History of the United States II / Unit 6 USH2 0765 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Mainstream and Radical
The idea
Florence Kelley and Big Bill Haywood both belong to the Progressive Era, and they are often filed together, but they were not the same movement. Kelley worked through the National Consumers League and state legislatures for safety laws, an eight-hour day and limits on child labour, reforming the industrial system from within. Haywood's Industrial Workers of the World sought to replace the system through direct action and the general strike. One wanted better terms from industrial capitalism; the other wanted to end it.
In practice
A reformer testifying for a factory safety bill, beside an organiser calling a mill town out on strike.
Where people slip
The confusion to avoid is treating every critic of industry in these years as one Progressive movement. Ask what each wanted to do with the system: repair it or abolish it. The anchor says the government met the Wobblies with arrests, tar-and-featherings, shootings and lynchings, a response the mainstream reformers never faced.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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