Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
Progressives
Social Studies 8
Mrs. Francis
Name: ______Period______
Essential Question: How successful were Progressive Era reforms in the period 1890-1920?
Problems in Society
When should the Government Intervene?
Directions: Read each of the situations below and decide whether or not government intervention should occur. The legality or illegality of the situation is not the issues, nor is whether or not the government currently intervenes. Simply focus on whether or not government intervention is appropriate. Be prepared to defend your reasoning.
Incident / Intervene / Do Not Intervene / ReasonA toy company produces an inexpensive toy designed and labeled for use by older children. In the hands of younger children, however, the toy could be dangerous.
An employer in a northern state refuses to keep the heat above 55 degrees during the winter.
Fifteen percent of Americans live in poverty.
A woman refuses to rent a room in her house to an Asian-American.
A company is so large that it is able to force smaller competitors out of business through price wars.
A community refuses to build low-income housing within the city limits.
A landlord raises the rent in his apartment house twenty percent every year.
A business refuses to hire union members.
The makers of a ring advertise that wearing it cures a specific disease. They include testimonials from people who claim the ring cured them of the disease. There is no scientific evidence supporting these claims, however.
The number of homeless people rises significantly.
Write a general statement explaining when, or under what circumstances, the government should become involved in public issues.
Reform
n Aim: Did Muckrakers address all the problems of society?
n Do Now: Define muckraker ______
n HW:
Muckraker
n ______
n Focused on problems created by ______as well as dishonest and corrupt practices in politics and business.
n Jacob Riis – ______
n Ida Tarbell – ______
n Lincoln Steffens – ______
n Upton Sinclair – ______
n Frank Norris – ______
Why did muckrakers decline after 1910?
· ______
· ______
· ______
Muckrakers
Directions: After reading the following passages, rank the problems in order in which they should receive priority by the US government. Include reasons for your ranking.
Problem / Rank / ReasonTenements in New York City
Meatpacking industry
City Government
Working Conditions
Big Business
Tenements in New York City
In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who came to the United States in 1870, exposed the slum conditions in New York City tenement buildings using both the written word and the newly invented camera. Read his account and list the social ills described.
Lest anybody flatter himself with the idea that these were evils of a day that is happily past and may safely be forgotten, let me mention here three very recent instances of tenement-house life that came under my notice. One was the burning of a rear house in Mott Street. The fire made homeless ten families, who had paid an average of $5 a month for their mean little cubby-holes. The owner himself told me that it was fully insured for $800, though it brought him in &600 a year rent. He evidently considered himself especially entitled to be pities for losing such valuable property.
Another was the case of a hard-workig family of man and wife, young people from the old country, who took poison together in a Crosby Street tenement because they were “tired.” There was no other explanation, and noe was neede when I stood in the room in which they had lived. It was in the attic with sloping ceiling and a single window so far out on the roof that it seemed not to belong to the place at all. With scarcely room enough to turn around in, they had been forced to pay five dollars and a half a month in advance.
The third instance was that of a colored family of husband, wife, and baby in a wretched rear rookery in West Third Street. Their rent was eight dollars and a half for a single room on the top-story, so small that I was unable to get a photograph of it even by placing the camera outside the door. Three short steps across either way would have measured its full extent.
Exercise:
List three social problems exposed by Jacob Riis:
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______
Abuses in the Meat-Packing Industry
Upton Sinclair, in his best-selling book The Jungle, described conditions in the meat-packing industry. Read and list the abuses described:
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected and that was mouldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted bullions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them, they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together…the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one –there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.
There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cart load after cart load of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some of they would make into “smoked” sausage –but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
Exercise:
What abuses in the meat-packing industry did Sinclair identify?
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______
Abuses in City Government
Lincoln Steffens, a leading muckraker, exposed the political corruption in American cities. Read the following excerpt from his autobiography. Then list some of the abuses in city government that Steffens implies.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
When I went to Cincinnati…I sought out Boss Cox. His office was over his “Mecca” saloon, in a mean little front hall room one flight up. The door was open. I saw a great hulk of a man, sitting there alone, his back to the door, his feet up on the window sill; he was reading a newspaper. I walked in; he did not look up.
“Mr. Cox?” I said.
An affirmative grunt.
“Mr. Cos, I understand that you are the boss of Cincinnati.”
Slowly his feet came down, one by one. They slowly walked his chair around, and a stolid face turned to let two dark sharp eyes study me. While they measured, I gave my name and explained that I was a “student of politics, corrupt politics, and bosses.” I repeated that I have heard he was the boss of Cincinnati. “Are you?” I asked.
“I am,” he grumbled in his hoarse, throaty voice.
“Of course you have a mayor, and a council, and judges?”
“I have,” he admitted, “but” – he pointed with his thumb back over his shoulder to the desk – “I have a telephone, too.”
“And you have citizens, too, in your city? American men and women?”
He stared a long moment, silent, then turned heavily around back to his paper. That short interview was a summary of the truth about Cincinnati.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
Exercise:
List abuses in city politics suggested by Lincoln Steffens.
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______
Abuses of Big Business
Ida Tarbell described the techniques used by industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller to build up his business, Standard Oil.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
The success the firm of Rockefeller and Andrews achieved after Rockefeller went into it was explained for three or four years mainly by his extraordinary ability for bargaining and borrowing. Then the corporation’s chief competitors began to suspect6 something. John Rockefeller might get his oil cheaper now and then, they said, but he could not do it often. He might have an unusual genius in his partner. But these things could not explain all. They believed they bought, on the whole, almost as cheaply as he, and they knew they made as good oil and with as great, or nearly as great, economy. Where was his advantage? There was but one place where it could be, and that was in transportation. He must be getting better rates from the railroads than they were…
Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has used force and fraud to meet his goals, justify him by saying “It’s business.” “It’s business” has come to be an excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges. It is a common enough thing to hear men arguing that the ordinary laws of right and wrong do not apply in business.
Now, if the Standard Oil Company were the only business in the country guilty of the practices which have given it monopolistic power, this story never would have been written. Were it alone in these methods, public anger would long ago have destroyed the Standard Oil Company.
But it is simply the most obvious examples of what can be done by these practices. The methods it employees are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers.
If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business. If the point is pushed, frequently the defender of the practice falls back on the Christian doctrine of charity, and points that we are only human and must allow for each other’s weaknesses! – an excuse which, if carried to its conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty while they picked one another pockets.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
Exercise:
List the abuses of Standard Oil, suggested by Tarbell.
1. ______
2. ______
3. ______
Working Conditions for Women and Children
The journalist Florence Lucas Sanville worked in a Pennsylvania silk mill to gather facts for the following article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1910. Read the excerpt and list the abuses that the author identifies.
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
Unit 4ProgressivesSS8 Mrs. Francis
The length of the factory girl’s work day varies from a legal limit of eight hours in one or two advanced states to ten, eleven, or twelve in less enlightened communities; and in some states where the law still fails to protect its women from industrial exploitation the hours are regulated only by the needs of the industry.
In Pennsylvania the law prescribes a limit of twelve hours daily and sixty hours weekly for women over eighteen; for girls under that age the law restricts this further to fifty eight hours a week and an average of ten hours a day. But in the factories’ scattered throughout the villages and small mining towns, in which great numbers of young girls are employed, such as are established by the silk industry, I found in a period of industrial depression that over half of the mills were working ten and a half to eleven hours a day.
One of the silk factory workers I met was Lena R., a thin shouldered, anemic looking girl, with a sweet, bright face. She looked so young that I asked her age. “I’ll be fourteen in the winter,” she replied, and added that she had been doing night work since she was eleven.
One of the most striking evils in the physical environment of women in the factories is the lack of seats. Very few mills provide the seats which are required by the Pennsylvania law. This harmful effect of continuous standing upon young and growing girls is too well established a fact to require explanation. I could always detect the existence of this rule by a glance at the stocking feet of the workers, and the rows of discarded shoes. For after a few hours the strain upon the swollen feet becomes intolerable, and one girl after another discards her shoes.
Another harsh and very common practice of employers to cover the lower sashes of the windows with paint, and to fasten them so that they cannot be raised in hot weather. This is done so that the girls “don’t waste time looking out.”