Katherine bentoncohen on the progressive era. Our goal today is to think about what progressivism was, and to think about what i think its core dialectic was. The tension between democracy and efficiency. These were both ideals that people from a Broad Spectrum of political backgrounds believes was important, and they believed they were not incompatible, but you can see ways that they were fundamentally at some tension. Throughout class think about democracy versus efficiency. So the central question for historians of the early 20th century is what is progressivism. A famous article that came in and out 1982 was titled in search of progressivism. They knew it existed but quibbling about what counted, what it started, when it ended. Some people were limited only to the Political Party where it was named and others define it more broadly. For me in this class this is howly define progressivism. In the broadest sense, it was the way a whole generation of americans defined themselves politically and how they addressed the problems of the new century in what i think we can all agree begins to look like modern america. Theyre interested in reforming a messy society that is new in fundamental ways while trying to keep some aspects of the old. Im defining it as lasting as approximately 1890 to 1891. I consulted with my coworker that wrote a phenomenal book. And skied him what he thought, made sure i got rid of any howlers in my lecture, luckily there were none, and this is what he wrote to me and i think this is worth talking about the pains that were all basically on the same page but we argue about the edges. The chronology is always questionable. But in national and state politics, there is no people that we consider progressive in power. If William Jennings bryant had won it would have been different. Of course it depends on what you think mattered most. It is worth noting that many populous became progressives. Some of you already recognize that already, you know, spoiler alert were going to talk about how wilsons new freedom plan included many things that the Populous Party proposed. Also many of them became socialists in places that we dont think of as areas of socialism today. Like texas, oklahoma, and western states. What they do largely agree on is the high mark was in 1912. The election, the fourway election between taft, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the fourth major candidate who was eugene webs. He pull ed 6 of the votes. I think everyone across that spectrum would have defined themselves as a progressive. So again, lets put some more fine notes on our definition of progressivism. It was a commitment to some sort of reform in society. I think too often in u. S. History classes we talk about the federal level of progressivism. I want to tell dwlu it is really starting at the grass roots in cities and states and territori territories. And it was perfectionism. There is no one way of doing things if you consider yourself a progressive, but it is a mood and attitude toward a change in politics, right . That is one in which you think things can be improved. In that sense as i will talk about through the rest of lecture, there is worry and concern. There is also incredible confidence and they can be improved. And again we have the tension between the did democracy. I wrote the first lecture. History changes but not that fast. This is the first year that i would assign the new freedom plan and i could not have invented a document better suited for the themes that i want to stress today, right . What does he compare liberty to . Yall suddenly got shy. An engine. A machine, right . This is perfect for all of you mathy, sciency, this is a perfect met for the machine doesnt work well with friction, right . He wants to reduce the friction. The more efficient the machine is the better. Liberty for the several parts consistent in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, he says. And you can see his optimism, even his might i say egoism as a professor. It is humantivit human activiti. He is saying the governments job, quite literally, is to get under the hood and get it reopening right. I love this document so much. We get back to machines, right . Technology, railroads, it is not an accident. It is enormously fascinating to people see the industrial and social components. Here are keywords if you need to come back to them in class. But we will come back to music on thursday. Let me move forward. It is an absolute wide range of things. Efforts, reforms, causes, that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. Conservation movement, which i know some of you are interested in, and certainly ways again, conservation as a kind of efficiency, a way that many have written about the koconservatio movement. Making sure that children who drink milk it is clean and unadulterated. They thought of women in a particular kind of way and well talk more about that on thursday. The expansion of public kindergartens. The expansion of some high schools. Trying to keep out the corruption owners from politics. Not successful, but a worthy effort. Public utility regulation. Those that are a private corporation that is licensed to a municipality or state, or ones that are publicly owned and operated. Regulation of food and drugs. I know many of you took ap history. The fda resonates in this time. The regulation of railroads that is also a kind of opening progressive error. Prohibition, the outlawing of alcohol. Social work. The modern field of social work then as now dominated by women. Antiprostitution and antipornography campaigns. You can see a strong moral element and protective element to this campaign. The campaign for legal Birth Control that was the comstock act. Election reform that i will talk about on the state level in just a few minutes. So okay maybe i put these sort of im making some judgments, i put it at the bottom, but also coercive control of clients. Voter disenfranchisement in the name of clean government, segregation in the south as a sign of efficiency, prohibition. We dont have to get into all of the details, but i want to say that were talking about from clean milk to voter initiatives, right . Kindergarten to higher ed, right . A really wide variety of things. Wilson talks about this in liberty. And you can see in just a random example of clean milk. Because Companies Used chemicals to make it seem like it would last longer. Liberty would say were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies. Right . Efficiency would say maybe our society would work better if they didnt die from adulterated milk. Why these two obsessions with democracy and efficiency. Could they be combatble and where does it come from. I want to talk about the way in which, and we can go back to the slides here. What i want to talk about is the way that what we talk about for progressivism bubbles up more from the crass roots even though it is a thing that is a government by experts. It is a National Movement built from regional movements. So what you have simplified, you know i like geography. The concerns about urbanization, overcrowding, industrialization, right . Political machines, political corruption. You have a great mass of demands for change, concerns, the ride of political figures like roosevelt, and they meet up with the more rural concerns of southern and western populism, right . It may not seem so today where we generalize rural america, a few of you are from more rural plaits, but the midwestern commodity culture was a very different kind. Yet they found enough common cause to unite briefly. Part of it was about the feeling of the rural places being left behind. Part tof was the political and electoral success. In the early 20th century, is that these urban concerns were able to find in some cases common cause with these folks that had been former populous. Particularly around issues like regulates interstate commerce. Regulating railroads, starting to talk about conservation. After 1900, populism and progressivism persevered. They are inspired by social gospel theory. You read an example of that today, right . A rather i dont want to aaggressive, but assertive campaign by those who were dominantly prodistant. They say we cant just think about the after life, we have to also think about the life here on earth. So they talk about what it means to think about jesuss work here and now. So that also inform this is progressive work, right . Wo woodrowwilson coming from an entire family of ministers. They feel a sense of christian mission. This is wedded to the invention of new social science. Disciplines like sociology, political science, economics, history, their first professional associations emerge in this time period. The first ph. D programs that are literally creating experts open up places like johns hop kkins the university of wisconsin, mitigating circumstanc michigan, the giant Research Institutions alongside the old stallworth and prestige institutions and new upstarts like hop kkins and the universi of chicago that are designed to create the graduate programs like europe has. The idea is they are going to produce not just pointy headed professors like me, but also solve social problems. Find the efficient answers, right . Wo Woodrow Wilson has a ph. D before he becomes president of the united states. So whats bothering them and we will review this and you know, i think, what many of these things are. We can talk about fears of new capitalism. Capitalism becomes more and more impersonal, im talking really fast, i want to step back and have you think about that. Think about a 19th century world where your neighbor might have chickens in her yard. Right . To sell eggs, and you know her, right . Her eggs are not rotten, she wont want to rip you off you have a face to face relationship. The farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. Youre not selling at a fixed rate. I think we take for granted global capitalisms impersonal nature. When you get things from amazon prime youre not thinking about who is pulling it off of the warehouse shelf. Like people were used to face to face transaction. This was threatening, right . This was a real change. They fear that the power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The run away railroad, as i mentioned, was just one example. There was devious methods that were writing long exposes and it reflects the changing in american capitalism and the anxieties those produce in americans. Speaking of anxiety in americans, fear of new americans, im grammigrants. Many americans have deep discomfort with immigration even though many of them are children of immigrants themselves. They constitute an unprecedented wave of new arrivals from 1882 to 1920. Immigrants come in the same time as the progressive era. They represent almost 15 of the American Population, the high t est amount. Before 2007 we were close to getting to that right now. I dont need to tell you what a hot issue immigration is right now, but in that sense from the standpoint of the proportion of the American Population that were immigrants, similar. Different places, though. Theyre from southern and eastern europe. Theyre also often feared in the same ways. They are predominantly catholic or eastern orthodox, or jewish. They seem unassemble. They still believe to be of rural origin. Africanamericans are moving in the great migration, migrating from the rural south to the urban south to the urban north. Close to two million move between the 1890s and 1910. Many are confronted with mixed populations for the first time. The transition of africanamericans to urban life, they are facing segregation in the north as well as the south. Horrible overcrowded conditions. Pitiful public health. Lack of utilities are facing many city residents. And there is a Little Chicken and egg debate among the americans, and this is really a progressive question. And i would not call it environmentalism. And what i mean by that is the belief of shaming ones outcome. Clean milk is a perfect example, right . Urban dellers that dont have their own cow to milk, they will have poor health outcomes. They dont have good nutritious food. Is the problem the poor city dweller . Is it the conditions theyre dealing with . Now remember when i talked about how the ideal when we talked about andrew carnegie, and we talked about the fact that this recognition of class difference as a fundamental feature of society was profoundly threatening to many people, and many not coincidental middle and upper class folks rejected permanent class distinctions. And one of the things they worried about, did they worry about the economic inequality . Yes. Did they worry about democracy functioning with those kinds of entrenched and seemingly irreparable differences, right . Would all of these new citizens know how to operate in a democracy . Would they be good citizens . Right . I am going to talk about ro roosevelt, he serves his terms and he says im going to hand the baton to taft. He runs, roosevelt gets super annoyed that taft is conservative. He is frustrated with taft, and he says im going to run against this guy, start a new party, im going to start a new party. Im going to endorse womens suffrage. Im going to ask jane adams to nominate me. So he is in milwaukee wisconsin which is add hotbed of socialism. They invented this wonderful thing that is the picture of progressivism. It is the idea that the Public University should be in the service of the state, right . It should produce experts, answers, solve social problems, and he is in there and an angry saloon keeper, its not hard to find a saloon keeper in milwaukee, tries to assassinate him. His speech is so thick and long that it protects him from the bullet. Here is one of the things he says in the speech. Whatever their social and industrial position to stand together for the most elements of citizenship. Those right thats are in the best republic of ours. Reformers start to look to local and federal government for solutions. Their afraid of Class Division as i mentioned, right . The major strikes starting with 182 1877. The American Railway union and the pullman strike where they emerge as a leader. The early 1900s. A coal strike that roosevelt helps hammer out a deal for. Union membership on 1911 is five times what it had been in 1897. Think about that, right . That was like trust me, this didnt happen. That would be like if since 2004 the union and labor members ultimate applied by five times. New immigrants are creating low way competition, right . They and africanamericans work has strikebreakers fuelling divisions among divisions that are trying to organize. Okay, so 60 years ago, a very famous historian named richard hoffstedder. Okay, he is history famous. He argued 60 years ago that the progressives were worried about status anxiety. That they felt frightened by their place in a changing world. It was a deeply psychological interpretation that reflected the popularity of freudianism. Remember they say they cant help but absorb the moment. We know that he exaggerated. This missed the fact that many catholic, jewish, and more shared the view. But it is a way to think about the phenomenon, right . There is a general insecurity about the state of society and how the problems can be solved. There is a recognition of a fundamental change in the economy. A kind of sobers realization that industrial capitalism is here to stay. At least it was then, not in 2019, right . This is not existential paralyzing fear. This is we have a problem, roll up our sleeves, and solve it. They didnt see those as antithetical ideas, right . So the bottom line is they appealed to someone with something to lose. Including their status in society. Theyre fearful but not hopeless. Right . Maybe that seems like a contradiction. Again what i want to emphasize is that if there is one thing they share it is an norm confidence that social and Economic Conditions can be improved and maybe even solved. And you can see that in wilsons fascination with making this machine of machine of liberty b frictionless as possible. Now, this may reflect a politics professors lack of knowledge about engineering and friction, but nonetheless hes bringing book knowledge to this problem, assuming we can solve the problems of democracy. Ill give you another example. Just put it this way. Woodrow wilson and Theodore Roosevelt are very different kinds of people, and i suspect you all know that, right . But who is more confidence than Theodore Roosevelt . Hes got a big stick. Hes like the kid who never gets picked at recess and reinvents himself as a rancher. He really shows this progressive idealism and confidence, right . And for him, of course, that comes from a position of privilege. Like dont tell Theodore Roosevelt he cant do something, he cant fix this great nation. Right . That is born and bred in him. Women, though, one of my favorite things about teaching the progressive era is that this isnt one of those deals where the famous, history famous said well theres an early stage of womens history called add women and stir, right . Like your pot of history doesnt have any women in it. Throw them in like chocolate chips. Its slightly better but its still the same thing. Right . You cannot understand the progressive era unless you include women from top to bottom. Women were central to this reorganizing of liberty, freedom, democracy and efficiency, right . Im going to bring up clean milk again. Its the wisconsin thing, i think. Well talk about this in much more in detail on thursday. Even beyond womens suffrage, women are involved in prohibition, which were going to end with, right . Theyre attending institutions of Higher Education in unprecedented numbers. Theyre going to graduate school. Theyre getting phds. Of course, this is mostly middle and upper class white women. Middle class and upper class black women as well, though their numbers are much smaller. Theyre much more likely to have careers than white upper and middle class women, partly because their husbands cant often make a living that the family can afford to live on. Women reflect and capitalize on this confidence. Women are confident in the progressive era. They are appearing in public forum. Jane adams is nominating roosevelt as the Progressive Party nominee. They also have confidence in the ability of the government to solve social problems. They share with progressive era men this idea, wait for it, that bureaucracy is a good thing. The