20th Century America: Democracy Background Reflection

International Ladies' Garment Workers Union founded

New York State passes a landmark Tenement House Act

Socialist Party founded

W.E.B Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk published

Industral Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) founded

National Women's Trade Union League founded

Upton Sinclair's The Jungle published

Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act passed

La Follette's Magazine founded (later renamed The Progressive)

NAACP founded

"Uprising of the 20,000": female shirtwaist makers in New York strike against sweatshop conditions

Milwaukee voters elect Socialist Emil Seidel as mayor, elect a Socialist Party majority to the city council, and elect Socialist Victor Berger to Congress.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes The Man-Made World, one of several of her books that advocate for women’s economic and social freedom and redefine gender roles

Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) beats William Howard Taft (Republican), Theodore Roosevelt (Progressive) and Eugene Debs (Socialist) for president

Socialist Party has about 120,000 members and 1,039 Socialist Party members hold public office, mostly in local cities and towns

Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns organize the Congressional Union, later known as the National Woman's Party, to organize for women's suffrage and women's rights

Congress passes Clayton Antitrust Act to break up corporate monopolies

Ludlow Massacre: John D. Rockefeller's private army kills thirteen women and children and seven men in a Colorado coal miners strike

Fellowship of Reconciliation founded

Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives

United States enters World War I

Palmer Raids begin: FBI arrests and deports radicals; seizes and shuts down radical publications

Four million American workers (one of every five) walk out in a great strike wave, including national clothing, coal, and steel strikes, a general strike in Seattle, Washington, and a police strike in Boston, Massachusetts

Eugene Debs wins almost 1 million votes (6 percent) for president while in jail for opposing World Ware I

American Civil Liberties Union founded

Nineteenth Amendment passed, legalizing women’s suffrage

Margaret Sanger founds American Birth Control League (later called Planned Parenthood)

The Immigration Act of 1924 limits the annual number of immigrants who can be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of people from that country already living in the United States in 1890, down from the 3 percent cap set by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded, the first African American labor union, founded

The Great Depression begins in October