Progressives

1
Progressives

• Social Reform
• Education
• Womens right to vote
• Prohibition
• Minorities

2
John Dewey (1859-1952).

• John Dewey
• - important American philosopher and educator,
• - Rejected rote learning
• - learn by doing rather than just by reading.

3
Rural one-room sod school house, Decatur, Kansas.

• Schoolhouses such as this Decatur, Kansas, rural
  one-room sod school were replaced by consolidated
  school districts and graded classes as John
  Deweys educational ideas took hold. 1907 photo
  by Joseph H. Young.

4
Carrie Nation (1848-1911), on shipboard.

• Carrie Nation
• evils of alcohol , one of the worst causes of
  poverty
• Became famous in 1900 when she attacked saloons
  with a hatchet
• She was arrested more than 30 times in her
  prohibition campaign.

5

• Prohibition
• laws outlawing the manufacture and sale of
  alcoholic beverages altogether
• Temperance movement
• 18th Amendment to the US Constitution was passed
  in 1919, effective 1920
• Temperance- the belief that alcoholic drinks
  should not be used at all

Governor Peter Norbeck (1870-1936) of South
Dakota signs his state's "bone dry law," February
21, 1917
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Womens Suffrage
Suffrage women should have the right to vote

• The demand for suffrage had been growing
  steadily since the first women's rights meeting
  at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Conflict
  between two rival organizations, the National
  Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman
  Suffrage Association, had ended when they merged
  to become the National American Woman Suffrage
  Association (NAWSA). Between 1904 and 1915, the
  NAWSA undertook a highly successful state and
  local organizational campaign that first sought
  change in individual state laws, then the
  adoption of an amendment to the Constitution to
  win suffrage at the national level.

7

• Opponents of suffrage for women also organized
  nationally. This headquarters of the National
  Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was in
  Washington, D.C., 191-.

8
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947).

• Carrie Chapman Catt, a respected educator and
  long-time suffrage leader, became the president
  of the NAWSA in 1915 and led it into a new period
  of growth. Determined to implement her "Winning
  Plan," she hired lobbyists in Washington, paid
  women organizers to travel throughout the nation
  setting up suffrage groups, and introduced new
  tactics in the struggle such as open-air
  meetings, widespread distribution of suffrage
  leaflets, and suffrage parades.

9
March 3, 1913 suffragists parade, Washington, DC.

• This parade of suffragists, held the day before
  the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson, created a
  national shock when hostile onlookers, unopposed
  by local police, attacked the marchers. In the
  ensuing uproar, the vocal and physical attacks on
  the women brought many who were previously
  neutral into the cause for women's suffrage.

10

• Alice Paul (1885-1977), the organizer of the
  March 1913 parade, advocated a more militant
  approach to the campaign for votes for women than
  did the NAWSA.
• In 1913 she organized the Congressional Union.
• After the outbreak of WWI, with the cooperation
  of women workers whose participation in the war
  effort was increasingly being sought by President
  Wilson, she organized the Woman's Party.

1918 photo
11
In 1917, the members of the Womens Party began
24-hour picketing of the White House, calling on
Wilson to support the vote for women, with picket
signs that read "Democracy Should Begin at Home."

• Paul and her followers were arrested, then
  force-fed in prison when they went on hunger
  strikes to protest their treatment. Although many
  of the more moderate supporters of the NAWSA were
  opposed to such tactics, revulsion against the
  harsh treatment given them did combine with the
  lobbying and organizing tactics of Catt and her
  followers to change Wilson's opinion. In January
  1918 he capitulated, and allowed the Democratic
  leadership in Congress to vote in favor of the
  19th Amendment.

12
Representative Jeanette Rankin (1880-1973). 1915
Harris Ewing photo.

• Jeanette Rankin, who in 1916 was the first woman
  to be elected to Congress, introduced the 19th
  Amendment on the floor of the House of
  Representatives on January 10, 1918 before
  galleries packed with watching women.
• The House passed it by 274 to 136, one vote over
  the necessary two-thirds majority, but Senate
  passage took another year and a half.
• Submitted to the states in June of 1919, the
  constitutional amendment granting women the right
  to vote achieved the required ratification by 36
  states in August 1920 with a vote in the
  Tennessee House, where it passed after intense
  lobbying by suffragist organizations.

13

• The 19th Amendment goes to the states for
  ratification on May 19, 1919, as Speaker of the
  House of Representatives Frederick H. Gillette
  (1851-1935) signs the joint resolution proposing
  to change the constitution to read that "the
  right of citizens of the United States to vote
  shall not be denied or abridged by the United
  States or any State on account of sex." The
  Amendment became a part of the Constitution when
  it was ratified by the 36th state, Tennessee, in
  August 1920 women get the right to vote.

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Minority Problems attempts at reform
15

• African Americans still lived in rural areas of
  the South. sharecropper
• disenfranchised by poll taxes and "grandfather
  clauses," and rigidly segregated by "Jim Crow"
  laws in schools, hotels, hospitals, and other
  public facilities.

16

• An African-American couple photographed in their
  Virginia home in 1900. The newspapers on the
  walls were pasted there to serve as insulation.

17

• African Americans faced increasing violence,
  particularly in the South. Lynchings such as this
  one (in Florida, 1928) were made possible in part
  because the tensions of economic competition
  between poor whites and African Americans
  occurred at a time when the latter had lost the
  protective power of the vote. Between 1900 and
  1914, white mobs murdered more than 1,000
  African-American men and women in barbaric
  executions that became public spectacles.
  Outraged African-American organizations
  unsuccessfully appealed to Congress for federal
  laws against lynching.

18
Booker T. Washington was the foremost black
educator of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. He also had a major influence on
southern race relations and was the dominant
figure in black public affairs from 1895 until
his death in 1915. Washington called for
Negroes to give up higher education and politics
in order to concentrate on gaining industrial
wealth. Though Washington offered little that
was innovative in industrial education, which
both northern philanthropic foundations and
southern leaders were already promoting, he
became its chief black exemplar and spokesman. In
his advocacy of Tuskegee Institute and its
educational method, Washington revealed the
political adroitness and accomodationist
philosophy that were to characterize his career
in the wider arena of race leadership.
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• He convinced southern white employers and
  governors that Tuskegee offered an education that
  would keep blacks "down on the farm" and in the
  trades.
• To prospective northern donors and particularly
  the new self- made millionaires such as
  Rockefeller and Carnegie he promised the
  inculcation of the Protestant work ethic.
• To blacks living within the limited horizons of
  the post- Reconstruction South, Washington held
  out industrial education as the means of escape
  from the web of sharecropping and debt and the
  achievement of attainable, goals of
  self-employment, land-ownership, and small
  business.
• Washington cultivated local white approval and
  secured a small state appropriation, but it was
  northern donations that made Tuskegee Institute
  by 1900 the best-supported black educational
  institution in the country.

20
One of Theodore Roosevelt's first controversial
actions as president was to invite
African-American leader Booker T. Washington to
dine with him privately at the White House in
October 1901. This recognition solidified Booker
T. Washington's control over the limited
political patronage given to African Americans,
and raised an outcry among southern Democrats.
Roosevelt defended his actions, but did not again
openly socialize with Washington or any other
African-American leader.
21
DuBois (1868-1963) had a different prescription
for curing the ills of the black community. He
believed that only though education could blacks
gain status and that Washington's idea promoted
black submission to whites. DuBois' wrote many
books and essays expressing his beliefs about
racial assimilation, cooperation, and the use of
education to end prejudice. DuBois openly broke
with the stance of Booker T. Washington in 1903
with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk.
The Souls of Black Folk was a very popular
analysis of the conflicts blacks were subjected
to in society.
Another great achievement was that of the
formation of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which he
founded along with a number of other black and
white leaders who shared his beliefs in 1909. He
served as director of publicity from 1919-1934.
He was also a consultant to the United Nations
and edited his magazine, Crisis, from 1910 -1932.
By 1914, the NAACP had grown to 50 branches with
6,000 members.
22

• African Americans were not the only minority to
  be ignored by the reformers of the Progressive
  movement. These rural Mexican-Americans,
  photographed on the Texas border, lived in
  poverty much like that of rural African
  Americans. A series of conflicts between Hispanic
  and Anglo residents on both sides of the
  Texas/Mexican border in the late 19th century -
  the "Cart Wars" and the "Salt War" - had left a
  legacy of bitterness and racism that exploded
  against Mexican-Americans just before WWI.
  Between 1915 and 1917, vigilante groups lynched
  about 300 Mexicans in the border area.

23

• The racism that led to the lynchings had another
  dimension in anti-Semitism. The Leo Frank case
  illustrated the violence that underlay much of
  the optimism and change of the Progressive era.
  Frank, a wealthy Cornell University graduate, was
  tried and convicted in 1914 for the murder of an
  employee of the Georgia pencil factory which he
  managed. When the governor of Georgia became
  convinced that the evidence against him was
  inconclusive and changed his death sentence to
  life imprisonment, a mob dragged Frank from the
  state prison and hanged him. New evidence in the
  1980s conclusively proved Frank's innocence, and
  he was posthumously pardoned.

Leo Frank
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• African Americans were important originators of
  new directions in the evolution of American
  culture in the early 20th century, particularly
  in music. Willie "Bunk" Johnson (standing, second
  from left) and his Original Superior Orchestra, a
  leading jazz band from New Orleans, inspired the
  young trumpeter Louis Armstrong with his playing
  in the Storyville "red light" district of New
  Orleans. The phonograph helped spread the
  popularity of the faster rhythms of ragtime, and
  the syncopation of jazz.

25

• Louis Armstrong (1900-1971), shown here on the
  riverboat S.S. Capital in 1919 with Marable's
  Capital Revue, helped make the improvizational
  innovation of jazz a national phenomenon when he
  moved to Chicago in the 1920s.

26

• Ragtime and jazz were not the only kinds of
  music to originate in segregated African-American
  clubs and communities, and then spread to become
  part of mass entertainment. William Christopher
  Handy (1893-1958), shown here being recognized
  for his contributions in the 1940s, brought the
  rural southern folk music of the "blues" to
  northern cities, playing at the Chicago World's
  Columbian Exposition in 1893. He then drifted
  eventually to Memphis, which he helped make the
  mecca for the blues.