Name_____________________________ Date______________________

THE PROGRESSIVE ERAMUCKRAKERS: DO NOW

Directions: Answer each of the following questions in complete sentences.

1.)All of the following were goals of Progressive reformers except: (A) to reverse the urbanization trend (B) to eliminate child labor and occupational diseases (C) to eliminate the power of political bosses and machines (D) to curb tariff abuses.

2.)The Progressives believed in… (A) socialism (B) rugged individualism (C) government regulation in the interest of the people (D) laissez-faire economy.

3.)Which of the following does not describe the general objectives of the Progressives?

(A) desire to replace capitalism with socialism (B) an attempt to improve the social conditions of the working classes (C) a great emphasis in fighting corruption in city governments (D) a desire to halt economic consolidation and monopoly.

4.)Which of the following was a major weakness of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? (A) a loose definition of terms (B) loopholes for big business (C) failure of the government to enforce the act (D) composition of the Supreme Court.

5.)Which statement best describes the Progressive movement? It was an effort to… (A) preserve Mid-west political strength (B) expand the two party system (C) solve the problems created by industrialization (D) call attention to new urban problems.

6.)Which term refers to a journalist who exposed social evils in the United States? (A) carpetbagger (B) muckraker (C) robber baron (D) Anti-Progressive

7.)The Progressive movement of the early 20th century represented an attempt to… (A) repeal the antitrust laws. (B) protect the rights of racial minorities. (C) destroy the capitalistic system of the United States. (D) deal with the problems created by industrialization.

8.)What four beliefs did most Progressives share?

Name_____________________________ Date______________________

THE PROGRESSIVE ERAMUCKRAKERS: CLASSWORK

Background: In 1904, in the midst of a bitter stockyard strike, socialist writer Upton Sinclair’s two-month visit to Chicago’s “Packingtown” area provided him with a wealth of material that he turned into his best-selling novel, The Jungle. The book is best known for revealing the unsanitary process by which animals became meat products. Yet Sinclair’s primary concern was not with the goods that were produced, but with the workers who produced them. "I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach."

The Jungle: Chapter 9

There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the woolpluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off.

…Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

The Jungle: Chapter 14For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be

used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the

spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest--that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus, by which they saved time and increased the capacity of the plant--a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor--a process known to the workers as "giving them thirty per cent." Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as "Number Three Grade," but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade--there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes--they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and "California hams," which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy "skinned hams," which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them--that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled "head cheese!"

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white--it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one--there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels.

Such were the new surroundings in which Elzbieta was placed, and such was the work she was compelled to do. It was stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence… She was sick and miserable, and often she would barely have strength enough to drag herself home. And there they would eat what they had to eat, and afterward, because there was only their misery to talk of, they would crawl into bed and fall into a stupor and never stir until it was time to get up again, and dress by candlelight, and go back to the machines. They were so numbed that they did not even suffer much from hunger, now; only the children continued to fret when the food ran short.

Name_____________________________ Date______________________

THE PROGRESSIVE ERAMUCKRAKERS: CLASSWORK

Directions: Answer each of the following questions based on your analysis of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

1. What did the miracles of chemistry do for the meat packing industry?

2. What were the specific problems in the meat-packing plants?

3. Why do you think Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle? What was his goal in writing this book? Based on what you read from The Jungle, do you think it was successful in meeting Sinclair’s goals? Why or why not?

Who Were The Muckrakers?

Prompt: Analyze the goals and strategies of the Progressives in bringing about reform at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Key questions to consider: What specific issues did the muckrakers choose to address? What forms of media did the muckrakers use to address various social, political and

economic issues?

Muckraker #1: JACOB RIIS

From How the Other Half Lives

1. LONG ago it was said that "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.

Jacob Riis, Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street, c. 1889

Muckraker #2: LEWIS HINE

CHILD LABOR IN THE COTTON MILLS OF MISSISSIPPIPhotographic investigation by Lewis W. Hine in April and May, 1911

I. From April 25th to May 16th 1911, I made quiet visits to every cotton mill in the state, with but one or two exceptions, and in all cases spending some time inside the mills during working hours, as well as other hours spent around the mills at noon-hours, and around the homes at various times. In some of the villages, I made a careful house-to-house canvass, locating some of the home of the working children and gathering data about them. I found ten cotton mills and one knitting mill running. The four largest in the state have been closed down from one to ten years. The State Textile School was well worth the visit.

II. Meridian, Miss. The Priscilla Knitting Mills, Meridian, Miss. This mill, employing about

125 hands, is located out on the edge of town. Many of the workers come from the Meridian Cotton Mill, (a large mill, see Mr. Seddon’s report 1907), since it closed down. Photos 1349, 1449, 1489, 1967, 2005, 2011, 2030 and 2031 show the youngest workers, and also the group of children under sixteen years who go home at 5:30 PM, reducing their hours from 63.5 to 60.

III. The Dependent Widower; Mr. JL Mitchell, 1402 Eighth Ave., Meridian, Miss., an able-bodies, Scotch-Irish farmer, after 50 years of farm life several miles from any railroad, came to Meridian two years ago in order to obtain better school advantages for his children (so he told me). His wife and two children died a year ago and his oldest daughter keeps house for them, and this is the way the children take advantage of school opportunities – one child of eleven years and one of fifteen work in the knitting mill. Two smaller ones go to school very irregularly (the teacher told me) and from close observation of Mr. Mitchell himself, for several days found his occupation consisted of loafing around the corner-grocery, toting dinner to his children and lolling around the house, occasionally visiting the farm.

Above - Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and to put back the empty bobbins. Bibb Mill No. 1. Macon, Georgia.

Muckraker #3: IDA TARBELLUdo J. Keppler, Next!, illustration, Puck, 7 September 1904

Ida Tarbell: Excerpts from The History of the Standard Oil Company (1902-1904)Web version: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rockefellers/sfeature/sf_7.html

Rockefeller’s rise:

The strides the firm of Rockefeller & Andrews … were attributed… mainly to [his] extraordinary capacity for bargaining and borrowing. Then its chief competitors began to suspect something. Rockefeller might get his oil cheaper now and then, they said, but he could not do it often. He might make close contracts for which they had neither the patience nor the stomach. He might have an unusual mechanical and practical genius in his partner. But these things could not explain all. They believed they bought, on the whole, almost as cheaply as he, and they knew they made as good oil and with as great, or nearly as great, economy. He could sell at no better price than they. Where was his advantage? There was but one place where it could be, and that was in transportation.

The South Improvement Company scheme:

For several days an uneasy rumor had been running up and down the Oil Regions. Freights were going up. Now an advance in a man's freight bill may ruin his business; more, it may mean the ruin of a region. …

On the morning of February 26, 1872, the oil men read in their morning papers that the rise which had been threatening had come; moreover, that all members of the South Improvement Company were exempt from the advance. At the news all Oildom rushed into the streets. Nobody waited to find out his neighbor's opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was "conspiracy."…

For weeks the whole body of oil men abandoned regular business and surged from town to town intent on destroying the "Monster," the "Forty Thieves," the "great Anaconda," as they called the mysterious South Improvement Company. Curiously enough, it was chiefly against the combination which had secured the discrimination from the railroads--not the railroads which had granted it--that their fury was directed. They expected nothing but robbery from the railroads, they said. They were used to that; but they would not endure it from men in their own business.

The aftermath of South Improvement Company scheme:

No number of resolutions could wipe out the memory of the forty days of terrible excitement and loss which the region had suffered. No triumph could stifle the suspicion and bitterness which had been sown broadcast through the region. Every particle of independent manhood in these men whose very life was independent action had been outraged. Their sense of fair play, the saving force of the region in the days before law and order had been established, had been violated. These were things which could not be forgotten. There henceforth could be no trust in those who had devised a scheme which, the producers believed, was intended to rob them of their business.

Muckraker #4: John Muir

John Muir (1838-1914) was America's most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist. He is one of California's most important historical personalities. He has been called "The Father of our National Parks," "Wilderness Prophet," and "Citizen of the Universe."

His writings contributed greatly to the creation of Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon National Parks. Dozens of places are named after John Muir, including the Muir Woods National Monument, the John Muir Trail, Muir College (UCSD), and many schools.

His words and deeds helped inspire President Theodore Roosevelt's innovative conservation programs, including establishing the first National Monuments by Presidential Proclamation, and Yosemite National Park by congressional action. In 1892, John Muir and other supporters formed the Sierra Club "to make the mountains glad." John Muir was the Club's first president, an office he held until his death in 1914. Muir's Sierra Club has gone on to help establish a series of new National Parks and a National Wilderness Preservation System.

---

"If you think about all the gains our society has made, from independence to now, it wasn't government. It was activism. People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person." -- Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast Yvon Chouinard in a ( recent Sierra Magazine interview)._________________________________________________________________________________________________

Muckraker #5: Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt Saves the Forests (1907) It is absolutely necessary to ascertain in practical fashion the best of methods of reforestation, and only the National Government can do this successfully.

In the East, the states are now painfully, and at great expense, endeavoring to undo the effects of their former shortsighted policy in throwing away their forest lands. Congress has before it bills to establish by purchase great reserves in the White Mountains and the Southern Appalachians, and the only argument against the bills is that of their great expense. New York and Pennsylvania are now, late in the day, endeavoring themselves to protect the forests which guard the headwaters of their streams. Michigan and Wisconsin have already had their good timber stripped from the forests by the great lumber companies. But the Western states, far more fortunate than their eastern sisters in their regard, can now reserve their forests for the good of all their citizens, without expense, if they choose to show the requisite foresight.

-Theodore Roosevelt 1907

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THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

MUCKRAKERS: EXIT TICKETDirections: Diagram the prompt below. Write an analytical thesis statement that fully addresses the prompt.

Prompt: Analyze the goals and strategies of the Progressives in bringing about reform at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Analytical Thesis Statement:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Effect:

Reform at the beginning of 20th C