Era (1890S-1920s) Coincided With the Republican Government Essay

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Era (1890s-1920s) coincided with the Republican government that followed the defeat of William Jennings Bryan and the gold standard and culminated in the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the Great Depression. Like all progressive movements, any progress that was made was in a direction favorable to a small majority -- in this case Wall Street and the WASP elite, who during this era kicked off a eugenics campaign against "undesirables" such as foreign (Catholic) immigrants and African-Americans. Other causes of the Progressive Era were prohibition and women's suffrage. This paper will analyze the effect of the Progressive Era on society and government.

The Progressive Era essentially started with the watershed year in which the Democratic Party split and McKinley gained the White House. A new age of politicking was ushered in with McKinley's campaign fund raising tactics, led by Mark Hanna, who saw a flood of corporate dollars lift McKinley into the White House through the back door (of what some historians would later call a rigged election).

Meanwhile Temperance societies and muckrakers were busy trying to end the evils of the day. Upton Sinclair's infamous depiction of the meat-packing industry in The Jungle brought forth government crack-downs and new regulation in the form of the Food and Drug Administration. Yet, oddly enough, the progressives ironically ushered in some new evils of their own such as the income tax (of the Sixteenth Amendment), mass production (ala Henry Ford), and the age of bootlegging. While many progressives professed to be "for the family," it seemed, rather, that family life and capitalism and industrialization were diametrically opposed to one another.

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Various WASP elitist foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, sponsored programs that would transform the face of society for the next century: their "philanthropic" enterprises would see the rise of the American Birth Control Movement as well as the end of the local family doctor in what had been his traditional role in the past (the new doctors of tomorrow would be churned out like Henry Ford's automobiles, products of the "best schools" in the nation, and subjects to the pharmaceutical industry, their feudal overlords) (Friedman, McGarvie, 2003, p. 232). Now, thanks to the Carnegies and Rockefellers, the nation no longer had to suffer the traditional ways of living of its forefathers: the era of new and improved was on the horizon, and people like Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Dwight Jones, head of the American Birth Control League in 1930, were at the forefront of the movement of sexual liberation and (ironically) preservation of the white race -- as Eleanor Dwight Jones said herself:

We…are concentrating on the practical work of making it possible for the lower social classes to practice birth control. For the good of the race, people of poor stock -- incompetent and sickly -- should have few or no children, and fortunately they want few or no children. In this matter private interest is in accord….....

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