That someone from Buffalo or Detroit could enjoy the sun in Florida during the winter seemed to defy nature itself.

JOHN MILTON COOPER, JR.:
I don't think you can exaggerate how much change was in the air for people. Things that had been around, conditions that had been taken for granted since time immemorial had changed. The scientific technological industrial revolution of that time was something absolutely unprecedented in human history.

NARRATOR:
In 1900, Americans were dazzled by the onrush of inventions. Machines that could peer inside the human body were revolutionizing medicine. Autos were promising to replace horses. There was even a doll house for sale with its own electric doorbell and electric lights no bigger than a pea. Americans believed that the inventions of the day were going to make them smarter, happier, healthier. Even popular music celebrated the breakthroughs.

MAX MORATH :
The turn of the century, particularly in America, represented a period that will someday be compared to the Renaissance. Within a period of very short time, 15-20 years, most of the breakthroughs in technology occurred that now influence our lives so heavily. Everything since then has been engineering. You capture motion. Motion picture comes about this time. Now everything since is engineering. It's technology. Sure, the picture's better, but the idea of seeing people move on a screen is new. The telephone. "Hello? I'm talking to Chicago." A miracle. But we take it for granted. You break through and record sound. It's gotten better, but everything since is simply engineering.

Do you realize that when the phonograph broke through just prior to 1900, that there were touring groups that went out with an old cylinder phonograph and the horn that you yelled into and the little mica diaphragm that transcribed, and they'd go to a town and they'd rent a hall and people would come and they'd play the phonograph and there'd be a dog barking. (Barks Twice and Claps) And people would applaud. And then the leading citizens of the town would come up. The mayor would come up and they'd instruct him and he would say, "Hello?" And they'd play it back, "Hello?" (Claps) And people would applaud.

The electric light, for heaven's sake. The electric current. The breakthroughs were considered miraculous.

JOHN M. STAUDENMAIER, S.J. :
Most people in 1900 can remember a time, a very recent time, when most of the things you did in your life were hard work, dirty, and disorganized. There's still a good bit of that around as a matter of fact, but all around them, particularly in cities, there begin to be amazing things, amazingly precise, well-engineered systems that are beginning to transform a - a dirty, messy world. Plumbing. You have to be still fairly well-to-do to have plumbing, but it's around and you know that that's sort of coming. There are a lot of things like that, that are sort of right around the corner even for people like you. You can see them around you and you know that after a while you'll have them, too...The promise that you will have electric lights and maybe you even have one already, a bulb hanging in your house. Or maybe you even have a hot plate that you plug in, just a little one, but maybe you have one already. This is - is a hot plate better than a great big, robust iron stove which is a pretty mature technology, a cook stove? No. It doesn't cook nearly as well, but the future. Ah!

NARRATOR:
In 1900, while Americans were dreaming of the future... the world around them was changing, leaving a troubling undercurrent of anxiety and doubt.

DONALD L. MILLER:
No place on the face of the Earth, in the history of the world had ever changed as fast as 19th century America. And I think Americans felt the whole floor underneath them had given way. Technology seems almost a spontaneous force with a power and life of its own. What it bred, I think, more than anything is a sense of anxiety and a lot of people felt they had lost their moorings literally.

JOHN M. STAUDENMAIER, S.J.:
If I'm the ordinary guy in 1900, and I am mostly optimistic, but I'm pretty intimidated, too, by these ever-increasingly complex systems that are turning up all around me. I am surrounded now by systems that make me an idiot because I do not know how they work nor do I know how to fix them nor do I even know how they made them in the first place. [Electricity]... isn't like a steam engine. You can watch a steam engine work and you can figure it all out. You watch the piston, you watch the flywheel. Not so with electricity. And so this feeling of being made small as an adult in the face of systems that transcend your intelligence, this is a hard thing along - it's a price tag for progress.

NARRATOR:
No where in America was progress more striking than in San Francisco. Fifty years before, when prospectors arrived heading for the gold fields, there were just eighty-two houses, a few scattered tents, and miles of all but impassable sand dunes. Now, at the turn of the century, 350,000 people lived here. San Francisco had become one of the country's most cosmopolitan cities - attracting writers, artists, and bohemians. 15,000 Chinese, many brought in to work on the railroads, now made their homes here, crowded into an Asian ghetto, an entire city within a city. In 1900 San Francisco was booming, but like so many other cities that had sprung out of nowhere, it had been built at a price.

For decades, the demand for lumber had been consuming the nation's forests. By 1900, half of the original forests had been cut, the great black walnut tree had all but disappeared, and the giant redwoods, standing for centuries before the republic was born, were under threat.

STEPHEN FOX :
We had been blessed on this continent with the finest natural resources of any country in the history of the world... rich forests, the finest forests in the world, and we'd just had so much of it it seemed that it was infinite. So if a forest was cut down, that's okay. There was always a new forest over the horizon. But for the first time, we started to get a sense that that may not be true, that the resources were finite. Around the turn of the century, we start to see a questioning of progress, as it has been conventionally understood, starting to see the limits of progress and that it is not an unalloyed good and in the course of this road toward progress maybe we've lost some things that we need to retrieve now.

NARRATOR:
In January, 1900, a 61-year-old Scottish immigrant living 15 miles south of San Francisco was writing a book to warn Americans that already too much had been lost... and to celebrate what still remained. For John Muir the wilderness was sacred.

"The forests of America," Muir wrote that year, "however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God, for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

STEPHEN FOX:
The thing to realize about Johnny Muir is he was not like you and me. He was different. He was a pantheist, a pagan, if you will, and when he goes out there into the woods he talks to the woods and the rocks and the birds and he thinks they talk back to him. He believed was that all forms of life, and rocks, too, have souls. And in that belief, he steps outside the Christian tradition. Christians believe that only human have souls, only humans go to Heaven. Well, Muir said that the Christian heaven was "stingy". He thought everything was divine, everything is holy, and, therefore, everything should be respected and protected.

NARRATOR:
In 1900, a wilderness craze was sweeping the country. Hiking and mountaineering were in fashion. The Audubon Society and the Sierra Club had recently been formed. People were fleeing the cities, heading for "the great outdoors."

STEPHEN FOX:
There was a widespread turning to Nature right around 1900. A lot of people in cities decided that they had lost something and they wanted to get it back. And this is the real wilderness. This is packing and camping overnight and climbing serious mountains.

NARRATOR:
For the first time, people began talking about conservation. Muir saw in "the back to nature" craze troops for his campaign to preserve the wilderness. "Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms," he wrote, "mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks, its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers - even this is encouraging, and may well be a hopeful sign of the times."

STEPHEN FOX:
He saw the good side of things and was an optimistic fellow and so he found grounds for hope... and that's the, the spirit of the age.

but actually there were grounds for hope.

NARRATOR:
In 1900, America could boast of 5 national parks; there were still millions of acres of untouched wilderness. And the environmental movement Muir championed began to find support in Washington. That year, Congress, for the first time ever, passed legislation to protect wildlife in danger of extinction. And the Senate, finally moved to protect the buffalo. There were only 400 left on the entire continent.

John Muir said he wanted "to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad." The little book he began in 1900 would remain in print throughout the 20th century, inspiring generations of Americans with his love of the natural world.

As the new century began, Americans were reaching beyond their own borders. In San Francisco, giant cargo ships laden with raw cotton from the South, fabric from New England, flour, iron and steel from Chicago and Pittsburgh were bound for the markets of Asia. For the first time, the United States was striding upon the world stage, proud and confident, competing with England, France, Germany, Japan.

New York Senator Chauncey Depew boasted to his colleagues: "There is not a man here who does not feel 400 per cent bigger in 1900.... bigger intellectually, bigger hopefully, bigger patriotically, now that he is a citizen of a country that has become a world power."

The United States had become a world power almost overnight. But there was a price to pay. The ideals of the American Republic were being tested by the temptations of new-found Empire.

In 1898, America had gone to war with Spain and defeated the 400 year old Spanish Empire in just 113 days.

All at once, America won control of Spanish colonies on both sides of the globe, including the Philippines --- a chain of more than 7,000 islands, gateway to the markets of China. But the Filipinos wanted their own independent country. Some argued that President McKinley should give it to them. Others, that he should annex the Philippines. McKinley told a group of Methodist Church leaders how he had decided what to do: "I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight," McKinley said, "and I am not ashamed to [say] that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance....And one night it came to me:
that there was nothing left to do but take [the Philippines] and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize them... And than I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly."

WALTER LAFEBER:
Most historians do not believe that story. It's pretty clear that McKinley had thought about the Philippines long before the War of 1898 and he had decided that he needed the Philippines as a base from which the United States could make sure that Asian markets were open to American products. And China is the logical place to look for these new markets. The Chinese have 500 million potential customers, and they need everything that Americans produce. Manila essentially became the pivot of the American empire in the Western Pacific. And without Manila, McKinley would never have been able to compete for this great China market.

NARRATOR:
The president had hoped the Filipinos would willingly become part of the new American Empire. But the Filipinos were ready to die for the right to govern themselves. For years, they had fought the Spanish. Now they were prepared to fight the Americans--if they had to. In January 1899, they established the Philippine Republic. By 1900, Americans were fighting a guerrilla war 7,000 miles from home.

WALTER LAFEBER:
For the United States to maintain this empire what the United States had to do was to use force and to project that force across thousands and thousands of miles. We had never done that....and we were now involved in civilizations such as the Philippines with which we had very little acquaintance. And it was a question whether or not Americans were really that good, ah, an imperialist in order to pull this off. This was an extremely brutal war that the United States and the Filipinos fought...Americans looked down on the Filipinos as people who were uncivilized... The term "gook" originated in the Philippine insurrection. We looked at this as essentially a superior power fighting an inferior people who deserved their inferiority because they had not been able to organize their society, they had not been able to "uplift themselves," as McKinley liked to say... the United States was willing to use very brutal force in order to bring the Filipinos around. One soldier's letter, for example, relates how one of his comrades, an American soldier, had been found murdered outside this village with his stomach slit open. And the American commander immediately orders that everyone in this Filipino village be executed. And, according to this young man who wrote home, there were a thousand men, women, and children who were executed in this reprisal for the murder of this one American soldier. This was no holds barred war between the Filipinos and the Americans. And by 1900, many Americans are beginning to wonder whether even all of the possible profits that this empire might offer were worth this kind of brutality.

NARRATOR:
As more and more American boys lost their lives, anti-war sentiment was growing. Many saw the war against a people seeking independence as "a monstrous perversion of American ideals." Multi-millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, a leader of a small but important anti-imperialist movement, asked: "Is it possible that the American Republic is to be the suppressor of the Philippine struggle for independence?" Carnegie offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million and set the island nation free.

All through the winter of 1900, Americans read of devastation and horror half a globe away. Time and again they were assured that the war was all but over. But native spies reported that thousands of Philippine insurgents were plotting to rise up against American forces in Manila that a stash of bombs and munitions were hidden in a house in the center of that city that rebels were massing in the provinces.

McKinley had been told by his generals that they could subdue their barefoot opponents with 20,000 men. Then the generals asked the president for 20,000 more. But 40,000 soldiers were not enough. By 1900, 60,000 American troops were on the ground in the Philippines, and the War Department was calling for another 2 divisions. McKinley knew that his chances in the November election could hinge on a war he didn't want to fight, and didn't know how to win.

NARRATOR:
In the winter of 1900, the most popular girl in America was the Gibson girl. She was cool, flirtatious... every red-blooded American man's ideal. Pinned on the walls of homes across the country--from dormitories at Harvard to miners' cabins in the Far West--the Gibson girl set the standard for a generation of American women. She had elegance and style. She appeared independent and in control, dominating men with her seductive wiles. But the Gibson girl was a fantasy of a New York magazine illustrator named Charles Dana Gibson.

In reality, most women, by law and custom, were dependent upon men. In some states, a woman couldn't own property. Everything she earned belonged to her husband. And in every state but four she was refused the vote. A woman's only hope was to make a good marriage.

But a few women were striking out on their own--choosing careers instead of husbands. Francis Benjamin Johnston was a 36 year old photographer--pioneering a new career for women in photo-journalism, President McKinley posed for her camera just as Grover Cleveland had 6 years before. Anyone who was anyone in Washington society wanted Johnston to take her picture.

LAURA WEXLER:
Upper class, talented, energetic white women like Johnston are knocking at the door of social power and professional power in the United States. Women at the turn of the century like Johnston are beginning beginning to come out from the shadow of men. They are demanding careers, they're trying to come out from their home. And photography is Johnston's way of doing that. Johnston's saying I am a photographer, I can have a business, I'm not going to be a housekeeper, I'm not going to be a wife, I'm not going to have that feminine role. She's saying I'm going to be as good a professional photographer as any man. Johnston had studied painting in France, then began drawing illustrations for newspapers before switching to photography. Photography, she wrote, was "the more accurate medium." This is a new era for photography. A way of printing photographs in the illustrated press has just been invented, and people like Johnston are trying to figure out now what photography is for. She's getting commissioned by magazines to discover how you can use a camera to do photo-documentary.

NARRATOR:
By 1900, photographs were replacing illustrations in the popular press, and Johnston was helping define a new profession--photojournalism--showing Americans pictures of themselves they had never seen before. Johnston traveled across the country, leaving a telling record of the people of her day: coal miners in Pennsylvania; sailors returning from the Spanish-American war immigrants, pouring into New York City; black college students in Virginia; sharecroppers in the South.

Johnston's portraits introduced Americans to the faces of the famous men and women of her time: war heroes Admiral Dewey and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt ; the Educator Booker T. Washington Inventor Alexander Graham Bell; Scientist George Washington Carver; Mark Twain; Andrew Carnegie; and Susan B. Anthony.

LAURA WEXLER:
I'm amazed at her appetite for recording the people of her day, how much she traveled, how often she tracked down any opportunity to take pictures.

NARRATOR:
In a series of photographs taken at a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, Johnston challenged the idealized image of women at the turn of the century.

The women of Lynn spent their days in foul-smelling rooms, the floors soaked with chemicals, the air reeking with poisonous fumes. They worked 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and earned less than 32 dollars a month, barely enough to put food on the table.

LAURA WEXLER:
Johnston's images of women working in factories look slightly bedraggled, they look tired, but they look very alive and human. They don't look discouraged... they look hopeful. Johnston's women have the same kind of pluck that Johnston had and knew in herself. Johnston's finding the vitality in America. And that's very much the spirit of the age. The vision of America which can move into the next century sure of itself, confident, believing that its dreams, if not true at the moment, will come true.