Chapter 28 Outlines
Progressive Roots
• There was unrest throughout the land because industrialists concentrated more and more power in fewer and fewer hands.
• Progressive theorists insisted that society could no longer use the “let-alone” or laissez faire policy.
• Before 1900, politicians and writers begun to pinpoint targets for the progressive attack. Bryan, Altgeld, and the Populists flamed about the “bloated trusts” with corruption and wrongdoing.
• Henry Demarest Lloyd wrote Wealth Against Commonwealth in 1894, it was about the Standard Oil Company and on its “predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption”
• Veblen viewed parasitic leisure class engaged in wasteful “business” which was making money for money’s sake rather than the productive “industry” which was making goods to satisfy real needs.
• Jacob A. Riis was Danish and immigrated to the U.S. He was a reporter for the New York Sun, and he wrote How the Other Half Lives. It shocked the middle class Americans in 1890; he talked about diseases, and how dirty and how bad off the New York slums were. It influenced New York City police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt.
• Theodore Dreiser wrote the The Financier and The Titan. He battered promoters and profiteers.
• A lot of the socialists were European immigrants where there were already socialist movements in the old world. Messengers of the social gospel promoted a brand of progressivism based on Christian teachings. They used religious doctrines to demand better conditions for the poor. The number of Feminists also multiplied. Jane Addams and Lilian Wald fought to improve the conditions of families living in the cities.
Raking Muck with the Muckrakers
• During the beginning of the 20th century, American publishers exposed the evils of the u.s.
• McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and Everybody’s, were popular magazines.
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