What role did science and expertise play in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era?During the Progressive era many states allowed the sterilization of “unfit” individuals. It was during both the Gilded age and the Progressive era that international expositions took place and helped spread what is known as scientific racism to large groups. These fairs would project forms of white supremacy by showing the differences of “primitive villages” with modern science and technology. The study of eugenics was the method of “improving the human race.” This idea was so popular at the time that it appeared in published writings more than stories about poverty. This theory is interesting when learning about the Progressive Era and Gilded Age because Two of the most noted popularizers of scientific racism were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, who both favored applying scientific knowledge to questions about immigration and race. Grant, a Nordic or Anglo-Saxon racialist who published the widely read The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, was primarily concerned about the “new immigrants” and thought the flood of recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe was pushing the nation toward a racial abyss. Convinced that such a dire result was imminent, Grant argued that America’s preservation required it to exclude all inferior racial and ethnic groups. Stoddard, in contrast, focused his attention on black-white relations and his book The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920) was said to have inspired the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan. The arguments advanced by the eugenicists were used to justify restriction, exclusion, and discrimination. Intellectuals promoted The Progressive Era and Race 179 the idea that the human race could be neatly divided into hereditary types.
Teutonic peoples topped the “civilized” list, and Medi- terranean, Oriental, and African peoples languished at the bottom. In response to the growing concern about the rising number of immigrants, immigration officials in 1907 added the characterization of “physical degeneracy” to the list of reasons that might be used to exclude new immigrants. The intention was to create a stringent medical test that would be administered by medical examiners at Ellis Island and used to exclude anyone deemed to be mentally or physically defective.
The provision suggested just how strongly the theory of innate degeneracy had taken root in society. That same year Congress created the United States Immigration Commission (known as the Dillingham Commission) to study the immigration problem and recommend solutions.
When the com- mission finally issued its report in 1911, it agreed that immigration from southern and eastern Europe did pose a threat to American society and culture, and called for the adoption of a restrictive literacy test to selectively limit the overall number. The Boston- based Immigration Restriction League quickly became the most effective of several lobbies for such a law. Both presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed efforts to impose such a test on newcomers, but in the months before the United States entered World War I, Congress overrode Wilson’s veto and passed the Immigration Act of 1917. The new law prohibited entry into the country for any prospective immigrant who was 16 years or older and could not demonstrate the ability to read in any lan- guage.
The measure served as a precursor to the quota-based leg- islation passed during the 1920s designed to severely restrict the number of southern and eastern Europeans and to exclude Asians entirely. With the outbreak of war, there was a surge in antiforeign senti- ment against “hyphenated Americans.” At the urging of the Amer- ican Psychological Association, the U.S. Army began to administer intelligence tests to new recruits to identify potential officers, match recruits with appropriate jobs, and exclude the mentally deficient.
The tests were heavily slanted in favor of native-born recruits from middle-class backgrounds who had attended high school. With such a built-in cultural bias, it is not surprising that new immigrants and southern blacks recorded the lowest scores. To defenders of the tests who regarded them as measures of innate intelligence, low scores could only serve as proof of inborn men- tal inferiority.
To many Americans who read or heard about the 180 Daily Life in the Progressive Era outcomes, the authority of experts and the U.S. government had been added to the arguments of intellectuals such as Grant and Stoddard to underscore the debasing influence of various ethnic and racial groups. THE ERA OF “JIM CROW” During the Progressive Era, the primary racial divide in the coun- try was white and black.
Most Americans either acquiesced in the entrenchment of Jim Crowism or simply ignored the problem. As a result, segregation, disenfranchisement, economic and educational discrimination, peonage, race-baiting, lynching, and race rioting intensified for African Americans. One scholar has concluded that the Progressive Era, for all its liberal rhetoric and legislative accom- plishments, marked the “nadir” of African American life after emancipation. As historian David W. Southern has noted, however, the “history of African Americans always has two sides. One side relates what whites have thought about and done to blacks..
.The other side traces the aspirations and strivings of blacks to make a life for themselves in a hostile white world.”1 Disenfranchisement The 1890s are historically significant for ushering in the era of Jim Crow (the term derived from the name of a poor, ragged minstrel character) when blacks were legally disenfranchised and segregated in the South. Although the black vote was reduced through intimidation and fear after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, white southerners sought to institutionalize the process during the 1890s. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890 and spreading to all 11 former Confederate states by 1911, white southerners amended their state constitutions to eliminate black voters without totally disenfranchising poor, illiterate white voters as well.
They accomplished this by a series of legal contrivances that included property qualifications, residency requirements, lit- eracy tests, “good character” and “understanding” tests adminis- tered by white voter registrars, and the adoption of the all-white primary. Another very effective method used to prevent hundreds of thousands of black men (and perhaps tens of thousands of white men as well) from casting their ballots was the poll tax. Poll taxes were personal taxes of from $1 to $2 per year, the payment of The Progressive Era and Race 181 which was required for voting.
Anyone wishing to vote was required to pay his poll tax long before the day of the election and to retain his receipt for several months to prove that he had paid his tax. In addition, the potential voter had to show that he had paid taxes for every year since turning 21. Perhaps the most ingenious method of disenfranchisement was the “grandfather clause,” which stated that only citizens whose grandfathers were registered to vote on January 1, 1867, could cast their ballots.
Although such blatantly discriminatory devices as the grandfa- ther clause would be successfully challenged in court, a combina- tion of the other tactics effectively eliminated the black vote in the South. Louisiana was a typical example. Although 130,334 black voters were registered in 1896, after that state altered its consti- tution in 1898, the number of registered black voters dropped to 5,320 in 1900. By 1904 the number of registered black voters was fewer than 1,000. 4) Why did labor become a central issue in the Progressive Era? How did the United States government respond to labor activists? Labor became a central issue in the Progressive EraThe US government responded to labor activists Nonagricultural labor for blacks was equally harsh. Working as blue-collar laborers, fewer than 3 percent of blacks nationally held skilled jobs in 1910. And no matter how skilled a black worker might be, he always received wages that were lower than those of his white counterpart.
With racial discrimination firmly entrenched, white employers offered the lower-paying and more arduous jobs to blacks. In 1910 blacks held 24,647 of the 28,674 jobs in the tur- pentine industry, regarded as the worst type of work available. Turpentine workers labored long hours in hot, humid weather at isolated worksites near insect-infested swamps. Poorly paid, they were forced to spend their hard-earned wages at company stores that charged exorbitant prices. Blacks made up 39.1 percent of the steelworkers in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1907, but they held the unskilled positions that paid the least and had the greatest risk of injury. Blacks comprised about one-half of the workers in the tobacco plants, but they were assigned the unskilled jobs that required haul- ing and stemming leaves by hand.
In the textile industry, blacks were usually excluded from work in southern cotton mills because that work was reserved for poor white workers to prevent them from dropping below blacks on the ladder of economic status. Black women faced even more limited job opportunities than did black men. Approximately 80 to 90 percent of black working women toiled as cooks, maids, and laundresses. They commonly worked a six-day workweek of 10- to 14-hour days for $2 to $3 a week. Although only a small part of the population in northern cit- ies, black women comprised almost 30 percent of those who worked as servants by 1920. The dominant culture stigmatized married women who worked outside their homes during the Progressive Era, yet more than one-third of married black women in New York City were forced to do so in 1910; the comparable figure for mar- ried white women was only 4.2 percent. As an indication that racial discrimination in hiring had no sectional boundaries, more than 60 percent of black men and more than 80 percent of black women worked at menial jobs in northern cities. 5) Describe the situation of Black Americans during the Progressive Era. What strategies did Black leaders and activists adopt in response?
Why? The Progressive era was a time of social activism. This means that it was also a progressive time for black Americans. At the time in Britain, blacks were gaining more rights and Americans learned and adopted a lot of those ideas and polivThe strategies Black leaders and activists adopt in response wereEducation Another problem plaguing African Americans, especially those who lived in the South, was a substandard education. At the beginning of the twentieth century, southern states spent roughly twice as much per capita on white students as they did on black students. In states such as Mississippi and South Carolina, the ratio was 10 to 12 times as much. Even in more moderate southern states such as North Carolina, the black share of educational money declined 190 Daily Life in the Progressive Era between 1900 and 1915. Black students often had only secondhand textbooks that applauded slavery and Jim Crow. Black students also had shorter school terms than did white students. Black urban schools were crowded, and class sizes were larger than those for whites. In many sections of the South, a dilapidated shanty might serve as a school. Black poet and essayist James Weldon Johnson remembered teaching 50 children in a crudely built church in rural Florida without a blackboard or desks. Public education for black children usually stopped at the sixth or seventh grade. Public high schools for blacks in the South were nonexistent.
Regardless of the level of schooling, white school officials emphasized industrial train- ing for black students over a more liberal arts oriented curriculum. Compounding problems for black education was the lack of qualified teachers and the low salaries paid to teachers. Only 20 percent of African American teachers had obtained more than a grammar school education. In 1915 the average monthly salary for elementary school teachers in Georgia was $60.25 for white men and $45.70 for white women. For black male and female elementary school teachers, the comparable figures were $30.14 and $21.69. African American school in Anthoston, Kentucky, where the tobacco harvest has severely reduced the attendance, 1916. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) Some northern philanthropists provided money to black educa- tion. Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, donated liberally to build black schools, subsidizing the construc- tion of 100 black schools in Alabama alone in 1914. The Anna T. Jeans Fund, the Phelps-Stokes Foundation, and numerous north- ern religious denominations also contributed money to black edu- cation. The Rockefeller-backed General Education Board (GEB) spent $58 million between 1902 and 1909 on southern education. Ironically, 90 percent of GEB money went to white education.
The reform-minded administrators of the GEB operated from the assumption that an educated southern white population would be less racist and more willing to accept the accommodationist ideas of black leaders such as Booker T. Washington. In the final analy- sis, the good news–bad news scenario for black education between 1900 and 1920 was that the overall illiteracy rate for southern blacks declined from two-thirds to less than one-half, and literacy rates were far higher for younger blacks. At the same time, however, educational inequality during the Progressive Era increased, and blacks fell even farther behind whites. BLACK LEADERS Thomas T. Fortune Trying to address the many problems confronting African Ameri- cans in their daily lives were a series of exceptional black leaders. One of these was Thomas T. Fortune, editor of the New York Age, who established the National Afro-American League in 1890. In his opening address to nearly 100 delegates representing 23 states at the inaugural meeting of the organization in Chicago, Fortune looked to encourage black resistance to white oppression: “It is time to face the enemy,” he said, “and fight him inch by inch for every right he denies us…. Let this League be a race League.”9 Fortune hoped to spread state and local chapters of his militant league throughout the South, where they would be encouraged “in their efforts to break down color bars, and in obtaining for the Afro-American an equal chance with others in the avocations of life [and]…in securing the full privileges of citizenship.”10 He also advanced a number of strat- egies to improve black life that included self-help and the promo- tion of education.
The Afro-American League supported civil rights and black voting, denounced segregation laws and the exclusion of blacks from public places, and condemned the convict lease system and lynching. Fortune favored peaceful methods to achieve his ends, 192 Daily Life in the Progressive Era but he warned whites that if they continued to use violence, blacks would respond. “[I]f others use the weapons of violence to combat our peaceful arguments,” he said, “it is not for us to run away from violence. A man’s a man, and what is worth having is worth fight- ing for.”11 But for all its noble objectives, trying to establish a militant black organization in the South just as Jim Crow began to intensify was doomed to failure.
The Afro-American League continued until the mid-1890s but was unable to make any progress. Booker T. Washington In 1895 another black leader, Booker T. Washington, delivered a famous speech at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, in which he laid out a different program for black advancement. Wash- ington was a former slave who had risen by hard work to become head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee stressed black self-reliance and self-discipline and emphasized the teaching of vocational skills that would enable blacks to become economically independent. From that perspective, Washington used his speech, known as the Atlanta Compromise, to prescribe his program for interracial cooperation in the South. He encouraged blacks to be willing to start at the bottom, learn industrial skills, commit them- selves to hard work, and focus on economic advancement. Seek- ing conciliation rather than confrontation, Washington also asked blacks to tacitly accept segregation and disenfranchisement and to defer demands for social and political equality. “In all things that are purely social,” he said, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” It was best, he thought, not to make defiant demands. “The wisest among my race understand,” he stated, “that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoy- ment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”12 If southern whites would recognize the economic potential of trust- ing blacks and would enable black opportunity (provide jobs), they would be repaid for their efforts with greater economic prosper- ity and racial harmony.
Over time, African American advancement in education (vocationally emphasized) and their contributions to southern economic growth would win white support for broadened civil rights. Washington’s program, seen in the context of worsen- ing race relations, had appeal. The speech was warmly received by both white and black audiences and by those who read it when Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute and proponent of interracial cooperation. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) it was widely reprinted in the press. Washington seemed to offer practical solutions to the problems of everyday life. W. E. B. Du Bois In 1903 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the most prominent black intellectual of his era, published The Souls of Black Folk, in which he challenged the accommodationist ideology of Washington. In his mind Washington conceded too much, practically accepting “the alleged inferiority of the Negro races,” and withdrew “many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens.” Blacks, argued Du Bois, needed their constitutional rights, includ- ing the right to vote and to have access to higher education for tal- ented members of the race. In his criticism, Du Bois raised a most important question: “Is it possible, and probable, that nine mil- lions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre [sic] chance for developing their exceptional men?
If history and reason give any distinct answer to these ques- tions, it is an emphatic No.”13 Du Bois believed that Washington’s economic-centered program would result in the creation of a cheap, submissive supply of labor for an industrializing South and result in further exploitation rather than economic progress for blacks. He further believed that racial advancement for blacks was the responsibility of the black elite, who he called the Talented Tenth. “Work alone,” he argued, “will not do it unless inspired by the right ide- als and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among people.”14 They would gain the respect of white society, serve as role models for other blacks, and raise the race. To give organizational stature to his ideas,
Du Bois issued a call for black leaders to organize a campaign for black equality. Fifty- nine men signed the call, and 29 of them ultimately convened in Niagara, Canada, (a major terminus on the Underground Rail- road) on July 11, 1905, to rekindle a militant abolitionist movement and demand full citizenship for black Americans. What grew out of that meeting (held on the Canadian side of the border because no American hotel would grant them accommodations) was the Niagara Movement. In a tone that reminded one of Fortune’s mili- tant stance 15 years before, the declaration of principles adopted by the delegates included calls for restoring to blacks the right to vote, ending segregation, and enacting complete equality in economic opportunity and education.
At the second annual meeting of the organization held at Harper’s Ferry (the site of John Brown’s mar- tyrdom), Du Bois expanded his demands to include social equality. In his address to the country, given on the final day of the confer- ence, Du Bois reinforced his commitment to an ideal. “We claim for ourselves,” he stated, “every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get those rights we will never cease to protest and to assail the ears of America.”15 Although the Niagara Movement continued to meet for two more years and eventually grew to 400 members, internal disagree- ments, insufficient funding, the lack of an official publication for publicity, and attacks from those who supported Washington pre- vented it from becoming an effective civil rights organization.
Requirements: 300 words each questions
