Progressives became concerned about long work hours and poor wages damaging the health of factory workers, especially women and children. Reformers like Florence Kelley lobbied for protective legislation. Jacob Riis documented poor living conditions in tenement housing. Muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell exposed corruption and fraud in big business, such as Standard Oil. Theodore Roosevelt, as president, took steps to regulate industry and break up trusts in the interest of public welfare, while also establishing national parks and promoting conservation. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle drew attention to unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry and spurred passage of new food safety laws.

1. Economic Reform Working Conditions Life in the Tenements Trusts Environment Food and Drugs

2. A woman worker in a New England cigar box factory Photo by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1910. Progressives became concerned about: * long hours * poor wages for factory workers, damaging their health, their children. Women like Florence Kelley began to lobby for protective legislation for women and children.

3. Child Labor An immigrant family doing piecework in a dirty, poorly lighted New York City tenement. Hine wrote that " Pauline 6 years old, works after school. Peter, 8 works until 8 p.m. Mike 12 years old, until 10 p.m. Father keeps a rag shop."

6. Lewis Hine Child Labor in America

14. Jacob Riis “How the Other Half Lives”

15. Tenement House Yard

16. Room in a Tenement, 1910

17. Twelve year old boy (who had sworn he was sixteen) pulling threads

18. Knee-pants at forty-five cents a dozen - a Ludlow Street sweat shop

19. Necktie workshop in a Division Street tenement, 1889

20. In a seven-cent lodging-house

21. Lodgers in a crowded tenement - five cents a spot

22. Street Cleaning, Fourth Street

23. Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters

24. Street Arabs in sleeping quarters [areaway, Mulberry Street]

25. Street Arabs in sleeping quarters [a church corner, Mulberry Street

26. Street Arabs in night quarters

27. Beginning in 1902, McClure’s Magazine , under the leadership of its owner Samuel S. McClure, was the most prominent of the Progressive “muckraking” journals. Selling for 10 cents an issue, it reached a wide audience with its vivid accounts of corruption in high places. Ida Tarbell was an editor of McClure’s from 1894 to 1906. McClure’s Magazine “ muckraking” journal

28. Minimum Wage Massachusetts 1912 Oregon 1915 $8.25 / week w/ exceptions for “slow” workers and children Not until 1930’s would this be popular

29. Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944). Ida M. Tarbell Muckraker that combined investigative reporting attacks on privilege . Published a history of the Standard Oil Company

30. Derricks in oil field near Tuft, in California. The advent of the gasoline-powered automobile, creating an increasing demand for oil, and the discovery of new oil fields in the West, led to opportunities for extensive fraud and stock swindles as well as to cut-throat competition and corporate takeover attempts . In the 1890s, Union Oil of California was able to resist takeover bids by Standard Oil, but in 1900 John D. Rockefeller was able to buy out another company in southern California, renaming it Standard Oil of California.

31. The Toll on the Environment

32. Cartoon, economic influence of Standard Oil. This political cartoon, inspired by Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the insidious extent of the political and economic influence of Standard Oil, shows the company as a many-tentacled octupus winding around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, and around a state house, the Capitol, and reaching for the White House. Lithograph in Puck , September 7, 1904.

33. Theodore Roosevelt As president from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt drastically changed American perception of presidents . he simply wanted government to regulate industry to make sure it served a larger public and national interest.

34. This idea came to be called the “New Nationalism.” While “TR” acted to break up certain trusts, he only did this when he thought their power would harm the country.

35. Natural Resources: Theodore Roosevelt - key leader of conservation movement . expanded the nation’s forest preserves established five new national parks John Muir in Yosemite National Park.

36. Like other Progressives, Roosevelt worried about the harm done by unchecked private companies – such as the mining operation shown here. In a 1907 speech he said, “The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.” Roosevelt was not opposed to industrial development. His fear was not that we were using our natural resources, but that we were wasting them, to the detriment of the nation’s power and prestige.

37. Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), an ardent Socialist, used fiction to work for industrial reform. His novel The Jungle (1906) argued passionately for the need to transform production from monopoly ownership to control by the workers, but most readers ignored the Socialist message in their outraged reaction against Sinclair’s brutally graphic depictions of the unsafe practices of the meat packing industry. Sinclair (right) is shown here in May, 1914, picketing the Rockefeller building in New York City.

38. Workers in a Chicago meat packing plant in 1905. When the revelations of unsanitary conditions in the meat packing industry in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) shocked Americans into demanding regulation of the food industry, Roosevelt played a key role in the fashioning of a Pure Food and Drug Act, and a Meat Inspection Act, both in 1906. Reformers had been demanding federal regulation of patent medicines and processed meats for some time. Theodore Roosevelt worked with the largest meat packers to design compromise legislation under which government inspectors were allowed into the packing houses, but meat packers could appeal their decisions in court.

40. Food Contamination