Introduction

The Schlager Anthology of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era provides an essential collection of primary source documents from the transformational period in United States history spanning 1865 through 1920. In this anthology, readers will find classic documents from this period such as Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic defense of wealth inequality (“Wealth”), excerpts from Upton Sinclair’s muck-racking exposé of the meatpacking industry (The Jungle), and Lewis Wickes Hine’s arresting photographs of child laborers. In addition to these well-known sources, this collection provides comprehensive and multicultural coverage of this time, emphasizing a wide spectrum of voices and perspectives. Students will encounter Russian immigrant and anarchist Emma Goldman’s critique of capitalism (“A New Declaration of Independence”), the prose of influential Black progressives Ida B. Wells and Booker T. Washington, and the eloquent words of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, a Paiute Indigenous woman who spoke to white audiences about the mistreatment of her people at the hands of white settlers and government agents. Taken together, the documents presented in The Schlager Anthology of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era reveal an era of American history energized by many voices: some clamoring for change, others for conformity; some advocating social reforms, others arguing for a radical rethinking of society. The chapters that follow feature the voices of Black Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, women, children, capitalists, anarchists, reformers, presidents, lawmakers, and lawbreakers through their speeches, essays, memoirs, letters, literature, advertisements, songs, cartoons, and photographs.

Chapter 1 (“Let us have liberty, law, and justice”: Reconstruction, Post-Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow South) focuses on the triumph and ultimate tragedy of Reconstruction and the white southern reaction to it. The includes Jourdon Anderson’s letter to his former owner. In the letter, Anderson explains what freedom means to him, an emancipated Black man who left the South in 1865 in pursuit of honest wage labor and the ability to protect his family and educate his children—things denied the enslaved. Students will see that Anderson’s letter reflects his specific circumstances as well as themes applicable to many in this period: the right to a decent wage for his labor, education for his children, and the hope of progress for himself and his family. Chapter 1 also features the words of some of the most influential thinkers from Black history, including an excerpt from an 1878 speech Frederick Douglass gave in New York City. The speech exhorted people not to forget the moral reasons why the Civil War was fought, even as the nation pursued peace and reconciliation in the post-war years. “Yes, let us have peace, but let us have liberty, law, and justice first,” stated Douglass. Chapter 1 is rounded out with a number of documents that shed light on this period defined by segregation and Black resistance to it as many white southerners sought to keep freedmen and freedwomen in as close to a state of slavery as possible through means both legal and extralegal, including examples of the Mississippi Black Code, a sharecropper contract, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), examples of Jim Crow Laws, and indelible images such as Thomas Nast’s “Worse than Slavery.”

Chapter 2 (“Here in the shop the machines roar so wildly”: Industrialization, Immigration, and Labor in the City) presents documents that address the rise of industrialization and the immense growth in wealth (for some) made possible by a diverse and large group of workers comprised of immigrants, women, children, and African Americans moving from the South to northern and midwestern cities. Morris Rosenfeld’s “In the Factory,” a song first published in 1898, shows the plight of factory workers whose repetitive labor had a deadening effect, making these male and female operatives akin to the machines they tended: “Oh, here in the shop the machines roar so wildly . . . void is my soul . . . I am but a machine.” Also included in Chapter 2 are excerpts from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, which illuminate the unique challenges women faced during this period, especially women living and working in big industrial cities such as New York City and Chicago. Advertisements for shirtwaists and bicycles, political cartoons lampooning the captions of industry, and important legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act all provide students with insights into this pivotal period in American history that saw an explosion of industry, immigration, labor, and wealth.

Readers might also note connections across chapters. For example, Lucy Parsons was born into slavery, like Jourdon Anderson, but became a radical labor activist. This chapter includes Parson’s 1886 speech “I am an Anarchist,” in which she speaks of workers’ rights to an honest wage, just as Anderson did in his letter to his former master. Many wage-laborers and their middle-class advocates engaged in labor activism, showing that it was not only privileged elites and well-known radicals who defined this era, but the masses—white and Black, male and female, young and old, rich and poor—who contributed to this transformational time period in American history.

Chapter 3 (“To sign away my country”: Westward Expansion and Imperialism) provides a number of sources that address the expansion of the U.S. across the West and the devastating effect this had on Indigenous peoples who were already there. Starting in the 1860s, the federal government began a policy of forced assimilation for Native Americans by removing them from tribal reservations to individual family allotments, and placing Indian children in boarding schools with the stated purpose of “Killing the Indian but Saving the Man,” to paraphrase Richard Pratt in an essay excerpted in the anthology. In addition to Pratt’s speech, this anthology includes the writings of Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin) describing her experience in an Indian boarding school in “The Cutting of My Long Hair,” as well as photographs of Indian children before and after Indian boarding school. These primary sources allow students to contemplate assimilation from the point of view of the federal government’s agent (Pratt) as well those who experienced it. Essays from Nez Percé Chief Joseph, Santee Sioux physician Charles Eastman, and Northern Paiute activist and author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins are also included in this chapter, providing a number of different Native Americans voices so students gain insight into what this period in U.S. history meant for Native peoples as they fought to maintain their identity, land, and traditions even as the federal government actively tried to strip those things from them.

Chapter 3 also presents several documents that address the United States’ imperial ambitions in places like Cuba and the Philippines. With cartoons and speeches addressing the Philippine-American War and the Spanish-American War, including Red Cross founder Clara Barton’s writings from Cuba, students will engage with both the voices of those who endorsed U.S. imperialism, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, as well as those who critiqued it, like the Anti-Imperialist League.

Finally, Chapter 4 (“The strong arm of the government”: The Progressive Era) provides an array of documents shedding light on the Progressive Era, the period known for middle-class reformers who sought to press the federal government to intervene in remedying the ills of the Gilded Age—ills wrought by unregulated industry and capitalism that produced such moral wrongs as child labor, dangerous working conditions, and worker exploitation. Photographs of child workers by Lewis Wickes Hine, excerpts from muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair’s exposé on the exploitative and dangerous conditions in the meat-packing industry, and Black progressive Ida B. Wells’s call for the federal government to stop the lynching of Black men all reveal how an array of progressive reformers sought to shed light on the many moral ills prevalent at this time, and importantly, to press the government to intervene for the good of society. As the various issues addressed by documents from prominent progressive reformer Jane Addams suggest (child labor, women’s right to vote, and the settlement house movement), progressive reformers sought to address social ills including and beyond those caused by unregulated industry. This anthology includes many documents that demonstrate these varied concerns. For example, journalist Nellie Bly went undercover in a mental health facility to expose the abuses there, especially of women, in Ten Days in a Mad-House. Francis Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union focused on the effects of alcohol abuse on families and all of society. Margaret Sanger advocated for birth control for women, arguing that it was a good not only for individual women and families, but for society as a whole—revealing how eugenics influenced many social reformers. For Black Americans, progressive reform meant addressing and seeking justice for ongoing and violent racism directed at them through lynching and segregation. The writings of Black progressives are featured in this chapter to demonstrate this point, including those of Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Through a diverse collection of primary sources, The Schlager Anthology of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era illuminates the immense changes in American life this period witnessed: the rise of big business and industry powered by new technologies; new waves of immigration that provided both the labor needed for growing industries as well as the radical ideologies that fueled workers-rights movements; progressive reforms addressing multiple social ills including women’s rights and child labor; the breaking up of tribal reservations and forced assimilation of Native Americans; and the struggle for racial justice for Black Americans following the abolition of slavery in 1865.

—Jennifer Koshatka Seman