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In the early 1900s, business continued to expand, labor conflicts increased, racial groups advanced, and there were more marvelous inventions. In 1903, for example, the Wright brothers had the first airplane flight on the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur and Orville Wright were actually from Dayton, Ohio, where a fascinating museum stands devoted to innovations in air travel.
A bicycle craze hit the nation in the 1890s, and the Wrights started making and selling bicycles. Then they began to focus on designing a bicycle-powered airplane:<ref>http://www.first-to-fly.com/History/Wright%20Story/wright%20story.htm</ref>
Yankee ingenuity continued. Within five years Henry Ford was producing his first "Model T" automobiles. He developed the assembly line and the use of interchangeable parts to speed production, reduce costs, and double output. Henry Ford also believed in sharing his enormous profits with his workers, increasing their wages to record high levels. He felt they could become his best customers if they were paid more. Ford was an example of a businessman who had almost no original ideas of his own, but improved and used the ideas he learned from others. There is nothing wrong with that, and unfortunately many do not achieve their potential because they are unwilling to use someone else's good idea.
The labor movement grew, while continuing to suffer from radical infiltration. "Big" Bill Haywood was a miner and a violent unionist who founded Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. He was involved in many labor disputes, including textile strikes in New Jersey. He was eventually convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 (see its discussion below) and, while he was out of jail pending appeal of his conviction, he fled to the newly communist Soviet Union after it was founded near the end of World War IRussia in 1918.
A split developed in the views of the African American community about how to advance. W.E.B. Du Bois took a more aggressive and militant approach to advancement than Booker Washington had. In 1905 Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement, which demanded full citizenship rights for African Americans. In 1909 he founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),<ref>http://www.naacp.org/about/</ref> which became very influential in the mid to late 1900s in advocating for civil rights.
In 1915, in ''Guinn v. U.S.'', the U.S. Supreme Court helped African Americans by striking down "grandfather clauses" that interfered with voting by descendants of slaves. The Court based its ruling on the 15th Amendment, which you should recall guaranteed the right to vote regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
In the last lecture we discussed imperialism, and mentioned how Teddy Roosevelt became a hero in the Spanish-American War. He is also a modern-day hero to some, such as Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and Teddy Roosevelt is the only modern figure to have his face carved in Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Let's now look now at this important American President.
== Teddy Roosevelt ==
Vice President Theodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt was only 42 years old when President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Teddy Roosevelt thereby became the youngest President in American Historyhistory. Athletically fit and vigorous, he brought an exciting level of aggression in leading America. He was a "progressive" but also an imperialist, pushing for a a strong foreign policy. As President Andrew Jackson had done over 70 years earlier, Teddy Roosevelt expanded the power of the presidency with a view that he should take whatever action he thought promoted the public good, as long as it was not expressly prohibited by law or the Constitution. "I did not usurp power," Teddy Roosevelt declared, "but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power."<ref>http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tr26.html</ref>
Roosevelt became famous as a "trust buster" for requiring the dissolution of a huge railroad conglomerate in the Northwest. The Roosevelt Administration took the case of ''Northern Securities Co. v. U.S.'' to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1904 that the Sherman (Antitrust) Act required breaking up the railroad trust. This decision had the effect of "resurrecting" or reviving the Sherman (Antitrust) Act, and Roosevelt used it to break up other monopolies. His popularity soared as a result, because newspapers and the common man loathed the big corporations.
The breaking up of monopolies was part of Roosevelt's approach that he called the "Square Deal," which was named after his negotiation of settlements between striking workers and big corporations, giving a "square deal" to both sides in the agreement. He campaigned in 1904 by taking credit for treating the owners and workers equally in resolving a nasty coal miner's strike in 1902, giving them both a "square deal."
Roosevelt was neither a liberal nor a conservative, and after he was serving as president he even left the Republican Party to start a new political party based on his own personality. He had his own "maverick" style similar to that of the recent Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Roosevelt approved many new regulations and assistance programs. He signed the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which gave federal assistance to irrigate Western land for farmers and ranchers. He signed into law the Hepburn Act of 1906, which strengthened federal regulation of railroads by increasing the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Later, in 1910, the Mann-Elkins Act empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to suspend any increases in rates by railroads in shipping goods. The Act also extended the ICC's authority to include communications. The political support for this increased regulation was so broad that it passed by the huge margin of 50-12 in the U.S. Senate.
Roosevelt died at the age of 61.
== Social trends and Court decisions ==
Americans were migrating to cities in large numbers in the late 1800s, transforming the nation from a predominantly farming society into an urban one. Between 1870 and 1920, the population of Americans living in cities increased over five-fold, from 10 million in 1870 to 54 million in 1920. Cities having more than 500,000 people increased from 2 to 12; cities having over 100,000 residents grew from 15 to 68; and for the first time (in 1920) more than half the American population lived in communities having more than 2,500 people. Part of this influx was due to the "New Immigration," when 26 million Europeans came to the United States prior to the curtailing of immigration in 1924. The "New Immigration" was more from southern and eastern Europe, which was more Catholic and Jewish, rather than from the more Protestant northern Europe as before. A decline in the profitability of farming also led to migration to cities, as the children of farmers looked for better work and income in urban areas.
Congress passed laws to address the plight of farmers, who remained politically powerful. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 provided for the establishment of Boards to provide loans to farmers and ranchers. It was expanded later to include assistance to the buyers of homes.
In 1903, the Women's Trade Union League was founded to unionize women workers, because they had been excluded from the AFL at its union meeting in Boston. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a State law limiting the number of hours women could work, in the case of ''Muller v. Oregon''. The Court ruled ''in favor of'' the regulation of women's working conditions even though it had previously ruled ''against'' the power of States to regulate men's working conditions. Specifically, in 1905 the Supreme Court invalidated a state regulation of men's working conditions (maximum hours that can be worked), by holding that it violated freedom of contract (free enterprise) under the Constitution. That was the case of ''Lochner v. New York'', also known as "''Lochner'' doctrine." This ruling stood for decades and became an obstacle in the 1930s to the "New Deal" of President Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted many new regulations in response to the Great Depression.
'''Debate: Should government be able to establish different working conditions for women as compared to men? How about in the case of working conditions that may be harmful to pregnancy or potential pregnancy?'''
He found his answer in the Darwinism that gripped England and Germany. World War I was, simply put, survival of the fittest by those who had come to believe that only the fittest should survive. It was application of Darwin's theory to mankind itself.
Upon his return to the United States, Bryan felt a calling to prevent the spread of this misguided theory to American. He supported State laws against teaching, to impressionable children in school, that man had evolved from lower life forms. Tennessee had such a law, and the ACLU challenged it in the name of schoolteacher John Scopes. William Jennings Bryan offer offered his formidable legal talents to the State of Tennessee to defend the law. The ACLU retained Clarence Darrow, the leading criminal defense attorney and believer in evolution. This became the legal fight of the century, Darrow (and Darwin) v. Bryan.
So many people flocked to watch the trial that it was often held outside the courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. An atheist (and bigot) H.L. Mencken, the leading journalist of the first half of the 20th century, traveled from Baltimore to give his "spin" (bias reporting) on what happened. Mencken's account misled the world into thinking that Darrow (and Darwin) had won. In fact, the opposite occurred: Bryan won, Darrow's client Scopes was convicted, and the Tennessee law remained in effect for nearly another 50 years. Tennessee has remained conservative to this day; Tennessee voted against its own liberal resident Al Gore for President in 2000, giving George W. Bush the national election, and in 2008 presidential candidate John McCain defeated Barack Obama by 15 percentage points there, despite Obama winning by 7 points nationwide.
Bryan and the State of Tennessee objected to the textbook being used by Scopes in the public school in the town of Dayton. The textbook taught that the Piltdown Man was the "missing link" proving that man had somehow evolved from apes. Years later the Piltdown Man was proven to be a complete fraud perpetrated by evolutionists. The textbook was also racist in teaching that whites had evolved to a higher life form than blacks.
