Apush chapter 20 the progressives coursenotes

Progressivism was less a minority movement and more a majority mood.The progressives sought two goals: to use state power to curb the trusts and to stem the socialist threat by generally improving the common personвЂ™s conditions of life and labor.Progressive reformers were mainly middle-class men and women felt pressure from new giant corporations, restless immigrant hordes, and the aggressive labor unions.To right social wrongs, they counted on publicity and an aroused public conscience.The muckrakers signified much about the nature of the progressive reform movement.The most effective fire of the muckrakers was directed at social evils-prostitution, slums, industrial accidents, subjugation of American blacks, and abuses of child labor.Phillips wrote The Treason of the Senate-senators represented companies not people

Thomas Lawson, a speculator, laid bare the practices o his accomplices in вЂњFrenzied FinanceвЂќ.

Muckrakers roasted the beef trust, the вЂњmoney trust,вЂќ the railroad barons, and corrupt fortunes.

Lincoln Steffens unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government and Ida Tarbell published a devastating factual expose of the Standard Oil Company.

A group of aggressive ten- and fifteen-cent magazines surged to the front editors financed extensive research and encouraged writing by reports branded вЂњmuckrakersвЂќ by Roosevelt.

By 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American publishers.

Feminists added social justice to suffrage on list of needed reforms (Jane Addams, Lillian Wald).

Messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism (using religious doctrine).

Socialists began to register appreciable strength at the ballot box.Theodore Dreiser battered promoters and profiteers in The Financier and The Titan.Jacob Riis shocked middle-class with How the Other Half Lives, an account of the NY slums.Thorstein Veblen assailed the new rich in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899, 1894 в†‘).Henry Lloyd charged into the Standard Oil Company with Wealth Against Commonwealth.Populists branded the вЂњbloated trustsвЂќ with the stigma of corruption and wrongdoing.Progressive theorists-society could no longer afford the luxury of laissez-faire policy.The roots of the new reformist wave went back the Green Labor party and Populists and to the mounting unrest as grasping industrialists concentrated more and more power in fewer hands.There were nearly 76 million Americans in 1900 a reform movement right convulsed the ethnically and racially mixed American people after the twentieth century had dawned.

Apush chapter 20 the progressives coursenotes