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5 TH~ "L~ISUR~ PRODL~m· AT TH~ TURn 0~ TH~ C~nTURY •'looPING THE LOOP' AMID SHRIEKS OF STIMULATED TERror or dancing in disorderly saloon halls are perhaps the natural reactions to a day spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling through the distracting streets," wrote Jane Addams in 1909, "but the city which permits them to be the acme of pleasure and recreation to its young people, commits a grievous mistake." Addams was no reactionary. She was an advocate for women's suffrage, an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a defender of immigrant America and beleaguered workers, and a founder of the helping profession of social work. Yet she expressed alarm at ways in which commercial interests were shaping mass entertainment, from amusement parks to budding movie theaters and popular music. She had no quarrel with having fun or finding joy in life. Like other turn-of-the-century reformers known as "progressives ," Addams worried, nevertheless, about a leisure problem that reflected a broader setofsocial, economic, and politicalthreats to America-threats such as the monopolistic concentration of wealth, the exploitation of the working class, political graft and corruption, and eroding moral values. To rescue the victims of industrialization and urbanization, to reinvigorate the nation's traditional democratic ideals, and to restore America's moral center , progressives such as Addams forged one of the most important reform eras in U.S. history, lasting from the 1890s through World War I. Although they accomplished much that was significant and substantial, they built on shifting sands, including those of popular culture, where social and economic outsiders continued to produce and revel in the "Coney Island stuff."1 Asense of crisis in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth galvanized progressive reformers. The United States seemed at a turn- 144 WITH AMUSEMENT FOR ALL ing point as dangers proliferated from many sources. Industrialization was one source, crea~ing huge disparities in wealth, triggering class conflict, producing a monied elite with a "public-be-damned" mentality, and fostering powerful economic combinations. To challenge these massive corporations , whether to regulate them or to protect the ideal of economic competition, coalitions of reformers rallied to a "new politics" dedicated to protecting the "general welfare" and the "public interest." A related danger was apparent in the burgeoning cities, where urban bosses ran corrupt machines via graft and favoritism and a flood of new immigrants crowded into impoverished neighborhoods and overwhelmed urban services . During the forty years after 1880, approximately 23 million immigrants came to the United States; by the end of that time, foreign-born individuals constituted, for example, 40 percent of New York City's population . In Chicago, by 1890, roughly four of five residents had at least one immigrant parent. Reformers dealt with these issues on a variety of fronts and with varying strategies. Some who hoped to broaden the democratic process backed such political changes as direct primary laws, direct election of senators, voter recall of officials, and women's suffrage. Others with a more elitist bent favored "management" in place of "politics" and emphasized the need for credentials, expertise, and social efficiency. Some, such as Jane Addams, sought to aid disadvantaged groups by battling inequities and injustices; others worried more about controlling the "dangerous classes." But most agreed that the spread of mass entertainment presented a host of moral dilemmas that demanded attention. Progressives tended to define issues in moral terms. The journalist William Allen White recalled the "profoundly spiritual" aspects of progressivism , which he described as "an evangelical uprising." Another reformer, Frederic Howe, remembered that "early assumptions as to virtue and vice, goodness and evil remained in my mind long after I tried to discard them." This progressive-style evangelism attested to the heavy influence on many reformers of mainline Protestantism, particularly its Social Gospel messages urging believers to respond, like the Bible's Good Samaritan, to the needs of workers, new immigrants, and the poor.2 Although the label progressive connoted a forward-looking perspective (which, indeed, characterized the reformers' views on, say, government's activist role), progressives tended to be cultural traditionalists, always more at home in the Victorian moral world from which they came. "Designate me an old fogey," wrote the California senator Hiram Johnson to his sons after reading that several thousand women had attended a boxing match in 1919, "but really, I prefer the womanhood of old to the non-child-bearing, smoking, drinking, and neurotic...

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