THE ERA OF PROGRESSIVISM

The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by

increasing industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and expansion of the
consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the
economy’s total output rose by about 85 percent. . As farm prices recovered
from their low point during the depression of the 1890s, American agriculture
entered “golden age.” The expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for
farm goods. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1
million
claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862 .
Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose
by nearly 2 million people, and Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas added
800,000. Irrigation trans- formed the Imperial Valley of California . Throughout
the industrialized world, the number of cities multiplied. The United States
counted twenty-one cities whose population exceeded to great numbers
The stark urban inequalities of the
1890s continued into the Progressive
era. Immigrant families in New York’s
downtown tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets.

According to one estimate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly

controlled 40 percent of all financial and industrial capital in the United States.
BUT more than one-third of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers
lived in “actual poverty.” The city became an attraction for the painters as well

THE MUCKRAKERS-
Others saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional
American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of
fifteen worked for wages
A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national magazines
exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln
Steffens showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political
corruption. Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to
social ills. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a hopeful young
woman’s descent into prostitution in Chicago’s harsh urban environment.
Perhaps the era’s most influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906),
whose description of unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat
stirred public outrage.

IMMIGRATION AS A GLOBAL PROCESS-

If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cities, it was their immi-
grant character. Immigration from south and Eastern Europe . Between 1901
and the outbreak of World War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 million immigrants
came to the United States, the majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-
Hungarian empire . From 1840-1914. 40 million people came to USA . This
population flow formed one part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout
the world, much of which took place in Asia. Millions of persons migrated to
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific,
Reasons for uprooting of population was large parts on Asia marked by poverty
and illiteracy , taxation and declining economy . Large numbers of Chinese,
Mexican, and Italian migrants, including many who came to the United States,
were bound to long-term labor contracts. These contracts were signed with
labor agents, who then provided the workers to American employers. But all the
areas attracting immigrants were frontiers of one kind or another—agricultural,
mining, or industrial—with expanding job opportunities.
Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island.
Some 1 million Mexicans entered USA. By 1910, 1/7th of American population
was foreign. More than 40 percent of New York City’s population had been born
abroad. In Chicago and smaller industrial cities like San Francisco, the figure
exceeded 30 percent.
IMMIGRANT QUEST OF FREEDOM -
Like any other, they came thinking of USA as a land of freedom, where equality
before law was there, eco benefits , and escape from social hierarchies from
homeland. The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic”
neighbourhoods with their own shops, theatres, and community organizations,
and often continued to speak their native tongues . Churches were pillars of
these immi- grant communities . Although most immigrants earned more than
was possible in the impoverished regions from which they came, they endured
low wages, long hours, and dangerous work- ing conditions. The vast majority
of Mexican immigrants became poorly paid agricultural, mine, and railroad
labourers, with little prospect of upward economic mobility . Low wages, the
unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the
con- sumer economy, which would not fully come into its own until after World
War II.
But it was in Progressive America that the promise of mass consumption
became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom

THE WORKING WOMEN -

The new visibility of women in urban public places indicated that traditional
gender roles were changing dramatically in Progressive America. Black women
still worked primarily as domestics or in southern cotton fields. Immigrant
women were largely confined to low- paying factory employment. But for
native-born white women, the kinds of jobs available expanded enormously.
Female work was no longer confined to young, unmarried white women and
adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working for wages, one-quarter
were married . The working woman Became a symbol of female emancipation.
Women faced limitations on their economic freedom, including wage
discrimination and exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves,
young immigrant working women developed a sense of independence . The
growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career, pointed to a
coming transformation of both economic and family life.
THE RISE OF FORDISM -
The exemplification of new consumer society was by HENRY FORD. - son of an
immigrant Irish farmer , worked as skilled labor , he did not invent automobile
but developed techniques for production and marketing . . In 1905, he
established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small automobile
manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he
introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate the
country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models like the
Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsmanship, Ford
concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.
In 1913, Ford’s factory , adopted the method of production known as the
moving assembly line, in which car frames were brought to workers on a
continuously moving conveyor belt which helped to expand the output . In 1914,
he raised wages at his factory to the unheard of level of five dollars per day
enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers. When other
businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages, Ford
replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by
American factories.

As economic production shifted from capital goods to consumer products, the

new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often by linking
goods with the idea of freedom. The promise of abundance shifted the quest
for freedom to the realm of private life, but it also inspired political activism.
The desire for consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fight for
higher wages. The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts
—a “living wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new
language for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive
America .