Introduction

The Emergence of Modern America, the seventh volume of the Encyclopedia of American History, covers the period between 1900 and 1928. During these years, the United States experienced economic, political, and social change that was unprecedented in its history. While its population grew at a slower rate than it had in previous decades, it experienced the greatest period of immigration in its history, with more than 1 million immigrants entering the country every year. Internal movements of men and women from rural to urban areas and especially from the rural South to the urban North made the United States a more urban and more racially complex nation. Economically, the nation grew at an astonishing rate, with mass-production industries leading the way. Its role in the world economy changed as it shifted from being a debtor to a creditor nation. Better nutrition and medical care and the spread of technological innovations, from the electric light to the automobile and radio, promised an improved standard of living, one that was reflected in declining mortality rates and an increase in life expectancy over these nearly 30 years.

These changes were reflected in new cultural, social, and political organizations. The federal government that had a small but important role in everyday life began to directly affect economic sectors, local communities, and individual families. In part, it was the economic chaos of the last three decades of the 19th century that brought a new era of government regulation. High unemployment, sporadic but persistent labor protest, social unrest, and individual bad conduct made some long for a more just society and others to seek increased social control. The merger movement among businesses in the early 20th century and the increasingly visible power of corporations in government sparked the interest of journalists and political organizations alike. Women, who had long fought for equal suffrage, were on the verge of winning the vote, and they increasingly participated in the nation’s political, economic, and cultural life. Progressivism, the most important political movement of the era, drew upon this discontent to forge a diverse and sometimes internally contradictory agenda for national reform. Presidents during these decades, the vibrant Theodore Roosevelt and scholarly Woodrow Wilson, echoed and helped to shape the reform impulse within government. The high culture of literature and art and the mass culture of pulp magazines and Tin Pan Alley expressed both the despair and the optimism of the day.

World War I presented a turning point for a nation on the brink of world leadership in foreign affairs, economic development, and culture. Unlike the chief combatant nations of France, Germany, and Great Britain, the United States remained outside the conflict for the first three years of the war. Its economy grew in response to the demand for war materiel, food, and clothing. Moreover, its war debt was small in comparison to the enormous indebtedness incurred by both the Allied and Central Powers in the war. Entering the war in 1917, the United States suffered fewer casualties than any other combatant nation and emerged from the war as the leader of the world economy. The war had other costs, however. Internal disputes over the wisdom of intervening in a European war, escalating labor conflict, and racial division sparked government regulation and surveillance. Ethnic and racial conflict added fuel to the fire as the superpatriotic societies and the Ku Klux Klan organized throughout the nation and race riots plagued cities during and after the war. The persistent demand to restrict immigration had its victory in new laws that instituted literacy tests and national quotas. Government agencies repressed labor unions, and socialist political organizations were repressed in the Red Scare of 1919-20; peace organizations found themselves similarly targeted. The federal government, which expanded in the course of the war, quickly dismantled wartime agencies by the 1920s, but the war’s impact was not so easily forgotten. The recession of 1921-22 and the agricultural depression of the 1920s had their impact on the nation’s attitudes as well.

In the 1920s, while the United States experienced some measure of economic prosperity, there remained questions about the need for greater social justice and more equal distribution of the nation’s wealth. Conservative presidential administrations under Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover reorganized the executive branch, lowered wartime taxes, and placed the federal government on a conservative fiscal footing, but none of them foresaw what the long-term trends of employment, a farm sector in recession, or the exuberant stock market speculation of the 1920s might do to the American economy. Increased tariffs, the debt crisis in Europe, and heightened international hostilities suggested that the next two decades would bring change as great and traumatic as that experienced by the modern nation that emerged between 1900 and 1928.

Abbott, Grace (1878-1939) social worker, child labor reformer

One of the leading figures in the progressive reform movement, Grace Abbott was best known as the director of the United States Children’s Bureau from 1921 to 1934. She had served in a number of other organizations that prepared her for the directorship. Born in Grand Island, Nebraska, Abbott graduated from a local college in 1898 and went to work as a high school teacher. She did graduate work at the University of Nebraska in 1902-03, and in 1906 attended summer school at the University of Chicago. It was at the University of Chicago where she was exposed to the new field of social work and social reform movements. After returning to teach another year in Nebraska, Abbott moved to Chicago in 1907 in order to take advantage of the opportunities available to women in the fields of social reform. She moved into Hull-House in 1908 and completed her master’s degree in political science at the University of Chicago in 1909.

Abbott became director of the Immigrants’ Protective League in 1908. In this position she became an expert on immigration. She published numerous articles and in 1917 published her first book, The Immigrant and the Community. Her work in the Immigrants’ Protective League attracted the attention of Julia Lathrop, director of the United States Children’s Bureau. In 1917, Abbott joined Lathrop in Washington as director of children’s services for the Children’s Bureau where she fought for the creation of the first federal child labor law, the Keat-ing-Owen Act. After the U. S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart, Abbott returned to Chicago and reestablished the Immigrants’ Protective League. As Julia Lathrop’s handpicked successor, Abbott returned to Washington, D. C., as the second director of the Children’s Bureau.

As head of the Children’s Bureau, Abbott oversaw the implementation of the maternity and infancy protection legislation, known generally as the Sheppard-Towner

Act. Sheppard-Towner established a federal-state partnership to develop state programs to promote women’s and infants’ health. The new legislation arose out of the reaction to the large number of babies who died in infancy and to the medical problems that mothers suffered in childbirth. Abbott actively lobbied governors and state legislatures to develop state programs that shared in the federal program. In addition, she reached out to women’s organizations in the states, hoping to convince them to lobby their state governments in favor of the programs. Abbott also lobbied on behalf of a child labor amendment to the Constitution. When the Supreme Court overturned a second child labor law in 1922, advocates like Abbott turned their attention to a constitutional amendment that would outlaw child labor. The proposed amendment made it through Congress, but it failed to gain the ratification from the required number of states.

In 1927 Abbott began to face health problems that would plague her until her death. She was forced to take a break from the Children’s Bureau in 1927 and again in 1931 to recover from tuberculosis. She resigned as director of the Children’s Bureau in 1934 and returned to teach at the University of Chicago. She died from cancer in 1939.

Further reading: Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

—Michael Hartman