Period 7: 1890–1945 unit test

Alfred Thayer Mahan

Court-packing plan (1937)

Schenck v. United States (1919)

Red Scare (1919–20)

Redlining

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments

Insular Cases

Zimmermann Telegram

Open Door Policy

Social Security exclusions

National Origins Act (1924)

Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments

DOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION. Evaluate the extent to which the Progressive movement changed the role of the federal government in the United States from 1890 to 1920. The seven documents below are real primary sources, described here in our own words rather than quoted. The identifying information — author, occupation, publication and date — is accurate and is the basis for the sourcing point. Document 1 — Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890. Riis, a police reporter for the New York Tribune and himself a Danish immigrant, documents the tenement districts of Manhattan with photographs and description: rooms without windows, families crowded into single apartments, sweatshop labor performed at home, and death rates far above the city average. He argues that these conditions are produced by landlords and by the absence of regulation, not by the character of the poor, and that the public has both the power and the obligation to intervene. Document 2 — Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, pamphlet, 1892. Wells, a Black journalist driven out of Memphis after her newspaper office was destroyed, compiles the record of lynchings across the South and shows that the accusations offered to justify them are usually fabricated. She calls for federal action and for organized resistance, noting that state and local authorities are themselves participants. Document 3 — Theodore Roosevelt, public statements during the anthracite coal strike, 1902. Roosevelt, facing a coal shortage as winter approached, summons mine operators and union leaders to the White House and threatens to have the army seize and operate the mines if the operators refuse arbitration. He describes the government's obligation as being to the public interest rather than to either side, a stance he later called the Square Deal. Document 4 — Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, novel, 1906. Sinclair, a socialist, sets out to expose the exploitation of immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards; the passages that drew the most attention instead described diseased animals, contaminated meat and filthy processing conditions. Sinclair later observed that he had aimed at the public's heart and hit its stomach. Document 5 — Report of the New York Factory Investigating Commission, established after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, 1912. The commission, whose members included Frances Perkins, Robert Wagner and Alfred E. Smith, inspects thousands of workplaces and recommends a body of legislation on fire safety, working hours for women and children, and factory sanitation, on the ground that employers will not adopt such measures voluntarily under competitive pressure. Document 6 — The Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified 1913. The amendment authorizes Congress to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the states according to population — reversing the Supreme Court's 1895 decision that had struck down a federal income tax. Document 7 — Woodrow Wilson, statement on signing the Federal Reserve Act, 1913. Wilson describes the new system of regional reserve banks under a presidentially appointed board as placing the nation's currency and credit under public rather than private control, and as a safeguard against the recurring panics that had struck the banking system, most recently in 1907.