 Hi, in this lecture we're going to look at a period known as the Progressive Era. Roughly this was about 1890 to about 1920. Who were the progressives? What were they trying to accomplish? And what did they actually do? Those are the three points we're going to look at in this lecture about the Progressive Era at home and abroad. What was progressivism? It's very difficult to say because in general we know that progressivism, as I've stated here, is a response to changes in society and the United States growing world power position. So the world was changing at the turn of the 20th century. From the 1890s to the 1900s, things had changed tremendously. You have immigration that is coming in from the 1870s onward that is going to change politics in the northeast and in the south. You also have people moving out west, and that's going to change politics. Foreign affairs, we are annexing various parts. We're intervening in places like Hawaii, in Samoa, in the Philippines. We have the Spanish-American War. And we have changes within society with the immigrants coming in. And we have concerns about the growth of cities. We have inequality. And how are we going to deal with that as a country? And of course, economic inequality. So both domestic and foreign affairs strive to become modern. We try to look at them from the 19th century to the 20th century. And we try to see how America is changing during that time period. So who were the progressives? Well, pretty much everyone. It's hard to say who was and who wasn't a progressive because it was such a pervasive term. You have professionals. You have educators. You have doctors. You have lawyers. You have social workers. You also have people in health. You have people in family services. You have mental health professionals. So everybody in many different areas were looking at being progressive, at changing with the times as they saw the modern era come into being. And so it was the rise of professional organizations. So the first time the American Medical Association gets organized and forms. The American Historical Association, American Psychological Association. You have all of these organizations that are forming to bring together college educated professionals in order to change and modernize their professions. So in short, a lot of people call themselves progressive. And I say that progressivism was a Hamiltonian means to a Jeffersonian and we have to look and see what these two term means. Now this is going back to United States history before 1877. So Alexander Hamilton wanted a strong central government. He wanted a strong Washington based government that could direct. Jefferson wanted more power in the hands of the average people. So he was more enamored with the rural life and many rural people saw him as their leader. So you have Hamiltonian means, strong central government to achieve equality, to achieve wholesomeness in many cases, to achieve rural concerns for the average everyday people. That's kind of what I mean by progressivism. And so you see two types of progressives and actually there's more than this. But there are urban progressives. These are middle class WASPs. I say WASPs. What does that mean? Well, white, Anglo, Saxon, Protestant is what the term means. So these are middle class English, very Anglo and Protestant religiously based people who are seeking to change their environment. But that they mean their government, their political organizations, their local county government. They believed in progress and in morality in urban areas. And so they're looking for a strong government reaction. On the other hand, you have rural progressives who are very similar in many respects. Now they too believe in progress and morality, predominantly WASP in orientation and very middle class, but they're looking at Jeffersonian traditions. They want better things for the individual, better things for state and local government. They're not looking at a strong central government. They're looking at more power in the hands of the individual. From these two traditions, the rural versus the urban, you see many similarities, but also some substantial differences. American expansion also played a role in progressivism. This idea of sending out, almost like missionary work, the American ideal of progressivism. This American ideal of morality. This American ideal of religion and Christianity. American Christianity. American Protestant Christianity and sending it abroad. This idea of democracy and of what good government means and of ending corruption, even though that may not have been what the local people wanted. And so you do see American expansion playing into this. And I've got on this map here some places where America has intervened in the late 1890s and even some of that before then up to 1900. In some of this we've talked about in other lectures. One example is Hawaii and we've talked about Hawaii before. Now there was a revolution in Hawaii and a lot of that was started by Americans and led and influenced by Americans. In 1890, the McKinley Tariff really hurt Hawaii because it allowed competition from Cuban sugar. And so this threatened the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Here we have a picture of Queen Lilia Kalani, who was the last queen of Hawaii and she is essentially taken captive by Americans who are living in Hawaii, forced to sign a new constitution, forced to give up the throne, and Americans take over Hawaii. In Cuba, you have the beginnings of problems that are escalating. We talked in the last lecture about the Cuban Civil War and it only escalates. Now you have Spanish sending in this general butcher, as he was called Wyler, who established concentration camps for rebels. And the interest that Americans have in Cuba is exacerbated by what we term yellow journalism. This is about sensationalist journalism. In today's discourse we hear the term of what the media is doing and fake news so often today. It's very similar to what was going on then. We believe that journalists were exacerbating in order to sell more papers. On the other hand, as far as the Cubans were concerned, you have Jose Martí, who is a revolutionary. He's headquartered in New York. So Americans were being influenced by rebels who were stationed in the United States and who were kind of also manipulating the news and manipulating Americans' opinions of what was going on in Cuba. President McKinley wanted to help the situation. He offered to mediate between the Cuban rebels in Spain, but Spain refused McKinley's efforts at mediation. And so he attacks Spain and he says they're just uncivilized. The Spanish Foreign Minister, a man by the name of Dalom, publishes a letter and the Hearst newspaper chain, one of these yellow journalists, gets a hold of the letter and prints it. And what it says is basically that the Spanish Foreign Minister says, look, McKinley, he's all talk. He's got the backbone of a chocolate eclair. He's soft and he's easy and we're going to be able to roll over him. Well, most Americans felt the same way about McKinley, but it was the hearing of this from a foreign agent that made people rally around our president and it turned many people against Spain. The big issue, however, was the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine. And this happened in Havana Harbor and it was blamed upon the Spanish and Cuban rebels. They were all blamed, depending on which newspaper you read. The truth of the matter is probably that it was an internal explosion, that the battleship had some problems and maybe was carrying fertilizer or some other things that led to an explosion and it became very convenient to blame it on the rebels or on Spain, depending on which side you were on. And so this became a controversial point. So there were more efforts at peace talks. Spain wasn't interested. So finally President McKinley went to Congress. But Congress did not want to annex Cuba. Cuba had, for one thing, a large Afro-Cuban population and there were many people who said, well, we don't want that. They were racist. There was some isolationist sentiment and there were also people who just feared that annexing this would basically bring in other elements into the American culture. So there was a lot of opposition to the idea of annexing Cuba. We finally did go to war from April to August of 1898 and Teddy Roosevelt called this a splendid little war. He was Assistant Secretary of Navy at the time. When the war was declared, a lot of people volunteered including Roosevelt and his famous group of rough riders. So there were Americans involved and many more died because of disease and actual battle, but it did have a tremendous effect on the Americans who volunteered. And what surprised a lot of Americans at the time was that the Filipinos were not eager to have Americans there. We thought we would be welcomed in, but instead there was opposition. Here you have a picture here of Emilio Cuelnaldo, who was the leader of the Filipino opposition and he also lobbied against and rallied against, rather, American intervention as well. And so this war, the Spanish-American war, which ostensibly started off on problems between us and Cuba, or us intervening between Cuba and Spain, before you know it, we're acquiring the Philippines, which were halfway across the world. And we got involved with the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa and other places. And so America, the United States, was able to acquire access and control of these territories as a result of the Spanish-American war. In China, we were very concerned about the way China, which was kind of seen as, quote, unquote, the sick man of Asia, Americans were concerned that other European nations were moving in on China and colonizing China. And what had happened was Japan had been engaged in a war. They defeated China in 1895. And so this is when other European powers began moving in. Secretary of State John Hay issued an open door note that said China should not be closed off by these other powers, but it should be open. And America's began, what the United States was trying to do was trying to keep the door open so that they could get a piece of the China trade. A rebellion in 1900, the so-called Boxer Rebellion, was again another surprise that foreign invaders were unwelcome in China by some of the nationalists. This was violently put down. And finally in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize due to his negotiations of peace between Japan and Russia in other areas. And so America is very involved in intervening and being a peacekeeper as this cartoon illustrates. In Latin America, we were also expressing our will and our power. And the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Of course, a Monroe Doctrine, this is an 1820s ideology that says the United States should be able to control what's going on in the Western Hemisphere. Well, the Roosevelt Corollary basically gave the United States broad powers to intervene. And so in 1905, you see that we're sending troops into places like the Dominican Republic, which is on the same island as Haiti. We're intervening in the Panama Canal. France had been in Panama for many years trying to establish a canal to make it a quicker route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But that had not gone anywhere and there had been a lot of delays and problems. And so the Hay, named after our Secretary of State, and one of Maria, who was the French representative there, they negotiated a treaty. There is a revolution that the United States helps form it against Colombia so that when Panama becomes and is recognized as an independent nation, they will be friendly to the United States. And they sign a treaty with the United States giving us control of what becomes the Panama Canal Zone perpetually. And we call Roosevelt's, Teddy Roosevelt, when he was president, we call his policy the big stick policy, you know, speak softly and carry a big stick. You don't have to make a lot of noise diplomatically so long as you have a powerful navy. Going back to a previous lecture, the idea of having a strong navy meant that you could control an area is what Roosevelt was going off of. And so you have these two cartoons from 1904 and 1905 of Roosevelt and this big stick diplomacy that he carried power. A lot of it was based upon the navy and the other cartoon. You have Roosevelt as a policeman to the world. The world's constable. This idea of progressivism where we're policing the world and bringing American values as we go.