Progressive Movement and Urban Reform

1. Chicago: 1890 to 1915 Progressive Movement and Urban Reform

2. Setting the stage • Between 1890 and 1915, the Progressive movement hit America, seeking reform in both national and local politics. • America was in transition from a country of farmers and artisans to a country defined by immigration, industrialization, and urbanization.

3. Chicago in transition • Problems: • Urban slums • Poverty • Dangerous working conditions • Corruption in politics • Political machines • Exploitive monopolies

4. Progressivism • Wanted to address these problems of urban centers like Chicago • Many progressive reformers were well-educated and well-informed middle-class Americans, including many women, journalists, small business owners, and college professors.

5. Common elements of Progressives • Promoted social justice concerns • Faith in government intervention in society • “Gospel of efficiency” • Order and organization

6. Progressive beliefs • Good government should be honest, efficient, and managed by professional public servants. • Progressive reform sought: • Moral reform • Get rid of prostitution and gambling and those who allowed it • Urban political reform • Get rid of corruption, bribery, patronage, and fraud • Civic reform • Make Chicago a safer, cleaner, better place to live

7. Local writers and Exposés Muckrakers and Upton Sinclair

8. Muckrakers • Progressive movement fueled by writers and journalists who were called muckrakers. • Exposed the dirty, seedy, and unethical happenings of life in America • Brought about a feeling of moral outrage

9. Upton Sinclair • Began as a journalist for a socialist newspaper • Came to Chicago in 1905 to investigate the Union Stock Yards and the meatpacking industry

10. Sinclair’s task • Expose the meatpacking industry • Expose the exploitative relationship between owners and employees • Intended for his work to support socialism

11. Sinclair’s book • The novel, The Jungle, published in 1906 • Books tells the story of an immigrant who comes to America and works in the Union Stock Yards of Chicago • Main character: JurgisRudkus gets crushed by the vicious capitalist system. • Jurgis converts to socialism

12. Response to the Jungle • Readers did not remember this book for Sinclair’s argument for socialism but rather for: exposing the unimaginable filth that could be found on a daily basis at meatpacking plants. • Exposed the meatpacking industry for packaging contaminated, spoiled, unclean, and occasionally doctored meat.

13. Roosevelt Connection! • President Theodore Roosevelt began to push for new federal laws • Health standards on the meat packing industry • Passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

14. Local writing • British writer and reformer William T. Stead came to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition. • He was appalled by the rampant vice he found here. He told of what he saw in his 1894 book, If Christ Came to Chicago.

15. If Christ Came to Chicago • Stead described Chicago as a city full of materialistic young men. • Called local society women selfish and lazy • He believed Jesus would not like Chicago

16. What the book exposed • Stead was appalled by Chicago’s famed “Levee,” known then as the “most notorious red-light district in the nation”– Jon C. Teaford • 200 brothels, countless saloons, dance halls, pawn shops and gambling clubs • The Everleigh Club: a local institution, a “classy and respectable brothel”

17. Effects of the book? • The Chicago Tribune called it “a directory of sin” • Sold 10,000 copies locally right away • Generated publicity but little in the way of actual reform • Most Chicago politicians avoided moral reform and ideas of the Progressives • Regulation of vice, confined to the boundaries of the Levee.