Chapter 18
1.
Industrial Society and
Progressive Reform, 1900-1915
I.
Emergence of Modern Society
A. Early twentieth-century world
changing rapidly.
1.
Population migrations, urban growth, new technologies, corporate expansion.
2. Environment had
changed so quickly that people had trouble keeping up.
B. Progressive Movement originated
as response to rapid societal change.
1. Fundamental belief in
the possibility of change for the better.
2. Included a multitude
of meanings and contradictions.
3. By improving the
environment, people could counteract imposed limitations.
4. Change in individual
lives, as result of group pressure, or through government laws.
II. The Immigrant Experience
A. Wave of immigrants between 1900
and 1914 altered the fabric of American society.
-between
1900-1914, 13 million more people arrived bringing nation’s total to nearly 100 million.
1. Learning process was
a two-way street.
-story of
Ishi (1911 Native in California) serves as a microcosm of the immigrant
experience – transfer of knowledge, customs, etc.
2. Yet native-born
whites remained on top of social pyramid.
3. Government processing
centers provided first taste of U.S. society; often hostile.
-Ellis
Island near New York opened up in 1890; Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and
the San Antonio border crossing in Texas.
- 20
percent of European Immigrants were place in temporary confinement or turned
back.
4. Immigrants after 1880
were different from their predecessors.
a. Older
immigrants had come from northern and western Europe.
- in
particular, Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia
b. New
immigrants came from eastern, central, and southern Europe.
-spoke
little English, professed Roman Catholic, Jewish or Eastern Orthodox religions,
and came from peasant or rural backgrounds.
-some
fled persecution, some came as temporary or seasonal works, most were single
men, and as many as half returned home.
B. New immigrants formed their own
distinct ethnic communities.
1. Tended to settle in
cities, where job opportunities were better.
- by 1910
the majority of persons in 12 largest cities were immigrants or children of
immigrants.
-two
million newcomers in NYC (only 40 percent of city), in San Francisco, 75
percent of all residents spoke a primary language other than English.
-immigrant
settlement reflected occupational and environmental preferences: Slavic
immigrants from Poland took to mining and industrial areas of the Northwest and
Midwest; Italians preferred construction, seaboard fisherman or farm workers in
California grape fields; Greeks and French Canadians took to textile mills of
New England; Jewish tailors and retailers laboured in the garment industry in
New York.
2. Built cultural
institutions to protect and perpetuate community life.
-language,
food and cultural traditions
- a
variety of mutual aid societies emerged: Chinese six companies – reflecting the six regions where most had emigrated from;
Japanese “ken” groups,
which celebrated holidays and offered relief assistance; Jewish “landesman”
organizations, held picnics, made loans and paid for funerals; Italian “societas” – whose dues paying members received emergency aid.
3. Supported culturally
based entertainment forms.
-Italian
marionette performances; German music halls and flourishing Yiddish theatre
-competed
with native-produced stage entertainment, known as vaudeville, – musical programs, risque comedy, and melodrama. Vaudeville’s ethnic stereotypes and blackface parodies, enabled white
newcomers to identify with the dominant culture.
4. Almost constant
tension between cultural preservation and desire for assimilation.
5. Pressure for children
of immigrants to become "Americanized."
-settlement
house movement, inspired by Jane Adams and Florence Kelley (last lecture)
appealed to immigrant children to question the authority of their
less-assimilated parents in matters of food, sanitation, and health.
C. Asian immigrants in the Pacific
region faced a unique experience.
1. Encountered more
obstacles to assimilation but fewer identity conflicts.
2. Laws limiting Chinese
immigration worked remarkably well.
-by 1900,
Chinese American population reduced to 90,000, half of whom resided in
California
a. Absolute
numbers of resident Chinese fell between 1900 and 1920.
-71,000
in 1910 and 60,000 in 1920
-most
were men, married, wives could not come by US law
-in 1900,
just 5000 Chinese women in America
-California
law prohibited intermarriage with whites, but Chinese in NYC often married
white
b. Barred
from becoming naturalized citizens.
-the
great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed city’s municipal records, enabled some Chinese men to claim
naturalized citizenship, and sponsor the immigration of so-called paper sons
and women.
c. Settled
in very tight-knit communities.
-some on
farms, most in cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston.
3. Japanese immigration
immigration reflected the advantages of family migration and a strong home
country.
-in
Hawaii, Japanese worked on sugar plantations, were given “bangos” – metal identification disks with numbers to wear around
their necks, and thereafter called by impersonal numbers.
-after
Hawaiian annexation in 1898, Japanese migration to US picked up, US law prohibited
contract labour.
a.
Outnumbered Chinese by 1910.
-in
cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, Japanese merchants built a
small business economy called ‘little
Tokyo’.
b.
Gravitated toward agricultural work.
-coincided
with boom in California agriculture, with extensive water projects increased
fruit and vegetable production; they grew 70 percent of California’s strawberry crop.
c. Strong
sense of community provided mutual support.
-kinship
ties maintained, the immigrant generation, known as Issei, summoned picture
brides from Japan and proceeded to produce a second generation of Nisei.
-mutual
aid groups, led to networks which included, credit, insurance, and farm
cooperatives
4. Asian immigration
aroused vocal opposition.
a. Asiatic
Exclusion League sought to prevent further immigration.
b. San
Francisco School Board voted in 1906 to segregate Asian students.
-President
Theodore Roosevelt was a racist, in 1903 he warned about “race suicide”, he had
also won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the settlement of the
Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan was an emerging world power – segregation issue was settled by the president who convinced
school officials to limit it to Korean and Chinese students
-in 1908
an oddly named “Gentleman’s Agreement”
effectively ended Japanese immigration.
c.
California ultimately denied non-citizen Asians right to own land.
-since
congressional law blocked Asians from becoming naturalized citizens, the state
measure undercut the Japanese American agricultural economy.
-to
bypass the law Japanese parents brought property in their children’s name
-Cecil B.
DeMille’s silent film classic, The Cheat
(1915) depicts themes of racist hostility to Japanese Americans and interracial
sexuality as an excuse for lynching.
D. Mexican immigration in southwest
on rise in early decades of twentieth century.
-opposition
to Asians stimulated migration of an alternative labour force from Mexico, US
railroad expansion in last decades of 19th century brought the
Mexican economy into an international marketplace.
-by 1900
there were about 100,000 Mexicans in the US
-by 1910
doubled to 220,000 and doubled again in the decade following the Mexican
Revolution of 1910.
1. Worked mainly in
mining areas or on ranches; later on farms.
-southern
Arizona mines, ranches of south Texas
2. Border very porous;
easy to move back and forth.
-worked
as contract labourers in violation of both US and Mexican laws
-before
1908 US immigration officials did not even keep statistics on Mexican
immigration.
3. Public opposition
assuaged by high rate of return migrations to Mexico.
E. Immigrant presence generated
white Protestant concern about the national identity.
1. Assimilation, not
pluralism, was way to go.
2. Belief in immigrant
inferiority, though, made total assimilation impossible.
III. Maintaining the Color Line
A. Position of African Americans in
U.S. at turn of century not easy.
1. Idea of black
inferiority was accepted throughout nation.
2. Racial segregation in
south was fact of life.
-it was
where 80 percent of African Americans lived in 1910, politicians excluded
blacks from voting, established rigid race segregation, and required demeaning
social practices, such as insisting blacks use rear doors and only their first
names.
-in North
Carolina the court system mandated two bibles to segregate the swearing in of
witnesses.
3. Racism in north was
less overt, but still there.
-organized
sport, such as baseball had no black players, black jockeys lost their premiere
status, black heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson had to wait years for a title
fight.
B. Differences between North and
South precipitated a major split within African-American leadership over how to
improve situation.
1. Booker T. Washington
advocated patience and accommodation.
a. Won
support from northern philanthropists.
-was
invited by Teddy Roosevelt to dine at the White House in 1901 – which shocked white leaders
b. Emerged
as spokesman of the majority of blacks.
2. W. E. B. DuBois
called for complete equality without delay.
-his
manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he wrote “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color line.”
-he
rejected compromise, inferior manual training and second-class citizenship.
a. Broke
openly with Washington in 1905
b. Organized
Niagara Conference to push for equal treatment.
-with
Monroe Trotter – a Boston newspaper publisher
-meeting
was held on the Canadian side of the border because delegates could not obtain
hotel accommodation in Buffalo.
-Niagara
group issued a Declaration of Principles to disavow the impression that “the Negro American assents to inferiority.”
-countless
outrages against blacks continued:
black
troops at Brownsville Texas responded to racial harassment by shooting up the
town in 1906 and the president ordered blanket dishonourable discharges of the
entire battalion, including six Medal of Honour winners, without addressing
their guilt or innocence; Populists such as Tom Watson played on anti-black
feelings to win elections; 10,000 Atlanta Georgia whites went on a rampage; mob
beatings in Springfield Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s home
town, left numerous dead after allegations of a white women’s rape.
-blacks
responded:
C. National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) formed in 1910.
1. Aimed at middle-class
blacks, assimilated Jews, liberals of all stripes.
-established
a magazine, The Crisis
2. NAACP became the
dominant civil rights organization for next half-century.
IV. Social Change and the Progressive Spirit:
-concern
about the nation’s racial identity reflected deeper
anxieties about the immense changes occurring in urbanized industrial society.
A. Urbanization and immigration
forced a confrontation with problem of poverty.
-a
popular theme of utopian fiction at the turn of the century was the regulation
of overcrowded living conditions.
1. Settlement houses did
what they could, but they were not up to the task.
2. Individual action
alone could not solve the problems of an industrial society.
3. Government would have
to intervene to improve society.
4. Hence the emergence
of Progressive Reformers who believed they were acting in best interest of
society as a whole.
5. Overlooked class and
cultural biases of proposed reforms.
-instead
they emphasized the progressive values of efficiency, order, and social
control.
B. Cities were one of the first
targets of reformers.
1. Plagued by
overcrowding, poor sanitation, pollution, health problems.
-(nation’s urban population tripled between 1890-1920)
-diseases
like tuberculosis and typhoid thrived in cities like New York which pumped 500
million gallons of raw sewage daily; or Chicago, where pollutants contaminated
Lake Michigan.
-in 1900
whites life expectancy was 48 years, nonwhites only 33.
-New York
City reformers had a new tenement house law requiring toilets and windows in
every apartment, by 1916 first major zoning restrictions were enacted limiting
height and placement of tall buildings.
-sanitation
programs were initiated
-in St. Louis local women’s groups
led the fight for clean air and demanded stiff sentences and fines for
violators
2. Pure
Food and Drug Act (1906) marked first government regulation.
-By 1900
most American states had enacted food laws, but they were poorly enforced. The
effort to enact a federal law was led by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, head of the
Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture. Wiley enlisted the
support of the more responsible food producers and pharmaceutical
manufacturers, the American Medical Association, the General Federation of
Women's Clubs, and other consumer groups. He faced the entrenched opposition of
the politically powerful "Beef Trust," small producers of patent
medicines, and southern congressmen concerned with the constitutional validity
of the proposed law.
-The tide
was turned in Wiley's favor by a series of sensational articles by muckraking
journalists. Following the "embalmed beef" scandal of the
Spanish-American War in 1898 (this concerned the quality of food supplied to
U.S. troops), Charles Edward Russell produced a series of articles exposing the
greed and corruption of the Beef Trust. Samuel Hopkins Adams demonstrated that
patent medicines were often pernicious compounds of alcohol and other
drugs. Then, in January 1906, Upton
Sinclair published his best-selling novel The
Jungle, replete with hair-raising descriptions of the manner in
which meat products were prepared in the Chicago stockyards.
-Upton
Sinclair's novel The Jungle tells
the epic tragedy of a Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and a group of his
friends and relatives. Penniless and unable to speak English, they are
mercilessly exploited by employers, foremen, police, political bosses, and
others with access to power in Packingtown. Women are forced into prostitution;
older men, unable to work, are left to starve. Jurgis loses his wife in
childbirth, and his infant son drowns in a pool of stinking water outside their
shack.
The impact of The Jungle was probably decisive. The novel
included gruesome descriptions of food production: tubercular beef, the
grinding up of poisoned rats, and even workers falling into vats and emerging
as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard.
The irony was that Sinclair included the horrific details on
meat production only in order to bolster his main theme, the exploitation of
immigrant labor and the need for socialism. As he later wrote: "I aimed at
the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach."
Amid a storm of public indignation, a Pure Food and Drug Act
was passed on June 30, 1906. The act forbade foreign and interstate commerce in
adulterated or fraudulently labeled food and drugs. Products could now be
seized and condemned, and offending persons could be fined and jailed. The
first of a series of consumer protection laws passed in the twentieth century,
the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a triumph of progressive reform/ critics
of course saw it only as the beginning of a new regulatory regime and felt it
did not go far enough.
3. New
"commission" form of government first appeared in 1900.
-it
occurred in Galveston Texas, as a consequence of disastrous floods
-henceforth
“commission”
government adopted corporate structures, whereby elected city Commissioners
rather than local alderman administered municipal operations, it broke
traditional patronage, installed “experts”.
4. Movement against
corruption in government as embodied in political
machines: ballot boxes moved from
saloons to libraries, and non-partisan offices were established with residency
requirements for voting.
5. Seventeenth Amendment
mandated direct election of senators in 1913.
-proposal
was barely heard when populists first presented it in 1890
-when
vacancies occurred, States mandated writs of election to fill such vacancies.
6. Initiative,
referendum, recall provided for "direct democracy."
-In
Oregon – first enacted the “initiative” whereby
citizens could propose laws and have them placed on statewide ballots for voter
approval.
-“referendum” allowed
public to repeal state legislation approved by elected representatives
- the “recall” – enabled voters to remove elected representatives from office.
7. Improved efficiency
and honesty, but had costs for city residents as well.
C. Some Progressive reforms amounted
to social control.
1. Reformers assumed the
superiority of middle-class values.
-their
emphasis on creating efficient government sometimes came at the cost of
weakening the power of immigrant and worker communities.
-the
introduction of citywide elections, aimed at eliminating “neighbourhood bosses” – Daniel Defoe Lewis – depersonalized
the political process, reduced voter participation, undermined informal loyalty
to ethnic, familial and neighbourhood ties.
2. Believed that
education could instill these values in children.
-compulsory
education brought higher enrollments and tripled the percentage of high school
graduates between 1900-1920.
3. Gave women reformers
a special chance to become involved.
-some
believed that women had a special expertise on matters related to children.
a.
Establishment of Children's Bureau with Department of Commerce and Labor in
1912 – first federal agency headed by a
woman – Julia Lathrop.
b. Worked to
regulate or eliminate child labor.
c. Juvenile
justice reform to keep young offenders out of adult prisons.
4. Structured playground
recreation often turned children off.
-The
Playground Association of America, founded by community and business leaders in
1906, lobbied for small parks, pools, fields – positive
and negative influence
5. Adults too, remained
vulnerable to “appeals for disciplined social
behaviour”:
Community efforts to curb public drinking and enact Sunday
"blue" laws.
-
Coca-Cola had small amounts of cocaine until 1903, many other over-the-counter
patent medicines and soft drinks contained morphine, cocaine and opium.
6. Harrison Narcotics
Act (1914) established rules for controlled drug use.
-henceforth
access to addictive drugs (some) was curbed, and limited to medical purposes
and required a prescription signed by a physician.
-How had
it come about?
– With the
annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, many of the
colonial administrators of the Philippines were appalled at the high rate of
opium smoking among the population, and since many of these same administrators
were religious leaders their opinion was strongly in favor of eradication of
this practice on moral grounds. In England, too, there was a movement to
eliminate the Sino-Indian opium trade that had served to support the budget of
the British colonial administration of India, but which also enslaved millions
of Chinese with opium addiction.
-The
Reverend Charles Brent, an Episcopalian Bishop assigned to the Philippines, was
instrumental in bringing the opium problem to heel in that colony. Brent held
considerable influence in the Roosevelt and Taft administrations and convinced
the State Department to call for international conferences dedicated to the
eradication of worldwide drug traffic. The man who headed the State Department’s efforts was Dr. Hamilton Wright, who understood that if
the United States was to have credibility in international efforts to stem drug
traffic, it would have to lead by example. Wright enlisted the help of
Representative Francis Burton Harrison to introduce legislation to control the
prescription, sale and possession of drugs such as opium, morphine, heroin and
cocaine within the United States.
-Some
critics have argued that to Wright, the passage of this legislation was
important not so much for its value in solving a growing public health problem
but in making the United States look good at the international conferences and
that this was the beginning of a long history of the passage of narcotic
control legislation more in the service of political expediency than for
legitimate public health reasons.
- Trade
organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American
Pharmaceutical Association, were concerned about the infringement of the
federal government into the practice of doctors and pharmacists. Manufacturers
of patent medications were concerned about loss of sales and profits. The
Treasury Department, which would be responsible for promulgating the Act, questioned
its enforceability. Many legislators were of the opinion that a federal law
overseeing what was usually considered a matter for state governments would
eventually be ruled unconstitutional.
-Many of
these concerns were subordinated to the growing fear of widespread drug
addiction, especially among minority groups. Hamilton Wright embarked on a
crusade to convince professional organizations, law enforcement bodies and
legislators that restriction of prescribing, sales and possession of drugs was imperative.
Much of the debate centered on racial issues. Cocaine was believed to make the
Southern Black male impervious to bullets, and to generally encourage rebellion
against laws designed to restrict the rights of African Americans. Opium was
believed to be used by Chinese men to seduce women into white slavery.
Marijuana was believed to make Mexican migrants bold enough to challenge
oppressive working conditions. Every attempt was made to link drugs to specific
minority groups. By race-baiting, popular support for narcotic legislation
grew.
-The
Harrison Act was passed in 1914. Originally, it was meant to be a registration
law: doctors, pharmacists and vendors would submit paperwork on all drug
transactions. But the Treasury Department quickly used violations of the law to
shut down legitimate practices as well as dope clinics and illicit drug stores.
The Harrison Act contained no specific wording about the prescription of
narcotics by doctors in the treatment of drug addiction. The Treasury
Department assumed that any prescription for a narcotic given to a drug addict
by a physician or pharmacist – even in
the course of medical treatment for addiction - constituted conspiracy to
violate the Harrison Act. Restricting the practice of medicine was not the
original intent of the Harrison Act, but following two 5-4 Supreme Court
decisions (U.S. vs. Jin Fuey Moy, 1916 and U.S. v. Doremus, 1919) the court
held that the federal government could assume that a physician’s prescription of a narcotic for the comfort or maintenance
of an addict was a violation of the “good
faith” practice of medicine, and therefore a
criminal violation. Thousands of arrests were made – of physicians, pharmacists and addicts. Consequently an
early war on drugs had begun.
7.
Increased push for alcohol restrictions; some areas chose to go
"dry."
8. Concerns about moral
depravity in nickelodeons and in the movies they showed.
D. Middle-class women experienced
greater opportunities for public involvement.
1. Declining family
sizes gave women more free time outside the home.
2. At home, they
approached their work as "domestic science."
-by 1916,
18,000 women had enrolled in home-economics programs at nearly 200 colleges.
3. Vast array of
cookbooks, how-to manuals, and housekeeping guides appeared.
-viewing
food purely as nutrition rather than flavor, one writer maintained in 1901 that
“the test of good food is to have no reminder of it after eating.”
4. Some women still
pushed for suffrage.
a. Three
western states had granted women the vote by 1912.
b. Growing
membership in National American Woman Suffrage Association NAWSA) passed 75,000
after 1910.
c. Massive
demonstration on eve of Woodrow Wilson's 1913 inauguration.
-this
disruptive affair divided the suffrage movement into fractions, magnifying the
frustrations of failure.
E. Public behavior seemed to suggest
a loosening of sexual propriety.
1. Working women
allowing men to treat them on dates; altered tradition.
2. Urban prostitution
raised concerns about the hazards of city life.
-attempts
to curtail it led to the passage of the Mann Act (1910), Mann, James
Robert, 1856–1922, American legislator, b. McLean
co., Ill. A Chicago lawyer, he held many local offices before serving (1897–1922) as a Republican member of the U.S. House of
Representatives. He was one of the sponsors of the Mann-Elkins Act in (1910)
which strengthened railroad-rate regulation,
author of the Mann Act, also introduced the Pure Food and Drugs Act of
1906 and led the fight for an amendment to the Constitution granting suffrage
to women.
The Mann Act (1910) which prohibited
the transportation of a women across state lines for immoral purposes:
“Whoever knowingly transports any individual in interstate or foreign commerce, or in any Territory or Possession of the United States, with intent that such individual engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both”
". . .In 1917 the provisions of the law [The Mann Act
of 1910] were further (extended by the decision in the Caminetti v. United
States) to include even non-commercial sex. . . The result of such decisions
was to change a law that had been designed to prevent white slavery to one
designed to enforce morals, even declaring private amorous pleasure trips that
crossed state lines to be illegal.
. . . The tendency of the U.S. Supreme Court for a time to
include all sexual activity under the categories prohibited by the Mann Act
undoubtedly reflected what was taking place in the United States. What had been
intended to be an abolition movement had become a prohibition movement, far
from the original intent of Mrs. {Josephine} Butler and her co-workers. The
United States advanced further toward prohibition than any other country. The
attack on illicit sex coincided with the movement to ban alcoholic beverages.
. . .Even fornication was made a crime in many states. In
1920, for example, some twenty states regarded habitual fornication a
punishable act, and in sixteen states a single act was enough to bring
conviction. Such widespread legal measures against all aspects of sexual
activity, however, made enforcement impossible. Most juries proved unwilling to
convict for illegal fornication; moreover, the Supreme Court soon recognized
that prostitutes had the same rights as other citizens and could be charged
with or convicted of only a specific offense. Thus, simply police suspicion
that a woman was a prostitute was not enough to have her arrested. Similarly,
attempts of municipalities to enact ordinances that prohibited men from talking
to suspected prostitutes on streets or sidewalks, or that states they could not
walk along the sidewalk with prostitutes have been ruled unconstitutional. As
far as individual prostitutes were concerned, this meant that conviction could
only come through the activities of vice officers who had to encourage a woman
to solicit them to engage in sexual intercourse.”
– The most famous Mann Act case was
boxer Jack Johnson, first African heavyweight champion whose public liaisons
with white women offended authorities. Indicted in 1913, he left the country
and held his fights abroad. He eventually served a one year sentence.
3. Efforts to spread
information about birth control were met with opposition.
-when the
Ladies Home Journal ran an article on diseases, 75,000 readers cancelled
their subscriptions.
F. Great public outcry over modern dance,
music, and art.
1. Reformers decried new
forms of artistic expression as animalistic.
-sexual
liberation alarmed Christian moralists and enthusiasm for modern music, dance
and art brought warnings of anarchy. — ragtime
dances such as Bullfrog Hop, Monkey Grind, Bunny Hug– implied sexually charged animalism.
-modern
poetry broke from conventional meters and rhymes – Ezra
Pund, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell experimented with new idioms
– a new movement of realist painters
appeared in the works of John Sloan and George Bellows whom critics denounced
as the “Ashcan School” — they
presented new untarnished images of industrial society.
– Most shocking was abstract paintings
from Europe at New York City’s Armory
Show in 1913
– Canvases by Pablo Picasso, Henri
Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp “forced
spectators to confront “the
inherent irrationality of human perspective and the multiple meanings of social
reality.”
-modernism dawned, between civilized
order and natural wilderness
2. Some also tried to
get "back to nature."
3. Backpedaling from
earlier efforts at Native American assimilation.
