DBQ 3/30

Throughout the period of industrialization treatment of workers, the conditions of work and some of the products themselves were dangerous and unethical. In the late and 1880s through the early 1900s Progressive reformers worked towards improving these conditions and through that, American society. Some of their ambitions were improving working conditions, regulating child labor and protecting consumers. Working conditions in the late 1800s through the early 1900s were not usually not regulated. The workers themselves faced dangerous situations at their factories. Document 1 describes some of the horrific working conditions in a meat-packing factory. Workmen would cut themselves, sometimes cutting their own appendages off, sometimes getting infections bringing them to their death. Other workhouses did not have necessary facilities such as fire escapes or proper care for the workers, like giving them breaks or a lunch hour for example. After these conditions and treatments were exposed by progressives such as muckrakers, reforms were taken into action. One of which is represented by document 4. The document is composed of a list of state actions that affected working conditions. For example, recommendations by the New York State Factory Investigating Commission resulting in new laws creating more sanitary and safer working conditions and Massachusetts passing the first minimum wage law. Child labor was also prominent during this era. Children were hired because their small fingers could fit into the mechanical parts of machinery in factories when they were jammed or things such as spools of thread needed to be changed. The children were mistreated as workers as well, besides the fact that children as young as 4 were being employed. The kids sometimes had to walk miles to the factory, they were not given food or substantial wages and sometimes lost fingers and even died. Progressives like Jane Addams, shown in document 3a, pushed for reforms on child-labor. Addams described times when children died in the factories, while the owner of the factory did nothing to improve the cause, and children sitting on stools in sweatshops pulling "thread after thread" out of the machinery. Jane Addams' actions were not in vain, document 3b shows an excerpt from the First Factory Law of Illinois that prohibited children under 14 to be employed and continually prohibited unless allowed in a legal document by the parent or guardian. Document 5 also shows how Jane Addams and other progressives work was successful by a graph showing the drastic decline of child labor from 1900 to 1920. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were not laws that indicated what was safe for consumers. Food packaging and labeling was not regulated. In the meat-packing industry rats would climb over dead carcasses stored on the floor breeding and leaving feces on the dead cows and pigs for days until the meat was scraped up to be packaged and sold. The meat was also injected with dyes and rubbed with seasoning so it would not look, or smell rotted. Muckraker, Upton Sinclair worked in the meat-packing industry for a time, and wrote a book called The Jungle, that exposed the dangerous and unsanitary conditions in the industry. Sinclair's book lead him to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt, explained in document 2, and forced him to make a promise to reform the industry. President Roosevelt kept his promise to Sinclair by crating a bill which would later become the Meat Inspection Act. Later, the Pure Food and Drug act came about making the mislabeling of food and drugs illegal. The work of Progressives in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s made life in the workforce ethical and safe for the workers, along with the safety of consumers and eventually also expanding democracy. Without the reforms started by the progressives, protests by suffragists and information found by muckrakers industry today would not be as regulated and secure as it is today, maybe not even at all. The effects of the Progressives' work created factories and industries to be what they are today, giving people jobs and producing much needed goods for consumers.