Social Justice and Social Control: Reading the Progressive Era
Fall 2005
Topic: The Progressive Era
Question:
How do conflicts around social reform and public policy during the Progressive Era (roughly 1880-1920) reveal differing visions of "progress" held by diverse kinds of Americans?
The Fall 2005 book discussion groups will focus on the Progressive Era, approximately 1880-1920. During this period, a tremendous variety of reform movements swept across the length and breadth of America, in response to rapid industrialization, increasing urbanization, growing concentration of wealth, and massive immigration, especially from southern and central Europe. But reform was complex and double-edged, often motivated by a mixture of idealism and fear. What historians call Progressivism was shaped by concerns for both social justice and social control.
Background Essays and Timelines
Session 1: Overview
Adult Non-Fiction
Richard L. McCormick, Public Life in Industrial America, 1877-1917 [1997 2nd ed. of AHA New American History series]
Primary Sources
Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889)
Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements” (1893)
Frederick Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management” (1911)
Internet Resources
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Module 14, Progressivism
This highly acclaimed organization maintains an excellent all-around website specifically oriented to teachers. All of the learning modules provide guided readings, primary documents, learning tools and lesson plans, visual aids, timelines, and additional resources (including more websites). Module 14 is the place to begin for a comprehensive introduction to the Progressive Era.
Pluralism and Unity
This website presents a wide array of materials that explore "the struggle between the two visions" of pluralism and unity in early 20th-century American thought and life. Organized around the questions: What is an American? Who gets to say what an American is? What is un-American? When did Americans become Americans? Where is the center of American identity? The site is arranged into six major sections: "The Idea of Pluralism," "The Idea of Internationalism," "Culture and Pluralism," "Labor and Pluralism," "Race and Pluralism," and "Gender and Pluralism." Features brief biographies and writings of many important figures of the era. The "Concepts" sections provide broader links to major sites on such topics as politics, culture, sociology, religion, economics, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, NAACP, KKK, and modernism.
Supplemental Readings
Michael McGerr. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (Free Press, 2003).
McGerr's interpretation of the Progressive Era stresses the role of the middle class as the fount of most progressive activity. He locates this activity in the emergence of a new set of middle-class values about the relationships between the individual and society, gender roles and domesticity, and work and pleasure, set in opposition to prevailing values of wealthy elites and working-class families and rooted in part, in middle-class unease about its own prosperity and the dominant ideology of individualism in America. McGerr also examines how these new values demanded that middle-class reformers remake not just themselves, but the wider world around them, in an effort to halt the conflicts and tensions of an industrializing nation. Liberally illustrated with quotes from scores of these reformers themselves, the book at once offers a clear window into the characteristic Progressive mindset, but also effectively portrays the Progressive movement as more like a jazz band than a symphony.
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Harvard University Press, 1991).
Dawley's interpretation of the Progressive Era focuses on the imbalance between the demands of an emerging urban, industrial, culturally diverse society and structures of state rooted in the needs and features of a more homogeneous agrarian society. His central thesis is that "The crux of American history in the early twentieth century lay in the reckoning between a dynamic society and the existing liberal state. . . [T]he combination of acute emergencies and long-term social change subjected the liberal governing system to intolerable pressures." In this vein, an important aspect of Dawley's analysis considers the changing meanings of liberalism from the late 19th century through the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Session 2: Inventing Wilderness: The Conservation Movement
Adult Non-Fiction
Theodore Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, chapter 9, “Conservation Reconsidered” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
Primary Sources
Theodore Roosevelt,
The Strenuous Life (1899)
John Muir on the Hetch Hetchy dam
Gifford Pinchot's
testimony on the dam
Internet Resources
American Memory
The Library of Congress's American Memory project offers a fantastic, wide-ranging archive of documents and images about many subjects of relevance to reading the Progressive Era (as well as the rest of U.S. history); it is fully searchable and easy to use. One collection of particular relevance to this book study session is:
Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
It includes an excellent overview, lots of references, concise document summaries, and full-text facsimile reproductions of visual and printed materials.
Supplemental Readings
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2001).
As Karl Jacoby notes, an aspect of the conservation movement not usually considered is that the creation of new environmental laws also meant the creation of new environmental crimes. His "hidden history of conservation" examines the impact of the new environmental regime of the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the rural people (including Native Americans) who lived within or near the areas turned into national parks and forests and customarily used them for subsistence purposes (hunting and fishing, livestock grazing, harvesting timber and wild plants). Jacoby focuses on three case studies-the Adirondack forest, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon-and presents an enlightening alternative perspective on the conservation ethos that reveals another paradox of Progressive Era reform.
Robert W. Righter, The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).
This freshly minted monograph provides a full, nuanced analysis of the Hetch Hetchy controversy. Righter reaches some surprising conclusions, among them, that the conflict between the Muir camp and the Pinchot camp was not about "wilderness" but rather about appropriate development; and that the more significant battle had to do with municipal control of electric power vs. private utilities. Read this book to gain a deeper understanding of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of this seminal episode in American history.
Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002).
As you know from reading chapter 9, Steinberg's provocative book places nature itself and environmental factors at the center of historical analysis. This kind of environmental history can be seen as an outgrowth of the development of environmental consciousness that first gained broad public influence in the U.S. during the Progressive Era. In addition to chapter 9, chapters 4, 7, 8, 10, and 11 are the ones most relevant to Progressive Era themes.
Session 3: Struggle and Disaster: Business and Labor in the Progressive Era
Adult Non-Fiction
David von Drehle, Triangle, the Fire that Saved America (Gove Press, 2004)
Juvenile Fiction
Mary Jane Auch, Ashes of Roses (Laurel Leaf, 2004)
Internet Resources
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
While the narrative of the strike, fire, and aftermath will be familiar to readers of David Von Drehle's book, each section contains a superb set of embedded links to photographs, audio clips, and full-text documents that further illuminate the historical context of this tragic and pivotal event.
Child Labor in the United States
This site offers a classroom activity based on links to websites displaying Lewis Hine's famous photographs of child laborers (1908-1912), and an exhibit about Southern mill towns (www.ibiblio.org/sohp/scholarship/bamberger/bamberger_closing.html).
Supplemental Readings
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, 1977).
Chandler's classic tells the story of how corporations evolved and became the dominant organizations in the American economy. More than simply a history of businesses and industries, this book clearly explains the emergence of the mass distribution, mass production, and mass consumption as central features of modern life.
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Zunz's work offers a nice complement to Chandler's Visible Hand, as it focuses on the people who made the corporations. Fundamentally a work of social history, this book has been called "a collective biography of middle-level managers and engineers," and it uses that approach to illuminate questions about how the middle class changed with the rise of corporations, and how they in turn shaped the corporate workplace and corporate cultures. Zunz also examines a variety of growth strategies used by American businesses during these critical turn-of-the-century years.
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
This book continues to stand as the best study of the American labor movement "from the time American workers organized the first tentative but recognizable trade unions, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence of the working class as an insurrectionary force during the first two decades of the twentieth century, to its humiliating defeat in the years following the first world war" (review by Barbara Ehrenreich). Montgomery supplies tremendous and fascinating detail about the labor process across the spectrum of the American economy, working-class life and communities, the ebb and flow of organizations, and the concerted efforts of capitalists to appropriate workers' knowledge and skills and integrate them into the managerial bureaucracies of modern corporations. Sets the stage for the more militant phase of mass-production unionism spearheaded by the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.
Session 4: Shaping the Ideal American
Adult Non-Fiction
Nancy Gallagher, Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green
Mountain State (University Press of New England, 1999)
Juvenile Fiction
Joseph Bruchac, Hidden Roots (Scholastic Press, 2004)
Primary Source
Eugenics Survey of Vermont, IQ Tests and Field Studies
Internet Resources
Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History
This well-conceived website contains a great selection of documents from the archives of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont compiled by survey director, Henry F. Perkins. Explore the primary sources that Nancy Gallagher relied on in writing Breeding Better Vermonters. The accompanying narrative provides an excellent overview of the early- and mid-20th-century eugenics project in Vermont, and nationally.
The Native American Experience
This set of websites illustrates and documents the experiences of Native Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, after removal and allotment and before the reforms of the "Indian New Deal."
The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced. Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians in popular culture. View more than 2,000 photographs at
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html (also has interpretive essays).
The Native American Documents Project provides numerous documents that describe federal Indian policy in this era, including key legislation, government reports, and statistics: http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/nadp.htm
Indian Boarding Schools: Civilizing the Native Spirit
A teaching unit, complete with lesson plans. In particular, see the Resources Page, which links to a wide variety of primary sources, including "Kill the Indian, and Save the Man": Capt. Richard C. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929. For other views see, "We Didn't Have Flies Until the White Man Came": A Yankton Sioux Remembers Life on the Plains in the Late 19th century: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/83; "The White Man's Road is Easier!": A Hidatsa Indian Takes up the Ways of the White Man in the Late 19th century: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/90
Native American resistance to oppression was epitomized by the Ghost Dance movement on the Plains, which culminated in the Wounded Knee Massacre that effectively ended the 19th-century Indian Wars. For an overview of this episode and some primary sources, see: www.bgsu.edu/departments/acs/1890s/woundedknee/WKghost.html
Supplemental Readings
Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
A history of the campaign in the United States to assimilate America's natives by forcing them to conform to the majority's culture, and how the meaning of assimilation changed over time. Hoxie examines this effort against the background of rapid immigration and industrialization, continued westward expansion, contemporary social science and popular culture, and national politics, policymaking, and court cases. He demonstrates how attitudes and policy toward Native Americans were at first propelled by the widespread belief that social evolution leads toward enlightened "civilization," and then how that consensus disintegrated by 1920. Examining land cessions and dispossession, federal Indian schools, and the concept of citizenship, he argues that the twists and turns in the policy of forced assimilation served the needs of and united diverse interest groups in white America.
Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Bedford/St. Martins, 2001).
A small primary source collection that documents the Native American response to white American society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book begins with an essay by Hoxie on "American Indian Activism in the Progressive Era," and he provides brief contextual introductions to each section and document excerpt. Also includes study questions and a chronology from 1890-1928.
Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (The Free Press, 1983).
This is a very good introductory survey of the history of immigration to the U.S. Beyond explaining these vast demographic movements (using the push-pull model of causal factors), Archdeacon's narrative centers around the interplay between assimilation and acculturation in America. Chapters are thematic as well as chronological. Has useful charts and tables.
Jodi Picoult, Second Glance (Washington Square Press, 2003).
Second Glance is an engrossing novel that has the eugenics project in Vermont at its core, the author drawing on both the archives and Nancy Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters. Part ghost story, part love story, part murder mystery, it's a great read that effectively imagines the emotions, attitudes, and experiences of people who were caught up in the eugenics fervor, as either advocates or victims. Picoult is a local best-selling novelist (she lives in Hanover, NH).
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