History of the United States II / Unit 6 USH2 0791 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Who Progressivism Was For
The idea
Whether Progressivism was a broad democratic reform or middle-class management of a population it distrusted is a question the anchor answers with both halves in a single sentence. Most Progressives, it says, sought to perfect democracy by expanding the vote to worthy citizens while restricting those considered unfit on account of health, education, or race. The democratic half is real: senators elected by the people, women's suffrage, safety and child labour laws, and Addams's campaigns, which Digital History says included legal protections for immigrants. So is the restrictive half. Digital History says the era saw disfranchisement and segregation spread in the South and even in the federal government, and reforms such as at-large voting that lessened immigrants' political influence. The Yawp says southern Democrats presented disfranchisement and segregation as progressive reforms, and that some suffragists argued White women's votes would maintain White supremacy.
In practice
One reform era producing both the Nineteenth Amendment and segregated federal offices.
Where people slip
Two misreadings sit on either side. The first celebrates Progressivism as democracy's widening and forgets who was excluded by design. The second dismisses it as elite control and forgets the fire codes, the child labour laws and the vote for women. The anchor itself notes that the muckrakers wrote mostly for a White, middle-class, native-born audience, and Digital History records critics who called Progressives moralistic, undemocratic and elitist. The debate between Washington and Du Bois in this unit was conducted under that exclusion. Hold both halves: the same movement widened democracy for some Americans and narrowed it for others, and the question of who counts as a worthy citizen is one the rest of this course keeps asking.
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