What problems exist in the US at the begnning of the 20th centry?

Question

What problems exist in the US at the begnning of the 20th centry?

Answer 1

Pancho Villa till 1923 and WWI followed by WWII then Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and you should know the rest up to Bosnia & Serbia.

The Cold War. Nuclear waste issues. The issues and problems grew bigger and bigger as the century developed. In the early days you had just small Bi Planes and bombs and machine guns were bulky but very deadly. It laid the ground work for WWII which totally mechanized warfare as it is today.

We had a stock market crash in 1929 and a depression soon after that we did not recover from until the end of WWII. It may have ended sooner if not for the war but it put us on strict rationing.

Highway and roadway development as well as Damns, Bridges and literally connecting the nation coast to coast by cables and wires for phones, and driving. The West was open like never before.

Does that help?

Answer 2

Slavery was abolished less than 40 years ago. Black citizens still suffer lynching, segregation, and denial of basic citizenship rights. Women are not allowed to vote. Do some research on labor history, especially the issue of child labor, and you'll discover other big problems.

Answer 3

The turn of the century (1890-1917) was really a period when the relationship between the U.S. Government and its people changed.

The trade union movement was growing stronger in this period, and the government was trying to find its place in this.
Labor wanted the right to organize and to negotiate their work conditions, salary and benefits, such as pay for sick time, vacations, and compensation for workplace injuries. They had to take these things in small doses, starting with a 10 hour work day. That would amount to a 55 hour week, with a half day on Saturday.
The owners didn't want to give it to them, some used hired armed guards to keep order, planted Pinkerton agents in the plants and mines to ferret out the organizers, and were sometimes given assistance by the state militias in breaking strikes, with clubs and fire arms by the way.

With state militias involved, this placed government in the position of supporting the "haves" rather than the "have nots". This is an ethical matter that continues, to a much less violent extent, to this day.

Temperance and Women's rights had been connected together since the latter 19th century. Carrie Nation, someone you've probably heard of for her habit of smashing saloons up with an axe, was a leader in the movement to get women the right to vote.
The rationale for this was that drunkeness was seen as one reason why men sometimes beat their wives. It was also a threat to the welfare of the family, if the husband is a habitual drunkard, and loses his job, the wife has to take in washing to keep clothes on their backs and food in their stomachs.

So, when the amendments for women's suffrage and prohibition came up at the same time, the people who were trying to kill the women's suffrage amendment tied the two together, since they thought then both were sure to fail, but the state legislatures fooled them and ratified both.

The Progressive movement was growing stronger at this time. Some millionaires, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, E.H. Harriman, and J.P. Morgan were controlling much of the nation's wealth. If you have ever heard of the term trust buster this is what it's about. A trust, in this sense, is a combination whereby a person or group of people try to gain complete control over the market in a given field of endeavor. They do this by controlling the manufacturing, distribution and supply of their industry, and by keeping anyone else from giving them any competition. This is harmful to the business community because it denies the "little guy" from the opportunity to compete. It's bad for the consumer because if one person has complete control, then there is no one to offer competitive prices.

As a for instance, if Exxon had complete control of the gas stations in the United States, and they decided to charge $10.00 per gallon for gas, there would be no BP/Amoco there to sell gas for $9.95 per gallon.

What the government, particularly under Theodore Roosevelt and later Woodrow Wilson tried to to, was to break up these combinations into smaller, competing companies. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil was a primary target for this. The thing was, since Rockefeller owned stock in all the smaller companies as well as the big company, when the "trust" was busted up, he made even more money than before, because the price of his stock soared when the news came out.

Prejudice was also a problem. It was during this period that the government began restricting immigration, particularly against persons from East Asia. The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) declared that public services, including schools, railroads and public facilities could be segregated by ethnicity, provided all such facilities were equal. This would be overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas.

The influx of immigrants from Eastern, Central and Southern Europe was causing concern among some Americans. Some of this had to do with religion (principally focused on Jews and Catholics), politics (left leaning political movements like Socialism, Communism and Anarchism), and others the old prejudices against the poor (criminal activity, slum dwelling, poor education).

In these instances, the government did next to nothing. Wilson, praised so often for his liberal views on the treaty ending World War I, had an awful record on his race relations. His comment on a screening of Birth of A Nation was that it was shocking but all too true. In may be due to the fact that he grew up in Reconstruction Virginia, but as a past President of Princeton University, I'd have expected better.

The role of government in this particular issue wouldn't even begin to be addressed until the desegregation of war plants during World War II.

The government was changing it's relationship to the people, trying to find a middle ground between being overly involved, which makes some people nervous and others more dependent, and a minimal involvement which leads to a situation where the 'have nots" have too little and the "haves" have too much.

Answer 4

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