Social worker, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and pacifist leader Jane Addams (1860–1935) organized volunteer efforts in the slums of Chicago in the 1890s and early 1900s, drawing attention to the horrors of urban poverty, and later spearheaded domestic opposition to the United States’ entering World War I (1914–1918). Her famous 1910 book Twenty Years at Hull House exposed to a wide audience the rampant malnourishment, alcoholism, and health problems in American cities. Urban reformers, influenced by Addams, successfully pushed for government programs to clean up the Dickensian conditions in many American slums. Later in life, Addams became a vocal leader of the antiwar movement, an extremely unpopular stance at the time. In recognition of her volunteer efforts and antiwar work, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
Born in Illinois, Addams was the daughter of a local Republican politician who had been an ally of Abraham Lincoln in state politics. Addams was a lifelong Republican and regarded Lincoln and her politician father as personal heroes. Addams and a friend, Ellen Starr, founded Hull House, a community center in Chicago, in 1889. Inspired by a similar experiment in England, the purpose of Hull House was to help struggling families in the city’s worst slums. The center provided medical care, kindergarten classes, and meeting space for clubs. Eventually it expanded to include an art gallery, coffeehouse, gym, library, and museum.
Addams’s work at Hull House made her a national celebrity and a moral authority on the nation’s social ills. As a result of her fame, she became a leader in national efforts to improve prisons and education.
When World War I began, Addams actively campaigned against American entrance into the war. Her efforts made her so unpopular that she was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Horrified by the war, Addams became an assistant to Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) in his campaign to distribute food supplies in Europe, and she later endorsed Hoover in his 1928 bid for the presidency.
1. Although Addams was a Republican, she broke ranks with the party to second the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) at the 1912 Progressive Party convention.
2. Among her many accomplishments is that Addams convinced government leaders in Chicago to create a juvenile court in 1899, allowing children accused of crimes to be tried separately from adults.
3. Addams was the first woman to be granted an honorary degree from Yale.
The period of American involvement in World War II (1941–1945) was a time of enormous sacrifice for the American people. As millions of soldiers fought in Europe and the Pacific, the public was asked to endure unprecedented hardships, including rationing of food, gas, rubber, metal, and other supplies. The experience of the war would leave a profound mark on American society and helped to set the stage for many of the social changes that would accelerate in the 1950s and 1960s.
Widespread mobilization began immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In all, a total of about 15 million men entered the Armed Forces during the conflict, and about 400,000 American service members were killed in Europe and Asia.
At home, the war placed huge demands on American workers. To fill the jobs left vacant by men who joined the Armed Forces, many women entered the workforce for the first time. The famous “Rosie the Riveter” poster is one of the most wellknown icons that reflected the new role women played in society during the war. The demand for labor at factories in the North also fueled the migration of African-Americans out of the South, a demographic shift known as the “Great Migration.”
Indeed, the effect of World War II on race relations was far-reaching. Wartime required whites and African-Americans to work and fight alongside each other to an unprecedented degree. At home, many Americans became painfully aware of the deep contradiction of fighting bigotry abroad while permitting Jim Crow segregation in the United States.
With Europe in ruins at the end of World War II, the United States was left as the most powerful nation on earth. At home, the experience of the war helped plant the seeds of the civil rights and feminist movements, which would gain force in the second half of the twentieth century.
1. Congress allowed women to join the regular US Army for the first time in World War II. Although they did not serve in combat roles, sixteen women were killed in action during the war and eightythree were taken prisoner.
2. The commissioner of Major League Baseball offered to suspend the league for the duration of the war, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) insisted the games be played for the sake of national morale.
3. American troops in World War II were the first generation with access to modern medicine, including blood transfusions and penicillin, resulting in a sharp decrease in noncombat deaths.
The Niagara movement was a series of conventions held by African-American civil rights advocates in the early twentieth century that led to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), now the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights group.
Organized by W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963), the Niagara movement embraced much more aggressive goals than existing civil rights groups, demanding an immediate end to Jim Crow segregation and promising “persistent, manly agitation” against racism.
In July 1905, when the thirty-two delegates to the first Niagara convention met, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was the reigning African-American civil rights leader. Washington, the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had largely accepted segregation as inevitable, and he focused his energies on building strong African-American institutions. For instance, Washington had convinced wealthy white philanthropists to fund hundreds of segregated schools for blacks in the South.
The young DuBois had emerged as a major critic of Washington, whom he derided as the “Great Accommodator” for his acceptance of segregation, in the 1890s. At the first Niagara meeting, DuBois and the other delegates released a statement that did not mention Washington by name but was loaded with veiled criticisms. “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults,” the statement said.
Four years later, after establishing dozens of branches across the country, members of the Niagara movement founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP would define the agenda of the African-American civil rights community for decades to come. Although considered radical in 1905, the Niagara movement’s emphasis on ending segregation would soon become the goal of the mainstream civil rights movement.
1. In a symbolic gesture, DuBois held the second Niagara movement meeting in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of John Brown’s failed 1859 effort to spark a slave uprising.
2. Although initially all Niagara members were black, DuBois invited several whites to join the group at its second meeting. When the NAACP was founded three years later, most of its executive board was white.
3. The Niagara movement took place against the backdrop of a spike in lynchings beginning in the 1890s, an era historians have identified as the worst period of race relations in American history since the Civil War (1861–1865).
In 1907, philanthropist and chocolate tycoon Milton Hershey (1857–1945) unveiled his most famous creation: the Hershey’s Kiss, a small, conical piece of milk chocolate wrapped in foil. One of the most popular candies in American history, the success of the Kiss helped Hershey build what was once the world’s largest chocolate factory in his company town of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Hershey was born on a farm in Pennsylvania and raised in the Mennonite church, a strict pacifist sect. He was apprenticed to a local candy maker after completing the fourth grade, and he started his own caramel company in 1883. In 1900, he sold the caramel company to devote his energies to milk chocolate, which was then a relatively new delicacy that was not widely marketed in the United States. The Hershey’s chocolate bar debuted that year.
For a corporate titan in the age of robber barons, Hershey was an unusual boss. The town of Hershey, which he built, was a model of city planning, meant to create a town where workers would be happy to live, rather than a faceless suburb built on the cheap. Influenced by his religious beliefs, he donated all of his stock in the company to fund educational programs for orphans. Hershey lived in the town for the rest of his life. A modest man, he eventually donated even his house.
Today the Hershey company remains a Fortune 500 company, although it is no longer the world’s largest chocolatier. The town of Hershey is still a tourist attraction, both for the amusement park located there and for the distinctive smell of chocolate that wafts through streets designed by the company’s famous founder.
1. The two main roads in Hershey are called Chocolate and Cocoa Avenues.
2. Hershey and his wife, Catharine, were unable to have children of their own and instead founded a school for orphans.
3. Hershey’s Kisses were wrapped by hand until 1921, when a wrapping machine was introduced. Today’s wrapping machines can cover up to 1,300 Kisses a minute.
The Panama Canal, a fifty-one-mile waterway across the Isthmus of Panama that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, opened to shipping in 1914 after a decade of construction. Although it was not built on United States soil, the Panama Canal was mostly an American project, and its completion remains one of the most dazzling feats of engineering ever undertaken. The United States retained control over the canal until 1999, when it was returned to Panama.
Prior to the opening of the canal, ships sailing from San Francisco to New York had to travel around the southern tip of South America, a long and dangerous voyage. Plans to dig across Panama had been discussed for centuries, and French engineers had attempted to construct a canal as recently as the 1880s. However, the dense Panamanian jungle, deadly diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, and the massive amounts of equipment and personnel required eventually doomed the French project.
For US President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), completing the canal was a major commercial and military goal. With technological improvements, he felt the Americans could succeed where France had failed. However, the government of Colombia, which controlled Panama at the time, was hesitant to allow American involvement. In a controversial move, the United States then launched a scheme to support Panamanian independence in exchange for permission to dig the canal.
The ploy worked. Panama, which had attempted a number of unsuccessful uprisings against Colombia since the 1830s, revolted once more, this time with US support, and became independent in 1903. Within a month, the United States received permission from the new government of Panama to complete the canal. Roosevelt’s meddling in Panama launched a period of far more aggressive American intervention in Latin American affairs. This interventionist policy, known as the “Roosevelt corollary,” would eventually prove extremely unpopular with many Central Americans.
With the political obstacles cleared, all that remained was to construct the canal itself. The remains of the French canal—basically, a giant ditch—formed the starting point for the Americans. Engineers would eventually spend $352 million over ten years to complete the project; more than 5,000 workers died of disease or accident. When it was completed, the canal drastically slashed travel time between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, strengthened US naval power, and signaled the grand scale of American ambitions in the twentieth century.
1. The first ship to traverse the canal, on August 15, 1914, was SS Ancon, a passenger vessel.
2. Until 1999, the United States exercised control over the canal and surrounding areas; Americans in the area were referred to as Zonians.
3. Builders used 102 steam shovels on the canal project, one of which has been preserved by the Smithsonian Institution.
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was one of the most respected playwrights of modern American theater. He wrote seventeen plays, including several scripts that are now considered classics: Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). Miller enjoyed unusual celebrity for an American playwright, in part because of his high-profile stance against McCarthyism during the 1950s and in part because of his infamous, rocky marriage to movie sex symbol Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962).
Born on the Upper West Side of New York City, Miller grew up wealthy. The Great Depression ruined his father’s business, however, forcing the family to move; many of Miller’s plays reflected his family’s traumatic experiences during the 1930s.
Miller put himself through college at the University of Michigan by winning undergraduate theater prizes. His first Broadway play, however, The Man Who Had All the Luck, failed after a handful of performances. Miller’s breakthrough finally came in 1947 with the production of All My Sons, a drama about corruption in the military that garnered two Tony Awards, including Best Play.
The most famous of Miller’s plays, Death of a Salesman, was produced in 1949, and the play’s main character, a traveling salesman named Willy Loman, has become one of the best-known creations in American theater. The play depicts Loman as he becomes increasingly delusional and despondent after failing as a businessman. Often interpreted as a savage criticism of the American Dream, the play ran for hundreds of performances and won both the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize in 1949.
Miller’s next play, The Crucible, was a retelling of the 1692 Salem witch trials, in which twenty suspected witches were executed. The play was as a thinly veiled commentary on the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. In 1956, Miller was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) of Wisconsin, where he famously refused to “name names” of other playwrights involved with the Communist Party.
Also in 1956, Miller married film actress Marilyn Monroe. The marriage was shortlived, however, and the two divorced shortly before Monroe’s death from a drug overdose in 1962. Miller remained active in politics and continued to write, but never matched his creative output of the 1950s; his last hit play was The Price in 1968.
1. Before the success of All My Sons, Miller worked a variety of odd jobs, including one feeding mice used in medical experiments.
2. Before Miller, Monroe had been married to New York Yankees slugger Joe DiMaggio (1914–1999).
3. Active in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam era, Miller was a delegate from Connecticut to the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Often named the best motion picture in American history by movie buffs, Citizen Kane, starring and directed by Orson Welles (1915–1985), tells the story of a dying newspaper tycoon and his mysterious last word, “rosebud.” Upon the release of Citizen Kane in 1941, Welles was immediately hailed as a genius by critics, but the film flopped at the box office. In Citizen Kane, Welles pioneered the use of deep focus, a photographic technique in which everything in a frame remains in focus, and he also employed highly creative sound and editing techniques.
The black-and-white movie begins at the giant, secluded estate of Charles Foster Kane, whose character was loosely based on the real-life publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951). As Kane is dying, reporters hear him mutter the word “rosebud,” setting off a frantic search through his past to discover its elusive meaning.
In the course of their investigation, the reporters, played by members of a New York theater troupe called the Mercury Players, revisit Kane’s rise to fame and fortune amid the cutthroat world of early twentieth-century American business. Although based partially on Hearst, the character of Kane is also based somewhat on Welles himself, a vain, egotistical genius with a self-destructive tendency.
The Wisconsin-born Welles had become famous in 1938, at the tender age of twentythree, for his radio adaptation of the 1898 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds by British author H. G. Wells (1866–1946). The performance was so realistic that it caused widespread panic among radio listeners who missed the disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast and feared that aliens from Mars had actually invaded New Jersey.
Impressed by his success in radio, the movie studio RKO gave Welles an usual amount of freedom to make Citizen Kane however he saw fit. After the commercial failure of the movie, however, Welles struggled with studio bosses for the rest of his career. He directed several more critically acclaimed films, including Touch of Evil (1958), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1952), and Falstaff (also called Chimes at Midnight, 1966), a film based on several Shakespeare plays, but never again was allowed the unfettered freedom to make a movie like Citizen Kane.
1. Hearst was so infuriated by Citizen Kane that he offered the studio $800,000 not to release it.
2. Citizen Kane was originally titled simply American.
3. In the movie, Kane’s estate is called Xanadu; the real-life Hearst had a seaside mansion in California named San Simeon.