HIST 1302 The Progressives Essay
Assignment #9 – The Progressives Step 1: Watch – “A Dangerous Business” and “A Dangerous
Business Revisited” online https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-dangerous-business-revisited/Step 2: Read – “The Socialist Challenge” from A People’s
History http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/13-the-socialist-challengeStep 3: Read – “Land of Opportunity,” from Lies My
Teacher Told Me (file below)Step 4: Complete the Discussion Board Discussion Prompt:
Please read the following excerpt from The Jungle, by Upton
Sinclair:
“There was another interesting set of statistics that a person
might have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various
afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the
packing-plants with Szedvilas, he had marvelled while he listened to
the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses
of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained
there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries
was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killingbeds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each
of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering
visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not
be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of
them about on his own person—generally he had only to hold out
his hand.
There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old
Antanas had got- ten his death; scarce a one of these that had
not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as
scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he
might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the
joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of
the butchers and floorsmen, the beef- boners and trimmers, and
all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who
had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had
been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the
man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would
be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to
count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had
worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that
their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked
in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors,
by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might
live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.
There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound
quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that
began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most
powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in
the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the
time-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to
be five years. There were the woolpluckers, whose hands went
to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the
pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool,
and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare
hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those
who made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too,
were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for
blood-poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and it
was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace
that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a
part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they
were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted
the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter,
peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old
Durham’s architects had not built the killing- room for the
convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have
to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran
on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few
years they would be walking like chimpan- zees. Worst of any,
however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the
cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—
for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitor
at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in
tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open
vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that
they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was
never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes
they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them
had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”
These were the typical dangers of working in a factory in 1900.
You literally could be sent out into the world as hamburger or
sausage for people to eat...not to mention all of the bugs, hair,
and rat droppings that ended up in the cooking vats as well.
During the Progressive Era many of the dangerous and unfair
business practices of the Gilded Age were changed for the
better. After watching "A Dangerous Business," does it seem as
if those changes have remained in place? Why or why not? What
other thoughts do you have about the film you watched over
the weekend and the business practices of the McWane
Corporation?
After reading articles like "The Chain Never Stops" and "Fowl
Trouble," or watching the films on Wal-Mart or McWane, does it
seem the Progressives were successful? To what extent do you
think the nation was altered by their proposals? How have these
kinds of business practiced continued if the Progressives were
supposed to have fixed this 100 years ago? Write a response to these questions of from 150 words to 300 words.