Sounds suspiciously like a homework assignment to me! Here are some of the major ones: The youth rebellion. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the "baby boomers," who were first generation born after WWII, rebelled against the authority of their elders, whom they perceived as having built a world full of fatal flaws that resulted in racial discrimination, the marginalization of women, and the deployment of nuclear weapons against civilian targets. They rejected their male elders, embarked on a marked feminization of American culture, brought rock and roll music into the forefront of world culture, defected en masse from the patriarchal monotheistic Abrahamist religions, and began an intellectual revolution that lasted until the end of the 1970s. Civil rights. After WWII, both our laws and our customs were revised to prohibit individuals or institutions from discriminating against people based on race, religion, etc. We have not achieved complete success and probably never will, but there has been utterly immense improvement over the way things were before WWII. Temperance. After the Civil War, a huge religious-based movement disapproving of drunkenness or even the consumption of alcohol gained political power, even though it never took in more than ten percent of the population. Starting around the end of WWI, the U.S. outlawed the sale of alcoholic beverages. This brought about the most widespread disresepect for laws that the country had seen since it rebelled against England. Women, who previously had seldom drunk alcohol in public, began going to bars. Children were recruited to deliver liquor because the police were reluctant to arrest them. Gangsters took complete control over the beer, wine, and liquor industry and it gave organized crime the financial power to become the huge force that it still is. Prohibition was such a disaster that it was repealed after about fifteen years. Yet Americans refuse to learn from their own history, and this same movement is again active, this time against all recreational drugs except alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, the ones that make corporate America rich. Abolition of slavery. Many of our movements were about the way people treat other people. Throughout the history of the country and even during its colonial era, a large segement of the white population disapproved of slavery. During the second quarter of the 19th century it became powerful enough to begin rescuing slaves and transporting them into states where slavery was illegal. Halfway through the Civil War, which was caused purely by economic issues as well as a rivalry between Northerners and Southerners, who felt that they represented the technological future and the genteel past, respectively, President Lincoln declared that one of the purposes of the war was to free the slaves, in order to gain more support for a war effort that was not going very well. After the war slavery was abolished throughout the country. There were many others. You get my own personal slant on history by looking for it on a bulletin board. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
The original progressive movement in the 1890s is a notable reform movement. It began as a reaction to the severe problems in the rapidly industrializing cities, particularly in the Northeast, poverty, crime, alcoholism, high birth rates in the slums, progressivism was a middle class reaction to what they believed was the degeneration of urban society. This would lead to municipal reforms, and would move to the state level as local and state governments attempted reforms. Progressivism would reach the national level with Teddy Roosevelt, reflected in efforts such as taking on the giant trusts, and acts such as the Pure Food & Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, and eventually with Woodrow Wilson, as would be reflected in his world view as seen at the Paris Peace Conference in his 14 Points.
I forgot about the tax reform movement. It started in my home state of California in 1978. The constitution there, as in many states, allows the people to enact legislation directly by simply voting yes or no. Property taxes had been based on the appraised value of real estate, and the annual tax rate was an astounding 3 percent. Retired people who had bought their house in 1950 for $10,000 were faced with an annual tax bill of $5,000. Even though the house was actually worth $150,000 on the market, no bank would give them a second mortgage to raise the cash and their pensions weren't generous enough to cover the tax bite. Many considered selling their houses and moving to another state as the only way to avoid having the state of California put a lien on it. Proposition 13 lowered the property tax rate to one percent, rolled back the appraised value of homes to a pre-inflation-era level, and froze them until the house was sold. Unfortunately California is a liberal mecca, the citizens continued to insist on expensive educational, social, and civil engineering projects. The counties and school districts get all of their money from property taxes; unlike states like Maryland, California cities and counties cannot levy an income tax. The state stepped in and made up the difference -- until the 1990s when times got tough and the state had to reduce its own budget. (Perestroika destroyed California's military weapons industry and the dot-com meltdown did the same to Silicon Valley. Nothing left but movies, tourism, and wine. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) The last nail was driven into California's coffin by President Bush's buddies, the barons of the energy industry. They doubled and tripled the price of electricity for no good reason except that Californians, like the majority of the nation's voters, had voted for Gore in 2000. The state was forced by its contracts to subsidize these costs for quite a while until they were legally able to pass them on to the hapless consumers, who will soon be spending the money they saved from Proposition 13 just to heat their homes during the state's mild winters. If I didn't make the point in my earlier post, here it is again. Reform movements almost always backfire. There's a reason for representative government instead of direct democracy. Unfortunately that hasn't been working very well lately either.
