The Progressive Era:
Reform and Reaction, 1890s-1925
CLASSES: Tue 29 Sep & Thu 1 Oct
READING & VIEWING
Start the readings before Tuesday and complete by Thursday.
- 1) Required film: Plutocracy, Part I, by Scott Noble, 2015.
Please watch the film before Tuesday. Your assignment is to watch two half-hour segments at different times, not all at once. Take notes and see the homework option below.
– On 1865-1900s, from 30:25 to 1:06:00.
– On early labor movements in US, from 1:06:00 to 1:46:18 (end).
The links lead directly to the timestamp indicated. - 2) Required reading: American Yawp, First Edition, Chapter 20: “The Progressive Era”
- 3) Primary Sources: All 3 are required by Thursday. They are short.
(via American Yawp, Chapter 20)
–> Black Progress: Booker T. Washington (1895) and W.E.B. DuBois (1903).
–> Crystal Eastman, ‘Now We Can Begin’ (1920).
–> Ellen Welles Page, ‘A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents’ (1922). - 4) Alternative Reading: The Progressive Era, 1890s-1925
You may choose to skip #2 and instead read my own treatment of the political and economic history from the 1890s to the 1920s. We will be using this in the classes. It is longer, but covers a much longer period. Anyone is free to take the challenge but it is strongly recommended for history majors and those of you who intend to write individual papers. Reading it needs about three hours. If you do, follow the usual strategy: Write down and look up words and terms you don’t know. Take simple and brief notes by hand, enough to remember key points. When you are done, go back and review. See homework option, below.
HOMEWORK OPTIONS.
These are not required. They are optional. They will count as extra credit toward the homework and quiz part of the grade. They are useful exercises. Please do no more than ONE of these and write by hand. You should aim to submit your short essay in class on Thu 1 Oct. I will accept later submissions until Tue 6 Oct without penalty.
- For those who read American Yawp (#2): Choose one full section. (They are numbered by roman numerals.) Re-read it and examine the images. Write your impressions. How do you see the issues raised still playing out today, if at all?
- For those who choose the alternative reading (#4): Choose two full sections. (Note that this is different and longer than the other assignment.) Write what the two sections describe, in a shorter form, in your own handwriting, and add your own thoughts. Submit the resulting short essay (two to three paragraphs) in class on Thu 1 Oct. I will accept later submissions until Tue 6 Oct. In class I will ask you which sections you chose, and we will review those (since we can’t possibly review the entire text in class). This assignment is designed to prepare you for writing your own essays and presentations.
DIANA: STOP HERE
– Extras –
NEW YORK 1911 – A black-and-white reel of 9 minutes, taken on the street in 1911, at the dawn of the cinematic age.
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WHAT IS TAYLORISM? Two minutes from a PBS documentary on the origins of Time and Motion Studies. This was also known as Taylorism: the science of making the motions of human workers motions more efficient.
There will be a Fake Quiz. (We will just do it live in class, no paper.)
Optional
5. American Yawp, Chapter 22 (‘The New Era’, on the 1920s).
6. Yasha Levine, ‘The Racist Origins of America’s Tech Industry’ (2020).
– Films –
NEW YORK 1911 – a black-and-white reel of 6 minutes, taken on the street in 1911, at the dawn of the cinematic age; now colorized, with sounds added to create atmosphere, and uploaded to Youtube.
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WHAT IS TAYLORISM? Two minutes on the origins of Time and Motion Studies (part of Taylorism: making human worker motions more efficient).
*
‘The Power and the People’
Episode 4 of New York, PBS documentary series, 2000, dir. Ric Burns. Start at 1:05:50, watch through 1:44:05.
1:05:50-1:44:05: This segment begins with the story of the big labor protests and strikes by New York garment workers in 1909. It shows how this mostly female labor force, underpaid and overworked under terrible conditions, acquired militant unity among people of different ethnicities and languages. But the strikes were worn out and defeated. At the time, many middle-class people were becoming more concerned about the conditions of the working poor and joining progressive movements, in part thanks to exposes like the photo book by Jacob Riis, ‘How the Other Half Lives’.
In 1911, a fire broke out at Triangle Shirtwaist, a crowded sweatshop factory with terrible and negligent safety conditions, on the eighth floor of a building that still stands today near Washington Square Park. 146 workers died within an hour, 141 of them mostly young women. Dozens jumped to their deaths in broad daylight, their bodies striking the sidewalk. The horrors of the worst industrial disaster in the history of New York City were witnessed by thousands of shocked onlookers who would never forget the moment. It spurred overwhelming demands for reform.
But how would the enemies of reform respond? What would the powerful Democratic political machine at Tammany Hall, who controlled the New York state and city legislature, do? One person who witnessed the fire was Frances Perkins, perhaps the most important architect of the New Deal reforms of the 1930s as the Labor Secretary (first female U.S. cabinet member ever) under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She wrote that the New Deal was born on the day the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burned.
The first 35 minutes of this episode are also highly recommended: We watched a segment, about the advent of motion pictures, in class in Week 4. The start of the film also shows the rise of skyscrapers, tells the story of Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty, and covers the mass immigration to New York through Ellis Island.
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Plutocracy, Part II: ‘Solidarity Forever’
dir. Scott Noble, 2016
Start from 35:40 (‘Women’s Suffrage movement…’) to the end. Scott Noble’s film gives less detail about the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster than found in the documentary New York, but provides more breadth on various subjects generally. It approaches the history from a different perspective than Ric Burn’s documentary. The part starting at 1:38:50 deals with the increase of women laborers in the industrial labor force and includes the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, as well as the Lawrence textile mill strike of 1912, a rare victory for labor actions at this time that discovered a brilliant way to converge with Progressive sympathizers in New York City.
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OLD LECTURE
–> Lecture Script.
–> Picture Gallery [pdf] – [ppt]
(Numbers in script match slides in Picture Gallery.)