Sidewalks of Struggle

2019 ◽  
pp. 402-440
Author(s):  
Vincent DiGirolamo
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Sexual Activity ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Night Work ◽  
Moral Legitimacy ◽  
Social Evil ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Street Trading

Long at issue, the moral legitimacy of juvenile street trading became a major concern in the Progressive Era. Parents, publishers and reformers asserted their right to define news peddling as a public good or a social evil. Efforts to control children’s labor underlay the campaigns to abolish newsboys’ night work and stop their fighting, gambling, smoking, spitting, drinking, swearing, and sexual activity. Investigators amassed damning evidence of these practices, but their findings also reveal the industrial pressures, parental logic, and working-class customs that allowed them. Unable to abolish news peddling by children, adults regulated it by establishing newsboy unions, clubs, courts, and “republics.” However, the success of their efforts depended entirely on the boys’ cooperation, making them agents rather than mere targets of progressive reform.

Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan

Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 231-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne L. Kinser
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Evil ◽  
The Social ◽  
Other Woman ◽  
The One ◽  
Newspaper Articles

It came as no surprise to John Sloan when in 1910 the National Academy of Design refused to exhibit his painting 3 a.m. (Fig. 1). Its subject matter must have appeared to the academy jury, as Sloan later said, rather “like a pair of men's drawers slipped into an old maid's laundry.” It is apparent that the critics of the day, who deemed the work “too frank and vulgar,” could hardly have overlooked the fact that the seated woman, sipping a cup of tea, is a prostitute. Indeed, the other woman, who is busily engaged in cooking her a meal, would appear to be one also. During the Progressive Era, it was common for prostitutes to share tenement flats like the one in 3 a.m., as numerous muckraking newspaper articles and tracts on the social evil were beginning to make plain. The reformist zeal for which the period is presently noted may have succeeded in closing down a number of brothels; but the world's “oldest profession” continued to flourish, as journalists were constantly reminding an apprehensive but nevertheless titillated American public. In 1910 prostitutes were more visible than ever. Operating independently out of tenements like the one in 3 a.m., they worked on the streets and out of dance halls, saloons, and cheap restaurants.

Disaster Citizenship

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob A. C. Remes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Family Members ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Emergency Powers ◽  
Social Landscape

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands—the Salem fire of 1914 and the Halifax explosion of 1917—saw working-class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. This book draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions—both formal and informal—that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. It explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as the book shows, these methods—though often quick and effective—remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive “solutions” on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

Politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 114-134
Author(s):  
Paula Baker
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
The Press ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Rapid Industrialization ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Impact

This essay follows political and policy change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by tracking the impact of Reconstruction and rapid industrialization on electoral politics and political development. The early-twentieth-century state developed gradually and unevenly, building on innovations of the 1880s and 1890s and debates that began during Reconstruction. Progressive reform moved in two directions: toward good government and efficiency, a line traceable to liberal Republicanism; and toward the amelioration of class tensions aimed more at curbing the arrogance of the rich than improving the lot of the poor. Policy reflected most of all southern and agricultural preferences, even as the great drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to do with industrial power and vicious labor conflict. This essay explores anomalies concerning the press, race, Progressivism and the South, and liberalism and conservatism.

Roots of Protection: The National Consumers’ League and Progressive Reform

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Labor Laws ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Dynamic Organization

This chapter describes the context in which the Progressive campaign for protective laws arose, assessing reformers' rationales and the oppositions they faced. Passage of the 1893 Illinois law marked the start of the Progressive Era campaign for protective labor laws. Through law, reformers hoped to impose standards on factories and improve the lives of industrial workers. Resistance to laws that affected men—from courts, legislators, unions, and public opinion—made protective laws for women and children imperative; reformers hoped that they would provide precedents for more “general” laws. Thus, single-sex laws became a crucial link in protectionist plans. The campaign for protective laws involved a range of supporters but rested largely on a dynamic organization, the National Consumers' League (NCL), and its determined leader, Florence Kelley (1859–1932), and the small group of activists that shaped its development.

Making the Case for Night Work Legislation in Progressive Era New York, 1911-1915

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Thomas McGuire
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Night Work ◽  
Court Of Appeals ◽  
Freedom Of Contract ◽  
The U.S

In 1907 the New York Court of Appeals considered a bindery company's challenge to a night work law passed by New York's legislature in 1898 and amended in 1903. The statute stated that “no female shall be employed, permitted, or suffered to work in any factory in this state before six o'clock in the morning, or after nine o'clock in the evening of any day.” The outcome of the case was preordained, for New York's highest court was famous for advocating the legal “freedom of contract” principle, which negated state efforts to limit workers' hours. From 1878 through 1904 the Court of Appeals had held that any restriction on laborers' hours was unconstitutional. The only exception, Lochner v. New York, had been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal.

Business, Democracy, and Progressive Reform in the Redevelopment of Baltimore after the Great Fire of 1904

1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Meisner Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Structural Reform ◽  
City Government ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Progressive Reform

The following article reexamines the role of business leaders in the structural reform of American city government during the Progressive Era. In presenting a careful analysis of the fate of redevelopment plans after Baltimore's great 1904 fire, this case study argues against an unsophisticated good guy/bad guy approach to urban and business history. Historians are urged, however, not to abandon attempts to make reasoned moral judgments concerning the consequences of structural reform, but rather to base those efforts on a recognition of the deepening complexity of twentieth-century urban society.

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