Progressive Era Mindmap

Progressive Era Mindmap

1. Working conditions were extremely dangerous and could be life threatening at times. Combined with low wages and long hours it made a deadly combination for workers around the United States.

   • Immigrant living conditions were just as bad as working conditions. Many lived in slums and struggled with extreme poverty.
     • In 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel dramatizing the experiences of a Lithuanian immigrant family who moved to Chicago to work in the stockyards. Although Sinclair intended the novel to reveal the brutal exploitation of labor in the meatpacking industry, and thus to build support for the socialist movement, its major impact was to lay bare the entire process of industrialized food production.
   • Big business and monopolies expanded and troubled the legal system. "Individual states naturally regulated industry and commerce. Extensive railroad routes crossed several state lines and new mass-producing corporations operated across the nation, raising questions about where the authority to regulate such practices rested. During the 1870s, many states passed laws to check the growing power of vast new corporations."
   • In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city’s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty.

2. Progressive environmentalism brought reformers to advocate for Americas protection during industrialization. Settlement house workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley focused on questions of health and sanitation, while activists concerned with working conditions, most notably Dr. Alice Hamilton, investigated both worksite hazards and occupational and bodily harm.

   • Women's groups advocated for environmentalism and the protection of birds for fashion. Pressure created national wildlife refuges and key laws and regulations that included the Lacey Act of 1900, banning the shipment of species killed illegally across state lines.
   • John Muir, a naturalist, a writer, and founder of the Sierra Club, invoked the “God of the Mountains” in his defense of the valley in its supposedly pristine condition.
     • Gifford Pinchot, arguably the father of American forestry and a key player in the federal management of national forests, meanwhile emphasized what he understood to be the purpose of conservation: “to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people.”

3. Women's clubs flourished in the late 19th century. Many clubs were segregated at this time but nonetheless still produced vibrant organizations that could promise racial uplift and civil rights for all black citizens as well as equal rights for women.

   • Reform came to many groups but did not come for black citizens. Jim Crow laws restricted and segregated southern African Americans.
     • Booker T Washington: vied for leadership among African American activists, resulting in years of intense rivalry and debated strategies for the uplifting of black Americans. He later established the Tuskeegee Institute.
   • The Hull House (1889) was created by activist and social worker Jane Addams and her partner Ellen Gates. The Hull House ran a nursery and kindergarten, held social/cultural events, and led classes for parents.
     • The 19th amendment (1920) allowed omen to vote by prohibiting states from denying someone the right to vote based on sex.
   • Led by Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party took to the streets to demand voting rights, organizing marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Beginning in January 1917, National Woman’s Party members also began to picket the White House, an action that led to the arrest and imprisonment of over 150 women.

4. Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Sympathetic to both business and labor, Roosevelt avoided labor strife, most notably negotiating a settlement to the great Coal Strike of 1902. He vigorously promoted the conservation movement, emphasizing efficient use of natural resources. He dramatically expanded the system of national parks and national forests.

   • William Howard Taft (1909-1913): firmly believed in court-oriented trust-busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt’s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.
     • Woodrow Wilson: declared his support for the women’s suffrage amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote.

5. Sherman Antitrust (1890): aimed to limit anticompetitive practices, such as those institutionalized in cartels and monopolistic corporations. It stated that a “trust . . . or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce . . . is declared to be illegal” and that those who “monopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce . . . shall be deemed guilty.”

   • Clayton Antitrust Act 1914: substantially enhanced the Sherman Act, specifically regulating mergers and price discrimination and protecting labor’s access to collective bargaining and related strategies of picketing, boycotting, and protesting.
     • Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act 1906: The growing invisibility of slaughterhouses and livestock production for urban consumers had enabled unsanitary and unsafe conditions. “The slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors,” wrote Sinclair, “like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.”