Part seven
Reform at Home, Revolution Abroad, 1900–1929
Many Americans greeted the first years of the twentieth century with optimism. Developments at home and abroad seemed to promise a new era of prosperity and progress. The mass manufacturing of automobiles proved a boon to the economy and transformed patterns of travel, leisure, and consumption. The beginning of commercial air flights heralded a revolution in communication and transportation. Moving pictures and new musical forms such as jazz delighted millions.
Focused on the new challenges of urbanization and industrialization, Progressive reformers sought to use science to solve a wide range of problems related to public health and welfare. Some advocated overhauling the system of public education; others pressed for legislation banning the sale and distribution of alcohol. Some lobbied for worker health and safety legislation, and still others sought to exercise social control through eugenics and state-mandated sterilization.
A variety of groups challenged white men’s exclusive claim to civil rights. African Americans took the national stage to argue for equality under the law and for freedom from state-sanctioned violence in the form of lynching and servitude for debt. Beginning with the Great Migration of World War I, southern blacks abandoned the cotton fields to seek jobs in northern cities.
The changing roles of women bolstered the women’s suffrage movement. Growing numbers of women were becoming labor organizers, reformers, and college professors. Rising divorce rates and the emergence of birth control as a political as well as a medical issue signaled challenges to the traditional patriarchal family. At the same time, conflicts among reformers emerged. For example, white middle-class suffragists hoped to maintain their “respectability” in an effort to win the support of reluctant male leaders; in the process, these women distanced themselves from members of the working class and even the African American women active in the suffrage movement. Suffragists’ efforts paid off in 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
With its lively consumer culture and rising standard of living, the United States continued to attract newcomers from abroad. Immigrants from Mexico and eastern Europe sought refuge from poverty, oppression, and civil strife at home. In 1914, 1.2 million immigrants came to America, the largest number in a single year before or since that date. Between 1900 and 1930, more than 1 million Mexicans migrated north, most settling in existing Mexican American communities in the Southwest or creating new communities there or in the Midwest.
World War I shattered the belief among many Progressives that conflicts could be solved in a rational, peaceful way. The end of the war had permanently entangled U.S. interests in European affairs. Moreover, revolutions in Mexico (1910) and Russia (1917) affected the United States directly, the former by spurring immigration across the country’s southwest border, the latter by challenging the nation’s system of industrial capitalism. Nevertheless, many Americans remained convinced that the country could and should isolate itself from world affairs.
Natural forces also remained beyond the control of reformers and government officials. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the great Mississippi flood of 1927, and the Florida hurricane of 1928 exacted devastating tolls in terms of human life and property damage. The local communities that were directly affected struggled for years to recover from these disasters.
But for many Americans, the 1920s were a period of peace and prosperity. New household appliances and conveniences lightened the burdens of housework. Radios and movies proved to be popular forms of entertainment. Traditional social mores gave way to expressions of sexual freedom. Progressive impulses waned as business values rose to take their place.
The decade after the end of World War I revealed both the persistence of old conflicts and the emergence of new conflicts within American society. Conservatives branded labor union organizers and socialists as unpatriotic and subversive. Asian immigrants on the West Coast and blacks in the rural South and urban North faced continued legal discrimination in the workplace and in the courts. Protestant fundamentalists challenged the move toward secularism and rationalism, claiming that religious faith, not science, set the standard for morality in modern life. Responding to those who feared that foreign immigration represented a threat to American society, Congress imposed immigration restrictions in 1924. Put into effect in 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages. The three Republican presidents who served during the 1920s—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—retreated from the activist stance favored by their predecessors, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
The stock market crash of 1929 revealed fundamental weaknesses in the American economy. A tide of bank failures engulfed individual American families even as it threatened businesses abroad. As the depression deepened, Americans looked to the federal government to address the crisis.
1901 McKinley is assassinated; Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes president
1902 Newlands Act spurs dam building and irrigation in the Southwest
1903 First motorized flight by Orville and Wilbur Wright
Henry Ford founds Ford Motor Company
1904 Roosevelt Corollary to Monroe Doctrine
1905 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded
Japan defeats Russia
1906 San Francisco earthquake
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Pure Food and Drug Act
1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan
Oklahoma (former Indian Territory) becomes state
Indiana becomes first state to pass compulsory sterilization law
1908 Muller v. Oregon limits maximum hours for working women
1909 New York City garment workers’ “Uprising of the 20,000”
Peary-Henson expedition reaches North Pole with four Greenland Inuit
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded
1910 Mexican Revolution begins
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, New York City
Society of American Indians founded
1912 Theodore Roosevelt helps form Progressive party
Woodrow Wilson elected president
1913 Federal Reserve Act
Sixteenth Amendment (federal personal income tax) ratified
1914 U.S. troops block German arms shipment to Mexico
War breaks out in Europe
1915 U.S. Marines occupy Haiti
Germans sink Lusitania
Film Birth of a Nation released
1916 Jeannette Rankin elected first female member of Congress
U.S. Marines occupy Dominican Republic
1917 U.S. enters World War I
U.S. Marines occupy Cuba
Russian Revolution
Residents of Puerto Rico granted U.S. citizenship
1918 Spanish influenza epidemic kills 20 million worldwide
Sedition Act
Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech to Congress
1919 Versailles Treaty ends World War I
U.S. Senate rejects League of Nations
Eighteenth Amendment (prohibition) ratified
1920 Nineteenth Amendment (women’s suffrage) ratified
1921 Tulsa whites attack black community
Sheppard-Towner Act
1922 Five-Power Naval Treaty
1923 Equal Rights Amendment proposed
1924 Johnson-Reid Act
Portable radio introduced
1925 Scopes trial, Dayton, Tennessee
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
1926 Gertrude Ederle is first woman to swim across English Channel
1927 Charles Lindbergh flies nonstop from New York to Paris
Al Jolson stars in The Jazz Singer, first talking movie
Sacco and Vanzetti executed
Buck v. Bell upholds compulsory sterilization laws
1928 Tamiami Trail across Florida Everglades completed
1929 Stock market crash
Chapter 19
The Promise and Perils of Progressive Reform, 1900–1912
Chapter Outline
Immigration: The Changing Face of the Nation
Work, Science, and Leisure
Reformers and Radicals
Expanding National Power
Conclusion
Sites to Visit
For Further Reading
ÒI
“I am a working girl,” declared Clara Lemlich in her native Yiddish, “one of those striking against intolerable conditions.” Still in her teens, the petite young woman took the podium on the night of November 22, 1909, in front of thousands of striking workers in New York, and roused them with her passionate, direct call for action: “I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now.” The next morning, 15,000 garment workers went on strike, demanding that the work week be reduced to fifty-two hours, with overtime pay and union recognition. Soon, the strikers swelled in number to more than 20,000. Observers at the time were astonished to see lively, fashionably dressed young women filling the picket lines. Ninety percent of the striking workers were women; they were overwhelmingly young Jewish immigrants, with Italian women constituting about 6 percent.
The strike was a demand for union recognition, reasonable wages and hours, and safe and decent working conditions, including an end to sexual harassment on the job. But at the same time, the strikers insisted that they should be treated as “ladies” and have access to the consumer goods and leisure culture taking shape in American cities. Ultimately, the strike ended with a failed compromise when the striking workers overwhelmingly rejected an offer of better wages and working conditions that did not include recognition of their union. Calling the strikers “socialists,” their more moderate allies broke from the union and left the young female workers vulnerable to the power of the company owners. The coalition of support fell apart, and most of the strikers eventually went back to work.
Less than two years later, a fire broke out in the top floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of the centers of the 1909 strike. Eight hundred workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian women, were trapped in the inferno because company officials had locked interior doors to prevent the women from taking unauthorized breaks or leaving work early. The flames tore through the building in less than half an hour, leaving 146 young women dead. Those who did not succumb to flames and smoke jumped to their deaths. One reporter wrote, “I looked upon the dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which the same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. Their dead bodies were the answer.” In the investigation that followed, the owner of the factory was never charged with a crime or held responsible for the tragedy. He claimed that his building was in full compliance with safety laws, but compliance with the laws did not ensure safety for the workers. No laws required sprinklers, adequate fire escapes, or fire drills. Just a few months before the fire, the building had been inspected and declared “fireproof.”
The “uprising of twenty thousand,” as the 1909 strike came to be called, and the tragic factory fire that ignited in its aftermath, are two among many dramatic episodes in the early twentieth century that expose the fractures and tensions within the nation at the time. Immigrants and racial minorities demanded the full promise of American life; workers struggled against the exploitation, poor pay, and dangerous conditions that characterized industrial jobs; young women insisted on respect at work and access to the playful environment of urban fashion and popular culture; female voices called for full citizenship and the vote and claimed their right to be heard by male bosses and union leaders; and activists across the political spectrum tried to control and manage the changes taking place around them in accord with their widely differing values.
During the first years of the twentieth century, the nation began to emerge as something profoundly different than it had been in the past. Even the landscape changed as cities continued to grow not only outward but also upward, with the construction of towering skyscrapers, and downward, with the creation of subway systems. But human enterprise continued to be vulnerable to the forces of nature. On April 18, 1906, an earthquake virtually leveled San Francisco. The earthquake symbolized American life at the dawn of the twentieth century, as did one word: upheaval. The dramatic changes taking place in the nation at the dawn of the new century, from industry and technology down to the most intimate levels of life, sparked equally dramatic efforts to control, tame, and regulate them. Because of the flurry of reform activity during this period, historians call it the Progressive Era. Politicians from all parties participated in the wide range of reform efforts known as Progressivism, fueled by a faith in progress and a belief in the possibility for social improvement.
Between 1900 and 1910, nearly 9 million immigrants entered the United States, the largest number for any single decade in the nation’s history until the 1990s. They came particularly from southern and eastern Europe, as well as Mexico and Asia. The United States was one of several potential destinations for these courageous and hopeful sojourners. It was particularly appealing because of its often exaggerated, but nonetheless real, opportunities for jobs and economic advancement, its official commitment to freedom of religion and political thought, and its reputation as a nation that welcomed newcomers from abroad.
On arrival, many found that the “promised land” was not the paradise they expected. They faced crowded living conditions in urban tenements, jobs in sweatshops and factories with long hours, low wages, and miserable working conditions, and a hostile reception. Many Americans—including some whose own parents or grandparents had come to the United States as immigrants—looked down on the newcomers as “racially inferior” and morally suspect, feared competition for jobs, and worried that the masses of poor foreigners in their midst would become a burden on taxpayers and public institutions. The Statue of Liberty may have held up the torch of welcome, but many citizens, from union halls to legislative chambers, wanted the newcomers to leave.
Many did leave. One-third of immigrants to the United States returned to their home countries. Some came for only a few years and returned to their native lands, including nearly 90 percent of migrants from the Balkans. Other groups, especially those who faced severe hardships in the lands of their birth, were more likely to make the United States their permanent home, settling with their families and building communities. Only 11 percent of the Irish and 5 percent of the Jews returned between 1908 and 1923.
The Heartland: Land of Newcomers
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At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was not the coastal cities, with their visible immigrant ghettos, but the settlements in the upper Midwest, along with the lower Southwest, where the greatest concentration of foreign-born residents lived. In the growing towns and cities of the Midwest, newcomers from central Europe and Italy joined the earlier settlers from Germany and Scandinavia to form farming and mining communities on the rich soil and abundant iron deposits of the region.
In the 1890s, the upper Midwest was sparsely settled. As a result of the Dawes Act of 1887, which divided tribal lands into individual parcels, much of the land originally held by Indians had been divided and sold. Most of the Indians who were native to that region were removed to reservations. The iron-rich areas near Lake Superior, previously the hunting, fishing, and gathering areas of the Native Americans, were now inhabited by lumberjacks who cut the forests. Mining companies discovered the iron deposits and began recruiting workers, first from northern Europe and then, after 1900, from southern and eastern Europe. By 1910 the iron range was home to thirty-five European immigrant groups. Gradually, these cohesive working-class communities, like others elsewhere, developed their own brand of ethnic Americanism, complete with elaborate Fourth of July celebrations and other festivities that expressed both their distinctive ethnic identities and their allegiance to their adopted country.
The Southwest: Mexican Borderlands
In 1904 a train carrying Irish orphans from a Roman Catholic foundling home in New York chugged westward to deliver its small passengers to waiting Catholic families in Clifton and Morenci in the Arizona territory. Church officials at the New York orphanage had screened the families carefully to be certain that the couples hoping to adopt these children were devout churchgoing Catholics, industrious workers, and respectable members of the community. The local parish priest approved these couples, and on the appointed day, they waited eagerly as the orphans, dressed in their best clothes with their pink cheeks scrubbed clean, departed from the train. But when the Anglo-Protestant residents of the town discovered that Mexican Catholic foster parents claimed these fair-skinned children, they were outraged.
That night, the Anglo women gathered to mobilize their husbands into a vigilante posse. In the middle of the night, during a driving rainstorm, the men went to the homes of the Mexican couples and kidnapped the children at gunpoint. The next day, the children were distributed to the vigilantes’ wives and other Anglo foster parents. Although the Catholic foundling home that had placed the children with the Mexican couples fought a lengt...
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