1900–1915 California Impressionists Enrich Art The artistic movement known as Impressionism came to America about a decade after its debut in Paris in 1874, where a small group of painters including Monet, Renoir, and Degas had sought to evoke sensory impression rather than the objective reality that their Romantic and Realist predecessors had tried to capture. By 1900, Impressionism had become the preferred style among American painters. Artists in California, and most especially in southern California, pursued a regional variety of this perspective, engaging in plein-air painting (a French term for “in the open air”) focused on landscape as the ideal subject for expressing Americans’ democratic aspirations. This art was characterized by loose, choppy brush strokes and the use of bright colors. Leading California Impressionists included William Wendt (1863– 1946) and Edgar Payne (1883–1947), who had homes and studios in Laguna Beach. By 1915, the plein-air artists of Laguna Beach and southern California had become widely recognized. SEE FIGURES 25A & B
1901–1917 Progressive Reform Era in the United States
The increasingly consolidated economic system created during the final years of the 19th century provoked both legal and political responses: (1) a legal response in the form of an antitrust movement which sought to outlaw and destroy monopoly, and (2) a political response in the form of a multifaceted Progressive reform movement. Beginning at the grassroots level during the economic recovery following 1898, and flowing upward in both political parties to local, state, and national politics, the Progressive movement sought legislation to ameliorate problems arising from rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and concentration of wealth. Among its achievements were the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Hepburn Railway Act, and the income tax amendment. In order to return government to the people, the movement also championed direct democracy with such innovations as the initiative, referendum, and recall. Among the most prominent progressives were Tom Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland, Robert La Follette, Governor and Senator from Wisconsin, Hiram Johnson, Governor and Senator from California, and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Figure 25A. (left) A Clear Day by Laguna Beach impressionist painter William Wendt features a view of Saddleback Mountain. Image courtesy of The Irvine Museum. Figure 25B. (below) Sycamore in Autumn (Orange County park) by Edgar Payne. Image courtesy of The Irvine Museum.
1901 U.S. Steel Syndicate Formed
During the years from roughly 1880 to 1920 the United States transformed its economy from one of family-owned businesses producing for relatively limited markets to one based on centralized, bureaucratic corporations producing for substantial markets. The man who became the organizational architect of this economic change was the banker, J. P. Morgan. His acquisition in 1898 of Carnegie Steel, the company formed by Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh six years earlier, signifies the passing of an era dominated by individual entrepreneurs. When in March 1901 Morgan merged Carnegie Steel with its chief competitors to form U.S. Steel, it became America’s first billion-dollar corporation and the largest in the world. Surprisingly, however, U.S. Steel did not monopolize the steel industry. Instead, together with several other companies including Bethlehem Steel, it became part of an oligopoly (a group of a few sellers), an arrangement that has characterized much of American business to the present day.
1903 Wright Brothers Invent Airplane
In December 1903, at Kittyhawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright, two Ohio brothers and bicycle-makers, conducted the first successful experiment in which a flying machine transported a man under its own power. For centuries, men had experimented with kites, hot air balloons, and gliders. As early as 400 BC, the Chinese discovered that kites could fly against the wind. In the 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci made the first systematic studies of flight. The Wright brothers, building on earlier experiments with gliders, discovered the three axes of motion required to
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