Progressivism and Reform
These movements, active from around 1900 through 1920, focused on reform in three big buckets: stability, democracy, and morality. Stability might involve laws around environmental protection or immigration. Democracy could involve efforts to create the right of recall or referendums, as well as the women’s suffrage movement. Movements and reforms grounded in morality included efforts to end child labor/create legislation limiting child labor and the movement against saloons or for Prohibition.
Progressivism/Progressive movements
This man was U.S. President from 1913-1921, meaning that he was President when the U.S. entered World War I. He initially kept the U.S. out of the war after the Lusitania incident in 1915 but supported entrance into the war in 1917. He also played a key role in peace negotiations after the war, in 1918 and 1919.
Woodrow Wilson
Many Americans used this notion to characterize the 1920s and it described a return to a period of American life ‘before’ war, sharp racial and ethnic tensions that exploded into violence, and economic uncertainty. Warren G. Harding campaigned on this idea during his successful 1920 run to the Presidency.
Normalcy
He was the thirty-second U.S. President, in office from 1933 until his death in 1945. The early part of his presidency, across much of the 1930s, was focused on fighting against the Great Depression. His many policies helped ameliorate the Depression for many Americans and provided millions of Americans with jobs.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
An 1896 Supreme Court ruling that legalized "separate but equal" public accommodations for black and white Americans. In actuality, the accommodations for black Americans were virtually always substandard or deficient. This ruling made racial segregation the law of the land and set the stage for the expansion of Jim Crow.
Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
He was the 26th President of the United States. Before being President, he was a politician and police commissioner in New York and the assistant secretary of the Navy. He also participated in the Spanish-American War, where the U.S. took control over Spanish territories such as Cuba and Puerto Rico. He was one of the most important advocates of Progressivism in the first decade of the twentieth century, which was evident in his work busting trusts (breaking up monopolies), among other policies of his.
Theodore Roosevelt
On May 7, 1915, a German U-Boat fired a missile that sank a civilian British boat. Over a thousand people died, including 128 Americans. The German Kaiser showed little remorse. But the U.S. did not go to war in response that year. The sitting U.S. President pressured the Germans to do something about the civilian deaths, leading to the Sussex Pledge (which they reneged in 1917).
Lusitania incident
This was a cheap and durable car that Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford, started building in 1912. It was produced through mass production and the assembly line. It was significant because it massively expanded the accessibility and usage of automobiles in America, helping to transform the American economy and American infrastructure in the process.
Model T
This is the name given to a group of economic, political, and social reform legislation and programs enacted during the first two terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, but especially from 1933-1936. These programs are often divided into two phases, with the first including the reforms passed in 1933 and 1934, and the second including those passed and instituted in 1935 and 1936. These programs gave millions of Americans jobs and, for many of them, restored their faith in the economy and American institutions.
New Deal
A black political organization founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Du Bois and other political activists and social reformers. This organization fought against racial discrimination, segregation and lynching in the South and was one of the most militant and important black political organization of the early twentieth century.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
This was a piece of legislation passed in 1919 that was meant to help enforce the 18th amendment and prohibit and regulate the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Members of the Anti-Saloon League, which was founded in 1893, pushed heavily for the legislation. It was an example of progressive movements' emphasis on 'morality.'
Volstead Act
This was a January 1917 telegram that was sent from the German foreign minister to Mexico asking Mexico to participate with Germany in joining World War I and attacking the U.S. If they won with the Germans, the Germans promised to help them get back territories they had lost to the U.S. in the previous century. The allies intercepted the telegram, which demonstrated to many Americans the danger the U.S. was in. It helped push the U.S. to enter the war three months later, in April 1917.
Zimmerman Notes
This man was the third American President elected during the 1920s. Heading into office, this President promised prosperity and even suggested that the U.S. was close to solving and eliminating poverty once and for all. His Presidency would be defined by the Great Depression, which he utterly failed to address and barely tried to solve before being voted out of office in 1932.
Herbert Hoover
This was a Depression-era federal jobs program, headed by Harry Hopkins. It was created in 1935 as part of the Second New Deal. This program or agency often gave people jobs based on their talents. One example of this was the Federal Writers’ Project, which recruited writers to write about the U.S. Teachers were hired through this program in schools and to teach immigrants English. The Federal Theatre Project was another important part of this program. Furthermore, in the Historical Records Survey project of this program, (predominantly white) people were hired to interview formerly enslaved black Americans who were still alive at the time of the Depression.
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
This 1915 film, directed by D.W. Griffith, portrayed Reconstruction as a period of 'black rule' over southern white people and depicted the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as the saviors of the South after the Civil War. It was significant because it revived the KKK in the 1910s and 1920s.
Birth of a Nation (1915)
This woman was a Progressive era reformer, writer, and political activist. While she was involved in a number of causes, she is most well-known for founding the Hull House in Chicago’s poorer West Side, a settlement house meant where middle-class women sought to share knowledge and aid with lower-income women. She also fought against child labor in the 1900s and 1910s, was involved in the women’s suffrage movement, and, as a pacifist, openly opposed the U.S. entering World War I.
Jane Addams
This law, passed in 1918, extended aspects of the Espionage Act. It sought to punish the expression of views of opinions that portrayed the U.S. or its military in a negative light. Passed during World War I, it was used to punish people who spoke out against the U.S. involvement in World War I and political radicals in general. A. Mitchell Palmer, then Attorney General, sought to extend this law to peacetime and infamously led the “Palmer Raids” against a swath of foreign-born political radicals in 1919 and 1920. The act was repealed in 1920.
Sedition Act
This trial, which was also known as the “Monkey trial,” took place in Tennessee in 1925 and concerned the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial was meant to challenge the Butler Act of 1925, a state law in Tennessee that prohibited teaching evolution in schools. A schoolteacher, in an effort to challenge the law, agreed to claim he taught evolution. The case was meant to establish a legal precedent and demonstrated the power of Christian fundamentalism in 1920s America.
Scopes Trial
He was a Louisiana politician during the 1930s. He was governor of Louisiana and a senator from Louisiana. Known as the ‘kingfish,’ he knew how to rouse the people and helped erect plenty of infrastructure as governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932. He, in some ways a left-wing populist, was critical of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he saw as not doing enough for poor and working people. But he was also was quite merciless to his political opponents, especially as LA governor. His 1933 Share the Wealth plan, which sought to redistribute wealth and help end the Depression, was popular among millions of Americans across the country. Some historians argue that this plan pushed the second wave of the New Deal further left. Seen as dangerous and a potential dictator by many on the national political stage, he was assassinated in 1935. Historians have long seen him as a contradictory figure.
Huey Long
This organization was a radical labor union founded in 1905 that practiced general unionism, working to unionize all workers regardless of their skill level, race, gender, immigration status, etc. They were also one of the few interracial unions of the early twentieth century and considered 'dangerous' and 'subversive' by big business and the government.
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
This was a federal government agency created in the summer of 1917 that worked to effectively organize industrial production to benefit the American war effort during World War I. It was an example of Progressive era politics during the War, as it involved significant government involvement in industrial production and cooperation between the government and big business.
War Industries Board (WIB)
This was a new, international or supranational organization founded in the wake of World War I. Partially the idea of Woodrow Wilson, it was founded in 1920 and supposed to promote peace and international ‘security.’ The U.S. never joined the organization because of opposition to participation in the U.S. Congress. The organization, meanwhile, was grounded in a notion of self-determination that served empire and contained its own racial hierarchies. For example, Liberia and Ethiopia were unequally integrated into the organization in the 1920s under the guise that they were unable to ‘successfully’ govern or rule themselves.
League of Nations
This man was the Secretary of the Treasury and the third-richest man in America during the 1920s. He was the Secretary of the Treasury under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover during the decade. He thought that bringing prosperity required constantly cutting taxes, deregulation, and a high tariff on imports.
Andrew Mellon
This program paid many landowners who were farmers to not grow corn, wheat, or other crops. They paid them to keep these crops out of the market in order to help crop prices go back up. This helped prices to go back up, putting more money in the pockets of farmers. It was created in 1933 as a part of Roosevelt's early Depression-era reforms.
Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)
A clause or stipulation that was put into a deed for a property, especially during the early-to-mid 1900s, that prevents black or other non-white people from living on that property. These clauses demonstrated white people's racist anxieties about living near black people, helped to solidify the segregation of housing, and locked black people out of high-value housing markets in a way that helped sustain and expand the racial wealth gap.
Restrictive covenants