The following originated as a classroom lecture on what is often called the Progressive Era of United States history. Here’s a 55-min video of a lecture in which I read an earlier version of the text, with the slideshow. It may help to watch that, but it’s probably best to view the images and read the script yourself. For best results, you will have to read it on a desktop or large pad.

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A Progressive Era?

I. INTRODUCTION

(Slide 1, cover) In the forty years from the 1880s to the early 1920s, different social groups and movements organized to change and shape the new, industrial, technological, always growing, and ever-more urban American society. Society was indeed transformed in many ways. By the end of this period, many people were calling it “the Progressive Era.” Local, state and federal government took a stronger role in promoting progressive social change and reforming the political and economic system. A few historians go so far as to call these decades a ‘Second Reconstruction.’ At the same time, business corporations also evolved, and became more powerful and present in all aspects of American life, so that the historian Martin Sklar has has instead called it the “Corporate Reconstruction of America.”

II. WORKING CLASS MOVEMENTS AND PROGRESSIVE CAMPAIGNS

(2) The rural-based Populist movement and the associated Popular Party continued fighting for farmers’ interests. The more urban movements of the industrial working classes continued organizing and fighting for their causes. But both mostly meet with frustration and defeat in almost all of their struggles and demands. The Popular Party won a few governorships and other offices in the Great Plains farm states. It declined after the 1896 presidential elections when they endorsed the losing Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Industrial labor actions continued to gain in strength, numbers, and militancy. A small percentage of the organized working class won contracts with their companies. But as we will see, the working-class movements met with powerful opposition from business and government. They remained strong but then they were hit by heavy repression and suffered a series of defeats during World War I (1914-1918) and in the general crisis that followed (1919-1921).

(3) AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR. Efforts associated with the American Federation of Labor followed the same by-now time-honored strategy as in decades past. The AFL were an organization of employed, skilled, and generally white workers. The AFL was not radical or revolutionary. Its strategy was to organize by industry and company. Their main aim was to get company management to accept unions as bargaining partners. They hoped to get each company to sign its own contract with the unions representing the workers at that company. The AFL argued that rather than treating unions as enemies, private industry would benefit from having an organized, capable, reliable, loyal, well-paid and well-fed work-force. They emphasized that they were patriotic and pro-business. They even supported the war with Spain in 1898, although they later turned against the continuation of the war in the Philippines.

(4) INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD. Like the old Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, believed in uniting all workers into “One Big Union.” The IWW hoped to break down and bridge all divisions among workers. They believed workers should not be separated by industry, trade, skill level, or even employment status. Membership was supposed to be open to all, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, citizenship, or language. They demanded sectoral contracts, meaning that all the companies in a given industry should have a single contract with all of their workers. But the IWW was never recognized as a negotiating partner by governments or by businesses, and its members undertook “wildcat” actions and strikes.

In many cases the IWW contributed to working-class unity and even general strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919 and the ‘mine wars’ of Colorado (1914) and West Virginia (1915-1919). But for the most part the activists of the IWW had a tough time organizing different kinds of workers in different indusries. It was often difficult to bridge the gaps between ethnic and racial groups, immigrants and natives, male and female workers, people speaking different languages, and cultural and regional divisions among workers. Employers exploited these divisions ruthlessly, pitting one group against another, using black and female workers to break strikes, even using immigrants from one country against immigrants from another. IWW activists suffered many forms of repression from management and governments. Employers were quick to fire IWW members. Many members were arrested, convicted on fake or trumped-up charges, beaten by private security forces like the Pinkertons, and even assassinated. IWW membership rose to 150,000 by 1915. The union was then crushed and dismantled by hostile government action against its leadership during World War I and the subsequent ‘Red Scare’ of 1919-21.

(5) SOCIALIST PARTY. Starting in the 1890s, there was also a Socialist Party, led by Eugene Debs, the deeply Christian labor organizer who had spent months in prison after leading the American Railway Union during a two-month railway worker strike in and around the rail-car factory at Pullman, Illinois in 1894. (This was another one of the many epic labor battles of the era that again, almost all ended in defeat.) Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for president five times, picking up 3.5% of the popular vote in 1920 (one million votes), even though he spent that year in a prison cell. He had been convicted for “sedition” after he made a speech against the military draft.

Almost none of these efforts won widespread and lasting implementation of main demands, like forcing management to recognize a trade union as a partner in collective bargaining, or to accept permanent guarantees of the eight-hour work-day. Labor organizing would however provide some of the radical energy that boosted many progressive reform campaigns.

(6) PROGRESSIVES. In contrast to the difficult situation facing the labor movements, the progressive reform campaigns, based mostly in middle-class advocacy, succesfully advanced a number of important social reforms. That is not to say the going was easy. Progressive efforts also ran into fierce opposition and setbacks. Like any form of people power wielded against establised power, success required hard work, persistence and sacrifice, faith and idealism, and a degree of realism. The first apparent successes of progressive reform came already in the early 1890s, with the passage of federal and state laws intended to impose limits on the power of private capital and political machines. By the early twentieth century, a wide variety of progressive reform movements and actions were underway. But making reform stick against entrenched interests often proved tricky, as the stories of anti-trust laws and the standard ballot in the 1890s show.

III. ROBBER BARONS, ANTI-TRUST, AND PHILANTHROPY

(7) An important reform move, starting already in 1889, was the passage of federal anti-trust acts. These aimed to limit the power of the new corporate monopolies.

(8) ANTI-TRUST. Federal anti-trust laws passed in the early 1890s targeted corporate-financial monopolies and cartels (‘trusts’) in vital industries. The biggest example was the Standard Oil company, brought together by John D. Rockefeller in the 1870s and 1880s, after the first discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1869. By the 1890s, Standard Oil set prices for kerosene and oil products throughout the country, dominating 90 percent of the market. Most households had become dependent on kerosene lighting, and Standard Oil could charge whatever it was believed they could get away with. It was a subject for “muckraker” journalists like Ida B. Tarbell, who wrote a two-volume exposé of Standard Oil’s history and business practices.

(9) ROCKEFELLER, CARNEGIE, MORGAN. The three richest men in the United States controlled the largest companies in oil and kerosene (Rockefeller), steel (Andrew Carnegie), and banking and railways (J.P. Morgan). Their critics called them and other members of their class “robber barons.” Their three industries were closely related. Steel was the most important building material for the railways. It allowed the construction of ever taller buildings, especially in financial districts. Standard Oil’s success came thanks to its collaboration with railway companies, who transported fuel before Standard Oil was able to build an extensive pipeline system of its own. Most of the railways agreed to slap Rockefeller’s competitors with higher fees for transport. At the top of the system were the banks, who loaned the capital needed for business. J.P. Morgan, the country’s richest banker, became the unofficial kingpin of Wall Street. His house was literally on Wall Street, across from the Stock Exchange. Morgan was the maker of corporate mergers. In the 1880s he organized a ‘trust’ of several holding companies that owned railways, known as Northern Securities. When Carnegie was finally ready to sell his steel businesses (in 1901), Morgan’s bank financed the purchase and restructuring. The Carnegie-Frick companies became a new corporate behemoth, U.S. Steel.

CARNEGIE AND STEEL. It should be noted that Carnegie was perhaps the most remarkable of the three for having guided the creation of a production machinery that was utterly devoted to increasing efficiency and scale at every level from buying the raw materials to delivering the final product. This new model was called “vertical integration.” It reduced the price per unit. It allowed the Carnegie-Frick enterprises to outproduce the rest of the market, in both North America and Europe. Carnegie factories adopted every new technology as soon as it became viable. He was constantly putting company profits into new equipment, building new and ever-larger factories. The competition could not keep up and went out of business, and Carnegie steel became a monopoly. He cultivated a management obsessed with finding every possible reduction of costs per-unit — including labor.

CARNEGIE-FRICK AND LABOR: THE HOMESTEAD STRIKE. At the same time, Carnegie believed that if the steel was getting cheaper, then the labor should be paid a lower amount per hour. After all, thanks to all the efficiency gains, the unit-price of the steel produced per worker was getting lower! Cuts in employment and pay at Carnegie factories finally led to a giant labor lockout at the firm’s largest steel plants in Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892. The company closed the factory doors to the workers in advance of a feared strike. Carnegie, who disliked conflict, had left for Scotland and put his partner, Henry Clay Frick, in charge of operations. Frick was willing to do the dirty work, and locked down the plants. A months-long battle followed as the workers surrounded the fractories. The workers and the people of the town were united in the fight. One day a force of 300 armed men from the Pinkerton detective company suddenly appeared. They sailed up the river on a barge, intending to invade the town and break up the protests. The townspeople surrounded them, defeated them, and captured every single one. The Pinkerton men were disarmed, beaten, and later released. None of them were killed. The Pennsylvania National Guard was called in. A dozen workers were killed in the suppression of the Homestead strike. It became another epic loss for organized labor.

THE LIMITS OF ANTI-TRUST. European states sometimes took over and reorganized or nationalized monopolies and exploitative companies. By contrast, US law left action to lawsuits by states or competitors. It was up to a judge to rule that a “trust” (monopoly) be broken up, for example if it was found to be fixing prices or unfairly squelching competition. At first, such measures were toothless, as was the case with an 1892 state court ruling that ordered Standard Oil to sell its Ohio subsidiary. Standard Oil went through the motions of transferring its Ohio subsidiary to a separate company, but kept full management control of it.

MERGER WAVE. Nothing slowed down the corporate merger wave of 1897-1904, once again led by Morgan. It left an ever-smaller handful of companies in control of every major industry. Worse, courts turned anti-trust laws more often against labor than against the trusts themselves. In decisions like Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of management suits to ban labor organizations on anti-trust grounds, arguing that the worker’s unions were colluding to monopolize and fix the price of human workers.

(10) ANTI-TRUST SUCCESSES. During the Republican administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and his successor, Taft (1901-1912), the federal government became more involved in closing the legal loopholes and pursuing lawsuits against the trusts. They finally achieved some anti-trust successes, after court battles that lasted for years. Court rulings ordered the break-up of the railroad trust, Northern Securities, in 1906, and of Standard Oil in 1911. Standard Oil was spun off into separate companies and sold to new shareholders. The managements of the new companies still knew each other and were still usually able to act in unison, maintaining an informal cartel. (If nothing else, different managements could just read the same newspapers to know what prices “the competition” was setting.) The robber barons, meanwhile, had little trouble moving their wealth into more diversified asset portfolios. That’s a fancy way of saying they re-invested the mountains of cash they received after being forced to sell their shares in their companies. They bought a whole lot of real estate, invested in companies in other industries, bought up resources like mines, bought or founded new companies around the world, and opened bank accounts in places like Switzerland.

The robber barons devised a new strategy: They started big philanthropic foundations that effectively remained under the control of their families for many generations to come.

(11) PHILANTHROPISTS. Depending on your perspective, some of the robber barons turned themselves into philanthropists with the aim of improving society. There was truth in this. Carnegie opened hundreds of free libraries for the public and avowed his support for public education. His donations originated many municipal public library systems. But the philanthropy of the super-rich also had the aim of influencing society, shaping it in their preferred image. Carnegie made no secret of his philosophy for society as a whole in publications like “The Triumph of America” (1885) and his book, The Gospel of Wealth (1889). Philanthropy improved the public relations of the super-rich. It protected their wealth from more muscular efforts to reduce and redistribute it. They could put large shares of their fortunes into their own foundations, and this wealth would no longer be taxed, since the foundations were charitable organizations. The foundations in turn employed family members for generations. They also built hospitals and funded medical research. Over time, the philanthropies of the wealthiest turned to the universities and began providing academic funding for the new disciplines like political science, economics, anthropology, urban planning, and sociology. These are all worthy endeavors, but foundation grants were among the reasons that most academics, scientists, and researchers were encouraged to study commercial applications, and to focus on improving the practical top-down management of politics and populations.

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IV. STANDARD BALLOT AND TRANSFORMATION OF ELECTIONS

(12) Another important (and usually little-noted) reform effort, this one against political machines, came with the rapid adoption of standard ballots in most states starting in the late 1880s. Slide 12 shows an early example of a standard ballot. A standard ballot is not printed by just anyone (as was the case until then). It is issued by the voting district. It is the only allowable ballot. It includes the names of all candidates running for each office. At the time, this innovation was called the Australian ballot, because the reform was first adopted in Australia before it came to the US and Europe.

POLITICAL MACHINES. Standard ballots ended the practice of voters coming to the polling place with their own colored ballots printed by political parties or by local political machines. Political machines were organizations that controlled local governments and politics. Generally speaking, political machines were funded by local or regional business interests. They were generally corrupt and self-serving, but they cultivated support among the people by providing jobs and limited welfare measures. In the absence of a welfare state or other benefits for the poor, this could make the machines very popular indeed.

(13) THE END OF TICKETS. Slide 13, above, shows examples of the older printed ballots, known as ‘tickets.’ These were distributed on the street by parties and local alliances, known as ‘lists.’ The tickets were used as the actual votes that voters inserted into the ballot box. Before standard ballots, voters could also just write their own ballot by hand. Printed tickets were of different sizes and colors, and it was therefore hard for people to hide how they were voting. Furthermore, until the mid-19th century, it was normal in many localities to have votes recorded in public by judges. Before standard ballots, therefore, there was usually no secrecy in voting. People voting “the wrong way” could be subjected to intimidation or beaten up. This was one of many ways that elections were rigged by political machines. The most significant form of rigging, however, was that once in power the machines could fire and hire the police and other employees. The police and election officials were the key groups to hire, because they were the ones who guarded the ballot boxes and oversaw the counting of votes. They were also the ones who could stuff the ballots with fake tickets.

PROFESSIONALIZING THE BUREAUCRACY. In short, the implementation of a standard ballot theoretically made the old forms of election fraud more difficult, and also enabled the secret ballot. Also in the 1880s, great strides were made to establish rules for governmental agencies (state, municipal, and federal) so that civil servants would be hired on a permanent basis and not be replaced every time the incumbent party lost an election. After a long fight, the federal government passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, which for the first time created a professional civil service in the United States. The act “provided that federal government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit and that government employees be selected through competitive exams. The act also made it unlawful to fire or demote for political reasons employees who were covered by the law.” (United States National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/pendleton-act)

Until then, the federal government had worked just like the local and state political machines: new administrations had the power to fire and replace any government employee for any reason.

STANDARD BALLOTS: THE ADVANTAGES. Standard and secret ballots were a crucial step toward greater election integrity and reliability of vote counts. They made it easier for vulnerable minority groups to vote against a local majority without fearing for their own safety. For example, there is little doubt that the improved protection of individual voters under the standard-secret ballot system was a key step toward the achievement of full women’s suffrage by 1920.

THE NEW ORDER. At the same time, the standard ballot also meant that state governments became the regulators of elections. This gave even more power to state governments, and to the big political parties on the state level. In the past, without standard ballots, anyone could run for election. Now state laws determined who was allowed on the ballot, which parties got ballot lines, and how the votes would be counted. This is why we still have different technologies and rules for holding elections and counting the vote in each state. (Some states even use several methods.) In practice, the most popular and powerful parties in a state (this always meant the Republicans and the Democrats) excluded independents and third parties and found new, usually legal ways to maintain their hold on power. The secret ballot became one among several factors that cemented the two-party system in place. Since then, the two parties have changed several times ideologically, and in the voter groups they attract in forming their coalitions. But we still have the same two organizations winning almost all elections in the United States.

V. THE 1896 ELECTION, McKINLEY vs. BRYAN

(14) LOBBYING AND CAMPAIGN FINANCE. Reforms to limit the power of the old political machines had other unintended effects. One was to increase the effectiveness of corporate lobbying of individual lawmakers. For the rich it meant big money could be spent directly on individual election campaigns. They had much less need to deal with and pay off political machines and local bosses. It helped cut out the middle man. This was illustrated in 1896, during what is often called the first ‘modern’ presidential election.

NEW MONEY IN POLITICS. The Republican candidate, William McKinley, was pro-business and pro-empire. (He was actually ambiguous about imperialism and the racism that justified it, but once in office as president he would go along with the prevailing Republican opinion favoring war with Spain.) McKinley’s campaign had an estimated five to ten times more funding at its disposal than that of the Democratic and Populist candidate, William Jennings Bryan. The big corporations considered Bryan to be a danger to the system because he advocated a silver standard for the dollar. McKinley enjoyed direct backing from Rockefeller and Morgan. Perhaps most importantly, he had the favor of the biggest newspaper magnates. They provided free advertising for his campaign through favorable news stories and propagandistic attacks on his opponent. The McKinley campaign was run by Mark Hanna, a coal and iron magnate who was a master of fundraising. He got himself appointed to the Senate soon after McKinley’s victory. The Populists, inspired by Bryan’s condemnation of the gold standard, had risked a joint run with the Democrats. Bryan’s defeat caused them to split and break up. Some later joined the Socialists. President McKinley oversaw America’s move into expanded overseas empire in 1898, and again defeated Bryan in 1900.

VI. FROM TEDDY ROOSEVELT TO WOODROW WILSON

(15) McKinley was assassinated the next year, in 1901, by an anarchist. He was succeeded by his vice-president Theodore Roosevelt of New York (left), who is known to us as “TR” to distinguish him from his nephew, the later president “FDR”. T. Roosevelt, who had successfully presented himself to the world as a military hero of the 1898 war in Cuba, became president from 1901 until 1908. Justly or not, Roosevelt’s name is closely associated with the Progressive Era, along with that of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson (right), who won the presidential elections of 1912 and 1916.

PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS? As we shall now examine in detail, the period from T. Roosevelt’s administration until 1920 did indeed see the greatest number of the kind of successful reforms that gave the “Progressive Era” its name, most of them supported by Roosevelt, his successor Taft, and Wilson. These included a series of four major constitutional amendments — to allow income tax, make Senators electable directly by the voters, prohibit the sale of alcohol, and extend the franchise to women — as well as the creation of federal wilderness reserves, the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank, the abolition of industrial child labor, regulation of workplace safety, building standards, water and food safety, and much more.

IMPERIALISM. Internationally, Roosevelt continued the war in the Philippines that had begun in 1898. US forces were militarily powerful killed hundreds of thousands of Filipino independence fighters and civilians through 1903, when the Filipinos surrendered. The country became an official overseas colony of the United States, ruled by a military governor (until 1946). Roosevelt ordered the building of a huge military fleet (the “White Fleet”) and sent it on a world “friendship” tour. He started a 20-year period of constant interventions and in Latin America, most notably arranging for the U.S. takeover of the Panama Canal project and initiating the 20-plus-year occupation of Nicaragua. These were called “Banana Wars” (for “Banana Republics”) because many of them involved protecting the interests and properties of US-American fruit companies, like United Fruit and Chiquita.

CONTINUITY. While TR was known for being a hunter and a flamboyant tough guy, and for saying things like “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” his Democratic successor Wilson cultivated a more internationalist and academic reputation. Nevertheless Wilson continued the Banana Wars. He launched a military intervention to change the government of Mexico, started a 20-plus-year occupation of Haiti, and eventually entered the U.S. into the Great War in Europe.

THE MACHINES ADAPT. At home the political machines, meanwhile, continued to adapt to new circumstances. They innovated new ways to stuff ballot boxes, rig elections, keep competitors off the ballot, control public budgets, and stymie reform. In the South, this was still done done with little need to cover it up with platitudes about democracy or equality or the law. State and local laws and courts in southern states neurtralized the 14th and 15th amendments so that all or almost all black people were completely locked out of voting. So were most poorer white people. This guaranteed a monopoly of power for the ‘Dixiecrats,’ the Democratic parties in the southern states. Southern systems of segregation and racial hierarchy (caste) remained in place and received periodic cultural enforcement through outbreaks of violence and popular terror, like lynch justice.

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VII. PROGRESSIVE REFORMERS AND THE CITIES

(16) A huge variety of citizen initiatives continued to arise throughout these decades. Not all of these were related. Some were in conflict. But most tended to use a modern organizing tool-kit.

(17) Progressive groupings and campaigns, in large part with middle-class women as foot-soldiers and often leaders, worked with a mix of agitation, protests, scientific research and journalistic exposes, arts and literature, education, and media campaigns. They often looked to forge alliances across causes and groups, and with lawmakers and philanthropies. They helped to create new disciplines of knowledge and new professions for the new age, in areas like social work, education, urban planning and architecture, public health, library sciences, and what became the environmental sciences.

(18) They fought for stronger municipal governments independent of state-level machines, and managed to beat the machines and elect many reform slates to municipal government in many places around the country.

The earlier Populists had many chapters but were united in their aims. They can be described as a nationwide movement of farmers that first arose in the 1870s. They founded a single political party that for a time won many local elections in farm states. By contrast, Progressivism was a label given to many movements and diverse reform efforts starting in the 1880s. It was not definitively associated with either of the two major political parties. Teddy Roosevelt did make a third-party run as the presidential candidate of a new Progressive Party in 1912, guaranteeing that Wilson was able to unseat President Taft (who came in third place).

WHAT DOES PROGRESSIVISM MEAN?

‘Progressivism’ was meant to describe a spirit guided by science, by enlightened and democratic values, by a general concern for the public good, by a desire for the better functioning of government and society, and by the idea — an American perennial — that every individual human being can and should engage in constant self-improvement alongside measures to improve society.

(19) NEW MIDDLE CLASSES. Progressivism was firmly rooted in the new middle classes. These new middle classes arose in the 19th century with the exponential increase in the number of professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants, teachers, professors, engineers, technicians and other specialists, and, of course, the salaried employees of the growing corporations and state agencies, the middle-managers, bureaucrats and secretaries. The traditional middle class, which remained, consisted of small owners, shopkeepers, small farmers, artisans and trades-people. The new middle classes tended to be more urban and more highly educated. At this time, they were also on average younger than the heads of household of the traditional middle classes. Unlike the populists, they were concentrated in cities and could more easily organize.

(20) CITY LIFE: A MESS! Progressive reform efforts had other advantages. In reality, given the circumstances of the new industrial society, many reforms were considered urgent and overdue. To put it bluntly, going into the 20th century, city streets were open sewers. Apartment houses for the poor were overcrowded fire-traps. Death from preventable contagious diseases was still common. Urban populations were concentrated like never before. Growth in cities at this time was driven by mass immigration from abroad, and also by new residents moving from rural areas and smaller towns in the U.S. While the ‘mortality revolution’ of the 19th century had massively decreased death rates from disease, especially among infants and children, death rates were still much higher in cities than in the country. (This longstanding difference has been reversed in our own era, and nowadays life expectancies are on average longer for US city dwellers than for rural populations.)

(21) POVERTY. Millions lived in tenements with minimal sanitation. Middle and lower classes could hardly avoid each other. Chicago and New York City both had population densities far higher than today, and by the 1890s both became majority immigrant. At the time New York’s Lower East Side was the most densely populated district in the world. New York reached a population of four million in the early 1900s, four times the level of 1860. Even as the infrastructure grew and the subways were opened, it was still hard to accommodate such large crowds.

Cities were home to opulent wealth alongside desperate poverty.

(22) RATIONAL REFORM. All this created enormous demand and also an economic need for rational reform, for initiatives to improve and expand education, public health, and other infrastructures. This period saw similar, primarily urban reform movements in the cities and towns of both the U.S. and Europe. Progressive (as well as not-so progressive) ideas and thinkers traveled back and forth across the Atlantic. This, for example, is how the idea of “garden apartments” traveled from England to Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, although it did mutate in the process (photo above).

(23) Progressive citizen initiatives sought to end child labor, to raise public health standards, to build working sanitation systems, to establish food safety standards, to improve housing and write the first building codes, to mandate safer workplace conditions, to alleviate poverty and child hunger, to address wealth inequality through taxation of the rich, to expose and combat political corruption, to legalize family planning and birth control, to open more hospitals, schools and universities, and to expand public schools.

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VIII. 1905-1920: THE ERA OF PROGRESSIVE SUCCESSES

(24) Many progressive social demands, if far from all, were met in some form during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and were put into law by municipalities, states and the federal government. The first federally-protected wilderness areas were designated starting in 1903 under the nature lover Roosevelt. The ideal of land conservation (protect the land while also using it sustainably for economic purposes) mostly prevailed over the idea of land preservation (keep wilderness and habitats as they are).

(25) Starting in 1905, New York City pioneered fire and building codes to alleviate the overcrowded, unhealthy, and dangerous conditions of its tens of thousands of tenement buildings. Federal agencies were established to oversee food safety after the uproar set off by Upton Sinclair’s novel about conditions at the Chicago slaughterhouses, The Jungle.

(26) Industrial child labor was gradually but almost entirely banned.

(27) New York City passed workplace safety regulations and new fire and building codes, but the story involved a major public tragedy...

(28) THE GARMENT DISTRICT. Workplace safety and building regulations were among the demands of a huge strike in 1908 by workers in the Garment District of New York. They were mostly female, young, and immigrant. They were also militant, well-organized, and stubborn. But once again, the strike was defeated after a long winter struggle.

TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST. It took the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 to mobilize enough outrage among the general public and to finally force the New York political machines to act. One-hundred-forty-six people, almost all of them young women workers, were killed in a 10th-floor fire at a garment sweatshop factory in Greenwhich Village. This was in broad daylight. Huge crowds gathered, including reporters. To their horror they saw dozens of women seeking to escape the flames fall out of windows and plunge to their deaths. The state and city governments finally passed measures regulating building and workplace safety. This is why we now have fire escapes and fire inspections.

IX. PUBLIC EDUCATION AND WELFARE

(29) Spending on public schools, hospitals, and universities increased in many localities. One example is the expansion of City College (the image shows Shepard Hall, built at this time). City College was shaped into the premiere college of the New York public university system that was later re-organized as CUNY. The city universities were open to the children of immigrants, especially Italians and Jews, who at the time were excluded from the Ivy Leagues because of their ethnicity. Thanks to public universities, many families made the jump from Ellis Island to children with professional careers in a single generation.

(30) JANE ADDAMS. New philanthropies run by progressive reformers like Jane Addams opened settlement houses for orphans and extremely poor or abandoned children. These were new in that they served as schools rather than human warehouses or child workshops.

(31, 32) MARGARET SANGER. The organization that became Planned Parenthood, founded by Margaret Sanger, waged a long campaign to educate about family planning and, often by underground action, provide contraception to women.

IX. CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

(33, 34) By 1913, two constitutional amendments were ratified, the first two in the more than 40 years since the Reconstruction amendments. One mandated that federal senators be elected directly by a state’s voters, rather than state legislatures.

The other allowed direct taxes on personal income. At first taxes where charged almost exclusively to the highest incomes. The chart above shows how the income-tax rate for the top marginal tax bracket (originally, starting over 1 million dollars) has changed through the decades.

(35) By 1920, the 19th amendment established universal suffrage for women, finally achieving a key and long-fought-for demand of the 1848 Seneca Falls conference.

X. PROHIBITION AND THE FIRST WAR ON DRUGS

(36) One year before the 19th amendment, the national prohibition of sale and distribution of alcohol was also constitutionally enshrined in the 18th amendment, culminating the efforts of a century of temperance movements.

(37) The original version of the many “wars on drugs” began in 1914 with the prohibition of the until-then widely available medicinal pharmaceuticals developed by German chemists and known as Heroin (a registered trademark) and cocaine, both of which had caused widespread addiction.

(38) It was not coincidental that Suffrage and Prohibition achieved victories within a year of each other. Women were prominent and central in organizing both efforts. More than a few women had opposed Suffrage, but they accepted it afterwards. But after the success of Prohibition, increasing numbers of women came to oppose it.

PROHIBITION BACKFIRES. By the 1920s alcohol prohibition helped boost organized crime on a massive scale. Alcohol smugglers made huge fortunes. This led to both the growth of the FBI and the formation of the first national crime syndicate. Law enforcement was often highly selective. In a big city like New York there were plenty of speakeasies tolerated by the police in exchange for payoffs. Drug and alcohol enforcement tended to leave the middle classes in (drunken) peace, and to instead target poor people and especially people of color.

XI. AFRICAN AMERICAN MOVEMENTS

(39) IDA WELLS. A woman of relentless spirit amid these movements was Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery in 1862 and grew up a free woman, writer and legal expert. She became the country’s most tireless advocate against the scourge of public lynchings in the South and elsewhere, and another one of the best known muckrakers, as journalists dedicated to opposing corruption and injustice were called. This example, unfortunately, is one of several things to remind us that this is also a not-so progressive era.

(40) W.E.B. DUBOIS AND BOOKER T. WASHINGTON. Ida B. Wells was a founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), together with the historian and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois debated about the strategy black people should pursue to regain civil rights with his former mentor, Booker T. Washington. Washington was the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which provided agricultural and industrial training to African Americans. Washington was associated with a so-called accommodationist position, especially after his 1895 Atlanta address to white elites. The speech did not endorse the racial order in the South, but accepted it as a reality that could not be changed at present. Washington therefore urged black advancement within the existing order. The speech was delivered a year before the Plessy v. Ferguson decision cemented the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine as an underlying legal justification for the Jim Crow system of segregation. DuBois later spoke out passionately against Washington’s views. Behind the scenes Washington sometimes channeled money to the more radical and confrontational causes and legal cases pursued by DuBois. One sad truth is that the “Question of the Color Line,” as DuBois put it, may as well have been happening on a separate planet from most, though not all, of the concerns motivating the progressive movements.

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XII. IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES

(41) The new immigrant communities grew. They started their own institutions: churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, businesses, banks, charities, clubs, mutual aid societies. They introduced new cuisines and new languages to the American mix. They produced writers and artists and popular entertainments like Vaudeville, theater, and opera. (“Vaudeville” describes traveling performance troupes who offered variety shows full of comedy, music, dance numbers, and magic tricks to audiences at theaters everywhere in the country.)

Immigrant communities sought to establish themselves in US society, changing the face of politics, especially in big cities. They became more ‘American’, as was demanded of them by many in the majority society. But they also transformed the meaning of ‘America’, at a time when the form of the culture and the national identity was both in flux and a widespread subject of obsession.

XIII. REGRESSIVE SUCCESSES: RACISM & NATIVISM

(42) So everyone was asking: ‘What is an American?’ This produced a backlash among many members of long-established communities. Opposition to immigration was known generally as ‘Nativism,’ although its visible signs were not usually as fancy as the name:

(43,44) Above: the power and normalcy of anti-immigrant nativism and forms of public and violent racism also grew during this time.

(45) After 1915 a refounded, openly organized, media-savvy Ku Klux Klan grew to millions of members in the North, where it was even more active than in the South. The second KKK was anti-immigrant as well as racist, and following the model of a corporation.

(46,47) BIRTH OF A NATION. The new KKK’s founding was inspired by the success of the first Hollywood blockbuster movie, Birth of a Nation. The film adapted a best-selling novel depicting the original KKK of the Reconstruction era as heroes who liberated the South from oppression by Northern Republican carpetbaggers and African-American freedpeople. The original novel was actually called The Clansman. The three-hour epic, the longest movie until that time, was released in 1915 and endorsed by President Wilson. As it happens, Wilson was an arch segregationist who ordered that African-American employees be fired from their federal government jobs. A caption of him praising the film was actually put into the movie and the trailers (above). Birth of a Nation was subjected to boycotts and protests in many cities, however, and Wilson withdrew his endorsement. The director, D.W. Griffith, later issued statements of regret.

(48) THE SECOND KKK. Founded by people who claimed to be inspired by the movie, the new or ‘second’ Ku Klux Klan acted in the open and officially abstained from violence. It won over millions of dues-paying members throughout the country. Its chapters hosted large and legal gatherings, outdoor picnics, concerts, and exhibitions designed for “the whole family.” Many politicians and Christian preachers supported it. It advocated for the wave of monuments built during that era to commemorate the leaders of the Confederate rebellion. The second KKK’s popularity peaked in the 1920s. Its leadership was plagued by various sex scandals and accusations of corruption, not to mention murder. It declined due to its association with lynchings. It was also a pyramid-scheme, with a ‘multi-level membership finance plan’ in which members would receive a percentage of the fees of new members they recruited. The KKK went bankrupt in 1928.

(49) THE WILSON PURGE. Wilson had won the 1912 election on a platform of clean government, anti-corruption, and measures meant to help small business. The first university academic to become a president, and the first Democrat who was a native of the south (born in Georgia) to be elected president since the Civil War, Wilson oversaw the purging of African American employees from almost all positions in federal service.

EUGENICS AND RACE SCIENCE. Fifty years after Darwin’s publications, elite opinion had largely adopted ‘scientific racism’ and the science of ‘eugenics’ or ‘racial hygiene’. These views were found across the political spectrum, including among many on the left, and spread throughout the US, Britain, and northern Europe. Northern Europeans were considered the superior race. All others, including southern and eastern Europeans, were designated as inferior. Many ethnicities were categorized as separate races, up to 28 just for Europeans alone. Various hierarchies of racial ‘quality’ were proposed. Many states, North and South, encouraged the medical sterilization of people judged to be ‘unfit’, and had laws against ‘miscegenation’ (mixed-race coupling). Among white elites and middle-classes there were assuredly voices dissenting from the racist consensus. They were often isolated, but also to be found in every quarter.

[NOTE ON THE FURTHER HISTORY: In the 1920s, ‘race science’ generally stopped short of publicly advocating ideas like ‘euthanasia,’ of killing the ‘unfit’ or disabled. This ultimate step of mass murder was undertaken on a mass scale by the National Socialist regime in Germany starting in the late 1930s. The genocidal and ‘exterminationist’ actions carried out under the German and Japanese authorities and occupations during World War II were often sanitized with race-science claims. Many on the Allied side came to see the conflict as a great crusade to defeat racism as well as fascism. This helped break the broad consenus favoring scientific racism. Such ideas were broadly discredited for several generations. The decades after World War II also saw the break-up of the European overseas territorial empires (British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese). In Africa and throughout the Asia-Pacific, more than a hundred new nation-states became politically independent by the 1970s (often after new and terrible wars). For many in the United States, these and other factors contributed to abandonment or at least softening of racist views, and encouraged support for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s.]

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XIV. HENRY FORD and the AUTOMOTIVE REVOLUTION

(Slides 50-54, above) The new technologies kept coming. In the early twentieth century, these included ever-more sophisticated counting machines, the advent of aviation (1903) and electric refrigeration (1913), steel suspension bridges and skyscrapers, and the vacuum tubes that allowed radio reception. Commercial broadcast radio started just in time to premiere with news of the 1920 presidential election results.

(55) FORDISM. From the 1890s to the 1920s, the second industrial revolution morphed into what has been called a third: mass production on moving assembly lines using fully standardized, replaceable parts. These methods cut the labor time required to make an automobile by 90 percent. They are associated above all with the newest and for a time biggest captain of industry: Henry Ford. Many came to see Ford as the informal pope of the new age. International competitors studied and hoped to learn the secrets of ‘Fordism’. He was associated with the elementary idea that paying higher wages to his workers would help create bigger markets for the products that workers produced. (By the 1920s, an increase in working-class buying power was also achieved through the advent of easier consumer credit.)

(56) The automotive revolution, initially set off by the Ford Motor Company’s introduction of serial assembly of the Model T in 1908, took off over the next twenty years. It would completely transform the material landscape of the country, at least as dramatically as had the railways. The number of automotive vehicles in the U.S. jumped from about 50,000 garage-made ‘horseless carriages’ by 1908 to about 28 million factory-produced cars and trucks in 1928, with massive road-building and street paving to accommodate the new traffic.

(57) FORD: THE DARK SIDE. Ford was further associated with a strict behavioral regime imposed on his workers and enforced by agents of his ‘Sociological Department’, who were sent to workers’ neighborhoods to monitor them during their off-hours. Drinking and partying in the off-hours were cause to fire a worker. Ford may have raised wages, but he was also strictly anti-union. Being caught organizing for a union was, of course, also a cause to fire a worker.

ANTI-SEMITISM. Starting in 1920, Ford authored The International Jew, a series of anti-Semitic essays. These were published over the next seven years in his own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. His essays laid out claims that a vast and global Jewish conspiracy aimed to destroy the ‘Nordic’ race, which was hard-working and superior, but too good and naive to understand what “the Jews” were doing. Ford’s essays blamed Jews for banking, communism, trade unionism, atheism, sexual freedoms, jazz, laziness among the youth, modern art, and ideas of racial equality. These were all part of a single plot to undermine Nordic culture. Ford paid personally to have his work translated into dozens of languages. The collection of Ford’s essays, The International Jew was published throughout the world in many editions. The German version went into dozens of printings. It is said to have inspired Hitler, although it must be said Hitler already believed all of the same things that Ford was saying. There was nothing new in any of Ford’s claims. He was not an originator, but an amplifier. These beliefs were the standards of modern European anti-Semitism dating back throughout the 19th century.

Hit with boycotts and protests, Ford claimed to renounce these views in 1927. But in the next decade he accepted a high award from the National Socialist government of Germany, a special medal the Nazis created for foreigners who had done great service to the Third Reich.

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XV. CORPORATE RECONSTRUCTION & FINANCIAL REFORM

(58) TAYLORISM. More than ever, the assembly line meant that human workers became part of the machine. Their movements while working were specified by engineers to maximize efficiency. This development was called ‘Taylorism’, after one of several industrial engineers who pioneered it using stop-motion film studies* enabled by the new motion-picture technology. (*You must click on the link and watch the video. It’s only two minutes! What do you think about the woman office worker being photographed in stop motion?)

GENERAL MOTORS. Corporations developed new forms of workplace organization: ‘sociological’ and ‘scientific’ control over workers, corporate bureaucracies with ever more layers of middle management, and ever-more sophisticated forms of public relations and mass-marketing techniques. By the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company would be surpassed by a new image of the faceless, horizontally-integrated corporation: General Motors. Rather than try to control every aspect of production, like Ford did, GM just went ahead and bought all of its most successful competitors, combining many different car companies and brands. Since GM was favored by banks, Ford of course blamed “the Jews” for their success.

VOCABULARY NOTE: Horizontal integration means buying up or beating out one’s competitors within an industry. Cartels, monopolies, and “trusts” that achieve dominance can set the prices within an economic sector. These are examples of horizontal integration. Vertical integration means seeking control of every stage in production and value-creation. Ford for a long time attempted to own or control the iron mines and the rubber plantations that supplied the vital raw materials for cars, the car-parts suppliers, the main factories, and the dealerships. All produced and sold entirely within the Ford ecosystem, and Ford tried as much as possible to also keep financing entirely under his control.

SIZE ADVANTAGES: Progressive reforms succeeded in imposing many new safety and fairness regulations on business and industry. These had the (perhaps unintended) side effect of favoring big corporations over smaller businesses. Big businesses could afford to pay for entire office floors in tall buildings staffed with dozens of regulatory lawyers, compliance officers, and secretaries filling out forms, and equipped these with mechanical computers. These costs were out of reach for many smaller businesses. Big businesses could also afford to pay much more for political lobbying and influence, not to mention advertising, public relations, donations to university departments, etc. This is among the reasons that historian Martin Sklar ironically relabeled the Progressive Era as ‘The Corporate Reconstruction of America’.

BANKING AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 1907

(59) Banking also re-organized, and made use of state intervention to do so. An internal near-meltdown of the financial system took place in 1907. Due to dodgy accounting, two major underwriters (banks who lend to other banks to insure all loan payments are made on time) became unable to meet their own payments. As Wall Street’s informal supremo, J.P. Morgan found himself forced to organize a rescue package using his own money, so that the bankruptcies of the underwriters did not cause the entire system to fail. (If one big bank fails and defaults on its debts to other banks, they may also fail, causing more banks to fall over like dominoes and leading to a general panic and crash.) This set off a sharp but relatively short economic recession for the country as a whole.

FEDERAL RESERVE. Top bankers like Morgan didn’t like carrying the risk for the system as a whole. They therefore supported the creation by Congress in 1913 of a public-private system of regional central banks, known as the Federal Reserve. Here again, we see the phenomenon of large corporations demanding the government regulation that they previously opposed. As long as the new rules served their interests.

[NOTE ON THE FUTURE HISTORY: We may get more into the complicated matter of central banking in future sessions. For now, the short history is that the Federal Reserve system proved useless in preventing the 1929 crash and ineffective in the early years of the Great Depression, but then began to take on a more muscular role under the New Deal. After the dollar crisis of the early 1970s, the Federal Reserve became a central institution in the maintenance of a world financial order centered on the United States dollar as the reserve currency.]

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XV. THE GREAT WAR: BOOM ECONOMY, GREAT MIGRATION

(60) THE BOOM. The Great War of 1914-1918 (World War I) added significantly to an ongoing economic boom in the United States. America became the primary backstop of war production and finance for the Entente Powers (Britain, France, Russian Empire, Italy, and allies) against the Central Powers (German Reich, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire). This was by far the biggest and most terrible war in all history up to this point. Within the first year Britain and France found they were strapped for resources, labor, and soldiers. They drew resources and men from their own large overseas empires, but they needed more. The US government therefore authorized them to borrow billions of U.S. dollars from American private banks, such as J.P. Morgan. Britain and France (and to a lesser extent the Russian Empire) used the American loans to pay for the products of American industry and agriculture. They went ever deeper into debt. The U.S. economy reaped the profits on both ends of these transactions, finance and production.

The resulting economic boom in the US encouraged the internal migration of about a million African Americans and another million white people from the South to the North and the West, where they hoped to finding jobs and escape the Jim Crow reality. This was the origin of far larger Black communities than had existed previously in Detroit, New York (Harlem), Milwaukee, Chicago and Gary, Indiana, and other cities from Newark to St. Louis to Los Angeles.

MODERN PROPAGANDA AND ENTRY INTO THE GREAT WAR. Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on, among other things, the slogan that “HE KEPT US OUT OF WAR.” His victory, however, was followed by the unleashing of a massive federally-led propaganda campaign to gain support for US entry into the war in Europe. This represented a new peak of innovation in the emerging sciences of public relations, psychological persuasion, and message management as pioneered by the likes of Edward Bernays (author of a volume titled Propaganda; the word got a bad reputation, so he later started renamed it “public relations”). Hundreds of speakers were recruited and paid as “Four-Minute Men” sent around the country to hold spontaneous speeches in favor of entering the war. They would erupt into sudden pro-war speeches (four minutes) at busy railway stations and public gatherings. Germany provided legitimate cause for war with an ill-advised escalation of submarine warfare against international merchant shipping on the Atlantic, and a clumsy attempt to encourage Mexico to invade the United States if the U.S. declared war on Germany, which was intercepted and publicized by the British. (Of course no Mexican government would contemplate doing anything of the sort.) Congress voted to declare war on the Central Powers in April 1917.

CRACKDOWN ON DISSENT. The U.S. instituted its second wartime draft, the first since the Civil War. Congress passed an Espionage Act and ‘Sedition Acts’ designed to lock up those who spoke out against the war or the draft. Long-time Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was imprisoned for several years for an antiwar speech delivered in Canton, Ohio. In a case named Schenk, the Supreme Court majority opinion held that the right to freedom of speech did not allow an individual to yell “fire” and cause a deadly panic in a crowded theater. (The majority did not consider whether there was an actual fire in the theater.)

WAR AND PANDEMIC. To help fund the war, the government raised income taxes on the richest percentile to nearly 90 percent. Millions of soldiers volunteered or were were drafted and sent abroad. Nearly 120,000 American soldiers died in 1918, during the country’s brief but decisive involvement in the European war. About half of them succumbed to the novel viral influenza outbreak that eventually hit almost every country in the world, resulting in an estimated 30-50 million deaths in 1918-1920. According to our best historical and medical findings on the matter, American soldiers were the first to bring the influenza to Europe from a military base in Kansas. News of the pandemic was at first censored heavily in the belligerent countries, even as tens of thousands of soldiers died from it. The disease came to be called the “Spanish Flu” because Spain was neutral in the war, and so it was Spanish newspapers that first published stories about the pandemic when it reached Spain. The influenza caused the deaths of an estimated 675,000 people in the U.S. in 1918-19. This was especially devastating because the fatalities were most concentrated among people aged 20-40. Unlike most flus, the infection was usually milder among infants and old people.

REVOLUTIONS AND COLLAPSE. The war ended with the Bolshevik Communist revolution in Russia in 1917, mutiny and partial revolution in Germany in 1918, and the rapid and total collapse of several large territorial empires. Years of civil wars and wars between new nations and would-be nations followed throughout the former territories of Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Sultanate. The United States contributed 10,000 soldiers to the Western coalition supporting the counter-revolutionary forces against the Bolsheviks in Russia, although these were withdrawn after a few months. In the war’s wake, both the Russian Bolshevik call for a world communist revolution and the US government’s proposals for a new international order were frustrated. Wilson’s brainchild, the League of Nations, meant to to avoid a recurrence of world war by conducting a joint management of imperialist holdings and new nations, came into being. But the Senate rejected U.S. membership in the League.

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XVI. 1919-1921: THE POST-WORLD WAR I CRISIS

At home, the end of the Great War brought a severe economic downturn and the climax of several ongoing social and political crises. The American war losses were a small fraction of the war’s overall casualties. However, as inexperienced soldiers sent into the trench hells of France, the Americans suffered high casualty rates in a short period of combat. Many who survived came back horribly wounded, poisoned by gas, or suffering from ‘shell shock,’ the condition today called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This caused many if not most Americans to sour on the adventure of war, generally. A later popular movement that attracted many of the earlier progressive activists eventually called for the abolition of war. (The abolition of war actually happened, by an international agreement known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in 1928. More on that later.)

(62) AFTER THE LAST DAY OF THE WAR. 1919 saw the start of a dramatic set of national upheavals. During the war boom, workers were forced to accept wage controls as a duty to their country. The war’s end was soon followed by a wave of militant labor strikes demanding higher wages to make up for the lower wages during the war. General strikes broke out in Seattle and other cities, and the long-running “Mine War” in West Virginia reached its climax. This came just as the economy went into recession because of the end of war demand. Employers began reducing their workforces. All of the labor actions were violently suppressed. Sometimes the repression was carried out by private forces hired by companies. Often it was the state police or the National Guard who put down the strike. The strikes were always blamed on militants who came from the outside: anarchists, communists, socialists, foreign agents.

(63,64) Newspapers ran cartoons about America being closed for business, or lurking anarchists ready to bomb Lady Liberty. Was Bolshevism coming to America? Hardly.

(65,66) HOOVER AND PALMER. A nationwide, federally-led ‘Red Scare’ began. It was endorsed with enthusiasm by most of the news media. The top federal cop in charge of these actions was J.Edgar Hoover, who went on to become the first director of the FBI until his death in 1972. (That’s fifty years.) An attempted assassination of Attorney General Palmer in 1919 set off what were called the “Palmer Raids,” but these rounded up hundreds of people who had nothing to do with the assassination plot.

RED SCARE. The Palmer Raids were only the beginning. The federal government and the states and the corporations and the media all joined in a broad attack on labor organizers and leftist movements. There were thousands of arbitrary arrests and imprisonments. Hundreds of already naturalized U.S. citizens who were considered to be anarchists or communists were summarily put on ships and deported to the Soviet Union, among them the anarchist leaders Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The ‘one big union’ of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was shattered. The Socialist Party broke up into pro-and anti-Bolshevik factions. Within a few years this led to a split between a new Socialist party that was anti-Bolshevik and the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA).

(67) TULSA. The worst attacks of all during the Red Scare were the many lynchings and outbreaks of mass racist violence against African Americans, starting in the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919. Black people were often seen as allies to communism, usually without basis. But for many whites, there was no need of a pretext to target African Americans. In some cases black veterans were targeted and murdered by mobs just for wearing their military uniforms with pride on the street. This extended to attacks on communities as wholes, including an outright pogrom in May 1921 in Tulsa. After a young black man was falsely charged with harrassing a young white woman, a white militia gathered and marched to the jail, intending to lynch him. There they were confronted by a black militia. There was an exchange of fire between the two groups. In the days that followed, members of the largely impoverished white majority of Tulsa burned down the town’s prosperous black neighborhood (Greenwood, sometimes called the ‘Black Wall Street’). The attackers were supported by an airplane taken from the county government, which dropped bombs on Greenwood. The whites killed and buried an unknown number of people, estimated in the hundreds. The black population of Tulsa fled the town.

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XVII. THE 1920s: ‘NORMALCY’ AND THE END OF PROGRESSIVISM

(68) The upheavals subsided, the economy turned back up, and a kind of stability was restored. Within the next couple of years, the rollbacks of civil liberties during the war and the ‘Red Scare’ were rejected as excessive by courts, legislatures, and public opinion. The New York State Assembly, which had expelled five Socialist members, issued an apology and let them back in. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founded by liberal, leftist and progressive lawyers during the years of persecution, came to the forefront of the fight to protect constitutional rights. Use of the Espionage Act as a means to suppress speech was put into mothballs until the 1970s. (It has had a revival since the 2010s.)

(69) The war and the crisis that followed soured most Americans on liberal internationalism. They rejected the image of technocratic progressivism represented by Wilson. A majority of both the new women voters and of men now voted for the Republicans. Wilson was succeeded after the 1920 election by a series of three Republican presidents who promised ‘normalcy’ and prosperity. Over the next twelve years the presidency rotated from Harding (died in office), to his vice-president Coolidge (plagued by corruption scandals), to the “great humanitarian” Herbert Hoover (as he was known). Hoover, who would be done in by the start of the Great Depression, is pictured as the third man in the top row, above.

MELLON. The series of three Republican followed similar policies. They continued the Banana Wars. Above all, throughout all three of their terms, they kept the same Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon (second row above). Mellon was a Pittsburgh banker who had structured the mergers that created the US aluminium cartel, ALCOA. He was incredibly rich but loved his job in Washington. He led the way in running a consistent Republican policy of lower taxes for the rich, looser enforcement and lifting of business regulations, no federal spending above tax revenues, and a general belief in laisez-faire market economics. When the Depression hit after the 1929 crash, his strategy was that the government should do nothing and let the economy go through the bad times until it got better.

XVIII. THE END OF MASS IMMIGRATION

(70) As we saw above, the 1920s were a peak era for the Second KKK and, tragically, for lynching incidents throughout the country. In the 1920s the nativists (anti-immigrant activists) and scientific racists finally won their political victory against mass immigration. Mass immigration had begun to decline even before World War I started and European countries closed their borders. The trend continued. Starting in 1924, Congress imposed strict entry quotas on all of the peoples considered to be culturally suspect or genetically inferior to Northern Europeans. The “Ellis Island era” of mass immigration run by the Labor Department soon came to an end. A system of visas, issued by American consulates abroad, replaced the former open-entry policy. To get an idea of the effects of the anti-immigration law as measured in statistics, see the bottleneck following the year 1924 in the above graphic, which shows the countries of origin and number of foreign nationals arriving at the United States for each decade from the 1830s to 2013. (Go to the interactive original at Insightful Interaction for the fully interactive and captioned version. Believe me, it’s a lot of fascinating history compressed into a single image, and fun to play with.)

XIX. HAPPY ENDING: THE ROARING TWENTIES?

Left: Hollywood star Louise Brooks displaying the “flapper” look of the 1920s. Right: Yankees slugger Babe Ruth, home run king and highest-paid player in the major leagues. When asked why he was making better money than the president, he answered, “Well I had a better year.”

(71-73) UTOPIA ACHIEVED? The 1920s saw a widespread feeling that the nation was turning inwards, away from foreign entanglements. Most Americans weren’t thinking about the Banana Wars, which were limited and did not require a draft. The US reached a population of 106 million in 1920, according to that year’s census, which also found that 50% of the population now resided in the nation’s urban areas. The 60-year transformation since 1860 and the start of the Civil War (population 31 million) was incredible. The “second” industrial revolution was complete.

COLOSSUS. What did this look like? The US had completely outpaced Britain and all others to become the undisputed industrial colossus of the world, the world’s leading economy, accounting for 1/3 of all manufacturing globally. The US was the leader by far in the production of steel, petroleum, chemicals, cars and trucks, machines large and small, tires, engines, bulldozers, bridges, roads, rail-cars, the first plastic (it was called Bakelite), telegraph wiring, telephones, radios, appliances, airplanes, newspapers, art prints, magazines, books, water systems, textiles and clothing, ads, managers, accountants, scientists, scholars, and college students. You name it, they made it. The US was equally an agricultural colossus.

CONSUMERISM. Workers were thought to have turned away from labor struggles for shorter hours and higher wages. They were thought to now be vesting their hopes in easier consumer credit for cars, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners. No one wanted to be a communist any more, or so it was thought. Home ownership and life in the suburbs became ideals, with a wave of home-building in new suburban towns. (Creation of suburbs in the 1920s was significant but very modest compared to the decades after World War II. For a sample, visit the Queens neighborhoods of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills.)

THE RICH. By the middle of the decade, with moderate rises in wages and increased credit including easier mortgages for households, a new consumer boom was underway. The 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, describes what seems to be a renewed Gilded Age, a permanent party for the rich living in giant houses on the North Shore of Long Island. They could drink themselves to death, if they so wished, and Prohibition be damned. There arose a widespread sense that a ‘new era’ of consumerism and care-free prosperity had begun. This has been exaggerated, given that the majority were still working class or small-time farmers who had to earn their living by the day.

THE NEW ERA. More women worked. They could vote. Fashions changed. They could move freely. The new fashions allowed them to run! Everything was suddenly electric. More than ever, the streets were illuminated at night. Every residence full of single wprlomg renters got its telephone, shared by all the tenants. The movies were everywhere, if still silent until 1928. Millions of households got their first radio sets and refrigerators. During the hot summers the theaters offered refrigerated air. Wages crept up. Advertising went up everywhere. Millions of cars were sold. Automotive traffic jams became a thing, along with high fatality rates from car accidents. Public relations specialists working for the car companies invented the “jay walker,” a term for stupid people who didn’t pay attention to the new traffic lights and who deserved whatever happened to them as a result. The war and the influenza and the crisis of 1919 became distant memories. The New York subway grew. The Jazz Era and the Roaring Twenties were declared. Led by the car companies and the new radio networks, the stock market kept going up, up, up.

The 1920s were a new era, in many ways, but it would prove to be short-lived. As things turned out, every credit is also an equivalent debt, and the debt would soon come due.