Name: The Progressive Era: Crash Course US History #27（The Progressive Era: Crash Course US History #27）
Uploaded: 2022-06-19T11:44:42.000Z
Duration: 15 min 1 s
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Hi, I'm John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. history, and today we're gonna talk

You know, like these guys who used to want to bomb the means of production, but also

Are we talking about, like, tumblr progressive where it's half discussions of misogyny

Me from the past, your anachronism is showing.

Your Internet was green letters on a black screen.

But no, The Progressive Era was not like tumblr, however I will argue that it did indirectly

make tumblr and therefore JLaw gifsets possible, so that's something.

So some of the solutions that progressives came up with to deal with issues of inequality

and injustice don't seem terribly progressive today, and also it kinda overlapped with the

gilded age, and progressive implies, like, progress, presumably progress toward freedom

and justice, which is hard to argue about an era that involved one of the great restrictions

on freedom in American history, prohibition.

So maybe we shouldn't call it the Progressive Era at all.

Intro So, if the Gilded Age was the period when

American industrial capitalism came into its own, and people like Mark Twain began to criticize

its associated problems, then the Progressive era was the age in which people actually tried

to solve those problems through individual and group action.

As the economy changed, Progressives also had to respond to a rapidly changing political

The population of the U.S. was growing and its economic power was becoming ever more

And sometimes, Progressives responded to this by opening up political participation and

sometimes by trying to restrict the vote.

The thing is, broad participatory democracy doesn't always result in effective government--he

said, sounding like the Chinese national Communist Party.

And that tension between wanting to have government for, of, and by the people and wanting to

have government that's, like, good at governing kind of defined the Progressive era.

But progressives were most concerned with the social problems that revolved around industrial

And most of these problems weren't new by 1900, but some of the responses were.

Companies and, later, corporations had a problem that had been around at least since the 1880s:

they needed to keep costs down and profits high in a competitive market.

And one of the best ways to do this was to keep wages low, hours long, and conditions

appalling: your basic house-elf situation.

Just kidding, house elves didn't get wages.

Also, by the end of the 19th century, people started to feel like these large, monopolistic

industrial combinations, the so-called trusts, were exerting too much power over people's

The 1890s saw federal attempts to deal with these trusts, such as the Sherman Anti-Trust

Act, but overall, the Federal Government wasn't where most progressive changes were made.

For instance, there was muckraking, a form of journalism in which reporters would find

Mass circulation magazines realized they could make money by publishing exposés of industrial

I guess the author of the Mystery Document.

“Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and all

the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one.

Of the butchers and floormen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives,

you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the

base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed

... They would have no nails – they had worn them off pulling hides.”

Well now I am hyper-aware of and grateful for my thumbs.

I am so glad, Stan, that I am not a beef-boner at one of the meat-packing factories written

Oh Stan, I can only imagine how long and hard you've worked to get the phrase “beef-boner”

By the way, just a little bit of trivia: The Jungle was the first book I ever read that

I don't know if it's positive, but there you go.

Anyway, at the time, readers of The Jungle were more outraged by descriptions of rotten

meat than by the treatment of meatpacking workers: The Jungle led to the Pure Food and

Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

That's pretty cool for Upton Sinclair, although my books have also led to some federal legislation,

such as the HAOPT, which officially declared Hazel and Augustus the nation's OTP.

So, to be fair, writers had been describing the harshness of industrial capitalism for

decades, so muckraking wasn't really that new, but the use of photography for documentation

Lewis Hine, for instance, photographed child laborers in factories and mines, bringing

Americans face to face with the more than 2 million children under the age of 15 working

And Hine's photos helped bring about laws that limited child labor.

But even more important than the writing and photographs and magazines when it came to

improving conditions for workers was Twitter … what's that?

Alright, so apparently still without Twitter, workers had to organize into unions to get

corporations to reduce hours and raise their pay.

Also some employers started to realize on their own that one way to mitigate some of

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The Progressive Era: Crash Course US History #27（The Progressive Era: Crash Course US History #27）

progress

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advocate

ability