Many of their ranks included socialists, often fresh European immigrants disillusioned that America wasn't necessarily the starry-eyed land of dreams they thought it would be, and they were inspired by imperial Germany's implementation of a welfare state. Other reforms were being undertaken in distant Australia and New Zealand. Women also played a major part in the progressive movement, spearheading offensives against unsafe working environments, unsafe food, and child labor.

Starting in about 1902, a cluster of magazines began exposing the evils of Big Business, including McClure's, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, and Everybody's. They vied for readership by running the most scandalous accounts of mines, factories, and slums, and President Roosevelt criticized them as "muckrackers", feeling they went too far and were more in the business of selling sensationalism than accurate reporting. However, the magazines continued to prosper and some of their stories became the subject matter of best-selling books. Lincoln Steffens authored a series of slashing articles in McClure's about the corruption of city governments and in the same magazine Ida Tarbell, a pioneering woman journalist, wrote a series of exposes on Standard Oil, which had ruined her father's business interests.

Knowing they could be sued for libel, the muckraking magazines were extremely careful to fact-check all stories before running them, sometimes paying up to $3,000 to verify a single story. They criticized the insurance industry, tariff lobbies, the beef trust, the money trust, the railroads, and the corrupt accumulation of wealth. Thomas Lawson, an erratic speculator who had made $50 million on the stock market, exposed his colleagues' practices in "Frenzied Finance" in Everybody's in 1905-06. The exposes cost Lawson most of his wealthy friends and he died in poverty. In Cosmopolitan, David Phillips charged 75 of the 90 US Senators with not representing the people at all, but the money interests. He continued his offensives through slashing novels and was finally shot dead in 1911 by an angry young man whose family he had supposedly maligned.

Other social evils exposed included prostitution, slums, and unsafe workplace conditions. Ray Stannard Baker's "The Color Line" (1908) highlighted the poverty and subjugation of African-Americans, who still lived mostly in the South and had a nearly 40% illiteracy rate. The evils of child labor were exposed by John Spargo's "The Bitter Cry of the Children" (1906). Vendors of strong medicines, often laced with alcohol, were also criticized. The muckrakers were long on emotional appeals, short on actual solutions. Their aim was mainly to arouse public fury and Roosevelt criticized them in a 1906 speech when he complained of those who found fault with society but offered no corrective ideas for it.

Progressives also favored reforms to the political system such as direct political action committees instead of relying on bought-and-sold legislators to pass reforms, for referendums, allowing recalls of inept or corrupt officials, and combating graft. Several states passed laws against corruption practices including caps on how much money could be spent in an election campaign. They also forbade large gifts from corporations. The secret ballot was also coming into effect; if one's voting was kept anonymous, it reduced the likelihood of bribery or voter intimidation.

One of the favorite ideas of progressives was direct election of Senators, who had an alarming number of millionaires in their ranks by 1900. However, this would require a constitutional amendment to enact and the Senate had no interest in sawing off the branch they were sitting on (a previous attempt in 1895 had passed the House only for the Senate to immediately shoot it down), but the Constitution allowed an alternative process whereby the states could amend it with a simple 2/3rds vote instead of the normal procedure of going through Congress and approval of 3/4th of the states. State legislatures began voting to amend the Constitution for direct election of Senators and by 1913 enough had done so that they were getting dangerously close to the 2/3rds minimum. Sensing the inevitable, Congress bowed the knee and passed the 17th Amendment, although the change to direct election of Senators did not necessarily bring about the improvement in honesty and competence that had been hoped for.

Theodore Roosevelt endured one of his toughest tests as president during the great coal miners' strike of 1902. Some 140,000 Pennsylvania miners, many fresh-off-the-boat immigrants who could only speak broken English, had long been subjected to harsh and brutal working conditions. The miners demanded a 20% raise and their workday shortened by an hour. Mine owners felt that this had all been seen before--in previous labor strikes, the government had been called in to suppress the strikers and the public was mostly unsympathetic to them. They would not budge and one of their numbers, multimillionaire George Baer, said "Workers should not be cared for by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country." Closed minds meant closed mines.

File: The coal strike that defi(...).jpg (384 KB, 1600x1319)

384 KB JPG

The situation was not good. The strike had begun on May 12 and was still ongoing as the fall months began. A national disaster was shaping up if it continued into the winter and there was no coal to heat buildings with. Rather than sic the Army on striking workers as previous presidents had done, Roosevelt hoped for a negotiated settlement. He summoned the mine workers' representatives and the owners to the White House for a conference. Roosevelt was appalled by "the extraordinary stupidity and bad temper of the wooden-headed gentry who controlled the mines." He said that he would have liked to simply grab them by the seat of their pants and hurl them out the window. Roosevelt at last threatened to send the Army in and nationalize the coal mines if a solution couldn't be worked out. The mine owners, used to assuming the White House would point bayonets at striking workers rather than them, were shocked and finally gave in. They agreed to a 10% pay raise and a nine hour workday, but they still wouldn't recognize the miners' union. The episode spurred TR to launch the Department of Commerce and Labor the following year (split into separate departments in 1913).

File: Standard_oil_octopus_loc_color.jpg (512 KB, 1920x1171)

512 KB JPG

They skimp over this period in high schools to avoid students drawing comparisons with our own times btw.
Still, seeing the state of our country today it's clear the progressives of those times didn't go far enough.

>>18553996
say you what? school textbooks used to always cover this era in detail back when organized labor was a lot bigger political force. that changed as the focus shifted to slavery/segregation/Indian removal guilt.

>>18553979
I read through it and was completely blown away by how much lies,deception, wishful thinking, and corruption that progressives went to just to try to ruin the country because of their fear of the people. Then I realized your thread was actually believing it all. Nvm.
Trump is a good president. He shows that as he has many businesses and corporations himself that he can be government in a sort of grandfatherly way like the founding fathers did when they started it. So progressives are just democrats with fears and aren’t really helping. They are looking at lies and promoting them to promote their lifestyle of lies. Instead of thanking God for what they still have left, they turn to thanking the gods of lies for rebellion.

It reminds me of two stories in the Bible. The one of Moses who returned back to his true God after following the Egyptian gods, and Pharoah, who returned back to his self as god after being blessed from following the true God of Abraham for 400 years.

Another one is the story of Ruth versus the story of Orpa. Ruth was a worshiper of false gods and she followed Naomi back to marry Boaz and believe in the God and savior of the Jews. Whereas in the story of Orpa, she returned back to those false gods. It is said that her descendants became Goliath and his brothers. So it became a negative legacy.

Which tells me that democrats create monsters like Puck man there, and then go “if you just listen to us, we’ll prevent this from happening!” But it was you who made it happen, you need to return back to God, not the other way around.

>>18553979
>the Constitution was outdated and meaningless
>but they had no problem with using spurious readings of the Constitution especially of the commerce and general welfare clauses to justify regulating this and that

>>18553993
see today he could just threaten to replace the mining executives with AI and have that run the mines instead

>>18553985
The FDA was one of the most profoundly useless things ever conceived.

>implications that meatpacking plants are not still absolute biohazard zones that get inspected once every few years and the factory foremen just have the place scrubbed down with bleach before the inspectors show up
>implications about drugs being any safer, all you do is basically pay a tax to the FDA disguised as a certification fee and Pfizer gets to sell their pill that will chew up up your liver and kidneys

a lot of the progressives were old money families descended from the colonial/early republic elite class (most famously the Roosevelts) who had been since overtaken by the industrial tycoons and were resentful about it

>>18554046
Upton Sinclair was unhappy with the Pure Food and Drug Act because he said he wasn't calling for regulation of the meatpacking industry but for the meatpacking workers to rise in revolt against the plant owners.

>>18553987
>The secret ballot was also coming into effect; if one's voting was kept anonymous, it reduced the likelihood of bribery or voter intimidation.

It used to be that states didn't print ballots, they were printed by newspapers who endorsed a particular candidate and all voting was public, the papers would list who voted for who.

>>18554080
meds

>Some of the states were willing to take steps to regulate big capital, in particular the railroad octopus, and especially in Illinois the legislature and courts were disposed to recognize the idea of regulating business for the public good. The railroads with their expensive lawyers fought back and could appeal to well-fed and staunchly conservative judges in their pockets, who would rule that since railroads were engaged in interstate commerce, the states could not regulate them, only Congress.

>Congress took up the bet and in 1887 President Cleveland signed into law the act creating the Interstate Commerce Commission. This proved beneficial to the railroads in the end as it gave them a forum to resolve disputes in a business-like setting instead of engaging in piratical actions against one another, and it proved fairer and more reasonable than the pitchfork mob laws often enacted by state legislatures.

>>18554113
this is still true btw, everyone knows you can't win a lawsuit against Disney in California where all judges are owned by them. instead file a lawsuit in Kentucky or something where they have no assets and the local hee-haw judges are more likely to side with you.

>>18554076
South Carolina did not implement the secret ballot until 1952.

>>18553989
>the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country

calvinists
not even once
didn't even need to look it up either

>>18554479
Catholics and Jews were heavily active in the progressive movements of that time while many Protestant churches were conservative and firmly wed to the status quo, especially the Episcopalian Church, which included John Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan as members and was widely referred to as "the Republican Party at prayer."

it's impossible to have a discussion about the Gilded Age that doesn't devolve into leftists screaming REEE RICH PEOPLE!!!

>>18554491
Yeah.

Here's the thing about the Catholics though.
They were staunch labor advocates, but actually counter-revolutionary by policy.

You had some outliers, like Dorothy Day.
But she, for all her good points, was an actual useful idiot for the Marxists very often.
As in, Castro supporter, Garibaldi fan girl (it's very ironic she didn't recognize that the state stomping on the liberties of the church and temporal independence of the clergy was actually a critical problem with deep historical implications), literally sided with the Spanish Republicans who raped and martyred nuns and priests en masse. I'm sure there are other things too.

Though her publication was very popular at the start, it dropped off dramatically after she went full retard and church authorities actually told her not to identify her publication with the church by name anymore.

Basically, her core distributism was influenced primarily by her mentor Maurin.
After they parted ways, she lost track of important things without his guidance and ended up glazing the modernist enemy of faith too often.
She, like many during that time, never really knew the true extent of communist atrocities in Europe and Asia.

In that, and concerning the masonic question, she should have taken a page from the notes of St Max Kolbe. The same Max Kolbe, who personally saw the same Italian Masons who Garibaldi enabled unfurl a satanic banner outside the gates of the Vatican.
Considering her strong anti-nuclear stance, it's curious to me how she seemingly never mentioned the man. I sure can't find and mention of him in her works.
Especially when the monastery he founded provided crucial shelter for survivors from fallout after the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
She cared so much about the atomic bombings in Japan, but did she ever visit the church there? It was the largest cathedral in east Asia before the bombing. Maybe if she had, she would have heard of him.

>>18554031
Outdated doesn't equal rejecting all of it

>>18553979
>The progressive movement held that
No, reality had profoundly demonstrated your following clause. Progressives merely created public policy based on reality rather than appealing to emotion about some mythical past in order to enrich malevolent moneyed interests in the present.
>>18554025
No amount of shucking and jiving for massa Trump will make you a billionaire, retardo. I mean of course this is ragebait but just want to make reality clear for any idiots lurking

File: The-Trial-of-the-Boot-and(...).jpg (23 KB, 531x450)

23 KB JPG

>>18554701
>based on reality rather than appealing to emotion about some mythical past
that was exactly what they did do though?

>vgh Thomas Jefferson's America when every farmer was an independent homesteader and companies were little shop operations where the owner was on a first-name basis with his employees
that obviously ignored how striking was illegal in most jurisdictions and working conditions were generally shitty and awful

>>18553996
Well yeah, if they show that people actually went after megacorps and passed policy that was capable of gimping then they would know reform is possible and marxism was just something midwits fell for.

>>18554706
the Gilded Age had a great deal of nostalgia for the First Party System era, no doubt helped along by how most people who remembered it firsthand were dead and there were only some elderly folks who were children back then and didn't have to deal with adult concerns. the good old days when men were strong and free and politicians stood for something more than lining their pockets with corporate donations.

>>18553979
Old school progressivism was based. Too bad it became gay as fuck today.

>>18554792
so exactly like 50s nostalgia today. the people who were adults then are mostly dead and there's just boomers who were 6 years old and didn't have to worry about living costs or the job market.

>>18554794
By the 60s there was nothing left to fight for, child labor was gone and there were social safety nets and organized labor was a mainstream part of American society. liberals of the day had nothing to do except fight for the right to get high and have gay butt secks.

>>18554792
People were disillusioned that the Civil War didn't lead to a resurgence in American idealism. Rather the mentality was "Hey, I got shot at for my country I deserve to get rich by any means necessary."

it was also true that corporations to an extent welcomed some regulations as it made it cleaner and easier to do business with a proper legal framework instead of paying saboteurs to wreck your competitor's railroad tracks and the other fucked-up shit that went on before the ICC was created.

>>18554792
and the Second Party System too, there developed a cult around guys like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster as a lost past of idealistic, forward thinking political minds that didn't exist anymore

>>18554804
Crazy how corporations co-opted genuine struggles for civil rights for marginalized communities to roll us right back to the Gilded Age but with a thin veneer of pretending to care about the rights of women, black, and gay people

>The South did not benefit from the explosive growth of the late 19th century. Devastated by the Civil War, the region was left in a quagmire of rural backwardness and Southerners increasingly reduced to the peonage of the sharecropping system. Any investment money had to come from the North, and those who controlled the purse strings were content to keep the Southern states as a source of raw materials for their factories. By 1900, the South still produced a smaller percentage of the nation's manufactured wares than it had in 1860.

>Attempts to stimulate industry only met with modest success--local iron and coal deposits allowed the development of Birmingham, Alabama's steel mills and tax incentives and cheap labor moved a lot of the textile industry out of New England to the South. The Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady, urging his compatriots to beat the North at their own game, wrote in 1889, "A Confederate army veteran died and was buried in a Yankee-made suit and Yankee-made shoes, in a Yankee-made coffin in a hole dug with a Yankee-made shovel. The only things the South furnished were the hole and the corpse."

>>18554502
>right wing is when you worship rich people

>>18554502
>OMG guys, why are you talking about WWII when discussing the 40s? Other things happened during that time you know

>>18554025
Actual craftsmanship quality bait, this reads exactly like how Baby Boomers I know from my hometown in rural Nebraska write.

>>18554046
Niggas will unironically type this out then take a vacation to Europe and wonder why the food there tastes better and the people are less fat

>>18554943
'cause they don't have government-subsidized corn and basedbeans lol

>>18554025
Actual bootlicking.

>>18554835
The South was uninhabitable before air conditioning and modern medicine to treat the assorted nasty diseases and parasites there.

>>18555444
Yet it was literally inhabited long before that. Retard.