History Homework

 The Chapter 11 section quizzes are due on Thursday December 5
Also, Chapter 11 section 4 guided reading, "Suffrage at Last," is also due on Thursday December 5.


These are the notes from the week of December 3, 2007

The election of 1912

TR had handpicked his successor as president to be William Howard Taft, but after he was elected, he made many Progressives angry with his actions after he was elected in 1908. 

TR went on a long safari to East Africa and when he returned to NY, he became part of the battle between the Progressives and Taft.  TR called for business regulation, welfare laws, workplace protection for women and children, income and inheritance taxes, and voting reform. 

In 1912, TR challenged Taft for the Republican presidential nomination.  Taft won the nomination.

The Progressives in the Republican party formed their own party, called the Progressive Party.  When they asked TR if he was physically ready for a campaign, he replied, “I feel fit as a bull moose!”  The Bull Moose Party became the nickname of the Progressive Party.

 

The election of 1912 had four candidates.

TR ran for the Bull Moose Party and they had a platform of tariff reduction, women’s suffrage, more regulation of business, a child labor ban, an 8-hour work day, a federal workers’ compensation system, and the direct election of senators. 

Taft ran on his record as president.  He had set aside more public lands and brought more antitrust suits in four years than TR had in 7.  he supported the Children’s Bureau, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the Mann Elkins Act of 1910.  This act gave the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) the power to regulate telephone and telegraph rates
 

Woodrow Wilson ran as the Democrat candidate.  He ran on a Progressive platform, but he criticized big business and big government.  As part of his “New Freedom” policy, he promised to enforce antitrust laws without threatening economic competition. 

 

The fourth candidate was Eugene V. Debs, who ran as a Socialist.

 

With the Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt, Wilson won the election.  The Democrats took control of both houses of Congress.

 

Wilson had been the president of Princeton University and then governor of New Jersey.  He believed that one of the main duties of the president was to offer major legislation to Congress, promote it publicly, and help guide it to passage. 

 

Wilson’s first major victory was tariff reduction.  The Underwood Tariff Act of 1913 reduced average tariff rates from 40 percent to 25 percent.  He also signed into law the 16th Amendment, the federal income tax.

Wilson believed that monopolies and trusts led to economic instability and the restriction of free enterprise.  He did not want to create more government to monitor the trusts, but to get rid of trusts altogether.
 

In 1914, Congress passed the Clayton Antitrust Act to strengthen the Sherman Antitrust Act.  The Clayton Act spelled out the specific activities that big businesses could not do.  The act also legalized unions as well as their key weapons: strikes, peaceful picketing, and boycotts. 

To enforce the Clayton Act and set up fair-trade laws, Wilson and Congress created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914.  The FTC was given the power to order firms to “cease and desist” the practice of business tactics found to be unfair. 

 

In 1913 Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act creating the Federal Reserve System.  It divided the country into 12 districts, each with a Federal Reserve bank owned by its member banks.  The system was supervised by a Federal Reserve Board appointed by the President. 

(The Federal Reserve banks were the central banks for their regions – the “bankers’ banks.”  Every national bank was required to become a member of the Federal Reserve bank in its district and to deposit some of its capital and cash reserves in that bank.  Member banks could borrow from the Federal Reserve to meet short-term demands.  This helped to prevent bank failures that occurred when large numbers of depositors withdrew funds during an economic panic.)

 

This system also created a new national currency known as Federal Reserve notes.  The Federal Reserve could now expand or contract the amount of currency in circulation according to economic needs. 

Wilson won the election in 1916 for his second term as president.  He ran on the slogan that he had kept the US out of World War I, which had erupted in Europe two years earlier.