Progressivism less and to think about what i think its core dialect guy dialectic was. The tension between democracy and efficiency. These were both ideals that people from a Broad Spectrum of political backgrounds and the progressive era believed were important, and they believed they were not incompatible but you can see in some ways in which they were fundamentally add some tension. Throughout class today, well be thinking about democracy versus efficiency. The central question for this historians of the early at 20 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 the progressive era existed but quibbleing about what counted as progressive severe them and who counted and when it started and when it ended. Some people limit only to the Political Party that it was named for. Others to find it much more broadly. 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 address the problems of the new century and what i think we can all agree, begins to look like modern america. Theyre interested in reforming a messy society that is new in fundamental ways while trying to keep some aspects of the old. Im defining the progressive era as lasting from approximately 1890 through world war one. Before i suggested you all today, i consulted with my colleague michael who many of you know is an expert on populism. He wrote a biography on William Jennings brian. He teaches socialism. He teaches this class as well. I asked him what he thought, make sure i got rid of any haulers in my lecture. Luckily there were none. 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 progressive area is always debatable beginning with an 1890 the sherman act and the beginning of chain adams remarkable settlement house in chicago which is called whole house which will talk about on thursday. And national and state politics there were no people considering progressive in power until 1900. If we will define it that way, we will push it up a little bit. If William Jennings brian had won that election in 19 1896 that wouldve been different. Of course, the chronological scope depends on what you think mattered most. It is worth noting, he also pointed out to me, that many populist became progressive and that is something im going to talk to you about. Some of you already recognize that already. Spoiler alert, we will 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 socialist and places that we do not 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 four way 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, 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 1 million votes. Everybody across that spectrum would have the find themselves in some sense as a progressive. Again, lets put some more fine notes on our definition a progressive him. 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 when we talk about federal level of progressivism, it turns into the discussion of wilson versus roosevelt. I want to tell you that it is really starting at the grassroots in cities and states and territories, moving upward to the federal level. It was a form of perfectionism, by which i mean, the belief that society could be perfected by using proper principles. In this sense, i think it is a mood as much as a method. There is 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 and society in politics. That is one in which you believe that things can be improved, and in that sense, as i will talk about through the rest of the lecture, there is some pessimism, worry and concern, that there is 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. Lets be honest. I wrote the first version of this lecture many many years ago. History changes, but not that fast. I gotta 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. What does he compare liberty to . You all suddenly got shy. Yes. An engine. A machine. This is perfect for all you matt, science, mechanical oriented people. This is the perfect metaphor. For the way that people think about government and politics in the early 20th century. The machine does not work well with friction. He wants to reduce the friction. The more efficient the machine is, the better. Liberty for the several parts will 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. His optimism, human freedom consists and perfect adjustments of Human Interest and activities and energies. The trouble lies when the machine gets out of order. In other words, he is saying that the governments job quite literally, is to get under the hood and tinker with the machine to get it right. Here we see from the cultural perspective, i love this document so much. We get back to machines, technology, railroads. It is not an accident that efficiency is a concept that becomes an enormously fascinating to people in the early 20th centuries. Efficiency in both its industrial and social components. Here are key words if you need to come back to them in class. I forgot to tell you. I did not start with this because he knew i was going to screw it up so i decided to just scratch that. We will come back to music. Let me move forward and tell you before i get into the leagues about what progressivism looks like in this time period. I want to give you a sense of an absolute incredible wide range of things reforms, causes that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. We have got Civil Service reforms. Cleaning up bureaucracy. Conservation movements which i know some of you are particularly interested in and we wont dally there today but certainly you are reading and it emphasizes the ways in which again, conservation as a kind of efficiency in fact is a famous way that many historians have written about the conservation movement. Clean milk campaigns. Making sure that children who drink milk, that their mom purchased from a dairy is clear and unadulterated. Womens suffrage. There is a reason why that where it is secure. They thought of women in a particular kind of way. We will talk about that on thursday. Public education, reinvigorated, since the reconstruction era particularly at the local level, the expansion of public kindergartens, the establishment of some 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 utility is either private and 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 this history. The fda originates and this time period under Theodore Roosevelt. The regulation of railroads which is actually a kind of opening salvo of the progressive era. Municipal ownership of utilities. I talk about that. Temperance, prohibition, the outlying of alcohol. Social work, the modern feed of social work now dominated by women. Anti prostitution and pornography campaigns in the form of what was called the white slavery movement, saving women from what we would call today, sex trafficking, so you can see a strong moral element and protective element to this campaign. The campaign for legal Birth Control which was a constant an act of the late 19th century discussing disseminating any information about Birth Control illegal. Election reforms which well talk about on the state level in just a few minutes. Okay, maybe i put these sort of i am making some judgments. Some of them im seeing as positives because i put at the bottom, but also, core scholes social control. Forced attempts to strip immigrants of their culture in the name of american is a shun. Voter disfranchised mint in the name of clean government. Segregation in the south as a sign of efficiency, prohibition and later, eugenics. I know i went through that really quickly. That is fine. No worries. We dont have to get out to all the details. But i do want to say, we are talking from clean milk to voter initiatives. Were talking from kindergarten to funding from kindergarten to a deeper a wide variety of things. And you can see in the examples ive noted here on the relationship between democracy and efficiency. Wilson talks about this in terms of liberty. That Liberty Works best in an efficient capacity. You can see in a random example of clean milk which was a campaign that many women were campaigning for. Companies adulterated milk with chemicals to make it seem like it would last longer and to keep it white. It poisoned children. Liberty would say we were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies. Efficiency would say, maybe our society would work better if children did not die from adulterated milk. So you can see, that is a one tiny example, but actually something that was very important to the people of the early 20th century. Why these two obsessions with democracy and efficiency . Could these be compatible . Where does it go . What i want to talk about is the way in which, and we can go back to this slide here. I want to talk about the way as we talk about progressivism as a National Movement. It comes to be known as this thing that is kind of a government by experts. It is a National Movement built from regional movements. What you have simplified, i like geography. Midwestern and northeastern urban concerns. The concerns about organization, overcrowding, immigration, industrialization. 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 world and agrarian concerns with populism. Populism may not seem so today as much to us now is where i think we generalize we are all america. A few of you are from more rural places. The mid western commodity culture was a very different kind of agrarian economy then the souths cotton based share cropping, vestiges of jim crow. They found enough common cause briefly in populism that did not last. But part of it was about this feeling of the world 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 populist. Particularly around issues like regulating interstate commerce, the railroads, starting to talk about conservation. In fact, after 1900, populism and progressivism basically merged as professor cases common suggested. Populist sexually become progressives except for those who stay more radical and join the socialist party. Intellectually, theyre inspired by gospel theories, a rather i dont want to say aggressive, but assertive campaign by many religious leaders predominantly protestant, that there were some reform jews in this movement as well, who said we need to realize that we cannot be just focus on the after life and the spiritual life. We actually have to think about life here on earth. We talk about what it means to think about jesus as work today here and now. Thats social gospel theory also informs this progressive work which will 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. Their first professional associations emerge in this time period. The first ph. D. Programs and social sciences are literally creating experts, open at places like johns hopkins, ivy leagues, schools like the university of wisconsin, yay. Michigan. University of california. Giant Public Research institutions alongside old prestige institutions and new upstarts like hopkins and university of chicago, which are designed to create these graduate programs like europe has. The idea is that they will produce not just pointy headed professors like me, but experts that are going to go out and solve social problems, financers, find the efficient answer. Woodrow wilson has a ph. D. From johns hopkins. He is the president of princeton be coat before he becomes the governor of new jersey and the president of the United States. What is bothering them and we will review this. I think you know what many of these things are. We can talk about a few of the 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 will step back and have you think about that. Think about a 19th century world where your neighbor might have chickens in her yard. Few cells eggs and you know her. Her eggs are not going to be rotten because she does not want to rip you off because you have the face to face relationship. Or you are a farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. You know that our parade are. You are not selling at a fixed rate across hundreds of miles on the Southern Pacific Railroad where you have to pay a certain rate and cannot go to negotiate or know who your seller is. We take for granted global capitalisms and personal nature, when you will get things from amazon prime. You are not thinking about who is pulling it off the warehouse shelf and putting it in a box and putting that label on and sending it to you. Like people are used to face to face transactions. This was threatening. It was a real change. They feared that the outsize power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The Runaway Railroad industry as i mentioned was just one example. The journalists were revealing devious methods Like Companies have standard oil, writing along exposes and popular magazines and this reflected both the real changes that are happening in american capitalism as well as the end sides that those produced in americans. Speaking of inciting in americans, fear of new americans, that is fear of new immigrants. Well talk about the son much more details 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 an unprecedented wave of new arrivals from about 1882 to 1920. 18 to 24 million new immigrants come to the United States and this exact same time period we are calling the progressive era. I did speak, they represent almost 15 of the American Population a figure we have never exceeded. We came very close and 2007 before the recession, but those are sort of parallels. Immigration is a hot issue right now. The numbers are way down from a decade ago. But in that sense, from the standpoint of the proportion of the American Population who are immigrants, similar. Different places. They are also often feared in the same way. They are predominantly catholic or eastern orthodox or jewish. They seem unassailable. They are very poor. They tend to congregate in urban places in a country that Still Believes itself to be a rural origin African Americans are starting to move in what will become the great migration. Migrating like ida b. Wells did from the urban south to the urban north. Close to 2 million African Americans room from the south to north between 1890s and 1910. Many Northern Lights are confronted with mixed population for the first time. The transitional from African Americans to urban life is difficult. They are predominantly rural people, not used to city life, facing segregation and the north as well as the south. Horrible overcrowded conditions. Pitiful public health. Lack of utilities like safe water, sewer and electric face many city residents. There is a little bit of a chicken and egg debate. Among more privileged americans. Are these new immigrants and African Americans from the south the cause of the poor conditions, or are the poor conditions thats producing the inequalities that are evident for all americans to see . This is really kind of an essential question in the progressive era, which eventually, in spite of all the prejudice, i would argue comes to what we could call, and it wont be what you think it is, environmentalism. What i mean by that is the belief that winds environment shapes their outcome. If you can i