Essay about The Pendleton Act

More and more women were becoming teachers during this period, and it was continuously being associated as a female entity. Women were allowed to engage in certain social affairs. Although this did not include fighting for the reduction of labor hours or the elimination of child labor, it did encompass helping the poor, which was the immediate motive behind establishing Hull House. Reaching out to women who needed a place to stay, or workers who could not afford to live in the crowded and unsanitary apartments that usually stuffed several families in one room, could find shelter in Addam?s creation. However, Addams worked extended beyond the ?private sphere? in too many areas to ignore. Her struggle led to many social and political reforms; she took a very radical political stance for her time, breaking her association from the standard middle class women.

By starting the tenement houses in Chicago through the Hull Houses, Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had already begun their journey into the public sphere. Through opening the tenement houses and allowing people to see them and come live in them helped the two women make a name for themselves, with the more well-known woman of the pair being recognized for much more, was Jane Addams herself. Addams saw rights and freedom for women as a “perfectly possible” thing to attain, as she was optimistic and very assertive on her way to work for women’s equality and rights. The optimism that Jane Addams had was not without a price to pay on her part, as there were many negatives that had to be dealt with along the way like setbacks in acting, legislation, supporters, etc.7

However, almost all of the populist party could be put under one label: Debtors. The farmers involved sought to regulate prices and make them affordable, while industrialists sought to regulate the hours in a work day. The people were left in great debt and hoped that these actions may soon begin to lift the economic depression that they were facing. The main idea of the populist party was to unite the common and poor people so that they may gain power as a group, and allow the aforementioned group to gain and retain more power and say within the operations and actions of the government.

The period between 1870 and 1900 was a time to change politics. The country was for once free from war and was united as one nation. However, as these decades passed by, the American farmer found it harder to live comfortably. Crops such as cotton and wheat, once the cash crop of agriculture, were selling at prices so low that it was nearly impossible for farmers to make a profit. Improvements in transportation allowed larger competitors to sell more easily and more cheaply, making it harder for American yeoman farmers to sell their crops. Finally, years of drought in the Midwest and the fall of business in the 1890s devastated the farming community. Most notably, the Populist Party arose to fight what farmers saw as the issues affecting

The Populist Movement began in the late 1800s with the Farmer’s Alliance. The Farmer’s Alliance aimed to improve economic conditions, including low agricultural prices and loss of land as a consequence (Foner, 510). In the 1890s, the Farmer’s Alliance grew into the Populists or the People’s Party. The evolved party appealed to a larger audience, specifically the working or “producing” classes (Foner, 511). Two of the Populists’ main focuses were lower mortgage interest rates and the

While the Populists were able to inspire some more government involvement in the economy with their currency concerns, the Progressives both reformed the government into a less corruptible system and called for more government participation in reducing the growing power of certain industries. Similarly, although the Populists managed to bring attention to the plight of the workers, the Progressives, with their wider range of supporters due to their broader appeal, was able to pass workplace regulations and to organize institutes to help foreigners assimilate into American society. Finally, as the Populists failed to convince the nation to address most of their most basic beliefs and goals, the Progressives succeeded in obtaining government recognition of their side of a long-standing racial dissension. In conclusion, historians are correct in believing that the Populists were less successful than the Progressives in attaining their goals because of the vast differences between the two results of the groups’ reform

Jane went to Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia in the fall of 1882. Later in the 1880’s Jane traveled to Europe where she visited a settlement house by the name of Toynbee Hall. Settlement houses were the country’s way of providing community services to the poor. Addams and her friend, Ellen Gates Starr, the Hull House in the lower income section of Chicago in 1889. Most of the residents who lived there were from countries such as Italy, Russia, Poland, Germany, Ireland, and Greece. Hull House provided a day care center for children of working mothers, a community kitchen, and visiting nurses. Addams and her staff gave classes in English literacy, art, and other subjects. Hull House also became a meeting place for clubs and labor unions. Most of the people who worked with Addams in Hull House were well educated, middle-class women. Hull House gave them an opportunity to use their education and it provided a training ground for careers in social work.

Although Addams has done many impeccable things, one of her most distinguishable actions was co-founding Hull House with her friend Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Hull House is a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, inspired by the Toynbee Hall she visited in England. Opening Hull House, Addams expected the settlement to be a place where the poor could attend cultural programs, such as art, however her ideas changed as she explored the city and got to know her neighbors. While walking down the streets of Chicago, the reformer noticed all the poor immigrants residing in the cramped and dirty tenements, which led to her newfound passion to help

These events and conditions were the reason behind the foundation of the populist’s party and their platform. They declared “ that this republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for the nation.”(Populist party platform, 1892) They believed that they would be able to correct the wrong and bring back the power of the government to the people, and put end to the poverty through the platform they issued. Through the platform, they provided solutions to both economical and political problems. To begin with, they called for creating unions to defend the producing class and the labor to protect them and giving them back their stolen rights. Also, they declared that “ wealth belongs to him creates it” and any other sources of income are counted as robbery. In addition, the populist’s party regarded the railroads as a public corporation not to be owned privately to prevent any monopoly or increase in the costs to protect these poor farmers from exploitation. They called for the a safe, flexible, national currency to be issued by the government as well as free coinage of silver and gold in a ratio of 16:1. Regarding the taxes they demanded it would not exceed the 2 percentile per year and it should be graduated according to the income, so the rich

This can be blantely obvious through the ever growing rift between the rich and poor classes. Henry George, a journalist-author who advocated for social reform through the imposition of a single, universal tax, stated “the gulf between the employed and the employer is growing wider” in his 1879 published work Progress and Poverty (Document A). The industrialization of this era was dominated by John D. Rockefeller’s horizontal integration of the oil industry and Andrew Carnegie's vertical integration of the steel industry. Horizontal integration was the technique of taking over and monopolizing an industry though consolidating smaller competitors while vertical integration aimed to own all phases of manufacturing from mining to market for efficiency and quality control. However, through this strive for the domination of industry came trusts. Trusts were created between companies who agreed upon what a beneficial asset was. James B. Weaver, the presidential candidate of the Populist party in 1892, stated “The main weapons of the trust are threats, intimidation, bribery, fraud, wreck and pillage” in his A Call to Action speech regarding trusts (Document E). Prior to this speech, it was perspectives, such as this, that led to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1892. The captains of industry were so self interested that they also had little regard for the skill level and residency of workers as they simply sought to have cheap labor. This came in the form of wage cuts or the employment of immigrants. A wage cut of ten percent was laid upon the railroad workers of Baltimore and Ohio in 1877 and it resulted in strikes spreading nationwide across the railroad line. Later on in 1894, the Pullman strike occurred also due to wage cuts. As for immigration, many of these new immigrants came from eastern and southern europe

The late 1800s was an era marked by outcry by farmers towards Government and corporations for their lack of understanding towards the agrarian cause. As farmers began to have more obstacles put in the way of their economic prospects, they began to set their sights on the political stage as a last ditch effort to make their lives easier. As unrest grew, the Populist party was born to voice complaints on a political scale.

At the end of the 19th century the United States were in a time called “The Gilded Age”, coined by Mark Twain; a time of mass immigration, Western settlement, and industrialization. Out of these times emerged a political party named the Populist party, later changed to the People’s party. This party stood for the working man, like farmers and factory laborers. Though this party meant well, it did not last long. Surviving until 1896, the Populist party eventually merged with the Democratic party. With this being said, the Populist party was a short lived dream and failure.

Jane Addams and her colleague, Ellen Gates Starr, founded the most successful settlement house in the United States otherwise known as the Hull-House (“Settlement” 1). It was located in a city overrun by poverty, filth and gangsters, and it could not have come at a better time (Lundblad 663). The main purpose of settlement houses was to ease the transition into the American culture and labor force, and The Hull-House offered its residents an opportunity to help the community, was a safe haven for the city, and led the way through social reform for women and children.

The class welfare was manifested in the county when the labor unions rose. Some of the labor unions that were developed include the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the international workers of 1905. There was also the development of the political parties that advocated for the minimum wages, reduced hours of working and the conditions of working that were very safe. They also initiated the factories that used machines instead of human labor and the hard labor done by women and children was suspended. During the same period, the federal government in America gave subsidies to the railroads through the provision of the free land. The courts became hostile to the laws on the social welfare such as the Hamer versus

Due to “…falling agricultural prices and growing economic dependency” (Foner 636) in the mid-nineteenth century, farmers in the South began to face inevitable economic uncertainty. Farmers, both white and black alike, were thrown into poverty due to sharecropping and the fall of the price of cotton, and many faced the fear of losing everything they had due the inability to pay bank loans. Believing that their situation was caused by “…high freight rates…excessive interest rates for loans…and the fiscal policies of the government” (Foner 636), disgruntled farmers hoped to better their lives and conditions through the founding of the Farmers’ Alliance in the 1870s. However, by the 1890s, the Alliance transformed into what became known as the Populist Party. Keeping their roots in mind, the Populists sought to end what they considered political corruption and economic inequality that arose during the Reconstruction. In order to do so, they proposed “…the direct election of U.S. senators, government control of currency, a graduated income tax, a system of low-class public financing…the right of workers to form labor unions…[and a] public ownership of the railroads” (Foner 638). In addition to their propositions, the Populists were considered radical due to their embracement of science and technology, their belief that the