 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And we get today to talk about the age of reform, the period before and into World War I, although it's arguable that the age of reform continued into the 1930s in the New Deal. But it certainly, while we can quibble about the end of the age of reform and whether the New Deal was a continuation of earlier reform under Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt or was something new. There's no question that the age of reform began with the assassination of William McKinley and the inauguration of Teddy Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, Governor of New York, Vice President of the United States, Ruffrider, Reiter, a human being extraordinaire, became president in 1901 and began a program of reform. I'll spend quotation marks because in the next talk we're going to talk about questions about how much reform was really in this reform. But for here we're going to talk about the sources of reform, of genuine regulation of capital and promotion, protection of labor from the rigors of the marketplace. And Roosevelt began this. You could go down a list of major legislation beginning with the Food and Drug Act of 1906, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. These were sparked by Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, which I see Dan has read. You all should read it sometime if you have a strong stomach. It was said of the jungle that Sinclair wrote it hoping to promote socialism in America and instead he promoted vegetarianism. You read that book and you see discussions of the vats where they would remove the hair and the skin from the animals and sometimes people would fall in those vats. And when they did, well, you got a new ingredient in the sausage. Seriously. The rats that would be ground up into the meat patties, the hair, the bones, these packing houses were appalling and disgusting and that's what people took from the jungle and from that we got the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, which were really good things, at least from my perspective. I think that most Americans would agree. Sinclair's major concern were the other parts of the book that people don't read in high school very much where he talked about the working conditions. And note in what I told you about the guy falling in the vat, immediately it becomes a matter of the quality of the meat. What about the poor guy? American workplaces going into the progressive era had accident rates, mortality rates, I should say. Workplace mortality rates two to three times those of the same industry in Britain and three to four times those of the same industry in Germany. They had very unsafe workplaces. That's part of what Sinclair was talking about. But that's not what came out of the jungle. Now, there's an issue of the origins of the age of reform. The antitrust, the business regulation activities of the age of reform, were occasionally spilled over into workplace regulations to protect workers. Those were pretty limited by comparison with the antitrust activities and the activities of the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System to police the banking system. These activities of the federal government were very prominent and have lasted and all those institutions have remained. By contrast, relatively little was done in labor reform and much of what was done, like the Keating-Ohan bill to ban the sale of products using child labor across state lines, that was overturned by the Supreme Court. There was very little done that lasted in terms of restricting the hours of work because of the Supreme Court in Lochnave, New York and other cases throughout our regulations. They threw out minimum wage laws. Laws to regulate the use of the injunction against labor unions were basically thrown out by the Supreme Court. Laws to prohibit the use of the blacklist were thrown out by the Supreme Court in the name of freedom of contract. That said, there is a debate over the origins of the age of reform and in this lecture we're going to talk about the origins in the labor movement because there was a strong part of the labor movement that pushed for reform measures and reform measures are much more prominent in states with stronger unions. Southern states, while we can argue about how meaningful these reforms were, Southern states didn't have them at all. Southern states didn't have labor date. They didn't have bureaus of labor statistics. They didn't have even the largely meaningless hour regulations. They didn't have workplace safety laws like those in Massachusetts and New York and Wisconsin, states with strong labor movements that were at the forefront of these types of reforms. And to some extent we have a simple model which comes out of the work I did in the article on third-party activity in Massachusetts which is on the reading list, required readings to do it. You start with strong unions. This is the virtuous cycle. You saw strong unions. Strong unions promote higher voter turnout. I showed that in Massachusetts in the 1880s. It's been shown consistently throughout 20th century American political history. Unionized workers are more likely to take part in elections. I show for Massachusetts that unionized workers are also more likely to vote for radical third parties where they get a chance. This is certainly true in Massachusetts in the 1880s with a very strong effect. Unionized workers, high turnout voters, they're the ones who vote socialist or vote in Massachusetts in the elections I'm talking about for the union labor party. When I was younger and people talked about such things, people would tell me that, well, the 30% of the American electorate that doesn't vote, those are the people who vote communist in France. In France, you have 30% vote in communist. It was probably more like 20%, but we'll ignore that. In the United States, those people just don't turn out because there isn't a strong communist party. There's nobody to vote for. My argument would actually be a little different, that those people don't turn out because they don't have a strong union to mobilize workers, to mobilize them to get everybody to go to the polls saying that if you all do it, it's going to have an impact. But where you do, strong unions, high voter turnout, radical voting. Strong unions, there's a direct line here to radical voting. I'll add that line. Radical voting leads to state policy. I show from Massachusetts, and I've shown it for Illinois and New York. You can show it by comparison with the places that don't have strong unions and don't have radical voting. State policy is more favorable to labor and the whole agenda of the age of reform in the progressive era. And that more friendly state policy strengthens unions. This is the virtuous cycle, virtuous if you like unions and you like workplace regulation and higher wages. Notice it goes in the other direction as well. Weak unions, weak, less voter turnout, less radical voting, anti-labor state policy. This is what we see in the South. The South in the United States after 1877 has a gradual erosion of voter turnout as the Ku Klux Klan and other institutions beat up on the blacks. People don't vote. After the 1890s, there's open disfranchisement of blacks and poor whites. You get elections in places like South Carolina in the 1920s where there's fewer 6% of the electorate turning out to vote. These are places with no radical voting. The ruling Democrats with the big D, the segregationists, Dixie Democrats who are now all in the Republican Party, things have switched, it gets very confusing. Because basically the Republicans of the late 19th century are the Democrats of today and the Democrats of today. And the Democrats of then are now the Republicans. Parties have completely inverted. But those anti-labor Democrats didn't have to worry about radicals. They didn't have to worry about people turning out to vote. They just did what they wanted which was to make sure that there were no strong unions in the South. So from the perspective of the labor movement of work of militancy, there's an association of reform activity with the strength of labor, an association that goes in both directions. You see this beautifully in one particular event that captured the imagination in a very bad way of everybody throughout the United States, whether in Oklahoma, in New York, in California, this was the triangle fire of March 25, 1911. Now, some of you may remember exactly where you were on September 11, 2001. I certainly do. And I remember, we didn't have a TV, we didn't have a TV, but I remember seeing on the internet images of people jumping out of those buildings. Well, for New Yorkers, people who grew up in New York like me, that is a particularly resonant image because very nearby the World Trade Center is the building that housed the Triangle Shirt Waste Company in 1911. On the 9th, 10th and 11th floors, they locked the exits. The fire escape broke. A fire swept through those floors. While people were lined up, getting ready to leave, 146 people died, many of them jumping out of the building. The fire department's ladders didn't go up that high. The fire department's hoses took a while to get going. By the time the fire department was in a position to do anything, it was all over. The morgue was filled with bodies of basically 17 to 20-year-old Jewish and Italian women who died, many of them leaping to their deaths, holding hands, hoping that somehow they'd be able to survive. Not a single person who jumped survived. This was a tragedy that shook New York. And it shook the political establishment in New York, Tammany Hall. Because Tammany Hall, the head of Tammany Hall, Charlie Murphy, woke up. He looked out and he saw the crowd at the funerals for those girls. And he saw his political demise. But Tammany Hall was flexible. New York's political leadership, the old Irish guard, they were smart people and they were like, okay, the people are really angry, we've got to do something. Murphy had his chief lieutenants in the state senate and assembly. Robert F. Wagner and Al Smith set up a commission for labor reform. They appointed a Mount Holyoke College graduate, Francis Perkins, to be the secretary of this commission. And they came out with a raft of suggestions for workplace safety for an industrial commission that would regulate hours and that they required sprinkler systems on all workplaces. They required exits, never be locked. They brought out reforms that probably saved thousands of lives. Labor reform coming out of fear of the electoral impact of a mobilized and angry working class. As it is, it didn't totally work. It saved Tammany. Tammany survived well into the 20th century, really breaking up about losing its grip in New York City only in the 1960s, 50 years after the triangle fire. But notice the names that I gave you. Francis Perkins. She became secretary of labor under Franklin Roosevelt, the first woman cabinet secretary. Robert F. Wagner. He went from the New York state senate to the federal senate where he sponsored the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, which established federal support for labor unions in the private sector. Al Smith ran for president as a reformer, as a progressive. A generation of reformers came out of the Triangle Fire Commission with a new pro-labor, urban, liberal agenda. These people were not looking to change capitalism, but they were looking to reform it. Well, next time we'll talk about the historians who wish that we had done more to change capitalism in the progressive era and after. Thank you and have a good day. Bye-bye.