Changes in Society

1. Changes in Society • As the 1800s came to a close, only a handful of people enjoyed wealth and prosperity, while immigrants and poor laborers continued to live and work under harsh conditions. • RESULT: • Many citizens & gov’t officials demanded reforms in gov’t, business, and society in general. • Turn of century marked the Progressive Era: a time of political, social, and economic change in the U.S.

2. Muckrakers • Muckrakers: were journalists or novelists who attempted to expose abuses in business and corruption in politics. • Jacob Riis was a muckraker journalist

3. Upton Sinclair • In 1906, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle • told of unsafe and unsanitary conditions in meat processing plants. • It’s readers included President Theodore Roosevelt. • Called for changes in the laws protecting food. • Called for the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906.

4. Upton Sinclair The Jungle • The title reflects his view of the brutality he saw in the meat-packing business. • The story centered on a young man, JurgisRudkis, who had recently immigrated to Chicago with a group of relatives and friends from Lithuania. • Full of hope for a better life, Jurgis married and bought a house on credit. He was elated when he got a job as a "shoveler of guts" at "Durham," a fictional firm based on Armour & Co., the leading Chicago meat packer.

5. Jurgis soon learned how the company sped up the assembly line to squeeze more work out of the men for the same pay. He discovered the company cheated workers by not paying them anything for working part of an hour. • Jurgis saw men in the pickling room with skin diseases. Men who used knives on the sped-up assembly lines frequently lost fingers. Men who hauled 100-pound hunks of meat crippled their backs. • Workers with tuberculosis coughed constantly and spit blood on the floor. Right next to where the meat was processed, workers used primitive toilets with no soap and water to clean their hands. • In some areas, no toilets existed, and workers had to urinate in a corner. Lunchrooms were rare, and workers ate where they worked.

6. Almost as an afterthought, Sinclair included a chapter on how diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat products were processed, doctored by chemicals, and mislabeled for sale to the public. He wrote that workers would process dead, injured, and diseased animals after regular hours when no meat inspectors were around. He explained how pork fat and beef scraps were canned and labeled as "potted chicken.”

7. Sinclair wrote that meat for canning and sausage was piled on the floor before workers carried it off in carts holding sawdust, human spit and urine, rat dung, rat poison, and even dead rats. His most famous description of a meat-packing horror concerned men who fell into steaming lard vats: • . . . and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! • Jurgis suffered a series of heart-wrenching misfortunes that began when he was injured on the assembly line. No workers' compensation existed, and the employer was not responsible for people injured on the job. Jurgis' life fell apart, and he lost his wife, son, house, and job.

8. Response to The Jungle • Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906 • Mandated safe and sanitary conditions for food preparation and packaging. • It also put regulations on medicines.

9. Gilded Age Disparities • There was a huge gap between the rich & poor. • The rich had conspicuous consumption. Versus • The poor who barely had enough money to make ends meet.

10. Gospel of Wealth • “The Gospel of Wealth” was written by Andrew Carnegie in 1889. • Carnegie proposed that the best way of dealing with the new phenomenon of wealth inequality was for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner.

11. 5th Avenue in NY • Became a street of the wealthy

12. Vanderbilt's Mansion

15. Westward Expansion • Webquest • Go to my website: bhsharris.weebly.com

16. Bellwork: “Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” • From The New Colossus by emma lazarus, 1883 Re-write the above quote in simple words. 

17. c. Describe the growth of the western population and its impact on Native Americans with reference to Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee. • Americans moved westward in the 1860s to become ranchers, miners, and farmers. • The settlers began to encroach on Native American hunting grounds and broke numerous treaties How would fences that were constructed by farmers and ranchers affect Native Americans?

18. Westward Movement • In 1862, Congress passed laws making it easier for people to get land out West, greatly increasing the number of western settlers in the years following the Civil War. • In 1889, Congress agreed to open central Oklahoma territory to settlement. • The Oklahoma Land Rush – over 50,000 people gathered at the border waiting for the gunshot officially opening the territory.

19. Movement Westward • What technological inventions made western farming possible? • One of the big industries in the west became cattle ranching. • Those in Texas learned cattle ranching techniques from the Mexicans who lived there. • Cowboy hats and chaps were both examples of dress adopted from Mexicans by the western settlers.

20. Cowboys • Who were the cowboys? • Men • Women • White • African Americans • Mexicans

21. Impact on Native Americans • As settlers moved farther west, Native Americans felt the impact. • Many Native American tribes were forced to relocate to reservations (parcels of land set aside by the federal government for the N.A.’s)

22. Violent Confrontations • In 1861, Cheyenne warriors, angry that the U.S. had forced them of of land they had been promised, raided several mining camps and local settlements. • Response: U.S. forces surprised five hundred Cheyenne at Sand Creek, killing roughly 270 Native Americans, most of whom were women and children.

23. Custer’s Last Stand • When news of Sand Creek spread, other Native American tribes became enraged. • In 1876, US colonel Custer tried to surprise the Sioux at the Battle of Little Bighorn. • Sioux warriors quickly surrounded and outnumbered the troops – killing Custer & 200+ troops. --- known as Custer’s Last STAND.

24. Surrender • By 1877, both the Sioux & Cheyenne surrender to US troops. • Sent out to reservations in Dakota’s and Oklahoma.

25. Wounded Knee • By the late 1880s most western Indian tribes had been resettled onto reservations • Sitting Bull, a Sioux Chief, who helped defeat Custer at the Little Big Horn, had moved onto a reservation and began performing the “Ghost Dance” which his followers believed would bring back the buffalo, and make the settlers disappear • Sitting Bull is ordered to stop, but refuses and is killed while being arrested • Along with 13 others.

26. Wounded Knee • Many of Sitting Bulls followers fled the reservation after his death and camped at Wounded Knee Creek with other Sioux • The U.S Calvary, which was sent to escort the Sioux back to the reservation, attempted to disarm them and a fight broke out

27. Wounded Knee • In the massacre that followed, nearly 200 Sioux men, women and children were killed • Many of the injured froze to death • Wounded Knee led many to question the treatment of Native Americans, and was the last major resistance by Native Americans