Teaches a class on the progressive era. She talks about how politicians and reform groups in the early 20th century attempted to improve social and Economic Conditions. 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 in the progressive era believed were important, and they believed they were not incompatible, but you can see some ways in which they were fundamentally at some tension. Again, throughout class today, be thinking about democracy versus efficiency. So the central question for historians of the early 20th century is, what is progressivism . A famous article that came out in 1982 was entitled, in search of progressivism, which i think aptly summed up the way historians were rummaging around, knowing that the progressive era existed but quibbling about what counted as progressivism, who counted, when it started, when it ended. Some people limit only to the Political Party that it was named for. Others define it much more broadly. So for me in this class, this is how im going to define progressivism. In the broadest sense, progressivism 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 newameno keep the old. Im defining it as lasting from approximately 1890 through world war i. Before i subjected you all to this lecture today, i consulted with my colleague, michael kaixian, whom many of you know as an expert on populism, who also teaches on socialism. He teaches this class as well. I asked 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 actually worth kind of talking about the ways we all basically are on the same pauj, but we sort of argue about the edges. The chronology of the progressive era is debate nl. Beginning in 1890, the sherman act, and the beginning of jane adams remarkable settlement house in chicago, called hull house, which well talk about on thursday. In nals and state politics, there were no people we would consider progressive in power until 1900. If William Jennings bryan had won that election in 1896, that would have been different. Thats him speaking. Of course, the chronological scope you favor depends on what you think mattered most. And its worth noting, he also pointed out to me, that many populists became progressives, and thats something im going to talk to you about, and some of you already recognized that already, you know, spoiler alert, were going to talk about how wilsons new freedom plan included many things that the populist party had proposed in the 1890s, but also many of them actually became socialists in places that we dont think of as bastions of socialism today, like texas and oklahoma and western states. What historians do largely agree on is that the high mark of the progressive era was in 1912. The election, the fourway election between taft, woodrow wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, who decided to come out of retirement, come back from african safari, and run as the head of the Progressive Party, also known as the bull moose party, as well as the fourth major candidate that year was eugene debs, a socialist whose readings you read today about how he came through the Labor Movement to consider himself a socialist. He pulled 6 of the votes in that 1912 election, almost a million votes. Now, again, i think everybody across that spectrum would have defined themselves in some sense as a progressive. So again, lets put some more fine notes on our definition of progressive. Progressivism. Progressivism was a commitment to some sort of reform in society. Often using local, state, or federal governmental means. I think too often in u. S. History classes, we talk about kind of the federal level of progressivism. It turns into that discussion of wilson versus roosevelt. I want to tell you that its really starting at the grassroots in cities and states and territories and moving upward to the federal level. It was a form of perfectionism by which i mean the belief that society could be perfected using proper principles. And in this sense, i think its a mood as much as a method. Theres no one way of doing things if you consider yourself a progressive. But it is a kind of mood or attitude toward change and reform in society and politics, right . And that is one in which you believe that things can be improved and in that sense, as im going to talk about, through the rest of the lectureture, theres some pessimism, some worry and concern, but theres also incredible confidence and optimism that society and politics and economics and democracy can be improved and maybe even perfected, and here we have, again, that tension between democracy and efficiency. Now, lets be honest. I wrote the first version of this lecture many, many years ago. History changes but not that fast. And i have got to tell you, this is the first year that i have actually assigned a portion of Woodrow Wilsons 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. Yes. An engine, a machine, right . And this is perfect for all you mathy, sciency, mechanically people, right inthis is the perfect metaphor for the way that people think about government and politics in the early 20th century, right . 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 would consist 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, right . His optimism, human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of Human Interest and human activities and human energies. Because the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order. In other words, hes saying the governments job, quite literally, is to get under the hood and tinker with the machine to get it running right. And here again, we see also from a cultural perspective, right, i love this document so much. We get back to machines. Right . Technology, railroads, right . Its not an accident that efficiency is a concept that becomes enormously fascinating to people in the early 20th century. Efficiency in both its industrial and its social components. Okay. So heres some key words if you need to come back to them in class. But oh, i forgot to tell you, of course i didnt start with the song because you knew i was going to screw it up so i decided to 86 it, but well come back to music on thursday. Okay. So let me move forward and tell you before i get into the weeds about what progressivism looks like in this time period, to give you a sense of the absolute incredible wide range of things, efforts, reforms, causes, that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. So weve got Civil Service reform, cleaning up bureaucracy. Conservation movement, which i know some of you are particularly interested in, and we wont daly there today, but certainly, your reading emphasizes the ways in which again, conservation as a kind of efficiency in fact is a famous way many historians have written about the conservation movement. Clean milk campaigns. Making sure that children who drink milk, that their mom purposed from a dairy, that its clean and unadulterated. Womens suffrage. Theres a reason why that word is singular. They thought of women in a particular way. Public education, reinvigorated since the reskruconstruction er particularly at the local level. The expansion of public kindergartens, the establishment of some public high schools. Campaign finance reform, trying to keep out those corrupts Railroad Owners from politics. Not successful, but a worthy effort. Public utility regulation. The origin of modern Public Utilities that are either a private corporation thats licensed to a municipality or a state, or ones that are actually publicly owned and operated. Regulation of food and drugs. I know many of you took a. P. U. S. History. The fda originates in this time period under Theodore Roosevelt. The regulation of railroads which is actually kind of an opening salvo of the progressive era. Temperance or prohibition, the outlawing of alcohol. Social work, the modern field of social work then as now dominated by women. Antiprostitution and antipornography campaigns in what was called the white slavery movement, saving women from what today we would call sex trafficking. The campaign for legal Birth Control, which was the comstock act of the late 19th century, discussing, disseminating any information about Birth Control illegal. Election reform, which ill talk about particularly on the state level in just a few minutes. So okay, maybe i put these sort of im making some judgments, some of these im seeing as positives because i put at the bottom, but also, coercive control of welfare clients, forcing to strip immigrants of their culture in the name of assimilation. Voter disfranchisement in the name of clean government. Segregation in the south as a sign of efficiency. Prohibition and later eugenics. I know i whipped through that really quickly. Thats fine. No worries. We dont have to get into all of the details and some of these ill return to, but were talking about from clean milk to voter initiatives. Were talking about from kindergarten to funding higher ed. From kindergarten to the first page programs in the United States. A really wide variety of things. And you can see in the examples i have noted here, again, this relationship a little bit between democracy and efficiency. And wilson talks about this in terms of liberty. That Liberty Works best in an efficient capacity. Right . And you could see just in a random example of clean milk, which was a Campaign Many women reformers campaigned for, because companies adulterated milk with chemicals to make it seem like it would last longer and keep it white, and it poisoned children. Liberty would say were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies. Right . Efficiency would say, ah, maybe our society would work better if children didnt die from adulterated milk, right . You can see thats a one tiny example, but actually something that was very important to people in the early 20th century. Okay. Why these two obsessions with democracy and efficiency . Could these be compatible . Where does this come from . Okay, so what i want to talk about is the way in which and we can go back to the slides here. Oops, thats a different computer. Okay. What i want to talk about is the way that what we talk about as progressiveism as a National Movement, actually bubbles up more from the grassroots even though it comes to be known as this thing that is kind of a government by experts. Its a National Movement built from regional movements. So what you have simplified, you know i like geography. Midwestern and northeastern urban concerns. The concern about urbanization, overcrowding, immigration, industrialization. Right . Political machines, political corruption. You have on the one hand that great mass of demands for change, concerns, the rise of political figures like Theodore Roosevelt. Those meet up with the more rural and agrarian concerns of southern and western populism. Populism, it may not seem so today as much to us now where we generalize rural america, a few of you are from more rural places. The midwestern corn, you know, commodity culture was a very different kind of agrarian economy than the souths cottonbased sharecropping vestiges of jim crow. Yet, they found enough common cause briefly to unite in populism that didnt last, right . But part of it was about this feeling of the rural places being left behind. Some of the political electoral success of the progressive era in the early 20th century was that these midwestern and northeastern urban concerns were able to find in some cases common cause with these folks that had been former populists. Particularly around issues like regulating interstate commerce, regulating the railroads, starting to talk about conservation. In fact, after 1900, populism and progressivism basically merge as professor kaixians comments suggested. Populists essentially become progressives except for those who stay yet more radical and join the socialist party. Intellectually, theyre inspired by social gospel theory. You read an example of that today, right . A rather i dont want to say aggressive but assertive campaign by many religious leaders predominantly protestant, though there were some reform jews active in this movement as well who said we need to realize that we cant be just focused on the after life and the spiritual life. We also have to think about life here on earth. Right . So bush talks what it means to think about jesus work today here and now. Right . And that social gospel theory also informs this progressive work. Woodrow wilson comes from an entire family of ministers. Right . Most of these folks definitely 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 in social sciences that are literally creating experts, right . Open at places like johns hopkins, the ivy leagues, schools like the university of wisconsin and michigan. University of california, those giant Public Research institutions alongside the kind of old stalwart prestige institutions, and new upstarts like hopkins and university of chicago, which are designed to create these graduate programs like europe has. And the idea is that theyre going to produce not just, you know, pointy headed professors like me but experts that are going to go out and solve social problems, find the answers, find the efficient answer. Right . Woodrow wilson has a ph. D. From johns hopkins. Hes the president of princeton before he becomes the governor of new jersey and the president of the United States. Okay, so whats bothering them . And well review this, and you, i think, know what many of these things are. We can talk about a few of their motivations in terms of fears. Fears of new capitalism, as Companies Grow larger and larger and 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, and her eggs arent going to be rotten because she doesnt want to rip you off because you have a facetoface relationship. Or youre a farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. You know that operator. Youre not selling at a fixed rate across hundreds of miles on the southern pacific railroad, right . Where you have to pay a certain rate. You cant negotiate. You dont know who your seller is. I think we take for granted global capitalisms impersonal nature. When you all get things from amazon prime, youre not thinking about who is pulling it off the warehouse shelf and putting it in a box and putting the label on and sending it to you like people were used to facetoface transaction. This was threatening. This was a real change, right . And they feared that the outsized power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The Runaway Railroad industry, as i mentioned, was just one example. The journalists called muck rackers were reviewing the devious methods of companies, writing long exposes in popular magazines, and this reflected both the real changes that are happening in american capitalism as well as the anxieties that those produce in americans. Speaking of anxieties in americans, fear of new americans. That is fear of new immigrants. And well talk about this in much more detail in the coming weeks. Cities are filling with people. Many americans have deep discomfort about immigration even though many of them are the children of immigrants themselves. New immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe constitute an unprecedented wave of new arrivals from about 1882 to 1920. 18 to 24 million new immigrants come to the United States in this exact same time period were calling the progressive era. Okay. At its peak, they represent almost 15 of the American Population, a figure we have never exceeded. We came very close in 2007 before the recession. But those are sort of parallels. Think, i dont need to tell you what a hot issue immigration is right now, which actually our numbers are way down from a decade ago, but in that sense, from the standpoint of the proportion of the American Population who were immigrants, similar. Different places though. Theyre from southern and Eastern Europe. But theyre also often feared in the same ways. They are predominantly catholic or eastern orthodox or jewish. They seem unassimilable. Theyre very poor. They tend to congregate in urban places in a country thats Still Believes itself to be of rural origin. Africanamericans are starting to move in what will become the great migration. Migrating like ida b. Wells did from the rural south to the urban south, to the urban north. Close to 2 million africanamericans move from the south to north between 1890s and 1910. Many northern whites are confronted with mixed populations for the first time. The transition of africanamericans to urban life is difficult. They are predominantly rural people. Not used to city life, facing obviously segregation in the north as well as the south. Horrible overcrowded conditions, pitiful public health, lack of utilities like safe water, sewer, and electric faced many city residents, and theres a little bit of a chicken egg debate among more privileged americans. Are these new immigrants and africanamericans from the so