In what ways did progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses?

� T h e P r o g r e s s i v e E r a 1 9 0 0 – 1 9 1 6

18

F O C U S Q U E S T I O N S • Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

• How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century meanings of American freedom?

• In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic impulses?

• How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?

It was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fi re broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three fl oors of a ten-story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’ blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owners’ way, it was later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fi re department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only to the sixth fl oor. As the fi re raged, onlookers watched in horror as girls leapt from the upper stories. By the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was typical of manufacturing in the nation’s largest city, a beehive of industrial production in small, crowded

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682 Ch . 18 : THE PROGRESS IVE ERA

factories. New York was home to 30,000 manufacturing establish- ments with more than 600,000 employees—more industrial workers than in the entire state of Massachusetts. Triangle had already played a key role in the era’s labor history. When 200 of its work- ers tried to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by fi ring them. This incident helped to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909—the Uprising of the 20,000. Among the strikers’ demands was better safety in clothing factories. The impover- ished immigrants forged an alliance with middle- and upper-class female supporters, including mem- bers of the Women’s Trade Union League, which had been founded in 1903 to help bring women workers into unions. Alva Belmont, the

ex-wife of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, contributed several of her cars to a parade in support of the striking workers. By the time the walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more than 300 fi rms. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them.

The Triangle fi re was not the worst fi re disaster in American history (seven years earlier, over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York Harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. More than twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would refer to it in a press conference as an example of why the government needed to regulate industry. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory inspection laws and fi re safety codes.

Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during the fi rst two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era. These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded rapidly—by 1920, for the

City of Ambition, 1910, by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, captures the stark beauty of New York City’s new skyscrapers. Photo © 2013 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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683

fi rst time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in combating social inequality. The fi re and its aftermath also highlighted how traditional gender roles were changing as women took on new responsibili- ties in the workplace and in the making of public policy.

The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defi ned political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about signifi cant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organiza- tions who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business.

Everywhere in early-twentieth-century America the signs of economic and political consolidation were apparent—in the power of a small director- ate of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives, the manipulation of democracy by corrupt political machines, and the rise of new systems of managerial control in workplaces. In these circumstances, wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book The Progressive Movement, “the individual could not hope to compete. . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.”

As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reformers responded to the perception of declining freedom in varied, contradic- tory ways. The era saw the expansion of political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman suffrage, the use of political power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary citizens more infl uence on legislation. It witnessed the fl owering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfi llment and personal self-determination—the ability to participate fully in the ever-expanding consumer marketplace and, especially for women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered the province of men. At the same time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those deemed fi t to exercise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the 1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political decision

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making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate. Even as the idea of freedom expanded, freedom’s boundaries contracted in Progressive America.

AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY

FARMS AND CITIES

he Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the con- tinued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices recovered from their low point during the depression of

the 1890s, American agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 mil- lion claims for free government land were fi led under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the previous forty years combined. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 mil- lion people, and Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed the Imperial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming.

But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new mass-consumer society. Throughout the industrialized world, the number of great cities multiplied. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhat- tan Island were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty- three of the states. Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighborhood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India.

The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s fi nancial fi rm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all fi nancial and industrial capital in the United States. Alongside such wealth, reported the Commission on Industrial Relations, established by Congress in 1912, more than one-third of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers lived in “actual poverty.”

cT

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685Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

The city captured the imagination of artists, writers, and reformers. The glories of the American landscape had been the focal point of nineteenth- century painters (exemplifi ed by the Hudson River school, which produced canvases celebrating the wonders of nature). The city and its daily life now became their preoccupation. Painters like George W. Bellows and John Sloan and photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen captured the electric lights, crowded bars and theaters, and soaring skyscrapers of the urban landscape. With its youthful, exuberant energies, the city seemed an expression of modernity itself.

THE MUCKRAKERS

Others saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fi fteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality. A new generation of journal- ists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens (published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901–1902 and in book form in 1904) showed how party bosses and business leaders profi ted from political corruption. McClure’s also hired Ida Tarbell to expose the arrogance and economic machinations of John D. Rock- efeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in two volumes in 1904, her History of the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what Theodore Roo- sevelt disparaged as “muckraking”—the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.

Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Theo- dore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a young woman’s moral corruption in Chi- cago’s harsh urban environment. Perhaps the era’s most infl uential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose descrip- tion of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public

A photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers, of a young spinner in a southern cotton factory.

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outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

IMMIGRATION AS A

GLOBAL PROCESS

If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cit- ies, it was their immigrant character. The “new immi- gration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 mil- lion immigrants came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agricul- ture. Poles emigrated not only to Pittsburgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Ital- ians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States. As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year.

During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be virtually cut off, fi rst by the outbreak of World War I and

C H R O NO LO G Y

1889 Hull House founded

1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics

1901 Socialist Party founded in United States

President McKinley assassi- nated

1902 President Theodore Roosevelt assists in coal strike

1903 Women’s Trade Union League founded

Ford Motor Company estab- lished

1904 Northern Securities dissolved

1905 Industrial Workers of the World established

1906 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Meat Inspection Act

Pure Food and Drug Act

Hepburn Act

1908 Muller v. Oregon

1909 Uprising of the 20,000

1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire

Society of American Indians founded

1912 Children’s Bureau established

Theodore Roosevelt organizes the Progressive Party

1913 Sixteenth Amendment

Seventeenth Amendment

Federal Reserve established

1914 Ludlow Massacre

Federal Trade Commission established

Clayton Act

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687Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

then by legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. This population fl ow formed one part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world, much of which took place in Asia. Millions of persons migrated to Southeast Asia and the South Pacifi c, mainly from India and China. Millions more moved from Rus- sia and northern Asia to Manchuria, Siberia, and Central Asia.

Numerous causes inspired this massive uprooting of population. Rural southern and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining econo- mies. Political turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration. Not all of these immigrants could be classifi ed as “free laborers,” however. Large numbers of Chinese, Mexican, and Italian migrants, including many who came to the United States, were bound to long-term labor contracts. These contracts were signed with labor agents, who then provided the workers to American employers. But all the areas attracting immigrants were frontiers of one kind or another—agricultural, mining, or industrial—with expanding job opportunities.

Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to an immigrant who passed through Ellis Island. The less fortunate, who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes, or in other ways undesirable, were sent home.

At the same time, an infl ux of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fi elds and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown to 72,000. Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia.

Far larger was Mexican immigration. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that country’s population) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European countries. Many Mexicans entered through El Paso, Texas, the main south- ern gateway into the United States. Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino migrant workers.

By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country’s history. More than 40 percent of New York City’s population had been born abroad. In Chicago and smaller industrial

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cities like Providence, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the fi gure exceeded 30 percent. Although many newcomers moved west to take part in the expansion of farming, most clustered in industrial centers. By 1910, nearly three-fi fths of the workers in the twenty leading manufacturing and mining industries were foreign-born.

THE IMMIGRANT QUEST FOR FREEDOM

Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law, could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated from the oppressive social hierar- chies of their homelands. “America is a free country,” one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale immigra- tion reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom

An illustration in the 1912 publication The New Immigration depicts the various “types” entering the United States.

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689Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

and prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Freedom, they added, was largely an economic ambi- tion—a desire to escape from “hope- less poverty” and achieve a standard of living impossible at home. While some of the new immigrants, espe- cially Jews fl eeing religious persecu- tion in the Russian empire, thought of themselves as permanent emigrants, the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land. Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only tempo- rarily in the United States. In 1908, a year of economic downturn in the United States, more Italians left the country than entered.

The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops, theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues. As early as 1900, more than 1,000 foreign-language newspapers were published in the United States. Churches were pillars of these immigrant communities. In New York’s East Harlem, even anti-clerical Italian immigrants, who resented the close alliance in Italy between the Catholic Church and the oppressive state, participated eagerly in the annual festival of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel. After Italian-Americans scat- tered to the suburbs, they continued to return each year to reenact the festival.

Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impover- ished regions from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, while native-born workers dominated skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”

CONSUMER FREEDOM

Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new meaning to American freedom. There was, of course, nothing unusual in the idea that the promise of American life lay, in part, in the

Table 18.1 I M M I G R A N T S A N D

T H E I R C H I L D R E N A S

P E R C E N TA G E O F P O P U L AT I O N ,

T E N M A J O R C I T I E S , 19 2 0

City Percentage

New York City 76%

Cleveland 72

Boston 72

Chicago 71

Detroit 65

San Francisco 64

Minneapolis 63

Pittsburgh 59

Seattle 55

Los Angeles 45

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enjoyment by the masses of citizens of goods available in other countries only to the well-to-do. Not until the Progressive era, however, did the advent of large downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mail-order houses for farmers and small-town residents make available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players. Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy, which would not fully come into its own until after World War II. But it was in Progressive America that the promise of mass consumption became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism.

Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption. Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the cen- tury was vaudeville, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into vaudeville shows. As the movies became longer and involved more sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly working-class urban residents, were attending “nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose fi ve-cent admis- sion charge was far lower than at vaudeville shows.

THE WORKING WOMAN

The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fi re revealed, more and more women were working for wages. Black women still worked primarily as domestics or in southern cotton fi elds. Immigrant women were largely confi ned to low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enor- mously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were offi ce workers or telephone operators, and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job category of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confi ned to young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands.

The working woman—immigrant and native, working-class and professional—became a symbol of female emancipation. Women faced special

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691Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abraham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New York.

The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her infl uential book Women and Eco- nomics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not fulfi llment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite, little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of the word.

The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. Contempo- raries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fash- ion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as old-fashioned and not suffi ciently “American.” Immi- grant parents found it very diffi cult to adapt to what one Mexican mother called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls with freedom, they want it too.”

THE RISE OF FORDISM

If any individual exemplifi ed the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing fi rms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models

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like the Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsman- ship, Ford concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.

In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of fi ve dollars per day (more than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing as the wages, however: assembly-line work was monotonous (the worker repeated the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detectives to prevent unionization. When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profi ts by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well

The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around 1915.

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693Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?

within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism.

THE PROMISE OF ABUNDANCE

As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equipment, etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty as a sales device. The department-store magnate Edward Filene called consumerism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to defi ne the “American way of life,” in which personal fulfi llment was to be found through acquiring material goods.

The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fi ght for higher wages.