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Summary As troubled blacks resigned themselves to "separate but equal" lives, Progressives planned to benefit the world with social policies, their monument to anti-business overuse of government. Chapter With roots in William James, the clamor for reform accompanied "Progressive" thinking, and the norm of innovative business growth was under fire from those who felt their goals were something to acquire through government. With Prohibition, women's rights, and preservation of the land, Progressive fights were often well-intentioned, but injurious to people in the longer term. It's curious that segregation lasted, even in the North, as "Plessy versus Ferguson" proclaimed thenceforth that "separate but equal" policy is fair. The Negroes lived in colonies of stark despair. An economic path was championed by Du Bois, and Booker Washington remained the stubborn voice of Negro tolerance. The N.A.A.C.P. used legal strategies. The west began to see the preservation issue come alive: John Muir said land was public, but his actions would ensure a loss of benefits to most, with property development curtailed (it's business, not decree of government, that "saved the bison"). So a surge of this Progressive thinking came in '12, the urge for woman's suffrage, healthy food, and temperance. The Socialists were soon to fade, a consequence of World War 1 demands for vital industry. Progressives fought a (normal) inequality of income with the income tax, with Wilson, Taft and "Bull Moose" Teddy Roosevelt all prepared to craft the legislation. Wilson, first a moderate of social thought, became a staunch confederate of moralist reformers, with the income tax, the Federal Reserve, and anti-trust attacks on corporations. Prohibition, a campaign of Women's Temperance, began against cocaine in Coca Cola. Suffrage had the radical and racist views of Margaret Sanger, and the full support of moralists, Jane Addams, and a host of misdirected "scientists." And truly, most Progressives found their best intentions gone astray: the quest for morals ushered Liberty away. |