Brinkley Chapter 20 vocabulary

They became known as the “muckrakers,” after Theodore Roosevelt accused one of them of raking up muck through his writings.

The progressive impulse took many forms—so many, in fact, that even today scholars do not agree on what progressivism meant.

In the fi rst years of the twentieth century, the suffrage movement began to overcome this opposition and win some substantial victories, in part because suffragists were becoming better organized and more politically sophisticated than their opponents.

And ironically, because women could not vote, the clubs had a nonpartisan image that made them difficult for politicians to dismiss.

Among the theories created to support this argument was eugenics, the science of altering the reproductive processes of plants and animals to produce new hybrids or breeds.

Alice Paul, head of the militant National Woman’s Party (founded in 1916), never accepted the relatively conservative “separate sphere” justification for suffrage.

Many of them had been trapped inside the burning building because management had locked the emergency exits to prevent malingering.

And they believed that these changes could come through peaceful political change, rather than through radicalism or revolution.

Gradually, that demand grew to include the complete prohibition of the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages.

And many women entered academia—often receiving advanced degrees at such predominantly male institutions as the University of Chicago, MIT, or Columbia, and finding professional opportunities in the new and expanding women’s colleges.

A similar commitment to establishing the government as an impartial regulatory mechanism shaped Roosevelt’s policy toward labor.

In the early twentieth century, the idea of preserving the natural world for ecological reasons was not well established.

The Old Guard eagerly supported another important aspect of Roosevelt’s natural resource policy: public reclamation and irrigation projects.

John Buenker strengthened this argument in Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (1973), claiming that political machines and urban “bosses” were important sources of reform energy and helped create twentieth-century liberalism.

Modern life was too complex to be left in the hands of party bosses, untrained amateurs, and antiquated institutions.