimination. To pass a job that doesnt really quire that kind of knowledge. Many immigrants and working classes presented this process. Thats the federal investigation, which in fairness, is a reaction to the assassination of president James Garfield by a deranged office seeker. A guy seeking a job who was mentally ill and shoots him and this is one of the political response. Responses. On the municipal and state, the australian ballot, the secret ballot. Right . This is meant to curb political machine influence. Then if you vote secretly, if no one know what is your vote is, you dont really know owe the boss anything, right . In the era where you went to go vote in the sa loond there was one box for the democrats and one for the republicans, right, if your bos 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 war. The machine system was based on a coalition of powerful neighborhood award bosses, right . Many urban reformers campaigned for at large elections, so rather than like in washington, d. C. , we have eight wards. Right . And each of them have members of the city council. At large elections, 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 . What were some demographic realities of that as well . Whos from yeah. Who else . Say you have a city thats majority white. But three wards are predominantly immigrant. If you eliminate words, yes. Thats exactly right. So the idea was for example, ill use chicago as an example in the 18th century. A hive of machine politics. Its renowned for the corruption in City Government. In this time period, especially, but i will say this. Chicago city council had africanamerican alderman at the turn of the century. That would not have been the case with that. So that was the two sides o that story. At large elections vastly reduced immigrant participation. They switched back to or established war elections for the first time. Another example of taking power from the the people to make democracy more efficient, a lot of this happens on the municipal level. These are City Governments that have a city manager or Commission Style government. These are much more common in the midwest, south and west. Their City Governments are newer. They were born progress i. The quintessential example. Heres our trust guy. You knew i was going to do this out of order. The quintessential example is galveston, texas, in 1900. Devastating hurricane. Literally wiped out city council and mayor. Some said its sad, but also a great opportunity. We can try out this new opportunity of a Commission Government where we just have this commission a board of appointed commissioners that run the city. They eliminated africanamerican alderman by changing this political system. They appointed experts to run the commission, so main 1900, galveston creates the first Commission 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. A weak mayor system. Where they have limited powers and the daytoday functioning of the City Government is done by an, sorry, an appointed, paid city manager. The west wildfire a laboratory for these reforms. They were literally building these towns and states during this period. The west uses at large elections, part time mayor, commission and city manager models. My hometown, tempe, arizona, has a city manager. It was incorporated during the city era. I love this example because its a great civics low sesson. My High School Government teacher taught at my high school for a 35 years. He was an alum. Also the mayor. He talked to zero to fifth hour and skipped prep because he had a halftime job as mare because the city manager ran the city. His full time job was teaching High School Government then in the afternoons, he went to city hall and 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 could see how that could eliminate the power of war and politic. It cant organize around Party Elections and choosing primary nominees. It was that Good Government is Good Government. Shouldnt matter what party, so many of these towns had nonpartisan elections. He went on to become a member of congress. Its okay, mr. Smith goes to washington. One of the most popular and controversial political reforms was a set of methods to bring voting to the people. And that was a set of erats again, which predominated in the west and still do. The initiative referendum. Im sure we have people from california and maybe someone from colorado. Anyone want to take a stab at what the initial referendum and recall are . Yes. So, recalling is to the get the elected official out of office. Something is [ inaudible ] teachers would be so ploease. Thats exactly right. Im glad youre from colorado, which is an example of this model. The initiative is you run around and get ballots from x many v e voters. You get it on the next ballot. The public votes r for it, up or down. This is a classic democracy. He let the voters decide. They pitch it back to the people to give it a yay or nay. Same thing. Pretty direct. Right . We call election only some states have this. Right . Its the able toy recall an elected official. In rare cases, you can recall judges. Almost never happens. Recall is a way that the people have a way to discipline indirect 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 sedgery is in some cases the pop sit has happened. That these kinds of elections are are especially vulnerable to special interests and large campaigns that can sway the outcome, right . Did not turn out exactly as the reformers had promised. Okay, i want to present to you as i promised that i would, that the south, that that jim crow could 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 who valued Efficient Government over democratic government. Remember how they saw reconstruction. They saw it as corruption. Unprepared voters. New voters. Citizens of citizenry. They said lets remove those citizen frs the voting population. Right . In some ways, the ultimate expression of Good Government and inefficiency. If we make sure people are litera literate, right, that they pay their poll taxes so theyre responsible and upstanding, 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 and system. You couldnt get a more naked example of efficiency winning over dmemocracy. And at least in my class abed we talk briefly about how many poor white voters were disfranchised 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 be asmall elite, they did not view that as an accident. That was fine to eliminate poor white voters along with black voters in the jim crow era. To them, that was better efficiency and democracy. Okay, weve made it almost to the end and im going finish on time. I know. Hard to believe. Its a good thing its recorded for prposterity. Talking about the south is a good place to mention progressive reform prohibition. Prohibition was the national, really interNational Movement to eliminate alcohol has a part of peoples regular lives. Why, you might ask, did anyone want prohibition, much less get it ratify ied. Why did they want it . To go out to the saloons then their children and they spent all the familys money on alcohol and it was causing women a lot of problems so when you have to carry ill show you a clip of that next week. Thats true. It sounds like an exaggeration and spoof and it sounds like a parody and in fact, theres some wonderful early 20th century Motion Pictures that are indeed spoofs of this. Theyre very sexist, right . Also a little funny, of women tearing up saloons and men having to take care of babies because women had become political organizers and men sneaki ining drinks while they baby sitting their children, that th th alcoholism was a serious problem. People missed work because of it. They lost jobs. Spent their incomes on it. Dmoesic violence was rampant, often feeled by alcohol abuse. It was in a very real way, a kind of ant see cant to me too movements 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 . Frances willard, leader of the Christian Womens temperance unit of the wtcu, adopted advocacy for womens suffrage after getting involved in the prohibition movement, right . Because she saw it as a tool for social reform. Right . And well talk about this more, but theres two camps in the womens suffrage camp, right . The camp that date d all the wa to 1848 and the declaration of sentiments and Elizabeth Stanton and susan b. Anthonys early version, where they said b we should have the right to vote because we are equal, we are citizens and its our natural right. Right . There were women who practiced civil disobedience and tried to do vote. Im just going to go do it. That begins to evolve by the late 19th and 20th sencentury t women are special and more righteous and more morally pure. Fits in with progressive era reforms, saying well clean up government and make it more efficient because we are not corrupt. Right . And its folks who are advocating that and they say some nasty things well talk about on thursday. We need to make these necessary changes in society. Why her motto was do everything. For her and millions of other women who come to support the vote, and men, too, theres a reason why roosevelt endorses womens suffrage. They see a womens vote 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. Not talking about the 21st century. Weve talked about one major motivation. Whats another . Native born protestants, many dont allow drinking. Most dont drink or dont drink publicly, but they associate political corruption, deboccieri, 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. The first is that it was often targeted against immigrants. The second was 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 mentioned at the beginning of class, its indicative of the progressive era in general. And why i always say women belong in history, they are essential to understanding progressive era, so on thursday, we will turn to more details about immigration and a womens lives in the early 20th century. Thanks. Weeknights this month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight mark burns explores public opinion, the rise of radio and debate over entering world war ii. He outlines the arguments and using radio clips to demonstrate the role they played in shaping American News and foreign policy. Watch tonight at 8 00 eastern. Enjoy American History tv this week and every weekend on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this labor day weekend, saturday, at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war, historians kevin levine and hillary green, discuss how we remember the civil war and whether to remove or contextualize confederate monuments and sunday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern, well preview photos of native americans from the smithsonian, which includes more than a half million images. At 8 00 p. M. On the presidency, a look at president ial retreats including abraham lincolns summer cottage. Hoovers fishing camp and stories of the kennedies, clintons and obamas in Marthas Vineyard and monday night at 8 00, the 75 ath anniversary of the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki. E we lowe look back at the even is led to the bombings with ian tall and president trumans grandson. Exploring the american story. Watch American History tv this. On lectures in history, Davidson College professor Sally Mcmillen teaches a class about the polio epidemic in the United States. Beginning with a major outbreak in 1916 in brooklyn, new york, that killed more than 6,000 people. The professor examines efforts by Franklin Roosevelt to help find a crew by starting the march of dimes organization. In addition, she details the efforts that led to the 1955 announcement of a successful vaccine created bid dr. Jonah sulk. This history course looks at responses to disasters in American History w
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