3. Muckrakers
Writers who exposed corruption and abuses in politics, business,
meatpacking, child labor, and more, primarily in the first decade of the
twentieth century; their popular books and magazine articles spurred
public interest in reform.
A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national
magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life.
Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social ills.
Lincoln Steffens
Upton Sinclair
Journalists fighting to expose corrupt politics in the early 1900s
4. Lincoln Steffens
Wrote the influential book the shame of the cities
Was an important expose of how corrupt most U.S. cities were
The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens
Published as a series in McClure’s Magazine in 1901-1902
In book form in 1904
5. Ida Tarbell
Wrote the book called “The Standard Oil Company”
She revealed after years of diligent research the illegal means used by
John D. Rockefeller to monopolize the early oil industry
published in two volumes in 1904
History if the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of what
Theodore Roosevelt disparaged as “muckraking”-the use of journalistic skills to
expose the underside of American life
6. Upton Sinclair
Published the Jungle in 1906
Whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat
stirred public outrage
Led directly to the passage of the pure food and drug Act and the Meat
Inspection Act of 1906
5he Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, highlighted all of the unclean and/or unsafe
practices of the meat packaging industry
7. Pure Food and Drug Act
An act “for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of
adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious
foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and
for other purposes
8. Ellis Island
Reception center in New York Harbor through which most European
immigrants to America were processed from 1892 to 1954
9. Henry Ford
Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line.
Ford paid his employees five dollars a day so that they could afford to buy his car.
Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shop and later as an engineer
He didn’t invent the automobile, but he developed the techniques of production and
marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary Americans
1905; he established the Ford Motor Company, one of small automobile manufacturing
firms
1913; ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the method of production
known as the moving assembly line
Model-T
10. Socialist Party
1901
1912, they claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, publishes hundreds of
newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of
labor, and had elected scores of local officials
Their goal was to abolish the “capitalistic system”
11. Eugene V. Debs
Socialism=Political equality and economic freedom’
Election of 1912- 6% of popular vote
Appeal to Reason-largest weekly circulation
The railroad union leader who, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of
1894
Debs criss-crossed the country preaching that control of economy by a
democratic government held out the hope of uniting “political equality and
economic freedom”
Eugene Debs Organized the American Socialist Party in 1901
12. Mother Jones
Mary “Mother” Jones
Who at the age of 83 had been jailed after addressing the Colorado
strikers
13. Margaret Sanger
Wrote : The Woman Rebel
Went to jailed of distributing
1911, she began a column on venereal disease, from the mails
1914, Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own
journal called “Woman Rebel”
1916, she opened a clinic in a working class neighborhood of Brooklyn had
began distributing contraceptive device to poor Jewish and Italian
women, and action for which she was sentenced a month in prison
14. Robert LaFollette
Wisconsin’s “laboratory for democracy’
Taxing corporations
Primary elections
State regulations of railroads and utilities
Under the progressive Republican leadership of Robert La
Follette, Wisconsin led the way in regulating big business
Known as the “Wisconsin Idea”
15. 16th Amendment
The 16rth Amendment was ratifies in 1916
It legalized a graduated federal income tax
Senators now had to be chosen by a direct election of the people of a
state, not by the state governments
U.S. Constitution create a national income tact
It gave the federal government the power to directly tax its citizens
16. 17th Amendment
Congress passed the 17th Amendment in 1913
U.S. Constitution required state legislatures to select their state’s senators to
the U.S. Congress
Constitution didn’t require any specific procedure for legislatures to follow.
As a result, each state’s method of selecting senators varied, and
deadlocks within legislature led occasional unfilled seats
1866
Congress mandated each state voted separately
If, they didn’t agree on a senator, two bodies met in joint session and voted until
senator was elected
18. Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt's Square Deal attempted to confront the problems caused by economic
consolidation by distinguishing between "good" and "bad" corporations.
Roosevelt used the Sherman Antitrust Act to dissolve the Northern Securities Company.
He pushed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and for more
regulation of the food and drug industry.
Youngest man ever to hold the office of president
Succession to presidency; reelection in 1904
Limits on corporate power
"Good trusts" and "bad trusts"
Northern Securities case
Mediation between labor and capital; 1902 coal strike arbitration
19. Gifford Pinchot
Head of the U.S. Forest Service
Ordered millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves
Encouraged congress to create new national parks
20. Woodrow Wilson
Democrat
“new freedom”
State’s rights; Laissez-faire
Unions
Anti-trust
1st term
Held press conferences and delivered messages to Congress
Outlawed child labor
8 hour work day
Money to farmers
Graduated income tax
