Chapter18 I t was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’ blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owner’s way, it was later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Onlookers watched in horror as girls leaped from the upper stories. By the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found inside the building. The Triangle fire was not the worst fire disaster in American history (seven years earlier, over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York Harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory inspec- tion laws and fire safety codes. Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era. These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded rapidly—by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in combating social inequality. The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defined political movement of indi- viduals and groups who hoped to bring about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that aca- demic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business. FOCUS QUESTIONS Why was the city such a central element in Progres- sive America? How did the labor and women’s movements expand the meanings of American freedom? In what ways did Progres- sivism include both demo- cratic and antidemocratic impulses? How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state? 544 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reform- ers addressed issues of American freedom in varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the expansion of political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman suffrage, the use of politi- cal power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary citizens more influence on legislation. It witnessed the flowering of understandings of freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination. At the same time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those deemed fit to exer- cise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the 1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully “Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political decision making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate. Even as the idea of freedom expanded, freedom’s boundaries contracted in Progressive America. AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY Farms and Cities The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the continued expansion of the consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total output rose by about 85 per- cent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than in the previous forty years combined. Irrigation trans- formed the Imperial Valley of California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming. But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new massconsumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them Economic growth Growth of the cities AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 545 New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhattan Island were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty-three of the states. The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant families in New York’s down- town tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets. Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row. According to one esti- mate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial and industrial capital in the United States. TABLE 18.1 Rise of the City, 1880– 1920 POPULATION YEAR (PERCENTAGE) 1880 20% 1890 28 1900 38 1910 50 1920 68 WITH 100,000+ POPULATION 12 15 18 21 26 URBAN NUMBER OF CITIES The Muckrakers Lewis Hine used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers such as this young spinner in a southern cotton factory. Some observers saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent social inequality. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities (1904) by Lincoln Steffens showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political corruption. Theodore Roosevelt disparaged such writing as “muckraking,” the use of journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life. Major novelists took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Perhaps the era’s most influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Immigration as a Global Process If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cities, it was their immigrant character. The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and the outbreak of World 546 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 million immigrants came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture. During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War I and then by legislation), perhaps 40 million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Millions of persons migrated to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, mainly from India and China. Numerous causes inspired this massive uprooting of population. Rural southern and eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Political turmoil at home, like the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration. Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the West. After the exclusion of immi- grants from China in the late nineteenth century, approximately 72,000 Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. Between 1910 and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as the main entry point for immigrants from Asia. Far larger was Mexican immigration. Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that country’s popula- tion) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European countries. By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country’s history. Worldwide migration Causes of emigration AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 547 The Immigrant Quest for Freedom Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law, could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated from the oppressive social hierarchies of their homelands. “America is a free country,” one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale immigration reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Although some of the new immigrants, espe- cially Jews fleeing religious persecution in the Russian empire, thought of themselves as permanent emigrants, the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land. Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only temporarily in the United States. The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops, theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues. Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impoverished regions from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, whereas native-born workers dominated skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.” Consumer Freedom Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new meaning to American freedom. During the Progressive era, large downtown department stores, neighborhood chain stores, and retail mail-order houses made available to consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sew- ing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players. The rise of mass consumption 548 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consump- tion. Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. By 1910, 25 million Americans per week, mostly working- class urban residents, were attending “nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower than that of vaudeville shows. The Working Woman The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fire revealed, more and more women were working for wages. Immigrant women were largely confined to low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enormously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were office workers or telephone operators. Female work was no longer con- fined to young, unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands. The working woman—immigrant and native, working- class and professional—became a symbol of female emancipation. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New York. The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remark- ably similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 549 Contemporaries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of fashion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as old-fashioned and not sufficiently “American.” The Rise of Fordism If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads. Park, Michigan, adopted the In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised wages at his factory to the unheard-of level of five dollars per day (more than double the pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages, Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000 Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916. The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called Fordism. The Promise of Abundance As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equip- ment, etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. 550 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty as a sales device. Economic abun- dance would eventually come to define the “American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods. The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living wage” and an “American standard of liv- ing”—that offered a new language for criti- cizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute” right of citizenship. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individu- alism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society. For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a central place in descriptions of American society and its future. VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM The immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize indus- trial capitalism and find common ground in a society still racked by labor conflict and experiencing massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large corpo- ration and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentra- tion of wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused with new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth century. An advertisement for Palmolive soap illustrates how companies marketed goods to consumers by creating anxiety and invoking exotic images. The accompanying text promises “a perfect skin” and includes an imagined image of Cleopatra, claiming that the soap embodies “ancient beauty arts.” By 1915, Palmolive was the best-selling soap in the world. VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 551 Industrial Freedom In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most poorly paid factory workers but from better-off employees as well. Large firms in the automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over the work process. Efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called “scientific management.” Through scientific study, Taylor believed, the “one best way” of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw the erosion of their traditional influence over the work process as a loss of freedom. These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was widely believed to lie at the root of the much-discussed “labor problem.” Many Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis, an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essen- tial principle of freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between “political liberty” and “industrial slavery,” Brandeis insisted, was America’s foremost social problem. The Socialist Presence and Eugene Debs Economic freedom was also a rallying cry of American socialism, which reached its greatest influence during the Progressive era. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party called for immediate reforms such as free college educa- tion, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories. By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of Labor, and had elected scores of local officials. Socialism flourished in diverse communities throughout the country. On the Lower East Side of New York City, it arose from the economic exploita- tion of immigrant workers and Judaism’s tradition of social reform. Here, a vibrant socialist culture developed, complete with Yiddish-language newspapers and theaters, as well as large public meetings and street demonstrations. In 1914, the district elected socialist Meyer London to Peak of American socialism Centers of socialist strength 552 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era Congress. Another center of socialist strength was Milwaukee, where Victor Berger, a German-born teacher and newspaper editor, mobilized local AFL unions into a potent political force. Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas like Oklahoma, and in the min- ing regions of Idaho and Montana. No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ideals of equality, self-government, and freedom than Eugene V. Debs, the railroad union leader who, as noted in the previous chapter, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894. For two decades, Debs crisscrossed the country preaching that control of the economy by a democratic govern- ment held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic freedom.” “While there is a lower class,” proclaimed Debs, “I am in it, . . . while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Throughout the Atlantic world of the early twentieth century, social- ism was a rising presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes Although the Socialist Party never won more than 6 percent of the vote nationally, it gained control of numerous small and medium-sized cities between 1900 and 1920. Debs and socialism VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 553 VOICES OF FREEDOM 554 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era From Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898) Women and Economics, by the prolific feminist social critic and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, influenced the new generation of women aspiring to greater independence. It insisted that how people earned a living shaped their entire lives and that therefore women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom. It is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men. . . . A truer spirit is the increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the beggary of their position. More and more do fathers give their daughters, and husbands their wives, a definite allowance,—a separate bank account,—something . . . all their own. The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change has come. . . . The radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us. . . . The growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable change to our daughters as well as to our sons. . . . One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. . . . Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the home and family relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of individual and race, we need not fear it. It does not involve a change in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it. But it does involve the exercise of human faculty in women, in social service and exchange rather than in domestic service solely. . . . [Today], when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing . . . freedom, the woman in marrying becomes the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. . . . When women stand free as economic agents, they will [achieve a] much better fulfilment of their duties as wives and mothers and [contribute] to the vast improvement in health and happiness of the human race. From John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of Industrial Liberty” (1910) During the Progressive era, the idea of “industrial liberty” moved to the center of political discussion. Progressive reformers and labor leaders like John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, condemned the prevailing idea of liberty of contract in favor of a broader definition of economic freedom. While the Declaration of Independence established civil and political liberty, it did not, as you all know, establish industrial liberty. . . . Liberty means more than the right to choose the field of one’s employment. He is not a free man whose family must buy food today with the money that is earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to work unduly long hours and for wages so low that he can not provide the necessities of life for himself and his family; who must live in a crowded tenement and see his children go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before their bodies are developed and their minds trained. To have freedom a man must be free from the harrowing fear of hunger and want; he must be in such a position that by the exercise of reasonable frugality he can provide his family with all of the necessities and the reasonable comforts of life. He must be able to educate his children and to provide against sickness, accident, and old age. . . . A number of years ago the legislatures of several coal producing States enacted laws requiring employers to pay the wages of their workmen in lawful money of the United States and to cease the practice of paying wages in merchandise. From time immemorial it had been the custom of coal companies to conduct general supply stores, and the workingmen were required, as a condition of employment, to accept products in lieu of money in return for services rendered. This system was a great hardship to the workmen. . . . The question of the constitutionality of this legislation was carried into the courts and by the highest tribunal it was declared to be an invasion of the workman’s liberty to deny him the right to accept merchandise in lieu of money as payment of his wages. . . . [This is] typical of hundreds of instances in which laws that have been enacted for the protection of the workingmen have been declared by the courts to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that they invaded the liberty of the working people. . . . Is it not natural that the workingmen should feel that they are being guaranteed the liberties they do not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them? May they not exclaim, with Madame Roland [of the French Revolution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!” QUESTIONS 1. What does Gilman see as the main obstacles to freedom for women? 2. What does Mitchell believe will be nec- essary to establish “industrial liberty”? 3. How do the authors differ in their view of the relationship of the family to individual freedom? VOICES OF FREEDOM 555 or president (6 percent of the total) in 1912. In that year, the socialist Appeal to Reason, published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly newspaper in the country. AFL and IWW Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive America. Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor saw its membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, its president, Samuel Gompers, sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. Most employers nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority and resisted them stubbornly. The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers— skilled industrial and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-born. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusion- ary policies formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part advocate of a workers’ revolution that would seize the means of production and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding principle. The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—the immigrant factory-labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks, and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast. The New Immigrants on Strike A series of mass strikes among immigrant workers placed labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that although ethnic divisions among work- ers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. The IWW did not originate these confrontations but was sometimes called in by local unionists to solidify the strikers. IWW organizers printed leaflets, post- ers, and banners in multiple languages and insisted that each nationality enjoy representation on the committee coordinating a walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant communities to persuade local religious leaders, shopkeepers, and officeholders to support the strikes. The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public conscious- ness took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-five nationalities. When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fifty- Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) The right to collective bargaining 556 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era four-hour limit to the workweek, employ- ers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those who had been laboring longer hours. Workers spontaneously went on strike. In February, strikers devised the idea of sending strikers’ children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist fami- lies in New York City agreed to take them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and half-starved, marching up Fifth Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the strikers. The gov- ernor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled on the workers’ terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan to the labor movement: “We want bread and roses, too”—a declaration that workers sought not only higher wages but the opportunity to enjoy the finer things of life. Labor and Civil Liberties The fiery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of eighty-three had been jailed after addressing striking Colorado miners, later told a New York audience that the union “had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayonets.” Yet the struggle of workers for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made free speech a significant public issue in the early twentieth century. By and large, the courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth- century America. The IWW’s battle for freedom of expression is a case in point. Lacking union halls, its organizers relied on songs, street theater, impromptu orga- nizing meetings, and street corner gatherings to spread their message and attract support. In response to IWW activities, officials in Los Angeles, Spokane, Denver, and more than a dozen other cities limited or prohibited outdoor meetings. To arouse popular support, the IWW filled the jails with members who defied local law by speaking in public. In nearly all the freespeech fights, however, the IWW eventually forced local officials to give way. “Whether they agree or disagree with its methods or aims,” wrote one journalist, “all lovers of liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for . . . [keeping] alight the fires of freedom.” VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 557 The New Feminism During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” first entered the politi- cal vocabulary. In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question “What is Feminism?” Feminism, said one speaker, meant women’s emancipation “both as a human being and a sex-being.” Feminists’ forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the discussion of personal freedom. One symbol of the new era was Isadora Duncan, who brought from California a new, expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of traditional technique and costume. “I beheld the dance I had always dreamed of,” wrote the novelist Edith Wharton on seeing a Duncan performance, “satisfying every sense as a flower does, or a phrase of Mozart’s.” During this era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex o’clock” in America. Issues of intimate personal relations previ- ously confined to private discussion blazed forth in popular magazines and public debates. For the generation of women who adopted the word “feminism” to express their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression and reproductive choice emerged as critical definitions of women’s emancipation. The Birth-Control Movement The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to birth control, an issue that gave political expression to chang- ing sexual behavior. Emma Goldman, who had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen, toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive devices. By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive infor- mation and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish- American working-class family, placed the issue of birth control at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York socialist news- paper. Postal officials barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The next issue of The Call included a blank page with the headline: “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U. S. Post Office.” 558 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own journal, The Woman Rebel. “No woman can call herself free,” she proclaimed, “who does not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn and began distributing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison. Native American Progressivism Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. It created a panIndian public space independent of white control. Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been captured as a child by members of a neighboring tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to Chicago. There Montezuma attended school and eventu- ally obtained a medical degree. In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signal- ing”), that called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Convinced that outsiders exerted too much power over life on the reservations, he insisted that self-determination was the only way for Indians to escape poverty and marginalization. But he also demanded that Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans. Indian activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism. THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM Effective Freedom Progressivism was an international movement. In the early twentieth century, cities throughout the world experienced similar social strains arising from rapid industrialization and urban growth. Reformers across the globe exchanged ideas and envisioned new social policies. The Chinese Goals of federal Indian policy Worldwide progressivism THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 559 leader Sun Yat-Sen, for example, was influenced by the writings of Henry George and Edward Bellamy. As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old-age pensions, minimumwage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regu- lation of workplace safety, American reformers came to believe they had much to learn from the Old World. The term “social legislation,” meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities of working-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of the United States. Drawing on the reform programs of the Gilded Age and the example of European legislation, Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious government. Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful government posed a threat to free- dom, because their understanding of freedom was itself in flux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, was far different from the “highly formal and limited concept of liberty” as protection from outside restraint. Freedom was a positive, not a negative, concept—the “power to do specific things.” It sometimes required the government to act on behalf of those with little wealth or power. Thus, freedom in the Progressive era inevitably became a political question. State and Local Reforms In the United States, with a political structure more decentralized than in European countries, state and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures. In cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of govern- ment to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public control of “natural monopo- lies” like gas and water works, and improve public transportation. They raised prop- erty taxes in order to spend more money on schools, parks, and other public facilities. Gilded Age mayors and governors pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, Hazen Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled the business interests that had domi- nated city government, forcing gas and tele- phone companies to lower their rates, and 560 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era established a municipal power plant. Hiram Johnson, who as public pros- ecutor had secured the conviction for bribery of a San Francisco political boss, was elected governor of California in 1910. Having promised to “kick the Southern Pacific [Railroad] out of politics,” he secured passage of the Public Utilities Act, one of the country’s strongest railroad-regulation mea- sures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the working hours of women. The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M. La Follette, who made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” After serving as a Republican member of Congress, La Follette became convinced that an alliance of railroad and lumber com- panies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he instituted a series of measures known as the Wisconsin Idea, including nominations of candidates for office through primary elections rather than by political bosses, the taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin. Progressive Democracy Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society. Alarmed by the upsurge in violent class conflict and the unrestricted power of cor- porations, they believed that political reforms could help to create a unified “people” devoted to greater democracy and social reconciliation. Yet increasing the responsibilities of government made it all the more impor- tant to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not. The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the politi- cal process, many seemingly contradictory in purpose. The electorate was simultaneously expanded and contracted, empowered and removed from direct influence on many functions of government. Democracy was enhanced by the Seventeenth Amendment (1917)—which provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures— by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary elections among party members to select candidates for office. Several states, including California under Hiram Johnson, adopted the initiative and referendum (the former allowed voters to propose leg- islation, the latter to vote directly on it) and the recall, by which officials could be removed from office by popular vote. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising women—the largest expansion of democracy in American history. Public Utilities Act Robert La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea Civic harmony Initiative and referendum THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 561 Restricting democratic participation But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation, most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, as noted in Chapter 17. To make city government more honest and efficient, many localities replaced elected mayors with appointed non- partisan commissions or city managers—a change that insulated officials from machine domination but also from popular control. New literacy tests and residency and registration requirements, common in northern as well as southern states, limited the right to vote among the poor. In the eyes of many Progressives, the “fitness” of voters, not their absolute numbers, defined a functioning democracy. Most Progressive thinkers were highly uncomfortable with the real world of politics, which seemed to revolve around the pursuit of narrow class, ethnic, and regional interests. Robert M. La Follette’s reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his administration reflected a larger Progressive faith in expertise. The government could best exer- cise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impar- tial experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry. Political freedom was less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualified persons devising the best public policies. Jane Addams and Hull House But alongside this elitist politics, Progressivism also included a more dem- ocratic vision of the activist state. As much as any other group, organized women reformers spoke for the more democratic side of Progressivism. Still barred from voting and holding office in most states, women none- theless became central to the political history of the Progressive era. The immediate catalyst was a growing awareness among women reformers of the plight of poor immigrant communities and the emergence of the condition of women and child laborers as a major focus of public concern. The era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams, who had been born in 1860, the daughter of an Illinois businessman. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago, a “settlement house” devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. Unlike previous reformers who had aided the poor from afar, settlement-house workers moved into poor neighbor- hoods. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children, established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settle- ment houses had been established in cities throughout the country. Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were more than 80,000 college-educated women in the United 562 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era States. Many found a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor families in the growing cities. The efforts of middle-class women to uplift the poor, and of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity of politics toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that even well-organized social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of inadequate housing, income, and health. Government action was essential. Hull House instigated an array of reforms in Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere, including stronger build- ing and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and safer labor condi- tions, and the right of labor to organize. The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” Florence Kelley, a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s power as consumers as a force for social change. Under Kelley’s leader- ship, the National Consumers’ League became the nation’s leading advo- cate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. The Campaign for Woman Suffrage After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage moved beyond the elit- ism of the 1890s to engage a broad coalition ranging from middle-class members of women’s clubs to unionists, socialists, and settlement house workers. For the first time, it became a mass movement. Membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew from 13,000 in 1893 to more than 2 million by 1917. By 1900, more than half the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues, and Hull House Florence Kelley A mass movement A “suffrage float” promotes equal rights for women in Nebraska. Although most of its neighboring states had extended the right to vote to women, Nebraska’s male voters rejected woman suffrage in a 1914 referendum. THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 563 Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full woman suffrage. Between 1910 and 1914, seven more western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the first state east of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections. These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere, were conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effective use of the techniques of advertising, publicity, and mass enter- tainment characteristic of modern consumer society. California’s success- ful 1911 campaign utilized automobile parades, numerous billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage buttons and badges. Nonetheless, state campaigns were difficult, expensive, and usually unsuccessful. The movement increasingly focused its attention on securing a national consti- tutional amendment giving women the right to vote. Maternalist Reform Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire the reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Female reform- ers helped to launch a mass movement for direct government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers and children. Laws provid- ing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. These “maternalist” reforms rested on the assumption that the government should encourage women’s capacity for bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same time. Both feminists and believers 564 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era in conventional domestic roles supported such measures. The former hoped that these laws would subvert women’s dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen traditional families and the mother-child bond. Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did in fact work outside the home but defined them as a dependent group (like children) in need of state protection in ways male workers were not. In 1908, in the landmark case of Muller v. Oregon, Louis D. Brandeis filed a famous brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demon- strate that because they had less strength and endurance than men, long hours of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Persuaded by Brandeis’s argument, the Supreme Court unani- mously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for women. Thus, three years after the notorious Lochner decision invalidating a New York law limiting the working hours of male bakers (discussed in Chapter 16), the Court created the first large breach in “liberty of contract” doctrine. But the cost was high: at the very time that women in unprec- edented numbers were entering the labor market and earning college degrees, Brandeis’s brief and the Court’s opinion solidified the view of women workers as weak, dependent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men. By 1917, thirty states had enacted laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers. The maternalist agenda that built gender inequality into the early foundations of the welfare state by extension raised the idea that gov- ernment should better the living and working conditions of men as well. Indeed, Brandeis envisioned the welfare state as one rooted in the notion of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and protection against unemployment and work-related accidents. This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By 1913, twentytwo states had enacted workmen’s compensation laws to benefit workers, male or female, injured on the job. This legislation was the first wedge that opened the way for broader programs of social insurance. But state minimum-wage laws and most laws regulating working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection, but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen as degrading. The establishment of a standard of living and working conditions beneath which no American should be allowed to fall would await the coming of the New Deal. Louis D. Brandeis and Muller v. Oregon The unintended effects of Muller A form of social insurance THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 565 THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS Despite creative experiments in social policy at the city and state levels, the tradition of localism seemed to most Progressives an impediment to a renewed sense of national purpose. Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of industrial democracy were national problems that demanded national solutions. The democratic national state, wrote New Republic editor Herbert Croly, offered an alternative to control of Americans’ lives by narrow inter- ests that manipulated politics or by the all-powerful corporations. Croly proposed a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve the “Jeffersonian ends” of democratic self-determination and individual free- dom, he insisted, the country needed to employ the “Hamiltonian means” of government intervention in the economy. Each in his own way, the Progressive presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—tried to address this challenge. Theodore Roosevelt In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley while the president visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the age of forty-two, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to hold the office of president. In many ways, he became the model for the twentieth-century president, an official actively and continuously engaged in domestic and foreign affairs. (The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be dis- cussed in the next chapter.) He moved aggressively to set the political agenda. Roosevelt’s domestic program, which he called the Square Deal, attempted to confront the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and “bad” corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel and Standard Oil, served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy financiers interested only in profit and had no right to exist. Soon after assuming office, Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company. Created by financier J. P. Morgan, this “holding company” owned the stock and directed the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the Great Lakes and the Pacific. In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement. 566 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era Reelected that same year, Roosevelt pushed for more direct federal regulation of the economy. He proposed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, which the Supreme Court had essentially limited to collecting economic statistics. By this time, journalistic exposés, labor unrest, and the agitation of Progressive reformers had created significant public support for Roosevelt’s regulatory program. In 1906, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads’ business records and to set reasonable rates, a significant step in the devel- opment of federal intervention in the corporate economy. That year, as has been noted, also saw the Pure Food and Drug Act. Many businessmen sup- ported these measures, recognizing that they would benefit from greater public confidence in the quality and safety of their products. But they were alarmed by Roosevelt’s calls for federal inheritance and income taxes and the regulation of all interstate businesses. John Muir and the Spirituality of Nature If the United States lagged behind Europe in many areas of social policy, it led the way in the conservation of natural resources. The first national park, Yellowstone in Wyoming, was created in 1872, partly to preserve an area of remarkable natural beauty and partly at the urging of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was anxious to promote western tourism. In the 1890s, the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir organized the Sierra Club to help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging by timber companies. Muir’s love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings. Nearly blinded in an accident in an Indianapolis machine shop where he worked in his twenties, he found in the restoration of his sight an inspiration to appre- ciate God’s creation. He called forests “God’s first temples.” In nature, he believed, men could experience directly the presence of God. Muir was inspired by the Transcendentalists of the pre–Civil War era—like Henry David Thoreau, he lamented the intrusions of civilization on the natural environment. But unlike them, Muir developed a broad following. As more and more Americans lived in cities, they came to see nature less as something to conquer and more as a place for recreation and personal growth. Muir’s spiritual understanding of nature resonated with these urbanites. The Conservation Movement In the 1890s, Congress authorized the president to withdraw “forest reserves” from economic development, a restriction on economic freedom in the name of a greater social good. But it was under Theodore Roosevelt THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 567 that conservation became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoors- man who built a ranch in North Dakota in the 1880s, Roosevelt moved to preserve parts of the natural environment from economic exploitation. Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create new national parks. In some ways, conservation was a typical Progressive reform. Manned by experts, the government could stand above political and economic battles, serving the public good while preventing “special interests” from causing irreparable damage to the environment. The aim was less to end the economic utili- zation of natural resources than to develop responsible, scientific plans for their use. Pinchot halted timber companies’ reckless assault on the nation’s forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that development and con- servation could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated. Taft in Office Having served nearly eight years as president, Roosevelt did not run again in 1908. His chosen successor, William Howard Taft, defeated William Jennings Bryan, making his third unsuccessful race for the White House. Although temperamentally more conservative than Roosevelt, Taft pursued antitrust policy even more aggressively. He persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (one of Roosevelt’s “good” trusts) in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, produc- ing, and refining companies. The government also won a case against American Tobacco, which the Court ordered to end pricing policies that were driving smaller firms out of business. Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which authorized Congress to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier citizens). It was ratified shortly before he left office. A 2 percent tax on incomes over $4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a “communistic threat to property.” A key step in the modernization of the federal government, the income tax provided a reliable and flexible source of revenue for a national state whose powers, responsibilities, and expenditures were growing rapidly. Despite these accomplishments, Taft seemed to gravitate toward the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Taft’s rift with Progressives grew deeper when Richard A. Ballinger, the new secretary 568 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in forest reserves. Ballinger decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger of colluding with busi- ness interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the Roosevelt administration. When Taft fired Pinchot in 1910, the breach with party Progressives became irreparable. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination. Defeated, Roosevelt launched an independent campaign as the head of the new Progressive Party. The Election of 1912 All the crosscurrents of Progressive-era thinking came together in the pres- idential campaign of 1912. The four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs became a national debate on the relationship between political and economic free- dom in the age of big business. At one end of the political spectrum stood Taft, who stressed that economic individualism could remain the founda- tion of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Debs. Relatively few Americans supported the Socialist Party’s goal of abolishing the “capitalistic system” altogether, but its immediate demands—including public ownership of the railroads and banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter working hours and a mini- mum wage—summarized forward-looking Progressive thought. But it was the battle between Wilson and Roosevelt over the role of the fed- eral government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public attention in 1912. The two represented competing strands of Progressivism. Both believed government action necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing the gov- ernment’s power and the inevitability of economic concentration. New Freedom and New Nationalism Strongly influenced by Louis D. Brandeis, with whom he consulted frequently during Ballinger and Pinchot A key election Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, speaking in Chicago during the 1912 presidential campaign. THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 569 the campaign, Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market competition and freeing government from domination by big business. Wilson feared big government as much as he feared the power of the corporations. The New Freedom, as he called his program, envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws, protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses— creat- ing, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that corporations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that proved remarkably accurate. To Roosevelt’s supporters, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era; his program, they argued, served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the inevitability of economic concentration and the interests of profession- als, consumers, and labor. Espousing the New Nationalism, his program of 1912, Roosevelt insisted that only the “controlling and directing power of the government” could restore “the liberty of the oppressed.” He called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of industries, including railroads, mining, and oil. The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice. Drafted by a group of settlement-house activists, labor reformers, and social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for all workers, and a national system of social insurance covering unem- ployment, medical care, and old age. Roosevelt’s campaign helped to give freedom a modern social and economic content and established an agenda that would define political liberalism for much of the twentieth century. Wilson’s First Term The Republican split ensured a sweeping victory for Wilson, who won about 42 percent of the popular vote, although Roosevelt humiliated Taft by winning about 27 percent to the president’s 23 percent. In office, Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader. He was the first president to hold regular press conferences, and he delivered messages personally to Congress rather than sending them in written form, as did all his predecessors since John Adams. Roosevelt’s New Nationalism The Progressive Party Platform of 1912 570 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his version of Progressivism. The first sig- nificant measure of his presidency was the Underwood Tariff, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost revenue, imposed a gradu- ated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans. There followed the Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and barred courts from issu- ing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the Keating-Owen Act, outlaw- ing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate commerce; the Adamson Act, establishing an eight-hour workday on the nation’s railroads; and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist subtreasury plan, which extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses. The Expanding Role of Government Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in tune with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism than the New Freedom of 1912. Wilson presided over the cre- ation of two powerful new public agencies. In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and influ- ence interest rates so as to promote economic growth. A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities such as price-fixing and monopo- listic practices. Both the Federal Reserve and the FTC were welcomed by many business leaders as a means of restoring order to the economic marketplace and warding off more radical measures for curbing corporate power. But they reflected the remarkable expansion of the federal role in the economy during the Progressive era. The Federal Reserve System THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 571 By 1916, the social ferment and political mobilizations of the Progressive era had given birth to a new American state. With new laws, administrative agencies, and independent commissions, government at the local, state, and national levels had assumed the authority to protect and advance “industrial freedom.” Government had established rules for labor relations, business behavior, and financial policy, protected citi- zens from market abuses, and acted as a broker among the groups whose conflicts threatened to destroy social harmony. But a storm was already engulfing Europe that would test the Progressive faith in empowered gov- ernment as the protector of American freedom. 572 Chapter 18  The Progressive Era Chapter19 I n 1902, W. T. Stead published a short volume with the arresting title The Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century, in which he predicted that the United States would soon emerge as “the greatest of world-powers.” But what was most striking about his work was that Stead located the source of American power less in the realm of military might or territorial acquisition than in the country’s single-minded commitment to the “pursuit of wealth” and the relentless international spread of American culture—art, music, journalism, even ideas about religion and gender relations. He foresaw a future in which the United States promoted its interests and values through an unending involvement in the affairs of other nations. Stead proved to be an accurate prophet. The Spanish-American War had established the United States as an international empire. Despite the conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, however, the country’s overseas holdings remained tiny compared to those of Britain, France, and Germany. And no more were added, except for a strip of land surrounding the Panama Canal, acquired in 1903, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in 1917. In 1900, Great Britain ruled over more than 300 million people in possessions scattered across the globe, and France had nearly 50 million subjects in Asia and Africa. Compared with these, the American presence in the world seemed very small. As Stead suggested, America’s empire differed significantly from those of European countries—it was economic, cul- tural, and intellectual, rather than territorial. The world economy at the dawn of the twentieth century was already highly globalized. An ever-increasing stream of goods, invest- ments, and people flowed from country to country. Although Britain still dominated world banking and the British pound remained the major currency of international trade, the United States had become the leading industrial power. By 1914, it produced more than one-third of the world’s manufactured goods. Spearheads of American culture like movies and popular music were not far behind. Europeans were fascinated by American ingenuity and mass- production techniques. Many feared American products and culture would overwhelm their own. “What are the chief new features of London life?” one British writer asked in 1901. “They are the telephone, the por- table camera, the phonograph, the electric street car, the automobile, the typewriter. . . . In every one of these the American maker is supreme.” America’s growing connections with the outside world led to increasing military and political involvement. In the two decades after 1900, many of the basic principles that would guide American foreign policy for the rest of the century were formulated. The “open door”—the free flow of trade, investment, information, and culture—emerged as a key principle of American foreign relations. Americans in the twentieth century often discussed foreign policy in the language of freedom. A supreme faith in America’s historic destiny and in the righteousness of its ideals enabled the country’s leaders to think of the United States simultaneously as an emerging great power and as the worldwide embodiment of freedom. More than any other individual, Woodrow Wilson articulated this vision of America’s relationship to the rest of the world. His foreign policy, called by historians “liberal internationalism,” rested on the conviction that economic and political progress went hand in hand. Thus, greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and self- interest. It would also inspire sincere efforts to bring freedom to other peoples. In either case, liberal internationalism represented a shift from the nineteenth-century tradition of promoting freedom primarily by example to active intervention to remake the world in the American image. AN ERA OF INTERVENTION Just as they expanded the powers of the federal government in domestic affairs, the Progressive presidents were not reluctant to project American power outside the country’s borders. At first, their interventions were confined to the Western Hemisphere, whose affairs the United States had claimed a special right to oversee ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Between 1901 and 1920, U.S. marines landed in Caribbean countries more than twenty times. Usually, they were dispatched to create a welcoming economic environment for American companies that wanted stable access to raw materials like bananas and sugar, and for bankers nervous that their loans to local governments might not be repaid. “I Took the Canal Zone” Theodore Roosevelt became far more active in international diplomacy than most of his predecessors, helping, for example, to negotiate a settle- ment of the RussoJapanese War of 1905, a feat for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Closer to home, his policies were more aggressive. “I have always been fond of the West African proverb,” he wrote, “‘ Speak softly and carry a big stick.’” The idea of a canal across the fifty-one-mile-wide Isthmus of Panama had a long history. A long-time proponent of American naval develop- ment, Roosevelt was convinced that a canal would facilitate the move- ment of naval and commercial vessels between the two oceans. In 1903, when Colombia, of which Panama was a part, refused to cede land for the project, Roosevelt helped set in motion an uprising by Panamanian conspirators. An American gunboat prevented the Colombian army from suppressing the rebellion. On establishing its independence, Panama signed a treaty giving the United States both the right to construct and operate a canal and sovereignty over the Canal Zone, a ten-mile-wide strip of land through Between 1898 and 1941, the United States intervened militarily numerous times in Caribbean countries, generally to protect the economic interests of American banks and investors. which the route would run. A remarkable feat of engineering, the canal was the largest construction project in history to that date. Like the build- ing of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and much construction work today, it involved the widespread use of immigrant labor. Most of the 60,000 workers came from the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, but others hailed from Europe, Asia, and the United States. When completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage between the East and West Coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. “I took the Canal Zone,” Roosevelt exulted. But the manner in which the canal had been initiated, and the continued American rule over the Canal Zone, would long remain a source of tension. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter negotiated treaties that led to turning over the canal’s operation and control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the year 2000 (see Chapter 26). The Roosevelt Corollary Roosevelt’s actions in Panama reflected a principle that came to be called the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This held that the United States had the right to exercise “an international police power” in the Western Hemisphere—a significant expansion of James Monroe’s pledge to defend the hemisphere against European intervention. In 1904, Roosevelt ordered American forces to seize the customs houses of the Dominican Republic to ensure payment of its debts to European and American investors. In 1906, he dispatched troops to Cuba to oversee a disputed election; they remained in the country until 1909. Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, landed marines in Nicaragua to protect a government friendly to American economic inter- ests. In general, however, Taft emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks, rather than direct military intervention, as the best way to spread American influence. As a result, his foreign policy became known as Dollar Diplomacy. Moral Imperialism The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson brought to the presidency a missionary zeal and a sense of his own and the nation’s moral righteousness. He appointed as secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, a strong anti-imperialist. Wilson promised a new foreign policy that would respect Latin America’s independence and free it from foreign economic domination. But Wilson could not abandon the conviction that the United States had a responsibility to teach other peoples the lessons of democracy. Wilson’s “moral imperialism” produced more military interventions in Latin America than any president before or since. In 1915, he sent marines to occupy Haiti after the government refused to allow American banks to oversee its financial dealings. In 1916, he established a military govern- ment in the Dominican Republic, with the United States controlling the country’s customs collections and paying its debts. American soldiers remained in the Dominican Republic until 1924 and in Haiti until 1934. Wilson’s foreign policy underscored a paradox of modern American history: the presidents who spoke the most about freedom were likely to intervene most frequently in the affairs of other countries. Wilson and Mexico Wilson’s major preoccupation in Latin America was Mexico, where in 1911 a revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Two years later, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the backing of the U.S. ambassador and of American companies that controlled Mexico’s oil and mining industries, military commander Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero and seized power. Wilson was appalled. He would “teach” Latin Americans, he added, “to elect good men.” When civil war broke out in Mexico, Wilson ordered American troops to land at Vera Cruz to prevent the arrival of weapons meant for Huerta’s forces. But to Wilson’s surprise, Mexicans greeted the marines as invaders rather than liberators. In 1916, the war spilled over into the United States when “Pancho” Villa, the leader of one faction, attacked Columbus, New Mexico, where he killed seventeen Americans. Wilson ordered 10,000 troops into northern Mexico on an expedition that unsuccessfully sought to arrest Villa. Mexico was a warning that it might be difficult to use American might to reorder the internal affairs of other nations. AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. This deed set in motion a chain of events that plunged Europe into the most devastating war the world had ever seen. In the years before 1914, European nations had engaged in a scramble to obtain colonial possessions overseas and had constructed a shifting series of alliances seeking military domination within Europe. Within a little more than a month, because of the European powers’ interlocking military alliances, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan (the Allies) found themselves at war with the Central Powers— Germany, Austria- Hungary, and the Ottoman empire, whose holdings included modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East. German forces quickly overran Belgium and part of northern France. The war then settled into a prolonged stalemate, with bloody, indecisive battles succeeding one another. New military technologies—submarines, airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and poison gas—produced unprecedented slaughter. In one five-month battle at Verdun, in 1916, 600,000 French and German soldiers perished—nearly as many combatants as in the entire American Civil War. By the time the war ended, an estimated 10 million soldiers, and uncounted millions of civilians, had perished. And the war was followed by widespread famine and a worldwide epidemic of influenza that killed an estimated 21 million people more. The Great War, or World War I as it came to be called, dealt a severe blow to the optimism and self-confidence of Western civilization. For decades, philosophers, reformers, and politicians had hailed the triumph of reason and human progress, an outlook hard to reconcile with the mass slaughter of World War I. The conflict was also a shock to European socialist and labor movements. Karl Marx had called on the “workers of the world” to unite against their oppressors. Instead, they marched off to kill each other. Neutrality and Preparedness As war engulfed Europe, Americans found themselves sharply divided. BritishAmericans sided with their nation of origin, as did many other Americans who associated Great Britain with liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive government. On the other hand, German- Americans identified with Germany, and Irish-Americans bitterly opposed any aid to the British. Immigrants from the Russian empire, especially Jews, had no desire to see the United States aid the czar’s regime. When war broke out in 1914, President Wilson proclaimed American neutrality. But naval warfare in Europe reverberated in the United States. Britain declared a naval blockade of Germany and began to stop American merchant vessels. Germany launched submarine warfare against ships entering and leaving British ports. In May 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania (which was carrying a large cache of arms) off the coast of Ireland, causing the death of 1,198 pas- sengers, including 124 Americans. Wilson composed a note of protest so strong that Bryan resigned as secretary of state, fearing that the president was laying the founda- tion for military intervention. The sinking of the Lusitania outraged American public opinion and strength- ened the hand of those who believed that the United States must prepare for pos- sible entry into the war. Wilson himself had strong pro-British sympathies and viewed Germany as “the natu- ral foe of liberty.” By the end of 1915, he had embarked on a policy of “preparedness”—a crash program to expand the American army and navy. The Road to War In May 1916, Germany announced the suspension of submarine war- fare against noncombatants. Wilson’s preparedness program seemed to have succeeded in securing the right of Americans to travel freely on the high seas. “He kept us out of war” became the slogan of his campaign for reelection. With the Republican Party reunited after its split in 1912, the election proved to be one of the closest in American history. Wilson defeated Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes by only twenty- three electoral votes and about 600,000 popular votes out of more than 18 million cast. Partly because he seemed to promise not to send American soldiers to Europe, Wilson carried ten of the twelve states that had adopted woman suffrage. Without the votes of women, Wilson would not have been reelected. Almost immediately, however, Germany announced its intention to resume submarine warfare against ships sailing to or from the British Isles, and several American merchant vessels were sunk. In March 1917, British spies intercepted and made public the Zimmerman Telegram, a message by German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerman calling on Mexico to join in a coming war against the United States and promis- ing to help it recover territory lost in the Mexican War of 1846–1848. On April 2, Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. “The world,” he proclaimed, “must be made safe for democracy.” The war resolution passed the Senate 82–6 and the House 373–50. The Fourteen Points Not until the spring of 1918 did American forces arrive in Europe in large numbers. By then, the world situation had taken a dramatic turn. In November 1917, a communist revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government. Shortly thereafter, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war and published the secret treaties by which the Allies had agreed to divide up conquered territory after the war—an embarrassment for Wilson, who had promised a just peace. Partly to assure the country that the war was being fought for a moral cause, Wilson in January 1918 issued the Fourteen Points, the clear- est statement of American war aims and of his vision of a new international order. Among the key principles were self-determination for all nations, freedom of the seas, free trade, open diplomacy (an end to secret treaties), the readjustment of colonial claims with colonized people given “equal weight” in deciding their futures, and the creation of a “general association of nations” to preserve the peace. Wilson envisioned this last provision, which led to the establishment after the war of the League of Nations, as a kind of global counterpart to the regulatory commissions Progressives had created at home to maintain social harmony. The Fourteen Points established the agenda for the peace conference that followed the war. The United States threw its economic resources and manpower into the war. When American troops finally arrived in Europe, they turned the tide of battle. In the spring of 1918, they helped repulse a German advance near Paris and by July were participating in a major Allied counteroffensive. In September, in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, more than 1 million American soldiers under General John J. Pershing helped push back the outnumbered and exhausted German army. With his forces in full retreat, the German kaiser abdicated on November 9. Two days later, Germany sued for peace. Over 100,000 Americans had died, a substantial number, but they were only 1 percent of the 10 million soldiers killed in the Great War. THE WAR AT HOME The Progressives’ War For most Progressives, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive values around the globe heightened the war’s appeal. Almost without exception, Progressive intellectuals and reformers, joined by prominent labor leaders and native-born socialists, rallied to Wilson’s support. The roster included intellectuals like John Dewey, AFL head Samuel Gompers, socialist writers like Upton Sinclair, and promi- nent reformers including Florence Kelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Wartime State Like the Civil War, World War I created, albeit temporarily, a national state with unprecedented powers and a sharply increased presence in Americans’ everyday lives. Under the Selective Service Act of May 1917, 24 million men were required to register with the draft. New federal agencies moved to regulate industry, transportation, labor relations, and agriculture. Headed by Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the War Industries Board presided over all elements of war production from the distribution of raw materials to the prices of manufactured goods. To spur efficiency, it established standardized specifications for everything from automobile tires to shoe colors (three were permitted—black, brown, and white). The Railroad Administration took control of the nation’s trans- portation system, and the Fuel Agency rationed coal and oil. The Food Administration instructed farmers on modern methods of cultivation and promoted the more efficient preparation of meals. The War Labor Board, which included representatives of govern- ment, industry, and the American Federation of Labor, pressed for the establishment of a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, and the right to form unions. During the war, wages rose substantially, working condi- tions in many industries improved, and union membership doubled. To finance the war, corporate and individual income taxes rose enormously. By 1918, the wealthiest Americans were paying 60 percent of their income in taxes. Tens of millions of Americans answered the call to demonstrate their patriotism by purchasing Liberty bonds. The Propaganda War During the Civil War, it had been left to private agencies—Union Leagues, the Loyal Publication Society, and others—to mobilize prowar public opin- ion. But the Wilson administration decided that patriotism was too impor- tant to leave to the private sector. Many Americans opposed American participation, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the bulk of the Socialist Party, which in 1917 condemned the declaration of war as “a crime against the people of the United States” and called on “the workers of all countries” to refuse to fight. In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel, put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.” The CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using every available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters, newspaper advertise- ments, and motion pictures. The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social coop- eration and expanded democracy. Abroad, this meant a peace based on the principle of national self-determination. At home, it meant improving “industrial democracy.” The CPI distributed pamphlets foreseeing a postwar society complete with a “universal eighthour day” and a living wage for all. Although “democracy” served as the key term of wartime mobiliza- tion, “freedom” also took on new significance. The war, a CPI advertise- ment proclaimed, was being fought in “the great cause of freedom.” The most common visual image in wartime propaganda was the Statue of Liberty, employed especially to rally support among immigrants. Buying All combatants raised money by selling war bonds. In the German poster, the text reads: “The war loan is the way to peace. The enemies want it this way [referring to the mailed fist]. So subscribe.” The fist conveys sheer power—it offers an image rather different from the representation of liberty on the American war poster. Liberty bonds became a demonstration of patriotism. Wilson’s speeches cast the United States as a land of liberty fighting alongside a “concert of free people” to secure self-determination for the oppressed peoples of the world. Government propaganda whipped up hatred of the wartime foe by portraying Germany as a nation of barbaric Huns. The Coming of Woman Suffrage The enlistment of “democracy” and “freedom” as ideological war weapons inevitably inspired demands for their expansion at home. In 1916, Wilson had cautiously endorsed votes for women. America’s entry into the war threatened to tear the suffrage movement apart, because many advocates had been associated with opposition to American involvement. Indeed, among those who voted against the declaration of war was the first woman member of Congress, the staunch pacifist Jeannette Rankin of Montana. Although defeated in her reelection bid in 1918, Rankin would return to Congress in 1940. She became the only member to oppose the declaration of war against Japan in 1941, which ended her political career. In 1968, at the age of eighty-five, Rankin took part in a giant march on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. As during the Civil War, however, most leaders of woman suffrage organizations enthusiastically enlisted in the effort. Women sold war bonds, organized patriotic rallies, and went to work in war production jobs. Some 22,000 served as clerical workers and nurses with American forces in Europe. At the same time, a new generation of college-educated activists, orga- nized in the National Women’s Party, pressed for the right to vote with mili- tant tactics many older suffrage advocates found scandalous. The party’s leader, Alice Paul, had studied in England between 1907 and 1910, when the British suffrage movement adopted a strategy that included arrests, impris- onments, and vigorous denunciations of a maledominated political system. Paul compared Wilson to the kaiser, and a group of her followers chained themselves to the White House fence, resulting in a seven-month prison sentence. When they began a hunger strike, the prisoners were force-fed. The combination of women’s patriotic service and widespread outrage over the treatment of Paul and her fellow prisoners pushed the adminis- tration toward fullfledged support of woman suffrage. In 1920, the long struggle ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which barred states from using sex as a qualification for the suffrage. The United States became the twenty-seventh country to allow women to vote. Prohibition The war gave a powerful impulse to other campaigns that had engaged the energies of many women in the Progressive era. Prohibition, a move- ment inherited from the nineteenth century that had gained new strength and militancy in Progressive America, finally achieved national success during the war. Employers hoped it would create a more disciplined labor force. Urban reformers believed that it would promote a more orderly city environment and undermine urban political machines, which used saloons as places to organize. Women reformers hoped Prohibition would protect wives and children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence when drunk or who squandered their wages at saloons. Many native-born Protestants saw Prohibition as a way of imposing “American” values on immigrants. After some success at the state level, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent breweries were owned by German-Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic. The Food Administration insisted that grain must be used to produce food, not brewed into beer or distilled into liquor. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It was ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920. Liberty in Wartime World War I raised questions already glimpsed during the Civil War that would trouble the nation again during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001: What is the balance between security and freedom? Does the Constitution protect citizens’ rights during wartime? Should dissent be equated with lack of patriotism? Despite the administration’s idealistic language of democracy and freedom, the war inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” Wilson remarked in his speech asking Congress to bring America into the conflict. Even he could not have predicted how significant an impact the war would have on American freedom. The Espionage Act For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the federal government enacted laws to restrict freedom of speech. The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited not only spying and interfering with the draft but also “false statements” that might impede military success. The postmaster general barred from the mails numerous newspapers and magazines criti- cal of the administration. In 1918, the Sedition Act made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that intended to cast “contempt, scorn, or dis- repute” on the “form of government,” or that advocated interference with the war effort. The government charged more than 2,000 persons with vio- lating these laws. Over half were convicted. A court sentenced Ohio farmer John White to twenty-one months in prison for saying that the murder of innocent women and children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States had done in the Philippines in the war of 1899–1903. The most prominent victim was Eugene V. Debs, convicted in 1918 under the Espionage Act for delivering an antiwar speech. Germany sent a socialist leader to prison for four years for opposing the war; in the United States, Debs’s sentence was ten years. After the war’s end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that he commute Debs’s sentence. Debs ran for president while still in prison in 1920 and received 900,000 votes. It was left to Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921. Coercive Patriotism Even more extreme repression took place at the hands of state governments and private groups. During the war, thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of red or black flags (symbols, respectively, of communism and anarchism), and twenty-three outlawed a newly created offense, “criminal syndicalism,” the advocacy of unlawful acts to accomplish political change or “a change in industrial ownership.” “Who is the real patriot?” Emma Goldman asked when the United States entered the war. She answered, those who “love America with open eyes,” who were not blind to “the wrongs committed in the name of patriotism.” But from the federal government to local authorities and private groups, patriotism came to be equated with support for the gov- ernment, the war, and the American economic system. Throughout the country, schools revised their course offerings to ensure their patriotism and required teachers to sign loyalty oaths. The 250,000 members of the newly formed American Protective League (APL) helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on their neighbors and carrying out “slacker raids” in which thousands of men were stopped on the streets of major cities and required to produce draft registration cards. Employers cooperated with the government in crushing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a move long demanded by business interests. In September 1917, operating under one of the broadest warrants in American history, federal agents swooped down on IWW offices throughout the country, arresting hundreds of leaders and seizing files and publications. Although some Progressives protested individual excesses, most failed to speak out against the broad suppression of freedom of expres- sion. Civil liberties, by and large, had never been a major concern of Progressives, who had always viewed the national state as the embodi- ment of democratic purpose and insisted that freedom flowed from partici- pating in the life of society, not standing in opposition. Strong believers in the use of national power to improve social conditions, Progressives found themselves ill prepared to develop a defense of minority rights against majority or governmental tyranny. WHO IS AN AMERICAN? The “Race Problem” Even before American participation in World War I, what contemporaries called the “race problem”—the tensions that arose from the country’s increasing ethnic diversity—had become a major subject of public concern. “Race” referred to far more than black-white relations. The Dictionary of Races of Peoples, published in 1911 by the U.S. Immigration Commission, listed no fewer than forty-five immigrant “races,” each supposedly with its own inborn characteristics. They ranged from Anglo-Saxons at the top down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and, lowest of all, Southern Italians— supposedly violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimila- tion. The new science of eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different races, gave anti-immigrant sentiment an air of professional expertise. Somehow, the very nationalization of politics and economic life served to heighten awareness of ethnic and racial difference and spurred demands for “Americanization”—the creation of a more homogeneous national culture. A 1908 play by the Jewish immigrant writer Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, gave a popular name to the process by which newcomers were supposed to merge their identity into existing American nationality. Public and private groups of all kinds—including educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials—took up the task of Americanizing new immigrants. Fearful that adult newcomers remained too stuck in their Old World ways, public schools paid great attention to Americanizing immigrants’ children. Moreover, the fe...
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