Reformers
Reflecting on your thoughts and our discussion last week about the potentially appealing aspects of the machine system for urban residents (especially immigrant and working class ones), how did the authors of this week’s reading—the social reformers—intend to meet these desires/needs? What systems and cultural practices are necessary to realize these hopes and visions? Feel free to be as specific as possible, concentrating and elaborating on just one or two examples.
Student Reflection 1:
Machine politicians appealed to urban voters by presenting an approachable and efficient system of politics that yielded direct benefits, especially for those in need. Social reformers recognized that many urban voters’ priorities were focused on a better quality of life, and having the time or energy to concern themselves with the broader political landscape was often a luxury. For example, for workers whose lives were occupied with finding housing in the city and taking care of their children, passing new legislation on unrelated issues would not be an immediate priority.
While reformers sought to revitalize democratic ideals, they also adapted their approach to the rapidly changing capitalist society of the time by balancing the relationship between businesses, laborers, and consumers. To achieve widespread political form, the first step was to introduce common welfare, where government changes would benefit more than just those who had wealth and power. Making democratic participation more inclusive involved creating venues where people could exchange assistance. Establishments like Hull House supported those whose social positions were still in flux. Lobby groups formed to take issues to the higher levels of government instead of being satisfied with a temporary fix on a local scale. For example, providing someone with a job or food would be immediate welfare, but for more official reform, groups like the Women’s Civic League campaigned for national legislation for food regulation and a juvenile court system. In the long term, urban residents would see consistent improvement in their lives.
Reformers recognized that urban populations would be interested in extending their political participation from casting a seemingly meaningless vote to directly making change in positions of power. The majority of surveyed workers in DuBois’s study were working class laborers who often felt that the government did not represent the ordinary voters. Redistributing the balance of vote weight between different neighborhoods in a city to more accurately reflect population distributions provided residents more incentive to vote. While offering direct appointment to offices would violate the reformers’ anti-corruption ideals, building a more direct platform to local citizens was effective in gathering supporters to lobby for change.
Although there was the pressing issue of the middle-class theory of reform, where the groups that dominated reform movements weren’t necessarily the ones who needed the most change, urban society still underwent significant change with focused investment in more durable forms of reform.
[by an MIT student, reproduced with permission]
Student Reflection 2:
One of the major issues that reformers identified in the rapid growth of cities was the expansion of both extremes of wealth. Especially in George’s “Progress and Poverty,” he recognized that before urbanization, rich men and poor men existed, but while nobody made an “easy” or “good” living, neither was anybody a beggar. In contrast, the most advanced cities of the day, New York in particular, was littered with the destitute, surrounded by despair and misery, even as the elite consolidated unimaginable wealth.
Throughout this era, reformers differed significantly in the approaches to uplift the lowest in society. Some reformers believed in private welfare, such as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, who started Hull House: the most famous of settlement houses that served as hubs of education, childcare, book clubs, and integration for immigrants. These settlement houses were outlets for people to fulfill their desires to raise up the greater good, to bring neighborhoods together despite differences in race, sex, condition, language or culture. These reformers recognized that many of the ills of the destitute were rooted in social and educational privileges. By embracing a philosophy of tolerance, these reformers hoped that the institutions they provided could inspire the heterogeneity in cities to start thinking of themselves as a collective human race with mutual interests, to form a cohesive force to establish legislation to fight against the dividing forces of industrialization.
This belief in education and skills as a form of uplifting the lowest class was also reflected in Du Bois’s writing. He believed that the root cause of discrimination, disproportionately high poverty and living conditions, was due to a disparity in the level of training. A lack of skills and trades amongst the black population allowed the incoming waves of white immigrants to continually outcompete blacks for jobs, perpetrating a vicious cycle as blacks were forced to live on poorer wages, have less people in the community inspire or teach the next generations, and beating the will to fight for better conditions out of them since it was all they were used to.
This deep rooted issue needs massive cultural and social shifts. While the ultimate goal is legislation to create safety nets, welfare, and fairer working conditions, the power of politics resides in the populace. A natural product of the division and heterogeneity in cities is extreme difficulty of empathy—it is exceedingly hard to see people of other ethnicities, colors, languages as fellow workers, not competition in the grueling environment. Only once a culture of tolerance and civic responsibility (such as the one promoted in Hull House) is established, can there be enough political inertia to enact the changes necessary to block the prevalent exploitation and destitution of the lowest class.
[by an MIT student, reproduced with permission]
