Library of Congress.Ī year before, the Triangle workers had gone on strike demanding union recognition, higher wages, and better safety conditions. Photographs like this made real the atrocities that could result from unsafe working conditions. Policemen place the bodies of workers who were burned alive in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire into coffins. Among the onlookers, “women were hysterical, scores fainted men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines.” By the time the fire burned itself out, 71 workers were injured and 146 had died.
PENN FOSTER THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT EXAM ANSWERS WINDOWS
Women lined the rooftop and windows of the ten-story building and jumped, landing in a “mangled, bloody pulp.” Life nets held by firemen tore at the impact of the falling bodies. A rickety fire ladder on the side of the building collapsed immediately. The doors of the factory had been chained shut to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks (the managers who held the keys saved themselves, but left over two hundred women behind). In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caught fire.
Whatever their goals, reform became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name. Reformers sought to clean up politics Black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces, and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Americans had many different ideas about how the country’s development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. The many problems associated with the Gilded Age-the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism-confronted Americans. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.” 1 An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. He wrote, “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,” Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel, his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States.
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