Title: Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era
Author: Nell Irvin Painter
Year of Publication: 2008
Thesis:
Tensions during the Progressive Era were characterized by opposing ideologies of prosperity and democracy, the former favoring order and hierarchy; the other favoring a democratic order in which all had the opportunity to voice themselves. The greater the voice of the people, the more they encountered repression.
Time: 1877-1919
Geography: U.S. & Colonies
Organization:
Preface to the 2008 Edition
- Unequal distribution of wealth still an issue
Acknowledgments
Introduction
- Production in U.S. goes way up during the 1870s, especially steel
- Describes wealth inequality as rather stark, then especially along gendered and racial lines, and even by type of work.
- Working life characterized by unemployement
- Mobility was downward as well as upward for M/C folks
- Defines classes
- Identifies "respectable" who seem to dovetail with the idea of middle-class
- Stereotypes of poor, working folk (Irish forefront)
- Irish success in politics credited to their permanence
- 1880-1920- Immigration patterns shift from NW Europe & China to Central/eastern Europe
- Economic mobility a possibility (curious what of this formed part of remittances)
- Because of appearance of classless society, economic vulnerability equated to democratic vulnerability for many
- Initially reforms were simple but large-scale (land grants, etc.)
- Producer/prosperity/hierarchical ideology - sees workers and capitalists working together, not in opposition (what's good for the business is good for the people)
- "Identity of Interest" = survival of the fittest
- "Democratizers" on the other hand see competing interests as a natural state of things and an aristocracy being built out of it, which they saw as a threat to Democracy, so reforms are therefore necessary
- Workers have trouble with messaging - folks believe they bring chaos
Chapter 1 - The Tocsin Sounds (Alarm Bell)
- Reversion to Democratic Party rule by 1877 in many southern states
- Coinciding with Hayes' removal of troops from the capitol cities
- Redemption ideology claims Black people and northerners were incompetent & malicious
- Black people leave in droves
- Economic downturn and fingerpointing
- National institutions (Supreme Court, for example) have lukewarm efforts for supporting Black folk
- In the South, Black people blamed - in the North, Irish
- Dichotomy - Knights of Labor/Jay Gould (financier)
Chapter 2 - The Great Upheaval
- Dichotomy - Statue of Liberty (freedom) / Brooklyn Bridge (progress)
- Railroads become synonymous with prosperity, progress, Manifest Destiny
- Dichotomy - modernity & poverty & death
- Knights of Labor fight to be recognized as speaking for labor
- Folks are able to use the Great Southwest Strike helps create idea that labor is reckless
- Labor begins to organize, realizing it needs to develop legislation to defend as well as to use striking as a means of political capital
- Appears to be no huge challenge to capitalism itself, just the distribution
Chapter 3 - Remedies
- Tarrifs - generally Democrats oppose (protecting consumers) / Republicans support (protecting industrialists)
- "By Democratic logic, the protective tariff enriched manufacturers at the
expense of farmers and workers, priced American producers out of world markets, and encouraged the consolidation of wealth into trusts and
monopolies that kept prices unnecessarily high."
- Covers Populists
- Cites Hull House & women's efforts
Chapter 4 - The Depression of the 1890s
- Rhetoric of cooperation, but Pinkertons as the reality
- Chicago Pullman strike
- Pullman also builds little towns - idea is to control labor by keeping them respectable
- Labor injunction makes striking illegal (interesting that initially gov't comes out behind labor)
- Populists don't deliver all the way, but 1896 election = McKinley representing elite interests vs. Bryan representing folks at the bottom
- Country traumatized from unemployment and strife
Chapter 5 - The White Man's Burden
- Entering an era of expansionism fueled by U.S. overproduction
- U.S. sheds its issues with imperialism & adopts a virile Anglo-Saxonism to justify war.
- Spanish American War (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines become U.S. Colonies)
- U.S. businesses invest heavily in Cuba, but under Spanish rule. Cubans try to throw of Spanish; U.S. intervenes but resumes control.
- Filipinos fight back, hard, and suffer 400k losses; Americans also die in much greater #'s than in Span-Am War.
- White Americans tend to side with Europeans / Black Americans tend to empathize with colonized
Chapter 6 - Prosperity
- McKinley shot; T. Roosevelt enters presidency
- Didn't know - Roosevelt wins Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace between Japan & Russia (even while not being particularly peaceful elsewhere)
- Taylorism - workers produce faster to increase profit
- Roosevelt blamed for financial collapse in 1908 for trustbusting - issues bonds to mitigate damage
- Roosevelt doubles down & sees more cause for regulation
Chapter 7 - Race and Disfranchisement
- Economic interventions that seemed extreme in 19th seemed tame in the 20th.
- Racism looks more apparent to white people outside of the South with racial violence
- Booker T. Washington placed squarely on the side of identity interests
- Compromise speech, then riot
- (right after The Clansmen play is shown)
- Folks who seem "progressive" in many other ways do so at the expense of Black voters (some poor whites, as well)
- Du Bois on the scene critiquing Washington
- Ida B Wells as well, confronting the lies
- Springfield a total fake accusation (white man is the perpetrator)
Chapter 8 - Woman Suffrage and Women Workers
Chapter 9 - The Progressive Era
Chapter 10 - Wars
Chapter 11 - The European War Takes Over
Chapter 12 - The Great Unrest
Epilogue
Afterword
Index
Type:
Political/Labor history
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
On the special interest groups within interest groups (separating and sometimes allying along lines of race, class, and gender):
"As a result, reformers who advocated much needed positive change
sometimes seemed at once to protect the interests of groups with legitimate grievances even as they defined themselves as a privileged subset within their larger group. Thus the spokesmen of organized labor were the most constant and most positive protectors of working people at the same time that they were the opponents of the poorest-paid workers, called contract labor. Women workers, for instance, could hardly look to employers to further their interests as workers. Yet organized labor itself rarely welcomed women workers or took up their specific grievances. The best representatives of workers not only conducted a campaign to prohibit the immigration of Asian workers to the United States but also neglected and opposed the interests of black workers."
On the advantages of Reconstruction:
"Led by new elements in southern politics, the Reconstruction
governments had given eleven southern states modern constitutions, public schools for black and white, modern prisons, social welfare organizations, and universal manhood suffrage (although some states temporarily disfranchised many former Confederates). But not only had this new leadership included elements that the old elites despised (poor whites and blacks), but the new constitutions also embodied an active role for government, which ran counter to southern traditions."
On the complicated nature of tarrifs:
"The bagging used for grain furnished a handy example of how tariffs
victimized farmers. This bagging was subject to a tariff of 54 percent, which meant that for every $100 worth of bagging that was imported, the farmer paid $154. But this was not the crucial point. Far more damaging was the effect on prices of domestically produced bagging. Even if this amount of bagging could be manufactured in the United States and sold profitably for $100 or $125, the manufacturer could charge any price under $154, undersell imports, and pocket the additional profit, thanks to the protective tariff. “This is called protection to the American bagging manufacturer,” said the congressman, but “it can be plainly seen that what is prosperity and advantage to the American bagging industry is an injury
and disadvantage to the farming classes.”
Reminiscent of the 1776 Project:
"The arguments of the Anglo-Saxonists rested on a specially tailored
version of English and American history. In this telling Americans were the descendants of the revolutionaries of 1776, who at Lexington and Concord threw off colonial rule and established the first successful republic in the history of mankind. Earlier attempts at republicanism all had failed for lack of intelligence, morality, self-restraint, and the genius for self-government that ran in the English “blood” of the American people.
Anglo-Saxonists admitted that Anglo-Saxons (or Teutons) had not always possessed this self-governing trait. It had developed slowly over the centuries, they said, since either the Roman occupation of England in the first century a.d. or the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Various theories existed on the import of this slow evolution for what were called less developed races. For Benjamin Tillman, Democratic senator from South Carolina, no others could make that journey, because “the Anglo-Saxon is superior to the African or to any other colored people and is alone capable
of self-government."
Notes:
- No notes have page #'s - search in chapter