Chapter 20 Review

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Progressive Era: A period between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the World War I when political reformers focused on four main goals: cleaning up politics, limiting the power of big business, reducing poverty, and promoting social justice.

Gilded Age: A term invented in the 1920s describing the late nineteenth century as a period of ostentatious displays of wealth, growing poverty, and government inaction in the face of income inequality. The Age was followed by the Progressive Era in which citizens mobilized for reform. The line between the two is unclear.

Historians generally agree that the era after 1900 brought about more laws to address industrial poverty, working conditions, and the power of monopolies and trusts.

Mugwumps: A late-nineteenth-century branch of reform-minded Republicans who left their party in 1884 to support Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland. Many Mugwumps were classical liberals who denounced corruption and advocated a reduction in government powers and civil service reform.

Sherman Antitrust Act: Landmark 1890 act that forbade anticompetitive business activities, requiring the federal government to investigate trusts and any companies operating in violation of the act.

Populists: In 1890, the Kansas Farmers' Alliance joined with the Knights of Labor to create a People's Party, later renamed the Populists.

free silver: The platform to loosen money supply by expanding federal coinage to include silver as well as gold, free because, under this plan, the U.S. Mint would not charge a fee for minting silver coins.

Solid South: The post-Reconstruction goal--achieved by the early twentieth century--of almost complete electoral control of the South by the Democratic party.

William Jennings Bryan: The Democratic presidential nominee in 1896. He advocated free silver, defended farmers, and called for a federal income tax on the wealthy that would replace tariffs as a source of revenue.

Lochner v. New York: A 1905 Supreme Court ruling that New York State could not limit bakers' workday to ten hours because that violated bakers' rights to make contracts.

Theodore Roosevelt: Vice president to William McKinney. He was sworn into office in 1901 after McKinney was assassinated. A Republican, he called for vigorous reform, investigated big business, attacked trusts, created three national parks under the Antiquities Act. He led his followers into what became known as the Progressive Party when Taft won the Republican nomination in the election of 1912.

Muller v. Oregon: A 1908 Supreme Court case that upheld an Oregon law limiting women's workday to ten hours, based on the need to protect women's health for motherhood. Muller complicated the earlier decision in Lochner v. New York, laying out grounds on which states could intervene to protect workers. It divided women's rights activists, however, because some saw its provisions as discriminatory.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Founder of the American Railway Union (ARU) in the 1890s. In 1901, he launched the Socialist Party of America.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): An organization founded in 1910 by leading african American reformers and white allies as a vehicle for adopting equal right for African Americans, especially through the courts.

Industrial Workers of the World: An umbrella union and radical political group founded 1905, dedicated to organizing unskilled workers to oppose capitalism. Nicknames the Wobblies, it advocated direct action by workers, including sabotage and general strikes.

Eugene Debs:

Woodrow Wilson:

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capitalism: An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.