American History:A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Paul S. Boyer

Author:Paul S. Boyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

7. Police officers collect the bodies of the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City. This catastrophic blaze, which killed 141 young garment workers, shocked a nation into confronting the social and human toll of unregulated industrial expansion.

Some reformers focused on moral uplift. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1874) and the Anti-Saloon League (1895) campaigned to prohibit alcohol. Antiprostitution crusaders, invoking the abolitionist movement, urged the eradication of “white slavery” from America’s cities. Others, however, drawing on reform initiatives in England, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere, advocated more radical solutions, including electoral reforms; support for labor unions; governmental regulation of corporate behavior; and legislation addressing unsafe factories, child labor, and unhealthful conditions in the immigrant cities. Some even embraced Socialism. Jane Addams in Democracy and Society Ethics (1902) drew on her settlement-house experiences to argue that “democracy” in an industrial age must encompass not only the right to vote but also public efforts to ameliorate the plight of society’s most desperate and vulnerable members. The journalist Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life (1909) renewed Alexander Hamilton’s call for an activist government—but now in the interests of all, not just the business class.

Mass magazines like McClure’s and Colliers publicized terrible conditions in urban-industrial America. These exposés often then appeared as books, extending their influence. Ida Tarbell documented John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless tactics in her History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). David Graham Phillips described Big Business’s stranglehold over politics in The Treason of the Senate (1906). John Spargo in The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906) wrote movingly of the 1.7 million children in the industrial labor force. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), an exposé of worker exploitation and disgusting conditions in Chicago’s packing plants, awakened consumers to the dangers of tainted meat. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” Sinclair later recalled.

Mobilizing locally, reformers from New York to San Francisco battled municipal corruption, documented in Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904). Sensing an opportunity, some business leaders proposed structural reforms, such as citywide rather than ward-based elections, and “city managers” rather than mayors, to increase corporate influence and reduce immigrants’ political power. After decades of helter-skelter growth, city-planning and urban-beautification advocates won support. More beautiful cities would promote good citizenship, they argued.

Other local and state-level reforms concentrated on worker protection and business regulation, including factory safety standards, prohibitions on child labor, and curbing pollution from belching smokestacks. After the Triangle fire, New York State enacted numerous worker-protection laws. Other state-level reforms included a workmen’s compensation law (Maryland, 1902), a ten-hour law for women workers (Oregon, 1903), and a minimum-wage law (Massachusetts, 1912). The National Consumers’ League (1899), founded by Hull House resident Florence Kelley, mobilized middle-class support for such measures.

In Wisconsin, Republican congressman Robert La Follette won the governorship in 1900 by challenging his party’s domination by railroads and other corporate interests. Working with professors at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, down the

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