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Aug 11, 2015, 6:09pm Imani Gandy

The last few weeks have exposed some real ugliness in the progressive movement, ugliness that has been simmering just below the surface for a long time, but which, due to Black womens increasing recognition of our political power coupled with leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and unapologetic commitment to dismantling white supremacy, has erupted into a fountain of White Progressive racism.

Yesterday morning, I tweeted something that now seems irrational.

I tweeted that there was no way I would vote for Bernie Sanders, and that is entirely due to the relentless campaign of harassment to whichsome of his more overzealous supporters have subjected me and other Black people on Twitter and Facebook. I even mentioned, as I have in the past, that I would vote for Hillary Clinton out of spite even though I have not yet forgiven her for the racist campaign that she ran in 2008 against President Obama.

As soon as I tweeted it, I knew it was irrational. Why would I refuse to vote for a person whose political positions are most aligned with mine simply because his followers have treated me with overwhelming disrespect, condescension, and flat-out ugliness? Its irrational. I admit it.

But do you know what else is irrational? The behavior of Sanders fanatical supporters in response to the disruption of #BlackLivesMatter activists at Netroots Nation and the Sanders rally in Seattle led by Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford this past weekend.

The last few weeks have exposed some real ugliness in the progressive movement, ugliness that has been simmering just below the surface for a long time, but which, due to Black womens increasing recognition of our political power coupled with leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and unapologetic commitment to dismantling white supremacy, has erupted into a fountain of White Progressive racism.

And it is appalling.

So it is in that context that I frustratedly tweeted that I would never vote for Bernie Sanders.

But the thing about irrationality is that sometimes it subsides and rational thought takes hold. And so it did with me.

Yes, I am tired of being belittled, and slandered, and talked down to, but that doesnt mean that I should sacrifice my well-being and the well-being of my community out of spite. That would be ridiculous and self-defeating. And I suspect that the many Black people that I have seen who have echoed my sentiment will change their tune in the upcoming months.

But for that to happen, Sanders overzealous supporters, many of whom are fundamentally indistinguishable from Ron Paul supporters in 2012, need to back off.

Sanders fanatics have been viciously harassing Black people on Twitter and Facebook for weeks nowever since the #BlackLivesMatter activists stood up during the presidential town hall at Netroots Nation and demanded that Sanders provide substantive answers about what he would do about the epidemic of police violence in the Black community.

In the wake of that protest, Sanders supporters took to Twitter to condescend, patronize, and belittle Black people, talking to us as if we are stupid and dont know whats best for us, and therefore should listen to our White Progressive betters lest we usher in a Trump presidency or a Clinton presidency or whomever is the Boogey Man du jour.

These supporters have twisted and perverted what is a movement about the liberation of Black people and turned it into a weapon to be used against us. They threaten to withdraw their support in protesting state violence against Black people. One Twitter user frankly told me that he was sick of #BlackLivesMatter and would actually vote for people who will put you in your place.

In the wake of the Seattle protest over the weekend, Sanders fanatical supporters behaved just as horribly as they had after the Netroots Nation protest.

If this progressive rageprimarily white progressive rageat Black voters continues, one has to wonder whether or not Sanders can be defined by the company he keeps, and whether that company will sink any chance he has at becoming the next Democratic nominee.

And let me be clear: It wont be Sanders fault if he loses the primary. It will be the fault of his supporters.

Despite reacting poorly to the protests when they were happening, Sanders has been doing all the right things.

Mere days after the Netroots protest, Bernie Sanders began tweeting about #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName. Indeed, the day after the protest, he said Sandra Blands name at a rally in Dallas.

And in a move I consider savvy, he hired Symone Sanders, a young Black organizer with the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and supporter of the #BlackLivesMatter movement as his press secretary. And whatever your view of the hirein theNew Republic, Jamil Smith writes that hiring Symone Sanders, a black woman, as his press secretary cant be expected to mollify the movement. #BlackLivesMatter wants policies for black people, not black people for his policiesit is undeniable that the #BlackLivesMatter protesters are inspiring Bernie Sanders to address the concerns of Black women.

On the morning after the Seattle protest, Sanders published a page to his website thataddresses racial justice, and specifically addresses police violence on its own terms. His racial justice platform includes Physical Violence (i.e., police violence), Political Violence (i.e., disenfranchisement), Legal Violence (i.e., mass incarceration of people of color), and his bread and butter, Economic Violence (unemployment and income inequality.)

This would not have happened were it not for the #BlackLivesMatter protesters.

Indeed, Smith writes, A campaign representative reached out to me to say that those proposals, in the works for the three weeks since Netroots, were derived froma speechthats been on the site since July 25.

Just yesterday, Bernie Sanders tackled the issue of institutional racism at a rally in Los Angeles.

And lets not forget that immediately after the Netroots protest, Democracy for America, the organization founded by Howard Dean in 2004, issued a press release via email stating the following:

After hearing the calls of our friends in the #BlackLivesMatter movement, thats exactly what we intend to do. Here is what Democracy for America is committing to as an organization with a mission to elect more and better Democrats across the country:

None of this would have happened if not for the #BlackLivesMatter protesters.

The #BlackLivesMatter activists are changing the political conversation. Black women are flexing our political muscles. And it is obvious that Bernie Sanders and the progressive infrastructure is listening.

The only people who continue to stalwartly refuse to listen are his fanatical supporters. They stubbornly continue to claim that the protests are stupid and counterproductive despite clear evidence to the contrary, and they express their displeasure in rhetoric steeped in racism andmisogynoir.

And its profoundly depressing.

Ultimately, Bernie Sanders has a coalition problem. His coalition is comprised of primarily white progressives and liberals, unsurprising for a man who hails from a state that is 94 percent white. And when a vocal section of that coalition thinks belittling and harassing Black people is a smart way to encourage Black people to vote for Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders likely has a larger problem on his hands than he probably realizes.

Look at the numbers. Black women are the most loyal and reliable Democratic voting bloc. We won the election for Obama in 2012. Black voter turnout surpassed white voter turnout in 2012. We won the gubernatorial election for Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.

No Democratic candidate can win without the support of Black voters, particularly Black women. And now that that is clear, we are no longer content for Democrats to take our votes for granted. The crisis in our community is too graveto blindly support a candidate and then hope theyll get around to addressing our issues. Weve been down that road before.

And when we see Sanders supporters entertaining conspiracy theories about the #BlackLivesMatter movement being funded by George Soros or Hillary Clinton, we have to wonder why it is easier for white and non-Black progressives to believe in ludicrous theories about #BlackLivesMatter attempting to destroy the progressive movement or destroy Bernie Sanders than it is to believe that the movement is beyond partisan politicsthat the Black women who are standing up in protest are fighting for their very lives and the lives of their children.

The name-calling and slander of #BlackLivesMatter supporters and activists, particularly Black women, by white and non-Black progressives is truly shameful.

Ben Cohen at The Daily Banter called the protesters idiots.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker called them stupid.

The staff of Ring of Fire Radio wrote a truly hateful post in which they complained that the #BlackLivesMatter movement was too focused on Black queer womenbecause God forbid a movement decenter whitenessand that Black lesbians (i.e., the founders of #BlackLivesMatter) were trying to destroy Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement. (That post has since been removed.)

Marissa Johnson, one of the women who led the Seattle protest, has been smeared ina blog post being circulated on Patheos as well as a fact-free blog post on PoliticusUSA (which is a website I formerly respected and read regularly) as a Sarah Palin supporter and a radical Christian. (Shesupported Palin when she was 17, and no longer does now that she is 24not that it matters since Black Sarah Palin supporters have a right to protest being gunned down in the streets just as much as any other Black person; and she is an evangelical Christian, but not a right-wing evangelical Christian.)

In addition, a group of progressives have been attempting to discredit and smear me by digging through my work history as a junior associate in a law firmworking on foreclosure cases for banks, tweeting screenshots of court documents they dug upand paid for!on PACER, and penning blog poststhat refer to me as a former foreclosure litigator instead of referencing the work that I have been doing for the past six years, which is racial and reproductive justice activism. These progressivestwo of whom, Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal, are respected journalists in the movement for Palestinian liberationthought it reasonable to attack and criticize me for progressing from the corporate work that I did for banks in 2009 to social justice.

All of the above is just a tiny sample of the ongoing harassment of Black people on social media by Sanders fanatics.

These are the same people who will swear up and down that they are your allies, right up until the protest for Black lives inconveniences them in some way or they disagree with the activists tactics.

It boggles the mind.

To those primarily white and non-Black progressives spreading conspiracy theories about #BlackLivesMatter being funded by Soros or paid by the Clinton campaign as if it is so unfathomable that a group of Black women would be politically savvy enough to organize protests without backing from a rich white savior like Soros or the ClintonsI can only say that your behavior is fundamentally anti-progressive and practically indistinguishable from the behavior of your average Tea Partier or Rush Limbaugh enthusiast.

And to those white and non-Black progressives who are not buying into the more outlandish conspiracy theories, but are nevertheless criticizing the protests as rude, ineffective, stupid, or inconvenient, and who have penned articles offering entirely unwanted and unneeded advice to these brave Black women, I will only say this: Your opinion doesnt matter.

As Monique Teal recently wrote for Daily Kos,

Posting that you dont understand the strategy behind a tactic exposes you as clinging to white supremacy.Allies dont decide the strategy of an oppressed group, they support the strategy said group develops. Period.Stop telling us that we need your validation of our humanity.Because thats what youre saying every time you talk about strategy. You can house your privilege in a thousand ways but ultimately, telling people to shut up because you dont like what they are saying and how they are organizing makes you an oppressor.

You may be inclined to point to disagreement among Black people about the tactics of the #BlackLivesMatter activists and glom on to that disagreement to voice your own disagreement.

Dont.

There is certainly disagreement within the movement about tactics, but thats a conversation to be had by and among Black people about the liberation of Black people. Its simply not your place.

That is not to say that we as Black people do not welcome white allies. Of course we do. But that allyship cannot be conditioned upon respectability politics or upon Black people acting in a way that makes you comfortable or else. Thats not allyship. Thats a threat.

If you intend to fight with us for our lives, you cannot wield your allyship as a Sword of Damocles to be dropped on our heads as soon as #BlackLivesMatter activists protest, in your view, the wrong candidate, at the wrong time, in the wrong space.

I have seen far too many fragile white progressives frustratedly exclaim, Youve lost an ally to your cause!

First, allyship is not an identity that can be self-declared. Being an ally is a process. And it can be a grueling and unpleasant process, especially for those who have never had to wrestle with decentering whiteness and centering Blackness instead.

Second, if you are truly a white ally, you recognize that #BlackLivesMatter isnt our cause. Its a cause for social justice. Its your cause too. And if you believe that threatening to retract your support is a viable threat, know this: It is not. It is actually a relief because when push comes to shove, Black people need white allies who will be in the trenches with us, not fair-weather audience participants.

I understand that this may be hard for some of you to read. You may be angry at me. You may feel diminished because you are likely accustomed to the warm blanket of whiteness in progressive spaces, and are resistant to centering Black lives and Black issues. Some of you have never been told that your opinion doesnt matter. And your initial reaction may be outrage or to think that Im racist or that I hate white people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Besides, the issue is not whether I or any #BlackLivesMatter activist or supporter hates white people. The issue, as Seattle protester and activist Marissa Johnson so succinctly put it in her radio interview with This Week in Blackness Prime(which you can check out in the video below), is whether or not you love Black people and are personally accountable to Black people.

Loving Black people is different than not hating Black people. Loving Black people is different than not standing in opposition to Black people. Loving Black people is different than tolerating Black people. If you love Black people and you, as a non-Black progressive, believe that #BlackLivesMatter is your cause, then fight with us. If you dont or youre not sure, then we will fight on without you. But believe me: The fight will continue. The disruptions will continue. The demands for recognition that our lives matter will continue.

The bottom line is this: #BlackLivesMatter activists simply do not have time to deal with white fragility. It may sound harsh, but Black lives matter more than white feelings. We are dying in the street. 314 of us so far since the killing of Mike Brownon August 9, 2014. Our community is in crisis.

By all indications, Bernie Sanders recognizes that our community is in crisis.

You should follow his lead.

I want to be as enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders as many of you are. But for that to happen, the harassment that I and many others are facing at the hands of his overzealous supporters must end.

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fellow white progressives - rewire.news

SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER In a videotaped interview Reuters about the new documentary film Clinton Cash based on Peter Schweizers bestselling book of the same name, the films write/producer Stephen K. Bannon says, I want as many progressives to see this as possible because I think we have to understand how the Clintons, who proclaim to support all your values, essentially have sold you out for money.

The American general public they dont argue about her competence, they dont argue about her toughness, they dont argue about how smart she is. The big concern they have is how trustworthy she is, Bannon added.

In the interview, Schweizer states, My hope for the film is that people will see it and it will get them to not only see the Clintons in a different way but when it comes to politics in general yes policies important, personality is important but follow the money, always follow the money.

Clinton Cash was shown at a special screening for distributors this week at the Cannes film festival.

Watch the video of the interview above.Watch the Clinton Cash trailer below:

Read the rest here:
Stephen K. Bannon: Progressives Need to See Clinton Cash ...

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Progressives - Atlantis Casino Resort

Several of the concerns targeted for reform by the Progressives were direct or indirect results of the great wave of immigration and industrialization around the turn of the century. In the single decade from 1900 to 1910, 8.8 million immigrants entered the United States, many of whom came from nations, ethnic groups and religions that contrasted with the traditional dominance of American immigrants from the

Ellis Island (left) and immigrants arriving for processing. Images Source: Library of Congress

countries of Western Europe. Immigrants from southeastern Europe provided cheap labor to support the rapid growth of major industrial centers and settled in densely-populated urban enclaves. Political parties and bosses used the voting base offered by these immigrants to pursue their own goals, often by aiding immigrant families with practical assistance in jobs, housing or other benefits. The poor housing, sanitation and health care, as well as the extensive exploitation of child labor in both factories and at home, prevalent in most immigrant communities also became a focus for reformers.

Progressive leaders attacked the political and economic system for allowing these conditions to continue, and often organized their own private relief programs to provide assistance through churches, charities and other private organizations direct relief programs.

....A visitor of the relief society found Rosina aged thirteen years, helping her mother and father in the work of finishing trousers. Since the arrival of the family in the United States seven years before, neither Rosina nor Vincenza had attended school, and neither could read or write. With the father ill of tuberculosis, Vincenza no longer able to work, and four younger children, aged eleven, seven, five and two years, to be cared for. Rosina, who had helped to support the family since she was six years old, was now the chief wage earner. Her brother, Giuseppe, aged eleven years helped in the sewing after school hours. But at the price of four cents a pair, for "felling" seams, finishing linings, and sewing buttons trousers, all the workers in the family,-father, mother and two children, by united effort, could not earn more than four or five dollars a week.

When the relief society aided the family, Vincenza was sent to a hospital, and Rosina for the first time in her life began to go to school. But she continued to sew at home after school hours. A later entry in the society's records reports that "Rosina and Giuseppe were busy at work finishing. Rosina said that she went to school regularly all day sessions, and that she and her brother helped at finishing after school."

All that the law could do for Rosina was to add school work to the ceaseless toil in which she had spent her days since early childhood. In her work at home from the time she was six years old for a manufacturer of clothing no provision of the labor law was violated. After her eighth birthday, her work at home, in that it prevented her attending school, caused a violation of the compulsory education law. But the work in itself, so long as the family lived in a licensed tenement, was never at any time illegal until Vincenza developed tuberculosis. Nor was this and the danger to the public health from the presence of a communicable disease in the home workroom prevented by the Department of Labor or the Board of Health.....

Account of Child Labor in New York City Tenements from Mary Van Kleeck, Charities and the Commons, January 18, 1908

Source: TenantNet

Concerns over abuses by business and the "robber barons" who exploited labor and the lack of government regulation of the marketplace also was a prevailing theme of those seeking reform. The sharp rise in economic activity spurred by industrialization and cheap labor contributed to concentrations of economic power among large national corporations and the formation of huge "trusts" as companies sought to eliminate their prime competitors. Between 1897 and 1904, 4,227 firms merged to form 257 corporations, with the largest merger consolidating nine steel companies to create the U.S. Steel Corp. controlled by Andrew Carnegie. By 1904, 318 companies controlled about 40 percent of the nation's manufacturing output. A single firm produced over half the output in 78 industries. See The Progressive Era, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Many Progressives came from the traditional upper and middle-class establishment, and were offended by the emergence of a class of government and political professionals who threatened their own views of democratic ideals and social justice. To some Progressives, their religious beliefs and views of their social responsibilities as privileged members of society demanded that they act to improve working and living conditions for the less fortunate. To others, the need to address the economic and social problems was motivated in part by self-interest. Without the reforms that were implemented, more radical and potentially violent change may have disrupted or destroyed the economic and social class structure such as would occur in Russia in 1916. Fear of the expansion of Socialism and Marxism provoked many in the upper class to support more moderate reform efforts as a means to ease the growing tensions between rich and poor and head off more extreme threats to their privileged role in society.

Progressive, "muckraking" journalists also played key parts in highlighting specific economic and social ills that led to government action. Jacob Riis exposed the poor living conditions of the tenement slums in How the Other Half Lives (1890), which led to significant legislation establishing minimum safety and housing standards in tenements. In The Shame of the Cities(1904), Lincoln Steffens exposed the rampant political corruption in the party machines of Chicago and New York, arguing that the political machines served the interests of businessmen who sought government contracts, franchises, charters, and special privileges. The Jungle, published by Upton Sinclair in 1906, traced an immigrant family's exploitation and the unsanitary practices prevalent in Chicago's meat packing industry. The outrage provoked by the novel contributed to the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906, the first legislation of its kind to set minimum standards for food and drug production.

Now, the typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a "big business man" and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop.

Excerpt from Lincoln Steffens, Shame of the Cities

Source: History 122, Northern Virginia Community College

Theodore Roosevelt Image Source: The College of New Jersey

Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency in 1901 at the age of 42 following the assassination of President William McKinley, is the most dominant personality of the Progressive Era. A member of a wealthy, aristocratic Dutch family, Roosevelt broke sharply from the pro-business policies of of his own Republican Party and targeted monopolistic business practices for reform. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create a Bureau of Corporations to investigate and regulate big business, then brought an anti-trust suit against J.P. Morgan's Northern Securities Company, a railroad trust controlled by the Wall Street financier, with the United States Supreme Court upholding the dissolution of the trust in the case of Northern Securities Co. v. United States issued in 1904. During Roosevelt's Administration, over 40 major corporations were sued for antitrust or price-fixing violations.

Roosevelt greatly expanded the powers of the government within the economy, often by endorsing new power for organized labor to organize and exert leverage against employers. By supporting labor in the settlement of the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, Roosevelt became the first president to assume such a direct role in intervening in labor disputes, including the threatened use of the U.S. Army to seize the coal mines and operate them until the owners agreed to arbitration to settle the strike. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1908, succeeded by his vice president and hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt later split with Taft, however, claiming that the Republican Administration had departed from the progressive course to align itself again with big business interests. When Roosevelt failed to defeat Taft in securing the Republican nomination in 1912, Roosevelt ran an independent campaign under the Progressive Party, popularly known as the "Bull Moose" party after Roosevelt's boast that he was "fit as a Bull Moose" to run for the presidency, but the division of the Republican vote insured the victory of the Democratic ticket headed by New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. See Woodrow Wilson and the Election of 1912.

The Progressive Era also saw increasing conflicts within the labor movement, as the earlier unions based on workers in crafts and skilled trades competed with those oriented toward those employed in the factories of the new industrialized economy. The new industrial unions also advocated more radical economic and social reform; in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago wiith cooperation from members of the Socialist Labor Party/Socialist Trades & Labor Alliance, Socialist Party of America, Western Federation of Miners and others from labor interests with progressive political agendas. The industrial unions also introduced more aggressive, and sometimes violent, practices to bolster their organizing or negotiating positions. In 1906, the IWW coordinated the first sit-in strike when miners at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, refused to leave the workplace and in the next year federal troops were sent in to crush the strike of miners belonging to the IWW in Goldfield, Nevada. In 1913, the Paterson Silk Strike in New Jersey started with a spontaneous walkout at Doherty and Company, the largest mill in what was then the world center of silk manufacturing, after the company owners introduced new looms that allowed a worker who had previously tended one or two looms to work three or four simultaneously. The strike spread to other mills in the city as workers feared for their jobs if employers could produce more silk with less labor; eventually, the stike idled some 25,000 workers and shut down the textile mills for six months. By its end, two workers had been killed by private detectives hired by the mill owners and over 3,000 strikers had been arrested.

The life of a strike depends upon constant activities. In Paterson, as in all IWW strikes, there were mass picketing, daily mass meetings, childrens meetings, the sending of many children to New York and New Jersey cities, and the unique Sunday gatherings. These were held in the afternoon in the little town of Haledon, just over the city line from Paterson. The mayor was a Socialist who welcomed us. A strikers family lived there in a two-story house. There was a balcony on the second floor, facing the street, opposite a large green field. It was a natural platform and amphitheatre. Sunday after Sunday, as the days became pleasanter, we spoke there to enormous crowds of thousands of peoplethe strikers and their families, workers from other Paterson industries, people from nearby New Jersey cities, delegations from New York of trade unionists, students and others. Visitors came from all over America and from foreign countries. People who saw these Haledon meetings never forgot them....

A touching episode occurred in one of our childrens meetings. I was speaking in simple language about the conditions of silk workerswhy their parents had to strike. I spoke of how little they were paid for weaving the beautiful silk, like the Lawrence workers who made the fine warm woolen cloth. Yet the textile workers do not wear either woolen or silk, while the rich people wear both. I asked: "Do you wear silk?" They answered in a lively chorus. "No!" I asked: Does your mother wear silk?" Again there was a loud "No!" But a childs voice interrupted, making a statement. This is what he said: "My mother has a silk dress. My father spoiled the cloth and had to bring it home." The silk worker had to pay for the piece he spoiled and only then did his wife get a silk dress!

Account of Paterson Silk Strike excerpted from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography (New York, 1955)

Source: New Jersey Women's History, Rutgers University, Scholarly Communications Center

These violent confrontations, and the illustration of the potential of labor-instigated revolutionary change demonstrated by the Russian Revolution of 1917, aided the elements of the labor movement and the politicians who sought more moderate reforms in the workplace.

Reform of the electoral process, which increasingly had become controlled by political machines and bosses, was another priority of the progressive agenda. The most famous of these machines, the Tammany Hall Democratic organization headed by William M. "Boss" Tweed in New York City, predated the Progressive Era, with Tweed brought down in 1871 and imprisoned following revelations of extensive corruption by the New York Times and the devastating cartoons of Thomas Nast published in Harper's Weekly, but the Tammany organization and similar machines in other areas continued to flourish well past Tweed's death in prison in 1878.

Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft-blackmailin' gamblers, saloonkeepers, disorderly people, etc.-and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before.

Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft.

George Washington Plunkitt, quoted in William Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall Source: Project Gutenberg

Progressives like Wisconsin Governor and Senator Robert M. La Follette sought to weaken the control of political machines, which often aligned themselves with the interests of big business, and promote wider citizen participation in the electoral process. In several states, particularly in the West, progressive reformers advocated forms of direct democracy, such as authorizing citizen groups through "Initiative and Referendum" to propose new laws or to review the actions of legislatures by obtaining sufficient citizen signatures on petitions to allow voter referenda on specific issues. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to amend its constitution to provide for popular initiative and referendum for enacting and rejecting statewide legislation. See South Dakota Secretary of State. Progressives also successfully lobbied for the direct election of U.S. senators by the voters enacted through the 17th Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1913, replacing the former system by which members of the Senate were elected by each state legislature. Reformers in many states also pushed through systems to allow for the recall of elected officials.

Women also played critical roles in the reform movement, advocating not only their own interest in securing the right to vote but also a wide range of other progressive social issues. The long struggle for women's suffrage began well before the Civil War. In 1848, the first woman's rights convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York. Twenty years later, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony founded their women's rights newspaper, the Revolution, in New York City. The movement had its first real successes, however, after the turn of the century, when in 1912 suffrage referendums were approved in Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon. Finally, on August 26, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutution was ratified by Tennessee, granting women the franchise throughout the country. See History of Women's Suffrage, The Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Leadership, Universityof Rochester

In addition to the right to vote, women also were leaders in other reform causes. Many women formed or joined associations pursuing political reform on specific issues and sometimes providing other social welfare services, such as the "settlement houses" that sought to provide immigrant families with various services, including guidance on proper moral behavior. The abuse of alcohol was the focus of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which succeeded in lobbying for the 18th Amendment to the Constitution mandating the prohibition of the sale of alcohol. The Nineteenth Amendment is adopted and the women of the United States are finally enfranchised. Other associations in which women activists were prominent included the Women's Trade Union League and the National Consumers' League, which worked to educate the public on issues of wages, hours, and working conditions, including through its "white label" awarded to employers whose labor practices met with the NCL's approval for fairness and safety.

While the Progressive reform agenda initiated under Theodore Roosevelt following Democrat Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912, Wilson increasingly was forced, however, to divert attention from domestic issues toward the deteriorating international situation that ultimately would bring the U.S. into World War I. See Woodrow Wilson and the Election of 1912. Progressive principles were evident, however, in the moralism that Wilson brought to the larger issues of world conflict and human rights, such as his idealistic call for the creation of a world body to mediate and prevent future wars. See After Wilson failed to gain the Senate's approval of of the League of Nations, progressive ideas lost favor as more pragmatic interests took hold both domestically and internationally during the prosperity of the early 1920s.

Resources

The Progressive Era: 1900-1918 >> PBS.org

TR, the Story of Theodore Roosevelt >> PBS.org

TR: An American Lion >> HistoryChannel.com

"Boss" Tweed and the Tammany Hall Machine >> David Wiles, University of Albany

American Labor Museum

Educational Tools

The Progressive Era, The United States 1900-1920 >> Henry J. Sage, Northern Virginia Community College

The Progressive Era >> Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

TR, The Story of Theodore Roosevelt:Teacher's Guide >> PBS.org

The Progressive Movement in the 20th Century >> Nebraska Studies

America in the Progressive Era >> Robert Bannister, Swarthmore College

Progressive Movement and the 1920s >> Theodore Roosevelt Center >>

George Burson, Aspen School District

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Progressive Era Resources: Rutgers University

In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is basically about one word democracy that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is Americas way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to secure the blessings of that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government natural liberty.

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individuals right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

Now the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the intensity of conservatisms disagreements with progressivism. For the many Americans who are puzzled and dismayed by the heatedness of political argument today, the message of Timothy Sandefurs The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty is this: The temperature of todays politics is commensurate to the stakes of todays argument.

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when instituted to secure natural rights.

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefurs formulation, spaces of privacy that government chooses to carve out and protect to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.

With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. In Europe, wrote James Madison, charters of liberty have been granted by power, but America has charters of power granted by liberty.

Sandefur, principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, notes that since the 1864 admission of Nevada to statehood, every states admission has been conditioned on adoption of a constitution consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration . The Constitution is the nations fundamental law but is not the first law. The Declaration is, appearing on Page 1 of Volume 1 of the U.S. Statutes at Large, and the Congress has placed it at the head of the United States Code, under the caption, The Organic Laws of the United States of America. Hence the Declaration sets the framework for reading the Constitution not as basically about democratic government majorities granting rights but about natural rights defining the limits of even democratic government.

The perennial conflict in American politics, Sandefur says, concerns which takes precedence: the individuals right to freedom, or the power of the majority to govern. The purpose of the post-Civil Wars 14th Amendment protection of Americans privileges or immunities protections vitiated by an absurdly narrow Supreme Court reading of that clause in 1873 was to assert, on behalf of emancipated blacks, national rights of citizens. National citizenship grounded on natural rights would thwart Southern states then asserting their power to acknowledge only such rights as they chose to dispense.

Government, the framers said, is instituted to improve upon the state of nature, in which the individual is at the mercy of the strong. But when democracy, meaning the process of majority rule, is the supreme value when it is elevated to the status of what the Constitution is basically about the individual is again at the mercy of the strong, the strength of mere numbers.

Sandefur says progressivism inverts Americas constitutional foundations by holding that the Constitution is about democracy, which rejects the framers premise that majority rule is legitimate only within the boundaries of the individuals natural rights. These include indeed, are mostly unenumerated rights whose existence and importance are affirmed by the Ninth Amendment.

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