CHAPTER 1- THE GILDED AGE (WILL COVER UNITS 1-3)
This information is meant to be a help for students who missed the in class lecture. While it contains a summary of what was covered it is not a substitute for being in class and being able to experience class discussions and teacher explanation. It is a summary of the information and students should review the PowerPoint, any videos offered in Canvas for study, and complete any assignments that are offered in Canvas in order to catch up with the course.
1A. THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD
In 1862, the United States Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Acts, a group of laws that would promote the building of a cross-country railroad system. After calling it the Pacific Railroad for a time, this rail system was later dubbed the First Transcontinental Railroad. The acts were officially signed into law in July of that year by President Abraham Lincoln.
Construction of the Transcontinental Railroad was overseen by two main companies: the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific. The objective for both companies was to start building on opposite ends of the planned railway route and eventually meet in the middle.
The Central Pacific Railroad Company was founded in 1861 by then-governor of California Leland Stanford and three others. Stanford was named president of the company, a title he held until 1893.
Workers for the Central Pacific began construction in Sacramento, California in 1863 and would build going east. Thousands of workers were needed to the massive undertaking.
During this time, the United States saw an influx, or an arrival in large numbers, of Chinese immigrants - specifically men who wanted to work to support their families. The company wound up hiring over 15,000 Chinese immigrants to work on the Transcontinental Railroad.
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All of the laborers faced the same hardships while engaging in the back-breaking work: massive mountains they had to dig through or around, deep ravines, and white-out blizzards that struck as the construction went on.
On the other side of the country, there was the Union Pacific company. Its task was to begin at the Missouri River in Omaha, Nebraska, and work westward. Thomas Durant was named Vice President of the Union Pacific Railroad and oversaw the project.
Although their counterparts in Sacramento began in 1863, the Union Pacific was delayed until after the Civil War ended. Their construction work on the railroad finally started in Omaha in 1865.
The majority of workers for the Union Pacific company were Irish immigrants. Many of the laborers were Civil War veterans and as well as some African American laborers.
The Union Pacific had to grapple with raids by Lakota and Cheyenne tribes, who were angry that the railroad was being built on their lands. There were also train robbers and thieves in these lawless, unpopulated areas.
To help protect workers, the railroad partnered with the Pawnee Nation to provide scouts that surrounded the workers as they laid track.
Finally, after years of grueling labor, the two sides met on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Utah.
The full path of the Transcontinental Railroad, once complete, eventually measured about 1,907 miles long and cut through Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. The Central Pacific constructed 690 miles of track while 1,085 miles were laid down by the Union Pacific.
It also connected to America's existing east coast rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, right on the Missouri River.
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1B. THE EXODUSTERS AND THE HOMESTEAD ACT
The Homestead Acts were first passed in 1862 and provided any person up to 160 acres of public land essentially for free. The requirements were that they live on it, improve it, and pay a small registration fee.
In all, more than 160 million acres of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders. Most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.
One famous homesteader was Pap Singleton. He was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1809, but escaped along the Underground Railroad in 1846. He returned to Tennessee after the Civil War and later took advantage of the Homestead Act to bring thousands of Black families to Kansas.
After Reconstruction ended with the Election of 1876, violence and discrimination toward Black people became entrenched in the South. Pap Singleton realized that African Americans could not achieve economic equality in the South.
Singleton recruited a group of Black settlers and searched for government land which his settlers could acquire through the Homestead Act. He found available land on what had been the Kaw Indian Reservation near the town of Dunlap, Kansas. In 1879, they officially established the Dunlap Colony and made the colony a success. He eventually recruited over 8,000 “Exodusters” to found settlements in Kansas.
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These migrants called themselves Exodusters, a name which took inspiration from the biblical Exodus, during which Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. The Exodusters settled primarily in Kansas but also in Colorado and Oklahoma. Kansas was heavily promoted by Singleton and also had a history connecting to John Brown, who many Black people looked up to for his work to help end slavery.
The most successful of the Exodusters were those who moved to urban centers like Topeka, Kansas and found work as domestic or trade workers. However, many others became farmers in the Kansas prairies.
Exodusters established many Black Townships in Kansas and other states. Nicodemus, Kansas is the most well-known, and successful planned community devoted to Black settlement. It was founded in 1877 and attracted many formerly enslaved people from Kentucky.
The harsh living conditions were difficult to adjust to, but after a short time the settlement grew to include a school, two newspapers, three general stores, at least three churches, a few small hotels, literary society, ice cream parlor, a bank, and a population of around 600 people.
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1C. INVENTIONS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Gilded Age was a time of rapid growth and change for the United States. From 1870 to 1910, new inventions changed the way people communicated and traveled all across the world. Factories, railroads, coal mining and steel production all became essential industries in the country. Some of the most important inventions ever created were brought to life during this period.
In 1876, an American inventor born in Scotland by the name of Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and co-founded the company AT&T. This made it possible for people to communicate much more effectively.
In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, allowing the recording of music and voices and aiding those with hearing impairments. The next year, he invented an improved lightbulb, which was essential for nighttime activities and increased safety as a less dangerous light source.
The Kodak camera was invented in 1888 by George Eastman. This was the first portable camera that could be used by the general public.
Inventions were not just technical innovations. Before the Gilded Age era, Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox in England in 1796. This disease had ravaged populations for centuries. However, Jenner's vaccine was successful in preventing people from catching the deadly disease of smallpox. By the industrial era, his vaccine was in use in America and protected millions.
Later, a French scientist named Louis Pasteur developed Germ Theory in the 1860s. His experiments showed that bacteria and germs caused disease and food to spoil. He is also known for inventing a technique to stop bacterial contamination of milk, a process now called pasteurization.
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At the start of the 20th century, inventions helped bring the world closer together. In 1901, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi developed the first long-distance wireless telegraph and transatlantic radio signal. This allowed ships on the ocean to communicate with land and led to the radio.
Just 2 years later Wilbur and Orville Wright invented and flew the first motor-operated airplane after many failed attempts. This drastically changed the landscape of travel. The airplane would become an essential part of war technology and everyday life.
Following the changing scenery of the sky, In 1908, the Model T was invented by Henry Ford, who was the co-founder of Ford Motor Company. The Model T was the earliest version of a car that could be purchased by the public. He developed an assembly line to modernize how factories operated by reducing costs of production with standardized parts and more efficient assembly.
The Gilded Age transformed the United States into a world leader in technology. During this time, inventions were produced at ten times the rate of the previous 70 years. Railroads, factories and other industries boomed and people were able to communicate in new and advanced ways. An important takeaway from this era is that people were able to connect with one another in ways they never could before through photographs, travel methods, and phone calls. This was all thanks to the many inventions that were given to us during this time.
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1D. THE AMERICAN MELTING POT
After the passage of the Homestead Acts and the end of the Civil War, the United States experienced an influx of around 12 million immigrants from various countries around the world.
Many of them moved to America with the dream of making a better life for themselves, either by finding a job or to escape religious and economic struggles that they might have been facing in their home country.
Once on US soil, however, immigrants were not welcomed with open arms. They were largely expected to join the Melting Pot, a term for various ethnic groups losing their culture and assimilating into American culture. Imagine taking many different colors of crayons and melting them together. The end result would be one color once the crayons melded together. In the same way, the U.S. was considered a place where cultures and ethnicities would “melt together” and become one.
The immigrants who arrived in America during the Gilded Age were known as New Immigrants. They mostly came from Southern or Eastern Europe, including Italy, Poland, Russia, and the Balkans. Until they were excluded by law, immigrants from China and Japan also arrived in large numbers as part of this wave of immigration.
The New Immigrants were primarily Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish. More of them were illiterate, meaning they could not read nor write, and were unskilled workers. Due to the fact that many of them did not speak English and did not come over with much money, they faced hostilities from many in America.
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They were called New Immigrants to distinguish them from the Old Immigrants. These were the people who came to America before the Civil War. They came primarily from Northern and Western European countries such as England, Germany, and Ireland.
Old Immigrants usually belonged to the Protestant faith, were more likely to be literate (meaning they could read and write), and had skilled jobs. The majority of them came as families and had some money to their names. The Old Immigrants assimilated, or fit in, much more easily than later immigrants due to the fact that they either spoke English or because they were considered "white".
Many of these Old Immigrants began to support nativism during the Gilded Age. These Nativists were staunchly anti-immigration. They often traced their American ancestry back to one the original British American Colonies.
Their strong feelings about immigration and the desire to preserve a what they believed was the "true American identity" led to the formation of the American Party. This became popularly known as the Know Nothing Party because members were instructed to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about it.
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Members of the Know Nothing Party sought to protect the rights of what they called “native-born Americans”, which ironically did not refer to American Indians. They were white Protestants and anti-Catholic, with a particular disdain for Irish Catholic immigrants. They thought that America's New Immigrants threatened them socially and economically.
The party died out in the second half of the 19th Century, with supporters switching to the Republican or Constitutional Union Party.
1E. TENEMENTS AND URBANIZATION IN AMERICA
The wave of immigration that the United States experienced after the end of the Civil War brought with it issues regarding housing. Due to the sheer amount of individuals who were coming into the country, cities found themselves scrambling to house the multitudes of families.
The jobs to be had at this time were in factories, most of which were in urban areas. The housing solution came in the form of tenement buildings, which were cheap, high-rise apartment buildings that could house many families virtually one on top of the other.
Construction of the tenement buildings was typically quick, and usually poorly done. The buildings themselves were usually five to seven stories high and divided into multiple living spaces. Families who lived in the tenements were crammed into 300-400 square foot apartments that featured a single bedroom, kitchen, and a front room for everyone to share.
On top of the tenement spaces being poorly built, they were also not well lit or ventilated. Fresh air could not circulate in the rooms and there was often no plumbing. Because of the overcrowding of these buildings, as well as the poor quality of materials used to construct them, diseases ran rampant as well as disasters such as building fires. The sickness and destruction would later lead people to speak out against the shabby construction methods of these cities.
Tenement buildings were first built in America's larger cities, such as Chicago and New York City. In fact, by 1900, about two-thirds of New York City’s population lived in tenements.
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The people inhabiting these buildings were certainly not the rich and the powerful; rather, the families who were crammed into the tenement houses and apartments were mostly European immigrants and poor laborers who could not afford to move to a better area of the city in which they were living.
New York was one of the first cities to introduce legislation that would improve living conditions for immigrants and poor families. In 1898, the Tenement House Committee was created to research and educate the public on the dangers that were present in the way tenement houses were built.
Thanks to their efforts, the Tenement House Act of 1901 was passed, which required that all buildings feature an out-facing window to ensure proper ventilation, indoor plumbing to protect against sickness and diseases, and plans to protect tenement dwellers in the event of a fire.
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1G. CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA
It may be shocking to learn that before the 1900s in the United States, there were virtually no laws protecting children from the cruelties of child labor. As more Americans left farms to move to cities and urban areas during the Industrial Revolution, adults were not the only ones who found themselves working in large factories and coal mines.
At the turn of the century, children were mainly put to work because their families needed the money. Wages tended to be very low and more family members working meant more money coming into the household.
Employers also had reasons for hiring child laborers over adult workers. Children could be paid even lesson money and, since they were smaller, could more easily fit between machines and into tighter spaces.
Consequently, these children often did not go to school. While Massachusetts was the first state to require children to attend school in 1852, most states had no laws on education until around the turn of the century. Mississippi became the last to require school attendance for children in 1918.
The conditions under which the child laborers worked were very dangerous. Not only did they have to work long, grueling hours, they also faced threats posed by the high powered machinery.
It was common for a child to lose a limb or a finger, as they did not have the most extensive training on how to properly work the machinery in their factory.
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Children who worked in coal mines experienced similar conditions: miners toiled away in spaces with poor ventilation and would frequently develop lung diseases. Sometimes, they were made to work around dangerous chemicals, which caused them to become sick from the toxic fumes. It was normal for a child to log between 12 and 14 hours of work a day.
Other jobs that children held included selling newspapers on the street and sweeping chimneys. In all cases, dangerous or not, children were paid tremendously low wages at a very high cost to their health and their education.
As word of the danger spread in the early 1900s, a handful of groups began to organize around protecting children and banning the use of child labor. The National Child Labor Committee was formed in 1904 to abolish all child labor. A few years later, President Theodore Roosevelt hosted the first White House Conference on Children.
It was due to their efforts and the work of other anti-child labor organizations that the first laws were proposed and passed at the state level.
It was not until the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor would be regulated at the national level. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed this legislation that was promoted by his sectary of labor Frances Perkins. Perkins was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.
The Fair Labor Standards Act banned children under 18 from working dangerous jobs and children under 16 were forbidden from work in manufacturing or mining or during school hours. It also required workers to be paid minimum wage and higher overtime pay.
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Today, most children are not put to work, as school has become their priority. While teenagers can certainly have part-time jobs, this system is now heavily regulated by the states and laws protect the well-being of minors who are employed.
1H. GILDED AGE ROBBER BARONS
During the Gilded Age, a number of businessmen made large sums of money by gaining control of whole industries such as railroads, banking, or oil. The practice of controlling an entire industry is known as having a monopoly over that industry.
Four men in particular created monopolies and gained vast wealth during the Gilded Age: JP Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.
JP Morgan was born John Pierpont Morgan on April 17, 1837. He dominated the banking and finance industry during the Gilded Age. During the financial Panic of 1907, Morgan helped save the American economy leading a bail out of failing banks. Morgan financed several multinational corporations including U.S. Steel and General Electric.
His power of the economy made some in the government nervous. As a result, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, which created America's central banking system the Federal Reserve.
Even wealthier than JP Morgan was John D. Rockefeller, America's first billionaire and founder of the Standard Oil Company. While Morgan was born into wealth, Rockefeller started at the bottom as a clerk.
After the Civil War, Rockefeller realized that oil would be the future of powering an industrialized America. He bought up every oil company he could and created a monopoly. This process of buying up companies to eliminate competition is known as "horizontal integration".
At this time, oil was an important commodity in the United States, as it was first used as a light source and later as a way to power automobiles. He even sold oil by products to create tar, petroleum jelly, paint, and chewing gum.
His ruthless business practices came under criticism, particularly from the muckraker Ida Tarbell. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil violated federal antitrust laws. It was broken up into 34 separate entities, including the future Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
In his later years, Rockefeller became a philanthropist and gave great sums of his money to charities that helped medicine, education, and scientific research.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was an American businessman who built his wealth through the railroad and shipping industries. Born in 1794, Vanderbilt was an early investor in America's first railroads. He got into the industry at the ground floor and was able to accumulate incredible wealth.
After 1849, when people flocked to the West with the promise of finding gold, Vanderbilt took advantage of Americans’ wishes to head to California. He set up the Accessory Transit Company, which many hopefuls used to travel to the West Coast during the Gold Rush.
Vanderbilt's railroads needed steel, as did America's growing cities. Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland, realized this need and became one of the richest people in American history through his Carnegie Steel Company.
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Carnegie immigrated to Pittsburgh with his parents in 1848 at age 12. Like Rockefeller, he started at the bottom and worked 12-hour days at a cotton mill as a young boy.
He later found work as a telegraph operator for a railroad company and worked his way up after investing in railroads, oil, and steel. America's industrialization led Carnegie Steel Company to become one of the most successful companies in the world.
Carnegie utilized "vertical integration" in which he owned ever aspect of the business, from the mines to the factories, to the railroads that shipped his steel. It was because he was in charge of the process from the first step to the last that he became so wealthy.
JP Morgan would later buy Carnegie Steel and transform it into his U.S. Steel Corporation. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie retired and became a philanthropist.
There is still a debate in American history if these wealthy business tycoons are robber barons or captains of industry. They helped to create the idea of the American Dream, that hard work and good fortune would bring wealth. However, they also exploited workers, often children, with low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions.
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A group of progressives would challenge them and help create laws that would better protect America's workers.
1I. PROGRESSIVE ERA REFORMS
The Progressive Era spanned the late 1800s to the 1920s. The political and social changes which occurred during this time were a direct response to the corruption and the greed displayed by powerful Robber Barons and tycoons during the Gilded Age.
America continues to benefit from the many reforms that were proposed and then enacted as a result of the Progressive Era.
The idea of referendums, recall, and initiative was one to give voters greater power over legislation and the lawmakers and politicians who served them.
A referendum is a question that appears on a ballot that voters can answer in order to voice their opinion on a particular issue. If the referendum question gains enough “yes” votes, then it passes. If it does not, then the referendum does not pass.
A recall occurs when citizens decide that they would like to vote an official out of office before his or her term has ended. Citizens might do this if they feel that the official is corrupt.
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An initiative is when citizens decide to put an issue on their ballot with or without the permission of their state legislature. It usually involves gathering enough signatures and then the initiative going on a ballot. This allows people the power to create a law when their legislators are not willing to do so.
These three moves gave more power to the citizen voting population.
Following the money and power-grabbing era of the Robber Barons, the U.S. government decided it was time to take on the powerful monopolies. A monopoly is when one corporation or person controls almost an entire industry, such as steel or oil, so there is no competition
In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was the first federal act to make monopolistic business practices illegal and to prohibit trusts.
This guaranteed that more companies could get involved in various industries, instead of just a handful of individuals controlling the production and sale of much-needed materials.
Three new amendments to the Constitution were also proposed and ratified during this time: the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, allowed for Senators to be directly elected by the people. Before the 17th Amendment, Senators had been chosen by the state legislatures, and not everyday voting citizens.
The 18th Amendment of 1919 established the prohibition of alcohol after decades of efforts by the temperance movement to have it banned. This began what is known as the Prohibition Era in US History. The law made the production, sale, and transport of alcohol illegal. Many people tried to get around this amendment through bootlegging and speakeasies, however, and the enforcement of this law was difficult.
Finally, the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, officially gave women the right to vote. This came after years of protests and attempts at reform led by the Women’s Suffrage Movement (the word “suffrage” means “the right to vote”).
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Among the other reforms that the Progressive Era saw were laws to regulate and limit dangerous child labor and laws which created the 8-hour work day and 40-hour work week.
1J. MUCKRAKERS AND SOCIAL REFORMERS OF THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
Muckrakers were journalists and novelists of the Progressive Era who sought to expose corruption in big business and government. Their work influenced the passage of key legislation that strengthened protections for workers and consumers.
The term “muckraker” was popularized in 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech suggesting that “the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the wellbeing of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck…”
In this context, “raking the muck” refers to the practices of investigative journalists and activists who brought the unpleasant “muck” of corruption in government and big business to the surface.
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Jane Adams:
Born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and established the first settlement in the US. Addams also served as the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work, established the National Federation of Settlements, and served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Social reformer, pacifist, and feminist. Born Laura Jane Addams on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She also established the Hull-House in Chicago, which was the city’s first settlement house and one of the earliest ones created in the United States.
The daughter of an affluent state senator and businessman, Jane Addams lived a life of privilege. Her father had many important friends, including President Abraham Lincoln. In 1880s, Addams struggled to find her place in the world. She traveled, battled with health problems, and even attended medical school briefly. On one trip with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, she visited the famed Toynbee Hall in London, a special facility established to help the poor. The pair were so impressed by this settlement house that they sought to create one in Chicago.
In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull-House, which was named after the building’s original owner. The house provided services for the immigrant and poor population living in the neighborhood. Over the years, it grew to include more than 10 buildings and extended its services to include child care, educational courses, an art gallery, a public kitchen, and many other social programs.
In addition to her work at the Hull-House, Jane Addams served the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work in 1910. She went on to establish the National Federation of Settlements the next year and held that organization’s top post for more than two decades.
Besides being a prominent social reformer, Jane Addams was a deeply committed pacifist. A frequent lecturer on the subject, she compiled her talks on ending war in the world in her 1907 book Newer Ideals of Peace. After the outbreak of World War I, Addams became the chair of the Women’s Peace Party. Along with Emily Greene Balch and Alice Hamilton, Addams attended the International Congress of Women in The Hague in the Netherlands in 1915. These three social reformers and peace activists worked together on a special report called Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (1915).
As part of her commitment to finding an end to war, Jane Addams served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom from 1919 to 1929. For her efforts, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, an educator and presidential advisor, in 1931.
While often troubled by health problems in her earlier life, Jane Addams began to seriously decline after a heart attack in 1926. She died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois. She is remembered as a pioneer in the field of social work and as one of the nation’s leading pacifists.
Born on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and established the first settlement in the US. Addams also served as the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work, established the National Federation of Settlements, and served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
Social reformer, pacifist, and feminist. Born Laura Jane Addams on September 6, 1860, in Cedarville, Illinois. Jane Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She also established the Hull-House in Chicago, which was the city’s first settlement house and one of the earliest ones created in the United States.
The daughter of an affluent state senator and businessman, Jane Addams lived a life of privilege. Her father had many important friends, including President Abraham Lincoln. In 1880s, Addams struggled to find her place in the world. She traveled, battled with health problems, and even attended medical school briefly. On one trip with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, she visited the famed Toynbee Hall in London, a special facility established to help the poor. The pair were so impressed by this settlement house that they sought to create one in Chicago.
In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened the Hull-House, which was named after the building’s original owner. The house provided services for the immigrant and poor population living in the neighborhood. Over the years, it grew to include more than 10 buildings and extended its services to include child care, educational courses, an art gallery, a public kitchen, and many other social programs.
In addition to her work at the Hull-House, Jane Addams served the first female president of the National Conference of Social Work in 1910. She went on to establish the National Federation of Settlements the next year and held that organization’s top post for more than two decades.
Besides being a prominent social reformer, Jane Addams was a deeply committed pacifist. A frequent lecturer on the subject, she compiled her talks on ending war in the world in her 1907 book Newer Ideals of Peace. After the outbreak of World War I, Addams became the chair of the Women’s Peace Party. Along with Emily Greene Balch and Alice Hamilton, Addams attended the International Congress of Women in The Hague in the Netherlands in 1915. These three social reformers and peace activists worked together on a special report called Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and Its Results (1915).
As part of her commitment to finding an end to war, Jane Addams served as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom from 1919 to 1929. For her efforts, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, an educator and presidential advisor, in 1931.
While often troubled by health problems in her earlier life, Jane Addams began to seriously decline after a heart attack in 1926. She died on May 21, 1935, in Chicago, Illinois. She is remembered as a pioneer in the field of social work and as one of the nation’s leading pacifists.
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Robert La Follett:
Robert La Follette developed his fierce opposition to corporate power and political corruption as a young man. Affiliated with the Republican Party for almost his entire career, La Follette embarked on a political path that would take him to Congress, the governorship of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Senate. His support for progressive reforms, rousing oratory, and frequent clashes with party leaders earned him the nickname "Fighting Bob."
Born in Primrose township, Dane County, on June 14, 1855, La Follette worked as a farm laborer before entering the University of Wisconsin in 1875. After graduating in 1879, La Follette launched his political career as district attorney the following year. Elected to Congress in 1884, La Follette was defeated in 1890 by Democrat Allen Bushnell. While for some people a defeat might have signaled the end of a political career, for La Follette it marked the beginning of a lifelong fight for political reform.
La Follette's career as a reformer began in earnest a few months later when the state Republican leader, Senator Philetus Sawyer, offered him a bribe to fix a court case against several former state officials. Furious that Sawyer would try to use money to influence the legal system, La Follette refused the bribe, angrily denouncing the use of money to shut out the voice of the people. For nearly ten years, La Follette traveled around the state speaking out against the influence of crooked politicians and the powerful lumber barons and railroad interests that dominated his own party. Elected governor in 1900, La Follette pledged to institute his own form of political reform.
Until that time, the candidates whose names appeared on ballots were selected by party leaders in private caucuses. Drawing on the ideas of other reformers to make politics more democratic, La Follette successfully pushed the legislature to pass measures instituting direct primary elections, which gave voters the right to choose their own candidates for office. He supported measures that doubled the taxes on the railroads, broke up monopolies, preserved the state's forests, protected workers' rights, defended small farmers, and regulated lobbying to end patronage politics. La Follette worked closely with professors from the University of Wisconsin to help the state become "a laboratory of democracy." By the time he joined the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette had become a national figure.
In Washington, La Follette pushed for the same kind of reforms he had promoted in Wisconsin. He often spoke at length on the corruption of government and the abuse of industrial workers. Arguing that the entire nation's economy was dominated by fewer than one hundred corporate leaders, La Follette supported the growth of unions as a check on the power of large corporations. In 1909, La Follette and his wife, Belle, founded "La Follette's Weekly Magazine," a journal that campaigned for woman suffrage, racial equality, and other progressive causes.
Though La Follette supported Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election, he adamantly opposed U.S. entry into World War I, believing that disputes should be solved peacefully. Although he was accused of being unpatriotic, La Follette believed that American's involvement in the war would end democratic reforms at home. Though critics declared that his opposition to the war was political suicide, La Follette was re-elected to the Senate in 1922. In 1924, he ran for president on the Progressive ticket and received almost 5 million votes, losing to Republican Calvin Coolidge. La Follette died the following year on June 18, 1925.
Robert La Follette developed his fierce opposition to corporate power and political corruption as a young man. Affiliated with the Republican Party for almost his entire career, La Follette embarked on a political path that would take him to Congress, the governorship of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Senate. His support for progressive reforms, rousing oratory, and frequent clashes with party leaders earned him the nickname "Fighting Bob."
Born in Primrose township, Dane County, on June 14, 1855, La Follette worked as a farm laborer before entering the University of Wisconsin in 1875. After graduating in 1879, La Follette launched his political career as district attorney the following year. Elected to Congress in 1884, La Follette was defeated in 1890 by Democrat Allen Bushnell. While for some people a defeat might have signaled the end of a political career, for La Follette it marked the beginning of a lifelong fight for political reform.
La Follette's career as a reformer began in earnest a few months later when the state Republican leader, Senator Philetus Sawyer, offered him a bribe to fix a court case against several former state officials. Furious that Sawyer would try to use money to influence the legal system, La Follette refused the bribe, angrily denouncing the use of money to shut out the voice of the people. For nearly ten years, La Follette traveled around the state speaking out against the influence of crooked politicians and the powerful lumber barons and railroad interests that dominated his own party. Elected governor in 1900, La Follette pledged to institute his own form of political reform.
Until that time, the candidates whose names appeared on ballots were selected by party leaders in private caucuses. Drawing on the ideas of other reformers to make politics more democratic, La Follette successfully pushed the legislature to pass measures instituting direct primary elections, which gave voters the right to choose their own candidates for office. He supported measures that doubled the taxes on the railroads, broke up monopolies, preserved the state's forests, protected workers' rights, defended small farmers, and regulated lobbying to end patronage politics. La Follette worked closely with professors from the University of Wisconsin to help the state become "a laboratory of democracy." By the time he joined the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette had become a national figure.
In Washington, La Follette pushed for the same kind of reforms he had promoted in Wisconsin. He often spoke at length on the corruption of government and the abuse of industrial workers. Arguing that the entire nation's economy was dominated by fewer than one hundred corporate leaders, La Follette supported the growth of unions as a check on the power of large corporations. In 1909, La Follette and his wife, Belle, founded "La Follette's Weekly Magazine," a journal that campaigned for woman suffrage, racial equality, and other progressive causes.
Though La Follette supported Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election, he adamantly opposed U.S. entry into World War I, believing that disputes should be solved peacefully. Although he was accused of being unpatriotic, La Follette believed that American's involvement in the war would end democratic reforms at home. Though critics declared that his opposition to the war was political suicide, La Follette was re-elected to the Senate in 1922. In 1924, he ran for president on the Progressive ticket and received almost 5 million votes, losing to Republican Calvin Coolidge. La Follette died the following year on June 18, 1925.
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Upton Sinclair:
Upton Beale Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father worked at different times selling liquor, hats, and men's clothes. He also struggled with poverty and a drinking problem. Young Upton was a shy, thoughtful boy who taught himself to read at age five. The family moved to New York City when Upton was ten, and at fourteen he entered New York City College. He graduated in 1897 and went to Columbia University to study law, but instead became more interested in politics and literature. He never earned a law degree. Through these years he supported himself by writing for adventure-story magazines. While attending Columbia he wrote eight thousand words a day. He also continued to read a great deal—over one two-week Christmas break he read all of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works as well as all of John Milton's (1608–1674) poetry.
Sinclair moved to Quebec, Canada, in 1900. That same year he married Meta Fuller, with whom he had a son. His first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), was a modest success. Three more novels in the next four years failed to provide even a bare living. Sinclair became a member of the Socialist Party in 1902, and he was a Socialist candidate for Congress from New Jersey in 1906. (Socialists believe in a system in which there is no private property and all people own the means of production, such as factories and farms, as a group.)
Also in 1906 Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel exposing unfair labor practices and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing factories of Chicago, Illinois, was a huge success. Sinclair had spent seven weeks observing the operations of a meat-packing plant before writing the book. The Jungle 's protest about the problems of laborers and the socialist solutions it proposed caused a public outcry. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) invited Sinclair to discuss packing-house conditions, and a congressional investigation led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Sinclair divorced his first wife in 1913. The autobiographical (based on his own life) novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911) treats his marriage and the birth of his child with an honesty that shocked some reviewers. Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough in 1913. Sylvia and Sylvia's Marriage, a massive two-part story, called for sexual enlightenment (freedom from ignorance and misinformation).
King Coal (1917), based on a coal strike of 1914 and 1915, returned to labor protest and socialistic comment. However, in 1917 Sinclair left the Socialist Party to support President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). He returned to the socialist camp when Wilson supported intervention in the Soviet Union. In California Sinclair ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress (1920), for the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930).
Sinclair continued his writings on political and reform issues. Oil! (1927) dealt with dishonesty in President Warren G. Harding's (1865–1923) administration. Boston (1928), a novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case (in which two Italian men, believed by many to have been innocent, were convicted and executed for having committed a murder during a payroll robbery), brought to light much new material and demonstrated the constructive research that always lay beneath Sinclair's protest writings.
In 1933 Sinclair was persuaded to campaign seriously for governor of California. He called his program "End Poverty in California." His sensible presentation of Socialist ideas won him the Democratic nomination, but millions of dollars and a campaign based on lies and fear defeated him in the election.
World's End (1940) launched Sinclair's eleven-volume novel series that attempted to give an insider's view of the U.S. government between 1913 and 1949. One of the novels, Dragon's Teeth (1942), a study of the rise of Nazism (a German political movement of the 1930s whose followers scorned democracy and favored the destruction of all "inferior" non-Germans, especially Jewish people), won the Pulitzer Prize. Before his death on November 25, 1968, Sinclair had produced more than ninety books that earned at least $1 million, most of it contributed to socialist and reform causes.
Upton Beale Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father worked at different times selling liquor, hats, and men's clothes. He also struggled with poverty and a drinking problem. Young Upton was a shy, thoughtful boy who taught himself to read at age five. The family moved to New York City when Upton was ten, and at fourteen he entered New York City College. He graduated in 1897 and went to Columbia University to study law, but instead became more interested in politics and literature. He never earned a law degree. Through these years he supported himself by writing for adventure-story magazines. While attending Columbia he wrote eight thousand words a day. He also continued to read a great deal—over one two-week Christmas break he read all of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works as well as all of John Milton's (1608–1674) poetry.
Sinclair moved to Quebec, Canada, in 1900. That same year he married Meta Fuller, with whom he had a son. His first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), was a modest success. Three more novels in the next four years failed to provide even a bare living. Sinclair became a member of the Socialist Party in 1902, and he was a Socialist candidate for Congress from New Jersey in 1906. (Socialists believe in a system in which there is no private property and all people own the means of production, such as factories and farms, as a group.)
Also in 1906 Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel exposing unfair labor practices and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing factories of Chicago, Illinois, was a huge success. Sinclair had spent seven weeks observing the operations of a meat-packing plant before writing the book. The Jungle 's protest about the problems of laborers and the socialist solutions it proposed caused a public outcry. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) invited Sinclair to discuss packing-house conditions, and a congressional investigation led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Sinclair divorced his first wife in 1913. The autobiographical (based on his own life) novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911) treats his marriage and the birth of his child with an honesty that shocked some reviewers. Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough in 1913. Sylvia and Sylvia's Marriage, a massive two-part story, called for sexual enlightenment (freedom from ignorance and misinformation).
King Coal (1917), based on a coal strike of 1914 and 1915, returned to labor protest and socialistic comment. However, in 1917 Sinclair left the Socialist Party to support President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). He returned to the socialist camp when Wilson supported intervention in the Soviet Union. In California Sinclair ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress (1920), for the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930).
Sinclair continued his writings on political and reform issues. Oil! (1927) dealt with dishonesty in President Warren G. Harding's (1865–1923) administration. Boston (1928), a novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case (in which two Italian men, believed by many to have been innocent, were convicted and executed for having committed a murder during a payroll robbery), brought to light much new material and demonstrated the constructive research that always lay beneath Sinclair's protest writings.
In 1933 Sinclair was persuaded to campaign seriously for governor of California. He called his program "End Poverty in California." His sensible presentation of Socialist ideas won him the Democratic nomination, but millions of dollars and a campaign based on lies and fear defeated him in the election.
World's End (1940) launched Sinclair's eleven-volume novel series that attempted to give an insider's view of the U.S. government between 1913 and 1949. One of the novels, Dragon's Teeth (1942), a study of the rise of Nazism (a German political movement of the 1930s whose followers scorned democracy and favored the destruction of all "inferior" non-Germans, especially Jewish people), won the Pulitzer Prize. Before his death on November 25, 1968, Sinclair had produced more than ninety books that earned at least $1 million, most of it contributed to socialist and reform causes.
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H. Ida Tarbell:
Tarbell was born, November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Pennsylvania Republicans. Two of her brothers knew Abraham Lincoln, and her father was forced out of business by John D. Rockefeller's Southern Improvement Company, a predecessor to Standard Oil. These connections would prove influential in her later career. She received her bachelor's degree in 1880 and her master's in 1883, both from Allegheny College.
She was hired by McClure's magazine in 1894, and her series on Abraham Lincoln nearly doubled the magazine's circulation. She soon turned to investigative journalism, and she and her fellow staff members Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens became a celebrated muckraking trio. Her investigations of Standard Oil for McClure's, which ran in 19 parts from November 1902 to October 1904, were collected and published as The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904. It placed fifth in a 1999 list of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century.
Although public opposition to Rockefeller and Standard Oil existed prior to Tarbell's investigation, it fueled public attacks on Standard Oil and in trusts in general, and the book is credited with hastening the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. "They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me," she wrote about the company.
In 1906, Tarbell, Baker, Steffens, and editor John Phillips left McClure's and bought American Magazine, where they departed from the muckraking style and adopted a more optimistic approach. She and most of the rest of the staff left the magazine in 1915. During this time, Tarbell also contributed to Collier's Weekly.
Tarbell's other books included Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900), The Business of Being a Woman (1912), The Ways of Women (1915), biographies of Elbert H. Gary (1925) and Owen D. Young (1932), The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1898 (1936), and her autobiography, All in the Day's Work (1939).
She died of pneumonia at the age of 86 on January 6, 1944.
Tarbell was born, November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Pennsylvania Republicans. Two of her brothers knew Abraham Lincoln, and her father was forced out of business by John D. Rockefeller's Southern Improvement Company, a predecessor to Standard Oil. These connections would prove influential in her later career. She received her bachelor's degree in 1880 and her master's in 1883, both from Allegheny College.
She was hired by McClure's magazine in 1894, and her series on Abraham Lincoln nearly doubled the magazine's circulation. She soon turned to investigative journalism, and she and her fellow staff members Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln Steffens became a celebrated muckraking trio. Her investigations of Standard Oil for McClure's, which ran in 19 parts from November 1902 to October 1904, were collected and published as The History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904. It placed fifth in a 1999 list of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century.
Although public opposition to Rockefeller and Standard Oil existed prior to Tarbell's investigation, it fueled public attacks on Standard Oil and in trusts in general, and the book is credited with hastening the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. "They had never played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me," she wrote about the company.
In 1906, Tarbell, Baker, Steffens, and editor John Phillips left McClure's and bought American Magazine, where they departed from the muckraking style and adopted a more optimistic approach. She and most of the rest of the staff left the magazine in 1915. During this time, Tarbell also contributed to Collier's Weekly.
Tarbell's other books included Life of Abraham Lincoln (1900), The Business of Being a Woman (1912), The Ways of Women (1915), biographies of Elbert H. Gary (1925) and Owen D. Young (1932), The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1898 (1936), and her autobiography, All in the Day's Work (1939).
She died of pneumonia at the age of 86 on January 6, 1944.
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Florence Kelley:
Florence Kelley, the daughter of United States congressman, William D. Kelley, was born on September 12, 1859. She studied at Cornell University and the University of Zurich. While in Europe she became a follower of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Over the next few years she worked on an English translation of Engels' The Conditions of the Working Class in England and this was eventually published in the United States in 1887.
Kelley moved to New York City where she married a fellow member of the Socialist Labor Party, the Polish-Russian physician, Lazare Wischnewetzky. The marriage was not a success and in December 1891 she left him and moved to Chicago with her three children. Soon after arriving in the city she joined Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Alzina Stevens, Mary McDowell, Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge and other social reformers at Hull House.
Kelley was extremely successful at recruiting people to socialism. She told Friedrich Engels: "We have a colony of efficient and intelligent women living in a working men's quarter with the house used for all sorts of purposes by about a thousand persons a week. The last form of its activity is the formation of unions of which we have three, the clock-makers, the shift-makers, and the book-binders. Next week we are to take the initiative in the systematic endeavor to clean out the sweating dens. The Trade assembly is paying the expenses of weekly mass meetings; and the sanitary authorities are emphasizing the impossibility of their coping, unaided, with the task allotted to them."
Josephine Goldmark was one of those who saw her speak: "No other man or woman whom I have ever heard so blended knowledge of facts, with, satire, burning indignation, prophetic denunciation - all poured out at white heat in a voice varying from flute-like tones to deep organ tones." Frances Perkins added: Explosive, hot-tempered, determined, she was no gentle saint. She was a smoking volcano that at any moment would burst into flames.
John Peter Altgeld was one of the many visitors to Hull House. When he was elected governor of Illinois in 1892 and the following year he appointed Kelley as the state's first chief factory inspector. Kelley recruited a staff of twelve, including Alzina Stevens and Mary Kenney. In 1894 Altgeld and Kelley managed to persuade the state legislature to pass legislation controlling child labor. This included a law limiting women and children to a maximum eight-hour day. This success was short-lived and in 1895 the Illinois Association of Manufacturers got the law repealed.
In 1899 Kelley helped establish the radical pressure group, the National Consumer's League (NCL). The main objective of the organization was to achieve a minimum wage and a limitation on the working hours of women and children. Kelley, the NCL's first leader, travelled the country giving lectures on working conditions in the United States.
One important initiative introduced by Kelley was the NCL White Label. Employers whose labor practices met with the NCL's approval for fairness and safety were granted the right to display the NCL's white label. The NCL then urged consumers to boycott those goods that failed to earn the right to use the label. Florence Kelly died on February 17, 1932, in Germantown at the age of 72.
In September 1905, Kelley joined with Upton Sinclair and Jack London to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Other members included Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Anna Strunsky, Bertram D. Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Rose Pastor Stokes and J.G. Phelps Stokes. Its stated purpose was to "throw light on the world-wide movement of industrial democracy known as socialism." Over the next few years she was a frequent speaker on American campuses and one of those students she recruited to the cause was Frances Perkins, the woman who was eventually to become the country's first woman cabinet minister and the person responsible for bringing an end to child labor in America.
A strong supporter of women's suffrage and African American civil rights, Kelley helped to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. A committed pacifist, Kelley opposed USA involvement in the First World War and was a member of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
Florence Kelley, the daughter of United States congressman, William D. Kelley, was born on September 12, 1859. She studied at Cornell University and the University of Zurich. While in Europe she became a follower of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Over the next few years she worked on an English translation of Engels' The Conditions of the Working Class in England and this was eventually published in the United States in 1887.
Kelley moved to New York City where she married a fellow member of the Socialist Labor Party, the Polish-Russian physician, Lazare Wischnewetzky. The marriage was not a success and in December 1891 she left him and moved to Chicago with her three children. Soon after arriving in the city she joined Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Alzina Stevens, Mary McDowell, Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge and other social reformers at Hull House.
Kelley was extremely successful at recruiting people to socialism. She told Friedrich Engels: "We have a colony of efficient and intelligent women living in a working men's quarter with the house used for all sorts of purposes by about a thousand persons a week. The last form of its activity is the formation of unions of which we have three, the clock-makers, the shift-makers, and the book-binders. Next week we are to take the initiative in the systematic endeavor to clean out the sweating dens. The Trade assembly is paying the expenses of weekly mass meetings; and the sanitary authorities are emphasizing the impossibility of their coping, unaided, with the task allotted to them."
Josephine Goldmark was one of those who saw her speak: "No other man or woman whom I have ever heard so blended knowledge of facts, with, satire, burning indignation, prophetic denunciation - all poured out at white heat in a voice varying from flute-like tones to deep organ tones." Frances Perkins added: Explosive, hot-tempered, determined, she was no gentle saint. She was a smoking volcano that at any moment would burst into flames.
John Peter Altgeld was one of the many visitors to Hull House. When he was elected governor of Illinois in 1892 and the following year he appointed Kelley as the state's first chief factory inspector. Kelley recruited a staff of twelve, including Alzina Stevens and Mary Kenney. In 1894 Altgeld and Kelley managed to persuade the state legislature to pass legislation controlling child labor. This included a law limiting women and children to a maximum eight-hour day. This success was short-lived and in 1895 the Illinois Association of Manufacturers got the law repealed.
In 1899 Kelley helped establish the radical pressure group, the National Consumer's League (NCL). The main objective of the organization was to achieve a minimum wage and a limitation on the working hours of women and children. Kelley, the NCL's first leader, travelled the country giving lectures on working conditions in the United States.
One important initiative introduced by Kelley was the NCL White Label. Employers whose labor practices met with the NCL's approval for fairness and safety were granted the right to display the NCL's white label. The NCL then urged consumers to boycott those goods that failed to earn the right to use the label. Florence Kelly died on February 17, 1932, in Germantown at the age of 72.
In September 1905, Kelley joined with Upton Sinclair and Jack London to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Other members included Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Anna Strunsky, Bertram D. Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, Rose Pastor Stokes and J.G. Phelps Stokes. Its stated purpose was to "throw light on the world-wide movement of industrial democracy known as socialism." Over the next few years she was a frequent speaker on American campuses and one of those students she recruited to the cause was Frances Perkins, the woman who was eventually to become the country's first woman cabinet minister and the person responsible for bringing an end to child labor in America.
A strong supporter of women's suffrage and African American civil rights, Kelley helped to establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. A committed pacifist, Kelley opposed USA involvement in the First World War and was a member of the Woman's Peace Party (WPP) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
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Booker T. Washington:
April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington was born in a slave hut but, after emancipation, moved with his family to Malden, W.Va. Dire poverty ruled out regular schooling; at age nine he began working, first in a salt furnace and later in a coal mine. Determined to get an education, he enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (1872), working as a janitor to help pay expenses. He graduated in 1875 and returned to Malden, where for two years he taught children in a day school and adults at night. Following studies at Wayland Seminary, Washington, D.C. (1878–79), he joined the staff of Hampton.
In 1881 Washington was selected to head a newly established normal school for blacks at Tuskegee, an institution with two small converted buildings, no equipment, and very little money. Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute became a monument to his life's work. At his death 34 years later, it had more than 100 well-equipped buildings, some 1,500 students, a faculty of nearly 200 teaching 38 trades and professions, and an endowment of approximately $2 million.
Washington believed that the best interests of black people in the post-Reconstruction era could be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise, and thrift. He urged his fellow blacks, most of whom were impoverished and illiterate farm laborers, to temporarily abandon their efforts to win full civil rights and political power and instead to cultivate their industrial and farming skills so as to attain economic security. Blacks would thus accept segregation and discrimination, but their eventual acquisition of wealth and culture would gradually win for them the respect and acceptance of the white community. This would break down the divisions between the two races and lead to equal citizenship for blacks in the end. In his epochal speech (Sept. 18, 1895) to a racially mixed audience at the Atlanta (Ga.) Exposition, Washington summed up his pragmatic approach in the famous phrase: “In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
These sentiments were called the Atlanta Compromise by such critics as the black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who deplored Washington's emphasis on vocational skills to the detriment of academic development and civil rights. And indeed it is true that, during the period of Washington's ascendancy as national spokesman for black Americans, his race was systematically excluded both from the franchise and from any effective participation in national political life, and rigid patterns of segregation and discrimination became institutionalized in the Southern states. Even Washington's visit to the White House in 1901 was greeted with a storm of protest as a “breach of racial etiquette.”
Most blacks felt comfortable with Washington's approach, however, and his influence among whites was such that he became an unofficial arbiter determining which black individuals and institutions were deemed worthy to benefit from government patronage and white philanthropic support. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard University (1896) and Dartmouth College (1901). Among his dozen books is his autobiography, Up from Slavery(1901), translated into many languages. Booker T. Washington died on November 14, 1915.
April 5, 1856, Booker T. Washington was born in a slave hut but, after emancipation, moved with his family to Malden, W.Va. Dire poverty ruled out regular schooling; at age nine he began working, first in a salt furnace and later in a coal mine. Determined to get an education, he enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (1872), working as a janitor to help pay expenses. He graduated in 1875 and returned to Malden, where for two years he taught children in a day school and adults at night. Following studies at Wayland Seminary, Washington, D.C. (1878–79), he joined the staff of Hampton.
In 1881 Washington was selected to head a newly established normal school for blacks at Tuskegee, an institution with two small converted buildings, no equipment, and very little money. Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute became a monument to his life's work. At his death 34 years later, it had more than 100 well-equipped buildings, some 1,500 students, a faculty of nearly 200 teaching 38 trades and professions, and an endowment of approximately $2 million.
Washington believed that the best interests of black people in the post-Reconstruction era could be realized through education in the crafts and industrial skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise, and thrift. He urged his fellow blacks, most of whom were impoverished and illiterate farm laborers, to temporarily abandon their efforts to win full civil rights and political power and instead to cultivate their industrial and farming skills so as to attain economic security. Blacks would thus accept segregation and discrimination, but their eventual acquisition of wealth and culture would gradually win for them the respect and acceptance of the white community. This would break down the divisions between the two races and lead to equal citizenship for blacks in the end. In his epochal speech (Sept. 18, 1895) to a racially mixed audience at the Atlanta (Ga.) Exposition, Washington summed up his pragmatic approach in the famous phrase: “In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
These sentiments were called the Atlanta Compromise by such critics as the black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois, who deplored Washington's emphasis on vocational skills to the detriment of academic development and civil rights. And indeed it is true that, during the period of Washington's ascendancy as national spokesman for black Americans, his race was systematically excluded both from the franchise and from any effective participation in national political life, and rigid patterns of segregation and discrimination became institutionalized in the Southern states. Even Washington's visit to the White House in 1901 was greeted with a storm of protest as a “breach of racial etiquette.”
Most blacks felt comfortable with Washington's approach, however, and his influence among whites was such that he became an unofficial arbiter determining which black individuals and institutions were deemed worthy to benefit from government patronage and white philanthropic support. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard University (1896) and Dartmouth College (1901). Among his dozen books is his autobiography, Up from Slavery(1901), translated into many languages. Booker T. Washington died on November 14, 1915.
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Susan B. Anthony:
Susan Brownwell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second of seven children born to Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony. Her father, the owner of a cotton mill, was a religious man who taught his children to show their love for God by working to help other people. Susan began attending a boarding school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1837. She left and began working as a teacher after growing debt forced her father to sell his business and move the family to a farm near Rochester, New York.
Anthony continued teaching to help her family pay the bills until 1849, when her father asked her to come home to run the family farm so that he could spend more time trying to develop an insurance business. Many famous reformers, such as Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), and Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), came to visit Anthony's father during this time. Hearing their discussions helped Susan form her strong views on slavery, women's rights, and temperance (the avoidance of alcohol).
Although her family attended the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls and Rochester, New York, in 1848, Anthony did not take up the cause until 1851. Until that time, she had devoted most of her time to the temperance movement. However, when male members of the movement refused to let her speak at rallies simply because she was a woman, she realized that women had to win the right to speak in public and to vote before they could accomplish anything else. Her lifelong friendship and partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), who had proposed a resolution giving women the right to vote, also began in 1851.
Anthony attended her first women's rights convention in 1852. From that first convention until the end of the Civil War (1861–65), she campaigned from door-to-door, in legislatures, and in meetings for the two causes of women's rights and the abolition of slavery. The passage of the New York State Married Woman's Property and Guardianship Law in 1860, which gave married women in New York greater property rights, was her first major legislative victory.
The Civil War was fought between northern and southern states mainly over the issues of slavery and the South's decision to leave the Union to form an independent nation. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Anthony focused her attention on ending slavery. She organized the Women's National Loyal League, which gathered petitions to force passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. When the war ended, she increased her efforts to gain the right to vote for women as well as for African American males. However, her former male allies from the antislavery movement were unwilling to help her fight for the first cause, saying the time was not yet right for women's suffrage.
Saddened by this defeat but refusing to give up the fight, Anthony worked solely for women's suffrage from this time to the end of her life, organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton. The association's New York weekly, The Revolution, was created in 1868 to promote women's causes. After it went bankrupt in 1870, Anthony traveled across the country for six years giving lectures to raise money to pay the newspaper's ten-thousand-dollar debt.
In 1872 Susan B. Anthony and fifteen supporters from Rochester became the first women ever to vote in a presidential election. That they were promptly arrested for their boldness did not bother Anthony. She was eager to test women's legal right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment by taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Free on bail of one thousand dollars, Anthony campaigned throughout the country with a carefully prepared legal argument: "Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She lost her case in 1873 in Rochester following some questionable rulings by the judge and was barred from appealing the result to the Supreme Court.
Susan B. Anthony spent the rest of her life working for the federal suffrage amendment—an exhausting job that took her not only to Congress but to political conventions, labor meetings, and lecture halls in every part of the country. After she noticed that most historical literature failed to mention any women, in 1877 she and her supporters sat down to begin writing the monumental and invaluable History of Woman Suffrage in five volumes. She later worked with her biographer, Ida Husted Harper, on two of the three volumes of The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. The material was drawn mainly from the scrapbooks she had kept throughout most of her life, which are now in the Library of Congress, and from her diaries and letters.
Anthony remained active in the struggle for women's suffrage until the end of her life. She attended her last suffrage convention just one month before her death. She closed her last public speech with the words, "Failure is impossible." When she died in her Rochester home on March 13, 1906, only four states had granted women the right to vote. Fourteen years later the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was added to the U.S. Constitution.
Susan Brownwell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was the second of seven children born to Daniel and Lucy Read Anthony. Her father, the owner of a cotton mill, was a religious man who taught his children to show their love for God by working to help other people. Susan began attending a boarding school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1837. She left and began working as a teacher after growing debt forced her father to sell his business and move the family to a farm near Rochester, New York.
Anthony continued teaching to help her family pay the bills until 1849, when her father asked her to come home to run the family farm so that he could spend more time trying to develop an insurance business. Many famous reformers, such as Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), and Wendell Phillips (1811–1884), came to visit Anthony's father during this time. Hearing their discussions helped Susan form her strong views on slavery, women's rights, and temperance (the avoidance of alcohol).
Although her family attended the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls and Rochester, New York, in 1848, Anthony did not take up the cause until 1851. Until that time, she had devoted most of her time to the temperance movement. However, when male members of the movement refused to let her speak at rallies simply because she was a woman, she realized that women had to win the right to speak in public and to vote before they could accomplish anything else. Her lifelong friendship and partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), who had proposed a resolution giving women the right to vote, also began in 1851.
Anthony attended her first women's rights convention in 1852. From that first convention until the end of the Civil War (1861–65), she campaigned from door-to-door, in legislatures, and in meetings for the two causes of women's rights and the abolition of slavery. The passage of the New York State Married Woman's Property and Guardianship Law in 1860, which gave married women in New York greater property rights, was her first major legislative victory.
The Civil War was fought between northern and southern states mainly over the issues of slavery and the South's decision to leave the Union to form an independent nation. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Anthony focused her attention on ending slavery. She organized the Women's National Loyal League, which gathered petitions to force passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery. When the war ended, she increased her efforts to gain the right to vote for women as well as for African American males. However, her former male allies from the antislavery movement were unwilling to help her fight for the first cause, saying the time was not yet right for women's suffrage.
Saddened by this defeat but refusing to give up the fight, Anthony worked solely for women's suffrage from this time to the end of her life, organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton. The association's New York weekly, The Revolution, was created in 1868 to promote women's causes. After it went bankrupt in 1870, Anthony traveled across the country for six years giving lectures to raise money to pay the newspaper's ten-thousand-dollar debt.
In 1872 Susan B. Anthony and fifteen supporters from Rochester became the first women ever to vote in a presidential election. That they were promptly arrested for their boldness did not bother Anthony. She was eager to test women's legal right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment by taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Free on bail of one thousand dollars, Anthony campaigned throughout the country with a carefully prepared legal argument: "Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She lost her case in 1873 in Rochester following some questionable rulings by the judge and was barred from appealing the result to the Supreme Court.
Susan B. Anthony spent the rest of her life working for the federal suffrage amendment—an exhausting job that took her not only to Congress but to political conventions, labor meetings, and lecture halls in every part of the country. After she noticed that most historical literature failed to mention any women, in 1877 she and her supporters sat down to begin writing the monumental and invaluable History of Woman Suffrage in five volumes. She later worked with her biographer, Ida Husted Harper, on two of the three volumes of The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. The material was drawn mainly from the scrapbooks she had kept throughout most of her life, which are now in the Library of Congress, and from her diaries and letters.
Anthony remained active in the struggle for women's suffrage until the end of her life. She attended her last suffrage convention just one month before her death. She closed her last public speech with the words, "Failure is impossible." When she died in her Rochester home on March 13, 1906, only four states had granted women the right to vote. Fourteen years later the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was added to the U.S. Constitution.
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Ida B. Wells:
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker. She stands as one of our nation's most uncompromising leaders and most ardent defenders of democracy. She was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 and died in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931 at the age of sixty-nine.
Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, her parents were able to support their seven children because her mother was a "famous" cook and her father was a skilled carpenter. When Ida was only fourteen, a tragic epidemic of Yellow Fever swept through Holly Springs and killed her parents and youngest sibling. Emblematic of the righteousness, responsibility, and fortitude that characterized her life, she kept the family together by securing a job teaching. She managed to continue her education by attending near-by Rust College. She eventually moved to Memphis to live with her aunt and help raise her youngest sisters.
It was in Memphis where she first began to fight (literally) for racial and gender justice. In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered her into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. Despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color, in theaters, hotels, transports, and other public accommodations, several railroad companies defied this congressional mandate and racially segregated its passengers. It is important to realize that her defiant act was before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the fallacious doctrine of "separate but equal," which constitutionalized racial segregation. Wells wrote in her autobiography:
I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.
Wells was forcefully removed from the train and the other passengers--all whites--applauded. When Wells returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit courts, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked tirelessly and fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.
Her suit against the railroad company also sparked her career as a journalist. Many papers wanted to hear about the experiences of the 25-year-old school teacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.
In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight. The paper was also owned by Rev. R. Nightingale-- the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as an educator.
In 1892 three of her friends were lynched. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. These three men were owners of People's Grocery Company, and their small grocery had taken away customers from competing white businesses. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The owners of People's Grocery were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all three. Again, this atrocity galvanized her mettle. She wrote in The Free Speech
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.
Many people took the advice Wells penned in her paper and left town; other members of the Black community organized a boycott of white owned business to try to stem the terror of lynchings. Her newspaper office was destroyed as a result of the muckraking and investigative journalism she pursued after the killing of her three friends. She could not return to Memphis, so she moved to Chicago. She however continued her blistering journalistic attacks on Southern injustices, being especially active in investigating and exposing the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.
In Chicago, she helped develop numerous African American women and reform organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She also became a tireless worker for women's suffrage, and happened to march in the famous 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.
In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers. She wrote: "I was married in the city of Chicago to Attorney F. L. Barnett, and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home." She did not stay retired long and continued writing and organizing. In 1906, she joined with William E.B. DuBois and others to further the Niagara Movement, and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909. Although Ida B. Wells was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was also among the few Black leaders to explicitly oppose Booker T. Washington and his strategies. As a result, she was viewed as one the most radical of the so-called "radicals" who organized the NAACP and marginalized from positions within its leadership. As late as 1930, she became disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, so Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, which made her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States. A year later, March 25, 1931, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker. She stands as one of our nation's most uncompromising leaders and most ardent defenders of democracy. She was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi on July 16, 1862 and died in Chicago, Illinois on March 25, 1931 at the age of sixty-nine.
Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, her parents were able to support their seven children because her mother was a "famous" cook and her father was a skilled carpenter. When Ida was only fourteen, a tragic epidemic of Yellow Fever swept through Holly Springs and killed her parents and youngest sibling. Emblematic of the righteousness, responsibility, and fortitude that characterized her life, she kept the family together by securing a job teaching. She managed to continue her education by attending near-by Rust College. She eventually moved to Memphis to live with her aunt and help raise her youngest sisters.
It was in Memphis where she first began to fight (literally) for racial and gender justice. In 1884 she was asked by the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company to give up her seat on the train to a white man and ordered her into the smoking or "Jim Crow" car, which was already crowded with other passengers. Despite the 1875 Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or color, in theaters, hotels, transports, and other public accommodations, several railroad companies defied this congressional mandate and racially segregated its passengers. It is important to realize that her defiant act was before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the fallacious doctrine of "separate but equal," which constitutionalized racial segregation. Wells wrote in her autobiography:
I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.
Wells was forcefully removed from the train and the other passengers--all whites--applauded. When Wells returned to Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad. She won her case in the local circuit courts, but the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked tirelessly and fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.
Her suit against the railroad company also sparked her career as a journalist. Many papers wanted to hear about the experiences of the 25-year-old school teacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.
In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight. The paper was also owned by Rev. R. Nightingale-- the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as an educator.
In 1892 three of her friends were lynched. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart. These three men were owners of People's Grocery Company, and their small grocery had taken away customers from competing white businesses. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. The owners of People's Grocery were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all three. Again, this atrocity galvanized her mettle. She wrote in The Free Speech
The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.
Many people took the advice Wells penned in her paper and left town; other members of the Black community organized a boycott of white owned business to try to stem the terror of lynchings. Her newspaper office was destroyed as a result of the muckraking and investigative journalism she pursued after the killing of her three friends. She could not return to Memphis, so she moved to Chicago. She however continued her blistering journalistic attacks on Southern injustices, being especially active in investigating and exposing the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.
In Chicago, she helped develop numerous African American women and reform organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She also became a tireless worker for women's suffrage, and happened to march in the famous 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.
In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers. She wrote: "I was married in the city of Chicago to Attorney F. L. Barnett, and retired to what I thought was the privacy of a home." She did not stay retired long and continued writing and organizing. In 1906, she joined with William E.B. DuBois and others to further the Niagara Movement, and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909. Although Ida B. Wells was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was also among the few Black leaders to explicitly oppose Booker T. Washington and his strategies. As a result, she was viewed as one the most radical of the so-called "radicals" who organized the NAACP and marginalized from positions within its leadership. As late as 1930, she became disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, so Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, which made her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States. A year later, March 25, 1931, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.
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Gifford Pinchot:
Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), American conservationist and public official, was chiefly responsible for introducing scientific forestry to the United States.
Gifford Pinchot was born in Simsbury, Conn., on Aug. 11, 1865, the scion of an old Huguenot family of moderate wealth and high public spirit. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and studied forestry in Europe on his own. After successfully instituting the first systematic forest program in the United States on the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, he served in 1896 on the National Forest Commission. Two years later he became head of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture.
Pinchot's influence increased enormously during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. He was influential in Roosevelt's decision to transfer millions of acres of forest lands to the reserves. He devised a system for controlled use of waterpower sites, and, above all others, he shared responsibility with Roosevelt for the notable advances in forestry and conservation between 1901 and 1909.
Unlike some ultraconservationists, Pinchot distinguished between the utilization and the exploitation of natural resources. Controlled use was the key to his philosophy. To this end he opened forests to selective cutting and leased the grasslands within them for grazing. He also converted some of the country's greatest lumber interests to the selective-cutting principle of "perpetuation of forests through use."
A driving, zealous man, Pinchot made many enemies and was attacked fiercely by western interests and anti-intellectuals in Congress. Yet he won the steadfast devotion of his subordinates. After Roosevelt left office, Pinchot fumed over the apparent slowdown in conservation under President William Howard Taft. Finally he charged Taft's secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger, with a "giveaway" of valuable lands in Alaska. The charge was an exaggeration, and Taft subsequently dismissed Pinchot from the government. The publicity given the incident, however, made Taft more sensitive to conservation during the remainder of his administration.
Pinchot ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate on the Pennsylvania Progressive party ticket in 1914. He later returned to the Republican party and served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania (1923-1927 and 1931-1935). Both terms were marked by controversy and highlighted by enactment of considerable Progressive legislation. In 1914 he had married Cornelia Bryce, by whom he had one son. Pinchot died on Oct. 4, 1946.
Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), American conservationist and public official, was chiefly responsible for introducing scientific forestry to the United States.
Gifford Pinchot was born in Simsbury, Conn., on Aug. 11, 1865, the scion of an old Huguenot family of moderate wealth and high public spirit. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and studied forestry in Europe on his own. After successfully instituting the first systematic forest program in the United States on the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, he served in 1896 on the National Forest Commission. Two years later he became head of the Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture.
Pinchot's influence increased enormously during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. He was influential in Roosevelt's decision to transfer millions of acres of forest lands to the reserves. He devised a system for controlled use of waterpower sites, and, above all others, he shared responsibility with Roosevelt for the notable advances in forestry and conservation between 1901 and 1909.
Unlike some ultraconservationists, Pinchot distinguished between the utilization and the exploitation of natural resources. Controlled use was the key to his philosophy. To this end he opened forests to selective cutting and leased the grasslands within them for grazing. He also converted some of the country's greatest lumber interests to the selective-cutting principle of "perpetuation of forests through use."
A driving, zealous man, Pinchot made many enemies and was attacked fiercely by western interests and anti-intellectuals in Congress. Yet he won the steadfast devotion of his subordinates. After Roosevelt left office, Pinchot fumed over the apparent slowdown in conservation under President William Howard Taft. Finally he charged Taft's secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger, with a "giveaway" of valuable lands in Alaska. The charge was an exaggeration, and Taft subsequently dismissed Pinchot from the government. The publicity given the incident, however, made Taft more sensitive to conservation during the remainder of his administration.
Pinchot ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate on the Pennsylvania Progressive party ticket in 1914. He later returned to the Republican party and served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania (1923-1927 and 1931-1935). Both terms were marked by controversy and highlighted by enactment of considerable Progressive legislation. In 1914 he had married Cornelia Bryce, by whom he had one son. Pinchot died on Oct. 4, 1946.
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W.E.B Du Bios:
Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard University and in 1895 became the first black American to earn a doctorate. He wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, known as W.E.B. Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up in a mostly European American town, he identified himself as "mulatto," but freely attended school with whites and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers. In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism. After earning his bachelor's degree at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard University. He paid his way with money from summer jobs, scholarships and loans from friends. After completing his master's degree, he was selected for a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin. While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most prominent social scientists of his day and was exposed to political perspectives that he touted for the remainder of his life. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a doctorate.
Writing and Activism
A year later, Du Bois published his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, marking the beginning of his expansive writing career. In the study, he coined the phrase "the talented tenth," a term that described the likelihood of one in 10 black men becoming leaders of their race. While working as a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois rose to national prominence when he very publicly opposed Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise," an agreement that asserted that vocational education for blacks was more valuable to them than social advantages like higher education or political office. Du Bois fought what he believed was an inferior strategy and became the spokesperson for full and equal rights in every realm of a person's life.
In 1903, he published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays. In the years following, he adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority and vocally supported women's rights. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the editor of the association's monthly magazine, The Crisis.
Pan Africanism and Death
Du Bois was a proponent of Pan Africanism and helped organize several Pan African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. He died on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95 in Accra, Ghana, while working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora.
Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard University and in 1895 became the first black American to earn a doctorate. He wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, known as W.E.B. Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up in a mostly European American town, he identified himself as "mulatto," but freely attended school with whites and was enthusiastically supported in his academic studies by his white teachers. In 1885, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend Fisk University. It was there that he first encountered Jim Crow laws. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism. After earning his bachelor's degree at Fisk, Du Bois entered Harvard University. He paid his way with money from summer jobs, scholarships and loans from friends. After completing his master's degree, he was selected for a study-abroad program at the University of Berlin. While a pupil in Germany, he studied with some of the most prominent social scientists of his day and was exposed to political perspectives that he touted for the remainder of his life. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a doctorate.
Writing and Activism
A year later, Du Bois published his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro, marking the beginning of his expansive writing career. In the study, he coined the phrase "the talented tenth," a term that described the likelihood of one in 10 black men becoming leaders of their race. While working as a professor at Atlanta University, Du Bois rose to national prominence when he very publicly opposed Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise," an agreement that asserted that vocational education for blacks was more valuable to them than social advantages like higher education or political office. Du Bois fought what he believed was an inferior strategy and became the spokesperson for full and equal rights in every realm of a person's life.
In 1903, he published his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 essays. In the years following, he adamantly opposed the idea of biological white superiority and vocally supported women's rights. In 1909, he co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and served as the editor of the association's monthly magazine, The Crisis.
Pan Africanism and Death
Du Bois was a proponent of Pan Africanism and helped organize several Pan African Congresses to free African colonies from European powers. He died on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95 in Accra, Ghana, while working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora.
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Carrie A. Nation:
Carrie Amelia Nation (November 25, 1846 - June 9, 1911) was perhaps the most famous person to emerge from the temperance movement—the battles against alcohol in pre-Prohibition America—due to her habit of attacking saloons with a hatchet. She has been the topic of numerous books, articles and even an opera, titled Carry Nation, that premiered in 1966 at the University of Kansas.
Born Carrie Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky, Nation attributed her passion for fighting liquor to a failed first marriage to an alcoholic. She got her myth-making last name from her second husband, David Nation. The spelling of her first name is ambiguous; both "Carrie" and "Carry" are considered correct. Official records list the former, and she herself used that spelling most of her life; the latter was used by her father in the family bible. Upon beginning her campaign against liquor in the early 20th century, she adopted the name Carry A. Nation mainly for its value as a slogan, and had it registered as a trademark in the state of Kansas.
She grew up in what most would consider trying circumstances. She was in ill health much of the time; her family experienced a number of financial setbacks and moved several times, finally settling in Belton, Missouri. Some sources indicate that her mother went through periods where she had delusions of being Queen Victoria, and that young Carrie was often tended to in the slave quarters as a result.
In 1865 she met Dr. Charles Gloyd, and they were married on November 21, 1867. Gloyd was, by all accounts, a severe alcoholic; they separated shortly before the birth of their daughter, Charlene, and he died less than a year later, in 1869. Nation attributed her passion for fighting liquor to her failed first marriage to heavy-drinking Gloyd.
Carrie then acquired a teaching certificate, but was unable to make ends meet in this field. She then met Dr. David A. Nation, an attorney, minister and newspaper editor, nineteen years her senior. They were married on December 27, 1877, and moved to a cotton plantation near Houston, Texas. Dr. Nation became involved in the Jaybird-Woodpecker War, and as a result was forced to move back north in 1889, this time to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David found work preaching at a Christian church, and Carrie ran a successful hotel. It was while in Medicine Lodge that she began her temperance work.
A large woman (nearly 6 feet tall and 175 pounds) she described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like," and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars. Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times, and paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets.
Nation's anti-alcohol activities became widely known, with the slogan "All Nations Welcome But Carrie" becoming a bar-room staple. She published The Smasher's Mail, a biweekly newsletter, and The Hatchet, a newspaper. Later in life she exploited her name by appearing in vaudeville in the United States and music halls in Great Britain. Nation, a proud woman more given to sermonizing than entertaining, sometimes found these poor venues for her proselytizing. One of the number of pre-World War I acts that "failed to click" with foreign audiences, Nation was struck by an egg thrown by an audience member during one 1909 music hall lecture at the Canterbury Theatre of Varieties. Indignantly, "The Anti-Souse Queen" ripped up her contract and returned to the United States. Seeking profits elsewhere, Nation also sold photographs of herself, collected lecture fees, and marketed miniature souvenir hatchets. Suspicious that President William McKinley was a secret drinker, Nation applauded his 1901 assassination as a tippler's just deserts.
Near the end of her life Nation moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she founded the home known as Hatchet Hall. Ill in mind and body, she collapsed during a speech in a Eureka Springs park, and was taken to a hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas. She died there on June 9, 1911,and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belton City Cemetery in Belton, Missouri. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union later erected a stone inscribed "Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition, She Hath Done What She Could" and the name "Carry A. Nation".
Carrie Amelia Nation (November 25, 1846 - June 9, 1911) was perhaps the most famous person to emerge from the temperance movement—the battles against alcohol in pre-Prohibition America—due to her habit of attacking saloons with a hatchet. She has been the topic of numerous books, articles and even an opera, titled Carry Nation, that premiered in 1966 at the University of Kansas.
Born Carrie Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky, Nation attributed her passion for fighting liquor to a failed first marriage to an alcoholic. She got her myth-making last name from her second husband, David Nation. The spelling of her first name is ambiguous; both "Carrie" and "Carry" are considered correct. Official records list the former, and she herself used that spelling most of her life; the latter was used by her father in the family bible. Upon beginning her campaign against liquor in the early 20th century, she adopted the name Carry A. Nation mainly for its value as a slogan, and had it registered as a trademark in the state of Kansas.
She grew up in what most would consider trying circumstances. She was in ill health much of the time; her family experienced a number of financial setbacks and moved several times, finally settling in Belton, Missouri. Some sources indicate that her mother went through periods where she had delusions of being Queen Victoria, and that young Carrie was often tended to in the slave quarters as a result.
In 1865 she met Dr. Charles Gloyd, and they were married on November 21, 1867. Gloyd was, by all accounts, a severe alcoholic; they separated shortly before the birth of their daughter, Charlene, and he died less than a year later, in 1869. Nation attributed her passion for fighting liquor to her failed first marriage to heavy-drinking Gloyd.
Carrie then acquired a teaching certificate, but was unable to make ends meet in this field. She then met Dr. David A. Nation, an attorney, minister and newspaper editor, nineteen years her senior. They were married on December 27, 1877, and moved to a cotton plantation near Houston, Texas. Dr. Nation became involved in the Jaybird-Woodpecker War, and as a result was forced to move back north in 1889, this time to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David found work preaching at a Christian church, and Carrie ran a successful hotel. It was while in Medicine Lodge that she began her temperance work.
A large woman (nearly 6 feet tall and 175 pounds) she described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like," and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars. Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times, and paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets.
Nation's anti-alcohol activities became widely known, with the slogan "All Nations Welcome But Carrie" becoming a bar-room staple. She published The Smasher's Mail, a biweekly newsletter, and The Hatchet, a newspaper. Later in life she exploited her name by appearing in vaudeville in the United States and music halls in Great Britain. Nation, a proud woman more given to sermonizing than entertaining, sometimes found these poor venues for her proselytizing. One of the number of pre-World War I acts that "failed to click" with foreign audiences, Nation was struck by an egg thrown by an audience member during one 1909 music hall lecture at the Canterbury Theatre of Varieties. Indignantly, "The Anti-Souse Queen" ripped up her contract and returned to the United States. Seeking profits elsewhere, Nation also sold photographs of herself, collected lecture fees, and marketed miniature souvenir hatchets. Suspicious that President William McKinley was a secret drinker, Nation applauded his 1901 assassination as a tippler's just deserts.
Near the end of her life Nation moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she founded the home known as Hatchet Hall. Ill in mind and body, she collapsed during a speech in a Eureka Springs park, and was taken to a hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas. She died there on June 9, 1911,and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belton City Cemetery in Belton, Missouri. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union later erected a stone inscribed "Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition, She Hath Done What She Could" and the name "Carry A. Nation".
![Picture](/uploads/5/6/8/5/56855031/published/jacob.jpg?1685653588)
Jacob Riis:
Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe., Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849, and immigrated to the United States in 1870 at the age of 21. He arrived in New York City with no money, but like so many other immigrants, he was hoping to make his fortune in America. Unfortunately for Riis, America was in the middle of a depression in 1870, and many people were out of work and homeless.
Riis managed to find a few odd jobs from time to time, but was unable to find steady work. There were many times that he didn’t have enough money for food or shelter and was forced to live on the streets. During the winter months he couldn’t sleep outside, so he had to utilize the only option for shelter available to people at that time who had no money—a police lodging house. They were dirty and crowded, and people had to sleep on the bare floor, on newspapers or a plank of wood, but at least they had a roof over their head.
After several months of hunger and homelessness Riis was in total despair. One cold and rainy night, he sat at the river’s edge and began to contemplate suicide. After all he thought, no one would notice and no one would care. Then, as he later wrote in his autobiography The Making of an American (1901), a little dog who had befriended him the day before and had followed him around ever since, "crept upon my knees and licked my face…and the love of the little beast thawed the icicles in my heart." Well, at least the little dog cared about him. The little dog’s affection lifted his spirits enough so that he was able to go on.
Later that night, Riis was forced by the cold to take refuge in a police lodging house. He tried to sneak the little dog in under his coat, but the desk sergeant saw and made him put it outside. As he slept, Riis was robbed of a small gold locket that he had saved and treasured as a memento from home. He complained to the desk sergeant who got very angry, accused Riis of being a liar, and ordered one of his officers to throw him out.
The little dog had been waiting outside the door all night. When he saw Riis being pushed out the door by the policeman, he bit the officer on the leg. The policeman grabbed the dog and smashed his head against the steps.
This incident could have been the thing that finally pushed Riis over the edge, but instead it transformed his despair into anger. He vowed that somehow he would find a way to avenge the death of that little dog. Soon thereafter he began writing a book he called Hard Times.
His "hard times" continued for a while, but one day his life was changed forever when an acquaintance who ran a telegraph school told him about a job. He said a man who ran a news agency was looking for a "bright young fellow whom he could break in" and offered to write a letter of introduction for him.
Riis was hired by the agency and soon demonstrated a talent for writing. Then he acquired a camera and taught himself photography. By 1877, his reputation had grown so that he was hired as a police reporter for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press. His beat was Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street, one of the worst slums in the city. In 1887, he read about the invention of the magnesium flash and he was one of the first photographers to use flash powder. That enabled him to photograph the tenement interiors and the streets and back alleys of the slums at night. In 1888, Riis left the Tribune and was hired as a photo journalist by the New York Evening Sun where he began his crusade in earnest to publicize the plight of the poor.
Riis’ work while at the Sun and his first book, How the Other Half Lives; Studies Among the Tenements of New York, published in 1890, were an international sensation. His evocative writing coupled with his revealing photographs were a powerful indictment of society’s indifference to the plight of the poor.
Riis was an advocate for the immigrant poor, the oppressed, the exploited, and the downtrodden. He wrote that the poor were victims of economic slavery and that they were the "victims rather than the makers of their fate." He also believed that poverty and misfortune were responsible for criminal behavior. He blamed much of the misery and crime present in the slums on the greed of landlords and building speculators. Riis called it "premeditated murder as large-scale economic speculation." His reporting inspired shock and horror among New York’s rich and middle classes.
His book also captured the interest of the New York Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, who would later become governor and then the 26th president of the United States. Riis took Roosevelt with him on his forays into the dark corners of the city. When Roosevelt became governor he closed down the police lodging houses, and led the fight to enact many reforms. Roosevelt called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York."
Riis continued to write and lecture on the problems of the poor for the rest of his life. He wrote several other books; including Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle With the Slum (1902), Children of the Tenement (1903), and his autobiography, The Making of an American (1901).
Riis conducted "magic lantern" shows in cities all over America, where he projected his photos onto a large screen. One newspaper reported, "His viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images, but as a reality that transported the New York slum world directly into the lecture hall."
Jacob Riis has been credited with precipitating many of the reforms that improved the living conditions of the poor during what is now known as the Progressive Era. Health and sanitation laws were passed and enforced. Landlords were forced to make repairs and improvements. Laws were passed requiring modern improvements to new residential construction. The Mulberry Bend slums were eventually razed, largely due to his efforts. He also started the Tenement House Commission and the Jacob A. Riis Settlement House. He died in Barrie, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1914, known as the "Emancipator of the Slums."
Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe., Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849, and immigrated to the United States in 1870 at the age of 21. He arrived in New York City with no money, but like so many other immigrants, he was hoping to make his fortune in America. Unfortunately for Riis, America was in the middle of a depression in 1870, and many people were out of work and homeless.
Riis managed to find a few odd jobs from time to time, but was unable to find steady work. There were many times that he didn’t have enough money for food or shelter and was forced to live on the streets. During the winter months he couldn’t sleep outside, so he had to utilize the only option for shelter available to people at that time who had no money—a police lodging house. They were dirty and crowded, and people had to sleep on the bare floor, on newspapers or a plank of wood, but at least they had a roof over their head.
After several months of hunger and homelessness Riis was in total despair. One cold and rainy night, he sat at the river’s edge and began to contemplate suicide. After all he thought, no one would notice and no one would care. Then, as he later wrote in his autobiography The Making of an American (1901), a little dog who had befriended him the day before and had followed him around ever since, "crept upon my knees and licked my face…and the love of the little beast thawed the icicles in my heart." Well, at least the little dog cared about him. The little dog’s affection lifted his spirits enough so that he was able to go on.
Later that night, Riis was forced by the cold to take refuge in a police lodging house. He tried to sneak the little dog in under his coat, but the desk sergeant saw and made him put it outside. As he slept, Riis was robbed of a small gold locket that he had saved and treasured as a memento from home. He complained to the desk sergeant who got very angry, accused Riis of being a liar, and ordered one of his officers to throw him out.
The little dog had been waiting outside the door all night. When he saw Riis being pushed out the door by the policeman, he bit the officer on the leg. The policeman grabbed the dog and smashed his head against the steps.
This incident could have been the thing that finally pushed Riis over the edge, but instead it transformed his despair into anger. He vowed that somehow he would find a way to avenge the death of that little dog. Soon thereafter he began writing a book he called Hard Times.
His "hard times" continued for a while, but one day his life was changed forever when an acquaintance who ran a telegraph school told him about a job. He said a man who ran a news agency was looking for a "bright young fellow whom he could break in" and offered to write a letter of introduction for him.
Riis was hired by the agency and soon demonstrated a talent for writing. Then he acquired a camera and taught himself photography. By 1877, his reputation had grown so that he was hired as a police reporter for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press. His beat was Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street, one of the worst slums in the city. In 1887, he read about the invention of the magnesium flash and he was one of the first photographers to use flash powder. That enabled him to photograph the tenement interiors and the streets and back alleys of the slums at night. In 1888, Riis left the Tribune and was hired as a photo journalist by the New York Evening Sun where he began his crusade in earnest to publicize the plight of the poor.
Riis’ work while at the Sun and his first book, How the Other Half Lives; Studies Among the Tenements of New York, published in 1890, were an international sensation. His evocative writing coupled with his revealing photographs were a powerful indictment of society’s indifference to the plight of the poor.
Riis was an advocate for the immigrant poor, the oppressed, the exploited, and the downtrodden. He wrote that the poor were victims of economic slavery and that they were the "victims rather than the makers of their fate." He also believed that poverty and misfortune were responsible for criminal behavior. He blamed much of the misery and crime present in the slums on the greed of landlords and building speculators. Riis called it "premeditated murder as large-scale economic speculation." His reporting inspired shock and horror among New York’s rich and middle classes.
His book also captured the interest of the New York Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, who would later become governor and then the 26th president of the United States. Riis took Roosevelt with him on his forays into the dark corners of the city. When Roosevelt became governor he closed down the police lodging houses, and led the fight to enact many reforms. Roosevelt called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York."
Riis continued to write and lecture on the problems of the poor for the rest of his life. He wrote several other books; including Children of the Poor (1892), Out of Mulberry Street (1898), The Battle With the Slum (1902), Children of the Tenement (1903), and his autobiography, The Making of an American (1901).
Riis conducted "magic lantern" shows in cities all over America, where he projected his photos onto a large screen. One newspaper reported, "His viewers moaned, shuddered, fainted and even talked to the photographs he projected, reacting to the slides not as images, but as a reality that transported the New York slum world directly into the lecture hall."
Jacob Riis has been credited with precipitating many of the reforms that improved the living conditions of the poor during what is now known as the Progressive Era. Health and sanitation laws were passed and enforced. Landlords were forced to make repairs and improvements. Laws were passed requiring modern improvements to new residential construction. The Mulberry Bend slums were eventually razed, largely due to his efforts. He also started the Tenement House Commission and the Jacob A. Riis Settlement House. He died in Barrie, Massachusetts, on May 26, 1914, known as the "Emancipator of the Slums."
1k. The Progressive Party and Rural Change
The Progressive Party and Rural Change:
At the end of the 19th century, about a third of Americans worked in agriculture, compared to only about four percent today. After the Civil War, drought, plagues of grasshoppers, boll weevils, rising costs, falling prices, and high interest rates made it increasingly difficult to make a living as a farmer. In the South, one third of all landholdings were operated by tenants. Approximately 75 percent of African American farmers and 25 percent of white farmers tilled land owned by someone else.
Every year, the prices farmers received for their crops seemed to fall. Corn fell from 41 cents a bushel in 1874 to 30 cents by 1897. Farmers made less money planting 24 million acres of cotton in 1894 than they did planting 9 million acres in 1873. Facing high interests rates of upwards of 10 percent a year, many farmers found it impossible to pay off their debts. Farmers who could afford to mechanize their operations and purchase additional land could successfully compete, but smaller, more poorly financed farmers, working on small plots marginal land, struggled to survive.
Many farmers blamed railroad owners, grain elevator operators, land monopolists, commodity futures dealers, mortgage companies, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of farm equipment for their plight. Many attributed their problems to discriminatory railroad rates, monopoly prices charged for farm machinery and fertilizer, an oppressively high tariff, an unfair tax structure, an inflexible banking system, political corruption, corporations that bought up huge tracks of land. They considered themselves to be subservient to the industrial Northeast, where three-quarters of the nation's industry was located. They criticized a deflationary monetary policy based on the gold standard that benefited bankers and other creditors.
All of these problems were compounded by the fact that increasing productivity in agriculture led to price declines. In the 1870s, 190 million new acres were put under cultivation. By 1880, settlement was moving into the semi-arid plains. At the same time, transportation improvements meant that American farmers faced competitors from Egypt to Australia in the struggle for markets.
The Populist Party:
A little more than a century ago, a grassroots political movement arose among small farmers in the country's wheat, corn, and cotton fields to fight banks, big corporations, railroads, and other "moneyed interests." The movement burned brightly from 1889 to 1896, before fading out. Nevertheless, this movement fundamentally changed American politics.
The Populist movement grew out of earlier movements that had emerged among southern and western farmers, such as the Grangers, the Greenbackers, and the Northern, Southern, and Colored Farmers Alliances. As early as the 1870s, some farmers had begun to demand lower railroad rates. They also argued that business and the wealthy--and not land--should bear the burden of taxation.
Populists were especially concerned about the high cost of money. Farmers required capital to purchase agricultural equipment and land. They needed credit to buy supplies and to store their crops in grain elevators and warehouses. At the time, loans for the supplies to raise a crop ranged from 40 percent to 345 percent a year. The Populists asked why there was no more money in circulation in the United States in 1890 than in 1865, when the economy was far smaller, and why New York bankers controlled the nation's money supply.
After nearly two decades of falling crop prices, and angered by the unresponsiveness of two political parties they regarded as corrupt, dirt farmers rebelled. In 1891, a Kansas lawyer named David Overmeyer called these rebels Populists. They formed a third national political party and rallied behind leaders like Mary Lease, who said that farmers should raise more hell and less corn. The Populists spread their message from 150 newspapers in Kansas alone.
Populist leaders called on the people to rise up, seize the reins of government, and tame the power of the wealthy and privileged. Populist orators venerated farmers and laborers as the true producers of wealth and reviled blood-sucking plutocrats. Tom Watson of Georgia accused the Democrats of sacrificing "the liberty and prosperity of the country...to Plutocratic greed," and the Republicans of doing the wishes of "monopolists, gamblers, gigantic corporations, bondholders, [and] bankers. The Populists accused big business of corrupting democracy and said that businessmen had little concern for the average American "except as raw material served up for the twin gods of production and profit." The Populists blamed a protective tariff raised prices by keeping affordable foreign goods out of the country.
The party's platform endorsed labor unions, decried long work hours, and championed the graduated income tax as a way to redistribute wealth from business to farmers and laborers. The party also called for an end to court injunctions against labor unions. "The fruits of the toil of millions," the Party declared in 1892, "are boldly stolen to build up the fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind." The Populists also called for a secret ballot; women's suffrage; an eight-hour workday, direct election of U.S. Senators and the President and Vice President; and initiative and recall to make the political system more responsive to the people.
The party put aside moral issues like prohibition in order to focus on economic issues. "The issue," said one Populist, "is not whether a man shall be permitted to drink but whether he shall have a home to go home to, drunk or sober." A significant number of Populists were also willing to overcome racial divisions. As one leader put it, "The problem is poverty, not race."
In the 1892 presidential election, Populist candidate James Weaver of Iowa received a million votes and 22 electoral votes. Five Populist Senators and ten Representatives were elected, along with three governors, and 1,500 state and county officials.
The Populists embraced government regulation to get out from the domination of unregulated big business. The platform demanded government ownership of railroads, natural resources, and telephone and telegraph systems. Even more radically, some Populists called for a coalition of poor white and poor black farmers.
Populism had an unsavory side. The Populists had a tendency toward paranoia and overblown rhetoric. They considered Wall Street an enemy. Many Populists were hostile toward foreigners and saw sinister plots against liberty and opportunity. The party's 1892 platform described "a vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world." After their crusade failed, the embittered Georgia Populist Tom Watson denounced Jews, Catholics, and African Americans with the same heated rhetoric he once reserved for "plutocrats."
But in the early 20th century, many of the Populist proposals would be enacted into law, including the secret ballot; women's suffrage; the initiative, referendum, and recall; a Federal Reserve System; farm cooperatives, government warehouses; railroad regulation; and conservation of public lands.
The Populist Party and the Currency Debate:
Bimetallism is a monetary system in which two metals (usually gold and silver) form the standard in which the unit of value is expressed. From 1792 until the Civil War, the United States, with a few brief exceptions, was on a bimetallic standard. Early in the Civil War, the country turned to a paper money standard called "greenbacks." The value of greenbacks fell consistently following the war.
In 1873, the United States went exclusively on the gold standard. The currency laws of the federal government were revised and codified. The standard silver dollar was dropped from the list of coins authorized by law for minting.
When the American economy fluctuated from the mid-1870s to the early 1890s, farmers, laborers, and others with modest incomes were the hardest hit. They became a large voting bloc seeking economic relief, and they blamed economic hard times on a low money supply and the switch from bimetallism to the gold standard. Politicians took up the cause of bimetallism and free silver. "Free silver" was a slogan representing the desire for unlimited coinage of silver by the U.S. government for anyone bringing the metal into the U.S. Mint.
The grassroots support for bimetallism and free silver grew into the Populist movement and peaked during the 1890s. The Populist Party (also called the People's Party) nominated former U.S. representative James B. Weaver of Iowa as its presidential candidate in 1892. Weaver collected over a million votes in the 1892 election (of about twelve million cast) and won twenty-two electoral votes. However, Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected (he had previously been president from 1885 to 1889) and refused to veer from the gold standard.
When a depression hit the United States in 1893, the Populist movement grew stronger. William Jennings Bryan, the 1896 Democratic Party candidate, embraced the unlimited coinage of silver in his famous "Cross of Gold" speech. Speaking to those who supported currency backed only by gold, primarily Republicans, Bryan proclaimed, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Populists embraced Bryan, but he lost a close election to William McKinley in 1896 and lost again to McKinley in 1900.
Bimetallism faded as an issue with the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which declared the gold dollar "shall be the standard unit of value, and all forms of money issued or coined by the United States shall be maintained at a parity of value with this standard and it shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to maintain such parity."
How do you create a Political Party?
- You must have a group of people who all have a common goal or set of goals.
- These goals are called your platform.
- Each governmental philosophy such as- Bimetallism, Safer Working Environments in Factories, or Women’s Suffrage- is a plank in your platform.
- You need to write down your parties philosophies, so that questions can be answered for people who are interested in your party, and find someone who can speak about your parties principals to help your numbers grow.
- You must gather money.
- Parties are useless without people in positions of political power.
- A political party helps fund candidates so they can run for government office and make the changes listed in your platform.
- You must register your political party with each state. This includes a fee and paperwork for each state.
Populist Achievements: Populist sought the following:
- Elimination of the gold standard. Populists supported the Silver Standards which would have made money cheaper and more available. This would have created inflationary pressure and raised prices. If a silver standard would not be accepted they would have settled for bimetallism.
- This will fail and the Gold Standard will remain in place.
- Passage of an income tax.
- Originally the Farmers wanted a graduated income tax which taxed the rich higher than the poor.
- This was unsuccessful and resulted in the system we currently have today.
- The end of life tenure of Federal Judges.
- This will fail and Supreme Court and Federal Judges continue to have unlimited tenure in their respective courts.
- The end of the printing of paper currency by nationally chartered private banks.
- Debatably successful—with the introduction of the Federal Reserve System.
The Populist Party did not achieve all of their goals, the nation remained on the gold standard until 1933, but they did get considerable recognition as a viable political force. By 1911 the new Federal Reserve System took over the printing of money. An income tax was indeed passed. Perhaps most importantly they proved that a third party could influence national politics and generate legislation.
THE DECLINE OF LABOR UNIONS
With its victories during this period, however, organized labor experienced several serious defeats. One of the worst setbacks for the trade union movement was the failure of the strike of iron and steel workers in 1919. Despite the fundamental importance of the iron and steel industry in the national economy, no significant effort to organize its workers had been made before 1918, when the AFL set up the National Committee for the Organization of the Iron and Steel Industry. The campaign to organize this industry was remarkably successful; the workers, many of whom worked 12 hours a day and 7 days a week, welcomed the advent of unionism. The iron and steel companies refused to bargain with the union, however, and discharged large numbers of union members. An industry-wide strike was called in September 1919. It involved almost 370,000 workers, one of the largest strikes in U.S. history. Both the intransigency of the employers and the disunity among the strikers, whose ranks were divided by splits between skilled and unskilled workers, between the native-born and the foreign-born, and between various groups of the foreign-born, forced the workers to abandon the strike without winning concessions from the employers. As a result, the iron and steel industry remained an open-shop industry, that is, one in which union membership is not obligatory, for almost two decades.
The trade union movement declined during the 1920s. A major influence in the decline was the severe postwar depression of 1921-1922. Unemployment rose steeply, and so desperate was competition for the available jobs that the unions in many industries were unable to prevent wage reductions and speedup methods, that is, methods by which workers are forced to work faster, or to produce more than they did previously in a certain period of time. Employment in certain industries continued to decline even after the return of general prosperity. The decline caused drastic losses of membership in many unions, including those of the coal miners, metal miners, and garment workers. The garment-trades unions were particularly hard hit also by bitter struggles for power between Communist and anti-Communist elements. The limited outlook of most trade union leaders during this period also weakened the labor movement. Although in 1924 the AFL endorsed the American political leader Robert M. La Follette as the presidential candidate of the League for Progressive Political Action, this move was an exception to the federation's general policy of refusing to endorse candidates. A more serious result of the conservatism of the AFL leadership was that it made no real effort to organize the unskilled and semiskilled workers in the mass production industries; because these industries, which expanded substantially during the 1920s, were not suited to the craft union type of organization, the AFL would have been required to revise fundamentally its principles before embarking on a unionization campaign. The conservative craft-unionist leadership of the AFL was unwilling to consider revision of its principles.
Taking advantage of the weaknesses of American trade unionism, many employers acted vigorously to forestall organization of their employees. Among other measures, they moved their establishments to areas lacking trade union traditions; abrogated existing collective bargaining agreements and refused to conclude new ones; required their employees to sign so-called yellow-dog contracts binding them not to join unions and induced them to join instead company-controlled employee associations; and engaged in paternalistic practices, such as the establishment of health and welfare plans, as a means of making unionism seem less desirable. For these and other reasons, union membership dropped from the peak of 5.1 million reached in 1920 to fewer than 3.5 million in 1929. During the same period membership in company-sponsored employee associations rose from an insignificant number to about 1.5 million.
The cataclysmic economic depression of the 1930s led to a tremendous rise in unemployment and to a corresponding further decline in union membership. The unions, attempting to offset the adverse effects of the depression on wages and working conditions, launched numerous strikes, but few were successful. The widespread use of the injunction by employers contributed to the defeats sustained by labor. In 1932 Congress, coming to the aid of the unions, enacted the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act, which banned yellow-dog contracts and curtailed the use of injunctions far more effectively than had the Clayton Act of 1914. The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act proved to be the forerunner of the large body of prolabor legislation enacted after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932.
1L. AMERICAN POLICIES FOR IMPERIALISM
Nearly 20 years after the Civil War ended, the United States moved into an era known as the Gilded Age. This period began in the 1870s and lasted until around the turn of the century.
During this time, the United States became isolationist, meaning that as a country, the US isolated itself and tried to avoid engaging in trade, wars, or other affairs with different countries. As the Gilded Age progressed, however, American politicians came to believe that the country was losing ground in a global land-grab in what is known as the Age of Imperialism.
Imperialism occurs when a powerful country decides to spread its influence, usually through military force, threats, or coercion over a country or region that is not as powerful. Today, imperialism is often viewed as morally wrong. At the time however, imperialism seemed necessary for countries to gain natural resources and markets for goods.
A series of American presidents each had their own views on imperialism and plans for how to best exert America's influence on the world.
One of the earliest examples of an imperialist policy comes from William McKinley’s presidency. In 1899, President McKinley’s Secretary of State John Hay helped to develop the Open Door Policy, which stated that trade with China should be open to all countries.
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This policy was created to prevent a monopoly over the trade with China. China was a massive market for selling goods. The US wanted to be sure that China wouldn't shut the US out or that another country would not establish a monopoly on trade in China.
McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and his Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was sworn into office. Roosevelt is known for being a bit more bullish when it comes to foreign policy, or the ideas and decisions one country makes in dealing with other countries.
Roosevelt liked the idea of increasing America’s influence and power in the world. He wanted to flex American muscle around the world. His ideas would be summed up as the Big Stick Policy, the idea that the U.S. should “speak softly but carry a big stick.”
This meant that while he promoted peace (the “speak softly” part), he also encouraged the U.S. to use force and “police” power to defend what was important to them if necessary.
President William Howard Taft, who served from 1909-1913, was not as militant as President Roosevelt. Taft believed that good foreign relations between countries meant helping other countries to become stable and strong.
If the United States had robust countries to trade with, then that would in turn help the U.S. economically. He developed what is remembered as Dollar Diplomacy. This policy stated that the US would guarantee loans made to foreign countries to promote their development. Taft hoped that this would strengthen the economic power of the United States and promote trade in Latin America.
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When Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, he cancelled Dollar Diplomacy and began a policy of Moral/Mission Diplomacy. Wilson’s policy gave support to countries who shared the same belief system as the United States as well as countries who, like America, had a democratic system of government. It also meant that the U.S. would not recognize or support any Latin American government that was not democratic.
1M. TIMELINE OF THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM
The idea of American Imperialism is one that began to grow at the end of the 19th century,. The United States looked to expand its political, social, and economic influence to other territories and countries. This was accomplished through a period of land acquisition and conflict.
One of the first acts of American imperialism was the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its Queen Liliuokalani. American business leaders first forced her to sign a "Bayonet Constitution" then later staged a coup and took over the kingdom in 1893. Liliuokalani was placed under house arrest and the US later annexed the Hawaiian islands in summer 1898.
April of 1898 saw the beginning of the Spanish-American War. The United States went to war with Spain for several reasons. One, revolts in Cuba against Spanish rule were growing. Yellow journalism stoked a public outcry against the Spanish. When the USS Maine, a Navy ship stationed off the coast of Cuba, blew up in February of 1898, it was blamed on the Spanish and America declared war.
The war was primarily fought in the Philippines and in Cuba, both Spanish colonies. The entire conflict lasted just four months and the United States was victorious. As a result, America gained possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
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The Boxer Rebellion of 1899 was an anti-imperialist and anti-foreign uprising that took place in China, and lasted until 1901.
The Boxers were rebels unhappy with the influence foreigners had on their country. The rebellion was an attempt to drive foreigners out, including missionaries, merchants, and diplomats. At first, the Chinese government was indifferent but they came to support the rebels.
America led an Eight-Nation Alliance of 20,000 troops that entered China and suppressed the rebellion. China was divided into spheres of influence, opened for foreign trade, and forced to pay reparations.
After the Spanish-American War ended, the Filipino people thought they would gain independence. However, America decided to annex the islands as a colony. Furious at having supported the US during the war against the Spanish, Filipinos then declared war against America.
Revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo led the uprising of Filipino citizens beginning with the 1899 Battle of Manila.
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The Philippine-American War lasted until 1902, with an American victory. However, Moro rebels and others would continue fighting for years and the Philippines would not be formally recognized as their own Commonwealth until 1935. Full recognition of independence finally came in 1946.
In 1901, the US issued the Platt Amendment, a treaty signed by the US and Cuba. It affirmed that the United States would offer Cuba protection against foreign invasions and threats to Cuban independence. America was given a base in Cuba to oversee this protection.
By entering into this agreement, Cuba was limited in its right as a country to sign and form treaties with other countries, and therefore, their freedom and independence were limited.
The Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, named for President Theodore Roosevelt, was an addendum to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The purpose of the Corollary was to let Europe know that America would protect not only itself, but other countries who might require intervention.
Though many Americans supported this move, there were countries around the world who did not. Namely, Latin American countries did not look favorably upon the Corollary, as they thought it gave the US too much of a military presence around the world. This Corollary helped to establish the US as a global “police” power.
Theodore Roosevelt maneuvered to have America take over construction of the Panama Canal in 1904. In the interest of establishing a passageway for trade, the canal cut across the country of Panama to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean.
An exceptionally difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming project, the 51-mile canal eventually opened 10 years later in August of 1914.
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