Assignment #9 – The Progressives

Step 1: Watch – “A Dangerous Business” and “A DangerousBusiness Revisited” online

https://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-dangerous-business-revisited/

Step 2: Read – “The Socialist Challenge” from A People’sHistory

http://libcom.org/a-peoples-history-of-the-united-states-howard-zinn/13-the-socialist-challenge

Step 3: Read – “Land of Opportunity,” from Lies MyTeacher Told Me

(file below)

Step 4: Complete the Discussion Board

Discussion Prompt:Please read the following excerpt from The Jungle, by UptonSinclair:“There was another interesting set of statistics that a personmight have gathered in Packingtown—those of the variousafflictions of the workers. When Jurgis had first inspected thepacking-plants with Szedvilas, he had marvelled while he listened tothe tale of all the things that were made out of the carcassesof animals, and of all the lesser industries that were maintainedthere; now he found that each one of these lesser industrieswas a separate little inferno, in its way as horrible as the killingbeds, the source and fountain of them all. The workers in eachof them had their own peculiar diseases. And the wanderingvisitor might be skeptical about all the swindles, but he could notbe skeptical about these, for the worker bore the evidence ofthem about on his own person—generally he had only to hold outhis hand.There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where oldAntanas had got- ten his death; scarce a one of these that hadnot some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much asscrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and hemight have a sore that would put him out of the world; all thejoints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Ofthe butchers and floorsmen, the beef- boners and trimmers, andall those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person whohad the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it hadbeen slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which theman pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men wouldbe criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend tocount them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they hadworn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so thattheir fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who workedin the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors,by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis mightlive for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-poundquarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, thatbegan at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the mostpowerful men in a few years. There were those who worked inthe chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; thetime-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said tobe five years. There were the woolpluckers, whose hands wentto pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for thepelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool,and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their barehands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were thosewho made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too,were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance forblood-poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and itwas very seldom that one could work long there at the pacethat was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have apart of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as theywere called, whose task it was to press the lever which liftedthe dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter,peering down through the damp and the steam; and as oldDurham’s architects had not built the killing- room for theconvenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would haveto stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ranon; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a fewyears they would be walking like chimpan- zees. Worst of any,however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in thecooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitorat a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked intank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were openvats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was thatthey fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there wasnever enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimesthey would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of themhad gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”These were the typical dangers of working in a factory in 1900.You literally could be sent out into the world as hamburger orsausage for people to eat…not to mention all of the bugs, hair,and rat droppings that ended up in the cooking vats as well.During the Progressive Era many of the dangerous and unfairbusiness practices of the Gilded Age were changed for thebetter. After watching “A Dangerous Business,” does it seem asif those changes have remained in place? Why or why not? Whatother thoughts do you have about the film you watched overthe weekend and the business practices of the McWaneCorporation?After reading articles like “The Chain Never Stops” and “FowlTrouble,” or watching the films on Wal-Mart or McWane, does itseem the Progressives were successful? To what extent do youthink the nation was altered by their proposals? How have thesekinds of business practiced continued if the Progressives weresupposed to have fixed this 100 years ago?

Write a response to these questions of from 150 words to 300 words.