A Fierce Discontent

Rahel Golub was a Russian-American who immigrated to the United States to help her father in a tailor shop in 1892. Only 11 years old at the time, Golub quickly learned how harsh life could be for the working classes in New York City at the turn of the century. Golub and her father worked hard and saved their money so that the rest of their family could also move to the United States. This required constant self-denial for Golub. She did not go to school, worked from dawn till dusk, ate meager portions at meals, and could never ask her father for even a single penny to spend on herself. When working at the tailor’s shop, Golub quickly learned not to betray the “family ties” of the workplace. She was able to work faster and finish more garments than some of the older ladies working at the shop, and they frowned upon her productivity, feeling it pressured them to also work more quickly. When she got older, Golub had to commit to marrying a neighborhood boy that she barely knew—a grocer—so that she could continue supporting her family.

McGerr says “the story of Rahel Golub was repeated over and over in the United States at the turn of the century” (63). In 1900, more than half of the country made up the laboring, or working class “that performed manual work for wages” (63). Like Golub and her family, these workers lived “circumscribed, vulnerable lives, constrained by low pay and limited opportunity, and menaced by unemployment, ill health, and premature death” (64). Independence was an inaccessible luxury, and self-denial was the shared—and, for most, lifelong—experience of the working class.

Despite the cost of pursuing independence, Golub continued to do so. She eventually refused to marry the grocer, and her exposure to the community volunteer efforts of middle class progressives allowed her to experience art, literature, hospitals, and summer outings—all of which were exemplary of middle class values and culture. Seeing that a different way of life was possible, Golub grew increasingly unhappy with the bleakness of her working class life. This part of Golub’s life as a working class woman was unusual: Most working class people were not as exposed to reform efforts (and most did not go on to publish a book about their experiences as Golub did). 

Richard Garland, a longtime farmer, came from a family of farmers who struck out west for Wisconsin in the 1850s in pursuit of dominion and independence. Garland continued west beyond Wisconsin, buying farmland in Minnesota, then Iowa, and finally settling in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. Like his family before him, Garland valued independence, freedom, and “lordship” of his own agricultural domain (80). In order to maintain his independence and dominion over his land, though, Garland required the help and labor of his family. His farm was over a thousand acres, and he could not afford to hire all the laborers needed to tend it. As a result, Garland’s son, Hamlin, remembers his mother toiling her entire life, taking care of domestic duties and working in the fields; additionally, each child in the family began working on the farm as soon as he was old enough—and seven years old was considered old enough.

The values that Hamlin remembers his father, Richard, instilling in him reflected the farming class’s complicated relationship to the working class and the rest of society. On one hand, Hamlin remembers his father teaching lessons of mutualism and self-denial likely familiar to Rahel Golub, but giving in when Hamlin demanded a certain degree of independence, which Garland wanted his son to experience as well. Though Hamlin valued hard work, family, and sober living as an adult, he chose to pursue independence differently than his father had. He did not want to be a farmer; he moved away from home and became a successful writer instead.

Most agrarians, McGerr claims, shared the values and experiences of Garland and his son, equally valuing and depending on mutualism and independence to maintain their strenuous lives as farmers in America. Many children of farmers grew up with a perspective similar to that of Hamlin Garland: Though they respected their parents’ determination and willingness to toil away for the agrarian life, they wanted even more independence, freedom, and prosperity, which they believed they could find away from farm life. Thus, though the farming class had different values and culture than the upper class and even the working class, they still had internal—and often generational—divisions with which to contend. 

Like Rahel Golub and Hamlin Garland, Frank Capra grew up dreaming of a life different from the one his parents his parents lived. A working class Italian immigrant growing up in Los Angeles, Capra hated being poor. He believed that education would be his way out of a life of poverty and relentlessly pursued education despite his family’s scoffing and ridicule. Capra’s determination forced his family to compromise, however: As long as he agreed to continue working part-time, they allowed him to attend school.

Capra’s dream eventually came true. He ended up attending college at Cal Tech and finding wealth and fame as a film director. Though most members of the working class did not go on to find fame and fortune, many children of immigrants pursued lives of independence and defied their parent’s values, like Capra. The hold of mutualism was wavering at the turn of the century. 

McGerr offers John D. Rockefeller as an isolated example of a socially aware, sober-minded member of the upper ten. Perhaps the wealthiest of them all, Rockefeller abhorred the world of the Bradley Martins and shunned ostentatious behavior. A religious man, Rockefeller was a committed philanthropist. By the 1890s, he realized that the pursuit of money and pleasure was ultimately an unfulfilling way of life. Where earning money for the sake of earning money felt empty, giving money away provided a lasting gratification.

Simply because he had so much money, it was difficult for Rockefeller to live up to his philanthropic ideals. He established a trust to manage his philanthropic benevolences and, as a result, gave away hundreds of millions of his wealth for the betterment of society. He believed that other wealthy people should do the same. For these reasons, McGerr considers Rockefeller a “revolutionary” of the upper ten (124). 

Jane Addams serves as McGerr’s foremost example of the background, ideals, and values, and reform efforts of the middle class progressives in turn-of-the-century America. The daughter of a self-made man who epitomized Victorian virtues, Addams wanted to grow up to be just like her father. John H. Addams began as a miller’s apprentice and eventually grew up to own his own mills, invest heavily, and even preside over a local bank. Despite her father’s success, Addams placed a high value on the worth of other people, serving others, crusading for the end of slavery, and supporting economic opportunity for all men, regardless of race or class.

Try as she might, Addams did not grow up as did her father. She attended college and made other educational and professional pursuits, but ultimately failed to find a career that would lead her to the self-sufficiency and success that her father had achieved. Furthermore, Addams never married. Without a career, a family, or a discernible path forward, Addams felt unmoored from the Victorian world of her father and, ultimately, from her own future.

Addams saw her personal crisis reflected in others’ experiences across America, ultimately leading her to become one of the greatest proponents of the progressive reform efforts. Like many from her generation, Addams needed a new way of living and recognized the dangers of class conflict to the wellbeing of society. Addams realized that addressing class conflict and defining a new way of living would require a reformulation of Victorian values into a new ideology. Addams and other progressive reformers recognized that Victorian values were often inadequate to address America’s social problems. For example, though Addams still shared her father’s valuing of service to others, her work with Hull House in Chicago revealed that the best way to serve the less fortunate was through collective action—association with others—rather than blind individualism.

As they witnessed the failures of these values in action, Addams and others played a prominent role in reframing the relationship between society and the individual, the nature of men, women, and the home, and the roles of work and pleasure in everyday life to suit the progressive ideology. 

Carrie Nation, a respectable Christian woman in her sixties, exemplified what progressive reform efforts could look like when taken to the extreme. One of the foremost goals of progressive reform was to remake individual Americans—and, eventually, the entirety of the working, farming, and upper classes—in the image of the middle class. Nation was committed to this vision, which she demonstrated through violent public displays that earned her quite a reputation across the country.

In June 1900, Nation gathered up brickbats and bottles of liquor, drove her bug to a nearby Kansas town, and smashed up four local saloons. In Nation’s view, it she was doing her duty to eradicate the vices of drinking and philandering that often tempted American men.

Nation had personally been a victim of these vices. Her first husband had been an alcoholic, and her second husband was deeply deceptive. When she served as a jail evangelist, Nation learned that almost everyone who was in jail was there because of the influence of “intoxicating drinks” (235). Given her first-hand experience with this vice, Nation continued her crusade. She smashed up saloons across Kansas and was arrested and sent to jail on more than one occasion. But Nation gained national notoriety and a following—others reformers who also began smashing up saloons—so she continued her crusade all the way to California and changed her name to “Carry A. Nation,” to imply that her reform efforts would carry the nation toward much-needed change.

Nation’s violent saloon destructions revealed the sense of urgency and changing middle-class values that “spurred the progressive crusades to reshape adult behavior” (238). Her actions also reflected the middle-class fervor and insistence on action that drove many progressive reformers to compel others to change their behavior. More than anything, Nation’s crusade was about preserving the integrity and life of the home. Progressives saw saloons as one of many external vices that threatened to cause existing domestic life to disappear. Such a threat, as Nation and others saw it, was certainly cause for taking drastic measures.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of the Progressive Era in the United States. Though he came from one of the wealthier families in turn of the century America, on many issues, he was a strong ally of the progressives. Throughout his life, Roosevelt broke free of the conventions of the upper ten and remade himself again and again: He was a naturalist, a cowboy, an author, hunter, state legislator, soldier, governor, and, finally, president of the United States. Such a wide array of vocational experience exposed Roosevelt to the diversity and division of turn of the century America—an education that most members of the upper ten never received. Roosevelt abhorred the moneymaking impulse of the upper ten, believing that the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake was indicative of serious flaws in character. Instead, Roosevelt shared many of the values of the middle-class progressives and thus proved a helpful ally in their attempts to change the culture and values of the upper ten and the working class.

Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt selectively supported progressive causes that would still allow him to maintain his popularity as president. He supported the crusade against prostitution, efforts to change the conditions of life in rural areas, and better funding for the National Bureau of Education; he favored labor unions, championed anti-trust prosecutions, and advocated the conservationist movement. Roosevelt also shared some of the more problematic values of progressives, like a paternalistic view of African-Americans and Native Americans.

Despite his public support for workers and his frequent appeasement of the upper ten, Roosevelt, like the progressives, ultimately just wanted all the classes to transcend their differences and live in harmony in favor of “association” and fellow-feeling” (374). Toward the end of his presidency, though, he became an increasingly alienating figure, struggling to define his position and to strike a balance between regulation and individualism. 

Robert Charles was the son of Mississippi slaves living in New Orleans. On the evening of July 23, 1900, Charles sat on a doorstep with his friend when a white policeman told them to move. When Charles stood up, the two cops present struck him with a club and pulled a gun. Angered and discouraged by the treatment of black Americans, Charles pulled a gun of his own. Both men shot; both wounded. Charles managed to run home to his apartment, but the police confronted him there later that night. Again, Charles responded by shooting: He shot one of the policemen through the heart, and the other through the eye.

The next day, white mobs and police stormed the streets looking for him. Acting out of their own frustrations with black people for—as the whites saw it—taking their jobs, they had random black people arrested in the streets when they failed to track down Charles. When, days later, Charles was still in hiding, a mob of white people met and resolved to lynch him. Growing increasingly angry when they could not find Charles, the mob killed three African-Americans and injured another fifty.

When an African-American man revealed Charles’ hiding place, a mob pursued him there. Still, he fought back and shot several members of the mob in the process. He managed to escape one last time before dying by gunshot from a white policeman.

The mob did not stop there. They repeatedly shot Charles’ body; the son of one of the dead policemen dragged him into the street and smashed his face. A black school was set on fire, and several more black men killed that day.

Charles’ story shows the deep pain caused by segregation and Jim Crow laws at the turn-of-the-century. The riots demonstrated that “of all the social differences at the start of the 20th century, those between black and white people were the most volatile, the most difficult to control” (507). 

Benjamin Mays was a young African-American man who grew up on a farm in South Carolina. The son of former slaves, Mays witnessed firsthand the impotence of black men in resisting the poor treatment by white people in the Jim Crow era (538-41). Like Rahel Golub and Hamlin Garland, Mays learned mutualistic lessons as a child. As an African-American man, however, the version of mutualism he learned looked differently: “not to talk about racial matters, not to get too close to white women, not even to mention the black boxer Jack Johnson, who whipped a white man to win the heavyweight championship in 1908” (539). To survive in Jim Crow America, Mays and others like him learned humility, meekness, and subservience in the presence of white people.

Nevertheless, Mays also recognized that even the effort embody the aforementioned traits might not be enough to keep young black men out of trouble in a world where, at the end of the day, the changing whims of white people dictated the perception of African-Americans and how their behavior was perceived. Mays believed that this created undue stress for African-Americans, and was the reason why they sometimes lashed out at each other.

Mays’ attitude of relative acceptance—living as peacefully as one could under the conditions of segregation and Jim Crow law—was also adopted by several African-American leaders during the era, like Booker T. Washington, who encouraged fellow African-Americans to adopt the same attitude as a way to lift up their own race in the midst of difficult circumstances. 

Booker T. Washington was a prominent African-American leader of the Progressive Era and a strong proponent of black accommodation of segregation to lift up their race through economic progress, self-help, thrift, and hard work. Accommodation was one of the popular responses to Jim Crow and segregation during the Progressive Era, and the underlying intention was to make the best out of a terrible situation for black people. Such an approach, Washington believed, required constant patience, forbearance, and self-control—virtues that both Washington and white progressive reformers extolled—but would in time result in the triumph of African-Americans over their circumstances. Additionally, such an approach would require harmony among African-Americans; there could be no divisive behavior if they lifted each other up as a race.

Though Washington publicly promoted accommodation, he privately worked to limit disfranchisement legislation and Jim Crow practices. Washington’s approach to segregation, like Benjamin Mays’, is indicative of the “double life” that many African-Americans felt they must lead during the Progressive Era. 

W. E. B. Du Bois was an African-American professor and sociologist who provided the “strongest and most comprehensive challenge” to Booker T. Washington’s approach to segregation. His 1903 essay, The Souls of Black Folk, directly critiqued Washington for advocating “submission” to white people. Whereas Washington believed that by acting respectably and behaving as model citizens, African-Americans would earn the respect of white people and given political rights over time, Du Bois feared that change could never occur for African-Americans if they did not have political rights in the first place.

Du Bois envisioned “a pluralist America, one in which blacks could be themselves rather than appear as whites wanted them to appear” (546). In other words, whereas presently, America was a country created by and for white people, Du Bois wanted it to become a country created by and for black and white people. Du Bois’ outspokenness led to the creation of significant conferences and organizations that advocated for greater rights for African-Americans; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was one of the organizations born of Du Bois’ robust efforts.

The NAACP included white benefactors and supporters, and Du Bois’ efforts showed that there was space for dialogue, debate, and multiple ways of responding to segregation and other racial issues during the Progressive Era. 

Sherwood Anderson was an advertising man married to an industrialist’s daughter with whom he had three children. He and his family settled down in Ohio and, at first, Anderson felt fulfilled by the wealth and independence that his success as an ad man afforded him. In the midst of this success, however, Anderson realized he no longer felt free; on the contrary, he felt trapped. He felt disgusted by his work, his wife, and even his children.

Anderson tried to escape through booze, adultery, and writing but none of those pursuits made him feel free. He attempted to hide from his life instead, retreating into his home and confining himself to an upper room solely occupied by Anderson. In his solitude, he realized that “he was trapped not only in marriage, business, and bourgeois living; he was trapped in himself” (601). 

Anderson’s personal crisis of identity as a man, husband, and as an American reflected the widespread unrest that other Americans felt as progressivism took hold of society in the early 20th century. The society that the progressive reformers attempted to created was all about control by various institutions: “segregation, big business, and the activist, regulatory state” (601). Like Anderson, many Americans remembered the time before progressive reform, when American life was characterized by a sense of independence, adventure, and exploration. Many Americans felt constrained and confined by the features of modern existence and many sought a new liberation, as Anderson eventually did. Years after his initial “crisis,” Anderson left his job and his family to become a writer. Other Americans also “broke free” during this time and reasserted a sense of individualism into the collectivist America that the progressive reformers built.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture reflected early 20th century Americans’ impulse for space and freedom. The most famous practitioner of the “Prairie School” of architecture, Wright was an advocate of simplicity and cleaner lines, which aligned with the “stripped down” culture of the progressive middle class (607).

Like Sherwood Anderson, Wright had known freedom and independence, but traded it for the confining reality against which Anderson rebelled. Wright made a successful life for himself in Chicago as an architect and grew a family. He, too, isolated himself from his children and had affairs. In the spring of 1909, Wright left home for his mistress and Florence, Italy, and eventually returned to a new life in Wisconsin with his mistress. Wright felt trapped in his old life; though it caused a scandal, he chose to strike out on his own again in pursuit of freedom.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wright was a strong advocate for individualism, which set him apart from the progressive reformers of the time. Wright felt that individualism—which allowed people to pursue their passions—had led to the progress that America made around the turn of the century. Individualism, to Wright, was progressive, and the progressive attempts to “reshape human beings from without” was confining (609).

Wright’s sense of individualism and desire for space shaped his approach to architecture. He abhorred the Victorian aesthetic, which he considered cluttered and excessive, “a denial of space and freedom” (609). His architectural aesthetic, demonstrated in his breakthrough design of the Larkin Soap Building in Buffalo, New York in 1904, “hammered away at the segregation and confinement of modernity” by eliminating doors and walls, when possible, and raising ceilings to imitate those in cathedrals (612). As Wright saw it, his open architectural designs displayed the spacious interior—a spaciousness that he felt similarly dwelled inside the heart and mind of every American, if only progressive reformers would allow them to access it.

The feeling of movement across space that characterized Wright’s architecture came to characterize American culture in the 1910s as new technologies, innovations in transportation, and a revolution in communication allowed many Americans to “transcend the here and now” (612).

Christy Mathewson was a baseball player, a pitcher, for the New York Giants in the 1910s. McGerr describes Mathewson as “something new in America: a professional athlete who inspired hero worship” (671). The prudent Victorians of the previous century had regarded athletes as lazy bums who would rather pursue pleasure than work for a living, but Mathewson provided a different picture: His parents lived by the Victorian code, opposing alcohol and tobacco and committing themselves to hard work and education. They even sent Mathewson to college.

Mathewson’s mother wanted him to become a preacher. Though he did not become a preacher in the traditional sense, Mathewson nonetheless found a platform as a baseball player which allowed him to share news with the masses. His strong character and commitment to Victorian virtues made him an example of middle-class morality, but his baseball career and, later on, other artistic pursuit, made him an example of how commercialized pleasure might become accessible to all Americans in the 1910s: “By his example, he showed Americans that they could reconcile old values with new enjoyments” (675). 

Jack Johnson was an African-American boxer in the 1910s and the heavyweight champion of 1908—one of many African-Americans who found new opportunities thanks to the commercialization of pleasure during the decade, but who simultaneously served as a symbol of the limits of liberation for African-Americans in the new world of commercial pleasures.

McGerr presents Johnson as a foil to successful athlete Christy Mathewson: “While [Mathewson] helped make pleasure legitimate, Johnson stirred America’s fears about the dangers of pleasure” (744). Johnson grew up in poverty in Galveston, Texas, but became an extremely skilled boxer. White people criticized his boxing style for being lazy when it was truly strategic: he would delay knocking out his opponent so he could continue hurting him. There was fear for the day that Johnson would face a white opponent in the ring. These fears found confirmation in 1908, when Johnson knocked out the reigning heavyweight champion—a white man. Outraged, whites turned Johnson’s win into an issue of racial pride and identity. Newspapers across the nation characterized Johnson as “jeering,” savage, and barbaric (746). Johnson bought property in an exclusively white neighborhood and had an entourage of white women. Authorities responded to his aggressive pursuit of pleasure across racial boundaries by arresting him and wrongfully convicting him—of kidnapping a white woman.

Johnson bribed authorities so he could slip out of the country after his conviction, but he found no rest living abroad in Europe, where white Europeans were just as hostile toward black people as white Americans were. The true issue with Johnson was not that he defeated a white boxer; the issue was that Johnson, due to his success as an athlete within the new culture of pleasure, easily crossed social boundaries that progressive reformers had worked hard to construct in order to keep order and harmony in society. Johnson “served as living proof that Americans would not accept all the explosive possibilities of the culture of pleasure” (751).