The Progressives

Assignment #9 – The Progressives 

Step 1: Watch – “A Dangerous Business” and “A Dangerous Business Revisited” online 

Step 2: Read – “The Socialist Challenge” from A People’s History 

Step 3: Read – “Land of Opportunity,” from Lies My Teacher Told Me 

Step 4: Complete the Discussion Board Discussion Prompt:  Please read the following excerpt from The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair: “There was another interesting set of statistics that a person might have gathered in Packingtown—those of the various afflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected the packing-plants with Szedvilas, he had marvelled while he listened to the tale of all the things that were made out of the carcasses of animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintained there; now he found that each one of these lesser industries was a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killingbeds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in each of them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wandering visitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could not be skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence of them about on his own person—generally he had only to hold out his hand. There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had got- ten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef- boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the woolpluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood-poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they  were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not built the killing- room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpan- zees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,— for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the 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!” These were the typical dangers of working in a factory in 1900. You literally could be sent out into the world as hamburger or sausage for people to eat…not to mention all of the bugs, hair, and rat droppings that ended up in the cooking vats as well. During the Progressive Era many of the dangerous and unfair business practices of the Gilded Age were changed for the better. After watching “A Dangerous Business,” does it seem as if those changes have remained in place? Why or why not? What other thoughts do you have about the film you watched over the weekend and the business practices of the McWane Corporation? After reading articles like “The Chain Never Stops” and “Fowl Trouble,” or watching the films on Wal-Mart or McWane, does it seem the Progressives were successful? To what extent do you think the nation was altered by their proposals? How have these  kinds of business practiced continued if the Progressives were supposed to have fixed this 100 years ago?

Link of the video- https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-dangerous-business-revisited/

Link of the article- http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/13-the-socialist-challenge

Link of the Chapter 7 summary- https://www.litcharts.com/lit/lies-my-teacher-told-me/chapter-7-the-land-of-opportunity