Transcript
Flash
1887–88
Lower Manhattan · a winter night, 1887–88
Two in the morning. Four men with a camera are climbing a tenement stair, in the dark.
One of them carries a revolver.
Jacob Riis The flashlight of those days was contained in cartridges fired from a revolver.
Flash powder was brand new, a German invention. For a split second, it turned night into day.
Jacob Riis came from Denmark at twenty-one. For a while, he slept in police lodging rooms himself.
Jacob Riis Long ago it was said that 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.'
Riis meant to show them.
His pictures helped get this block torn down. They also carried his blind spots.
Would Americans fix what they could finally see? And if they did, progress for whom?
Loaded Dice
1893–1904
By 1900, a few giant companies ran oil, steel and the railroads. Party bosses ran the cities.
Cheap magazines reached millions of middle-class readers, and learned that outrage sold.
McClure's January 1903 issue carried three exposés: a corrupt city, an oil monopoly, a coal strike. The editors admitted, 'We did not plan it so.'
Ida Tarbell grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields, where her father had fought Rockefeller in 1872.
Ida Tarbell Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.
Rockefeller never answered her in public. His kerosene was cheap and good. Tarbell showed how it got that way: secret railroad deals and rivals squeezed out.
Lincoln Steffens went city by city. His verdict on Philadelphia:
Lincoln Steffens Philadelphia is simply the most corrupt and the most contented.
Soon a president would give these writers a name. First, he got the job by accident.
A Square Deal
1895–1906
In 1895, New York's new police commissioner left Riis a card: he had “come to help.” His name was Theodore Roosevelt.
In September 1901, an assassin shot President McKinley. He died eight days later. Roosevelt, 42, became the youngest president in American history.
In 1902, the hard-coal miners of Pennsylvania went on strike. Winter was coming.
The owners' spokesman, railroad president George Baer, wrote a letter that summer.
George F. Baer The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.
In October, Roosevelt called both sides to the White House and threatened to run the mines with the Army. A commission he named gave the miners a ten percent raise and a nine-hour day, but no union recognition.
In 1902, Roosevelt also sued J. P. Morgan's railroad trust, the Northern Securities Company. By one account, Morgan said:
J. P. Morgan If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.
In 1904, the Supreme Court broke the trust up.
Theodore Roosevelt Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism…
Good trusts could stay. Bad ones would go.
In 1906, socialist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel about the immigrants who worked here.
Upton Sinclair 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.
Upton Sinclair I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
You may have heard that Roosevelt threw his breakfast sausages out the window.
'Mr. Dooley' …begun throwin' sausages out iv th' window.
That's a humor column. What Roosevelt actually did was send inspectors.
Theodore Roosevelt …the men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.
He meant it as a warning. The writers wore it as a badge. On June 30, 1906, he signed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
The Greatest Good
1902–1909
May 1903. The President left his official party behind and went camping for three nights. His guide was John Muir, the country’s best-known naturalist.
Theodore Roosevelt The second night we camped in a snow-storm, on the edge of the cañon walls, under the spreading limbs of a grove of mighty silver fir.
John Muir I had a perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains.
Three years later, the valley they camped above joined the national park. Roosevelt protected about 230 million acres: forests, parks, eighteen monuments, fifty-one bird refuges.
In 1907 Congress banned new national forests in six western states. Before signing, Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot created twenty-one.
Theodore Roosevelt The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath.
Gifford Pinchot The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development.
Irrigation dams, grazing permits, timber sales: all for “the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.”
Muir wanted some places left alone. Both men wanted national parks. The next valley north would split them.
Dam Hetch Hetchy
1901–1916
John Muir Imagine yourself in Hetch Hetchy on a sunny day in June, standing waist-deep in grass and flowers (as I have often stood).
Hetch Hetchy sat inside Yosemite National Park, a smaller twin of Yosemite Valley.
In April 1906, an earthquake broke San Francisco's water mains. The city burned for three days. More than 3,000 people died.
San Francisco wanted water it owned, not water it bought from a private company. The best site was inside a national park.
Muir and Pinchot had once talked until midnight by a campfire on the Grand Canyon's rim. Now they were on opposite sides.
Four sides argued over this valley. Walk it, and hear each one.
In December 1913, Congress passed the Raker Act, and new President Woodrow Wilson signed it. No private company could ever resell the water or power.
Muir died a year later. The dam was finished in 1923.
The lost valley helped push Congress to create the National Park Service in 1916. Its job: keep the parks “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Use it, or save it. Americans would argue it again in the Dust Bowl, and they still do.
Stock in These Little Children
1893–1914
Many reformers were college women who moved into poor neighborhoods. Florence Kelley, from Hull-House, became chief factory inspector of Illinois.
Dr. Alice Hamilton traced lead poisoning through Illinois factories. Harvard later made her the first woman on its faculty. She still couldn't get football tickets.
In 1903, Mother Jones asked reporters why they ignored the children in the mills.
Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones They said they couldn't because the mill owners had stock in the papers. “Well, I've got stock in these little children,” said I, “and I'll arrange a little publicity.”
She marched them toward Roosevelt's summer home on Long Island. He wouldn't see them.
From 1908, Lewis Hine photographed working children for the National Child Labor Committee.
Lewis Hine Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us…
The Supreme Court struck down a ten-hour law for bakers in 1905, then upheld one for women in 1908.
Louis Brandeis filed a brief built with Josephine Goldmark and Kelley's National Consumers' League. Two pages of law. Ninety-five of facts.
The catch: the Court protected women because it called them weaker. For decades, some laws like it shut women out of better-paid jobs.
Shut out of most white women's clubs, Black women built their own.
Nannie Helen Burroughs For a number of years there has been a righteous discontent, a burning zeal to go forward in his name…
March 25, 1911 Washington Place, New York
Near quitting time on a Saturday, fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company. Survivors said a stairway door was locked.
The fire escape collapsed. The ladders reached the sixth floor. The fire was on the eighth, ninth and tenth.
One hundred forty-six people died, most of them young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. The youngest were fourteen.
Rose Schneiderman I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting.
New York passed more than thirty new factory laws. Frances Perkins, who had watched the fire from the square, helped investigate. Twenty-two years later, she became Secretary of Labor.
Voters or Experts
1888–1913
Around 1900, party bosses chose most candidates in back rooms. Progressives had two fixes, and they didn't agree.
They agreed on the problem. Robert La Follette, 1897.
Robert La Follette We are fast being dominated by forces that thwart the will of the people and menace representative government.
Fix one: trust the voters. A secret ballot, and a primary where voters, not bosses, picked nominees. In Oregon, voters could write laws and fire officials.
Fix two: trust the experts. After a 1900 hurricane killed at least 6,000, Galveston handed the city to five commissioners. Dayton went further in 1913: a city manager.
Experts made some cities cleaner and more honest. They also left immigrant voters, the bosses' base, with less say.
In much of the South, the new primaries were for white voters only. One historian called it "Progressivism—For Whites Only."
Progressives split over immigrants, too. Boston's Immigration Restriction League wanted a literacy test. Chicago's Grace Abbott fought it.
Bull Moose
1907–1916
A blizzard drove the swearing-in indoors, into the Senate chamber. Roosevelt handed the job to his friend William Howard Taft, then went to Africa to hunt.
Taft filed about ninety antitrust suits in four years, roughly twice Roosevelt's total. In 1911, the Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil, Ida Tarbell's target, into more than thirty companies.
But Taft signed a tariff that raised rates, and he fired Pinchot. Roosevelt came home angry.
William Howard Taft I do not want to fight Theodore Roosevelt, but sometimes a man in a corner fights. I am going to fight.
Party leaders renominated Taft. Roosevelt's supporters walked out and formed the Progressive Party. Jane Addams seconded his nomination. The platform promised votes for women.
In Milwaukee, a man shot Roosevelt in the chest. The bullet went through his folded speech.
Theodore Roosevelt I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.
Wilson won with 42 percent of the vote. Roosevelt came second. The sitting president carried two states: Utah and Vermont.
Add up the reform candidates and three voters in four wanted change.
In February 1913, the Constitution changed for the first time in forty-three years, to the day. The 16th Amendment allowed an income tax. Nine weeks later, the 17th had voters elect senators.
Wilson went to Congress himself, the first president to do that in more than a century. He asked for lower tariffs. The Underwood Tariff cut rates that October and added a small income tax.
In the Panic of 1907, J. P. Morgan locked bankers in his library until they agreed on a rescue. Congress decided one old man shouldn't be the nation's safety net. In 1913, it created the Federal Reserve.
Then came the Federal Trade Commission and the Clayton Antitrust Act, which said unions were not trusts. Samuel Gompers called it “the Industrial Magna Carta.”
The Color Line
1903–1916
W. E. B. Du Bois The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Most white Progressives looked away from it. Many Southern Progressives built it.
Between 1900 and 1914, mobs lynched about 1,200 people. More than a thousand were Black.
Booker T. Washington, in that same South, told Black Southerners to build wealth first and wait on equal rights. Du Bois answered in print.
W. E. B. Du Bois Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission.
Quietly, Washington was paying for a lawsuit against Alabama's voting laws. The Supreme Court turned the case away.
In 1905 twenty-nine Black men met in Ontario, across the river from Buffalo, and started the Niagara Movement.
W. E. B. Du Bois We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil, and social;
W. E. B. Du Bois and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.
In 1908 a white mob attacked Black neighborhoods in Springfield, Lincoln's hometown. On Lincoln's hundredth birthday, reformers Black and white issued a call that became the NAACP.
Du Bois edited its magazine, The Crisis.
In 1913 Wilson's cabinet began segregating federal offices: screens around desks, separate lunchrooms and toilets.
William Monroe Trotter Have you a “new freedom” for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens?
Woodrow Wilson If you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why the consequences will be very serious.
Others told Progressives they had it wrong.
Carlos Montezuma The Indian Bureau system is wrong. The only way to adjust wrong is to abolish it, and the only reform is to let my people go.
Hurrah and Vote for Suffrage
1913–1920
March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson's inauguration. More than 5,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for the vote.
Crowds of men shoved into the line. Police stood by. More than a hundred people were hurt in the crush.
Organizers asked Ida B. Wells to march in a separate Black delegation. She stepped into the Illinois line instead.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett I shall not march at all unless I can march under the Illinois banner.
By then women voted in nine states, all of them west of the Mississippi.
Catt's NAWSA worked state by state. Alice Paul's National Woman's Party picketed the White House.
Carrie Chapman Catt Do not forget that we cannot win with thirty-five States, it must be thirty-six.
In wartime, pickets called the President 'Kaiser Wilson.' Police arrested them for obstructing traffic.
At the Occoquan workhouse, guards handcuffed Lucy Burns to her cell bars overnight. In the D.C. jail, Alice Paul went on hunger strike. The jail force-fed her.
Jeannette Rankin How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen; how shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?
That day the House passed the amendment, with not one vote to spare.
In 1918 Wilson finally backed the amendment, as a war measure. The Senate said no twice. It passed in June 1919.
Another amendment got there first. Drys like Carry Nation smashed saloons with hatchets.
Liquor taxes had paid about a third of Washington's bills. The income tax replaced them. In 1919 the states ratified the 18th Amendment, banning the making and sale of liquor.
By summer 1920, thirty-five states had ratified. It needed thirty-six. It came down to Tennessee. Anti-suffragists there, many of them women, wore red roses. Suffragists wore yellow.
Tennessee made thirty-six. The next day, Harry Burn explained his vote.
Harry T. Burn I knew that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.
Eight days later, the Secretary of State signed it at his house, at eight in the morning. No suffragists. No cameras.
Progress for Whom?
1920
Four amendments in seven and a half years: an income tax, elected senators, prohibition and votes for women.
By 1920, Washington inspected meat, set railroad rates, ran a central bank and taxed incomes. In 1890, it did almost none of that.
Mulberry Bend became a park in 1897. Riis wasn't invited to the opening. He went anyway.
Progress for whom? For millions of Americans, a lot.
For Black Southerners, Native nations and Chinese immigrants, far less. And the people in Riis's pictures never wrote the captions.
1917 → 1933
In 1917 the country went to war, and reform waited. In 1933, Frances Perkins carried it into Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet.