On which three Progressive reforms will you spend $1,000,000 ($600,000, $300,000, $100,000)?
How will you justify your choices?
How will you spend a million dollars?
It is 1913. You have been asked to spend Aunt Bessie’s $1,000,000 on three Progressive reforms. Using your own background knowledge and the documents provided, choose which causes are most deserving of the following amounts: $600,000, $300,000, $100,000. (For each document you will need to determine a name for the cause under study.) In a letter to Aunt Bessie, argue for and justify the choices you made using specific evidence to explain your choices.
SOURCE 1A: Atlantic monthly
Vocabulary:
· Tempest: a violent windstorm usually with rain, snow, or hail
Document Note: John Muir was a Scottish immigrant to the United States. He co-founded the environmental group, the Sierra Club in 1892. After a meeting with President Teddy Roosevelt, he became instrumental in the establishment of Yosemite National Park in 1905.
Document:
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees—tens of centuries old—that have been destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods,—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,—only Uncle Sam can do that.
Source: Excerpt from John Muir, “The American Forests” in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1897.
sOURCE 1B: aREA OF pRIMARY (nEVER bEEN lOGGED) fORESTS IN THE u.s.
iNSERT COPIES OF MAPS (PG. 77 OF dbq bINDER) HERE.
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENTS 1A & 1B.
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Source 2: nATIONAL cHILD LABOR COMMITTEE REPORT & pHOTO, 1911
Vocabulary:
· Breaker – a building where coal from a mine was broken up and sorted
Document Note: The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) is a non-profit organization, established in 1904, and supported by Congress in 1907 for the purpose of promoting child welfare. Lewis Hine was hired by NCLC to investigate and photograph the plight of America’s working children.
The boys working in the breaker are bent double, with little chance to relax; the air at times is dense with coal-dust, which penetrates so far into the passages of the lungs that for long periods after the boy leaves the breaker, he continues to cough up the black coal dust. Fingers are calloused and cut by the coal and slate, the noise and monotony are deadening…While I was in the region, two breaker boys of 15 years…fell or were carried by the coal down into the car below. One was badly burned and the other smothered to death. This was the Lee Breaker at Chauncy, Pennsylvania, January 6th, 1911. The boy who was killed was Dennis McKee.
Source: Excerpt from Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Report, 1911.
Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division. Photo by Lewis Hine, 1911.
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENT 2.
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Source 3: Why Women Should Vote
Vocabulary
· Tenement house: cramped and unclean apartment buildings for the poor
· Untainted: unspoiled
Document Note: The woman suffrage movement generally began with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. It would take 71 years for the efforts at Seneca Falls to materialize into the 19th Amendment of 1919. Many western states gave women the right to vote years before the 19th Amendment was passed. Jane Addams was not generally regarded as a suffragist – her interests were in social reform in general.
…A woman's simplest duty, one would say, is to keep her house clean and wholesome and to feed her children properly. Yet if she lives in a tenement house, as so many of my neighbors do, she cannot fulfill these simple obligations by her own efforts because she is utterly dependent upon the city administration for the conditions which render decent living possible. Her basement will not be dry, her stairways will not be fireproof, her house will not be provided with sufficient windows to give light and air, nor will it be equipped with sanitary plumbing, unless the Public Works Department sends inspectors who constantly insist that these elementary decencies be provided. …In a crowded city quarter, however, if the street is not cleaned by the city authorities no amount of private sweeping will keep the tenement free from grime; if the garbage is not properly collected and destroyed a tenement-house mother may see her children sicken and die of diseases from which she alone is powerless to shield them, although her tenderness and devotion are unbounded. She cannot even secure untainted meat for her household, she cannot provide fresh fruit, unless the meat has been inspected by city officials, and the decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale in the tenement districts, has been destroyed in the interests of public health.
…if woman would fulfill her traditional responsibility to her own children; if she would educate and protect from danger factory children who must find their recreation on the street; if she would bring the cultural forces to bear upon our materialistic civilization, then she must bring herself to the use of the ballot-that latest implement for self-government. May we not fairly say that American women need this implement in order to preserve the home?
Source: Jane Addams, “Why Women Should Vote,” Ladies Home Journal, January, 1910.
Source: Library of Congress
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENT 3.
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Source 4: The Jungle
Vocabulary
· Hopper: a funnel shaped container used to make sausage
Document Note: Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle as a novel, but it was based on research into the real Chicago meat-packing industry.
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… There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit. 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… 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. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water--and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast.
Source: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Viking Press, 1905.
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENT 4.
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Source 5: The shame of the cities
Vocabulary
· Machine: an organized group that runs the government of a city
· Assessor: government employee in charge of tax payer lists
· Deceased: dead
Document Note: Lincoln Steffens was a muckraking journalist at McClure’s magazine. He wanted to promote social changes by appealing to people’s sadness and outrage on political conditions in the cities.
The machine controls the whole process of voting, and practices fraud at every stage. The assessor's list is the voting list, and the assessor is the machine's man. . . . The assessor pads the list with the names of dead dogs, children, and non-existent persons. One newspaper printed the picture of a dog, another that of a little four-year-old negro boy, down on such a list. …Rudolph Blankenburg, a persistent fighter for the right and the use of the right to vote (and, by the way, an immigrant), sent out just before one election a registered letter to each voter on the rolls of a certain selected division. Sixty-three per cent were returned marked "not at," "removed," "deceased," etc. From one four-story house where forty-four voters were addressed, eighteen letters came back undelivered; from another of forty-eight voters, came back forty-one letters; from another sixty-one out of sixty-two; from another, forty-four out of forty-seven. Six houses in one division were assessed at one hundred and seventy-two voters, more than the votes cast in the previous election in any one of two hundred entire divisions. …The police are forbidden by law to stand within thirty feet of the polls, but they are at the box and they are there to see that the machine's orders are obeyed and that repeaters whom they help to furnish are permitted to vote without "intimidation" on the names they, the police, have supplied.
Source: Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 1904.
SOURCE 5B: THAT’S WHATS THE MATTER
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENTs 5A & 5B.
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Source 6: How the other half lives
Vocabulary
· Tenement: crowded and unclean apartment buildings for the poor
· Census: counting of people to document numbers living in a certain location
Document Note: Jacob Riis documented the horrible conditions faced by people (especially children) living in the tenements.
THE problem of the children becomes, in these swarms, to the last degree perplexing. Their very number makes one stand aghast. I have already given instances of the packing of the child population in East Side tenements. They might be continued indefinitely until the array would be enough to startle any community. For, be it remembered, these children with the training they receive—or do not receive—with the instincts they inherit and absorb in their growing up, are to be our future rulers... I counted the other day the little ones, up to ten years or so, in a Bayard Street tenement that for a yard has a triangular space in the centre with sides fourteen or fifteen feet long, just room enough for a row of ill-smelling closets at the base of the triangle and a hydrant at the apex. There was about as much light in this “yard” as in the average cellar. I gave up my self-imposed task in despair when I had counted one hundred and twenty-eight in forty families. Thirteen I had missed, or not found in. Applying the average for the forty to the whole fifty-three, the house contained one hundred and seventy children. It is not the only time I have had to give up such census work. I have in mind an alley—an inlet rather to a row of rear tenements—that is either two or four feet wide according as the wall of the crazy old building that gives on it bulges out or in. I tried to count the children that swarmed there, but could not. Sometimes I have doubted that anybody knows just how many there are about. Bodies of drowned children turn up in the rivers right along in summer whom no one seems to know anything about. When last spring some workmen, while moving a pile of lumber on a North River pier, found under the last plank the body of a little lad crushed to death, no one had missed a boy, though his parents afterward turned up.
Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies of the Tenements of New York, 1890.
pLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS ABOUT DOCUMENTs 6A & 6B.
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Source 7: The temperance army Song Lyrics
Vocabulary
· Temperance: use in small amounts, especially of alcohol
Document Note: During the late 19th century, many middle class Christian women became involved in the movement to prohibit alcohol sales. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (The Saloon League) wanted to outlaw saloons which they saw as threatening the stability of the family.
18
On which three Progressive reforms will you spend $1,000,000 ($600,000, $300,000, $100,000)?
How will you justify your choices?
1. Now the temp'rance army's marching,
With the christian's armor on;
Love our motto, Christian Captain,
Prohibition is our song!
Chorus:
Yes, the temp'rance army's marching,
And will march forevermore,
And our triumph shall be sounded,
Round the world from shore to shore,
Marching on, Marching on forevermore,
And our triumph shall be sounded,
Round the world from shore to shore.