Just before the Progressive Era Americas avoided getting involved with other countries was slowly fading. Because of rapid economic and social growth, the U.S. had became a major power. The Progressive Era was from 1890-1918. "Progressivism" means that a wide spectrum of social movements that include environmentalism, labor, anti-poverty, peace, anti-racism, civil rights, women's rights, animal rights, socialism, and etc.. Reform means to make changes in something for example typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice. They needed the reform improvements during this time because the Progressive reforms urged cities to pass legislation which set standards for housing and such sanitation matters as garbage pick-up and sewage systems. Some reforms wanted to improve the urban environment by making it more pleasant and attractive. During the Progressive Era in America they entered a period of peace, prosperity, and progress. By 1900, 30 million people, or 30 percent of the total population, lived in cities.
Public Education
Before the Progressive Era, education was about who you are, not what you can do. Women, minorities, and people from the lower classes didn't really go to school or collage. But during the Progressive Era, that began to change. There was a great expansion of high schools throughout the United States. The Progressive Era saw that education was the key to equality for all people. A high school education became the new normal for many people. The Progressive Era was mostly fueled by urban, educated people who saw that the country would benefit if everyone had opportunities to be their best. African American immigrants were coming from eastern and southern Europe in big groups. Cites were overcrowded and people suffered greatly. African Americas wee faced with consistent racism in the form of segregation in public spaces, no access to quality healthcare, education and housing. Niagara Movement was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter.
WEB Du Bois
W.E.B Du Bois was one of the most important African Americans activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded NAACP and supported Pan-Americanism. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He freely attended school with whites and was supported in his academic studies by his white teachers. Du Bois became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. For the first time, he began analyzing the deep troubles of American racism. W.E.B. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963 one day before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington at the age of 95, in Accra, Ghana, while working on an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora.
Segregation and Discrimination |
|
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented the nadir of American race relations. Nine-tenths of African Americans lived in the South, and supported themselves as farmers or sharecroppers. Most southern and border states had a legal system of segregation, relegating African Americans to separate schools and other public accommodations. Under the Mississippi Plan, involving the use of poll taxes and literacy tests, African Americans were deprived of the vote. The Supreme Court stripped the 14th and 15th Amendments of their meaning, especially in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible under the 14th Amendment. Each year approximately a hundred African Americans were hanged. A Pox tax is a tax on every adult, without reference to income or resources. The Grandfather Clause was a statute by many American southern states in the wake Reconstruction 1865-1877 that allowed potential white voters to literacy tests, poll taxes, and other tactics designed to disfranchise southern blacks. The Plessy v. Ferguson is a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1896 that upheld the rights of states to pas laws allowing or even requiring racial segregation in public and private institutions such as schools, public transportation, restrooms, and restaurants. The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882. It was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in US history, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese labors.
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was an African American journalist activist who led an ant lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. A daughter of slaves, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on July 16, 1862. Wells received her early schooling, but she had to drop out at the age of 16, when tragedy struck her family. Both of her parents and one of her siblings died in a yellow fever outbreak, leaving Wells to care for her other siblings. Ever resourceful, she convinced a nearby country school administrator that she was 18, and landed a job as a teacher. She died in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois.
Women
In the 19th century, began in New England and spread to the South and West. Women in both rural and urban areas engaged un paid labor both inside and outside the home. National Association of Colored Women, NACW is an American organization formed at a convention in Washington, D.C.The mission of NACW is to strengthen women's commissions in their work to promote equality and justice for all women and girls and ensure they are represented and empowered in their communities.NACW serves as the national voice for Women's Commissions across the country. In the 1820s and for decades to come married women could not own property, make contracts, bring suits, or sit on juries. They could be legally beaten by their husbands and were required to submit to their husbands' sexual demands. During the early 19th century, however, a growing number of women became convinced that they had a special mission and responsibility to purify and reform American society. In 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Anthony, was formed to agitate for an amendment to the Constitution. This amendment was presented by Anthony and her successors to forty consecutive sessions of Congress. It repeatedly failed to pass. National attention and support came to the movement when Anthony was arrested and tried for voting in the 1872 presidential election.
After Anthony's death in 1906, a phrase from her last suffrage speech, "Failure is Impossible," became the motto of young suffragists. Fourteen years later in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified. Women had finally won the right to vote. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890. August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
After Anthony's death in 1906, a phrase from her last suffrage speech, "Failure is Impossible," became the motto of young suffragists. Fourteen years later in 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified. Women had finally won the right to vote. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890. August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified, enfranchising all American women and declaring for the first time that they, like men, deserve all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony was a suffragist, abolitionist, author and speaker who was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Born on February 15, 1820, Susan B. Anthony was raised in a Quaker household and went on to work as a teacher before becoming a leading figure in the abolitionist and women's voting rights movement. Anthony was the second oldest of eight children to a local cotton mill owner and his wife. Only six of the Anthony children lived to be adults.Anthony died on March 13 1906.
Progressivism Under Taft
He signed and defended the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, a weak bill that raised tariffs, but not enough to protect American big business. Opposed Taft because he seemed to oppose conservation and because he supported the mare conservative member of the republican senate. William Howard Taft favored business, but worked to break up trusts. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, named for Representative Sereno E. Payne and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, began in the Unite States House of Representatives as a bill raising certain tariffs on goods entering the United States. The Bull Moose Part was made by Theodore Roosevelt. When asked whether he was fit to be president, he responded that he was as fit as a "bull moose." In 1912, Roosevelt was unhappy with Taft's time in office and put his name forward to become the Republican Party's nominee again.
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, fulfilled a lifelong dream when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court, becoming the only person to have served as both a U.S. chief justice and president. William Howard Taft was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on September 15, 1857. He was the first president to have a presidential automobile, converting the White House stables into garages; the first to occupy the Oval Office, which was operational as of October 1909; the first to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game; and the first to play golf as a hobby. Along with all of his "firsts," Taft was the last American president to have facial hair. William Howard Taft died on March 8, 1930, at his home in Washington, D.C.