America’s History: Printed Page 666
| MAKING CONNECTIONS | Recognize the larger developments and continuities within and across chapters by answering these questions. |
ACROSS TIME AND PLACE Returning to Chapter 17, review the strategies and goals of the labor and agrarian organizations that flourished in the 1880s (“Labor Gets Organized”). The People’s Party embodied many of those ideas. Imagine that you are a journalist interviewing a former People’s Party leader in 1917. To what extent might he or she have said that progressives had, after 1900, fulfilled the agrarian-labor agenda? To what extent might he or she criticize progressives for failing to achieve important reforms? What do you conclude from this about the similarities and differences of populism and progressivism?
VISUAL EVIDENCE Study the cartoons “Political Purity”; Reining in Big Business; and “The Finishing Touch.” One depicts a woman’s dressing room; two depict combat among men. What do these cartoons tell us about the ways that ideals of masculinity and femininity were deployed in political campaigns? How might you use these cartoons to explain the challenges that women faced in winning suffrage during the Progressive Era? (For a counterpoint, you may also want to examine John Sloan’s drawing about the Ludlow Massacre and compare its depiction of masculine violence to the other three cartoons.)