Quiz 2 Flashcards
What does “Progressive” mean and who were the people associated with it?
The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a broad, loosely defined political movement of individuals and groups who hoped to bring about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers. Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems, and members of an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big business
What did “Rerum Novarum” mean in Progressive America?
His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s powerful statement of 1891, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good society.
What were the goals/objectives of the Socialist Party in 1901?
The party called for immediate reforms such as free college education, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories.
What is the Society of American Indians and how did it affect Indian life during the Progressive Era?
Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. Because many of the society’s leaders had been educated at government-sponsored boarding schools, the society united Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan-Indian public space independent of white control.
Know the two government agencies put in place by President Woodrow Wilson to assist government supervision of the economy.
He abandoned the idea of aggressive trust-busting in favor of greater government supervision of the economy. Wilson presided over the creation of two powerful new public agencies. In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional banks.
Where did most of the 60,000 workers on the Panama Canal Zone come from to provide labor on this massive project? How did the canal affect travel between the East and West coasts of the United States? Which U.S. President turned over control of the Canal Zone to Panama?
A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities such as price-fixing and monopolistic practices.
Who created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and what was its purpose? What type of people worked with it? How did the CPI influence life in America?
When completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage between the East and West coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. / In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel, put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.” Enlisting academics, journalists, artists, and advertising men, the CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using every available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters, newspaper advertisements, and motion pictures.
What were the desired goals of supporters (employers, urban reformers, women, and native-born Protestants) for Prohibition?
In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel, put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and free institutions.” Enlisting academics, journalists, artists, and advertising men, the CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using every available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters, newspaper advertisements, and motion pictures. / the CPI also set a precedent for governmental efforts to shape public opinion in later international conflicts, from World War Ⅱ to the Cold War and Iraq.
How did the Eighteenth Amendment affect the use of alcohol (liquor) in America during wartime?
Prohibition would protect wives and children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence when drunk or who squandered their wages at saloons. Many native-born Protestants saw Prohibition as a way of imposing “American” values on immigrants.
like the suffrage movement, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation as their best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent breweries were owned by German-Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic.
In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It was ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920.
Know the examples of American backlash towards German-Americans in the United States.
Iowa, Governor William L. Harding issued a proclamation requiring that all oral communication in schools, public places, and over the telephone be conducted in English. Freedom of speech, he declared, did not include “the right to use a language other than the language of the country.”
By 1919, the vast majority of the states had enacted laws restricting the teaching of foreign languages. Popular words of German origin were changed: “hamburger” became “liberty sandwich,” and “sauerkraut” “liberty cabbage.” Many communities banned the playing of German music. The government jailed Karl Muck, the director of the Boston Symphony and a Swiss citizen, as an enemy alien after he insisted on including the works of German composers like Beethoven in his concerts. The war dealt a crushing blow to German-American culture. By 1920, the number of German-language newspapers had been reduced to 276 (one-third the number twenty years earlier), and only 1 percent of high school pupils still studied German. The census of 1920 reported a 25 percent drop in the number of Americans admitting to having been born in Germany.
How did white leaders of the woman suffrage movement influence the voting rights of Blacks?
White leaders of the woman suffrage movement said little about black disenfranchisement. In the South, members of upper-class white women’s clubs sometimes raised funds for black schools and community centers. But suffrage leaders insisted that the vote was a racial entitlement, a “badge and synonym of freedom,” in the words of Rebecca Felton of Georgia, that should not be denied to “free-born white women.” During Reconstruction, women had been denied constitutional recognition because it was “the Negro’s hour.” Now, World War Ⅰ’s “woman’s hour” excluded blacks. The amendment that achieved woman suffrage left the states free to limit voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Living in the South, the vast majority of the country’s black women still could not vote.
Despite the excitement and social/material conformity of the “Jazz Age, or the Roaring Twenties”, why did many Americans not embrace it?
Many Americans, however, did not welcome the new secular, commercial culture. They resented and feared the ethnic and racial diversity of America’s cities and what they considered the lax moral standards of urban life. The 1920s was a decade of profound social tensions—between rural and urban Americans, traditional and “modern” Christianity, participants in the burgeoning consumer culture and those who did not fully share in the new prosperity.
What is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)?
long-standing division between two competing conceptions of woman’s freedom—one based on motherhood, the other on individual autonomy and the right to work—now crystallized in the debate over an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution promoted by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. This amendment proposed to eliminate all legal distinctions “on account of sex.” In Paul’s opinion, the ERA followed logically from winning the right to vote. Having gained political equality, she insisted, women no longer required special legal protection—they needed equal access to employment, education, and all the other opportunities of citizens. To supporters of mothers’ pensions and laws limiting women’s hours of labor, which the ERA
Although religious fundamentalists touted the success of Prohibition in reducing the consumption of alcohol, public drunkenness, and drink-related diseases, it was deeply divisive. What were the concerns raised by Prohibition?
Prohibition a violation of individual freedom for the flow of illegal liquor to stop. In urban areas, Prohibition led to large profits for the owners of illegal speakeasies and the “bootleggers” who supplied them. It produced widespread corruption as police and public officials accepted bribes to turn a blind eye to violations of the law. These developments reinforced fundamentalists’ identification of urban life and modern notions of freedom with immorality and a decline of Christian liberty.
What is meant by the “New Deal?
The New Deal is Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign promise in his speech to the Democratic National Convention of 1932 to combat the Great Depression with a “new deal for the American people.” The phrase became a catchword for his ambitious plan of economic programs.
