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. So again, throughout class today be thinking about democracy versus efficiency. So the central question for historians of the early 20th century what is progressivism . A famous article that came out in 1982 was entitled in search of progressism, which i think aptly summed up the way that the historians were rummaging around, knowing that the progressive era existed but quibbling about what counted as progressive his. Who counted, when it started. 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 new and fundamental ways while trying to keep some aspects of the old. On defining the progressive era as lasting from approximately 1890 through world war i. Before i subjected you all to this lecture today i consulted with my colleague who many of you know is an expert on populism and wrote a phenomenal biography on William Jennings bryant. He teaches this class as well and i asked the professor what he thought, made sure i got rid of any howlers in the 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 that we all basically are on the same page but we sort of argue about the edges. The chronology of the era is debatable. Beginning in 1890 takes in the sherman act which well talk about today and the beginning of jane adams remarkable settlement house in chicago. But in the national and state politics theres no people wed consider progressive in power until 1900. If were going to define it that way, wed push it up a little bit. If William Jennings bryant 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 the me that many populists became progressives and you recognize that already. You know, spoiler alert well talk about how wilsons new freedom plan included many things that the populist party had proposed and many became socialists in places we dont think of 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 learned about how he came through the Labor Movement to consider himself a socialist. He pulled 6 of the votes in the is 1912 election, almost a million votes. 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. It 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 the discussion of wilson versus roosevelt. I want to tell you its really starting at the grass roots 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 towards change and reform and society in politics, right . 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 lecture, theres some pessimism, theres 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 got to tell you this is the first year that i have actually assigned a portion of wilsons new freedom plan and i could not have invented a document better suited for the themes i want to stress today. What does he compare liberty to . You all suddenly got shy. Yes . An engine, a machine, right . And this is perfect for all of you mathy, sciency, mechanically people, right . This 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. 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. You can see his optimism, even his might i say egoism as a professor, right . His optimism, human interests and human activities and human energies because the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order. In other words, he is 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 from the culture perspective, right, i love the 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 id screw it up so i decided to 86 that, 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, effects, reforms, causes, that people thought of as progressive campaigns in the early 20th century. So we have got Civil Service reform. Cleaning up bureaucracy. Conservation movement which i know youre interested in and we wont dally there today, but certainly your reading emphasizes in the way that theres a famous way that many have written about the conservation movement. Clean milk campaigns, children who drink milk their mom purchased is inadulterated. Womens suffrage, well talk about that on thursday. Public education. Reinvigorated since the reconstruction era. The expansion of public kindergartens and the establishment of the first public high schools. Campaign finance reform, trying to keep out those corrupt 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 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 is under roosevelt. The regulation of the railroads which is an opening salvo of the progressive era. Municipal ownership of the utilities. Temperance, the outlawing of alcohol. The modern field of social work dominated by women. Antiprostitution and antipornography campaigns in what is called the white slavery movement. You can see a strong moral element and protective element to this campaign. The campaign for legal Birth Control which was the com stack act which made discussing any information about Birth Control illegal. Election reform which ill take about on the state level in a few minutes. So okay, maybe i put these sort of im making some judgments, some of these im seeing as po positives but also coercive control of the clients. 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. Those are illustrative. We dont have to get into the details and some ill return to you, but i want to say were talking about from clean milk to voter initiatives. We are talking about from kindergarten to funding higher ed. From kindergarten to first ph. D. 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. Right . 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 that 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. Well, liberty will say were not going to interfere with regulations for dairies, right . Efficiency would say, maybe our society would work better if children didnt die from adulterated milk, right . So you can see thats a one tiny example but actually something 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 . So what i want to talk about is the way in which we can go back to the slides here. Thats a different computer, okay. What i want to talk about is the way that what we talk about progressiveism bubbles up from the grass roots even its known as a government by experts. Its a National Movement built for regional movements. So what you have simplified i like geography. The concerns 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 a Theodore Roosevelt. Those meet up with the more rural and agrarian concerns of southern and western populism. Populism i would may not seem so much to us today and we generalize rural america, a few of you are from rural places. The midwestern corn you know, commodity culture was a very different kind of agrarian economy than the souths cotton based sharecropping vestiges of jim crow. Yet, they found enough common cause briefly to unite in populism that didnt last, right . This feeling of the rural places being left behind. Some of the political, electoral success of the progressive era in the early 20th sempblry was that these midwestern and northeastern urban concerns were able to find, in some cases, common cause with these folks that had been former populous. Particularly around issues like regulating interstate commerce. Regulating the railroads. Starting to talk about conservation. In fact, after is the 00, populism and progressives merged. Except for those who stay more radical and join the socialist party. Intellect intellectually, theyre inspired by social gospel theory. You read an example of that today. A rather, i dont want to say aggressive, but assertive campaign by many religious leaders, predominantly protestant, who said we need to realize that we cant be just focused on the afterlife, right, and the spiritual life. We also have to think about life here on earth, right . So rosh talks about what it means to think about jesus work today here and now, right . And that social gospel theory also informs this progressive work, right . Woodrow wilson comes from an entire family of ministers. 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. First professional associations emerged. Theyre creating expert rs right, opened at places like johns hopkins, the Ivy League Schools like the university of wisconsin, whoop whoop, university of california. Those giant Public Research institutions alongside the 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 problems. Wo Woodrow Wilson has a phd from johns hopkins. So what bothered him . Well review this and i think you know what many of these things are. We can talk about a few of their motivations in e teterms of fea. Fears of new capitalism as Companies Grow larger and large rer and it grows more impersonal. Im talking like this. 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 the rip you off because you have a facetoface relationship, right . Or youre a farmer that goes to the local grain elevator. You know the operate or. 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 youre seller is. Right. I think we take for granted global capitalisms in person, right . When you all get things from amazon prime, youre not thinking about whos pulling it off the warehouse shelf and putting it in a box and putting that label on and sending it to you. This was threatening. This was a real change, right . And they feared that the outsized power of huge corporations would ruin democracy. The run away Railroad Industry as i mentioned was just one example. The journalists called muckrakers were revealing the dooefous methods of armor meats and standard oil, writing long exposes in popular magazines. And this reflected both the real changes, right, 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. Well talk about this in much more detail in the coming weeks. The 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 new arrivals from 1882 to 1982. 18 to 24 million new immigrants come United States in this exact same time period were calling the depressive era, okay. At its peak, they represent almost 15 of the American Population. A figure we have never exceeded, but came very close in 2007 before the recession. But those are are sort of paralle parallels. Do i need to tell you what a hot issue immigration is right now, and actually, our numbers are way down from a decade ago. But in that sense from the standpoint of a proportion of the American Population who were immigrant, similar. Different places. 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 unassemble. Theyre very poor. They tend to congregate in urban places in a country that Still Believes itself to be a rural origin. Americans are starting to move in what will become the great migration. Migrating like ida b. Wells do to the urban north. Close to 2 million africanamericans moved from the south to north between 1890s and 1910. Many northers are confronted with mixed populations for the very first time. The transition of africanamericans to urban life is difficult. They are predocument. Com nantly 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, suer and electric. And a little bit of a chicken egg debate. Among more privileged americans. Are these new immigrants and africanamericans from the south the cause of the poor conditions or are the poor conditions thus producing the inequalities that are evident for all americans to see . Right . And this is really kind of a central question in the progressive era, right, which eventually, in spite of all the prejudice, i would argue comes to what we could call, t not going to be what you think it is, environmentalism. What i mean by that is the belief that ones environment shapes their outcome. So if you can improve the environment, you will improve the quality of americans, right . I dont know why im on clean milk today. That would be a perfect example. Urban dwellers that dont have their own cow to milk, to have fresh, clean milk from the farm and have to buy milk. Theyre going to have poor health outcomes. They dont have good, nutritious food. Is the problem the poor city dweller, the conditions theyre dealing with . Now, remember what i talked about how the ideal when we talked about Andrew Carnegie and rockefeller, gospel of wealth, we talked about the fact that this recognition of class difference as a fundamental future of American Society was profoundly threatening to many people and many, not coincidentally, middle and upper class folks, rejected the idea that there would be permanent class distinctions in the u. S. And one of things they worried about, did they worry about the you know, economic inequality, yes, but they worried about whether a democracy could function those kinds of entrenched, seemingly irreparable diff