Posted: April 2nd, 2022

American History essay

Students will construct a well-organized thesis-based essay that integrates your interpretation of the primary sources listed in documents A-J. Students must also supplement these documents with readings from the American Yawp online textbook in order to demonstrate knowledge of the period referred to in the question.

Prompt: Write a word essay – Evaluate the effectiveness of Progressive Era reformers and the federal government in bringing about reform at the national level. In your answer be sure to analyze the successes and limitations of these efforts in the period 1900-1920.

High scores will be earned only by essays that both cite key pieces of evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the period. For this assignment only you may cite sources referring to the documents listed below as well as the chapter from American Yawp for your additional research. The next two essays will require CMS (Chicago Manual of Style) citations which we will go over before then.
20. The Progressive Era | THE AMERICAN YAWP Chapter to get sources

Note that this is the only essay in which primary sources are provided. If you chose to add in outside primary sources, it is completely acceptable. The reason I’ve provided primary sources for you in this assignment is so that you have examples to fall back on of different types of sources to use in future essays.

Essay Structure and Written Communication
• The essay must include an interesting and concise introductory paragraph (Between 6-10 sentences.)
• The introductory paragraph must end with a thesis statement: a single sentence which precisely articulates the argument.
• All body paragraphs must be a sub-argument of the thesis and must stay on topic in relation to the thesis.
• All body paragraphs must contain a topic sentence at the beginning and a concluding sentence at the end.
• All body paragraphs contain well- organized evidence and analysis that never stray from the thesis or sub-argument of the paragraph.
Critical Thinking
• The essay must demonstrate an understanding of the events, people, and/or ideas discussed in the paper in their correct historical context.
• Students will only select evidence that best proves their argument.
• Students will not narrate events. They will synthesize pertinent points and explain how they connect to the main arguments.
• Writers will go beyond presentation of evidence in a narrative way to draw conclusions that are not immediately obvious.
• The writer not only mentions specific dates, places and people, but connects them to his/her thesis.
Accuracy/Validity
• Historically accurate evidence and analysis
• A mixture of BOTH primary and secondary sources
• All evidence is properly cited using the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) (except for essay 1)
• Students will write a paper that demonstrates the ability to use English for written expression at the college level
• Paper is understandable with little grammatical or stylistic mistakes
• The word count is at least 1000 words

Document A

Document B
Source: The Neill-Reynolds Report, June 4, 1906.
Meat scraps were also found being shoveled into receptacles from dirty floors where they were left to lie until again shoveled into barrels or into machines for chopping. These floors, it must be noted, were in most cases damp and soggy, in dark, ill-ventilated rooms, and the employees in utter ignorance of cleanliness or danger to health, expectorated at will upon them. In a word, we saw meat shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables rarely washed, pushed from room to room in rotten box carts, in all of which processes it was in the way of gathering dirt,
splinters, floor filth, and the expectoration of tuberculosis and other diseased workers.

Document C
Source: Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 1909.
Knowing as educators do that thousands of the city youth will enter factory life at an early age as early as the state law will permit; instructed as the modern teacher is as to youth’s requirements for normal mental and muscular development, it is hard to understand the apathy in regard to youth’s inevitable experience in modern industry. Are the educators, like the rest of us, so caught in admiration of the astonishing achievements of modern industry that
they forget the children themselves?

Document D
Source: Speech by Theodore Roosevelt, February 22, 1912.
I believe in providing for direct nominations by the people, including therein direct presidential primaries for the election of delegates to the national nominating conventions… I believe in the election of United States senators by direct vote. Just as actual experience convinced our people that presidents should be elected (as they are now in practice, although not in theory) by direct vote of the people instead of by indirect vote through an untrammeled electoral college, so actual experience has convinced us that senators should be elected by direct vote of the people instead of indirectly through the various legislatures.

Document E
Source: Clayton Antitrust Act, October 15, 1914
That it shall be unlawful for any person engaged in commerce, in the course of such commerce, either directly or indirectly to discriminate in price between different purchasers of commodities which commodities are sold for use, consumption, or resale within the United States, where the effect of such discrimination may be to substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce… That the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce. Nothing contained in the antitrust laws shall be construed to forbid the existence and operation of labor organizations.

Document F
Source: Herbert Croly, New Republic, Nov. 21, 1914.
How can a man of President Wilson’s intelligence possibly delude himself into believing the extravagant claims which he makes on behalf of the Democratic legislative achievement? How many sincere progressives follow him in believing that this legislation has made the future clear and bright with the promise of best things? After every allowance has been made for his justifiable pride… there remains an ominous residue of sheer misunderstanding. Any man of President Wilson’s intellectual equipment who seriously asserts that the fundamental wrongs of a modern society can be easily and quickly righted as a consequence of a few laws… casts suspicion either upon his own sincerity or upon his grasp of the realities of modern social and industrial life.

Document G
Source. Hammer v. Dagenhart, 1918
[Suit was brought] by a father in his own behalf and . . . his two minor sons, one under the age of fourteen years and the other between the age of fourteen and sixteen years, employees in a cotton mill at Charlotte, North Carolina, to enjoin [stop] the enforcement of the act of Congress intended to prevent interstate commerce in the products of child labor. . . . The controlling question for this decision, is it within the authority of Congress in regulating commerce
among the states to prohibit the transportation in interstate commerce of manufactured goods, the product of a factory in which . . . children under the age of fourteen and sixteen years have been employed or permitted to work more than eight hours in any day, or more than six days in any week? In our view, the necessary effect of this act is purely a state authority. Thus, the act in a two-fold sense is repugnant to the Constitution. . . . [I]t not only transcends the authority delegated to Congress over commerce, but also exerts a power as to a purely local matter.

Document H

Document I
Source: W.E.B. DuBois, The Crisis, May 1919.
We are returning from war! The Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant Southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult, for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also. But today we return! . . . This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed is yet a shameful land.

Document J

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