Class Tomorrow

All,

I received an email from a student regarding study guides and such and I felt it germane to post my reply to this blog for all to read:

"As the terms go on the blog, if you can describe, contextualize, identify the relevance of what is listed, that is what I want you to study from the book. For instance, you don't see Emma Goldman listed there but you do see Margaret Sanger. A-ha! you should say - I will not ask you about Emma Goldman, and you would be right. The purpose of the list is so that you can narrow down what you have learned from the book. Your lectures will require you to have notes. There isn't going to be any further sort of comprehensive study guide for the exam, but of course, tomorrow would be a good day to bring in your questions."

Tomorrow's class will depend entirely upon you to ask and answer questions about the material.  Come prepared. Do not come in and say "give me a basic recap of your lecture on the Progressives." You should have notes from the lectures, you should have read your chapters. Be ready. Invariably, people waste these review sessions because they fail to study until the night before or perhaps the morning of an exam. I will not spend the class period reviewing material without some sort of accurate questions. Moreover, I'll be expecting you to help out your classmates. Think of class tomorrow as a moderated review session.

Chapter Review Terms

Chapter 15 review terms:

Freedmen's Bureau

Sharecropping

Crop Lien

Presidential Reconstruction

Black Codes

Radical Republicans

Radical or Congressional Reconstruction

Civil Rights Bill of 1866

Fourteenth Amendment

Reconstruction Acts

Fifteenth Amendment

The relationship between women's rights movement and black civil rights

Carpetbaggers and Scalawags

Liberal Republicans

The Redeemers

The Bargain or Compromise of 1877

Chapter 16: in previous blog post

Chapter 17:

Be able to define Populism

The Farmers' Alliance

The People's Party

The Populist Coalition

The relative success of the Populist Party in 1892

Eugene Debs

The Pullman Strike

Free Silver

Subtreasury Plan

Free Silver

William Jennings Bryan

Henry Grady

Kansas Exodus

understanding clause

grandfather clause

disfranchisement

Plessy v. Ferguson

Lynching (and when it was most prevalent.)

New Nativism

Chinese Exclusion Activities

Booker T. Washington

Tuskegee

Women's Christian Temperance Union

Alfred T. Mahan

William Randolph Hearst

The Maine

San Juan Hill and the celebrity of Teddy Roosevelt

Philippine theater of the Spanish-American War (general context and length)

Anti-Imperialist League

Chapter 18:

Triangle Shirtwaist Company

Muckrakers (who and what)

Changes in immigration in the Progressive Era

Fordism

Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

Eugene Debs and Socialism

American Federation of Labor

Margaret Sanger

Robert M. LaFollette

Jane Addams and Hull House

Women's Suffrage

Prohibition

Maternalist reform

Food and Drug Act

Yellowstone and what it meant.

Sherman Antitrust Act

The New Freedom

Why Were the Progressives Like Velveeta Cheese?

A 1974 Kraft Cheese Commercial (though not what inspired the title of this lecture!)

This, however, was the commercial that inspired the title:



There's no single cheese like Velveeta? What Kraft is trying to say is even they aren't sure what it contains, because it contains so many contradictory things that we don't really want to discuss!

The Progressives are a little like Velveeta Cheese because we tend to lump a lot of different campaigns for social change together under the banner of "Progressivism" yet many of these campaigns had vastly different aims and inspirations.

As you have read in your textbook, the Progressives included well meaning upper middle-class white women like Jane Addams who starts Hull House in an effort to make life better for immigrant women who have not yet discovered the joys of living like middle class white women.  Another "Progressive" impulse led another group of middle-class white women into Appalachia where they taught southern mountain folk the value of baking powder and flour biscuits in an attempt to lead them away from the backward practice of baking cornbread!

The Progressive impulse is an important one, and we will discuss it in great detail. As a political movement the Progressives were not only incredibly successful, passing FOUR amendments to the Constitution of the United States, their ideas remain current - perhaps more current than we would like to admit.

Here are some links to help us discuss Progressivism:

A discussion of the Corbett-Sullivan fight (that took place right here in New Orleans!) Why were the Marquis of Queensbury rules for boxing a Progressive idea, even though they were incorporated in 1892, before the main of the "Progressive Era?" Can we justifiably define the Progressive Era in chronological terms? If not, how should we define it?

As this advertisement humorously indicates, people began worrying more about health and fitness in the Progressive Era. Imagine if all products were as effective as "Rondo" promises!

Lastly, when we consider "ballot reform," prohibition, and eugenics, we should be careful of Progressives  bearing gifts. Consider Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s opinion in Buck vs. Bell . Ruled in 1924, like the Corbett-Sullivan fight, it takes place outside of what we consider the "Progressive Era." Why is this important when considering the legacy of the Progressives? What might we consider Progressive impulses in our society today?

Ragtime

Based on the E.L. Doctorow novel by the same name,  Ragtime won an Academy Award for best picture in 1981. Outside of the academic reasons that we are watching the film, this movie is quite enjoyable on many counts. It has a fantastic score composed by Randy Newman. It contains some of Hollywood's more recognizable actors like James Cagney toward the end of his career and a young Samuel L. Jackson and Jeff Daniels before their acting careers had really taken off. Plus it delivers a compelling story.

We are watching it in our class for its fictionalized account of turn-of-the-century America. It will be important for you to grasp the film's multiple story lines and accept them as while not always fully related to one another, they compose a montage of the whole - a time period when a variety of forces shaped the nation. It is set roughly in 1905-1908 just as the tide went out on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era hit its full swing. We see elements of both, from the elaborate excesses of Stanford White to the Progressive-Era inspired insanity plea of Harry K. Thaw. We see the racial tensions of early twentieth-century America in the dilemma of Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the forces of modernity on traditional patterns of patriarchy in the collapse of the Delmas family. In short, you should be able to relate a variety of themes in this film to topics that we have studied in class.

The film will be available online, streamed on Blackboard. Be sure to select the "Streaming Video" option at the bottom of the main list of selection items.

Populism, Race, and Imperialism

Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden

The USS Iowa (1898)

Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders

 

Daniel Desdunes 

 

The Combine Against the Democracy

The West of Romance and Reality

 

 George Armstrong Custer and his wife Elizabeth Clift Bacon not long after their 1864 marriage.

George Armstrong Custer and a hunting expedition in 1874. He was as big of a celebrity as was known in America at the time. (National Archives)

The 7th Cavalry on the Dakota Plains in 1874, two years before Custer's company of troopers met its fate at Little Big Horn. (National Archives

Frederic Remington, The Herd Boy (1905) Museum of Fine Art, Houston. 

Few shows were as popular in late nineteenth-century America than Buffalo Bill's Wild West. (In fact, it once played in what is now Lee Circle!) At the same time, the western "dime novel" became very popular, only to be later replaced by the detective story. Both Buffalo Bill and the "western" genre of literature and film have done much to shape both the self-image and projected image of Americans.

A map depicting the scheme by which private railroad companies acquired land in checkerboard fashion. Shaded squares reflect railroad land. Those shaded red have been sold. Unshaded land was sold by the federal government. (Library of Congress)

 

Apache prisoners ready to board an eastbound train toward captivity. Does this picture suggest any irony? (Library of Congress)

Although it would not embed, this image of Virginia City, Nevada, adjacent to the Comstock Lode, is worth a look.

Sample questions from Chapter 16

You read chapter sixteen for last week which chronicled Gilded Age America. You could probably surmise from the emphasis given by your book's author that stems from a labor union background. Both his father and uncle were blacklisted as Communists (probably wrongly) earlier in the 20th century because of their labor activism on behalf of "the workers." Edward Bellamy might not have been quite so influential or labor so deeply rooted as this chapter depicts, but Foner presents a compelling argument for its vibrancy and relevance in late nineteenth-century America. 

Here are a few sample questions that you should be able to answer from the chapter:

How did railroads, both as corporations and as transportation networks, revolutionize the American economy?

What were "pools" and "trusts?" What does Foner mean by "economic concentration" with regard to big business and the leadership of private industry?

How were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller the same, how were they different?

Who was Jacob Riis?

Who was Frederick Jackson Turner and what was the Frontier Thesis all about?

What were the main techniques for the final defeat of the Plains Indians of the West?

What was the Dawes Act? Wounded Knee?

Who was Boss Tweed and why was he significant?

What did the Crédit Mobilier scandal symbolize and what sorts of people were involved in it?

Why was the Civil Service Act relevant, and what did the Interstate Commerce Commission hope to accomplish?

What were the ramifications of the Gold Standard and why did some people want Greenbacks?

What was the Grange?

Who was William Graham Sumner and what were the principles of Social Darwinism?

What, generally speaking, was the government (local, state, and federal) toward organized labor?

Who were Edward Bellamy and Henry George?

Who were the Knights of Labor, and why was the Haymarket "Affair" so damaging to organized labor?

NOTE: WE will be coming back to some of these themes in the next two lectures!

The Miracles of Science

This advertisement is amusing, but it is also indicative of the belief that Americans had in science in the second half of the nineteenth century... even if it what was at stake in some instances was snake oil!

The American Civil War introduced many new technological innovations, but above all, the need to produce large amounts of material for the war encouraged the development of more sophisticated production techniques. Yet in many ways, the technology evident during the war was largely transitional. Not until the postbellum period, when engineering and hard science became professionalized and studied in a systematic way at the university level, did the great explosion in technological advancement take place.

Perhaps no innovation was more telling than the development of high quality and inexpensive steel. Before the late nineteenth century, steel was a craft. It was produced in small quantities and was expensive - reserved for only the most important applications. Iron production was equally primitive. This furnace would not have been uncommon in the production of Civil War Era pig iron. Yet twenty years down the road, thanks to the proliferation of the Bessemer Process, steel made giant leaps forward to the point that a steel mill looked like Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thompson works or the Sloss Furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. Its widespread use revolutionized American life.

Perhaps nowhere was the impact of steel greater than on transportation.

The following images and links will help us think about the impact of steel on naval technology. This cistern at the Hermann Grima house in New Orleans is actually a pretty good example of how antebellum boilers were constructed.

Weak boilers could lead to horrible events like the Sultana disaster.

When Admiral Farragut took New Orleans with his Gulf Blockading Squadron, his flagship, the Hartford, was considered state-of-the-art, including auxiliary steam propulsion. But it was made out of wood.

Over the course of the war - four short years - the Hartford was obsolete. So, too, was the famed Confederate raider, the Alabama. The war introduced ironclads, yet like many transitional technologies, this was basically a wood ship with iron quite literally bolted to the frame. They were far more effective than their predecessors, but were fairly crude in reality.

 

A Monitor class river cruiser from the Civil War. 

The real revolution came about when ships began to be made out of steel - that is the hull itself as well as propulsion systems. This led to ships that were much larger, faster, and reliable. The consequences for an industrial power capable of producing them were awesome. Steel led to powerful navies, which in turn led to imperial might. Steel ships drastically increased the ability to ship products reliably over great distances. It made markets much more vast.

The USS Atlanta - a mere 35 years after the Hartford.

Steel had an equally great impact upon rail transportation. Size, speed, regularity, cost effectiveness were all fundamentally altered by its introduction. The very shift from iron to steel rails was significant. We will discuss this more next week in our lecture on the West.

Steel was part of a revolution in science. Modern steel represented a sophisticated understanding of metallurgy. It also had enormous repercussions on weaponry.

Chemistry also revolutionized everything from warfare to agriculture. The develoment of smokeless powder at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, still stands as the most significant recent development in small arms technology. It was what made the machine gun and all other modern arms possible. Likewise, chemical fertilizer altered American agriculture in unpredictable and sometimes harmful ways. Science had the power to create and destroy, a fact that Americans were not yet fully aware of.

Communications also underwent a technological revolution. The telegraph had been around since the 1840s, but not until 1866 did we have a reliable Transatlantic cable. The laying of the cable was a tremendous feat of engineering, and says much about Gilded Age ambition. Like steel ships, it made the world smaller.

A cable ship plying the waters. 

Steel's introduction will transform the way everybody lives. Before steel, most people didn't need a clock, for instance. Few people will be able to avoid it afterward.

The Many Reconstructions of Reconstruction

The ruins of Richmond at the end of the Civil War. (National Archives)

Confederate prisoners held toward the end of the war (National Archives)

 

A somewhat posed photograph of soldiers from the United States Colored Troops (National Archives)

 Members of the first Radical state legislature in South Carolina. (National Archives)

Louisiana Governor Henry Clay Warmoth (1868-1872)

Your textbook's chapter on Reconstruction does a good job of outlining the important details and themes in the overall narrative of this period in American History. After reading this chapter,  you should have a good handle on all of the major phases (Presidential Reconstruction, Radical or Congressional Reconstruction, and the "Redemption" or overthrow of Reconstruction, Compromise of 1877, etc.) and the key figures associated with the era. Reconstruction is also important because it laid the foundation for the debate about civil rights in America, its most important legacies were probably the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.

Reconstruction was more than this standard narrative of political struggle, and your book also does a fairly good job of outlining the broader social challenges of the era, although it pays particular attention to the plight of the South's four million recently-freed slaves. In our lecture, we will consider what Reconstruction meant to some of these competing interest groups and the roles that they played in shaping political and social outcomes:

Freedmen
Former Confederate soldiers (the average soldier)
Union veterans (their counterpart)
Republicans (Northern and Southern)
Democrats (Northern and Southern)
Old Secessionists
Former Slaveholders and planters large and small
Poor whites
Former free people of color

Lastly, we will consider the memory of Reconstruction and the ways in which we write its history have been a metaphor for shifting values and interpretations in the intervening 135 years.