Chapter 12 sect 3 La. Hist

Chapter 12 sect 3 La. Hist

Louisiana Enters the Twentieth Century

As Louisiana entered the twentieth century, the state and its people faced many challenges. Most people still lived in rural areas where modern conveniences were unknown and decent roads were thirty years in the future. New Orleans was by far the state’s largest city. While rural areas remained remote and life went on much as it had throughout the nineteenth century, some small areas of progress were made. Issues like lack of passable roads, poor drainage, and primitive water supplies often went unchallenged in rural areas. In a city the size of New Orleans, where more than 200,000 people lived close together, issues like these were not only a nuisance but actually dangerous. In order to meet these challenges, some citizens adopted a set of reforming ideas that went under the description of progressivism. 

Multiple Choice

One major problem faced by Louisiana as it entered the twentieth century was that

• Rural Areas still lacked Modern Convivences like electricity.

• People were becoming too educated

• New Orleans's population was shrinking

• Louisiana was still not a state

Progressive Reformers

The progressive movement had many facets, but in general terms, progressives believed government could and should be used to help address social problems like poverty, illiteracy, and improving the conditions for all workers. Progressives opposed the kind of politics practiced by the New Orleans Ring, which was dominated by ward bosses who had little or no education, but who controlled votes with promises of jobs. Progressive reformers argued that those elected to office should have specialized qualifications like degrees in law, accounting, or engineering

Multiple Choice

Progressive reformers argued that those elected to office should have what?

• an advanced age, 60 or above

• the support of the former governor

• special Qualifications

• only the vote of the people

Multiple Choice

What did Progressives believe

• government should not spend money on things like illiteracy and other social problems.

• believed that government should begin to educate people to become self reliant

• Believed that Louisiana should revert back to the way it was before Reconstruction.

• believed government could and should be used to help address social problems like poverty, illiteracy, and improving the conditions for all workers.

Multiple Choice

Who dominated the New Orleans Ring which controlled politics?

• The Bourbon Rulers

• ward bosses who had little or no education

• The Mafia

• war bosses who held the advantage of education over the people

Sisters Jean and Kate Gordon were prominent Louisiana progressives. Jean devoted much of her energy to convincing the state legislature to provide protections for child laborers. Her efforts led to the state’s first child labor law, which was passed in 1906 and strengthened two years later. She even served, without pay, as a factory inspector to make sure the laws were enforced. She was also committed to solving the social problems she believed contributed to the delinquency of young women. Jean’s sister Kate devoted much of her energy to the campaign to secure voting rights for women. The state’s 1898 constitution provided a small measure of suffrage (the right to vote) for property-owning women who paid taxes to the state.

Multiple Choice

Two prominent Louisiana progressives

• Huey and Earl Long

• Jean and Kate Gordon

• John McKeegan

• Willard Dunn

Multiple Choice

Jean Gordon devoted much of her energies in the progressive movement to what issue?

• Prison reform

• Women Rights

• The protection of child laborers

• Abolition

Multiple Choice

Kate Gordon devoted much of her energy to what issue?

• Child Labor laws

• Abolition

• Women's right to vote

• Free compulsory education for all children

Multiple Select

According to the Louisiana Constitution of 1898 what two things ere required for women to have the right to vote?

• They had to own property

• They had to be Married

• They had to be over 50 years old

• They had to pay taxes

Using this stipulation, Kate led a drive to get a series of improvements to the New Orleans sewerage and drainage systems on the ballot. As a progressive, she believed these improvements would reduce flooding and slow down the spread of disease. She led a successful public campaign for the measures, and newspapers actually gave the Gordon sisters and other members of the Women’s League for Sewerage and Drainage credit for the victory

Multiple Choice

True or false Kate Gordon led a successful drive to get a series of improvements to the New Orleans sewerage and drainage systems on the ballot.

• True

• False

Kate devoted the next twenty years to expanding and guaranteeing women the right to vote. Kate was a progressive, but like many southern progressives, she was also a white supremacist. As such, she believed women’s suffrage should be guaranteed by state rather than federal legislation. Thus, she opposed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave all adult women the right to vote, in part because she feared African American women would insist on their right to vote as well

Multiple Choice

What was the exception to the belief of Kate Gordon that women should have the right to vote?

• She felt that young women under thirty should not vote

• She believed that single women should not have the right to vote

• She believed that African American women should not have the right to vote

• She believed that women should own property to vote

Progressive Governors

Early-twentieth-century governors also agreed with some of the progressives’ ideas about the use of government to better society, to ensure more humane treatment for the most vulnerable, and to increase government efficiency. Like Nicholls and Foster in the 1890s, the governors in the first two decades of the new century believed in white supremacy but also sought to improve the quality of life and the state’s reputation. Governor William Heard was trained as an accountant and worked to improve the state’s financial reporting systems. He also sought to expand educational opportunities. The next two governors, Newton Blanchard and Jared Sanders, were both trained as lawyers.

Multiple Select

Which were goals or beliefs of Early-twentieth-century governors in Louisiana ?

• Humane treatment of the most vulnerable

• increase government efficiency

• Government should take a hands off approach to governing

• government should be used to improve society

Blanchard sought to improve conditions for the state’s prisoners and was the first to create a juvenile justice system designed to separate child and adult prisoners. Sanders was the first governor to impose a small tax charged to companies that profited from extracting the state’s timber and petroleum resources.

Lumber and Oil

The extraction and processing of the state’s timber became a big business in the post-Civil War era. Lumber mills in southern Louisiana processed the huge cypress trees that skilled lumbermen harvested from the swamps in the southern part of the state. In the forests north of Lake Pontchartrain and in the vicinity of Shreveport, pine was the main kind of tree harvested. Large lumber mills were spread around the state. A man named George L’Hote had a lumber company in New Orleans that processed timber, but also sold the plans and precut lumber that a purchaser could use to quickly build a home. Lumbering jobs were plentiful in the years between 1880 and 1920. The pay was good, but the jobs were dangerous.

Multiple Select

Which would be a good description of the Lumber business in Louisiana?

• Low Paying

• The main business in the State after the Civil War

• Dangerous

• Good Pay

Because lumber workers often lived in company-run camps in rural areas, they too were often forced to buy high-priced goods on credit from company stores. In fact, some lumber companies paid their workers in scrip (a kind of currency that could only be used in stores run by the lumber companies themselves). 

Multiple Choice

What is script?

• State issued money

• a kind of currency given as pay by the company that could only be used in stores run by the lumber companies themselves

• Goods paid instead of money

• A common name for gold workers received for working

New opportunities were created after the state’s first oil field came in near Jennings in 1901. For the first time, many people who had only done agricultural labor had the chance to try something new. Like lumbering, working in the oil fields could be dangerous and sometimes deadly work. The pay made these risks worth it for many. Men traveled to and lived in camps or tent settlements around oil wells. These rough camps quickly gave way to industrial development. Corporations like Standard Oil came to the state and built plants to refine the oil. They also built pipelines to transport the refined oil to other parts of the state and nation. Standard Oil built a pipeline that carried the state’s crude oil from its northwest corner over to Baton Rouge, where their refinery was processing more than 7,000 barrels of oil a day by 1911. 

Multiple Choice

Where was Louisiana's first oilfield located?

• Jennings

• Lake Charles

• Baton Rouge

• Rugon

In the course of oil exploration, many wells also produced natural gas. The gas was considered worthless at first, and many companies allowed it to burn off. Over time, the value of natural gas also became clear and it, too, was piped to other parts of the state and country. A major natural gas field was discovered near Monroe in 1916. 

Multiple Choice

What was the attitude concerning natural gas when it was first discovered in Louisiana?

• It was considered valuable

• It was considered a sign of good luck

• It was considered worthless and not valuable

• It was considered as a sign from God of bad fortune.

The Pursuit of Pleasure

As the 1920s approached, the state was impacted by widespread changes in American culture. People in Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, had long had a reputation for knowing how to enjoy life. But the idea of having specific leisure time in the evenings and on weekends was just entering the mainstream. In part this was because progressive reformers had worked to make shorter workdays and free weekends the norm for many workers. 

New Ways to Shop

The idea of enjoying yourself by buying consumer goods was also entering the mainstream. Even in the state’s most rural communities, the arrival by mail of a catalog from Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck and Co. allowed rural people to buy—or at least dream about buying— fashionable clothes and modern tools and farming equipment. In New Orleans, Canal Street became a destination for shoppers from other parts of the state who came by train to shop in the city’s sprawling new department stores. Electric lights also began to appear in stores and restaurants and on major thoroughfares, expanding shopping and leisure hours into the evening.

Multiple Choice

Street in New Orleans that people traveled from all over the state to shop on

• Magazine

• Canal

• Bourbon

• Esplanade

The Rise of the Automobile

Although the roads in Louisiana remained abysmal (extremely poor) until the early 1930s, automobiles became a more common sight, particularly on city streets. In response, the state began to regulate automobiles and, by 1915, required drivers to have licenses. Even people with modest incomes began to purchase cars when inventor Henry Ford introduced his Model T automobile in 1908. Ford used innovative assembly lines that brought down the time and cost it took to build a car. Americans could also purchase Ford’s cars on a credit plan, making it easier to pay for the automobile over time. 

Trains and Streetcars

Most people, however, still relied on trains for travel between cities. Although Louisiana’s railroads developed later than some other states, by the early twentieth century, approximately 5,000 miles of track connected all parts of the state. In Shreveport and New Orleans, horse-drawn carriages and streetcars were replaced by electric-powered ones in 1893 and 1898, respectively.  

The Birth of Jazz

A new and original American musical form was born in Louisiana during this period. Played mostly in disreputable New Orleans bars and honky-tonks at first, these loud, lively, and unusual sounds came to define a form of music known as jazz. By the 1920s, jazz had entered the mainstream, and people listened and danced to jazz bands at private dances and on riverboats that traveled up and down the Mississippi River. As some early jazz musicians, many of whom were African American, left the state to seek better opportunities and a life free of Jim Crow laws, they took jazz with them and spread it to the rest of the nation and the world. One of the most famous was Louis Armstrong.

Multiple Choice

A new and original form of music developed in New Orleans

• Rockabilly

• Rap

• Rock

• Jazz

Multiple Choice

How did Jazz spread from New Orleans?

• African Americans took it with them as they left the area to escape Jim Crow laws

• Wagon Train Drivers emulate the Jazz musicians of New Orleans

• Jazz musicians wrote letters describing how to play jazz to relatives across the nation

• Jazz did not spread it still remains only in New Orleans

After learning to play the cornet (an instrument similar to a trumpet) in a juvenile detention facility, Armstrong became one of the pioneers of American jazz. By the time of his death, Armstrong had become a world ambassador for the music he and common people like himself had helped to create in Louisiana in the first two decades of the twentieth century

Multiple Choice

Where did Louis Armstrong learn to play the clarinet

• In school in Band Class

• Private lessons with Mr. Perez

• In a juvenile detention facility

• In the streets of his neighborhood

As Louisiana entered the 1920s, the state’s inhabitants remained concentrated in rural areas. While cities were modernizing, development of roads and public facilities lagged behind other places in the nation. Louisiana was entering a new era, but the state had not yet entered the modern age. In this time of great changes, the state’s people and leaders faced both challenges and opportunities. One man in particular would meet those challenges head on. It is to his life and the ways in which he changed Louisiana that we now turn.